GoofBoy & Girls: Planning Ahead

GoofBoy is heading towards adolescence. Not yet, for him this is all far away. But he is ten. For him the teens are decades away, but as one gets older time goes faster (I was told this in college and it has haunted me ever since – not that it has kept me from wasting time, I just fret about it more.) According to my subjective perception of time, GoofBoy will be an adolescent in about a week.

The school is already beginning a program to teach the children about what is coming next. It is taught by the gym, sorry - phys-ed teacher. My recollection of gym leads me to believe nothing could be more horrible. Gym teachers were angry men with enormous voices and little patience for the weak. Apparently they are much nicer now. I feared them, but GoofBoy loves them. In fairness, I was also very strange – GoofBoy isn’t.

Presumably, I will still need to offer some guidance as my son enders the churning waters of puberty. Teenage boys are extremely stupid versions of the male gender (and that’s saying something.)

One area where I can offer no counsel is girls. He has tried to read the section about girls in The Most Dangerous Book for Boys but his sister won’t let him.

“Anything he needs to know about girls, I can tell him. I am a girl!” GoofGirl declares. With her instincts for agenda setting, she will be a combination of Cyrano de Bergerac and Cus D’Amato to GoofBoy’s dating efforts.

GoofBoy is pretty ambivalent about girls now. He doesn’t dislike them, it is simply a matter of whether or not they are interested in sports, Magic and whatever else is rolling around in his brain. If they are, great, if they aren’t there just isn’t a lot of common ground.

Still, I think he knows what he is doing. A few years ago I arranged for him to go to a friend’s house for his sister’s fifth birthday. But he didn’t go, he insisted on sticking around. He organized games, took the girls outside for a bug hunt. Then, he finished off the festivities with a big pillow fight in which half a dozen girls pounded him with pillows and jumped on him.

He’s got a plan, and at eight years old he’s got better moves then I had at five times that age.

I wonder if he worked it out in advance with his sister?