Forgetting Oneself

The mall with children is always evil, but today, it was positively Dick Cheney, to convey a superlative.

I took the children - all three - on the carousel while Mommy went to Macy's, and then I had to meet her there - in the home section, which is a wonderful place for the likes of young Daniel and Madeleine. So just getting the three of them out of the sacred enclosure containing the merry-go-round and trying to march them down the corridor was very difficult. But it was much complicated by the fact that Daniel found the candy-and-gum machines, and there was a plenteous crop to be harvested on the fertile Mall floor. We don't encourage this, even though there are no public health concerns associated with gleaning Mike-And-Ike's off the tiled underbelly of one of Simon's six-thousand malls across these United States. As soon as I found Daniel looking to benefit from the tragic oversight of previous previous child-consumers, with hands too small to capture the bounty of these machines, I redirected him toward Macy's along with the other two troops.

Looking back on the whole event, Daniel gave me the story from his own, somewhat different perspective:

"I didn't remember that you were with me. I didn't remember that anyone was with me..." This was the state of mind he was in, when I whisked him from the floor, away from some very shiny crop of little Greed-Dye-Number-Seven and Orange-Dye-Number-Nine colored candies scattered on the floor, and swept him in the direction of Macy's.

(March 26, 2011)