My two sons aren’t cute anymore. But I’ll get to that. It’s July: I am standing on the beach boardwalk in Santa Cruz, Calif. Starting high, from the gliding sea gulls and moving down, I’ll paint the picture for you:
Birds carry popcorn and pieces of deep-fried Twinkies away, over the colorful beach umbrellas planted like asterisks across the sand and up to the concrete walk, where a mass of people mill along like ducks who never walk quite straight or purposefully.
The skyway-pod ride carries couples from one end of the park to the other. When they pass overhead I look up and see only the bottoms of shoes, gum-thick and sticky.
A vendor with an air-filled hammer waves it and promises plastic riches if you hit the mark, squirt the clown, or toss the beanbag in a cup. Quarters fall like rain, silver and tinkling, into the glass bin at his side.
Ice cream passes, curled just-so in a swirl of vanilla, and then melts down the sides of the cone, lolling over the fingers of a sandy girl. It is halfway down her arm before her little head bends — she raises her hand as if trying to swallow her elbow — and she expertly licks the white ribbon up and away.
My husband and two sons decide to enter one of the boardwalk shops to escape the heat for a moment.
My sons are no longer small, no longer puppy-dog-tail cute. They loom some, not quite over my head, but that will come soon.
They know the going-in-a-store drill by heart; I’ve spent much of my life watching boys and men, for various reasons, some recreational, some self-preservational. I no longer need to tell my sons to take their hands out of their pockets, unhunch their shoulders, make eye contact.
When boys become teens, people who don’t know them and spot them don’t tend to see cute, or sweet, or endearing. Instead, they usually see a question — however slight — of danger, or menace, or threat.
This is part of being a boy — the bigger the boy, the more a part of his life. The darker-skinned the boy, the more a part of his life. The wilder the hair — Mohawk, shaved, very long or oddly colored — the more a part of his life.
I watch my two boys as they lean over the glass display cases filled with beanies and sunglasses. They’re bored but having some sort of fun anyway. I prop myself against a bookshelf to people-watch the crowd as it surges past.
Big boys come in bunches, their energy almost visible in a huff around them — excitable, edgy, joyful, maybe dangerous. They are all bigger than me, some huge with muscle and youth. Some with saggy pants and decorative chains, some with chopped blond hair, dark tattoos, too hot and heavy black-cool coats. Some so tall and lanky they look like drinking straws, some low to the ground and full of attitude — enough to make them seem very big.
They all saunter, or try to, many just learning, growing into their man-walks. Some eat cotton candy, carry stuffed penguins won at the dart toss booth, or bop each other with blow-up plastic mallets. Most will, at least once, check their reflection in a piece of glass, to adjust their hat or hoodie or belt. Some will end up at the hammer game, testing their muscle against the last man up, hoping to ring the bell that says, blaring and blinking, “I am strong.”
I look over at my two boys, pushing at each other with shoulders aimed just so. One surreptitiously tries to trip the other; it’s subtle. I can catch the eye of neither. They’re already done with this store, and moving into the crowd, beside each other, heads on a swivel, catching and taking in every wild and wondrous choice swirling around them.
I steady myself against the bookshelf, push off and upright, take my husband’s hand, and we both plunge onto the boardwalk, following our two sons, trying to keep up, trying to stay far enough away.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
