We planned to take our two eldest grandsons to Shepparton’s crackerjack Illuminate festival last weekend. It was going to be blindingly fantastic – the kids, six and seven years old were going to have a fantastic time, and it was just going to be fantastic seeing all our friends out and about and having a good old fantastic community time of chin-wagging and waving and hugging and sitting down with mobile phones to share this awesome and fantastic event with our faraway friends who were going to be so fantastically jealous they weren’t there.
We planned to go on the Saturday night when things would be really buzzing and the CFA torch march would light up the night and Christine Anu’s voice would make the universe sparkle with love.
Then life got in the way.
The boys were given a taste of what to expect when their parents took them early to Friday night’s opening event. It was all going fantastically until they saw the giant robot with flailing arms and glowing eyes. The eldest froze in terror, his bottom jaw dropped and his saucer eyes became locked like tractor beams, as he took in this staggering apparition of horror.
I have this vivid description from his parents – because we weren’t there.
His frozen fear infected his younger brother until they snapped and ran screaming towards the Shepparton Art Museum car park and demanded to go home immediately.
What is it that makes one child beam with wonder and another scream in terror at the same sight?
There my friends, you have the mysterious essence that makes all of humanity so different. Each of us is a unique world with individual obsessions, reasons, insanities and fears.
Perhaps my grandsons have overactive imaginations, fed by nightly bedtime stories from The Hobbit to Alice in Wonderland combined with a deliberate avoidance of movie violence.
Perhaps other children have had their senses dulled by years of exposure to superhero battles and destructive, bad-ass robots.
I would never dare to set one parental approach as more conducive to creating happy, balanced humans over another. We’ve been trying to do this for hundreds of years – ever since people stopped treating children as tiny adults. Nothing has worked so far. The only certainty we have is that bad childhood experiences will play out in adulthood.
I can remember hiding behind the couch as a small child whenever the robot Daleks appeared on Dr Who. They bubbled in my imagination for years until I was given a battery-operated toy Dalek with flashing eyes and the infamous robot voice that yelled “Exterminate!” with the same psychopathic monotone as the TV ones.
The toy taught me I had control – I could switch it off whenever I wanted.
Looking back I now think that was the age I also lost the ability to completely immerse myself in the moment. So there’s a price to pay for the gaining of experience.
Anyway, we didn’t take the grandkids to the fantastic Illuminate festival. Instead we stayed home and made our own deep pan veggie pizzas, bashed around on the old piano with its exposed soundboard, watched a heart-warming little film called Ice Age 2: The Meltdown and went to bed with a story about Percy the Park Keeper called One Snowy Night and a poem or two from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
Needless to say, it was a fantastic night.
Because as we know, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
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