The self-conscious child who announced his own lurking

texture · UNDATED (childhood/adolescence, B.S. era, Québec)

• When: UNDATED (Tavis's Québecois childhood, B.S. era)
• What: Even the Moms recalled that as a teenager, taken to Québecois functions with the child Tavis, she watched him too self-conscious to join any cluster of kids — so he would drift cluster to cluster and, in some lull, announce loudly that he was too self-conscious to join in and was going to lurk creepily at the fringe and listen, if that was all right, just so they knew: the germ of the adult's pathological, disarming openness. The inheritance that later paid for his and Avril's university came from Avril's binge-drinking potato-farmer father — "His inheritance to Charles and me paid for university".