Cage Match

I’ve always wondered if the little tics and habits you have as a child give any indication as to what kind of career you will have when you grow up. Take my stepfather, for example: from a young age he showed an unusual interest in both sweeping, and making recordings of people using the toilet; he grew up to be crazy. Ok, so that’s not such a good example; but maybe the five-year-old Thomas Edison drove his parents crazy with his inventions, and Mademoiselle Curie’s favorite toy was her junior chemistry set. Who knows, maybe even George Bush made a habit of invading neighboring kids’ yards and liberating their unusually large toy reserves.

The reason that I have such a strong interest in this is because of my son, Clyde, and his rather “interesting” personal habits. When he was younger these habits involved things like wiping his butt and blowing his nose with the same piece of toilet paper–in that order. Naturally, this made me think that any future career he had would involve saying things like “would you like fries with that?” and “I’d like to tell you about a special offer from Dell”. Lately, however, he has begun to show talents of another sort, talents that I hope may lead him down an entirely different, albeit not quite as respectable, career path: lately I have begun to think that maybe he will grow up to be a fight promoter.

Everything he touches starts a fight. His silverware at dinnertime, the pair of socks he has been told to put on, even the worms he finds when I am planting in the yard. Nothing is safe from his Don King-like machinations; when it comes to organizing a throw down he is Tina Turner in Beyond the Thunderdome, except he doesn’t have that creepy little guy following him around saying, “Who rules Bartertown?”

With Clyde, though, it’s not just the fights, but the nature of the fights that makes me think he has a future in the sports world: like all the best fight promoters, Clyde knows that there is more to orchestrating a fight than throwing a couple of combatants into a ring: instinctively he seems to understand that the best fights involve not just man against man (or, in Clyde’s case, fork against spoon), but are actually little Morality plays where Good can finally triumph over Evil. That’s why, in Clyde’s rumbles, the potato masher (Good) always wins out over the ice cream scoop (Evil), and even the lowly (but still Good) butter knife can carry the day against the supremely Evil corkscrew.

Of course, the thing that really makes me think that Clyde will grow up to be a fight promoter, and not just a fight instigator, are his audiences. Who can forget the big showdown between the slotted serving spoon (Good) and the melon-baller (Evil)? Certainly not all the soupspoons and teaspoons, who turned out en masse to cheer their brethren on. (And certainly not the rest of us, who ate our cereal with forks for weeks afterwards).

You’d think, with Clyde’s career path seemingly laid out before him, that I’d be entirely sold on the idea that the things you are interested in when you are young will determine what you will become when you grow up–but actually, I’m not. I can’t be, because that would mean my daughter, Clementine, whose favorite hobby is cutting out little tiny pieces of paper and leaving them in piles all over the house, will someday grow up to be a performance artist. Or crazy. I have to say that, of the two, I’m hoping for the latter.

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