I Don’t Like Fiction

Kindergarten draws to a close not a moment too soon for Mrs. B. As you can see from the photo, she is due any week now, and will soon have her own switch her focus from twenty-five petulant, demanding creatures to one. We were lucky to get through the school year before the blessed event—without Mrs. B’s loving encouragement, kindergarten might have been a disaster, but with her it was wonderful. Booker has grown considerably under her tutelage—he can read a little, add a little, tell stories a little. The greatest change is that he now understands that his is not the only perspective on the world, and the range of experiences that realization makes possible—humor, empathy, more strategic manipulation of his parents and his little brother—is now available to him.


He has grown in other ways, of course: as you can see, he is now six feet tall and climbing. He towers over his peers in the violin group, swaying gently like a skyscraper in heavy winds as they fiddle furiously beneath him.


He still insistently carves his own path through the standards of the Suzuki songbook, always always always starting up when everyone else starts correctly down, and building successive variations from that initial divergence. But it is less noticeable now, maybe because we are halfway napping through the recital, like most of the other parents.

Probably the most significant achievement here is that standing in front of a fitfully dozing crowd and struggling through “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” is no longer an agonizing experience for Booker.



He checks it off his list, collects his cookie, and moves on. What more can one ask?

Booker has also begun to separate the world of reality and invention. We were watching Angus Lost a few weeks ago—the tale of a curious Scot terrier who escapes his yard and has a rousting adventure about town—when Booker asked, “Is this fiction?” Well, kid, generally when the pet dog talks to the goat, its fiction, but I’ll let you make the call.

Not long afterwards, he determined his preference, telling Mary at storytime, “I don’t like fiction. I like non-fiction.”

That excludes the world of toy cars, of course. But that is another story.