Subways are concrete tunnels containing smaller concrete tunnels, with the only sound absorption provided by the organic objects which move through them (on two legs or four). Thus the full-throated voice of a child careens about the place, bouncing off everything, naturally amplified to a level matching the screech of a mythical banshee.
Of course we all look around to make sure there isn’t some emergency, which thankfully is rarely the case… just another toddler losing their mind over a dire life moment:
a binkie has fallen;
a plastic non-spill cup of Cheerios™ now stands empty;
a boom boom needs – attending to…
Or they may have just seen a blood curdling demon, masked lunatic, or hungry zombie lurching toward them, as our subways feature giant posters on the walls which every now and again promote the latest horror movie or television show. That’s what happened yesterday, and the scream was particularly epic because it was not from a baby but a three year old boy, who was using the opportunity to explain exactly to his mother (and the rest of us, due to the acoustics) his concern.
“I don’t want to go in there!”
“Well we can’t walk, it’s just too far.” His mother was coaxing him through the turnstile. She had moved to the far side of the entrance to avoid a particularly frightening promotion of a haunted house, posted last Halloween. “C’mon, just look this way and follow me over here, we won’t even go past it…”
A train arrived, heading south, filling the station with the sound of screeching metal for a minute. In that time the boy’s mother had gotten him downstairs into the station. As the train left, their conversation continued.
“Look!” The mother stood the child in front of another poster, this one advertising a new Broadway musical; it featured six friendly people who were smiling and waving. “These,” she said, hitting the poster with her hand, “are not people. It is just a picture. These are all pictures. That is not a monster back there, it’s a picture on the wall. That’s all, see?”
As a parent, one quickly learns not to critique other parents. The job is an impossible one, with no instruction book or customer service number to call. We are all just making it up as we go – steering a new being through a new world, the challenges as fresh and plentiful as a farmer’s market.
As subways are not at all engineered with child-rearing in mind, our congruent commuter experience quickly generates empathy toward other parents’ situations. So we hold a door for a stroller, or help lift one up the stairs, or offer our seat to a family trying to keep their kids from careening like pinballs once the train starts moving.
Thus the problem of the underground nightmare gallery was a familiar one. I remembered when we delivered a similar speech to our own child, that pictures were not objects. We used colored pencils and the Rene Magritte painting “The Treachery of Images” – the one showing a pipe with the words (in French) “This is not a pipe” beneath it.
I drew (as best I could) a cat.
“This is not a cat.” I told my daughter. “It is a picture of a cat. It doesn’t eat food or purr or chase anything.”
“That’s not a good cat, Dad.” my daughter critiqued. “Let me help you.”
She drew a better cat.
“This is a better cat.” she told me.
It was a better cat, with more convincing whiskers and perkier ears.
“That IS a better cat,” I admitted, “but it isn’t a real cat. You understand that, right?”
“I know it isn’t a real cat.”
“So when you see a scary picture of a monster, you know it isn’t a real monster, right?”
“I’m not scared of the monster,” she told me, applying detail to the cat’s tail,
“I’m afraid of the picture.”
I never tried to convince my daughter that monsters were not real. I didn’t think was fair, because certainly I’ve seen some monsters.
On a grade school visit to the aquarium, a tour guide turned over a horseshoe crab and I just about fainted. (This is not when I was little: this was when I served as a chaperone for my daughter’s trip. Don’t look it up. Yipes.) The world is filled with just about everything. It’s ok to be wary of some of it.
But I was impressed with her honesty and self awareness. Due to our household’s general nerdiness she already understood that the monsters on the screen and posters were just people in make-up or special effects from a computer. She could change her own face when we played with Snapchat. Reality wasn’t a problem for her. It was the images that bothered her.
She quickly learned the locations of these posters and, while holding one of our hands for guidance, closed her eyes to walk past them. She got so good at this that she wouldn’t miss a step or slow down, even a little bit.
It took me years to realize how truly genius her system was, because as an adult I retained a bit more ego about navigating the world, and did not admit to myself that the volcano of tragedy and mayhem force-fed to me everyday wasn’t a volcano of tragedy and mayhem but instead a volcano of pictures of tragedy and mayhem.
At its very worst, it serves pictures of someone else’s actual tragedy and mayhem. But most of the virulent headlines are pencil sketches of potential threats, rough “coming attractions” posters of shows that might get made, or might not.
And as much as the situations are disheartening, it is, indeed, the pictures that get me down. I can deal with mayhem, but I tire of its advertising campaign. So now I walk through the world with my eyes open, holding the hands of trusted friends, not looking at the walls, and just focus on where I’m headed.
And maybe, every now and then, I scream a little.
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