A Penny for Your Thoughts

Oh, Eamon.





My desire for you to start talking, in full complete sentences, is purely selfish.



You see, you are one of the goofiest people I have ever met. You think "silly" is a goal and you strive to meet it every day. You are crazy and bizarre and I don't even think you're marching to the beat of your own drummer, but possibly a trombonist or maybe even the sound rubber boots make on wet tile. And I don't think you're marching, either, but possibly tangoing or even hula-hooping.

Sometimes, when we are in the car driving to your grandparents' house, and you are looking contemplatively out the window, you will suddenly break out into hysterical laughter, silly faces, and crazy noises, flinging your arms and kicking your feet wildly as if the world is simply too fantastic, too great, too amazing to hold it in any longer...and then after a few seconds, you go right back to staring out the window. I can't help but laugh, too, and I just want to know...what were you thinking about?





And you are talking...more and more each day. I am no longer shocked when you learn a new word, because each day you add at least three more to your vocabulary. Today you told us that you were going to "smim" in the "puh" and that you were eating a "brry" with your "tust" at breakfast.

But I know it's not enough for you, either: that you are always thinking more and anxious to say everything on your mind and sometimes you are frustrated when we cannot decipher your string of unintelligible syllables that you obviously mean to be a sentence of immense gravity.

And though you find the Pidgin-Eamon-English so frustrating, each day you are also finding ways to show us more and more of what you actually know. You are able to say almost every letter in the alphabet, or at least the sound (except for the nefarious H and its evil compatriot Y), and today, you even pointed to the word ME, and said "Mmmm" and then "eeeee," and then looked expectantly at me. When I said the whole word "ME" you smiled knowingly and made we did it again and again. "Mmmm....eeee." "Me." "Mmmm....eeee." "Me."



And who knows? Without the accompanying speech, it's hard to gauge what you actually can do. Maybe you can already read. Maybe you're figured out a cure for cancer. Maybe you've developed an effective method of time travel or have secretly worked out how to start a colony on Mars or have written four operas in your head already.

But the real reason I want you to be able to talk? The purely selfish reason? Because I am pretty sure, pretty gosh darn sure, that one day, I will be able to tell you this joke:

Two ions were walking down the street. The first ion looked at the other and said worriedly, "Dude, I think I've lost an electron."

"Are you sure?" asked the second.

"Yeah," replied the first. "I'm positive."

And Eamon? I think you, unlike almost every other person I have ever met, will laugh hysterically with me at that joke, and then tell me one equally as terrible and funny.

So about those operas? Eh, I don't care. The cure for cancer would be nice, but really, I just want to know what you're thinking about when you burst into laughter for seemingly no reason at all.



Because I have a feeling you might be the coolest person I know.