PORTLAND, OR — A local mother of two, 38, has now been saying the words “wow, buddy” in various tones, cadences, and registers of feigned amazement for eleven consecutive minutes at a Lego construction completed by her seven-year-old son that is, by any objective measure, a single rectangular wall.
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The wall, which the boy presented to his mother at 6:42 p.m. as she was attempting to drain pasta, measures approximately four inches tall, six inches wide, and one brick deep. It is composed entirely of red 2×4 bricks. There are no windows. There are no doors. There is no roof, no figure, no vehicle, no narrative element of any kind. It is a wall. It is the simplest possible thing a person can build with Legos. It is, in some sense, the ur-Lego.
The mother knows this. She has known this since approximately the third “wow, buddy.”
“Wow, buddy,” the 38-year-old said, holding the wall at eye level and turning it slowly. “Wow. Wow, buddy. Look at that. Look at that.”
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The boy, beaming, asked his mother what her favorite part was.
“The whole thing, buddy,” she said, after a pause that registered, on a sensitive enough instrument, as a small geological event. “The whole thing is my favorite part.”
According to family members who have observed the interaction from the adjoining living room, the mother has now cycled through at least fourteen distinct intonations of the phrase, including the upward-lilting wow, buddy? (suggesting genuine inquiry), the downward-resolving wow, buddy. (suggesting solemn appreciation), the breathy wow… buddy (suggesting near-religious awe), and the increasingly desperate wow, buddy! wow! (suggesting a woman whose pasta is now overcooked).
“She’s running out of road,” said her husband, a regional sales manager, watching from the couch with the expression of a man who has been here before. “Watch her. She’s gonna have to start asking him questions about it. That’s the only move left.”
The mother, on cue, asked her son to tell her about the wall.
“It’s a wall,” the boy said.
“Wow, buddy,” she said.
A growing body of unwritten, never-published, and yet somehow universally understood parental research suggests that the phrase “wow, buddy” — along with its sister constructions “look at that, bud,” “tell me about it, pal,” and the Hail Mary deployment “is that a [pause] is that a spaceship?” — functions as a kind of verbal load-bearing wall in the architecture of modern American childhood, holding up the entire emotional structure of the home through nothing more than enthusiastic vocal modulation.
“It’s not a lie,” said a developmental psychologist at a research institute in Eugene who, for unrelated reasons, recently asked her own son the same question about a similar wall. “It’s a kind of love that has been compressed, under enormous pressure, into a single repeating syllable pair. The mother is not seeing a wall. The mother is seeing the small hands that built the wall. The mother is seeing the proud, upturned face. The mother is seeing every single Lego she has stepped on at 2 a.m. for the past four years, and she is, in real time, deciding that it was worth it.”
The psychologist added: “She is also, of course, dying inside.”
By minute eight, sources confirm, the mother had begun to physically rotate the wall to inspect it from new angles, hoping to discover something — any small structural complexity, any single contrasting brick, any indication of intent — that would allow her to deliver a “wow, buddy” with newly authentic energy. None was forthcoming. The wall remained the wall.
The boy, undeterred and indeed visibly emboldened by the sustained maternal response, then announced he was going to go build “another one.”
“Wow, buddy,” she said.
“This one’s gonna be bigger,” the boy said.
“Wow, buddy,” she said.
“It’s gonna be a wall too,” he said. “But longer.”
The mother’s eyes did not change. Her smile did not change. Somewhere, deep within her, a single bone in her body became porcelain.
“I can’t wait, buddy,” she said.
The pasta, by this point, had been draining in the colander for approximately thirteen minutes and was now an unrecoverable mass of starch resembling, in a cruel piece of cosmic feedback, a single rectangular wall.
The husband, observing the kitchen, made the executive decision to order pizza without comment.
Asked later, in private, whether she had been genuinely impressed by the wall, the mother paused for a long time.
“He made it,” she said finally. “He made it himself. He stood there and he chose every brick and he pressed every brick down with his little hands and he was so proud. Do I think it’s a good Lego build? It is the worst Lego build I have ever seen in my life. It is an insult to the Lego corporation. If you showed it to a Danish person they would weep. But he made it. So yes. Yes, I was impressed.”
She paused.
“Wow, buddy,” she said quietly, to no one.
At press time, the seven-year-old had returned from his bedroom carrying a second wall, identical to the first in every respect except slightly longer, and his mother was reaching, deep within herself, for a fifteenth distinct way to say the same two words.