The Thing about Wonder

The media diets of my teenagers and I don’t typically converge, I suppose because I can’t muster interest in a spray-tanned bachelorette dropping her kimono for one man and then switch to a bikini and do it again with another man the very next day but we do all share passion for the movie The Fantastic Mr. Fox, the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen and online videos about animals. Recently, we hovered around a cell phone — mouths agog — while a British man narrated the birth of a marsupial.

A joey begins in a pocket of mucus that drips out of a kangaroo’s hoo-ha. This creature — the size and weight of a jelly bean, crawls blindly up the outside of its mother, through hairs that, relatively speaking, look like mangroves, for about 3 minutes … it’s nose leading it to the lip of pocket where it falls in. Unbeknownst to anyone, in the pocket is a nipple ready to serve its duty for the 9 months it will take for this surreal dripping to become a leggy, adorable joey.

With a teenager on either side of me, I wanted to use the special words — words whose meaning has been nearly drained by overuse — sublime … profound … transcendent. But I held back.

Lest they miss the magic, I went a little nuts listing all the pieces that had to come together in order for us to know the kangaroo in this new way…. HD camera technology, drones, data storage, zoom lens and infrared cameras, not to mention funders who coughed up millions so that we might see a termite blink or a Komodo dragon eat a goat or two sloths hug.