I’ve spent the past hour and a half trying to get my nephew to let go of the absurdity he claims he saw while walking to school this morning. It’s not going well at all.
“Devin, I promise that whatever you may think you witnessed, there was absolutely not a bird riding a skateboard down Forfee Avenue.”
“But I diiiiid,” he said as he melted into the couch.
I don’t know how kids do that, how they summon the ability to express the deep emotive qualities of their words with their knees. But ask a kid to do something they don’t want to, or tell them they can’t have a soda for breakfast, and it’s like their bones and ligaments turn into those goats that faint as a defense mechanism.
Devin has only lived with me for six months. This is his first year at the elementary school at the front of the neighborhood and I’m relieved to report at least that part of this whole arrangement is going well. He’s a good student. He pays attention in class. He’s the kind of kid that helps out his desk neighbor without being asked to and doesn’t see why anyone would tease a classmate on the playground.
He has an imagination though. I guess that comes in handy when you spend the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth grades largely by yourself outside of school. There’s no choice but to make up a different world around you. For Devin, that world was one in which whatever parent he was staying with that week might have remembered he was going to be there and had a cereal box ready or something for him to take for lunch at school. That same parent might remember to leave a door unlocked for when Devin came back in the afternoon and might ask him something about himself other than if he had any money in his Daffy Duck bank. Whether in his bedroom or stuck in the backyard, those hours after school were his chance to dream up a world of spaceships among the treetops and sea monsters lurking underneath the patchy grass. He would make costumes out of Coca-Cola boxes he found in the garage. One day a king’s crown, the next the famed sword of Devinus the Conqueror. It never occurred to him that he might invite a friend over to play. At school he heard other kids making such arrangements, but the receiving party always said something about having to ask their mom or dad for permission.
Devin gets home from school now at 3 p.m. Well, 3-ish. He’s been known to take quite a scenic route and arrive on my–our–doorstep at more like 3:30, but one of the first things I did when he got here was to equip him with a small square device that allows me to check up on where he is. He’s great about remembering to keep it in his backpack so at least I know he’s safe while he’s exploring.
His other uncle, my brother Henry, is more of what you might call a worrier, and when I told him once about these walks home from school he was livid. I did my best to gently remind him about the relative safety of our community and the fact that when Henry and I were kids, we, along with our sister Nicky, Devin’s mom, would spend entire days wandering on our own with no negative consequences. And we didn’t even have tracking squares, just a promise to be home by dinner.
Devin never fails to give me a full report when I get home an hour or so after him. I hear about a leaf he caught (with the visual aid of the actual leaf he has yet to put down), any stray cats lurking around the gas station that’s next to the school, or what shapes he saw in the clouds as he walked with his face pointed to the sky. It’s all so fantastic and I’m thrilled with his observational skills as well as his general curiosity about the world around him. I hope he never loses those. I do worry about the melding of the imaginative and real world though.
“Uncle Hugh! Uncle Hugh!” he screamed before I could even get the keys out of the door. “You’ll never guess what I saw today!”
“Hey, bud. Was it an animal, a machine or a plant?” I asked. Those were the most popular categories.
“Well, it was an animal AND a machine.”
“So it was a machine shaped like an animal.”
“Noooooo,” Devin said with a slight hint of melting knees.
“Okay, then you saw two things that were related in some way.”
“Yes! Yes, exactly.”
He gave me an enthusiastic finger point to let me know I was on the right track. Or so he thought.
“You saw a dog with its head out the window of a car. Big tongue slobbering everywhere!”
“Nope! That’s gross. Way cooler than that. Come onnnn.”
Patience is not a quality Devin possesses when he wants to tell you about something. But the follow-the-rules part of his 12-year-old brain absolutely will not let you out of a game he started.
“Hm, well, what could it be…? Oh, I know. You saw a horse dragging a plow in that field over behind the big yellow house.”
“BRRRR. Wrong again! You only get one more guess.”
“Man you’re harsh today. Okay. Gotta make this one count. I believe that you, Devin, a young man standing five feet, four inches tall with blue eyes and hair that I can never see because you always wear a Blue Jays hat, saw today while walking home from Livingston Elementary school where you are in the sixth grade–”
“Ughh you have five seconds to answer!”
“You, young man, saw today…a bird carrying a typewriter.”
“Ohhh, you were SO CLOSE!”
He showed me with his thumb and pointer finger that I was roughly one inch from the right answer.
“It was a bird riding a skateboard! A little one. The bird and the skateboard. Like the bird was like this,” he said, cradling his hands to show the thing could fit in his palms. “And it was yellow all over its body but then it had this cool orange face kind of like it was wearing a mask. And the skateboard was so small too, like just the perfect size for it.”
“And this bird was just riding down the street like a kid would?”
Devin could clearly sense my skepticism and that only emboldened him to back up the situation with his facts. More than quitting on a game, he hated losing arguments or having someone not believe him.
“I’m telling you it was cruising! The owner, or I guess it was the owner, was walking behind it, but she wasn’t pushing the board or anything. Just walking and taking pictures or whatever with her phone.”
“I guess it does make sense that if you had a bird with skateboarding talent it would have its own Instagram account,” I said.
“Which, by the way, I still think I should be allowed to get,” he said.
This discussion was so important to Devin that even though I had segued perfectly into giving him his latest chance to make a case to enter the world of social media with the usual arguments about alllll of his classmates already having phones and every cool app and game account imaginable, he remained focused on his task at hand.
“But anyway it wasn’t doing tricks or anything fancy. That would be super silly. But like what was so cool is that when I ride on that street I have to use my legs to push to keep going every once in a while, but this bird is a BIRD so it was just using its wings to half-flap or whatever to keep going but not so much that it flew up in the air.”
“Well what doesn’t make sense to me is that, why wouldn’t the bird just fly? Isn’t that way more efficient?”
“You’re not getting iiiiit,” Devin said. He made his frustrated flop onto the couch and sat there for a second, deciding whether to make me see the light or to give up and go play Xbox. He dove back in.
“Animals do have skills that we don’t have, but that doesn’t mean they have to use them all the time. It’s not a rule. They can have fun too. Like remember when we watched the video of those pandas at the zoo eating a birthday cake? It’s natural for them to just eat bamboo and run around, but their faces were covered in icing and they were rolling around like they were having so much fun. Remember?”
“Yes, I remember. I accept that premise. Of course a bird does not have to fly 100 percent of the time, but I’m just having a super hard time believing all of the steps that would have been necessary to lead up to a bird being on a skateboard on a public street. It’s just…not that likely, you know?”
“Just because you don’t believe, doesn’t mean it’s not real. I know what I saw,” Devin said. Some sadness crept into his voice and I knew that even if this boarding bird wasn’t real, it was time for me to reinforce my role as someone who always believes him. We had a lot of good things going as a household and trust was the basis of it all.
“Mostly, I’m just jealous of you, Devin. I’ve never seen anything even zero point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, five percent as cool. Do you think they live in our neighborhood?”
“I can only skateboard for a few minutes before I get tired and my muscles are wayyyy bigger than that bird, so probably yes, maybe even next door!”
I thought for a second about some of the things that scare me about unleashing the world of social media on a kid, and one is that at such a young age, he probably can’t fully grasp the potential dangers of letting certain personal data out into the world that you can’t bottle up again. I thought about the device in his backpack and how only I have the password to access the encrypted site. And I thought about Instagram, and how so many users, particularly adults, will include their location in posts not caring if that might help someone track them down in real life. Even if they are a harmless neighbor.
“Hold on a second,” I said as I walked over to get my phone. I brought up the search bar, typed in the name of our town and started scrolling. Devin started to walk over to see what I was doing, but I had no idea what might pop up in that stream, so I used my superior height to keep it out of his view.
“Want to order a pizza?” A universally rhetorical question, and in this case a distraction. “Grab one of the menus and pick out what you want.”
He barely made it back from the menu drawer in the kitchen by the time I found it. Son of a bitch. One of the biggest adjustments with having a kid in the house was to push all my cursing into my inner monologue.
“Wow, look at that,” I said as I tapped the username TinyHawk. Dozens and dozens of pictures and videos stared back at me in rows of perfect squares.
I sat down next to Devin and we spent the next hour looking at every single post. Tiny Hawk taking a tentative step onto the board. Tiny Hawk scooting across its kitchen table. Tiny Hawk on a sidewalk, on a path by the lake, and going back and forth on the metal bleachers at the park across the street. A yellow bird with an orange face on a tiny skateboard having the time of its life.
“Can we get one?” Devin asked.
“I think this is a pretty unique bird. Probably took a long time to train it, or the person just got lucky and noticed it standing on the board one day.”
“Yeah,” Devin said with a little resignation.
“But I can follow this account and we can watch all the videos they post. And who knows, maybe they’ll want to be our friend.”
I tapped the follow button and set my phone down. Without me even asking, or honestly thinking about it myself, Devin got up and set two places at the table in anticipation of our pizza arriving any second. I walked over and told him how proud I was of the kind of kid he is, and he, in natural kid fashion, didn’t really know what to do with that and focused on getting the napkins perfectly lined up.
The next thing I expected to hear was a knock at the door. Instead, there was a ding from my phone.
TinyHawk followed you back.