From the Mouths of Babes
Kids say the darndest things
I have a tradition of going to Whole Foods for dinner before going to my writing group on Thursday nights. I close the shop at five and group doesn’t start until six, so I go five minutes down the road to Whole Foods and make myself a big salad or sometimes pick out a couple of sushi rolls, and I sit at the janky tables along the wall by the registers and eat and watch the Thursday night happenings. I’ve memorized who’s working that shift and where they’re posted, I’ve memorized the faces people make when they’re confused about the self-checkout and the blind spot around the corner where they run into each other with their carts. Once I overheard the man with the blond bouffant (whom I’ve come to understand is the manager) tell the security guard on duty about an “unattended bag” that they thought was suspicious and he said, “Usually when that happens it’s either dirty old clothes or dirty old needles.”
This week I sat with my sushi rolls and I listened to the man and his grandchildren sitting at the next table. I knew he was their grandfather because they kept calling him “Pepe.” He was maybe 70, the girl was maybe five, and the boy was maybe eight, dressed in his karate uniform, which flew open to reveal his bare torso every time he got up to fetch a fork or a napkin. The girl got mac and cheese to eat and the boy and Pepe got pizza, and once the girl realized this difference she wanted pizza too.
“You said you wanted mac and cheese. It’s too late,” Pepe said. “Nooooo!” the girl whined, eating her mac and cheese without hesitation. “You can have some of mine,” Pepe said, and he settled himself on the bench seat next to her, all three of them sitting side by side. “That’s the spicy kind, I don’t like spicy,” she said, getting a closer look at the slice. Then she asked if she could “call Mommy to see if she’s doing good,” because presumably Mommy was away someplace and that’s why Pepe was watching them. Pepe called Mommy and I heard the girl as she said into the phone, “Mommy, are you doing good?” Mommy must have been doing good because then she said, “Okay. Bye Mommy, I love you.”
Then the conversation went back to sharing because she still wanted pizza, so as Pepe helped her rip off an un-spicy piece of his spicy pizza, her brother, without looking up from his pizza, said, “Sharing is useless because one day the sun’s gonna blow up and you’ll have nothing,” and I choked on my spicy tuna. Pepe and sister were too consumed with their sharing to have heard him.
When I relayed this remark to the women in my writing group they laughed it off knowingly. “Sounds like something a big kid would have said to him on the playground,” one said. Meanwhile, I didn’t know how I’d be able to write a word that night because I was so floored by the desensitized awareness of the end times clearly accessible to the youngest generation. What happened to “the children are our future?” These children aren’t even expecting a future!
Now that I’ve said that, though, it’s something I understand, and I realize that’s why it hit me so hard: because I’ve always, even since I was his age, felt that feeling he articulated so effortlessly, but just haven’t been able to articulate it. It’s the reason why when conversations turn to politics of the day or whatever catastrophe is currently transpiring on the other side of the world, my mind goes blank and my heart shuts off, because as much as I usually agree with the person talking who is usually saying something like, “Ceasefire!” or “I can’t believe he’s going to win again,” it all feels like a whole lot of nothing new to me. I can’t remember a time in my life when the adults in the room weren’t throwing up their hands in righteous indignation, astonished at the latest crazy thing that just happened.
“Was it like this when you were my age?” I caught myself asking my parents at the dinner table once, discussing that day’s crazy thing. They said honestly, no, it wasn’t. They had that year’s crazy thing, or that decade’s crazy thing, and then when that was mostly over they went back to chain smoking cigarettes and perming their hair.
People like to point to the internet or social media as the thing that separates now from then, but as far as I can tell those are just the things that tell us about the crazy things that are happening, not what makes them happen, so it’s difficult to know if more crazy things happen now than did in 1990, or if it’s always been this way and I just know about more of it now.
The kid at Whole Foods doesn’t have an Instagram, though, or at least I hope not, so how does he know the sun’s gonna blow up someday? Maybe a big kid did tell him on the playground, but how did that big kid know? Did he see it on Instagram? Even if he did, that means enough crazy things have happened to him or he’s seen and heard enough crazy things happening that he could read something about the sun blowing up and it didn’t shock him at all, it was just something to say on the playground like “What’s your favorite color?” and “Justin picks his nose.” If you had told me the sun was gonna blow up someday back when I was a big kid on a playground I would have wet my pants and cried for my mommy, but it makes as much sense to these kids as the rules to four square.
How do you live your life knowing the sun’s going to blow up someday and you’ll have nothing? Does it mean never sharing, hoarding resources, and defending yourself against every perceived threat? I can tell you that the smallest subconscious fear of sun death has made me wonder if it’s ethically responsible to have children—to add more human bodies to the inevitable mass grave—but what kind of fragile, cautious existence is that? Shouldn’t I be raging against the dying of the light? Shouldn’t I be seizing the day? Is that what Whole Foods karate kid is doing? Or has he resolved himself to his potentially dark future, walking through his young life prepared for danger at every turn?
The kid went back to the pizza in front of him after playing Oracle, and then he had a question for his family.
“What’s your second favorite holiday?” he asked, and before they could answer he said, “Mine’s St. Patrick’s Day.”
And so it goes. All we can do is eat our pizza and wait. In the meantime, there are big questions to ask, and maybe we’ll find some comfort in the answers.
Mine’s Halloween.