Questions
I like children's minds because they weave together logic and wild leaps of imagination so seamlessly, effortless in a fashion most writers would kill to emulate. This afternoon one of my young charges told me, "my brother asks weird questions". I said, "Oh?" and he replied, "Yes. He asks things like, 'what if volcanos were cups?' - and I told him that was easy. If volcanos were cups we'd drink out of them, and Dad would have lava instead of coffee!" He then scrutinised me closely and asked, "that's right, isn't it?"
And I had to admit that it was.
I also admire the little girl who, in a fit of naive and nakedly brilliant philosophy, told me that she sometimes wondered if the world wasn't kept by a giant in a jar, if the the sky we see isn't just the blue of his eye looking in on us when the real sky is out there somewhere beyond the walls of the jar and the giant's house, and then went on to speculate if someone was keeping that giant in a jar and watching him watch us.
Or the girl who reflected that "when I cry, my eyes look like a haunted house."
My five-year-old self, asking my mum in the middle of the supermarket how we knew my dad was really my dad, and not some other man walking around in his skin.
The boy who dreamed for the first time of flying, and informed me that humans must have known how in another life, "or else how could our brains know how it feels?"
The children who aren't afraid to bring me dead moths cradled in the bowl of their two hands; who build bigger and taller stories with every try - being bitten by sharks, seeing one hundred bears on the way to school, the number of pizzas they have ever eaten, the distance to places they have travelled, even in dreams.
And I had to admit that it was.
I also admire the little girl who, in a fit of naive and nakedly brilliant philosophy, told me that she sometimes wondered if the world wasn't kept by a giant in a jar, if the the sky we see isn't just the blue of his eye looking in on us when the real sky is out there somewhere beyond the walls of the jar and the giant's house, and then went on to speculate if someone was keeping that giant in a jar and watching him watch us.
Or the girl who reflected that "when I cry, my eyes look like a haunted house."
My five-year-old self, asking my mum in the middle of the supermarket how we knew my dad was really my dad, and not some other man walking around in his skin.
The boy who dreamed for the first time of flying, and informed me that humans must have known how in another life, "or else how could our brains know how it feels?"
The children who aren't afraid to bring me dead moths cradled in the bowl of their two hands; who build bigger and taller stories with every try - being bitten by sharks, seeing one hundred bears on the way to school, the number of pizzas they have ever eaten, the distance to places they have travelled, even in dreams.