Mouths of Babes

During our otherwise heavenly 18 months living on the remote Indonesian island of Sulawesi, my youngest son, Nathan (7 years), was struggling to stay out of trouble with his teacher in the small company-operated school.  I think there were three or four kids in his third grade class.

Another kid in the class was one of those who likes to stir the pot, to provoke other kids when the teacher isn’t looking in order to enjoy watching his classmate take the heat.  Nathan’s somewhat pugilistic personality was easy fodder for this closet bully’s games.  He would consistently be in trouble with the (downright saintly) teacher because it was Nathan’s reactions, not the other kid’s provocations, that were getting noticed.

I came upon an idea one day and decided to tell Nathan about an “old time hockey player” named Gordie Howe.  This master of deception would goad younger players with an elbow here, heal of the stick there, or even the back of a hand to the nose, etc., all when he knew the referee wasn’t looking.  Oftentimes, he could provoke one of these young hotheads into taking a swing at him or to commit some other prohibited act that would land him in the penalty box and gain an advantage for Mr. Howe’s team in the form of a “power play.”

Nathan is all about the “life is a game” concept and the “spirit of play”  so I suggested that the problem in school was a game and that his classmate was winning.

“Do you want to win, Nathan?”

“Yeah, Daddy, yeah!”

“Here’s what you do…” and I proceeded to teach Nathan that what this other kid wanted was to see his reaction and for the teacher to see the reaction.  I explained that every time Nathan reacted and got in trouble, this other kid won the game.  I told my son that if he refused to react, the other kid would escalate his provocations and as long as Nathan didn’t react, eventually this other kid would get frustrated and do something “big” enough for the teacher to notice.

I figured that if Nathan could pull this off, it would take at least a few days to see any results (and I didn’t figure his gnat-like attention span could keep it up much longer than that anyway) other than Nathan not getting into trouble, but I was wrong.

The very next day when I arrived home from work, Nathan came running to tell me that he had won the game!  He was so excited that what I had taught him actually worked and worked the first time he tried it.  “No matter what he did, Daddy, I just didn’t do anything…”  My son told me how the other kid kept acting up more and more until he was the one enjoying a time out and not Nathan.

Score one for the good guys.

Flash forward a couple months and I stopped on the way home to greet some friends from Romania who were out walking.  Believe it or not, they were actually from the province of Transylvania AND they had just come from my house where they had dropped off a couple bags of Halloween costumes for the boys.  I said, “This will be fun when I get home.” but little did I know how much fun.

I rolled up under the house, which was on poles, and I heard the pitter patter of little feet running for their bedroom at the other end of the hall.  I walked upstairs and in the front door pretending I was looking for them calling, “Anybody home?” and so forth.

When I pulled open his closet door, Nathan leapt out of the closest, roaring like a monster, wearing a rubber Mikhail Gorbachev mask.  I acted a little startled and then recognizing the face on the mask, I said,

“Hey!  It’s Gorby!”

Nathan rips off the mask all excited with big bright eyes and asks,

“Gorby Howe?”