Daniel's Spinning Yarn

Tonight, as I lay down with Daniel and Madeleine, thinking that they might eventually go to sleep, Daniel started telling me a long-and-winding story that he had heard at school, pertaining to the holiday season. But he had the good sense to stop in mid-sentence, to make sure that he wasn't using vocabulary that was beyond me:

"And so this boys spinned a - have you ever heard of a dreidl?"

Appropriate to the narrator, it was a shaggy-dog story about a boy who would routinely receive magical dreidls from a goblin, with the power to shoot out latkes as it spun - or "spinned" - only to set the hapless lad up for misunderstanding with his parents, when he would arrive home and tell them about his magical dreidl, only to find that the magical one had been switched-out for a non-magical one just as he was trying to demonstrate the latke-jetting properties of his new dreidl. (The goblin was also responsible for this stealthy replacement of magical, much-touted dreidls for routine ones just in time to make the boy out to look like a liar in front of his parents.)

It was the absolute-wackiest story of its genre that I had ever heard; you would almost think that Daniel either invented it or was somehow conflating or embellishing it. But I think this is all happenstance: that this story - while probably produced in the last five to ten years - did not get its surrealism from the six-year-old narrator who shared it with me.

(December 20, 2011)