The Car Doctor

“…And then we had to find a place to sit because the phone rang and the man who had to answer it got really really busy and he told us he would be right back and so Daddy said why don’t we just sit down for a minute, so then we sat down and waited and waited, but I don’t remember what the clock said because I couldn’t tell time yet, but it was a long long time, but not as long as a whole movie.”

The word movie barely made it out. Max had to draw a breath before adding to his barrage of never ending verbiage. In that single second pause, I managed to both lock eyes with Cindy and glance at our own clock just long enough to note that the story had been unfolding across a long twelve minutes.

“Then we had get up from our seats and the car doctor put the Sienna on one of those big metal poles that makes the car go really really high in the air so you can see underneath. What is it called again?” Max wrinkled his nose and shrugged his shoulders, the final sentence ending in a squeak, just as it always does when capped with a question mark.

Cindy and I glanced at one another again, neither of us with anything close to a clue. “I’m not sure buddy,” I said, a bit embarrassed I didn’t know, but also a little glad. Though I love my son to see me as the Lord of all Vocabulary, my not knowing underlines the simple truth that we are all constant learners. “Why don’t we call it the car doctor pole,” I said.

“That’s a great idea, Dad!” Max agreed. I could swear his smile added 5 watts to the already bright bulb. “Then we had to walk home, but first we had to give the man the key and after we gave the man the key he said thank you and his manners were really great, and then we left the car doctor and we had to walk all the way home.” Max paused, lifting his little hand in front of his quickly growing face. He stared at his palm with all five fingers spread for about a second before lowering his thumb. “It was four blocks,” Max declared with a nod. “We walked four blocks from the car doctor and then we were back home.”

Mia, Cindy and I all waited, allowing the silence to settle, wanting to make certain this wasn’t one of the false finishes we’d already sat through several times before. “I’m done with my story,” Max sang more than said. We all clapped.

For fifteen minutes we’d listened as Max told us a teeny tiny tale elongated toward infinity about the time we had to take our car to the car doctor. The magic of his narrative didn’t lay in the details of his delivery, though they were abundant enough. It was in the fact that our little boy, a few days shy of his fifth birthday, was telling us about something that had happened to him two years earlier, when the scope of his vocabulary lay in three digits rather than five.

Max related the story with the eager enthusiasm I might have expected if we had just returned from the car doctor ten minutes earlier, but two years had done nothing to strip the immediacy. A born storyteller, my son was simply waiting for the right time to release his reams of waiting thoughts.

Memory is a remarkable thing.

Great storytellers deserve an audience and performers must never take their listeners for granted. My son has manners it seems that nothing, at least right now, can ever seem to melt.

“Thank you for being patient and listening to my story,” he said.

Thank you, Max.

Writer Dad

Max is turning 5 this week, next week we’re going to celebrate with you. He’s been dying to talk to the audience again since one second after the last time. I promised him for his birthday he could.

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