“Can I play with the bad idea?”
My youngest granddaughter had just arrived at my house for a visit and was giving me her best and bluest sad eyes as she requested to play with one of her toys. The toy in question had been purchased by another of her well-meaning family members, and Sponge-Myah Square-Dress had soaked up my comment about it: “That’s a bad idea.”
Every toy sold in this country will have this warning, if it applies: “Contains small parts that may present a choking hazard. Keep away from chuckleheads.” When Myah was worming her young way across the early carpets of her life, she would occasionally encounter some debris that her guardians had missed in the vacuum sweep. Every other child on The Big Blue Marble would have immediately gobbled up the find, but Myah would closely examine it until she heard me (or her mother) say, “Give that to me.” And she would promptly comply. Myah is soon to end what her mother calls “Fournado,” but she is dragging an attitude into the “Year of Five.” I’ve had to chide her for dragging her heels in the clean-up of her playthings, and once told her, “You’re four years old: You’re not in charge.” Her snappish response was, “I’m almost 5.” I staked out the intellectual high ground and did not clap back by saying, “And you still won’t be in charge!” But she is relatively cooperative about picking up one set of toys before we engage with another set, though she plaintively asks, “Will you help me?” Of course, I (absolutely do not) say, “No.”
The warning for Bad Ideas should read, “Contains 21-thousand small parts that your chuckleberry will want to disperse about the playroom floor and then refuse to gather up when play-time is over.” The specific bad idea that Myah wanted to play with has little plastic mermaids (2), mermaid babies (2), a flat blue cloth to simulate the ocean, seashell replicas (80), seahorses, starfish, stones, balls, crystals, flowers, and small confetti strips in green, yellow, and blue (40,000). Myah likes to take out all the pieces and array a few of them on the “ocean,” liberally sprinkling the seaweed about the cloth, the living room floor, the dining room floor and two of the three floor registers available in the area. The mermaids adopt the baby mermaids, the seahorses wiggle past the starfish and stones, until Myah wants to play with the next thing. Myah negotiates a conditional surrender — “Will you help me?” — and after we’ve picked up all 700,000 little bits of fun, we spread paper across the dining room table, fill two cups with water and take out 10 jars of poster paint. Myah chooses a brush and paints Edward Scissorhands on a paper bag. And then we (I) clean up the paint in the plastic palettes, empty the water from the cups, rinse out the brushes and look for some more fun.
I recently discovered a TV series called “Bad Ideas With Adam Devine.” I’ve yet to watch it, for every man has heard the drunken cry of another man: “Hey guys! Watch this!” We all know that the cry signals a bad idea and outcome. But there does not seen to be an internal warning when a parent or grandparent reaches for that toy in the bright, shining box. The boxes are not labeled with an appropriate warning, and grandparents especially, have forgotten those moments of extreme misery that results from our bare instep coming into forceful contact with a little Lego, left on the floor.
A bad idea.
cjon3acd@att.net