The Thief And His Pushups

I have two boys.
Sam. Eleven. Gregarious, thoughtful (I'm boasting) and fun loving.
Ben. Six. Sensitive. Wide-eyed and a little too cautious.

This is about Ben, who just left my embrace and headed upstairs to place the pen he stole in a safe place so we can take it back to his piano teacher next week...

Ben broke his leg when he was three. Somewhere in the back of his three year old heart, he grew scared. He jumped off one step when other kids were jumping off three or four. He walked when others ran, sat when they sprinted. He's burned off some of that fear and put himself in harm's way a couple of times since then, but usually because he's not looking where he's going.

He has these huge blue eyes and a totally honest heart, so you can't imagine for a minute that he would become the Keefe thief. But he did, clear as a blue bell today at his piano lesson. I wasn't there, but I could see it in those eyes the second he walked into the house. He looked like he stole the car, ran over the dog, went out with friends and got drunk, tagged the neighbor lady's garage door with green spray paint, and then passed out in the bushes in the front of a cop's lawn. But he is six and I just watched him leave for piano an hour earlier, so I put that anxiety on hold for 12 years from now.

One of the jobs a little brother has is to be amazed at things. You have this big brother that does stuff and you can't be too amazed because you share a room with this guy, and you can't just be dropping your jaw every time he coughs or defeats Bowser on a Wii game. But all the same, keeping your cool isn't easy and sometimes your big bro does stuff and you just want to faint because it seems so cool. But the closer we get to 7, the less we decide to be impressed with big bro and the more we'd like to show him up just a little.

I made a New Year's resolution to complete a minimum of 40 pushups every day this year until 40 seems wimpy and I'm not sore (not yet) and then move it to 50 and so on until I transform magically into a 5' 9" version of Michael Phelps with smaller teeth and fewer cranial hair follicles. I shared this with the boys and they went bananas. They practically cleaned their room to make a place to do pushups to outshine the other. Sam has good core and leg strength (I rationalized after his 3rd pushup left his arms shaking like a hummingbird trying to pose for a class photo). Ben, however, just lit it up. He could probably do 100 pushups if he didn't constantly lose his train of thought and decide to go have a snack.

Sam needed the rationalization not to feel to bad for being outshined Soundgarden style by Ben. He appreciated my praise of his core strength and tried to blow it off. Little bro finally had the upper hand, though, and was not letting him off the hook. He dropped and gave me twenty for no reason and then shot a supermodel-catwalk-over-the-shoulder glare at Sam as if to say, "I know you counted."

And I want to be impressed with both my kids for their achievements, honesty, hairlines etc., so it's really hard not to want to give Ben a high five at this point, which I wisely choose not to do in order to save some emotional scarring for the 11 year old. (Ed. Note: I can hear my father, father in law, brothers, grandfather and high school gym coach now: "Oh man, the pussification of American kids...") Maybe.

Bottom line, Ben is staring at me and wanting this reassurance, so I give him a quick wink and smile and we move on to less competitive activities like going to bed. That wink sticks with you as a boy, and he wears it like an honor badge for two straight days, falling on his hands and throwing down 10 pushups between bites at dinner. Anything to catch that wink and smile again.

Well, I'm glad I gave him that wink now. It occurs to me that needing your Dad's approval and support makes it harder for you to let him down. Ben had the complete opposite look on his face when he came home from piano tonight. Kari and Sam walked in chatty and moved in different directions and left me staring at big blue-eyed Ben, half crying and broken. I was clueless at the time what might have gotten him to that state of mind, but I could sense the body language in the threesome that someone needed to tell me something. He was holding a pen. It was silver and had a ball point tip on one side, and on the other side it came equipped with a laser pointer and a light blue flashlight. This is a an extremely rare find for a first grader; such a marvelous and multi-purpose writing/pointer-of-things-on-the-wall/dog-teasing instrument rolled into one.
He'd stolen it from his piano teacher's apartment, subsequently been questioned as to the origins of such an awesome instrument, and copped to the theft in the car. Mom and Bro told him it was wrong, but they left him alone with his tears and sobbing apologies because they knew it was me he was really afraid of disappointing.

He didn't. He admitted it, told me he was sorry and agreed to return it and apologize.

I couldn't be more proud if he broke the world record for pushups.