Wild boys, Strawberry Summers

Ihave a friend named Travis who is 3 1/2 years old and has begun preschool.

We spent the last weekend of his unencumbered life together and I asked him what he thought of the idea of attending school.

We were walking up a back trail of Topanga State Park with Travis striding along in the lead, as he likes to do.

He shrugged and said nothing at first and, when I asked him again, he laughed and spun around and said, “Hello, thank you, goodby!”

It’s a phrase he uses when he doesn’t want to answer, which, I suppose, is better than no comment at all.

Travis is talking a lot these days, and reaching his own conclusions about life in general.

Driving along the other day, I honked and yelled at a man who had pulled his car in front of me.

Travis watched for a moment and said, “He’s OK. He didn’t mean it.”

I stopped honking.

On the weekend, we keep busy. We feed the goats and make spaghetti and read Winnie the Pooh. We also fix things.

Just before we started out on our walk, I was trying to repair a heater fan. Travis watched in silence a while and then said, “It’s got a pizza in it.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Yep. Got a pizza in it.”

“Everything that doesn’t work has a pizza in it,” his mother explained. “It’s his own idea.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it does. I’ll have to buy a pizza wrench before I can fix it.”

“Yes,” Travis said, nodding somberly.

Then he took off across the room, dancing. Amber sunlight splashed through a window. Travis spun across the golden tile like a sun-fired sprite in a dance to youth as old as magic.

Dylan Thomas must have had a scene like that in mind when he wrote about “the wild boys, as innocent as strawberries.” A spirit flung free, head back, arms swinging outward, as sweet and natural as a maple leaf in an autumn wind.

“You learn a lot in school,” I said to Travis, as we made our way up the trail. The ground was wet after the storm and the air as crisp as chilled champagne.

Travis said nothing, poking instead with a stick at a hole where a spider might live.

“You’ll meet lots of kids to play with and make new friends.”

“Hello, thank you, goodby!” Travis said, running on up ahead.

The first day of school is a trying time. We are jerked abruptly from the cozy shelter of home and play and thrust into a strange environment of rigid instructions. The first steps in life are hard indeed.

“What do you want for Christmas?” I asked, to change the subject.

Tendrils of smoke drifted from a fire place on Entrada. The smell of burning oak rode down the canyon breezes, evoking memories of other times and other places.

Travis stopped and threw a rock down a hillside. It arced over the green sprouts of new grass pushing up through the rich soil and careened off a wooden fence.

“A fly swatter!” Travis said.

“You want a fly swatter for Christmas?”

“Yes.” He says the word crisply.

“Why?”

Travis looked at me. “Swat flies,” he said, then went on up the trail.

You don’t get a lot of subterfuge from kids. Fly swatters swat flies. Period. Then I remembered. His daddy is death on flies in the house. The son watches. The son copies.

I remember the day my own boy headed off to kindergarten. It was raining that September in San Francisco. He paused at the door, looked back at me and said, “Put my toys away.” I said I would. And an infant walked out of my life.

Transitions. Phases.

Travis, when I wasn’t looking, had developed a sensitivity I never knew existed. When my wife and I vacationed abroad for three weeks, he felt abandoned. When we saw him, he was silent and distant. It was unlike him.

We talked about it. I told him about vacations and how they only lasted a little while. I told him how much we had missed him. I took him to his favorite place in all the world, Chuck E. Cheese’s, a bedlam of electronic kid games.

He loved it all, and before we parted, he said, “No more sad.”

He had been hurt by our absence, but now everything was all right.

“Travis,” I said, that blustery afternoon on the Topanga trail, “you’re growing up. And when you grow up, life changes a little. You do new things. You go to new places. First, you’ll find it hard. But then . . . well, you’ll like it. I promise.”

He stopped suddenly at a point on the trail where the view opens to the ocean. The last of the storm clouds were drifting off like childhood memories. The sky glowed amethyst.

“No more summer,” Travis said sadly.

I touched his face.

“Summer will come again,” I said. “It always does.”

He laughed and ran up the trail and stood on a knoll. That’s when I realized, I guess, that Travis, the baby, was gone, and a little boy was standing in his place.

“Hello, thank you, goodby,” he called to the vivid sky.

A wild boy, as innocent as strawberries.