Baby Talk

It’s Got To Mean Something

I was sitting on a beach with my 1-year-old niece when a crab crawled past us. I pointed and she looked, and then let loose a sound I have not heard since. It was the sound that Donald Duck might make if he stubbed his toe. She took the air into the corner of her mouth and squeezed it against her cheek, releasing a short, repetitive noise that was somewhere between a hiss and a quack. I looked to her mother for a reaction, but she kept right on clicking away at her phone.

“What is your daughter doing?” I asked. She looked up from her phone. “Oh, that’s her noise for frogs and crabs and swamp-like things.”

Somewhere along the way, my niece had not only learned that this sound meant something about swamps, but she had retained it. And no one had corrected her.

It reminded me of how my brain worked as a kid, like the time my mother hired a French woman to clean our house. One day, we drove the woman to her home near a mall in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was told the woman was from France. I was told we were driving her home. Putting two and two together, I figured that France was located over by the mall. From age three to six I believed that somewhere behind the Wanamaker’s, a group of uppity people wearing berets sat in a cafe with a checkered table cloth, sipping coffee.

Not only did I believe it, but I defended it with certainty. “No,” I’d think when I was told France was located far away. “That must be a different France.” I clung to my knowledge, figuring that if I couldn’t trust what I had learned with such compelling evidence, that it didn’t make sense to learn anything new at all. The same logic applied when kids at school told me that there was no Santa Clause. “Surely, you must have been misinformed,” I’d say. “He left presents under my tree just last year.”

This may explain why little kids are the most confident people on the planet. Learning something new is stunning every single time, and the experience can instill a terrifying arrogance.

When I uncover a new piece of information — say, a study about how tomatoes cause cancer in The New York Times — I don’t just incorporate it into my knowledge-base. I carefully plan on how to shove it into the knowledge-bases of my family and friends. Before a dinner party, I’ll rehearse my delivery, aiming to sound offhand but informed. The idea is to make it seem as if I retain a lot of useful knowledge and that this gem just happened to fit nicely into the conversation. The best tid-bits are counterintuitive, surprising, and likely to start an argument. They start with words like“Actually” or “You’d think that, but…”

Imagine what an arrogant prick I’d be if I learned more than one thing each day.

“You weren’t at church!” my 2-year-old niece barked at me one Sunday. “I was, it just a different church,” I explained. Her jaw dropped and her voice raised three octaves “Wait,” she cried. “There’s more than one church?”

Can you even imagine the amount of new information this little person has to process each day? If she gains half of the confidence that I do with each new fact, it’s no wonder that she and other children tend to translate that blind belief in their own brainpower to more abstract concepts. I believe that the methodology goes something like this: if I can learn why Mommy puts the key in the car and that this color is blue, why can’t I also learn what happens after I die or why God doesn’t stop the hurricane from blowing down the building?

One weekend, I stayed with my 5-year-old nephew while his parents went out. We were staying at my father’s house in the bedroom that my brother (his father) and I had shared as boys. Lying next to me in bed, my nephew lay quietly, staring around the room at all of our old toys — our Ninja Turtle dolls, the creepy collection of nut crackers my aunt bought us as kids, my old violins. In the silence, I could actually hear him thinking. I waited for a question and sure enough:

“Sean?”

“Yeah?”

“This was my dad’s room, right?”

“Yup.”

“So you guys were once how old I am now, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So where was I when you were my age?”

I hesitated, and tried to think of what my brother would say.

“You were just a part of God’s plan.”

“No,” he said, annoyed, as if I was just couldn’t seem to understand his level of thinking.

“I mean where was I?”

He didn’t say the word “physically,” but I knew what he meant. I didn’t really have a suitable answer. I just didn’t know. As an adult, I was used to that. To my nephew, this was unacceptable.

We will never know everything. That’s why it’s so exciting to know one thing.

That’s what I should have told him. Instead, I yammered on for a bit about a divine plan or the cosmic unknown. I don’t really remember, but I’ll never forget the look that he gave me when I finished. It was the look a Depression-era housewife gives to her drunken husband when she knows its over: sad, disappointed, accepting.

I could tell that he had more questions, but he knew my answers weren’t what he wanted. So he let loose a deep sigh, rolled over, and said, with a whiff of quiet condescension, “Good night.”