Three dialogues
One.
Small child: Why do we have eyes?
Parent: So we can see.
Small child: Why do we want to see?
Parent: Because the world is beautiful.
Small child: Why do we have two eyes?
Parent: So that we can judge depth.
Small child: Why do we have ears?
Parent: So that we can hear.
Small child: Why do we have two ears?
Parent: Symmetry. And stereo.
A pause.
Small child: Why do we have one body?
Parent: Do you mean, why do we have only one body instead of two?
Small child: Yes.
Parent: Well, I suppose because it’s more convenient than wondering where you left your spare body.
Not quite so small child: We could live in both bodies at the same time.
Small child: Yes and have company all the time.
Two.
Child (looking out the car window): There are advertisements everywhere.
Parent: Yes. Billboards.
Child: They just want our money. Dumb advertisements.
Parent: Yup.
Child: Well I’m going to build a machine to take care of that. It will suck in and crunch and eat billboards and advertisements and turn them into chewing gum. Pink chewing gum.
Three.
Mother (trying to tidy the kitchen table having given up on the dining room table): He just puts papers everywhere. Everywhere is his space.
Grown-up daughter: Well, why don’t you declare a paper-free zone? Or you and Dad could negotiate one.
Mother: It wouldn’t work.
Grown-up daughter: It might. You could just collect anything that escaped into the paper free zone and dump it in the zone of paper terror. (Proceeds to ramble on about Somebody Else’s Problem Fields and pink mountains until she notices that her mother is completely silent). Um, this is not helping, is it?
Mother: (Shrugs.)
Grown-up daughter: You can ask for things to be how you’d like them to be, you know. There are two people living in this house.
Mother: No there aren’t. There’s only one. And one non-person.
She turns away.
Brilliant kids! And a very sad Mother. I laughed through the first dialogue, grinned ruefully during the second, and felt like crying by the end of the third.
BTW: Symmetry is exactly it! I am deaf in one ear and therefore do not hear in stereo. Some people call my right ear my “bad” ear but I prefer to think of it as my decorative ear.
hmmmmm.
i’ve gone back
and reread twice
and am still uncertain
as to what to comment
and yet
want
to comment…
i do love the two body theory
except that i’m kind of loner
and may not want the company.
perhaps my other body could
go to work for me…
i could “out-source” it maybe…
and yay for recognizing
billboards for being the
money-hungry-ugly-monsters
they are
Oh such cool kids! I cannot wait for my son to be able to share his take on the world.
You rat! You mugged us. We were set up with the simple majesty of the first two stories and left open and vulnerable, defences down, to being clinically impaled by the third!
wow … the first one gave me shivers like really bad … wow!
So brilliant, little words, clear thinking, pity they all grow up.
Children’s minds are the most wonderful thing.
I don’t have anything to add, except: Thank You.
Your children are incredible.
Let this be a lesson to all of us.
And let Mother be heard, too.