Vicarious Pleasures

Clara Grace barely plays with her toys. Well, she plays with them about 5 percent of the time. The rest of the time she is playing with boxes of Macaroni-and-Cheese from the kitchen shelf, pots and pans, digital cameras that she extracts from camera bags, chargers, phones, doors, CDs, and toilet paper (thank goodness not the toilet.) She even slides chairs up to a light switch and will spend several minutes turning the light on or off. “Light on!” she announces, and then, “Light off!” Over and over again.

But when kids come over, she inevitably follows the guests into the nursery. The visitors start playing with her toys, usually with vigor. She will stand there and watch, suddenly desirous of this toy that has been in her nursery for six months or more. Sometimes I think, “Why don’t you go play with the light switch? That’s what you really want to do.” As soon as the guest moves on to a new toy, Clara Grace rediscovers the recently abandoned one. As she plays with it, I watch to see if she wonders why she hasn’t been enjoying this thing everyday. It seems to be her new favorite pastime.

There is something, isn’t there, to watching a person thoroughly enjoy something? When a person is completely passionate about an object or a hobby that I had previously ignored, I see it in a new light. It’s the reason why I ever tried to pick up the game of golf. Another example: in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, the fictionalized Antonio Salieri lusts after Mozart’s seemingly divine skill in composing. Shaffer—through Salieri—describes Mozart’s music in the most enticing terms. It’s not just that the musical portraiture is poetic--it’s authentic. Suddenly I hear Mozart like I never did before and wonder why I have not been listening to Mozart everyday.

But anyway, one reason Clara Grace watches these children play with her nearly-forgotten toys is that we have worked diligently with her in teaching her to share. She’s not perfect at it, but she does pretty well. When she begins to get antsy about wanting something—say a stuffed horse—that someone else is using, she’ll chant, “Share. Share the horse. Share. Share the horse.”

Jut before Halloween, we decided to teach Clara Grace how to trick-or-treat. She still doesn’t quite have the concept down, but she’s farther along then the last two years. On her first try, she knocked on the door and said “Trick-or-Treat” when we opened it, as instructed. We dropped candy in her bucket to activate Pavlovian learning. Then, keeping in mind our manners lessons, we said, “What do you say?”

“More candy,” she replied.

“No,” we laughed, “what do you say?”

“More candy…please,” she tried.

“Say, ‘thank you’”, we prompted.

“Morecandymorecandymorecandy!” The volume was rising.

“Say, ‘thank you’”, we urged.
Then she remembered her reasoning skills. ”Share! Share the candy,” she said.

She ate the candy and she thoroughly enjoyed it. I watched her suck on this cheap treat, saturated with drool and pleasure. She reveled in it so much, it made me want to try it. I like salty snacks, not sweets--and especially not cheap sweets. But, maybe I had missed some sublte joy.

It's like "Three Dog Night." It's childish, unrefined, and simple, but I like it. Whenever I listen to "Never Been to Spain", I feel a little silly, like I am relishing cheap candy. So, I tried the cheap candy again. Apparently, not all similes can be extended in reality. And, I guess that's why I don't golf anymore, either.