Hang 'Em High

You never know what you are going to get with a play date. You throw a couple of kids together, their little cogs spinning, that unbridled imagination, and usually something you never would have expected happens.

Once, when my eleven year old daughter E was about three and a half, she was playing at a friend’s house. The other mom and I had poured generous glasses of wine for ourselves and sat downstairs to talk. While we were busy with that, the girls played alone upstairs, which looking back was probably a major lapse in judgment. By the time that play date was over, my friend’s daughter wore a diaper, expertly put on by my daughter, who unbeknownst to us had taken a big dump in the potty chair, you know, the kind that sit on the floor with no water or flushing mechanism? She didn’t mention it to anyone, and my friend didn’t discover it until about four hours later, when the entire upstairs of her house reeked of old turd.

Nowadays, what with my daughters being older and all, I don’t have to worry much about unannounced bowel movements and amateur diapering. Instead, play dates seem to involve a lot of skits, songs, and plays, all of which I remind me of why these kids need a good strong education and a career path. Still, every once in a while, I get treated to a little burst of inspiration that makes me wonder what the hell were those kids thinking.

“Hey, Mom, look at this!” my daughter, S, yelled at me from the second floor. She and her friend, KB, had been playing quietly up there, perhaps too quietly.

We have a balcony that overlooks the downstairs family room. I glanced up, and hanging over the railing, from what looked like poorly tied nooses, were two of S’s Build-A-Bear stuffed animals. One was a monkey wearing a dress, and the other was Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer. The monkey was swinging in the breeze, while Rudolph looked like his neck snapped from the weight of his body hanging. His nose was still glowing. I have heard that when a man dies sometimes he will get an erection at the moment of death, but I didn’t realize it applied to Rudolph’s nose as well.

“What did they do wrong?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?” S said. She is a child of the 21st century, and therefore doesn’t know a lynching reference when she sees one.

“What was their crime? Why were they sentenced to hang to the death?” I tried again.

“They aren’t dead, Miss B,” S’s friend told me.

“They aren’t? Have you checked Rudolph’s pulse? He looks pretty dead to me."

“Mom, stop it,” S said. “They aren’t dead. They are flying.”

“Just Rudolph,” KB said. “Cause reindeers fly.”

“Of course he is. But what about the monkey? Unless she one of those flying monkeys from “The Wizard of Oz. Those are the only monkeys I know that can fly.”

“No, she isn’t flying. She is swinging from a tree. On a vine,” S added.

They didn’t look like they were flying and swinging to me, but maybe that was what was going through their minds when they saw the bright light. Isn’t that all that matters? That they died happy?

I’m not complaining, mind you. They didn’t go through my stuff looking for my giant bras and vibrators. They didn’t play with my make-up and break my lipstick. They didn’t dress up in my high heels. They didn’t spray what was left of my discontinued favorite perfume on each other and waste it. All they did was dangle a couple of Build-A-Bears from some homemade gallows. They didn’t dismember them or drag them ten miles down the road, so it’s all good, right? And the best part? They are old enough to remember to flush a toilet.