Tonight was delightfully nostalgic. I got to reconnect with one of my favorite people. I met Charles my freshman year of college when he was four years old. His mom was my literature professor and asked me if I'd be interested in babysitting her son. As everyone else in that class could attest to, I was not a particularly stellar student in that class and had a strong and very vocal aversion to Renaissance love poetry (which unfortunately for me was the title of the course). When she asked me to watch him, the first thought that went through my mind was "This kid has got to be an absolute terror...I bet she's asked every other student in this class to babysit him, they've all said no, and now she's left with me!"...but she assured me that she thought that I would be a good friend to Charles and that we'd get along quite well. She was right! (He didn't like Renaissance love poetry much either) The first time I met him we colored pictures of food on paper (normal) and then he started eating the pictures and gave me some to eat to (not normal). This was momentarily a babysitters nightmare, but I quickly figured out it was special edible rice paper and it was one of his favorite things to do. He was an awesome kid! Every week throughout college I spent a few afternoons with Charles. I think he kept me sane all that time. He was also the reason why I ended up taking Chinese (too long of a story to go into here). I loved hearing his outlook on life, it was so refreshing because at school I was only surrounded by people my own age en masse, and professors. It was so great to be with a little kid again for a few hours. One of my favorite conversations was a few days after he turned six. He was sort of gloomy and when I asked him why he said it was because he wasn't sure if things were going to work out with his girlfriend Iris, "Everything was going great. She was 5 and I was 5 and a half. Now I don't know what to do because I'm 6 and she's still 5 and a half. I think she might be too young for me." I didn't even try to explain the math on that, but we talked through it and he decided they should still be friends and see what happened. (She moved to Texas unfortunately). After I graduated, Charles moved away for a few years. But now he's back, and he did NOT want to go to the symphony with his parents on Saturday night so I got to come hang out instead! It was really great to reconnect with him. He's now 11 and has a vocabulary! It's crazy how much a person changes in just a short amount of time. Some things never change though...I was happy to see that he still wears mismatched socks...no matter how his parents tried to change it, he just likes it that way. (These are the reasons why we get along so famously I think) So, anyways, that's a little character sketch on one of my favorite little people. Today, we spent a lot of time blowing bubbles and then trying to stab them with sticks.
3 comments:
When Ellen was that age, she wore unmatched socks as well (and besides, they were luminescent--the kind you can wear for bike riding). She was imitating her favorite youth pastor in Cambridge England, but she wore them even after she got home to Wooster. I think, were you to get to know her, that you'd get along famously as well. P.S. I "knew" Charles best during the days when he was a spitting image of Christopher Robin, complete with Wellington boots. (Another English reference there....)
Charles' father, incidentally, is one of my favorite people in the world.
-Zack
Me too.
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