My Dziennik Zwiazkowy column. Please consider leaving a comment at the newspaper’s website, linked below.
A FUNNY STORY
Our ten-year old granddaughter Lulu was over this morning, and Linda and I were sitting around the dining room table drinking coffee and finishing breakfast when Lulu suddenly looked up from her bowl of cereal and asked, „You want to see my animal ballet?”
We weren’t sure what an animal ballet was, but we said, “Sure, let’s see it.”
So she started doing her animal ballet. First, she did the giraffe ballet dancing slowing and gracefully with the longest neck she could manage, and then she did the elephant ballet full of wagging ears and a trunk that wouldn’t stay still, and then a queenly lion ballet and an incredibly cute panda ballet. And each one was perfect. She hummed a tune and danced like each of the animals would dance a ballet if it could.
It was great, and we applauded and applauded, and Lulu bowed the way a panda would bow.
Then she turned to me and said, „Now, it’s your turn.”
I can’t dance. I’m an old man with a bum knee and two feet that are still both recovering from getting broken in a fall about a dozen years ago, so I said, „Can I tell you a story instead?”
She seemed a little disappointed at first, but then she nodded yes, and I start ad-libbing.
I do this all kind of story telling all the time, just some kind of goofy stuff, one silly plot point after another. This time I’m telling her a story about a panda and a horse and how the horse gets lost in the panda’s jungle and how the panda doesn’t want to help the horse get out of the jungle no matter what so the horse starts eating all the panda’s bamboo.
And then I suddenly stop. The story was just some dumb ad-libbing that ended as soon as it began, and I said to my granddaughter, „That’s it, Lulu.”
And she paused for a moment and didn’t say anything. She was clearly thinking, thinking harder than I was thinking when I was making up the silly story about the panda and the horse, and then suddenly her eyes shone all bright and bubbly and she said, „Oh I get it. It’s like Aesop’s Fables. The panda first refuses to help the horse and so at the end the horse sort of punishes the panda by eating its bamboo. The panda should have been nicer.”
And I sat there and marveled.
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