My son is three and a half years old.
Since social-isolating commenced, we go to the train stop near our apartment and sit on the platform with a small picnic. He loves everything train and so sitting there with our roasted chicken and home-made bread is a perfect afternoon for both of us.
The platform where we normally, looking out across the four lanes of tracks, has been blocked by a idle oil-tankers. This obstruction sends us to the main platform where the passengers disembark or wait for trains — less socially-distanced; but, we go to the end and sit away from them.
We are in St. Petersburg, Russia where people use trains a lot more than in the United States. The flow of trains is usually 8 an hour. On this particular very windy day, wind has become a problem here these days, the refinery-smell from the cars blows across us a regular intervals. Oh, good Lord, smell that…horrible, I say to my son.
He speaks both Russian and English and so is tuned in to every sound I make. I speak only English with him and so he wants to catch the nuances of “papa’s language” because no one else around speaks English with him.
He hears me often saying stuff like Oh my God, when I read about the fires in California; when reacting to the record-breaking temperatures throughout the world. He often hears the: ohhhhh, good Lord, unbeelllliEEvable, ahhhh. I am 53 and so this displeasing groan comes packed with a lot of angst, some wisdom and a heavy dose of frustration. He hears that sound a lot lately.
He knows I am upset about the climate calamity underway. It keeps me awake a night because as an older father, if all works out and I live as long as I am statistically supposed to, I will have maybe 30–35 more years on this earth. At the rate we are going, our planet will be like in the movie Interstellar, if not worse.
My worry is where will I be able to find a safe place for him? What can I do to ensure his life won’t be the rapidly on-coming climate tragedy? Not using straws just won’t cut it, I fear. My son is fully in-tune with my existential ruminations. He feels my worry. Every time the gusts come, I let out an ohhhhh, good Lord, unbeelllliEEvable, ahhhh followed by an Oh my God. I need him to be informed, prepared even; but I also need to let him be a kid, right?
He is really in tune with the weather because of my stress over it. I want to move out of Russia but honestly the United States scares me. My home state of New Jersey is getting hit with rain storms that drop not inches of rain per hour but feet! Powerful hurricanes are wiping away towns. Massive snowstorms and even tornadoes nowadays are the norm. My son, sensing my stress over a tornado that touched down in New Jersey last year began playing a game where a “canada” — this is what he calls tornadoes — blows all of his stuffed animals off the bed and tosses them around the room. The idea of moving back home makes me think this one wouldn’t be a game.
I think he might have a plan
His preoccupation with trains is like that of many kids his age except for one thing. There is a way he looks at the wires and large clasps of the park trains, the way they connect together, that makes me think he is seeing more. His ability to put together his Brio wooden train set is now beyond mine — he lays out crossings and intersections and pass-overs and loops and traffic-flows that I think a civil engineer would struggle to do.
Maybe he is doing what other kids do at his age but I need to see more. For my own sanity, I need to believe that the 1% or 2% of evolutionary difference in his DNA, the part that keeps humans ever evolving and makes parents say stuff like these kids these days are doing stuff we never could. When they are born they already understand (put in the technological break-thru of the moment). My generation is failing at saving this earth. My generation elected a Donald Trump. We aren’t changing our habits; instead, some of us think using more straws or more power-consuming light bulbs is actually bravado — to hell with the earth, man, I am a patriot.
My son is obsessed with the plumbing and tries to figure out where the water goes to and comes from; in the airport in Frankfurt, the ceiling tiles had been removed and instead of continuing to our gate, we had to stop so he could study the massive, multi-colored bundles which fed the Europe’s largest transit hub. His eyes absorbed every turn and twist of the wiring and once he felt some sort of pattern had been established, he let it be known we could continue — he was two and a half then.
The benefits of the multi-generational family, we spend a lot of time with his grandparents who are also very active and busy repairing their country small country house and growing food — as if the case in Russia at the “dacha” — are flowing his way. Engaging us in the way we engage him, I decided to have the conversation with him.
A breeze blew and the oil smell over us again. He crinkled up his little nose and said foo, pop, stinky-stinky. The smell was strong and so I told him, bud, pop hates oil. I honestly felt like I was breaking all parental conventions. I really do. It’s so foo. It’s not good for us. It kills our earth and just makes it so windy. He dislikes the strong, gusty days as much as I do.
But the choo-choo needs Benzin (gas), pop. In his world, if the train needs oil to go, then this means that oil is a good thing. I was stepping into sacred territory.
It does, pal. But maybe something else could be used to make the choo-choo go, maybe Marcello’s poopy? His eyes shot up and he giggled. Marcello is our 20-year old cat. No, he squealed.
I know, pop’s just kidding. But maybe something instead of oil. Oil is just bad, pal. Smell that, right? Look at how dirty those train are. I am sure there is something less foo, don’t you think?
Yeah, he said; and, then his eyes focused on the dirty, trains still dripping oil off onto the tracks beneath them. He had that same look he did when studying the wiring in the ceiling in the airport. He looked at me and smiled. He wanted to calm me for he felt my worry.
I felt hopeful that he would save me us. I pulled him closer and hugged him tight.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Daniel Olah on Unsplash