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Scabs, Scars & Tangy Ketchup
Posted: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 by LePhilozophe in Labels: loaded handguns, Make-believe, Mary Poppins, reality, Santa Claus, spiderman, Superman, Tarzan, Umbrella
Some twenty-odd years ago, a little boy of about 7 grabbed a black umbrella off the hat rack in the vestibule, ran up the stairs to his room,clambered through a window and onto the railing of the veranda , unfurled the large umbrella open, and - brandishing it high above his head in one hand - jumped out into space. Give or take a week before that, he'd been spotted (by a nosy-good-fer-nuffin neighbor no less) tying a rope around the uppermost branches of a Jacaranda tree and swinging off in full vocal rendition of a tribal ululation, clad in nothing more than "...what appeared to be Scooby Doo..."- (to damnation, i say, that no-good neighbor's eye for detail and even more-so, her feeling of moral and communal obligation to rat on one to one's parents)- "...undergarments". Barely two days before that, he'd been standing in the backyard with a makeshift cape (later to be identified and confirmed during a rather painful disciplinary spanking, as mum's best table cloth) fastened around his neck, his hands fisted at his waist, feet wide apart and staring brazenly at the sun in an apparent let's-see-who'll-blink-first showdown.
A couple of Mary Poppins-Superman-Spiderman-Tarzan-Huckleberry Finn- inspired gaffes were about as far as the effects of television on my development as a kid went. No broken bones (surprisingly) , but in their place a lifetime's worth of stories, bookmarked in all the scabs, scars and bruises i sported proudly; much like the pins, badges and sashes of an old general in full military regalia. Television-inspired violent conduct in our day amounted to the occasional staged post-kung fu flic mass fracas involving all the lads in the neighborhood or in the playground at recess; or the McGyver-glorifying attempts to build a nuclear submarine out of planks of wood, fire crackers, dental floss, super glue and chicken wire.
i suppose the lads and i followed some unspoken rule or code as to how far towards the border between the realms of make believe and hard hitting reality we could take our copycatting, concerning what we witnessed on television. i'm almost certain we were pretty much cognitive of the basic differences between the two. i'm positive we knew when Wile E. Coyote kept coming back from a fall/an explosion/getting chopped up into slices/disappearing underneath a large boulder , that it was really all make-believe? That it couldn't really happen in real life? i'm convinced we knew that when Rambo rattled off a couple of shots at the enemy to send them screaming and sprawling off a cliff edge or off the roof of a building, that all that 'blood' was really only just ketchup? That upon the scrolling of the credits at the end of the movie, we'd find out that 'Bad Guy #1' actually had a name and that he wasn't really dead, after all? But that the same couldn't be said of those other people on the news,y'know, the ones covered in white sheets or zipped up in black bags at that school?
We were 7. Grown kids, we were. Of course we knew the difference between fantasy and reality. Just as much as i'd known the difference when- as a seven year old- i'd grabbed a flimsy umbrella and jumped off a balcony 26 feet up with the expectation of floating and steering myself to wherever the wind would take me; or as i swung around from a frayed, knotted rope attached to the branches of trees the height of buildings in the full belief that i was the king of my very own patch of jungle; or when i did permanent damage to the photoreceptors in my eyes by staring down the sun in my cemented conviction of my invincibility as an underground superhero.
And so, when an eight year old goes to school one morning with a couple of loaded handguns in his backpack in preparation for that day's exciting game of cops and robbers at recess, of course he deserves our benefit of the doubt that he knows full-well the difference between make believe and reality. After all, he has it on good authority that the presents underneath the tree at the end of the year will have been delivered by an overly-obese, jolly good Samaritan of a man dressed in a red coat and hat with a long white beard. He's also seen that on the telly, by the way, but he knows for a fact that the jolly, fat man is real.
He's pretty sure he is, anyway.
Profound .... inspiring and a bit spooky ... really enjoyed your writing style... thanks !!!