Childhood and Drugs

On a warm Sunday afternoon, a mother lets her child move a toy car along the top of a low wall. As the mother stands there casually regarding her son, the child's face is full of bliss and expressive enjoyment. He is concerned with nothing else other than the car in his hand, which is a crude wooden handcrafted construction bearing no markings or elements other than four wheels. His intention, I gather as I pass the mother and son, is to run the car along the wall from one end to another. He is in no rush to hurry this process; rather, he savors the moment. His enjoyment possibly comes from playing out the act, perhaps, or recreating what he has noticed in the world. Perhaps he is reenacting a dream he had of a car driving impossibly along a small wall. Perhaps his enjoyment stems from the independence he feels of doing something without his mother's help. Whatever makes him smile in such earnestness, he is completely involved in the act with no knowledge of what else is going on outside of this moment with the car or how silly he seems to the outside world, deriving so much enjoyment from the car. He is so involved in this act that it makes me a trifle jealous.

Oh, to be this child. To find such wonder in such a mundane activity. I imagine being born is something like being extremely high. To burst through the womb with no knowledge of anything except warmth and nourishment and all of a sudden have outside elements pierce your skin and perception, you would feel in an intense daze. I've often tried to imagine what the world looked like in that moment, and I believe that the world spinning all about you so suddenly would not be as we know it, but rather embedded with magical, neon colors, like an animated film. Still wet from all the juices of a mother's body, in this moment, you resemble a crazy person on drugs in public in the middle of a dead sober crowd. Just like the stoned man, you have no idea how ridiculous you look: naked, unkempt, crying hysterically. You are crumpled and your digits don't work properly. Your private parts know no clothe and they look pathetic. And above all, in the face of all this you have absolutely no shame.

But, unlike a high person in a crowd, to see you looking so pathetically, the crowd is beside themselves with joy. They all have taken part in a way in something even the most dedicated scientists have not yet been able to do: produce life where there once was nothing. They must feel like some sort of cutting edge biologists. Now they are given the task to instruct their being to understand such horrific facts of the world as genocide, natural disasters and overdraft fees. The child will one day understand the implication of paying $250 for a three night stay in a hotel in Upper West Side Manhattan. But if you tried to tell that to the pathetic being after just being born, it would be unheard of.

In a way, the child playing with his car was in the process of learning all of this. He had demonstrated his knowledge of automobiles and transportation. He was demonstrating play and pretending. He showed that he had noticed that to go somewhere requires four wheels and momentum. Maybe this is why he looked so happy and involved in the act: he knew that in moving the car from one end of the wall to the other, he had learned a vital part of the everyday world around him.

To age then and to learn is like the descent from a high. Coming out your stupor, you realize the world is a harrowing place and so to put this out of your mind, you seek once again the drug that got you high in the first place. To be sure, there are some good drugs out there if you can find them, but none are as potent as childhood, naivete and innocence.

"The dishes aren't even put away!" Because of the nature of the apartment I live in, I can often hear the conversations and ejaculations from the family that lives in an adjacent apartment. I have never seen them, but I have gathered some information from them. The family is african-american, I can tell that by the way they speak. There is a boy named Jamal and a girl named Maya. They leave for school at exactly 8 every morning. They have a small dog that the children sometimes torment.

Admittedly, my perception of them is probably a filtered view of their true lives because more than anything, I can hear the mother yelling at her children, and it seems to happen often. I don't mind the yelling because it makes me feel part of the world without leaving the confines of my private room. When the mother yells she reminds me of family life, and her expressive voice reminds me that, despite all the terrible news these days, mothers are still forcing their children to put the dishes away.

The mother's eye requires order. A mother in general categorizes and compartmentalizes the world. The dishes, after having been used, must be cleaned, then put away. To a child, the dishes are equally useable clean as they are dirty, and that they be "put away" seems superfluous. What matter if they are in the sink or in a cupboard. But a mother does not see it that way. In her point of view, dishes, when not being used, are to be clean and carefully stowed away in their places.

A child will play outside in the dirt with his friends and wouldn't mind to approach the dinner table without having washed. For him, there is no cleanliness nor filthiness: those two concepts are one in the same and therefore nonexistant. But the mother is the authority and she begs to differ. Wash your hands before you eat. So the child learns: cleanliness is good, filthiness is bad. And then, as an adult, that same person will perhaps live out the rest of his life without playing in the mud again.

There are many factors that go into making a person who he is. Raising two children in a similar matter might produce completely different people; one, for instance, a serial killer, the other a prolific writer. Take for example the loving mother who never once thought to yell at her children to put the dishes away. With the best intentions in mind, after dinner every night this mother clears the table, washes the dishes quietly and relishes in the sounds of her children playing. A child in this situation might then eventually age and become independent and move away and he would, not having been told to clean the dishes, never do it for himself and live in squalor. But another child in the same situation might have appreciated the orderliness and cleanliness that his mother maintained for him and, in his own home, follow suit.