phywriter.com

So my son is 14 going on 15 and has been growing like a fast-growing thing. Every day when I get home, he walks up to me and sketches out the difference between our eye-levels to see if he’s finally as tall as I am (I’ve been telling him for years that he’ll be taller than me). Tonight, he walked up to me in my bedroom, where I have a fan and a window-unit air conditioner going, and he was talking on speaker phone with his friend, so there was a lot of noise. He sort of saluted me and said, “I think I love you.”

I looked at him oddly, not because I had any trouble with the sentiment, but because he’s a teenage boy, a social creature not normally given to such brazen expressions of emotion. But, whatever. I said “I think I love you, too?”

He looked at me like I was crazy and started laughing his head off. Then he stepped closer and said, “No, I think I’M LEVEL WITH YOU.” He sketched the invisible eye-line again, and I realized we were comparing how tall he is to me, and not something else.

So I had to break out the song, “Wild Thing” at which point I said, “I think I love you.” He said, again, “I think I’m level, I think I’m level!” at which point I explained that’s the way the song went. He rolled his eyes in comprehension, said, “aaaahhh,” and went off to his room with his speaker phone and a confused friend, and repeated the whole story.

For the record, he’s still a hair shorter than me. But just a hair.