Niall Post One: Double yellow lines
This is one of three planned Niall posts for today, split apart for your commenting convenience and reading inconvenience. They are presented in chronological order of how they happened, all on the same drive from home to his maternal grandparents’ in Orange County.
Joshua: Whoa! That black car just did something illegal!
Niall: What did it do?
J: It crossed a double double-yellow line. When there are four yellow lines, you can’t cross it.
N: (Genuinely puzzled:) Why can’t you cross four yellow lines?
(Bravo! Most kids would have accepted this as some magic of the color and number. But his razor-sharp reason kicked in again and dispelled the magical thinking.)
J: Actually, it works the other way: in some places you are not allowed to cross, and in those places they paint two double-yellow lines to let you know.
N: Why did that car cross them?
(He’s fascinated by motives for disobedience.)
J: Because that driver thought getting to his destination quickly was more important than being safe.
N: Is getting there quickly more important than being safe?
J: (Father-knows-best tone:) No. Nothing is as important as being safe.
N: No!
J: No what?
N: Being safe is not the most important thing.
(Well, yeah, I don’t believe that either. And I was just caught trying to brainwash my four-year-old by the subject himself. Shame on me.)
J: What’s the most important thing?
N: CEMENT TRUCKS!
(And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason that, despite powerful reasoning, he’s not allowed to hold the soldering iron yet.)
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February 10th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Niall’s pretty young to be a post-modernist. I didn’t hit that phase until I was six.
February 10th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Geoff Nunberg: “And to everything po-mo // Let us say no mo’”
Same poem in which he rhymes “fatwa” and “patois”. Gotta love language geeks.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:30 am
The only way to top this is to tell him that nothing is more important than being safe about cement trucks.
The upside of this is that it is quite possibly true.