Life Lessons While Driving
While driving my two year old cousin Riley around in the car I often discover fascinating things about myself. I am a songwriter and a brilliant joke teller. Given such directives as, "Nanny sing me the song about teeth." I can come up with brilliant and witty lyrics like "You have teeth, chomp chomp, I have teeth, chomp chomp, Baby Soren doesn't have teeth, wah wah!" (You might be more impressed if you heard the melody.)I am also excellent at explaining the laws of motion. "Nanny how does that train move?" "Well, it makes the choo chooing sound and the conductor who drives the train pushes the button that makes the chugga chugga sound and the train keeps moving. Also, don't play on the train tracks."
I am NOT good however at explaining death and loss, which is also something that one can view while driving along the highways of Idaho. On a recent trip home Riley and I viewed a most horrifying event. A horse had been struck by a vehicle and then, being too big to move a bullodozer had to be called in to pick it up and then hoist it HIGH in the air and dump it into the back of a pickup truck. Even I at the mature age of 24 was truly shocked by the event taking place before us, but Riley slowly removed her sunglasses and stated with much upset, "Nanny, WHAT are they DOING to that horse?"
How to answer such a question? As the horse was hoisted high above our heads, right in the middle of our path, it's legs stiff with rigor mortis, I turned to see Riley's eyes light up just as they had at spud day when I took her on the pony ride. Then, in one awful moment, the bulldozer released it's bucket and the horse fell, making a horrible THUD onto the back of the flat bed truck.
The THUD was too much to bear. Hitting reverse we flipped around on the country road, Riley beginning to squeal in excitement at the accelaration. "Nanny WHAT were they DOING to that horse? WHAT were they DOING to that horse?" Some sort of explanation needed to occur here. Did I need to explain death? That seemed to hard. Was the horse asleep? That seemed horribly implausible. Maybe she hadn't gotten as good a view of the event as I had.
"Well Riley, the horse was training for a trick where he jumps really high in the air and then onto a truck." "Like my daddy's truck?" "JUST like your daddy's truck!" "I love my daddy's truck."
Problem solved.
posted by Anonymous @ 2:34 PM
1 Comments:
Oh, how I laughed! I love your Riley explanations. It's like the time when you started to tell her about where milk comes from: "Remember that cow we saw at the fair?" and when you noticed her horrified face, you quickly assured her, "Milk comes from the fridge."
Also, a rant: I have often wondered what it is about horses that make them seem, to many people, so much more valuable than other animals or even other human beings.
For example, I'll be sitting in a movie theater during a bloody battle scene, and people will be dying painful deaths left and right, and then--horrors!--a horse will die, and people all over the theater will gasp, and some preteen girl will say, "Oh! The Horsey!"
And then there's you, who has a bloodlust for the skunk who chased you home the other day, and who has personally bludgeoned suffering birds to death using a shovel, feeling so much horror at the sight of a horse being plopped into a pickup bed that you felt the need to rapidly accelerate away.
What gives?
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home