SCOOTER MAGEE

Last fall, we were sort of amoeba-ing down the sidewalk, four tired people struggling to fill a day with something other than struggle.

Not 200 yards (or 16 hours) into our progress towards a playground, my son spotted a derelict, metal, toy ride-on tractor from the 1960s in the weeds beside a residential driveway. [GAME OVER]

I started flipping through the Panic Rolodex. How was I going to separate him from this thing without someone in the neighborhood calling the police?

Then I realized, as I caught up to him, that we were in my friend’s driveway. My friend wasn’t home, but I told the small farm-vehicle devotee I would text Mr. Dan and ask if we could play with the tractor. He “waited” as only three-year-olds can (they can’t / he didn’t). I texted Dan and said Can we take this tractor in your driveway for a spin? We were walking by and now H is losing his mind.

Dan wrote back instantly: Someone dropped that off in our driveway one day as trash. The only reason I didn’t throw that out months ago was the desperate hope that exactly this would happen.

And so: we wheeled Dan’s trash down the sidewalk, squeaking slowly over November’s fallen, mashed, ornamental berries, and began the era of the pedal-tractor. It has no steering wheel, only the rods that would hold one on, but when we replaced it with a safer and less eye-poking-out steering mechanism, the child politely requested a return to the original rods. The vehicle is now named “Peckapecka,” after the sound old tractor engines make, and he has lobbied successfully to bring her inside for the winter, which means there are Pecka-sized fender marks on every cabinet and piece of furniture on our first floor.

Fast-forward to the ass-end of January and one mom’s desperation to get her children out of the house (children who have perfected the art of lying prone, wailing, across an open door’s threshold, yard-sale style, half-in/half-out of their sprawled and flung winter assortments… I have altogether too many notions about everyone getting out of the house, really). What it came down to this time was Pecka: he didn’t want to leave her, and no, the bicycle was not a sufficient replacement.

I explained for the eleventh time that Pecka wouldn’t fit in the car. SHE WILL, he sobbed, still lying over the door frame with his feet on the snow and his head on some half-melted muddy ice on the mudroom floor.

So I did what desperate parents do and I found a way to get a tractor into a car. (Along with winter gear bag, snack bag, pee-accident kit, water bottles, back-up bicycles in case Pecka’s slick wheels couldn’t hack the icy paved trails at the park, a light-up push scooter, and everyone’s stuffies.)

There were a lot of people at the park, and Pecka induced a variety of reactions as she squealed rhythmically across pavement and ice, driven as she was by a neon-headed three-year-old with no steering wheel and a talent for speed.

His sister and I struggled to keep up. We relished the half hour during which Brother kept shoving Pecka into a tangly little ditch at the edge of the woods, saying “WOAH LOOK AT THAT BANDONED TRACTOR. WE BETTER GO GET IT OUT.” While he tugged Pecka out of the ditch, pushed her back in, and repeated his MAZING DISCOVERY 50 or 60 times, Sister and I built a “beaver dam” out of carefully selected sticks (“Not the small ones, Mama.” <preschooler facepalm>).

We rounded out the day with some archeological work in the mud by the lakeshore, finding a buried tabasco bottle the children proclaimed was “a T-Rex femur,” and then it was time to start the long, dicey navigation towards the car. So off we went, with two small persons on wheeled vehicles with varying speeds, intensities, and intentions, weaving (in theory) between and not into passersby, who had markedly different levels of child-tolerance.

At the final turn to the parking lot, my son met with a stranger we’d seen on the way out—an older man with a coffee cup walking alone in the sunshine, a fellow who had smiled understatedly on our first crossing. This time the man stopped to talk to my son, and I could hear him ask some mild questions about the make and model of the rust-bucket. I let the two enthusiasts enthuse as I turned to wait for my daughter, who had stopped to eat snow.

By the time my daughter and I caught up, my son and the stranger were discussing rack-and-pinion steering. I joined the conversation for a little bit, distracted because I was also checking my watch and guesstimating blood-glucose levels of each child for the return to the car, which, as a Transition Between Activities, might throw us into a wormhole where everyone was required to cry and scream, possibly bite and kick.

The man was very friendly and kind, and the conversation continued as my son pedaled almost all the way to the car. We finished our chat and I started loading our things as the man walked off to his truck, which was parked in an adjacent lot.

When my daughter caught up on her turquoise scooter, her spunky little frame had wilted over the handlebars, and her curly, hatted head was completely downcast.

“What’s wrong, baby?!” I yelped.

She turned her face up at me and the sadness in her gray-blue eyes shone like the whole of the lake. She looked down at the pavement again.

“He didn’t like my scooter,” she whispered to the gravel.

OH HELL YES HE DID.

“Oh sweetie, I’m sure he likes scooters— he just didn’t see it! Come on, let’s RUN and we can ask him before he leaves!” I grabbed her scooter and made like someone being chased by a whole kindergarten classroom. I glanced over my shoulder, continuing the exaggerated run, and saw she’d taken the bait. She grinned every one of her gappy little teeth into the sunshine and flapped her elbows hard, completely out of synch with her legs, as she RAN to catch this stranger.

When we were a couple hundred yards away I yelled “EXCUSE ME SIR” twice before he turned, surprised, to see us. I stopped and waited for my daughter to catch up, pointing to the scooter I was holding, out of breath. “We were wondering,” I said loudly, “— do you like scooters?”

Thankfully, the man seemed to understand. “Oh, yes,” he said, earnestly. “Would you show it to me?”

And my very shy daughter walked right up to the man and said, happily, “this is where you steer it!” He touched a booted toe to the turquoise brake, and she confirmed that yes, that’s how you stop it. They admired the scooter together in general small mumbles for a while and then she finished with, “When you undo this thing it makes the handlebars go down so it can fit in the car.” The man smiled again and I thanked him and introduced myself, and my daughter turned, beaming, to scoot slowly and precariously back to the car.

In all the fuss about the more obvious, more active, more attention-grabbing phenomena of our daily family life, which are so often captained by her brother, I had lost track of my daughter’s needs— the quietest and deepest of her wants—for a while. It made me briefly, tremendously sad that I had failed her in this small but significant way.

And yet: deciding to make her desires suddenly and assertively audible, to a kind stranger, was not only easy but downright delightful. It had me going full-on Muppet, in fact, running in muddy snow-boots across a football field’s-worth of parking lot, dragging a turquoise scooter and waiting for a small, winter-garbed blob to catch up on her swinging, scudding, pudgy legs.

The act of repair became an act of renewal, somehow better than having gotten it right the first time. The hustle and glee, the chase, the wild hope of the fixing—perhaps entirely regardless of what the man might actually say— made us both briefly, exquisitely happy.

.