My boy had picked up an odd habit of skipping the number fourteen when counting to twenty, while washing his hands in this COVID shaped world.
On the one hand, that makes him a good Asian (14 is an unlucky number that is a homonym with death in Chinese). However, we have no idea where that came from because we aren’t a superstitious household.
We didn’t make a big deal about it. He hasn’t even turned three, so we’d rather celebrate that he’s nailed nineteen of the numbers on the way up to 20. Then again, we couldn’t just let this mistake stand, so we would correct him every time as he washed up for a meal.
Yesterday he got it right.
He was so pleased with himself he stumbled past sixteen through twenty.
Meanwhile, I stood at the sink, struck with a lingering sadness as another phase of his life suddenly came to an abrupt end.