Supermarket Shopping TWO
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.
Mom doesn’t really notice.
……………………………….
But that was a few years’ ago.
So, 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.
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.
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?
…………..
Okay, I just realized the complications that arise with using that expression in relation to the toddler. Ah well.