SOTW: Riley Lapointes; excavation
For the prompt: Dan and Leon doing son/dad things
Charlie’s easy. Well, that’s not true. Easy is not the first word that would come to mind to describe her, or the tenth, or honestly, one that would ever come up. Charlie relishes being difficult: one guess where she got that from.
But her interests match what Dan’s were when he was her age. They have the same taste in movies, in books — ‘can you branch out from sports just once?’ Marc asks in despair, but obviously not — and Dan learns the rules of lacrosse, curling, dusts off his baseball mitt in the summers, plays goalie for her in the driveway. That part is easy.
Leon’s not interested in sports, which is fine, but it feels like everything he likes is something that Dan hated when he was a kid. He does his best to encourage it, even though he feels a little out of his depth. Marc is objectively better at anything, well — smart, Dan guesses. He’s not particularly interested in science, but he has a head for it that Dan doesn’t. Hell, Leon has a head for it that Dan doesn’t, which, obviously, but by that Dan means his eight year old is already smarter than him. It’d hurt his ego if he wasn’t so proud.
Leon has collections. Dan had collections too as a kid, but his were hockey cards, hockey figurines. Pucks from every arena he went to. Leon’s collections are a little different. Shells Marc’s parents bring back for him every time they go to Florida. Leaves he carefully presses. Different types of rocks, some he’s ordered, some he’s picked up. Not so much stuff you buy as that you find.
Living in Montreal makes that a little difficult, so some weekends Dan leaves Marc to shuttle Charlie to whatever sport she’s doing at the moment, takes Leon on day trips, the two of them trailing along the St. Lawrence, do a field trip to an old nickel mine near Sherbrooke that has Leon as excited as Dan’s seen him, filling his arms, sorting through the cache before they leave so they make sure they’re bringing home the best ones. The best ones ends up being basically all of them, and Marc’s visibly amused when Dan comes in the door lugging what feels like ten pounds of rocks that all look the same to him.
When they feel like staying in town, they wander through various parks and keep an eye out for anything that looks different than what Leon already has, though by now it feels like he’s got just about everything.
Eventually Dan starts to pick things up, know how to differentiate by more than colour, quits describing things as, say, ‘that tan scratchy one’ and actually identifying it as sandstone (or, grès) after he consults one of Leon’s million books, knows the main types, some of the subtypes. Dan’s pretty sure proudly telling someone he can tell the difference between igneous and sedimentary rocks at the age of forty-five would get him laughed at, but he is proud. Leon seems proud of him too. He’s a good teacher.
“Nerds,” Marc says with a grin after Dan finishes helping Leon on his geology project — and by help, he means he just helps make the poster look nice, Leon is pretty capable of everything else — and they’ve practiced Leon’s presentation in front of Marc, because obviously he’s the one to go to to double check it sounds right. Dan’s French isn’t there, probably never will be. Leon loudly protests, but Dan takes it as the compliment he knows it is.












