But imagine just for a minute if he was wrong. Think of the brilliance, the magnificence—not to mention the cacophony—if all the homeowners in all the towns up and down the Long Island Expressway, from Great Neck to Riverhead and everywhere in between, in all those split-level ranches on all those cul-de-sacs, had switched on their vacuum cleaners via a prearranged signal at the exact moment the Jamieson family in its blue Volkswagen went bouncing by.
Now that would really have been something.
Dean and all the other children who asked questions reminded me, at forty, not to take the world at face value. Why do we use the words we use?
“Why is it called kidnapping if you can steal away adults, too?”
I figured finding the answer would be easy: I’d just call the FBI and whoever answered the phone would be able to explain why that word is used even though children aren’t the only ones you can grab off the street. But one official passed me to another. It took a lot of research. For the detective, for the prosecutor, for the kidnapper, even for the kidnap victim languishing in a storage locker like Sue, without food or water and wondering if his family will pony up the cash, the word is just taken for granted.
Until a child hears it.
Dean saw a picture of a volcano erupting beneath a towering upside-down mountain of ash and smoke. And he asked: “What happens if your plane flies over a volcano?”
It was the first thing that entered his mind, and it seems obvious enough. But Captain Eric Moody and his crew had no idea what was happening when they flew on that dark old night into the plume of ash from Mount Galunggung and their engines shut down one by one. They kept it cool in the cockpit, but for fourteen long minutes they were certain they were dead. No one, until then, had truly understood what happened. Now airplane manuals come with warnings. The language is very stiff and official but the meaning is clear: “Whatever you do, DO NOT fly your jet into a plume of volcanic ash.”
Jacob Sklodowski was four when he saw the Mona Lisa in an Elmo Halloween movie, and again in store displays. How many adults have gazed at this painting and tried to unlock the secret of that faint quarter-smile? How many others have stood on line at the Louvre in Paris and then been surprised by just how small and seemingly inconsequential it is?
But Jacob looked beyond the canvas, off the edge—literally, out of the box. What is happening in the world we can’t see, he asked, and what, just what, is she wearing on her feet?
“Does Mona Lisa wear shoes?”
I was disappointed when Mark Norell said he wasn’t that interested in dinosaurs. But now I think maybe he had a point when he said, “I’m more interested in whether we can actually figure some of this stuff out, if we are clever enough to do that, as opposed to just knowing a lot about dinosaurs.”
Because sometimes the questions are better than the answers. And sometimes, no matter how good the answers are, they can be swept away.
Think of my grandfather, Pop Pop. I had used his age—ninety-five—and relative good health to explain to Dean that he need not fear his death or mine anytime soon. Pop Pop was born when horses still pulled wagons down the street, I told him. Lots of time passes in a single lifetime. But then Pop Pop threw my analogy into disarray. He died.
His last few months had been rough ones, in declining health in a nursing home, and the last time we saw him he looked like a grayish wax facsimile of my grandfather, just vaguely familiar, asleep with his mouth open when we walked into the room. I wasn’t sure he knew we were there. But after he woke up and we all talked at him for a while, he looked at me and said, “You’re wearing new pants!” in his familiar deep voice. And I was, and I laughed. When we left, Dean gave him a long hug.
He died a month later, and I worried how this would affect Dean. But he was more fascinated than upset; dying is interesting, no doubt about it. We drove back to Pennsylvania for the memorial service. There was a big dinner party the night before, and my cousins from North Carolina were there, and maybe a hundred other people, and Dean and Paulina charmed them all, running around on the giant lawn behind the house, trying to catch the first lightning bugs of the evening.
Then there was Pluto.
It still hangs in Dean’s room. I’m sure the top half is covered with dust—I haven’t been up there lately. But it’s not the planet it used to be.
The battle in the astronomical community about what Pluto should be called raged long after that night four years ago when Helene and I hung those Styrofoam balls—or I hung them and she advised me. We had decided to just let it remain a planet, not a plutino, as some observatories and planetariums had reclassified it. But the wails of protest from around the world eventually became too much for us to ignore.
In the summer of 2006, scientists gathered for a meeting of the International Astronomical Union. They traveled from around the world and convened in Prague, and after much debate, finally, and once and for all, threw Pluto out of the planets. To have the honor of being a planet, they agreed, one must orbit the sun, one must be spherical and one must have cleared its orbit of all other objects. Pluto failed this last one, cutting as it does across the icy detritus of the Kuiper Belt.
But their final decision was more than just a banishment. It was a humiliation.
Pluto, they decided, was not a plutino, or a small planet or a block of ice.
Pluto was a “dwarf planet.”
And so a debate was ended once and for all, and the answer determined—at least until the next meeting, in Paris or Chicago, next year or next decade, when a new theory is put forward and a new vote is taken and Pluto is invited back into the elite brotherhood of round, sun-orbiting, orbit-clearing celestial bodies.
When that happens, we’ll be ready with our little Styrofoam ball.
I’ll never forget my dad explaining Watergate. He took so much time to lay it all out for me, unaware, I suppose, that he’d gone sailing over my head after the first sentence. But I appreciate what he was doing, and have tried to do the same for Dean: treat him like an adult, take him seriously, even when he’s asking if the hummus I’m about to eat is like dinosaur poop. In a funny way, when my father made up an answer, he was taking me seriously, too; he was making a joke he figured I’d get. And eventually, I did.
I understand this phenomenon better now: the urge to invent can sometimes be very strong, especially when finding the answer takes longer than you think it will, or when people you are certain have the answers won’t call you back or are evasive and confused when they do.
But kids these days are not like kids in my kid days. They are hard to fool, even harder to impress and nearly impossible to scare. The entire world is cynical and disbelieving, and they start picking up these traits early. If you want to shock their imaginations, well, you’ve really got to pour it on.
Last summer I was driving Helene and the kids back to our little cottage in the country. We passed a Dunkin’ Donuts in a strip mall. Dean, like many children, harbors a strange fascin ation with this and all fast-food chains. I had been in there buying coffee and doughnuts the previous Monday, at 6:00 a.m., going in the other direction, on my way to work.
Dean and Paulina seemed to be occupied in the backseat. I started talking to Helene.
“Boy, if you want to see something scary, stop in at that Dunkin’ Donuts at six a.m. on a Monday. There were these two tiny women there, each with giant hair. They were in front of me. One got six sugars in her coffee, one got eight. And they were smoking these long cigarettes.”
“Eight sugars?” Helene said, suitably impressed.
But the word “scary” had traveled over our headrests and punched its way into my son’s consciousness.
“Wait,” Dean said from the backseat, suddenly paying attention. “What happened?”
“Oh, nothing. I was just telling Mommy about the last time I was in this Dunkin’ Donuts.”
“You said it was scary.”
“Yeah, a little bit.”
“What was so scary?�
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“These women with big hair. They wanted a scary amount of sugar in their coffees.”
“That’s not scary.”
I thought for a moment. Helene rolled her eyes. I looked in the rearview mirror to see Dean’s expression. It was a bored expression. I decided to fix that.
“And there was this man there in a Dracula suit; he was covered in blood.”
“That’s not scary.”
“And there was another man—well, he wasn’t a man, he was half-horse, half-wolverine, and he was running around terrifying everybody.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And then this half-horse, half-wolverine tore off this kid’s leg and went galloping down Route 58 with the leg in his mouth, and the kid’s mother went running after them, screaming, ‘That half-horse, half-wolverine has my kid’s leg! That half-horse, half-wolverine has my kid’s leg!’ And people were crashing through windows, falling on the glass, shrieking and yelling and getting scalded with hot coffee. Then the police came and they were shooting everywhere and I got hit in the shoulder. Twice.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“That is scary.”
“Damn straight it was scary.”
My father would be proud.
That afternoon I took Dean and Paulina for a walk so they could see what I did for fun back in the days before million-channel cable systems and video games. I had bought an Estes toy rocket and a couple of engines and a launcher that morning, and I thought they might get a kick out of seeing what I did on my ninth birthday, when my dad took me and my friends up to the park.
Dean and his sister trundled along the gravel road in the woods. I walked behind them with the equipment for our space shot. They get along pretty well, these two, although Dean does enjoy torturing her and making her scream, and she has developed a surprisingly strong right hook for a three-year-old. When Paulina first came home from the hospital, her arrival didn’t seem to bother him: she was more pet than person; by the time she started to cut into his time with his parents she was already part of the scenery and there didn’t seem to be any jealousy. Still, he has asked me some questions that suggest trouble: a few nights earlier, hungry at dinnertime, he eyed her while she had a tantrum, and asked why we couldn’t just cook her.
Now I looked at her walking ahead of me, her pink-and-white sneakers crunching the gravel, her light brown hair catching the errant streaks of sunlight that snuck through the trees. She was coming into focus in my mind as Dean did during his post-truck, early-dinosaur days.
I wondered what questions she will ask me. Will she be as curious about physical injury, falling buildings, carnivorous beasts and crashing planes as her brother is? Will she tell my secrets to the used-car salesman? Will “Why?” become her mantra, repeated like a mystical chant? Or will she find her own methods of interrogation? She has already taken to the girl path as Dean took the boy path, without, really, any encouragement from us—she likes ballet as Dean likes play-fighting, dolls as Dean liked trucks and buses. She picks her own outfits and wants everything to match; Dean wouldn’t care if we sent him to school wearing a garbage bag. Helene was a tomboy when she was a girl and has no idea how this happened. We’ve given up, for now, trying to figure it out.
Will she ask me one of those great, moment-stopping questions that have, at the same time, no answers and a hundred answers, the kind that make you stop and think: Where did that come from? What is going on in this child’s brain? And how come I never thought of that? I’m sure she will. Those questions are my true joys; they speak to a world where anything is possible, where nothing cannot be explained and nothing can be explained, a world where we never grow up.
We came into the field and set up in dry grass that stung our bare legs; I’m sure it was filled with ticks and poison ivy. We avoided the droppings from the deer we’d seen at night jumping through our high beams. I slid the rocket onto the launcher and inserted the igniter into the engine as if it had been only minutes, and not thirty-one years, since the last time I’d done it. I unspooled the wire, crouch-walking backward, and sat down cross-legged in the grass with my son and daughter.
“How far will it go?” Dean asked.
I told him I couldn’t answer that: we didn’t know the weight of the rocket, the thrust of the engine, the current wind velocity or the angle of our shot. I didn’t tell him that even if I knew those things, I still would have no idea how far our rocket would fly.
We had a countdown, and he pushed the button and the little rocket shot up over the field with a phffffffffffffffffffffffffft, trailed by white smoke. At its apex—I wondered if you could see the Dunkin’ Donuts from up there—the parachute popped out and it started falling down to Earth, swinging back and forth, smelling of sulfur even at a distance. Dean went running for it.
I don’t think I could have been any happier than I was sitting in that field in the waning late August sun. I wouldn’t have minded if everything in the world had just stopped while that little rocket hung up there. The sky was as clear as it had been on my ninth birthday, but it was later in the day, later in the season, and it was a darker blue, almost violet—the wavelengths of the sun’s light scattered across the heavens. Gnats flitted around our heads as Paulina and I watched Dean get smaller and smaller. The rocket fell farther than I’d expected; his tiny shape looked out of breath as he bent down to pick it up. Well, at least he had his answer.
Then I felt a disturbance in the universe. It was just a hint, as hard to detect as the first half-inch of a long-distance train trip, but it was unmistakable. I looked off to the bushes and trees at the edge of the field, but quickly realized the disturbance was emanating from somewhere closer, much closer, and a bit lower. It was coming from the tiny girl in my lap. I looked down. She stared up at me.
She said, “Where’s the deer?”
I looked at her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sleeping, I guess.”
She stared at me some more. I stared back at her. I felt the need to fill in the silence.
“They’re, you know, nocturnal. They sleep during the day and go out at night.”
She crinkled her eyes, eyes as big as her brother’s when he asked his first question. Her gaze hardened. And then she asked:
“How come?”
Dear Dr. Taylor:
I am a New York author seeking to interview someone who is familiar with animal species or primitive cultures that engage in cannibalism. It would be a quick interview, and could be done on the telephone, or via e-mail. It is for a book I am writing in which I seek experts to answer the questions of children. The question I need answered is one my son, Dean, asked about his little sister, Paulina, while she was having a tantrum during dinnertime.
He asked: “Why can’t we just cook her?”
I’d like a serious answer: why cannibalism is not socially accepted, if it ever was, and if it once was in some cultures, why it is nonetheless unlikely that one would have cooked and then eaten one’s little sister. Or perhaps it was common. I don’t know. She certainly looks tasty.
Sincerely,
Wendell Jamieson
“Why can’t we just cook her?”
—DEAN, pointing at his sister
Timothy Taylor, M.A., Ph.D., FSA, reader in archaeology, Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, United Kingdom:
“You cannot just cook and eat your sister, because your father is trying to civilize you. You would find it existentially upsetting. Even if you were uncivilized, like the seventy-plus species of mammal who are known cannibals, it would not be your sibling you would kill and eat. For instance, male lions and female chimpanzees kill and eat the offspring of rivals, not infants who are closely related to them genetically. In a cave I was excavating recently, I discovered the ancient remains of butchered babies and toddlers, so I know that early humans certainly sometimes ate other humans. It was not always their enemies. Before farming was developed to pro
vide regular meals, if a member of your family died, it would have made nutritional sense not to waste anything, and you would not want to attract dangerous meat-eating animals to your camp or allow your enemies a chance of a good feed off your deceased loved one. So in those circumstances you would have been obliged to eat your little sister, as part of a solemn, dutiful ritual. Nowadays you don’t need to do that, unless times get very, very tough. So keep your fingers crossed that civilization continues—our sort, that is. The apparently civilized Aztecs deliberately terrorized, sacrificed and ate bits of their own children. Their priests were obsessed with being scary, and were not—in my opinion—nice people.”
“Does Mona Lisa wear shoes?”
—JACOB SKLODOWSKI, age four, Wilmington, Delaware, after seeing a mock Mona Lisa in an Elmo Halloween movie, and then in store displays for The Da Vinci Code
Douglas W. Strong, medieval-footwear researcher, author of numerous booklets and DVDs on how to make medieval footwear, and a historical reenactor who is a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism:
“Certainly she is wearing shoes. The year of the painting—1503 or 1504, we don’t know exactly—is on the cusp of shoe-making technology between medieval shoes and more modern shoes. I think with the Mona Lisa we would be looking at medieval shoemaking because you find this style a little later in Italy than you do in northern and northwest Europe. Also, this older style persisted as indoor shoes even as the newer style became available. And since she is sitting for a portrait, she would be indoors. Even though the background is outdoors, she probably wasn’t sitting in a field.
“The newer style was not all that different from a good pair of modern dress shoes: when you look down you can see the sole sticking over the top of the shoe; the sole attaches to a thinner layer of leather that is attached to the shoe. The older style of shoe is called a ‘turn shoe’—a shoe that is sewn inside out and then turned as part of its construction. So you didn’t see the seam, and the sole didn’t extend beyond the bottom of the shoe, if you looked at it downward. She was probably wearing a turn shoe that would look like a house slipper today—a low, slip-on shoe, with no fastening at all. It would have a short, fairly blunt point, a little like a gothic arch. No heel, nothing extra added on. Color is tough to determine because most of the shoes that survive from that time are all dark brown and black—by this point, they’ve been in the ground a long time. But it is not unreasonable to think she has brown shoes on.”
Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister? Page 20