They got a cool new tag on the back of the building at Moon Marble. I remember them saying one time that they'd talked to Scribe and some other local artists about having the building tagged up, but nothing had come of it. I don't know if they encouraged this particular tag or if it was spontaneously donated by an unsolicited contributor (which is how I tend to think of illegal tags provided they have a modicum of artistic flair and originality).
But of course I wasn't at Moon Marble to look at tags, or for that matter to watch Bruce yet again make sticks of glass into beautiful spheres.
That stuff is all cool and everything, but I've been hitting the Moon every year for a few years now for stocking stuffers. I know the jig is up, my kids don't believe in Santa anymore—or probably even in their Dad in a lot of circumstances. But I haven't let go of the stocking thing yet.
Em was hinting at stuff she'd like to find in her stocking, something she wouldn't have done when she was young enough to still believe. Unfortunately, the stuff that worked for her back then doesn't seem to hold much interest for her now, and she kept hinting at items that cost more than what I had in mind to spend in total, for everything, both kids included.
Mo isn't much easier, she mainly wanted a rubber chicken, which they were sold out of. And even the cool sunglasses thing, those suckers were ten bucks and I wasn't convinced she'd ever wear them.
I guess I'm slipping on the Santa front in general since Em came out of the closet as knowing it was all a sham. She kept it up until she was, I think, almost 16 years old—not out of actual belief but out of fear that once she admitted to being in on it, the goodies would stop.
I've heard some Christians say they think of Santa as 'training wheels for God,' a way to teach their children faith in the unseen/unprovable-yet-beneficial. I disagree: tell a kid to believe in something for years then step out from behind the screen and say, 'Just kidding, it was me!'—that is the training wheels for atheism.
Or it potentially could be—in my own case, the atheism was apparently almost a born characteristic. In my adult years, I've strayed, in part from seeing and experiencing things I can't otherwise account for, but I can remember hearing the Creation story from my Dad at, I think, the age of four and thinking, Dad, you're going to have to come up with something better than this God character throwing gases around the universe. I remember picturing a gasoline can wielded by man in a denim jacket, what a goofy origin story. I believed, wholeheartedly, in Santa at that age, but God was obviously a bunch of silly talk.
I do also remember at that age being absolutely sure that adults could read children's minds. To the point where I tried to redirect my thoughts lest the adults around me pick up on them. No doubt this was fueled by situations where I thought I was being sneaky and devious but was completely transparent and obvious. How did you know I was the one that broke that? No, I wasn't just about to hit my brother.
For some reason the mind reading had a distance limitation I just intuited, so I could daydream about a girl I had a crush on at school or listen to Dr. Demento covertly when my parents where in their room or the living room, but if they walked down the hall by my door I had to knock it off lest they pick up on my brain waves.
No comments:
Post a Comment