Listening to co-worker on the phone with his very small little girl (Six or Seven years old):
"Hi, Honey, how was your day?... Oh, good. What did you have for lunch?... Did you eat it all?... Good, I'm glad you liked it. Did you have fun in class?... Oh, too bad. Well, what WAS a fun part of your day?... Recess? Yeah, recess is a lot of fun. Did you play a game?...A running game? Wow that sounds pretty cool. What is it called?"
Silence for a minute.
"OK. And how do you play 'Corona'?"
Silence again.
"Well, that sounds like a lot of fun..." (conversation continues till he says goodbye...)
He sat staring at the phone softly shaking his head. Then he glanced over and saw me watching him.
"Corona," he said.
"Yeah, I heard. What's 'Corona'?"
"Well, apparently it's a game where whoever is 'it' has Corona and she chases the other kids and whoever she catches is then on her team and they both chase the others getting them on their team until in the end the whole class is baying after one kid trying to catch him. It's a game they invented on their own."
He sat staring at the phone.
"I'm really unclear on how I feel about that..." he said.
I didn't have any advice for him.
"Yup." I finally said with a shrug, "Kids adapt to their surroundings. It's a survival trait."
But, y'know, I kind felt a chill there for a minute...
That's ... kinda frightening.
ReplyDeleteThough I imagine we had similar games. Can the Man was a good one. Jr High School. Take the little plastic bottle they sold orange juice in at the snack bar, fill it with rocks and pebbles, and then everyone feints and parries over it until someone grabs it and runs and everyone else tackles him to the ground.
Renamed it -- seems to me that the purported 16th Century plague folklore behind versions of the nursery rhyme fits better here...
ReplyDeleteDisturbing... but kids are weird!
ReplyDeleteYes they are. And, God bless 'em, they have the most utterly innocent dark humor in the universe. Kids have always made me laugh a lot more accidentally than any adult has on purpose...
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ReplyDeleteHad to delete the first comment that, witty as it was, totally ignored the fact that you already made the connection in the title of the post (which I didn't read.) Derhh . . .
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, I'm reminded of my son when he was pre-school and the next door neighbor kid, whose (Mormon) mom would only let them watch animated Biblical stories on the VCR instead of regular cartoons. Soon after, they were both running around the yard waving wooden swords proclaiming that they were "the evil Lamenites!" What'ryougonnado?
Yup. As Cormac McCarthy would have it:
Delete“It makes no difference what men think of war.... War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
Truer words were never written/spoken.
On a lighter note, your reference to Mormons reminded me of my High School days. Mormonism was practically the state religion out in the parts of the country where I lived. Mormon girls, incidentally, are pretty much the most fun I've ever had, but that's another story.
Anyhow, it seems my current lack of "kumbaya-isness" was an early feature of my life. I ran across a bumper sticker in Montana on vacation one year, and immediately bought it and slapped it across the rear window of my '67 VW bug, to immediate effect. If you know anything about the Mormon religion, it was hysterically funny:
"You Think Mormon Liquor Laws Are Weird, Wait 'Till You See Their Underwear"
This received what I'd describe as a "lukewarm" response, which is what you get when you mix hot and cold, as well as the occasional fistfights between people arguing over it. I'm not sure why they never actually involved me.
My mom corralled me about a week later and told me to take it off the car. I told her it was the funniest thing I'd seen all year and I had no intention of taking it off, and she told me that Jesus would want me to approach Mormons in a more loving manner. I did not respond by highlighting my missionary work with the Mormon girls as my contribution to that principle, but instead said:
"So your dead magician is annoyed at me because I'm aggravating people who are following a psychotic megalomaniac so I have to take a BUMPER STICKER off my car?"
This did not go down well, and finally resulted in the real explanation, which was that we had to live in this town, so take the freakin' bumper sticker off or start walking. Which made more sense.
This probably should have been a separate post. Wonder if anyone even reads these comments?
I underwent a similar epistemological crisis when I first came up with the idea for this bumper sticker: "God is my seatbelt." I figured in my town, a hotbed of Bible Belt Christianity, this would probably not end well--with my car upside down in a ditch, wheels still spinning just like in a Hollywood movie.
ReplyDeleteHmm. Yeah. Sometimes, I've been known to read only the comments, which is probably loosely related to my sometimes habit of reading magazines from back to front. I mean, c'mon, this is why they invented the inverted pyramid in journalism.