The other night at dinner, my youngest child, a boy person of four years of age, declared to us in his most excited voice that he had an idea. A tense silence followed as we waited for him to tell us, for the unleashing of this new thought onto an unsuspecting world.
“I’m going to build a house out of butts!”
His big brother laughed. His mother and I snickered, our eyebrows cocked upwards in an appraising fashion. “Butts, you say? A whole house made out of butts?” The repetition of the word just incited more laughter. Fanning the flames, baby, fanning the flames.
I can picture us all, decades from now, my wife and I gray and old, riding along in the backseat of a car powered by sunflower seeds or rainwater or perhaps good intentions. Our eldest son at the wheel. “Are you sure this is the way?” my wife will ask. She’ll propose two or three different routes to get us where we’re going.
“I know where I’m going, Mom,” he’ll say, turning up the music.
“What is this you’re subjecting our ears to?” I’ll ask him. “I thought we instilled you with better taste than this.”
We’ll turn down a street, then another, maybe a few more. Then, just as I’m about to ask if the nav-system has gone and gotten us lost, we’ll come around a bend and there it will stand, a sight so breathtaking that all conversation will instantly fall silent. The car’s audio system, futuristic mechanism that it is, will detect this awed hush and mute itself. My eldest will pass his hand across a panel and the car will turn into the drive and come to a halt. We’ll step out of the car – or perhaps it will gently eject us, somehow – and we’ll stand there basking in the sight of this unbelievable structure, this mass of glorious curves rising outward and upward, folding in upon one another into deep crevices...which we’ll later learn are for rainwater drainage. Form and function.
“Mom! Dad!” His voice will snap us back into the moment. We’ll look, and there he’ll be, our youngest son standing outside the front door beneath a buttockesque overhang. “You made it!”
Hugs all around, then he beckons us inside where the wonders continue. Majestic slopes, eye-popping curvature, great giant’s handfuls of roundness greet the eye wherever it falls. It’s all rather…stirring.
My son built this, I will think to myself. I’ll put my hand on his shoulder.
“Son, I’m sorry I ever doubted you. This is truly amazing.”
He’ll wipe away a tear and say, “Thanks, Dad.”
Then I’ll smile and ask, “Now then, where’s the shitter?”
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