I’ve mentioned my favorite line from 5-year-old MilliCal:
“Daddy, my Imaginary Friend’s friends are telling her that I don’t exist!”
That one still floors me. But she’s come up with some new ones:
“Mommy, if we’re always making things, does that mean that the Earth is getting heavier?”
Sometimes at night she’ll ask me if there are still Ancient Greeks or Ancient Egyptians around. She’s seen movies and cartoons with these characters. I think our answer that there are still Greeks and Egyptians around, but not Ancient Greeks or Egyptians, smacks of equivocation to her. Last night she asked me:
“Daddy, are there still Pilgrims around?”
I explained to her that there weren’t any Pilgrims like she saw in the Thanksgiving books – that people used to dress in that style, but nowadays no one did, and that the people practicing the faith of the Pilgrims evolved into modern-day Congregationalists. She wasn’t buying this.
“Daddy, are there still Pilgrims around, yes or no?”
A little later she came out of bed to ask us “Are there still Indians around?” We told her that there were, and finally got to the bottom of the issue. We’d been to Plymouth Plantation a few times, where they have living actors representing the Pilgrims and the Indians. There were, indeed, still Indians around, and some of them “played” the Abenaki at Plymouth. But even though there were old-time Pilgrims around at Plymouth, there weren’t any Pilgrims in the Real World. How could there be real Indians, but not real Pilgrims, if they were both there at Plymouth?