Science fiction is not my best genre – for that matter, neither are epic Russian novels – both lose me with names for places and people that somehow slip right out of my mind within milliseconds of reading them. Backwards time travel is about the only form of science fiction I can follow, as it goes to places I already know about. Yesterday I had a time travel experience of my own, hurtling backward in time about a full 7 years.
My son’s summer camp is in the middle of nowhere, and last year they offered van service to pick up the kids from my side of town; this year, no such luck. Parents are required to haul their kids daily to and from the camp. There are three families from what is, according to the camp, the outer limits of the galaxy, so we are creating a patchwork carpool system.
It was my turn to drive yesterday. In my back seat there was a soon-to-be kindergartener in a car seat and a soon-to-be second-grader in a booster seat. My own soon-to-be middle-schooler was in the front seat, because I am one of the few parents in the outer galaxy to have a sedan rather than the more spacious intergalactic SUVs and vans. I’m an alien even in my own part of the universe.
We’d brought a joke book, thinking it would pass the time and let the kids bond nicely. The youngest can’t read yet, so he simply told the one knock knock joke he knows. It’s the banana/orange joke, a classic. Yet every single one of the youngest’s “r”s was replaced with a “w.”
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who? (this goes on for several verses), then the finale:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Owange.
Orange who?
Owange you glad I didn’t say “banana”?
When it was his turn to respond to Knock knock, his reply was an enthusiastic, “Who’s thewuh?”
The second-grader is a reader, and he occasionally re-read some jokes my son had read, without knowing he was re-reading them. “I wemembuh that one,” chuckled the littlest, laughing again as the humor washed over him.
The joke about the Abmoninable Snowman included the line, “Let me in it’s fweezing out hewuh.”
We told stories and knock-knocked ourselves all the way to camp. We sang a few refrains of an oldie but goodie, “Thewuh’s a dinosauh knockin’ at my doowuh.” My favorite moment was when the youngest described his karate class. He’s quite pleased with himself, and stated, a few times, “I’m the quickest yelwow belt in kawate histowy!”
I was hooked on the magic of young speech. The cadence, the mispronunciations, the making up of new sounds and words in an attempt to sound like all the big people.
When we got to camp, I bent into the back seat to take out the car seat, struggled with the seat belt holding it in place, picked a few pieces of uneaten food off the floor (these must have come with the car seat because the boys weren’t eating anything back there), and carried it awkwardly up to the row of car seats waiting until the end of day carpool.
The ride home was quiet and, I must confess, I felt a tiny bit lonely in a car without kids, carseats, jokes and songs. I had returned to the present in the flash of a car door closing.
I used to live in this other time. I engaged in daily car seat/seat belt tugs. Endless refrains of the Dinosaur song, first getting all the words right, then intentionally mixing up the lines. The unanswerable “Why?” questions. Conversations that sounded completely mundane, except there wasn’t a single “r” in them. Mistaken words repeated every time (my son’s “usudal” instead of the harder, “usual”). The way it takes at least 10 minutes to get in or out of a car, even if you’ve managed to think several steps ahead and not have to go back in the house for forgotten items. The vulnerability I felt driving with a backseat full of little kid gear – the stakes so much higher with a car full of tiny beings. Back there, time moves faster than the speed of light; young years zoom across the galaxy at the speed of magic.