Holding Childhood Together

"I want to buy those handcuffs, Mom," he tells me. "I know that you don't agree with that because they're cheap and you think I won't like them for more than a day, but...."

"But you don't care about that, you just want them anyway?"

"Yeah! I just want them anyway," he smiles, relieved. "It's my money after all."

"It is," I say. "And even if I don't like your choice, I can reserve all further comment."

"Good!" he says. "Thank you. And now, can you get them down for me? I'm not tall enough."

I suppress a smile. Why did the supermarket hang the cheap chinese handcuffs so high up? How many times have the keys been "lost" so that little brothers and sisters remained tethered to their breakfast chairs for days? I reach up and take down a pair of chrome-plated pot metal cuffs and hand them to my eleven year old whose feet are nearly as big as mine.

He must be on the verge of outgrowing these toys, I think. I would like to find the patience to make my way through this last stretch. But when will our spending habits ever perfectly coincide? Trinidad assures me point-blank that it is not wise to wish for that ever.

We load the groceries into the crate on the back of my bike. We load them into the boys' backpacks and into mine. There are too many boxes of cereal, jars of salsa, cans of beans, bags of rice. "Oh no," I tell them. "I think I may have done it this time."

I situate the gallon jug of filtered water this way and that to make room for a bunch of bananas that I suspect I will crush with my backpack anyway. Every week I test the limit of what I can actually bring home on my bike during our grocery expedition for a family of four. Every week it is almost too much.

This week it is too much.

"Mom! You can use the handcuffs to strap that bottle of water to your handlebars!" cries Trinidad, eyes shining. "I knew they would have a purpose."

I allow him to hook one cuff to my rusty handlebars and one to the handle of the gallon jug. We survey the set up.

"I think that the jug will give before the handcuffs do," he says. "But if not, I know it's my fault, not yours. I take responsibility if they break."

"You're on," I tell him, and we peddle off. Each corner we round, I say a breathless prayer to remain upright. Every wheel revolution, I am grateful that the kids have not accidentally swerved in front of me so far. The jug swings violently back and forth with every small adjustment in my steering.

We ride three blocks before the chain of the handcuffs snaps when I hit a bump. The jug skids out between and behind my wheels. Miraculously, none of us or any other oncoming cars or bikes hit the bottle as we coast into the parking lot of a shopping center.

"Oh!" Trin exclaims, disappointed. "Well, I guess they weren't the quality that I hoped they were. Now we know." He examines the break and sees that it makes sense that the cuffs would fail in that place, even though he hadn't seen it before.

"It was a good try," he says.

"A learning experience," I agree. And I watch as all the fantasy of boyhood collapses happily into size 7 sandals, an accepting nod, and then an impish grin.

"There's always duck tape!"

And so it was that childhood was held together just a little longer with a set of broken handcuffs and a roll of silver adhesive tape, impervious to tears and sun. I trust that he'll know when to take it off.