Hat tip Raven
Guest Post by Anthony Esolan
Whenever I’m in a diner or a family restaurant, I look around for the most cheerful thing in any day’s experience, and that’s a young husband and wife and their children. Today the two children sitting with their parents at the table next to us were a baby boy and his four-year-old brother. The four year old had glossy blond hair, tousled over his forehead, and was all skinny arms and legs, elbows and knees. Foolishness regarding the supposed sameness of men and women cannot stand up against a moment or two of looking at how they are shaped, and that is true even of little boys and girls. In the boy we can see the man-shape in miniature: the straight-angled legs, the shoulders made for throwing, the jaw line, the snowshoe feet. I imagine that it delights the heart of any ordinary mother and father.
Ordinary—but these are not ordinary times. They are dis-ordinary. Try to pretend that they are ordinary: that the most important things in life strike everyone as a matter of course. So the parents of the little boy look at their son, and imagine what he will be like when he grows to manhood. They imagine him as marrying a woman and begetting a family of his own. That is a matter of course. It is what all parents have always done, on the banks of the Hwang Ho or the Father of Waters, on the treeless expanses of Alaska or in the rain forests of Borneo, in the Roman forum or on a village green in New England. It is normal, not in a mere statistical sense, but in the sense of the Latin noun norma: a carpenter’s square. It is what ought to be, when you raise your son in a healthy way. To do anything other would be like building a house with crooked walls. Why would you do that? The thing will buckle.
