Dad, Pirate Expert

Our friend Katya was watching the boys, and they and her daughter, Kristen, were playing with Mr. Potato Head, who happened to be in pirate mode at the time (I don't think Mr. Potato Head was quite that ambitious in my own distant youth...).

So Ian noticed that Mr.-Potato Head-as-pirate happened to have only one shoe, because he had only one (intact) leg. The other leg was wooden, as our culture's ill-informed stereotype of pirates has led us to imagine that misunderstood class of professionals. Ian didn't initially understand the caricature, and noticed only that the protagonist had only one shoe, so he asked Katya why that was the case.

Katya: Because he has a wooden leg. Pirates have wooden leg. And whem Mommy comes, you ask her why Pirates have wooden legs.

Ian: Well, actually, I'm gonna ask my Dad, because my Dad knows more things than my Mom, because he was telling me lots of God stories.*


*"God stories" are Ian's term for stories from the Bible, from the Lives of the Saints, or any other account that addresses the spiritual life. We do, in fact, have many such stories around bedtime...

But I don't understand how that body of knowledge would prepare me to explain the dire occupational hazards that threaten Pirate Americans, or the lack of even rudimentary health insurance that would drive these injury-victims to turn to driftwood for makeshift prosthetic limbs.

(November 21, 2008)