Week 237: Bears, Colors, and Robots

We still read to Sam (and Mandy) as a bedtime ritual, but occasionally Sam will want to forgo the books and ask me to tell her a story that I make up off the top of my head. The experience is much akin to going in for a big job interview and having the stern faced person across the table ask you to tell them about a time when you “leveraged your competencies to move the needle on key organizational metrics” and you just kind of stand there, stunned and slack jawed while they continue to stare at you.

But blessed as I am with the gift of making up a continuous stream of absurd nonsense at the drop of a hat (c.f., this blog) I can usually recover and make stuff up. Sam often even provides helpful “notes,” such that the story must feature a cat. Lately Sam has taken a turn at storytelling herself, though hers are of a substantially different tone.

Here, allow me to demonstrate. Here’s a story I came up with the other night:

Once there was a polar bear named, uh, Bernard. He lived at the South Pole and all in all he thought it was pretty okay. He had lots of white snow to play in, he had lots of sky to gaze up at (white in the day, black at night), and he add all the black and white penguins he could eat. And he had white ice sheets to walk on, and he had dark, practically black water to swim in. But sometimes Bernard felt like something was missing, only he didn’t know what.

One day Bernard saw something that stopped him in his tracks: a spot of RED against the white snow. He was amazed, because he had never seen RED before, and it made him feel all excited and happy. Turns out it was a bright red coat being worn by one of a team of scientists who had come to the South Pole to study, um …what kinds of chili peppers penguins prefer to be rubbed on the bottom of their feet. Bernard watched the RED jacket and he saw other colors too! The scientists’ tent was ORANGE and another one had BLUE snow pants. Bernard was totally amazed by these colors. He had never seen anything like them and they made him so happy.

When the scientists finished their research (turns out penguins prefer cayenne peppers) they packed up and got into their helicopter. Bernard ran after the helicopter, and then he ran after their car to the port, and then he swam after their boat, all the way to San Diego. Once there Bernard kept following the scientist in the RED jacket, all the way to the deserts of New Mexico where the scientist had gone to visit his family.

And let me tell you, Bernard LOVED the deserts of New Mexico. He saw BLUE sky, ORANGE earth, RED rocks, GREEN cacti, the YELLOW sun, and every other kind of color you can think of. He would just sit up on a rock for hours and hours looking at all the colors, with only the occasional hiker as a snack. He lived there the rest of his life and eventually he became a celebrated landscape painter. The end.

(Finding a way to end the stories is always the hardest part for me.) Sam loved the story, and thought she’d try her hand. Here’s what she came up with:

Once there was a cat. And a robot. And the robot was mean so he chased the cat and took out a gun and shot at the cat but the cat ran and he ran and the robot chased him into a castle. The cat locked the door but the robot shot the door with his gun and ran through the door so the cat ran and found a little boy who’s name was …Sammy. The robot chased the cat and the Sammy boy and they ran into a castle and they went into the basement and it was dark but the robot came down the stairs and then the cat flipped the robot’s switch and he became a nice robot so they were all friends.

All the psychoanalysts in the house will no doubt read much into both of the stories presented above, but whatever. I was delighted by Sam’s story myself, and it goes hand in hand with her robot fascination of late. I think it started when I let her watch an anime movie called Castle in the Sky, which featured a giant war robot that kind of freaked her out. Or maybe it was watching The Iron Giant before that. I should probably cut it out with the giant scary robots.

Oh, Mandy? Yes, Mandy. Not much to tell there. She’s getting more and more verbal, though she’s also been running a fever the last few days so she’s not too chatty. I’ll tell her you asked.