'I've grown tired of living Nixon's mess'
-Meat Puppets, "Lost"
Watching Whit play, listening to the internal dialogues he (inadvertently?) delivers externally, opens windows into my own memories.
When he knocks down a tower of blocks he's building, for instance, offering as sort of a demented play-by-play that this is happening because the builders are testing it for strength in case of tornadoes, I'm brought back to my own 4-year old mind struggling to apply the logic of the things I was learning - and in this case, I can trace these Whit-trends to documentaries we've watched endlessly (or so it seems to me) about people designing, testing and constructing tall buildings and huge bridges and about weather phenomena/natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and dambreaks - to parts of life around me.
For the parenting thing, this leads to difficulties. Apparently, there's a new girl at his school who had a young brother die ("Do little kids ever die, Dad?") and had video of the WTC fall, maybe even had friends or family perish in that horrible event (we've never intentionally kept this event from the kids; we just tend not to fetishize the tragedy). This led Whit to tell a long story about planes crashing into a 'warehouse' somewhere which then crashed into the buildings below, 'deading' the people below (he might not have used this cloyingly cute way of expressing the tragic, but I'm pretty certain he didn't just say 'killed').
That's made me think: my parents lived (before me) through some huge events - the Kennedy assassination comes immediately to mind - that I've only read about in history books. 9/11 is going to be like that for Whit & C (his little sister).
That puts everything in some sort of weird perspective for me.
I remember news stories about Vietnam, the drug problem (I was confused how there could be a problem with drug stores), Nixon-on-the-rise (I remember with great abashment telling my parents to vote for him in '72. I will be eternally shameful), Nixon-on-the-fall (I remember drawing a picture for my grandma and great-uncles & -aunts showing water rushing over a dam - my understanding of Watergate). Obviously, my perceptions of the events of the time were skewed by my tiny understanding of the world around me.
It makes me onder how Whit & C will perceive all of this bad craziness surrounding them now that they're only vaguely perceiving now, through the wonderful gauziness of childhood.
-Meat Puppets, "Lost"
Watching Whit play, listening to the internal dialogues he (inadvertently?) delivers externally, opens windows into my own memories.
When he knocks down a tower of blocks he's building, for instance, offering as sort of a demented play-by-play that this is happening because the builders are testing it for strength in case of tornadoes, I'm brought back to my own 4-year old mind struggling to apply the logic of the things I was learning - and in this case, I can trace these Whit-trends to documentaries we've watched endlessly (or so it seems to me) about people designing, testing and constructing tall buildings and huge bridges and about weather phenomena/natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and dambreaks - to parts of life around me.
For the parenting thing, this leads to difficulties. Apparently, there's a new girl at his school who had a young brother die ("Do little kids ever die, Dad?") and had video of the WTC fall, maybe even had friends or family perish in that horrible event (we've never intentionally kept this event from the kids; we just tend not to fetishize the tragedy). This led Whit to tell a long story about planes crashing into a 'warehouse' somewhere which then crashed into the buildings below, 'deading' the people below (he might not have used this cloyingly cute way of expressing the tragic, but I'm pretty certain he didn't just say 'killed').
That's made me think: my parents lived (before me) through some huge events - the Kennedy assassination comes immediately to mind - that I've only read about in history books. 9/11 is going to be like that for Whit & C (his little sister).
That puts everything in some sort of weird perspective for me.
I remember news stories about Vietnam, the drug problem (I was confused how there could be a problem with drug stores), Nixon-on-the-rise (I remember with great abashment telling my parents to vote for him in '72. I will be eternally shameful), Nixon-on-the-fall (I remember drawing a picture for my grandma and great-uncles & -aunts showing water rushing over a dam - my understanding of Watergate). Obviously, my perceptions of the events of the time were skewed by my tiny understanding of the world around me.
It makes me onder how Whit & C will perceive all of this bad craziness surrounding them now that they're only vaguely perceiving now, through the wonderful gauziness of childhood.
An entry this good deserves a good comment, but for the life of me I can't drum one up. I just want to say, hey! This is good.
One of my early memories is of some kid running around the playground yelling "Nixon, Nixon, he's our man! McGovern belongs in the garbage can!". Even back then, I was what could passingly be called a liberal kid, I think, and I thought that that kid was an idiot. I think the kid's name was Bob Garlich, and he had a very long, very narrow nose. Funny the things we remember when others tell us their memories.