Never mind keeping an eye on the little ones, who's watching out for the geezers?

The neighbor kids, that’s who. They’re the ones that always know what’s happening with the ancient people next door. I know because I’m just the pseudo-grownup version of one of those little squirts. I was the one that went over to the big tall wood fence on Ryan Street when I knew Mrs Pipkin was gardening because I could see the top of our dear neighbor’s head from my shrimpy P.O.V., and piped, “Pickens, my mommy says I can play with you!” I can’t confirm at this great remove that I’d actually received such permission, especially given that I suspect, more accurately, that I was approaching my add-on grandma of my own volition–she having proven endlessly patient in answering my blue-sky questions and letting me trail around after her like a little bit of leftover Christmas ribbon.

Let’s face it: children are insightful whether you want them to be or not, and especially adept at providing their deepest insights at the most inconvenient moment possible. Which is decidedly the most entertaining as well as the most hideously dangerous aspect of spending time with persons of the childish persuasion. Witness the uncanny gift mini-people have for repeating, verbatim but utterly out of context, horrendously revealing things that their elders have previously uttered within the hearing of said small persons. There is simply no antidote for having been indiscreet around toddlers and their ilk. Part and parcel of this talent is they are marvelously gifted at cutting through the cauliflower and getting down to gritty reality in record time.

A friend and colleague once related an excellent tale of such insightful youthful efficiency, regarding a long-ago episode one of his cohorts experienced while teaching in the deep south during the era of Civil Rights‘ supposed birth. A Concerned Parent had contacted the school board with a complaint that friend Mr Krapelski was behaving in a fashion incompatible with the intents and aims of the whole Civil Rights concept, and the board felt the complaint warranted a full inquiry. Hurray for the Board; I imagine this sort of follow-through was fairly rare at the time. The approach was simple and obvious enough. Talk to the kids. So the inspectors, amazingly, did. Somebody did recognize the power of children’s keen observation.

They approached the situation with simplicity and no pre-arranged outcomes dependent on ulterior motives, and they posed the obvious questions to the class: “Does Mr Krapelski treat any of you children differently than others? Is Mr Krapelski prejudiced?” And their answer was equally simple and untainted. A pert little fellow raised his hand immediately. “No, sir, he ain’t prejudiced. He hates us all equal!”

I, though a childless person, am well equipped with nine brilliant nephews and one equally dazzling niece, all of whom in their time have provided rich stores of intelligent interpretations of the universe and its workings, from understanding the threat of the backyard swing that ‘threw’ Grandma when she stuck her toe too firmly in the ground under it (“Mormor, det er farlig!” [“Grandma, that’s dangerous!“]) to telling wildly indecipherable stories that despite their incoherence become clear (and hilarious) by way of outsized pantomime and garbled, gagging narration (the best one was about–you won’t be surprised–a gigantic sneeze followed by an even bigger booger).

They taught me about instinctively genius juniors knowing just how to make it possible for Mormor to get back up the long steep hill from the beach if she wanted to walk down there with the family after her back had gone bad (let Tristan, the beautiful husky dog, tow her back up while she held his leash–which he did briskly and without batting a pale blue eye) to why the same grandma should act as Home Base in a closely contested game of Hide-and-Seek (“because she’s the oldest thing in the house!”).

This latter is precisely the appeal of childlike clarity and bluntness, in my book: they recognize that all of us over about the age of twenty are unspeakably, unreachably, unimaginably distant in the mists of antiquity–yet this has a certain cachet with young kids: unlike, say, their teenage counterparts, they admire and respect this very strange quality of Oldness. It’s really weird, and thus somehow kind of piquant and beguiling.

My husband and I thought of ourselves as only moderately advanced in age when we were in the early fifties and just moseying into the forties, respectively. The neighboring kids put that right into perspective. They lived in the house across the fence from our apartment garage, and the young sprats spent a great deal of their spare time and energy bounding around on the trampoline next to that back fence. We could hear them flouncing and giggling almost ceaselessly–enough, perhaps, on its own to make us feel our age a little more keenly–and then one day we paused for a moment when we’d gone out to get in the car.

BOING! The neighbor kids heard our talking, through the fence. They jumped a little harder so they could clear the top of the fence and get a better look over our way. We heard them cackling and turned around. BOINGGG! We grinned. BOINGBOINGBOING!!! The biggest of the kids waved madly and yelled, “Hi, Old People!” And they collapsed on the trampoline, laughing their curly heads off, while we fell about in equal hilarity as we stumbled into the car. That was all the encounter required. Acclamation and affirmation–of childhood silliness, of punctured pompous pretend-adulthood, and of the joy of being whatever age one is, as long as it’s not taken too seriously. Can’t help but rebound from such commentary a lot higher than we were leaping just a little bit before.

Hurray for unfiltered youth! Hurray for the goofiness of happy aging! Getting old, after all, surely does beat the alternative. Especially when there are some junior wildlings handy to keep everything somewhat in perspective.

<BOING!>