Car Seat

Toddler Dreams

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Pooh Poo Pooh Podcast. This memory is from a long time ago. I didn't even remember it myself. I call it car seat. When I was too little to remember this, but apparently verbal, we were living in an apartment building in Queens, New York. My mother got me into whatever the 1960s called toddler's clothes, told me we were going to the supermarket, and would I please climb into my car seat so we could go? I said no. Please no. Come on, Lisa, please, the store is going to close. No. Apparently we went back and forth like this in the basement garage of our apartment building, and maybe my mother promised I could buy something special at the supermarket, but little Lisa finally relented. Okay, I said, probably dramatically, but when I'm big and you're small, I'm gonna put you in the car seat and see how you like it. I guess being confined was never my thing, nor did I get the grasp yet nor did I yet grasp the concept that people grow only one way. Thankfully, my mother had a master's in early childhood education. I was too creative for my own good, but mommy cheerfully celebrated it. Another example, when I was five and in kindergarten, it was nap time, cue confinement, and instead of nap time, I put on the whole Peter and the Wolf musical for my class. I was Peter singing the strings part, and the wolf with the French horns, and the bird with the flute and the cat with the clarinet, and the duck with the oboe. To this day, I think oboes sound sad. Anyway, my kindergarten teacher, who also had a master's degree in early childhood education, was actually delighted and called in the principal to watch me. Then before I even got home, the teacher called my mother to quvel to exult. I never got in trouble for my um creativity. That was a big blessing for me. Of course, now it's a blessing and a curse. Two reasons. One, that I still don't like to follow confining rules, and two, that there are a zillion people out there who are creative, and at least half a zillion of them are more creative than I am. I can hang on to the fact that I was most creative in kindergarten and be satisfied, or, guess which, I can continue thinking that Nickelodeon will buy my screenplay if only I get it to the right person. I'm big now, and though I never put my mother in a car seat, I still have big dreams. Yesterday I was teaching my Hebrew school class, and, as teachers do, I took a break and I asked them what they wanted to be what they grew up when they grew up. A cop, one boy said. I thought, wow, that's a big and important job. Another boy mumbled, MBA. And I thought, Oh, his father is a businessman, that makes sense. But then he said NBA. I said, Oh, you love basketball and you want to work for the he said no, I want to. He mimed chucking a ball into a basket and clicked his tongue. He wants to play for the NBA. I was going to say all kinds of things, how really difficult that is, how competitive, how a zillion kids want that too. But I could still hear all the other kinds of disapproving clicking that I heard from grown-ups when I said no thank you to NYU Law School. I want to go into advertising, which I did, and every day was glorious. Who am I to talk confinement? Who am I to talk against big and possibly crazy dreams? And I thought, he's eleven. So I looked at him and I was heartfelt. Good for you, I said. Good for you.