At 4 a.m., fifteen years ago, my son Paul was born. He was a fat baby, a tall toddler, a scrawny grammar-school boy, and now he is a lanky freshman in high school. Last night, on the closing night of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I sat in the audience watching him cavort around the stage in a tailcoat and top hat, smacking shrieky students with a paddle, competing with his brother's best friend for the affections of the heroine, getting "murdered" by the Headless Horseman; and I couldn't help but recall all the years of play acting he's gone through in our backyard. For several years, he maintained a superhero identity (Weasel Man) whose superpower was wind finger and whose street-clothes persona was Otis Redding. For those same several years, he enacted entire soccer teams with numerous invisible friends (Jack, Jesus, Connecticut, and Fred). Even as a toddler he was a swift inventor of characters. For something called the Monkey Swing Game, he created several personae--the Cook, the Meat, the Napkin Passenger, Rocko, and Sticko--and he made me write down all their names so that we would never forget them.

There’s no denying him

announced the old lady at Bud’s Shop ’n Save,

grabbing your father’s coat sleeve, eyeing you

up and down like post-office criminals.

Flat cheekbones, shock of hair, same aloof,

thin-hipped stride, same touch-me-not scowl:

six years old, already the masked man.

What have I done to deserve lover and son

so beautiful, both remote as trout in green shallows?

I fritter my squirrel antics on the bank, swing

head-first from a cedar bough: Notice me, notice me!

You cock his cool stare and flit into shadow, my slippery fish.

But dangle the lure, the words—

up you flash, sun bronzing your quick scales.

“Away went Alice like the wind!” you cry; “In Lear I love the Fool!”

Feathers sprout from my worldly paws, your gills suckle air.

New born, we flee open-eyed into the east,

bright wingbeats carving cloud, below us the unfolding sea—

white chop, clean spray.

You know the story.

["There's no denying him," by Dawn Potter, from How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]