The Monkey and the Pie
My son Matthew is the youngest of 3 children, and as such he has worked very hard all his life to "keep up" with his siblings. When they are having conversations that are not completely understandable to him he's not bothered in the least. He's perfectly content to participate by simply making it up as he goes along. He also has an imagination that is more fertile than most - of course I would say that as his father.
A couple of years ago (Matt was 7 or 8) we were traveling along in our vehicle on our way to dinner or church or something and Matthew announced "I know the difference between people and monkeys." Now, I thought this rather obvious - fur, living arrangements, speech patterns and all. I was interested to see what Matthew had deduced.
"Ok," I said, "what is the difference between people and monkeys."
Matt explained, "When people eat pies they use a fork, but a monkey just sticks his face right in....." Matt paused and pondered this a little further before adding, " ...if a monkey ever had a pie."
Well, I hope we didn't scar him for life, but we must have laughed for 5 minutes. It was a very funny moment. Ever since then monkeys and pies and forks are sort of inside jokes in our family. Matthew wears the badge of being absurdly creative quite proudly. Personally, I think his pie/monkey analogy was a stroke of genius. I'm considering writing a book called "the monkey and the pie" where a man discovers his humanity by living in a bakery with a monkey during s silverware shortage.
1 Comments
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Classic. When my son was about the same age, he came up with a similar gem. Eating a bowl of cornflakes, he suddenly stopped and started staring out the window, and back into his bowl. There was obviously a very deep thought brewing in there, so I waited for it. Finally, it came out: "You know... a cornflake is much smaller than a house."
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