Pull a shopping cart into line behind a toddler (sitting in her mother’s shopping car). The toddler thinks that she can slide her fingers into the open grate spaces of my cart. She can’t — because her fingers are too fat — but I slide the cart closer to her so that she can reach over and try.<\/p>\n
Mom doesn’t really notice.<\/p>\n
……………………………….<\/p>\n
But that was a few years’ ago.
\nSo, yesterday I was doing some supermarket shopping, and I was behind another pre-speaking toddler in the back of a shopping cart. He stared at me. He found my vision fascinating, such that he was compelled to pry his head over a bit whenever his dad obstructed his view of me. I have noted that most people in such a situation tend to throw the child a funny face. I have come to think of this as a insulting to the child, and have decided that the best tact has to be to respond to the child in kind — thus, I affected as close to the same expression as the child, slid my head a bit askew, and stared right back at him.<\/p>\n
The problem comes in with the dad, who every so often looked back toward me, seeing what his kid was staring was, at which point I had to resettle back into a normal expression. After a few glances backward, and at the first immediate opportunity, the dad pushed the shopping cart forward far enough that his kid and creepy-looking me would no longer be engaged in this staring-tango.<\/p>\n
There is this manner in which the act of a toddler staring at a stranger reveals something about human nature, undiluted. It spews forward into the paradox of the “Purity” of childhood: as adults, we have become conditioned to be polite to a certain degree — we are not going to stare agasp at somebody who appears to be strange to us. A toddler has no such predilections, and thus anybody who appears strange — slightly outside their scope of what a person should look like — is a fascinating subject to stare at and is immediately noticed. I am an object; not a subject. Where this goes forward in the child’s shuffling of how People are Different, in terms of tolerating cultural diversity and the like, is met with an awkward duality — anecdotal evidence from children suggesting they can be the most open-minded and accepting peoples on Earth (undiluted by received prejudice) and the most narrow-minded and non-accepting (not taught as yet to think outside their narrow experiences). How am to interpret the toddler staring at me — and what is his thought process? Will he make love, or will he make war, if given half a chance?<\/p>\n
…………..<\/p>\n
Okay, I just realized the complications that arise with using that expression in relation to the toddler.\u00c2\u00a0 Ah well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pull a shopping cart into line behind a toddler (sitting in her mother’s shopping car). The toddler thinks that she can slide her fingers into the open grate spaces of my cart. She can’t — because her fingers are too fat — but I slide the cart closer to her so that she can reach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}