A Big Twuck
The Smallest Guy
Back in ’98 I worked for a daycare/preschool. Not exactly the most masculine of jobs, perhaps—if you subscribe to traditional gender roles—but being untrained in anything resembling early childhood education my utility there was limited. As a result my job could best be described as “human plaything.”
It was actually a pretty great job. For the most part I showed up, horsed around with a bunch of rowdy kids: Tossing footballs, attending tea parties, climbing jungle gyms, drawing pictures, playing board games, tossing the rugrats up into the air (and catching them, of course), reading stories and feeding them snacks and meals. It was like getting paid for recess.
Usually my kids were in the older age group: They went to school in the mornings and came by after school until their parents came and picked them up when they were off work. It worked pretty well since they weren’t the favorite age group for a lot of the teachers and other aides that worked there since they weren’t the cute little babies and toddlers nor were they the awe-struck and engaging preschoolers. The Kindergarten kids had their own teachers but they were old enough to be lumped in with the after school kids once regular school let out, so I played with them quite a bit as well.
Sometimes I would have a shift that started way earlier than the after school kids were due to show up. It was sort of awkward a lot because I didn’t mind hanging out with and taking care of the littler kids, and I certainly didn’t want to shy away from any responsibility but I think some of the old school daycare workers found it odd for me to be helping out in the toddler room or the nursery. At any rate there were plenty of times where I would end up taking care of pretty young kids.
One of my favorite assignments in those earlier hours was the pre-preschool room, or the Twos as we called them. As much as I liked hanging out with the after school kids (they could occasionally hold a real conversation with you and of course there was sufficient attention span to play an actual organized game or two), there is something hysterical and impressive about kids around late toddler age. For one thing, everything is pretty exciting for them: Most of them have this sort of gusto about their approach to life. What’s this new food? Dig the hands in and find out, shoveling a fistful of it in your mouth can reveal taste and texture in one motion. Efficient!
But their efforts to properly communicate are the best. They have enough cognition at that point to think and recognize and question but the language skills often lag behind so you end up with some approximation of English that is, at first, completely unintelligible but gradually becomes more refined. And an interesting thing happens when you spend a certain amount of time with them during this stage: You start to adjust your own comprehension to a level that can best decipher their stunted efforts at speech.
There was one little boy, Brian, who was in this room. Brian was my buddy. He had big buck teeth with a wicked inch-wide gap between them and a surprisingly deep voice for such a little guy. He was built thickly, like he was born to be a future linebacker or hockey D-man and he bowled over blocks and chairs and other children like a bull in a china shop. But he had a ready grin and he loved to hang out with me and show me all his cars and have me read him stories (Brown Bear was his favorite).
I learned after a few weeks of spending time with him to mostly understand his broken speech patterns. But I remember specifically the first time I heard him say something that was very, very close to real English (other than the standards like “Mommy,” “Dada,” “Juice,” etc). We were playing with some assorted toys and he noticed a large plastic dump truck off in the corner. He pointed and said with one of the biggest grins I’d seen on him, “A Biiiig Twuck!”
A big truck. And he loved it. A few times after that point we were outside in the play area and a service vehicle would roll by. Brian would point with glee and say in his little baritone, “A Biiig Twuck!” There was something about trucks that he found fascinating.
Of course he wasn’t the only little boy there that had an infatuation with trucks, but it goes to show that even that early on, there is something about boys and trucks that matches. Maybe it’s the power: Most regular cars are powerful in that abstract way that says, “This machine is stronger than ten men” but trucks are the ones that get the size and design to match the abstract; they have names like “Ram” and “Titan” and get engines that are much bigger and capable of feats that even the fastest cars couldn’t pull off. Or perhaps it is the utility: It’s a big powerful machine and it moves dirt! Or it’s a big powerful machine and you can carry a couch in it; you can even haul a big boat around behind it! Whatever it is, whoever invented the truck was a guy and he designed it for himself and every other dude he knew.
By 1998, a love of trucks was imprinted on the DNA of the smallest Guy I knew.
A Procrastinator’s Cautionary Tale
Last week our Saturn got towed. We had parked it in the parking lot of our apartment complex after the theft a few months ago and the subsequent insurance/safety test brouhaha with the following facts in mind: It was in need of or about to need some fairly costly repairs including a drive belt, an engine bracket, new brakes and a few assorted unknown factors like the passenger door handle and some kind of short in the electrical system that usually made the warning ding go off when the driver’s door was open, whether there were keys in the ignition or not.
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