One of my favorite parts of Facebook is clicking on the Memories heading and scrolling, through the years, a scroll along memory lane, if you will. This exercise of looking back and recalling days gone by is also something my teenagers enjoy alongside me; they take greater interest in past posts that include photos of them and it’s always fun to listen to them reminisce about the things they remember, and how they remember different things (sometimes recalling them a wee bit differently from how they may have happened at the time, or, at least confusing the details of an event sometimes). For them, some photos make them cringe, while others invite waves of laughter. Always, we get to look back together.
Tonight, I shared the accompanying Fowl Language comic with my husband because it causes me to laugh every time it comes up in my memories. My 17 year old immediately wanted to see it, and, as I shared it with her, I told her I dedicate it to her and her sister each year, to which she immediately replied, Bruh, and followed that up with what she has since declared her Aristotelian gem: The kid can’t find it because it doesn’t exist until the parent walks into the room. Essentially, she told us, parents make things materialize out of thin air.
That moment right there? That sums up nicely why I love these two amazing young women. While her 15 year old sister was not a part of this conversation, she likewise is clever and witty and able to inject similar learned things from our unschooling adventures into such moments. I love that in an instant my 17 year old took a seemingly nondescript moment and introduced Aristotle, logic, humor, and a bit of paradoxical mix of Plato and Aristotle and the existence of reality, in ideas versus in physical objects.
I love that when we are exploring new ideas or reading one of our read alouds, whether fiction or nonfiction, these two extrapolate and synthesize information so often quite seamlessly. But it’s also the wit and the humor that truly draws me in and impresses me. I am reminded quite often how intelligent and capable they are when they are able to weave in bits of shrewdness with their observations. As a fan of puns and clever wordplay, I maintain a deep appreciation for my girls’ sharp repartee.
There remains, of course, the well-played Fowl Language cartoon and their insistence that parents apparently are a bit like voodoo witch doctors when it comes to finding missing objects. Indeed they have gotten better in their own location of said items, or it, but, still, their quick wit and clever comebacks tend to save them from any lengthy parent lecture (most of the time) about giving certain items a designated place. We’re working on that—all of us, including me, because I am sometimes guilty of misplacing things that matter to me as well. In the meantime, I am pretty comfortable with my role as the spontaneous conjurer of lost things out of thin air. In fact, I’m thinking I should probably have my girls create a conjurer crown for me for just such occasions.