Sunday, July 29, 2012

Adventures in Empathy Acquisition



I remember a Battersea little girl  who wheeled her large baby sister  stuffed into a doll’s perambulator.  When questioned on this course of conduct, she replied:  “I haven’t got a dolly, and Baby is pretending to be my dolly.”
-- G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (1909)

Now that’s … meta.

~

Marya  strolled by with her little toy dog, who last time had been nameless, and gave me an update.
“I named him ‘Cutie’.”
“Ah!  Because he’s cute.”
“Yes.”
Nomen omen,” I refrained from saying.

~

She held forth, in her tiny hand, two little flowers side by side:  a buttercup, and a clover-flower.  “Look what I made for mommy -- a bouquet!”
Two tiny flowers -- one almost a weed -- just barely make bouquet-hood:  but they do.  They compose, indeed,  Minimalist Bouquet, reduced to its essentials.  Not for her the gaudy floral excess of a Mafia funeral.

[For the complete dossier of Marya's special adventures, click here.]

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