What the World Should Be

There's a scene in the movie "Sweet Home Alabama" where Reese Witherspoon is in a bar in Alabama. She sees an old friend there and the friend has a baby with her. Reese says, "You have a baby! In a bar!" I think about this scene almost every time I'm at Lefthand Brewery with my kids. I rationalize that, really, it's NOT a bar. It's a brewery, and it's really family friendly with other kids and sometimes horses.

We were at Lefthand recently with Asher, Harper, some friends and their kids. A group of young people was sitting at a table and had a two special needs adults with them. I don't know what these two men's diagnosis is, but by their appearance they seemed to have a form of retardation. Harper walked away from me playing, gave one of them her studying look and then burst into tears, the kind of crying that means she's scared. I quickly hugged her and comforted her. Asher saw the same man, and Michael told him that some people just look different. Wanting Harper to feel safe, I also didn't want the man to be sad about her reaction.

The last time I saw my dad in August 2006, Clare, Asher, Jaden and I went to visit him at his apartment. At the time, we didn't know he had Huntington's Disease, but his symptoms were quite evident - wagging tongue, flailing arms, difficulty walking, slurred speech. He was scary to see. Asher took one look at him, looked at me and then burst into tears, like Harper did.

I know kids don't recognize skin color differences for some time - maybe some time in elementary school - but kids know from an early age what is normal in other respects. I read recently that infants have an understanding of gravity and will look at a floating object as if its doing something strange. My kids, apparently, can recognize this in people, what is "normal." Again I am struck by what we are born with or quickly learn, as if "eidos" - true forms of things - is something real. Most of us, no doubt, do have a sense of what the world should be like and have learned to be less scared by it, to cry less about it.