Proverbs 22, Verse 6
"Teach a child to choose the right path,
and, when he is older, he will remain upon it."
---
CHIPPED WISDOM:
I walk through this world guilty of things I haven't done, things I wouldn't do, and things that couldn't be.
On Sunday, I was out to brunch with an old friend of mine. We went to a diner run by another old friend of mine. I was convinced that the diner's owner assumed I was cheating on my wife. I also assumed that the cute waitress with the bandaged wrist and the harried busboy, the young, African-American family seated next to us, and the hipster asshole in the madras shorts who was standing by the door listening to The Civil Wars on his earbuds, all thought so too.
When I worked for a small performing arts center, I used to go to all the neighborhood elementary schools to deliver flyers about upcoming productions. As the receptionist spoke to me through the post-Columbine, yet pre-Newtown intercom system, asking me to state my name and my business, and then as I watched her watching me carry my box of "Seussical!" posters down the hall of local K-through-5's, including my own, I knew she was thinking that the only reason I was there was to run down the halls and systematically lick the anuses of all the boys and girls I could possibly find.
Or shoot them.
Either way-- a young, white male travelling unaccompanied to an elementary school was clearly not safe. If I had boobs, nobody would have thought twice about it. Well, if I was a female with boobs, that is. And I could have been affronted by the suspicion-- after all, I didn't do anything and wouldn't do anything, but, when you walk around feeling guilty, you don't mind being suspected by others. Because, to you, it makes sense. You get it.
I found myself in an upscale toy store on Saturday afternoon, searching for a gift for my friend's 9-month-old baby whom I was meeting for the first time, and for a gift for my twins. I recently asked my son and daughter what their favorite animals were. They have lots of experience with Basset Hounds, and cats, who roam free and borderline feral in our back alley-- most other animals they know from books and from Baby Einstein. We took them to the zoo last year, but it was too early. They didn't give a fuck. Every time we would approach a new, thoroughly medicated species and ask them, "What noise does __________ animal make?" the answer from both of them was invariably,
"NOOOOOO!!!!"
Which is creative, though inaccurate.
So, getting back to their favorite animal, they both answered readily. My son said, "Tigee, Daddy!" and made an adorable roar through the bars of his cribbie. My daughter happily announced, "PINKO-MINGO!" which, of course, is a pink flamingo, and not a communist epithet popular in the 1960s and '70s.
So off I went on my mission to find my children a stuffed tigeee and a stuffed pinko-mingo. I knew where to go. When I walked in through the blue and red doorway, it wasn't quite like entering a time-machine... but, almost. There were new, gimmicky toys and stuffed animals mixed in with the traditional and the refined. This was a toy store that carried all manner of stuffed, plush versions of exotic creatures from all over the planet and from varied forms of the ecosystem. They had a brand of animal that was officially endorsed by the WWF, and I don't mean the WWF frequented by Stone Cold Steve Austin's ilk-- I am referring to the World Wildlife Fund.
I can still hear myself....
"Mommy? Can we go look at some of the endangered species animals?" I'd ask. I'm sure you have fond memories of your doe-eyed, mop-topped 5-year-old asking you that selfsame question.
They were all there: chin-strapped penguins and ostriches and sea turtles and spotted snow leopards, all lovingly and accurately (not anatomically) reproduced for the burgeoning, pre-pubescent connoisseur. And I pored over them for extended amounts of time. I called it "visiting" to soothe the inevitable blow of not having one of them, at an exorbitant price, come home with us. Of course, every so often, on a very rare occasion such as my birthday or a graduation or the anniversary of Golda Meir's hysterectomy, there would be a white box with the telltale WWF sticker on the top:
And I had a new friend. I was not one to adopt Cabbage Patch Kids. I preferred Capybaras.
They're ordering the pinko-mingo, and they're holding the tiger in a bag for me with my phone number until the pinko-mingo comes in. I like the gestalt of visiting that same toy store I used to drag my parents to endlessly now for my children. Even if, shopping there by myself, I do definitely feel like a dirty freak, like they're just waiting for me to grab a stuffed elephant and stuff it down my pants and start moaning Gregorian chants. But I was able to suspend all of that when a couple in their mid-fifties came in, announcing to the shopkeeper when he asked if they needed assistance that they were "killing time waiting for a dinner table to open up next door-- we didn't even know you were here. Are you new?"
"Oh," smiled the shopkeeper beneath his reading glasses, "we're quite new-- just thirty-one years old."
"Yes, I used to come here as a little boy, that's how new this place is," I chimed in, making a rare spontaneous and unsolicited utterance to a stranger.
Everybody smiled and laughed at that. And then thought, "Sure, perv."
