They say a picture is
worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, I
don’t have the picture. So here we go.
It is a dream come true.
Although it is not a dream I ever had. Which means that describing it as a dream come true is entirely
inaccurate. Although I have to say that if
I ever did have a dream like that,
and it wound up coming true, it would,
I believe, feel exactly the same way.
Really, really nice.
Making it kind of a metaphorical
dream come true. Okay, I’ll stop.
Rosario, who takes care of (the now two year-old) Baby Milo when
his Mom Rachel and Dad Tim are at work, had left town on a two-week-long
vacation. Our family immediately jumped
into “It Takes A Village” mode, constructing a schedule wherein each of us
would take turns with the child-care responsibilties.
My obligation was
the least onerous, as, as with most duties, I am deemed to be totally
incompetent – a perception I do very little to disprove, thus allowing me more
time to do what I like to do most. Nothing.
In my defense, in this
case, I actually lobbied for some
child-care time – my perceivers on this occasion, seeing me as more useless
than I actually wanted them to. As a
consequence, a forty-five minute assignment on Monday mornings, and an additional
hour on Wednesday afternoons.
The Monday morning stint (at our house) went rapidly. Some time earlier, I had introduced Baby Milo
to my small, metal coin bank – fashioned in the shape of a double-decker London
bus – and very quickly, Baby Milo developed an enthusiasm for removing the lid
of the coin bank, dumping all the change inside onto a table (a few coins
finding their way to the floor), replacing the lid, and then, one by one,
returning each coin, through the narrow slot on the top of the coin bank, to
its previous location.
That knocked off twenty minutes right there.
The rest of the time involved Baby Milo pushing the button
on the be-horsed talking Toy Story
“Woody” doll (it is actually my be-horsed
Toy Story “Woody” doll), triggering
its recorded message and musical accompaniment, thus engendering countless
repetitions of:
“Giddy up, Bulls Eye,
let’s ride like the wind!... Awww. You
can do better than that, Little Buddy… EEEE-HAW! Now that was some fancy footwork, Bulls Eye!”
That ate up another twenty minutes.
And by then, it was pretty much “Game Over.”
My second
assignment was a little trickier. On
Wednesday afternoons, when our housekeeper, the magnificent Connie, went
off-duty and home at three-thirty, it was my job to oversee Baby Milo (again at our house), until his mother
came to retrieve him about an hour or so later.
Normally what I’d
be doing at that time of the day would be relaxing in the back bedroom where
our best TV is located after an energy-depleting morning of blog writing,
enjoying reruns of old cowboy series on the Westerns
Channel, a routine which, being congenitally unhappy with alterations to my
schedule, I was, despite my childcare obligations, determined not to surrender.
Ergo…
“Hey, Milo, you wanna watch cowboys?”
At age two, Baby Milo’s excitement vastly exceeds his actual
understanding. Though it was unlikely that
he comprehended my invitation, he responded to it was an enthusiastic
“Yeah!!!”
I reached down and pulled him up onto the bed
(ignoring the amount of bodywork it would entail to repair the damage this maneuver
would inflict on my deteriorating vertebrae.) I then positioned him – sitting
envy-inducingly straight-backed – in the crook of my right elbow (so he wouldn’t
fall off the bed), and together, we immersed ourselves in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.
That’s the picture I wish had been taken.
“Pappy” (that’s what he calls me) and “The Kid”
Watching westerns together.
The little boy was absolutely entranced, noticing the
familiar Toy Story-infused signposts:
Big hats,
“Horsies!”
And
“Cowboys!”
And so this magical moment unspooled.
Until…
There is no way, if you’re not old enough, for you to know
this, or if you are old enough for
you to necessarily remember, but Wyatt
Earp was an inordinately violent series.
Outlaws would unexpectedly emerge from an alley, instigating these
explosive shootouts with the law at pretty much “Point Blank” range. I could barely handle this level of brutality
myself. (I don’t mean when I was a kid. I mean now.)
Despite the near certainty that Baby Milo was oblivious to
what he was looking at, I was pretty certain his mother would in no way find
this appropriate viewing for a two year-old.
Rachel, being an offspring of hippies – I don’t mean me, I am a
fifties-infused Canadian Stepdad – and therefore a committed opponent of the
use of “weapons” as playthings, there was little doubt in my mind that exposing
her toddler son to outright mayhem at a tender age would earn me a respectful
but firm babysittorial beratement.
I could switch channels, I suppose. There was an SVU episode on USA
Cable. There were usually children in that. Wait! – sexually abused children. So probably
not.
Anyway, every time I did
flip around the channels for something more age-appropriately Square Pantsy, Milo would vociferously insist
“Cowboys!”
And I would have to switch back, hopefully at a point where
the bodies had been carted away, and Marshal Earp was sitting behind his desk,
flipping through “Wanted” posters.
Inordinately aware of the western’s story structure, I knew that the
climactic shootout was yet to take place, guaranteeing this vulnerable two-year
old an exposure to further bloodshed,
as owlhoots by the handful bit the dust before his impressionable, albeit uncomprehending,
memory bank.
Fortunately, just before that cataclysmic confrontation played
out, ironically, as in the “nick-of-time” rescues in westerns, Mama Rachel
arrived to collect Baby Milo, preserving him from the psychic trauma his
irresponsible caretaker was about to inflict upon him. There was little doubt that the
rationalization “The violence is not actually real” was unlikely to save me from a stern and unsympathetic
talking-to.
Still, before it got complicated, there was that incomparable
moment,
When we sat together and watched.
Can you see it?
I can.
And, at least till the Alzheimer’s kicks in,
It’ll never go away.
1 comment:
My 2 and a half year old grandson asked me the other day, "Grandpa,you know what the word on the street is?" I don't have any idea where he got that from. We haven't been watching old Starsky and Hutch episodes.
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