Because I Said So

There is an alien in our midst, someone who seems like us, but is not. She is ostensibly related to us, but possesses characteristics and properties that make it clear that she is not one of us.

As an exercise in her sixth grade class, Maddie was able to remember 55 digits of Pi.

I have trouble remembering my home phone number.

We had a seven-year-old boy over the other night and Maddie used a science kit to show him how to make a circuit board that could launch a propeller into the air.

I can’t quite install the windshield wipers we just bought.

Maddie can step up to the computer and get an iChat going with her sister while surfing Disney.com and I.M.’ing three friends at the same time.

I have trouble opening up an archive of my email.

It has begun - that ineluctable destiny in which the skills of the next generation not only surpass those of the previous, but render them a little beside the point. It’s scary, in part because Maddie’s skills with scientific and technical matters have no genetic precedent. Both Jill and I bobbed and weaved our way through high school science - physics is something I still have nightmares about - and then made sure in college that we stayed as far away from equations and formulas as we could.

And yet here is Maddie, a burgeoning scientist in our midst. When she walks into the room with her latest scientific epiphany, Jill and I stare at each other and wonder: Where did this kid come from?

It’s not so much that she is some kind of Frankenstein’s monster so much as sharing some interests with the good doctor who created him. And don’t think that we haven’t already thought through the collegiate angle even though she isn’t yet five feet. With the huge appetite for girls in the fields of math and science, there is a lot to be said for a young lady who actually perks up when the subject of particle physics comes up.

Still, we are a little worried that we won’t have much to talk about around the dinner table if present trends continue. What if she actually attempts to engage us on our familiarity with the periodic table or the properties of some of the substances it contains?

Isn’t that the way that it goes? You reproduce and think you’ve managed to replicate yourself and instead something or someone pops out that seems to have very little to do with you. Maddie is her own darn thing. Apart from being a scientific adept, she is patient, shy, and cautious, characteristics that no one would accuse Jill or I of possessing.

Rather than fighting the trend, I’ve decided to go with it. When the creator was handing out financial skills, Jill and I were in the same line, the one with all of the people who can’t balance their checkbooks. Neither of us have any understanding of personal finance, so the last time I got one of those bewildering 401K statements, I left it next to Maddie’s computer in hopes she might take an interest. No luck so far.

Ditto for the packet of tax stuff. She just moves it aside and sets down her homework. But I have remaining ambitions for my expenses, a source of constant doom and keening around here. If I can’t master the software we use at work to input past outlays, is it too much to ask that she at least spend a few hours looking into it - and doing a little data entry while she is at it?

As her interests develop and her facility with tools grows, I could very easily come up with a list of honey-do’s up at our lake place. The door on the pump house has been dangling off its hinges for years and it would be nice if someone with some ability would step up to the tangle of phone wires that have snaked around the place as the years have passed.

And given her reservoir of patience and good will toward fellow men, I am sort of anxious for her to reach driving age. Think of all the drama and the swallowed invective that we could avoid if she was behind the wheel instead of either Jill or I.

With all of that kindness toward strangers business, maybe the next time we get knock-knocked by religious types at our home, we should send Maddie to the door? Of course, there is the chance that she would be converted, which might make her a little tough to handle in Sunday school, but there are risks in everything.

Fact is, all that kindness, patience and tolerance brings to mind the biggest challenge facing our family, which is that there is yet one more teenager on the way. If Maddie really puts her mind to it and brings all those attributes that we do not have to bear on that teenage situation, maybe she can all but raise herself. A boy, or a parent, can dream, right?

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