The sky was dark and smattered with stars. The Big Dipper shone out, bright and prominent. I stood on the campground road, looking up, my mouth partly open as if I was about to say something but then stopped in surprise. I watched the sky for a few minutes and then walked up the road to our campsite, my flashlight off. I gazed upwards every few moments, trying to cement the sight into my memory.
As I reached the campsite, my kids were getting ready to walk to the bathroom. “Keep your flashlight off!” I recommended. “You’ll see the stars so much better.” They hesitated, then turned them off, trusting me and the desire to see that beauty themselves.
Driving home on the second hour of a seven hour drive with the windows down because our air conditioner broke, I wondered how my kids would remember this experience. Would they remember it in the same way I remembered getting stuck in stop and go traffic without air conditioning outside of Washington D.C. when I was 10? (Sorry Mom and Dad – that was *awful.*) Or will they look back on it fondly as “well, we got through that”? After all, people took plenty of road trips before air conditioning was introduced in cars and survived. I’ve read many people say their family road trips were some of their favorite parts of childhood.
In a way, this conundrum extends to all of summer. So often, adults’ memories of childhood summers are full of nostalgia – memories of ice cream, the pool and playing outside until the sun goes down. My older son loves Calvin and Hobbes, with the pages of his four volume collection well-worn and the spines chomped on by our pet rabbit. The comics about summer reflect this perspective. Calvin romps around in the forest all day with Hobbes and turns cardboard boxes into fantastical devices at home. Summer is endless, innocent and free. It’s the epitome of a “simpler time.”
I’m generally in charge of choosing and buying my kids’ birthday presents, but my husband does one very special thing for them every year – make a phenomenal cake. He did go to culinary school, but only spent about a day or so on pastry. It’s mainly self-taught. And it’s such a clear illustration of his love for our kids and how that relationship has evolved over the years. My older son’s 11th birthday brought about the latest of my husband’s creations.
As I held the furry gray and white body against my chest, a sense of warmth moved through me. This rabbit had been abandoned in the streets of Washington DC, sitting in her cage for God knows how long before being rescued. And yet she let me pick her up. She could have scratched or bitten me, but she just wanted to be held closely, with love. The fact that she felt safe around me was an honor.
While most of us have never been abandoned as completely as she was, we’ve all be hurt by people in some way or another. Yet like her, we need to rely on others.
As I ran, mulberries bounced out of my hand, trailing behind me as if I was some sort of fruit-based Hansel and Gretel. I paused in my run to pick mulberries from a neighbor’s tree – they littered the sidewalk, so they weren’t going to be missed – and had overestimated how many I could hold while jogging. Bringing them home, I announced, “Mulberries!” and dropped them in a plastic bowl. My older son ate them quickly, staining his mouth dark purple.
“The seasons go round and round / the painted ponies go up and down / on the carousel of time….” I crooned softly to myself, looking out my back porch. Joni Mitchell’s song The Circle Game echoed in my head, one of the few guaranteed to make me choke up. For those not familiar, it’s about a child growing up, with each verse describing a different stage of childhood.
In the past, I heard it and was sad about the child growing up. How terrible to have to leave each of those ages behind, especially as that child’s parent?
Looking in the mirror, I saw someone looking back at me who was both terribly familiar and foreign. For one, she had green skin in comparison to my normal pale visage. I noticed a spot that was a bit light and dabbed on a bit more green makeup. There – finished. Save the red hair and the cartoon skinniness, I was the image of Poison Ivy from the Harley Quinn animated show.
On the lawful to chaotic and good to bad morality scale, I am solidly in the lawful good zone. I was obsessive about rules as a kid to the point I would correct other kids regularly. (That made me very popular.) While I’ve shed much of that slavish devotion, I hate breaking rules for no good reason and hold myself to high moral standards.
So why was I cosplaying a chaotic supervillain at a comic book convention?
Before kids are old enough to really believe in God (or choose to not believe in God), they believe in their parents. Having taken care of them since they were babies, small children look up to their parents as all-knowing, all-powerful beings that can fix anything. And then, one day, they stop.
My kids are both around the ages – 8 and 10 – where they start losing serious faith in parents as masters of the universe. So when I saw This American Life was doing an episode on that subject called Parents Are People, I was intrigued.
The computer screen showed a line drawing of the classic philosophical thought experiment called The Trolley Problem. Except instead of stick figure people tied to the railroad tracks like in the original version – which asks you to decide whether to redirect the trolley and save the 5 people on the tracks but kill a single person on the alternate track – it was a choice between you and five identical clones of you.
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting twist,” I commented to my older son, who was both laughing and seriously contemplating the moral implications of this ridiculous choice. It was one of a series of increasingly silly versions of the problem that he was futzing around with. I pointed out, “You know, a lot of people think the original version is silly too because it only offers those two awful choices. Which is true. I guess the thing is that it makes us think about who gets hurt in the decisions we make.”
While the trolley problem itself is ridiculous, there are plenty of versions of it in our society, like people who posit that we have to trade off between environmental protection and the economy. Or posit that to have a good life, we have to screw over Amazon workers so we can have overnight delivery. (In fact, one of the versions says “A trolley is heading towards one guy. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your Amazon package will be late. What do you do?”) Or that we don’t have an obligation to pay school taxes over a certain age because well, that’s not *our* responsibility. At that point, society is not even presenting us with an impossible choice – it’s saying that we don’t have to care at all. After all, it’s not our responsibility if the trolley is going to run someone over.
“Remember Ms. Margarett from church? She’s in that picture,” I said to my younger son, pointing at a photo of her and her husband. “She’s had cancer for a long time and she’s at the point where the treatment isn’t doing much and is making her feel worse. So she’s stopping treatment. But that means that she’ll die soon. They’re just trying to make her as comfortable as possible and we’re making cards about peace and love. But like, we can’t say get well soon or anything like that. Because she won’t.”
“Hm,” he said, contemplating the situation. He started drawing an elephant.
