Match Game 2011 . . . ALREADY?

My wife and are I incredulous. Are they really doing this already? The strains of that familiar tune are unmistakable:

Jackson and Gabriella, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,

First comes love, then come marriage,

Then comes Baby in the baby carriage.

When the tune comes around to "Malik" (our next-door neighbor, a first-grader, who I've written about in these pages previously) Jeanette and I decide we can stay silent no longer.

"Okay wait," I say, "who is this girl they have you sitting in a tree with?"

Amidst much giggling, Malik grins his crooked grin and shyly repeats the name from the song.

"And what do you love about her?" J. asks.

"Her clothes."

More giggling.

We look at each other and shake our heads in disbelief. Jeanette gets up from the dinner table to retrieve something from the kitchen. On her way there she says over her shoulder, “Just don’t worry about that baby carriage part. There’s plenty of time for that.”

I don’t remember how old I was when my friends and I started accusing each other of sitting up in trees and kissing girls. It was more that than anything else – an accusation. The song held you to task for being the guy doing something yucky, while betraying the trust of the all-male club at the same time. Fraternity is important to young boys; it’s all about who’s “in” and who isn’t. Each of these boys needs to be able to say they could, in theory be up in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g someone. And that someone – based on the age-old rules of boyhood – must be named in this song.

When I think back to my own childhood, I’ll bet there was a big gulf between when I played this “Match Game” and when I first actually did start with the k-i-s-s-i-n-g. If, let’s say, I played the game with my brother Mike and best friend Miki in 1971, which would have made me about the age Diego is now, that’s a good six years before I first kissed a girl.

So, by that math, there’s time to prepare ourselves.

For Diego, anyway. Something tells us (and something has told us this from very early on) that we will have less time to prepare for Jackson. We need to keep a close eye out on his doings up in trees. Because as Jeanette pointed out, we do not want to be thinking about no baby carriages for a long, LONG time around here.