By Jim Hagarty
1988
As a concept, I think kids are great. They have cute smiles, say cute things and look cute when they’re all dressed up like mini-adults in their Sunday morning dresses and little sports coats. As a way of carrying on the human race, they’re ideal. A great idea. I can’t think of a better way to start out in life than as a kid.
Show the average child the least bit of attention and you’ll be wipin’ sloppy kisses off your cheek for a hour. And when they decide they like you, they go all out to show it. They don’t give a hoot about your appearance or the frailties in your character and will love you whether you rob banks for a living or belong to the peace corps.
But kids also don’t wait for a judge and jury to find you guilty or innocent before deciding they don’t like you. And if they don’t like you, backing up to their front door with a truckload full of toys once a week won’t win them over. Where they used to be just a kid who doesn’t like you, now they’ll be a kid with a lot of toys who doesn’t like you.
Like most things in this world, kids sound better in theory than they very often are in practice. The tame ones are generally preferable to the untamed ones though even the quiet ones will get into mischief if they’re alone for a while. But all kids, wild or domesticated, are by nature opposed to order and feel better in the midst of chaos. This is why they spend their days creating it.
Perhaps the most admirable trait of children, a feature that somehow gets trained out of them later on, is their absolute directness of purpose. Whatever they want to do, they do, regardless of where they are at the moment when it strikes them to do it. Or say it. Or throw it. Or jump on it.
But endearing as their strength of will may be, there are also times when a person might be forgiven for mistaking this as a liability and not an asset. Take the day I was walking down the street when I saw a young mother and her preschool boy walking toward me, hand in hand. So cute was he, that I smiled at the two of them as they approached and bent down to ask his name when we met. I planned to pat him on the head and tell him what a good little boy he was. Uninterested in such social pleasantries, the boy instead walked up to me and kicked me as hard as he could in one of my shins. Perhaps this commando maneuver was taught in his streetproofing class or perhaps he was the son of a professional wrestler. Whatever the case, I was not aware until then that such a thing as the steel-toed bootie had even been invented and I still can’t understand why it’s legal.
A person can love ice cream without liking every flavour, and so too is it possible to love children without immediately taking a shine to every kid he sees. Take the one I met one day recently. I saw him looking at me, realized he was going to speak and expected him to tell me he got a new water pistol or that his grandmother gave him a dollar for his birthday. Instead, he had this to say to me:
“How’s it going, Tubby?” he asked.
I was shocked. I know when I slouch and if the light is wrong, I can be mistaken for a person who should lose about two, maybe three, pounds. But Tubby? I asked him what it was he’d called me.
“I called you Tubby,” he said, defiantly.
“Well, don’t call me that again!” I ordered him.
“Why?” he asked me.
“Because that’s not my name,” I said.
A few quiet moments passed. Finally, he asked me: “So, did you plant those trees, Tubby?”
Fortunately, at my age, unlike him, I am able to think out a mature response to belligerent exchanges such as this. Were I a child, too, I would have engaged in a name-calling spree or threatened to tell his dad.
Instead, I said nothing. I do plan, however, to put a rubber snake in his wading pool.
