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Miss Boo is Sixteen

Now We Know

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Getting a letter from your child is often a shattering experience.

Not quite as much of a milestone as the first time you hear her voice on a telephone, for that happens, of course, when she is just recovering from babyhood. Suddenly you realize she is no longer a cunning little ventriloquist’s doll for you to operate as you please. From here on she will be an unpredictable individual, running under her own power, evolving according to some mysterious hidden pattern. Every day she will become more like herself and less like what you omnisciently have decided she should be. You may have thought you had an orchid; gradually you see it is a beanstalk or a daisy. From here on, your success as a parent will depend on how willing you are to help a daisy be a daisy, and not try to make something else of it.

The letters she writes you when she is out from under your hovering influence tell you more than news. Sometimes you’re unprepared for those letters, often badly spelled and curiously phrased. For instance, when Boo was not quite thirteen we let her go away to summer camp, by no means certain we had done the right thing. After all, the camp up in the High Sierras was quite primitive. We had heard of mountain lions, and even more grisly, of rattlesnakes. We were timid about asking if brushes with these were exceptions or routine. But she cleared that up for us on a postcard sent after a week of wracking silence.

“Hi folks,” the postcard said giddily. “Today we found a rattlesnake under our tent. The riding master killed it. Eeek! Boo.”

Ghastly as that was, a letter worried me even more. It, too, came after we had heard nothing for days and days. The letter said:

Today we had a talk about sex. In case you’re interested, everybody has some kind. Also we found out we are all addle essence. They say that can give us a lot of trouble, and make your family mad. But you finally outgrow it. So here’s hoping.

Boo

Well, she has outgrown quite a lot of it in the last three or four years. But we still have some distance to go. As for me, I don’t want to hurry it, for I find it a delightful journey. Since I belong to Parents’ Union Local 359, however, I must keep this fact to myself, and complain with the rest of them.

My experience has been that addle essence is strenuous exercise for everybody. Even when you let it get in your hair, you can’t help acknowledging that its irrepressible honesty, its poetic beauty, and its radiant absurdity keep everybody in the vicinity from getting into a rut.

But it is a perishable commodity. The only thing you can be sure of, is that it doesn’t last forever. For sooner or later, no matter how delightfully mad we may be in our youth, eventually we are swept off our feet by common sense.