"I think I was starting to spin thread that no one else wanted to use, and would tag along to carry water without actually doing very much carrying, and helped with laundry sometimes, and occasionally fished things out of the river that nobody else found half as interesting as I did."

"You still take him river-combing, don't you?"

"Sure. Every Sunday."

"Does he find much? If he's anything like you, it might be good for him to find some way he can really be useful."

"Not much that's really valuable. Shells, rocks, glass, bones, pretty pieces of trash. But that's how it is at first. He finds plenty of things he likes."

"I wonder if he'd like to have something just the two of us did together, though I'm not sure what. Maybe I will try to teach him to read." 

"I'm sure he would like that. It's less urgently necessary, perhaps, since you're here more than I am, but you know he adores you."

"He doesn't get as much of my undivided attention, since the baby." 

"Well, he doesn't need as much undivided attention as he did, now that he's five. But he'd probably still appreciate it sometimes."

"I don't really think there's much else one really needs to know at five, unless you feel strongly about the spinning."  

"For a boy? Not unless he wants to."

"And what are boys supposed to learn?"

"An excellent question. Farming, I think. Animal husbandry. Boat care, if you've got a boat. Tool maintenance. None of this is very relevant to him, I guess. It'd be good for him to know how to take care of animals, but he already has the turtle. And of course at five - I really don't think most five-year-olds are very much use at all, I was just in a hurry to be older."

"Weren't we all.

....I could get him a boat. I think he'd like it."

"Probably. Do you know anything about boats?"

"I've been on a riverboat plenty of times, haven't I? It doesn't seem complicated."

"Well, I support you in trying to figure it out. I don't know what level of success to expect, but I trust you will not let the child drown."

"I do such a good job of that, don't I?"

"You do. I'm not worried. I am curious how it'd go for you in terms of other success metrics."

"I do genuinely think I could learn. And figuring it out together might not be the worst thing, at that – I don't want the children to grow up thinking I know everything."

"That's fair. All right. I'm sure he'd enjoy it."

"...do we think there's anything else in this space that we ought to discuss that isn't getting ahead of ourselves? Or - does any of this really matter, at this point."

"I think – well, I'm back to where I was at the beginning. Once he can read, we'll see what he's interested in and take it from there. Of course I think a child ought to know something of history and mathematics and natural philosophy and poetry and music and – oh, economics, probably – but all of that can wait. I can't think of anything less likely to instill a love of scholarship than forcing it on him against his will." 

"All right. I'm fine with that, then."

"We can revisit the apprenticeship question when he's much, much older. And maybe after we've agreed on which institution we're actually talking about."

"All right. I am not particularly worried about it."