The Miniaturization of Possibility

Life was filled with all kinds of mysteries when I was about three years old. Sometimes adults would look down at me and smile so broadly and intensely it was as though they were really laughing, even though there was no sound coming out, and I knew that when people laugh, something funny must be going on. I could see that they were pleased and happy as they beamed down at me, so there wasn’t anything to worry about. But they seemed to be enjoying themselves so much because they were beholding something funny.....namely, me, skinny little fellow not saying a word, just standing there looking up at them, silently bewildered. I reasoned that it must be my face that entertained them so, something about my face, because I didn’t think adults laughed when they came upon little kids just as little bodies, there were so many around.

Part of the mystery was the way all this tied into another bit of strangeness between me and older grown-ups. I had sets of dimples and long eye-lashes as a small child, and sometimes old ladies would go ga-ga as they contemplated these marvels, oohing and ahhing and pinching my cheek, etc. All this weird behavior seemed totally absurd to me and one of the two most noteworthy things about older (usually Jewish) women......the other being that occasionally one or another of them would visit us wearing a fur stole around her neck ending with the head of a fox, a real one, a dead animal with glass eyes to impart a fancy dressed-up look. And added to the incomprehensibility of their being so exercised about such stupid parts of my face, quite a few times I heard some of them predict that in the future I would be a “lady killer.” Feed that to an orthodox three-year-old literalist on top of all the rest.....I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

But back to the original mystery. Me, funny? Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck were funny, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were funny. What could I possibly have in common with them, just standing there holding the hand of my mother or father, motionless and silent? To me I just looked like a little kid, like I was supposed to. Yet the grown-ups with all that laughter in their eyes taking me in were so big and so old, I was smart enough to know they might know something I didn’t. But what could that be? Just what exactly was so damn funny?

Now that I’m quite well entrenched on the other side of the generational divide, I can see how one might experience a sort of incongruity in the presence of a small beautiful child, an incongruity as extreme as a tycoon in top hat and tails slipping on a banana peel. The world suddenly becomes so unlike the way it usually is, tragic, brutal and ugly, or just commonplace and average, boring. And this transformation, this perfection (human!) is as though packed into just the beginnings of a life, a launching, a seed. All the gravitas of The Good and The Beautiful is compressed into the little boy-child or girl-child we see before us, members of our tribe without consequence or power of any kind except for that perfection and its promise.

It’s as though we know that the perfect beauty of those little kids is so unlikely and probably so temporary that it’s really just a sort of illusion, an innocent and pretty little aberration, a joke of sorts. But like a good joke, what we see can make us feel so good nothing can contain our pleasure except a growing smile that’s happily on its way on up to laughter.