So much delight!

Evan loves to dazzle me with odd bits of knowledge. As we walk down 23rd Avenue, he asks me, “You know how so many living creatures in Australia will kill you?” I say yes, as apparently it’s a rhetorical question. “They even have a snail that will kill you.”

A what?

“They have a snail that shoots out a toxic harpoon that paralyzes its prey and then eats them.” I ask what it eats. “Fish. But its venom is so strong it can kill a human being.” Marveling, I tell him I never heard of such a thing. That’s amazing. “Hang out with me and you’ll learn a lot.”

On the way back from 23rd Avenue, he takes up a new topic. “There’s a word that means a fear of long words, and it’s a really really long word. It starts with hippopotamo-something, and it goes on and on. So if you had this fear, you wouldn’t ever want to know the name of your fear.” This makes him laugh so hard he has to stop walking and stomp his right foot. Back at my place we do a search. He’s right, the word is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. We try various ways to pronounce it, each one more hilarious than the other. 

He takes pleasure in everything we do. He shows me novel ways to use my five-pound weights. We play board games and he devours grapes, blueberries, mangos, and a dinner of black beans, cheese, and tortillas. He puts on the penguin hat he has worn on his visits to see me since he was a baby (extra). At ten, he hasn’t yet begun to exit his childhood. 

I ask him what he and his friends do together. He tells me Nolan, Ohsana, and Calvin all play the same game he plays. I ask if they all get together and play the game? He explains for his clueless grandmother, “It’s a video game. They play it. I play it. And then we talk about it.” The social lives of ten-year-olds is as much a revelation to me as a snail that can kill you.