DANIEL MENAKER
For the few people not familiar with the idea behind the Domestic Rider to Parkinson’s Law—children expand to fill the space allotted to them and also a great deal of the space not allotted to them—a brief, selective inventory of the contents of the “public” areas of our apartment (entrance hall, dining room, living room) will demonstrate it nicely: Plastic bag filled with cheap Walkmans, dead batteries, and Gordian earphone cords. Pieces of paper on the floor, including an old birthday-party list on a page torn off an Amoxil Chewable notepad and a drawing done by Elizabeth, my eight-year-old daughter, of an Asian-looking smile face with a third, Caucasian eye in the middle of its forehead and mucus dripping from its nose. A pair of navy-blue Stride Rite party shoes. Small clay figure resembling Mr. Bill, the victim of “Saturday Night Live”’s sadistic Sluggo. Similar figure of a woman in a chair, whom I think of as Dame Edith Sitwell. A drawing done by my eleven-year-old son of a nightmare version of a subway station. A wedge of wood that my daughter painted green and red, with black pips, to resemble a slice of watermelon. Lionel XR Speed Machine bicycle with two flat tires. A two-foot-long Medusa’s coiffure of plastic lanyard under a chair. A pair of Reebok Blacktop sneakers. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players’ Handbook. And so forth.
The Domestic Rider will surely prove to govern not only real space but electronic space. In fact, around our cyber-household it already does. I bought a PowerBook a few weeks ago and, the other day, when I turned it on I noticed that a new icon had floated down onto its desktop. Its title was “Willy’s Folder,” and in it I found one document called “The Moron Gang” and another called “Wish.” Yeah, I opened them. (Hey, it’s my PowerBook!) “The Moron Gang” turned out to be a short story, abandoned, at least for the time being, after a few pages; and this is “Wish,” a docket-in-progress of Christmas desiderata (reprinted with the permission of the author):
Music
Beastie Boys: Ill Communication
Offspring: Smash
Nirvana: Bleach
Nirvana: Nevermind
Janes Addiction: Ritual de lo Habitual
Clothing
Princess Mary flannel
muted Dress Stewart flannel
pair of faded denim jeans
pair of saddle jeans
pair of stonewashed denim jeans
pair of double black jeans
Green Day Dookie Bombs T-shirt
Nirvana in Utero T-shirt
Pearl Jam Flame Picture T-shirt
Soundgarden Black Hole Sun T-shirt
Barney eating kids T-shirt
Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics T-shirt
Necklaces, Rings
Nirvana necklace
Soundgarden necklace
skull rings
claw holding crystel necklace
wizard necklace
anarcy necklace
Exspense Things
black leather 8 eyelet pair of doc martians
Sony disc man
For all their found-poetry quality, and despite my having watched the Grammys with Willy last fall, some of the bytes that “Wish” took out of my PowerBook are Klingon to me, but even so they clearly illustrate another article of the universal Code of Parenthood: children grow up five years for every five minutes their parents aren’t looking. Skull ring? Not for that molarless tyke my wife just now put down for a nap. Jane’s Addiction? Not for that towhead who yesterday was afraid of the Cookie Monster. And so on. I could have sworn I saw him teetering into his room Pampers-clad and with oatmeal adorning his head this morning, and yet here he is at 7 P.M. going out to a dance wearing (single?) black jeans held up around the tops of his thighs by what means I have no idea, and a dab of mousse in his hair.
So it wasn’t truly surprising to learn that a kid’s eminent domain extends beyond real estate and into RAM. What did arrest me was the extreme force with which Willy’s wish list applied the law of They Grow Up Too Fast, and it made me understand that my children’s childhood, like a lot of other things around here, will remain, for me, unfinished. That’s the law, too, of course: you have to let your children go before you’re ready to. And that is why childhood is poignant even when it’s not. I will someday, too soon, fatten my laptop’s trash can with Willy’s file folder and put Elizabeth’s Stride Rites away for good, but Christmas is around the first corner, so wish away, the two of you—all of a sudden you’re old enough to know a soft touch when you see one.
1994
