“Just buy me something!”
It seems to me that there are few periods in childhood that are more frustrating than the time that comes right after articulation, but just before rationalization. It is the time when they are finally able to tell you exactly what they want, but still not able to understand why they can’t have it. Such was the case a few years ago when our annual trip to the Phoenix zoo ended in our annual meltdown in front of the gift shop (conveniently placed near the only exit).
We had almost made it out the gates, when suddenly Clementine realized that we were actually going to leave without buying one single thing: no tube of little plastic animals to get lost in the car seats before we had even left the parking lot; no stuffed bear sporting the holiday wear of the season–not even a smashed penny. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. This, of course, fired up every single one of her consumer sensibilities, as well as her incipient patriotic fervor (I think it was soon enough after 9/11 that the nation–Clementine included–was still trying to “shop its troubles away.”) As the awful realization that she was about to become persona non shoppa finally sunk in, she dug in her heels (both figuratively and literally), and, refusing to go even one step further, issued the now famous demand, “Just buy me something!”
I could see other parents eyeing us nervously as they too made the mad dash to the exit, and, even though I could see that they felt for me, I could also see that they were desperately trying to avoid having their own children contaminated with what looked to be a very serious case of consumer longing. It’s true: avarice is the most contagious of all childhood diseases; in Clementine’s case I believe she had picked it up by unprotected exposure to some contaminated toy catalogs– for days she had been carrying them around the house, lovingly stroking them so often that you would have thought they had been retrieved from the Lost Ark of the Covenant instead of their true origin, which was the recycling bin.
So there we were, in the middle of the zoo exit; it was plain to see that, as far as Clementine was concerned her plastic levels were dangerously low, and that only by dint of an immediate intervention in the form of some cheap, yet overpriced Chinese toy product could she be saved from a case of pernicious toylessness (a disease that hasn’t been seen in this country for the last fifty years–except, of course, in the Amish; but then again, they don’t vaccinate).
Hoping to head this outbreak off at the pass, I told her the story of her great-grandmother, and how she had considered herself to be the luckiest child I the world if she got one orange for Christmas. I told her the story of children throughout the world who had to make their own toys out of pieces of paper and plastic bags. Hitting my stride, I was about to launch into even more pitiful tales still when suddenly Clementine gave me a look that told me the awful truth: she knew. She knew I was a fraud: wasn’t I the same one who had grown up demanding, and frequently receiving, my own weight in Barbie dolls and Breyer horses? How could I be playing the hypocrite now, when the weight of a thousand discarded Barbie shoes still lay heavy on my back?
Properly chagrined, I meekly followed her into the gift shop where I bought her something–maybe a plastic monkey cup; all I really remember is that whatever it was it only kept her satisfied until our next stop at a gas station twenty miles down the road, where, surrounded by aisles full of chips, candies and sodas, Clementine once more turned to me in frustration and demanded, “Just buy me something!” This time, though, I was better able to resist: after all, even the weight of a thousand Barbie shoes can only go so far.