Little Boy Passions

Right now the road past our house is being resurfaced. We're seeing a parade of sweepers, dump trucks, tanker trucks, asphalt-laying machines and packers go by, and hearing the beep beep beep of trucks moving backwards. I'm thinking it's a real shame not to have little boys living here to watch all this activity. When our boys were little, they would have spent days like this camped out in the front yard so as not to miss any of it.

I remembered something similar recently when we got a family update letter from the people who live now in our Trail West house where we raised our family. Just across the road from the house, and across a very narrow field, runs the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) rail line. The mother who lives there now said that their toddler son, Dothan, loves trains. I'm sure he does just what our boys used to do--run to the window every time he hears a whistle from one of the nearby crossings. Our boys also eagerly noted any maintenance and repairs to the tracks because they brought out a whole new set of machines to watch.

I suspect things that go are nearly a universal fascination for boys. Even Joel, who turned out to be less mechanically inclined than either of his brothers, had a special sound for such things when he still had no speaking vocabulary otherwise: BahPOO. (And no, we did not use those sounds as single words in our routine conversation.) He usually made the same sign-language-like gesture with his right hand when he said it--rotating his hand from the palm-down to the palm-up position. Go figure.

My next turn at first hand observation of this little boy things that go obssession will probably not happen till there are grandsons. Now that's a thought to brighten my day. . . .