For weeks, his teachers have been sending home little notes -- frantically scribbled tattle-tales warning me my son’s classroom behavior has grown exponentially worse, gorging on itself, so to speak, to the point that he’s likely to become a danger to both himself and his classmates if I don’t intervene.
Most came from Mrs. Scranton, a woman whose judgment I do not respect. She has, in my opinion, been unable to keep the emotional shrapnel from her exploding marriage out of the classroom. Naturally, I ignored those allegations.
But when others like the gym teacher who formerly played tackle for the now-defunct Orlando Rage began expressing similar damning concerns, I thought it was time I take action against my 9-year-old son. I’m currently gathering intelligence.
It started last Tuesday:
-- I called in sick as soon as the boy closed the living room door behind him, then I fled out the back in order to tail him. For an entire block, he followed the sidewalk like the little toe-headed cherub his mother and I believed him to be, dragging his coat, with his blue pack over one small shoulder -- while I navigated a row of small backyards, cursing each six-foot privacy fence that hindered my progress. It seemed important at the time that I maintain a safe distance, mostly to ensure I was getting a true reading on his behavior, but also to preserve the delicate trust the boy and I share.
-- I immediately noticed a transformation once we turned the corner at Bannock and Kenyon.
His first destructive act was to repeatedly kick the neighbor’s chain link fence until the man’s two slick-haired Rottweilers had worked themselves into a terrifying frenzy of vicious barking and growling. The boy paused for a moment and quietly cursed, then resumed his kicking. I couldn't hear what he said, but the animals threw themselves at the metal fencing, biting the links with the maddening intention of eviscerating their tormentor.
The noise was hideous, and I think the dogs had started to injure themselves. I also worried the fence would give. Even from my hidden vantage point across the street, I felt unsafe. The boy stopped only when the dogs wore themselves out, curling up on the oil-soaked dirt in a distant corner of the yard. Others in the neighborhood granted that yard a wide berth, as the dogs and their inbred owner were infamous terrors. Not the boy.
-- Two blocks later, I was surprised when he picked up a handful of ping-pong-ball-sized landscaping stones and threw them one-by-one at late-model cars as they whizzed down the southbound lanes of Broadway.
On the ballfield, the boy is hopeless, but with rocks, he’s surprisingly strong and as accurate as a Palestinian teenager in the streets of Hebron.
I must admit I enjoyed watching the commuters wince or frown when they heard the unpleasant clank of the rocks against their highly buffed fenders. For a moment, seeing the boy actually doing something well spawned inside me a small, shameful pride that had almost no hope of enduring.
-- The boy later set fire to something – by the way it moved, it likely was a cat or some other small creature. Maybe a rabbit. At that point, I had fallen too far behind to see exactly what.
Not that it mattered. He had crossed a line. Burning animals -- even a cat -- was considered unusual, pointless, and for some observers, probably cruel. Whatever the poor creature was, it finally collapsed in a noisome, smoldering heap at the doorstep of a nearby house, possibly the home of its owner.
I wrote a note detailing what had happened, but thankfully realized in time that a note like that might be taken the wrong way.
No. I tore the note to pieces. The boy must be forced to apologize in person, perhaps after school.
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