You’ve heard of Harry Houdini the escape artist, right? Can you imagine how his mother felt when he started practicing his octopus routines at an early age? I can. I can tell you exactly how she felt because I raised my very own escape artist. Of course, all babies love to head toward danger. It’s their job to wear us out at an early age so they can replace us. It’s nature’s way of making space. However, not all babies are reincarnated military spies. My first clue about the military part occurred one evening when a friend brought her young daughter over to play. We dimmed the lights, handed scarves to the children, and put on classical music so they could dance and be faeries. The first thing my non-verbal three-year-old did was motion for me to tie a scarf around his head like a Sikh turban. Then he disappeared into his bedroom and returned with a toy rifle. (I know, why would we give a child a toy gun? Because if we didn’t he would drag tree branches into the house and use them as make believe firearms. Plastic versions were less painful to step on in the dark.) As I was saying, he returned with a rifle and a length of ribbon which he handed me with grunts and hand waving, indicating I was to tie a strap from barrel to stock. I tied the ribbon around the barrel as best as I could. He examined it with displeasure and handed it back, pointing and grunting I’d done it wrong. We went back and forth until I explained, “A real rifle has some sort of loop for straps; yours doesn’t.” Though he was dissatisfied with the answer, he grasped the concept. He then walked to the end of the living room where he proceeded to perfectly imitate the three stances of a British Rifle Formation. It might have been straight out of the Zulu wars, but I thought he was an Indian Sepoy based on the turban slipping down one side of his little bald head. The other mother and I stared in fascination as he pretend loaded his rifle, stepped up to the second row where he faced an imaginary enemy, then moved forward and knelt on one knee to fire his rifle, only to move back to the center of the formation, reload and repeat. Whatever he was looking at was not the narrow end of our living room. While the girls were flitting around like Isadora Duncan, he was mowing down oncoming hordes. He was definitely not playing games. That’s when I realized he probably was a soldier in a past lifetime and was having a little trouble reconciling his memories with the limitations of a child’s body. Take, for example, Halloween. When he was five he decided he wanted to be a Viking. I made a tunic for him out of muslin, drew some lines on it, and told him it was chain mail. We even found a plastic Viking costume for him, complete with breastplate, wrist guards, sword, and horned helmet. Unfortunately, he was still slightly undersized and bald. (He had hair. It was just too pale to see.) Hard as he tried, he couldn’t keep the Viking helmet straight on his head. It kept slipping to the side. We promised him he looked like a fierce warrior and sallied forth on our rounds. When people asked who he was, we replied “Elmer Fudd.” (To this day every time I hear Wagner’s Ring Cycle, I picture the Looney Tunes version, with Elmer wearing the same helmet, looking just like my son, singing “Oh Bwunhiwde you’re so wov-wee….”) Soon thereafter, Houdini Fudd discovered the joys of the Army Navy Store. From that point on he spent every cent of gift money collecting old military gear. I had the only child in Southern California who owned two sets of gas masks and flack jackets. He would have brought home hand grenades if we’d let him. Oh! Wait! That’s right; he did get at least one, pin already pulled, of course. His greatest frustration was sizing. Cadet size shirts hung on him like housecoats. “You have to understand! They don’t make real uniforms for seven-year-olds. You’re going to have to wait until you grow bigger.” When paintball games became a thing, he had enough gear to outfit himself and his cousin with camouflage suits and masks so they could hide in the bushes at local parks, leap out at strangers and shoot them with paintballs, run back through the streams to hide their tracks, and disappear before the local Sheriffs could find them. (This was while the rest of the group was innocently munching sandwiches and admiring the fine weather, unaware our darlings were terrorizing the neighborhood,) Did I mention my son was also an escape artist? I should have suspected something of the sort when he was two and I turned my back on him for a minute. The doorbell rang and when I opened it, there was my neighbor, my dog, and a toddler wearing only his diaper. “I noticed them walking down the street toward the cow pasture so I brought him back.” “Back? He was in the yard, fenced in. I just saw him there.” “Well, he must have got out. It’s a good thing I saw him because there was a lot of traffic.” He’d directed the dog to dig a hole under the fence when I wasn’t looking so they could both squeeze through. Age two. It only got worse. I would be holding his hand tightly one minute and the next minute he’d be balancing on his stomach atop the railing at the Mall mezzanine, arms spread wide, singing “Look, Mommy! I’m flying!” We’d be at the top of some stairs, me with an iron grasp on him, and the next second he break free and leap to the bottom of the stairwell. “Whee! Let’s do that again!” One minute he’d be playing in his bedroom and the next he was nowhere to be found. Three seconds before I’d decide it was time to call the police, he’d leap out of small cupboards that were literally seven feet off the floor. They were so unused I could hardly pry open their doors. How did he get up there? How did he even fit? Who knows? We were lucky he had an innate sense of self preservation because his stepdad was a firearm collector and had two locked safes in a locked garage. Nevertheless, my soldier/sailor/marine could tell us about every piece, where they were hidden, and when they were acquired. Locks were no deterrent. Leashes never worked. Now that he’s a father, he’s onto all the tricks of the trade so his children get away with nothing. That’s not to say they don’t try, but he’s usually two steps ahead of them. Once in a while he wants to tell me about how he avoided getting shot at a school party or other adventure, but I put my hands over my ears and go “La la la la la.” I don’t need to hear any more stories, no matter how funny he thinks they are. He gave me enough reasons for a heart attack when he was growing up, my son E. F. Houdini.