Archive for June, 2009

My son turns four next month. Blink and you are designing a new birthday cake. Last year Marcello had no say. This year he makes me go to the cake shop once a week to leaf through the ugly album full of brutally ugly ice cream cakes for the party he wants NOWWWWWW. The boy has dramatic flair. When he does really dreadful things like roaring in my face like a lion, I laugh so hard, then realize I am meant to be a paragon of etiquette. Like me, he has two life codes…what one does at school and what one does at home.

At home he is usually nude and roaring like a lion and eating ice cream for breakfast. Sounds a bit like university life really. Anyway, very soon, he turns four and I love the developing four year old mind so much. Most of his questions relate to the workings of the body and what animals share in kin. Do fish have blood? How does the blood stay inside the skin?  Why did Daddy cut his hand and how did he stop the blood coming out everywhere? Is my head a bone or a skull? Can I sleep under your dress? Can I go back into your belly like a baby then come out again?

All this but he still hasn’t asked me why the sky is blue and I keep wanting to write the answer on a piece of paper for my handbag just in case… I googled the question and found a website www.whyistheskyblue.com…and this brief summation which I don’t even fully grasp…But I’m time starved so here goes nothing:

“The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air.

However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.”

OK, how do I translate THAT into four year old? God has a lot of rainbow ribbons and the longest one is blue. The ribbons are wrapped around the sun which the heavens drag around the earth like a cat pulling  a ball of wool and as the sun sets we get to see all the shorter ribbons, the pink, the violet, the orange and the red. When the sun goes down all the ribbons of light start to slide away and we get to see the blanket of night where the light from other stars and planets pierce through the darkness like light through the holes of a sweater.

Mummmmm!..that makes no sense

OK, sorry, OK imagine that the earth is an orange covered in a layer of cloud fluff called atmosphere and light is all different lines of color and when the color enters the fluffy stuff it all melts and bounces around  like a frozen blueberry in a milkshake maker and the colors melt and make blue sky. If the fluff is too thick the sky gets dark and if there are no clouds the sky gets super blue…..Now go to sleep.

I see how these creation myths started in all cultures, children asked for them and everyone wanted the children to be quiet for a bit. So they worked fast.

I failed science in high school by one point. 49 percent. I cried in the toilet with the shaming report card in my hands and tried to lobby for that arbitrary distinction that kept me from being accepted by a subject I loved but could rarely decipher. But I can ace it now. I will take the bone that is my skull (actually a bunch of bones) and fill it with the stuff I have managed to ignore and slide through life without and my son will also teach me, properly, about the natural world. His questions wake me up very day and even though I am a very silly person by nature I take his questions seriously and respect his need for the facts as well as the fun. Marcello is very nearly four and they say that four year olds ask too many questions. This is only of course that we have too few answers or a very preposterous idea that we are grown and hence already  know and name many things. I find myself doing homework now. Reading simple grade school level science books and quizzing myself on dinosaur names so I can keep the pace. For pleasure. For light in the dreary tunnels of my mind. But mostly for love.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA