THE FOURTH STORY

I present you with the facts of the case, from which I feel you will be able to assemble your own take:

1. The kind of adult-centered choice (for the parents to watch Netflix during the day) that occurred hadn’t occurred since before the twin children had been snap-shotted as embryos in their petri dish somewhere on the outskirts of Boston

2. It also happened at the exact moment that former Embryo B, now one 48-lb Heinrich Magnus von Dean (for this is what we call him during peak enthusiasm) had the revelation / assignment from the heavens that he was to build a “four-story cat castle with a grooming station.”

3. We do not have a cat.

4. The location selected: the dining room, with the central structural feature to be the dining table itself.

5. We were able to stay out of it during the early phases of construction, getting up from our couch-nest only to locate some large flat items the architect required for an “extra patio roof,” for which purpose an old drawing folio met muster.

5. We were able to keep our mouths shut when the second stair-slide panel got added to the edge of the dining table at an angle most accurately described as vertical.

6. When the architect yanked four cookie sheets and two muffin tins out onto the tile floor of the kitchen with symphonic verve, we only had to run it back about ten seconds to catch what it was Daniel Ricciardo was actually revealing about the vulnerability of questioning risks on track.

7. We remained disengaged when the new vase of tulips the neighbors gifted us the night before went in on the ground floor of the cat castle, with two perfect yellow tulip heads removed so that von Dean could gift us each with a peace offering towards our continued tolerance. The smiling delivery of the buds to our palms was, however, also a sign that things were about to escalate.

8. We even stayed mostly focused on Formula One: Drive to Survive over von Dean’s requests for “boards from the garage, and could you cut them to size” (mildly ignored, which dismissal von Dean absorbed with aplomb, I have to say— not a skill he possessed even six months ago).

9. When, however, the architect began to campaign for more direct and useful parental involvement by carefully and insistently drawing out his plans in marker and pointing to them, tapping animatedly (see? There are TWO LINES up to the fourth floor, where the GROOMING STATION is. Two lines. TWO. And over it there is aNOTHER ROOF.) it became clear that we were not going to be able to remain uninvolved.

10. If we had not found a way to provide more active support, we would face von Dean’s unilateral solution to the problem of us not helping, which was inching ever closer to putting the piano bench on top of the dining room table.

11. The paternal unit’s solution was to cleave to duty and cite the need to make dinner as he deftly vectored the architect’s recruitment zeal towards his mother.

12. The maternal unit mostly just looked tired and tested the tensile strength of the dining table in her mind as she shuffled over to the piano bench with a heavy heart.

13. Yoga mats tend to mitigate damage in such cases. Two plus a block and a foam roller were employed in this case.

14. While the architect’s bathrobed assistant made her slow progress in trying to downgrade the fourth-floor piano bench plan to a second-floor piano bench plan without the architect noticing, the architect himself found a usefully pre-peeled mango to add to the scene, in case the cat needed a snack when she arrived.

15. He also provided a pan of water to which he silently added maple syrup and a straw (everyone knows cats drink from bowls and pans, not cups) in the moments while his assistant was most engaged in testing the probability of a piano-bench crash from the dining chairs upon which she had now mostly successfully perched it.

16. The cat, it turns out, was his sister. He brought her in triumphantly— right as his assistant was balancing the third-floor roof atop the grooming station—buckled into a life vest which served as a harness and attached to a cooler-strap that served as a leash.

17. The cat herself was very glad indeed to see the grooming station, which had been successfully downgraded to a third-floor operation and composed from two picnic baskets and the drawing folio. She scrambled right in, before even stopping to snack on her lightly-used mango or pan of syrup water.

18. Whatever grooming did or did not get achieved went unrecorded, as dinner was being plated.

19. Fortunately, von Dean did not seem to notice that there was no actual fourth story, in the end, only three. The fourth resided mostly in his heart, and could be sensed only in the otherwise inexplicable aura of grandeur the rather glorious heap of parts before him seemed to take on through his narration and gesturing and recruitment and extreme satisfaction.

For my part, I feel there are several options for a takeaway from whatever story you may have assembled out of the above facts of the case.

One might take away from the story that the dream is more important than the outcome.

One might glean quite defensibly from the story the sense that good god their house should probably be bulldozed.

One might really mostly wonder where we ate dinner. The answer is not at the dining room table.

One might ask was it really worth it? To which I would be obliged to reply with the architect’s drawing itself: this particular human’s first non-school-based, un-prompted written communication, specifically for the purpose of engaging other humans in the service of a vision he held steady in his eye, like a known star in the night sky.

My own takeaway will be perched on that razor’s edge between hope and fear, that place we sit with our kids where we recognize both how much and how little influence we really have. I fear that my architect’s sheer momentum, his power, will cause him pain in his life; I hope his hurricane of life force will bring him and others joy and comfort. It ultimately feels that there is both much and little I can do to tweak whatever courses flow from this confluence.

The cat at least, I will say again, was greatly pleased.

In the end I guess I feel that it’s better the architect have his eye on the star of his vision than on me, worrying whether I will approve, whether I will assist. If I err, which I very often do, then it seems I will most likely do so on the side of approval and assistance. This is an imperfection I’m willing to lean into, from my exhausted robe, as I search for suitable rooves for that ever-enchanting fourth story—the one whose deep and abiding promise is what builds the first three, after all.

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