“What is Tiki?”
—WILL POPALISKY, age six, Brooklyn, New York
Mike Buhan, who owns Tiki-Ti in Los Angeles and whose father, Ray Buhan, worked in the 1930s with Don “the Beachcomber” Gantt, generally acknowledged as the father of Tiki cocktail culture:
“Tiki is a lot of things. It comes from Polynesian cultures where there are all kinds of carvings, called tikis, of various gods—the God of Love, the God of War. Tiki style began in the 1930s; that’s when my dad worked with Don the Beachcomber in the original bar that he opened on McCadden Place in Hollywood right after Prohibition ended. He was one of four Filipinos who actually worked there when it opened up. Don got all this tropical stuff together and rented out this tiny place and opened up a little bar, and all of the movie industry people started hanging out there, and that was the start of the Tiki craze. It really took off right after World War II because a lot of the GIs were in the South Pacific, and when they came back they were already accustomed to the islands, the tropical stuff. That’s why it kind of flourished. Basically, Tiki is escapism: you’re in a big city and you open a door and you step into another world.”
“Why is noon p.m. instead of a.m., since it has been a.m. right up to twelve o’clock?”
—DREW RICKARD, age eleven, Burlington, Vermont
Demetrios Matsakis, Ph.D., head of the Time Service Department, United States Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C.:
“People raised in different cultures often do things very differently, often because that’s how they learned from the previous generation. In Japan, they started saying that noon was twelve a.m., and that’s how they think of it. And they call midnight either zero a.m. or twelve p.m. They’re not any more wrong or any more correct than we are. Actually we are both wrong, and we should not say that noon and midnight are either ‘a.m.’ or ‘p.m.’ They are simply noon and midnight.
“The terms ‘a.m.’ and ‘p.m.’ came to us almost by accident. Long ago, Greek and Roman astronomers conceived of the meridian—an imaginary line in the sky that goes from north to south. It goes from the most northerly spot on the horizon through Polaris, the North Star. Then it goes straight overhead, and continues on down towards the south. In the mornings, the sun is rising towards the meridian. So the Romans used the term ante meridiem, which is Latin for ‘before meridian.’ The abbreviation is ‘a.m.’ Exactly at noon the sun is on the meridian. Then in the afternoon the sun has passed the meridian and is going down, and so they called it post meridiem, or ‘p.m.’ Almost no one speaks Latin anymore, but we still say ‘a.m.’ and ‘p.m.’”
“Why is it called ‘kidnapping’ if you can steal away adults, too?”
—ALEX AGUILERA, age nine, Clifton, Virginia
John F. Fox, Jr., official historian of the FBI, Washington, D.C.:
“The word ‘kidnap’ brings together the words ‘kid’ (originally slang when applied to people) and ‘nap/nab,’ meaning ‘to take.’ The combination of the two words appears in the late seventeenth century and referred to the taking of youths for slave labor. Likely the first use of the word was as a noun referring to people who engaged in taking slaves, kidnappers, and eventually became a verb, ‘to kidnap.’ As slavers took able-bodied adults as well, the use of the term came to describe all who engaged in this practice. By the mid-1700s, the English legal theorist Blackstone noted that the official definition of ‘kidnapping’ entailed the forcible abduction of a man, woman or child. Thus, in less than seventy years, kidnapping has come to mean the taking of any person.”
“Why do they call it soccer? They don’t play in socks.”
—OLIVIA FOLEY, age six, Fairfield, Connecticut, while watching English Premier League highlights with her father
Sunil Gulati, President, U.S. Soccer Federation:
“Well, most players actually do play in socks, they just also wear shoes over their socks. But that’s not why they call it soccer. The real reason is that in England, where the sport became organized for the first time nearly 150 years ago, they called it ‘football.’ However, another sport was also becoming known as football: rugby, which became the football we know here in the United States. So to differentiate between these two footballs they started calling rugby ‘rugby football’ and soccer ‘association football,’ because of the organized association (in England) playing football. From there, the word ‘association’ was shortened to ‘assoc’ or ‘soc,’ which became ‘soccer’ and was used as a slang term for football. That is the word that eventually moved to the United States to describe the game.”
“What is legal and what is illegal?”
—JUDE RIZZO, age three, New York City
Justice Barbara J. Pariente, Florida Supreme Court:
“What is ‘legal’ is based on rules that everyone must follow. Rules—or laws—allow us to get along with one another. If a person does not follow the rules, that person acts in a way that is illegal. For example, it is illegal or against the rules to hit someone else. But rules must be fair to everyone and treat everyone equally. So if it was legal to hit someone if they had blue eyes or it was only illegal to hit someone if they had brown eyes, that would not be fair. Many years ago there were laws that made black people sit in the back of buses. In some states, that was ‘legal’ but it was not fair. Judges make sure that the laws are fair to everyone based on the Constitution of the United States. Judges and juries also decide if the person has followed the law or has broken the law.
“Imagine a planet where there were no rules for anything, not even for games, and what the consequences would be. Think about what a game of baseball would be like on this planet. You would not even be able to play baseball because there would be no rules to tell you how to do it. It works the same between people. When people follow the rules and act in a ‘legal’ way, it is much easier to get along.”
“What is the Q in Q-tip for?”
—SOPHIE INDIANA BAKER, age six, Brooklyn, New York
Stacie Bright, Unilever senior communications marketing manager, Q-tips:
“In 1923, Leo Gerstenzang, original founder of the Q-tips Company, conceived the idea of Q-tips cotton swabs after observing his wife apply wads of cotton to toothpicks for their daughter’s daily bath. The product was originally named Baby Gays after Gerstenzang’s baby Gayle. It wasn’t until 1926 that the name was changed to Q-tips Baby Gays. Later the Baby Gays mark was discarded and the product name shortened to Q-tips. The Q in the name Q-tips stands for ‘quality’ and the word ‘tips’ describes the cotton swabs on the end of the stick.”
I’m not the first parent to remember his child’s questions. Some of the best ones we never forget. And our children remember asking. My friend Gia in New Brunswick asked a great one when she was little. In her training as a psychologist, which was quite lengthy, she came across the answer to the question she had asked thirty years earlier.
“How come if you forget what you were going to say, you don’t forget that you were going to say something?”
—GIANINE ROSENBLUM, age nine, Brooklyn, New York
Gianine Rosenblum, Ph.D., age thirty-nine, licensed psychologist, therapist and child development researcher:
“The reason is that there is more than one type of memory, and as far as I understand it, the part of your memory that holds the desire to make a comment is your working memory, which keeps stuff at hand and is very active. If there is something you want to share, an idea or a memory, it is in long-term storage. You have to get from your working memory to your long-term storage, and sometimes you get interrupted. It’s like you are in a truck and you are on your way to long-term storage, but you get run off the road; the thread is broken. You know you are in the truck—in other words, you know you want to make a comment—but because something or someone interrupted you, you have forgotten where you are going.”
7.
Tough Ones
When she was little, Helene’s friend Kathy asked the same question again and again, posing it to her mothe
r and, during confessional, to her priest. It’s a question every parent has heard, with a million variations: Where do babies come from? Finally her mother, doubtless harried and in a terrible rush, wrestling with the query for the hundredth time, had had enough. She knew she had to give an answer, any answer. Here is what she said:
“At the Woolworth’s on Central Avenue.”
From that moment on, every time little Kathy and her mother walked past the store, she would see all the women with boys and girls and babies sitting in the shopping carts, and be certain that a sale was going on, a sale on small children. She would beg her mother, again and again, to go in and buy one. Maybe they were even free.
Fibbing to your children, even for good reasons, can have unintended consequences.
Helene created an elaborate back story to explain Dean’s arrival to him. He was in heaven, she said, floating around and around, gently somersaulting through the clouds, looking for a mommy and daddy to live with. When he picked us, someone—God? A doctor?—placed Dean in her belly, where he cooked for a while until he was ready to come out.
I liked the idea of little Dean floating through the clouds. He did, too: “I was looking for a pretty mommy named Helene and a daddy named Wendell who worked at a newspaper—and then I found you,” he’d tell us. But as he got older, he came to realize that there were some parts of this story that did not quite add up.
We were sitting one evening on the screened-in porch of the little cottage in the country when he asked: “So after the baby gets put inside the mommy’s belly, how does it get out?”
Helene glanced at me. A moth fluttered outside the screen and a heron glided above the smooth orange surface of the tidal estuary. Dean was five. I thought about it and I decided he could take the truth. I gave Helene a look that said: Lay it on him.
“Well,” she said, tentatively, “the baby comes out of the mommy’s poochie.”
The poochie pseudonym comes from Helene’s family and has always been funny to me, because my family has a very old and dear friend who goes by the same name. But there was no time for thoughts of her now; Dean was mulling. He scrunched up his face. “But then the baby would only be this big,” he said, holding his fingers about a half-inch apart.
It had been two years since Paulina was born, in the same ward at New York Hospital as Dean. He had first seen her when she was twelve hours old, expressionless, a thick shock of black hair on her head just like when her brother was born. He held her and said, “We have a big family now,” as I stood nearby, proud but ready to dive for the catch if he dropped her. He therefore knew, firsthand, that a baby isn’t two inches long when it is born, the size he presumed a poochie to be.
I said: “Well, that part of mommy kind of, um, expands.”
Dean nodded his head to the side, and then looked away: he had already tired of the poochie-newborn spatial relations conundrum; he’d moved on to the next pressing matter in his head. Helene and I relaxed. His eyes focused in the middle distance, on a dark clump of trees set in the reeds across the water. He then asked his follow-up question:
“Do vampire bats live in Pennsylvania?”
That first one, “Where do babies come from?” is a true perennial, a question that has bedeviled parents, I’m sure, since humans first learned to communicate. One mother said Woolworth’s, we said clouds. Dean still has not asked exactly what I had to do with him and his sister being born; that part of the process would surely shock him. We tried to be honest, but our honesty mixed with the gentle fibs we’d kept going for years. The result was that Dean simply tuned us out and moved on to the next thing.
But it was only one of a million tricky questions. And in many ways, the easiest of them: it’s grown-ups who’ve made birth and everything leading up to it weird-sounding and complicated. But how do we answer the really tough questions? How do we explain a world where nations hurl missiles at each other, and entire races have been forced into slavery, and women have been denied fair chances because they are women? How do we answer questions about torture, and drug abuse, and cruelty? What do we say when entire buildings, the tallest in sight, collapse in flames outside our living room windows?
We do our best, that’s all.
“Where do babies come from?” is a snap compared with those.
If birth is the beginning and prompts tough questions, questions about the end are even harder. How do you explain the unexplainable?
Nicholas Hurley, age three, the son of a friend, was sitting on his kitchen counter watching his mother, Vicky, make dinner when he asked her: “What is die?” and “Do I want to die?”
Vicky paused, put down the salad bowl and explained that he probably didn’t want to die quite yet.
“Why?”
Because, she said, she wanted him to be with her for many more years and wanted to watch him grow up. And didn’t he want to live a long time, to reach old age? She got surprisingly emotional. Nicholas sensed this and decided to have some fun, saying over and over again that he wanted to die, nearly causing Vicky to burst into tears.
But her older daughter, Nell, who was six, was an even tougher proposition.
“When are you going to die?” she asked. Having practiced this sort of thing on her younger son, Vicky was ready. She explained that she didn’t know, really, but she hoped it would be many years in the future, and pointed out that both her parents were still alive. She said she would be around to watch her daughter graduate from school, get a job, get married and have her own children—just as her own parents had been around to see her do all these things.
But she had taken the analogy too far. Her daughter looked at her. Now she began to cry.
“But then you’ll be an old lady and I don’t want an old lady for a mother.”
My friend Greg’s son Damon was four, watching a show about mummies, when one of his cousins told him: “That’s what you are going to look like when you die.” Damon had never considered his own mortality, and became alarmed. He started sobbing.
Greg sat Damon down and asked him how old he was. He asked him to count to eighty-six, which he did. I’m not sure why Greg picked eighty-six as the magical death age—the current life expectancy for an American male born now is seventy-five—but his gambit worked: the sheer number of integers little Damon had had to enumerate between four and eighty-six proved that death was not something he had to worry about just then.
With Dean, and I’m sure with most children, the ever-soothing concept of heaven proves helpful when confronting death queries. That’s where you go when you die, and it’s a great place—fluffy clouds, lots of trucks, pretty girls. In one of his kinder moments Dean said: “Daddy, if you are going to heaven, I’m going to grab your leg and you can pull me up with you.”
“Dino,” I told him, “do me a favor: grab me and pull me back down instead.”
Helene mumbled something under her breath. Dean couldn’t hear it but I could.
It was: “I’m not sure your father is going to heaven.”
Are we lying when we talk about heaven to our children? We lie about Santa Claus, and sometimes other questions for which we don’t know the answers. We lie about Woolworth’s. The heaven lie, to me, is the most worthwhile. When we are adults, we still can’t get our arms around death—how can a child?
So that’s one approach. But I really think Greg had the right idea: put some distance between the kid and the great beyond. Dean has never asked, straightaway, when or how or why he might die; perhaps he senses that the honest answer to this question is something of a downer. But he has asked things that hint around the edges, like, “When I’m fifty, how old will you be?” (Eighty-three.) “Will you be dead?”
While the answer, most likely, is yes, unless I begin some type of strenuous health regime that is in direct contrast to the way I’ve taken care of myself for the last forty years, I hedge my bets a bit here like Vicky and Greg and point out to him that there are two generations in our family who must confront death befo
re me, and three before him, as long as we look both ways when we cross the street and don’t smoke or drink too much.
My parents are both alive, and my stepparents and even one of my grandparents, my mother’s father, known to me and my sister and our cousins from North Carolina as Pop Pop. Dean has met him many times. He was a superior court judge in Pennsylvania (where there are no vampire bats); my mother took Lindsay and me to see him up on the bench in his black robes when we were little. He was hearing the appeal of a man who had set his girlfriend’s door on fire because she wouldn’t have his baby.
“Pop Pop is very old,” Dean said, accurately.
Yes, Pop Pop was born in 1910, when horses walked down the cobblestone street outside our apartment, when only a few airplanes had ever flown—and those that did were made of sticks and canvas—when sailing ships were still regularly seen in New York Harbor, when there was no radio, no television and certainly no cell phones or Internet. See how much changed since Pop Pop was a boy? Imagine, I tell him, how the world will look when you are old—flying cars, space travel, whatever. It is so far in the future it is almost impossible to imagine. But when Dean tries, my mission is accomplished. The issue of death is temporarily forgotten, or placed in an unimaginable future, to be asked about another day.
I know I asked my parents a few tough questions. I asked about testicles when a torture victim on television said electrodes had been attached to his. I worried about nuclear war, like probably every other kid who grew up between the 1950s and 1970s. Walter Cronkite talked about how many times the United States or the Soviet Union could obliterate the planet with their missiles. It seemed like overkill to me, destroying the planet more than once; I asked my dad what was stopping either one of us from just firing our ICBMs.
“Wen, imagine if you had a fish bowl and a brick,” he said, starting an explanation that I imagine he had practiced or heard somewhere, it was so thoroughly thought out. “And imagine your friend had a fish tank and a brick. Well, if you smashed his fish tank, he would just smash yours. So what would be the point?”
Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister? Page 11
