Crickets (we on the hot dry ground).

01

I peeked out the window. The flowers had exodused, en masse, to somewhere inhabitable. The grass, the grasses, clung to life; skeletal remnants of their once-verdant green.

The sun leered down at us all. Leered at the top of the mountain, the hot dry mountaintop where the flowers had found an oasis or graveyard elsewhere, and where the grass was on hospice.

I smiled and turned back to the children. The children, cool and supplied with three million books, high speed internet, and enough art supplies to supply six generations of Matisse’s descendants.

Translation: no need to go outside.

02

Can we go outside?
the 4-year old, the precious 4-year old enquired.

03

Not right now.
I said.
It’s too hot.

04

He is the child of his mother, and he is the son of his father, and he is four years old, and the combination of these three variables meant that

a simple ‘no’ might be a mandate he must accept, but it also meant that

the mandate might be malleable, should he request further details on the negative response.

I silently whispered a plea to God and the infinite mechanisms available to possibly distract young children that this child would somehow be…distracted and deterred.

05

Why?
he continued.
I like the sun. And I love crickets. The only thing I want to do is go find crickets.

06

Wouldn’t it be great to read some books?
I said.
Or we can play hide and go seek, or we can have a dance party, or we could watch a film, or we could do some schoolwork?

07

Great idea!
he said.
I want do schoolwork!

Excellent!
I said, grinning with confidence at my cleverness as I turned away.

The front door clicked.

What are you doing?
I said, turning back, realizing too late the trap I had sprung on myself.

He looked back.
You said we’re doing school now. So now we can go into nature to look for crickets.

Someone sighed, and The Sigher might have muttered something horrific about murdering nature.

08

Sometimes things look worse than they really are. And sometimes things are worse than they really look, which is not a good thing when something already looks miserable.

Things I love

The outdoors
Nature
Learning about flora and fauna

Things I do not love

Hot dry dying scratchy grass
Large expanses of giant weeds
The sun flooding down on a large expanse of shade-less yard

Environments that crickets seem to love

Hot dry scratchy grass that is surrounded by giant weeds that are soaking up the rays of a malicious sun that is hindered not by any clouds, precipitation, or trees of any size.

Four-year old boy looking for crickets on the hot dry ground

I looked longingly at the house, at the interior of the house, as he led me to the cricket zoo.

How about over there?
I asked, moving in the direction of the blessed woods and their forested canopy of small respite from the blasted sun.

It’s okay,
he assured me, leading us to the broad expanse of weeds inhabited by hibernating mole-squatters,
this is where the crickets like to be.

Are you sure?
I asked with calm desperation.

Yeah,
he said confidently,
they’re around here. We can split up now.

Split up?!
I said,
SPLIT UP? You wanted me to come out here with you!

I know, he said calmly. But there’s crickets here (he pointed) and over there (he pointed in the opposite direction. So we can look together, and I’ll be here and you can split up and go over there.

Actually, I said, asserting authority, I’m going to stick with you.

He sighed and buried himself in the position I have grown accustomed to seeing him in:

A figure with two legs, body bent at the waist, head and nose and blond locks almost touching the dry hot grass as he roams carefully through the weeds, hunting down crickets at play and recreation.

I sighed and joined him, and my back ached. But we were together.

09

Here’s the thing, and this thing is fundamental to understanding a big part of what motivates me and what I think should motivate every artist and creative and innovator and teacher and parent. It is this:

We ask questions to learn.

Simple idea. A simple idea that kids know so, so, so well, and then as we get older, a lot of us un-learn it.

As we get older, we ask questions, with increasing frequency, to get definite answers.

Definite answers are often:

a) necessary, and
b) helpful, and
c) help us learn something tangible and specific

But definite, concrete answers are also the end of the road. That’s the problem with cold, hard, immoveable, rigid, final answers. WHICH, of course, have their place. But they stop learning in its tracks.

Which is why a lot of the time, a good concrete answer should be followed by a question.

If you pair a concrete answer with an open-ended question, then they help balance each other out

So as we’re out there, scratching our way across the dry hot ground, I asked him this:

What’s the difference between crickets and grasshoppers?

His head continued bobbing perpendicular with the mole hills and ogre-weeds.
Well,
he said,
crickets like to live in the dry grass, and in the hot areas like right around here, and…

The end

His explanation about the differences between grasshoppers and crickets was, to the best of my limited knowledge, almost entirely incorrect, although I am not certain anymore about placing the scope of my knowledge against that of my children, as I have increasingly found myself relegated to the incorrect side of the equation in binary disagreements.

The distracted, rambling, articulate reasoning he gave for why we were looking for crickets rather than grasshoppers went on for about eight hundred percent longer than the 15 seconds of concrete answer he could have given, if the priority was to be correct and close out the dialogue.

(Something along the lines of grasshoppers being bigger than crickets and having shorter antennae)

But why?

What would have been gained by a short-interchange of factual information in which I straightened him out?

I sometimes feel very unintelligent about so many things relating to the outdoors, to nature, to flora and fauna and animals and this and that…

…and it’s true: I sometimes laugh at how little I feel I know about these things, given the amount of time our family spends in the outdoors in various capacities, between hiking mountains, combing beaches, and…hunting crickets.

There’s a lot of things I don’t do well.
Of those things, I’m trying to do better and learn more about the topics I care about,

and accept the limits of my knowledge and interest with the topics I don’t care so much about,

but the thing I try really hard to do, is to give breathing room for kids to learn and to explain, in their words and their way, how they perceive the natural world and the explanations they have for why things are the way they are.

I believe so, so strongly that when kids are interested and enthused about something, they’ll keep at it. They’ll stay with it. They’ll keep asking questions, and

they’ll learn. They’ll keep learning, and over time their explanation will become increasingly articulate and even accurate, and ideally

their imagination will grow alongside that and the questions they have will always outpace the answers they’re provided.

That’s a good thing.

Epilogue

So we got a couple crickets,
I said.
How about we let them back into the wilds of our home outside, here in the dry hot ground that you’ve convinced me they love so much.

Okay,
he nodded dismissively,
we can do that, except…

Except what?
I asked.

Except,
he said, drawing the back of his filthy hand across his dirty face as he took a dusty step through the dry grass,
except do you want to go look for snakes with me real quick first?

Post-script:

“We on the hot dry ground” is the refrain to a song our 11-year old wrote and has performed, and has remained a very catchy anthem to a cult following. I hope, when he is ready, to share this instant classic with you.