Into The Mouths Of Babes

New neighbors are present in the apartments on both east and west sides of my house now. That means small children are now present on both sides too.

Last weekend, as I watered the embankment out front, two little girls started playing 'Peter Pan' in their front yard, on the west side of my house. I could hardly believe my ears! Did they see the recent DMTC show, or had they been viewing a DVD? I don't know, but one girl was playing Tinkerbell and the other was playing Wendy. Then, they started discussing who was going to play Captain Hook. I could barely hear their voices, and I know it wasn't any of my business, but if their parents hadn't been there I might have burst out: "The baby plays Hook!"

This weekend, I focused on painting the east wall of the shed. Since the shed abuts the neighbors' yard on the east side, that meant spending the entire weekend trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible in their yard.

Inconspicuousness comes at a price. One fellow came out of the apartment house talking on a cell phone. Regardless of my presence, he explained quite loudly a lot more than I really needed to know about his year-long experiment with celibacy. I also heard arguments I didn't need to hear too.

Saturday afternoon, a toddler appeared in the yard with his mother. The toddler was attracted by the discarded bright, shiny soda cans that I had casually tossed on the ground during the afternoon. In true toddler fashion, he tried to jam both soda cans into his mouth.

In the old days, the child's mother would have acted immediately to pull away the soda cans from the child's face. Germs, you know. Nevertheless, this child's mother did not do so. Indeed, the mother seemed inclined to let the child experiment, and pulled the child away only when he began moving towards the paint.

I hope this mother's approach is the harbinger of a new, more-realistic approach by parents to letting their children get exposed to at least some of the germs of the world. An antiseptic upbringing can be deleterious to children. Indeed, some authorities blame FDR's antiseptic upbringing for his later vulnerability to polio. In places like the Nile Valley, where polio was more-common than New York State, children rarely got sick from it. Their dirtier upbringing may have been crucial!