The shiny pink handle of the jump rope swung back and forth in front of my eyes. “You’re feeling sleepy,” my hypnotist sa id.
“I am?”
“Yes, you are. When I clap my hands, you will wake up wanting to smoke cigarettes.”
“I will?”
“Yes,” she said. “A lot of them. You’ll want to smoke them 30,000 hours a day.”
“But there aren’t 30,000 hours in a day.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then you’ll smoke 30,000 packs a day.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s an awful lot.”
“Yes,” she said, “And you’d better do it. Because I’ll be watching.”
She clapped her hands. I didn’t feel any different, but she was indeed watching me. She’d retreated to the living room and was peering at me through a pair of binoculars.
“You’re not smoking!” she cried.
“Right,” I said. I picked up a banana and pretended to smoke it.
“That’s not a cigarette!”
“It’s a cigar,” I said. “Doesn’t that count?”
Was this a dream? A nightmare?
No. Just another happily crazed moment from last weekend’s marathon two-day birthday sleepover on St. Peter’s Church Road. My hypnotist was a seven-year-old girl, the younger step-sister of one of our daughter’s good friends from school.
The seven-year-old told me that her grandmother had gone to a hypnotist to stop smoking, but20it hadn’t worked. “Not everybody likes being hypnotized,” she said. “But you will.”
For some reason, getting a grown-up to smoke 30,000 packs a day was a lot more fun than helping him quit.
(For the record, I don’t smoke, nor do I have any plans to start. Although a carton or twelve does sound pretty good right about now…)
Failed experiments in mind-control aside, the weekend was a success. The weather cooperated. The pond was full. We introduced our guests to some of the simple pleasures of being up at the Creek. There was bluegill fishing—a first for at least one of the girls. There was swinging on our neighbor’s huge tire swing. There was a visit to see the new kittens at the dairy farm next door, followed by a flurry of phone calls begging distant parents for a new kitten. There were secret confabs in the tree house, and follow-up meetings in a heap of pillows on a bedroom floor. There was delirious splashing in Shermans Creek under the watchful eye of a kayaking den mother.
There was cupcake decorating. I’d never seen such verticality on a cupcake. You’d have thought the girls were presenting designs for an edible Freedom Tower. “Sugar wafer beams! Marshmallow windows! And plenty of M&Ms! Just because!”
Some of the cupcakes looked good enough to smoke.
There were movies to watch, pinball machines to play, a basset hound in need of constant tummy rubs. In short, an eleven-year-old’s nirvana.
There was also a kind of poignancy to the visit. Our daughter will be changing schools in the fall, so it was also a kind of final hurrah for these four friends, who’ve been together for years.
Back in Baltimore, I reflected on these good friends. They were like a miniature United Nations, in their own way. One of them was adopted from Tuva, Outer Mongolia. Another was from Namibia. The third was born in the States, but likes to announce that she’s never met her biological father, who was an anonymous gene donor. Each of them lives in a complex world of step-parents, step-siblings, or single parent-hood that my grandparents could scarcely have imagined.
But somehow, it’s working for them. This was an amazingly happy, harmonious, and polite gaggle of girls.
What a pleasure it was to see them brought closer together by the peaceful bounty of the country. The age-old divisions of skin color, religion, and nationality seemed to melt away before our eyes.
It struck me that children are a lot like cigarettes. They may come in different packaging, but fundamentally they’re the same inside.
Thank you, Perry County. I’m so glad you’re not Salem, Winston, or Upper Marlboro.
Now where’s my lighter?
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 28 May 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
