Cave Dwellers

My oldest son turned 14 last month. He's suddenly taller than me. I see his upper body broadening, and his face is beginning to take on a more manly look. His voice is changing. Squeak.

He shares a room with his 10 year old brother. They have two dressers, two beds, two bookcases and a desk in their room. They have posters on the walls, and a clock radio. There are a couple of boxes of action figures. A guitar and martial arts bags fit easily into their closet.

And yet, when I seek to venture through the door, I find myself tripping on a skateboard, a basketball, or a pair of sneakers. There are always papers strewn across the floor. Empty water bottles and twisted cracker packages, smuggled in from the kitchen during the night, lay by the bed.

Legos are littered dangerously across the rug, beckoning to barefeet, "Oh, step on me, step on me...I need to hurt your foot...."

I wonder how their room becomes so hideous. How the careful straightening and vacuuming which I insist upon each week, kicks into the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The natural breakdown of things. The decomposition of what was once neatness and beauty.

I personally go into their room and reorganize their drawers. I say, the socks go here, the underwear goes here, the t-shirts here and the jeans go here. See, if you do this and maintain it, you will never lose another sock, another t-shirt, another pair of jeans.

And yet the piles of clean, sorted and folded laundry that I send into their room, are tipped over and confused. They become sandbags stacked against the enemy. Trenches dug for War.

Wait! I see something dark, moving in the corner of the room -- crows sitting on fence posts, cawing mawkishly. Rats scurry in the gutters, and crawl through heating ducts, searching for scraps of pizza and gum. They swill flat coke from bottles clutched in their little paws.

I scan the foreign atmosphere, so different from the rest of the house. Bats hang from the ceiling, and discarded bones of gnawed, unfortunate animals are strewn at the cave door. Animal skins lie in a pile in a corner. Ashes of a cold fire lay neglected. A vulture picks fragments from a mangy carcass. Hyenas snicker in the corners. A lone wolf howls in the distance.

I step cautiously and find a place which must be the cave powder room. I don't even want to talk about it. The cat has been there too.

I pray that I can impart to them the idea that some day they may want a home with a wife. A woman who will share their bed, their stove, their -- eegad-- powder room. The woman may like clean sheets, toilet paper and other modern luxuries. She may hope to share the hunting with them -- foraging for nuts and berries. Nesting with young. The works.

Right now my sweet boys are deep in the land of boydom. They are fixated on the pointy-nosed and pointy-headed characters of Dragon Ball Z. They love the screech of an electric guitar. The primal taste of cold pizza. And yet these things will pass and they will become men, they will become husbands, they will become fathers. They will hunt for game and forage for nuts and berries. They will find a new cave and they will raise young.

And until that day, I will love the cave in my home, with all its fruitflies and strange smells. For this is the sweat-tent where boys become men. The place of drums, of facial hair and boxer shorts. The place where they stand in the doorway with a large club and bare feet and grunt, "Ungawa."

It is the place where I come and call to them, "Clean this room before I set fire to it and put it out of its misery."

And they grunt and say, "Mom, have you seen my favorite t-shirt?"

"You might find it under the hyena dung."

Yet there is light at the end of the tunnel. This year my older boy began to use a comb. The future looks bright.

Written in 2001