Seriously, though, who is this kid?

I remember when we thought five was the best year ever—and maybe it will turn out to have been—but six has become a formidable contender for the title.

I was looking back at photos of him from just last summer and felt myself going all light in the head. Can this really be the same kid?

For one thing, his haircut back then was just awful. Ugh. Now he uses hair product—just a little, tastefully applied—and is a handsome son of a bitch. Even with the missing teeth, he looks like a hillbilly Brad Pitt. (It’s still okay to make Hillbilly jokes, right?)

Besides the obvious outward changes, though, it occurred to me… back then, he was still struggling to sleep through the night dry consistently. He was still afraid of the dog instead of his master (I cracked this one when I turned over feeding and out-letting of the dog to him). He couldn’t read nor write a lick. And extricating a ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ from him was a once-in-a-blue-moon event.

He was determined to stay a little kid because for five years, that’s exactly where we liked him the most and, apparently, subtly encouraged him to remain.

Then Kindergarten hit and really upset the apple cart. Our precocious bundle of joy turned overnight into a socially awkward scholastic underachiever who wasn’t even particularly adept at recess.

The Missus, to her credit, had been working with him on some critical stuff, like bike riding and reading, while I was wanking off trying to push a boulder up the inevitable unpublished novel. But Kindergarten caught my attention. And as soon as I took a look, I realized The Damned Boy (not his new sobriquet!) was playing his Mommy like a really cool guitar, something Eddie Van Halen would play. He had her reading to him, and pushing him down the street on his bike.

The first thing we did was send him back to Taekwondo, this time with him being fully on board. At the current 101 rank he’s about to age out of, he’s not required to memorize the twenty or so complicated steps to his form (think Tai Chi with more punches and kicks), but he has, on his own initiative. There’s maybe two or three other kids in his class who have done that, and the others are all the intense, aggressive little boys who will grow up to be Navy Seals or pro linebackers.

Immediately, all the drama about his lack of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ disappeared, to be replaced by curt, courteous “Yes, ma’am” and “yes sir”s. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but man is it cool when it happens.

And it’s not just formal courtesy either. He holds doors, he shleps groceries with minimal complaining, orders politely and concisely and pays for himself at Fuddruckers and fast food joints.

But it was over the summer that the heavy intensity training occurred. As soon as he was freed from school obligations, I used the first thing every morning as the time of day when he and I went out and checked items off his pail-and-shovel list.

During the last 3-4 months, The Boy has:

• Learned to read at a third-grade level, starting from virtually zero when we began. His resistance to reading remains considerable but was recently, finally made plain—his eyesight is several different kinds of fucked up, and his first glasses just came in a few days ago.

Which makes the fact that a crash course begun at the beginning of the summer vacation has yielded dazzling results even more impressive. He’s been reading age-appropriate kid stuff with his Mom (“Flat Someone”?) while he and I blazed through third-grade level reading and workbooks on the Titanic and the U.S. Presidents.

Just for good measure, we also watched the first few episodes of Roots after he tearfully accused me of treating him like a slave (and we were probably fighting about reading).

He now has an informed opinion about slavery, and we have heard no more about it around the house.

• Learned to ride a bike, also starting from about zero. His Mom and I (but mostly The Missus) have been working with him for what feels like years on his training wheels bike, to no avail. The damn training wheels were never strong or tight or something enough, and they never kept the bike aloft while The Boy was on it unless one of us was also keeping it from crashing, so instead of learning how ride a bike, he learned how to take his parents out for a good run.

I decided this was bullshit and yanked the training wheels off with extreme prejudice. Then I took him to a steep hill and ran down it with him until he had trained me how to run down hills real good. The Missus finally cracked the code when she combined my ripping-off of the wheels with her actual remembering of how to ride a bike, and he was at long last… up in no time.

• Learned to swim. At least that’s what I call staying alive in the water, and that’s what he learned to do. He can also do a slick but totally useless back float from the shallow end, but that will not keep him alive in the water like the dog paddle he seemed to pick up naturally between last summer and this summer. And with it came the confidence to try new things like the waterpark-length enclosed, loopy pool slide at the local ‘natatorium’ a couple weeks ago. Last summer, he was scared of slides the length of my arm.

• Conquered playground equipment. Look, let’s face it. We dropped the ball. We had so much fun hanging with him and watching him grow that we kind of missed some developmental milestones along the way. Rudimentary stuff.

All the stuff kids with sibs or physically- or socially-active parents were up to speed on, our little guy was woefully behind on. All the stuff I just expected would come with age, like they did with me, left unprompted hadn’t happened yet. No reading, no biking, no swimming—what the hell?

As soon as we realized that—and aware that I would have a lot more time than usual alone with The Boy as his mother traveled the world to take care of job-related stuff—I decided to bring him up to speed on everything I could think of by the time he entered first grade in the fall. One friend referred to it as “Little Kid Boot Camp.”

And I guess I worked him hard enough to earn his ‘slave’ epithet, although prior to Roots, I have no idea where he would even have been introduced to that concept.

Besides the results of my browbeating him all summer, he’s also grown tremendously on his own this year. He really took to school; he loved his Kindergarten teachers and they loved him. And he seems completely sanguine about the big step-up to first grade coming in a week. He is the classic only-child who gets along better with his parents’ peers than his own.

Which I used to think was kinda cool, but I have since come to reconsider that opinion.

He had to come into the office with us for the first couple weeks of the school year, and by Day One of Week Two, he was escorting lost undergrads (and presumably overgrads as well) around the labyrinthic bowels of the Social Sciences Department to their necessary destinations.

We went out on our first bike ride together today. It was the last day of his summer vacation and we went for a bike ride in the morning, and a trip down to the crick with the dog in the afternoon. It was as Andy and Opie a day as I could make it, at least around the edges (the dog is much stupider than Andy’s fishin’ rod).

I could only be happier with this kid if his eyes were in better shape. Even the stuff he does that bugs me are either amusing and non-harmful, or short-lived and easily corrected.

His teachers described him last year as a vector for love, and he still is. But this year, our little wellspring of good cheer will also be prepared to kick a little ass in the readin’, writin’ and runnin’ ’round the playground departments, too. He is well prepared to succeed on his own terms.

By the time I finish this, he’ll be seven. Sometimes I walk by his room at night at look at him, sprawled out almost the entire length and width of his regulation-size twin bed, and again find myself wondering, in all sincerity, “Who is this kid?”