Jared Diamond Books

My boy Sam is turning 9 two weeks from now and I just don’t know what to do for the kid. We’re thinking about booking him one of those party venues Melbourne seems to have plenty of, but darn it I’m just not sure we really should.

I mean, it’s not like he’s mentally challenged or anything, he’s just real awkward in social situations and pretty slow on the uptake. He’s got a couple of friends at school, or so he says, but we never see them round at the house. We talked to his teacher to make sure the people he’d named in his class were real people, about six months ago, when I asked about his friends, it turned out he’d just made up names off of the top of his head. When I talked to his teacher about it she said there were no people by that name in his class. I gotta tell you, that made me real worried for a moment there. This time, at least the names were real, but we’ve got no way of knowing whether they’re actually his friends, see? And if they’re not, we wouldn’t want to book him out a party venue for friends he doesn’t have. It’s a complicated kind of situation.

Couple of years back, he got real into ice skating, learning to ice skate through lessons and such, but it was a cold kind of a pastime for such a warm country as Australia. I always thought learning to ice skate here was a real impractical thing to be doing, but he seemed to enjoy it a lot and that was good enough for me. Maybe we should have his birthday at an ice skating rink? That way he doesn’t have to talk to the other kids if he doesn’t want to, which, knowing him, he probably wont. I’m not a bad parent, mind you. All I really want for him is to have a good time.