Those were the two times she almost cried so far, but didn’t.
14. Fire Safety Tips
Nory left Boston and moved to the Trumpet Hill house in Palo Alto when she was still one year old. So the only reason that she had any memories about Boston and its bricks was that they had been back to visit. That was before she had Cooch, her only daughter from her marriage to Sylvester the Cat, who later sailed away to Africa. It was before she knew almost anything, for instance that long ago sailors threw pigs overboard to see what direction they would swim, because whatever direction they swam in was land. Or that if a cat is bred without a tail he won’t be able to feel where he’s going to the bathroom, since the tail is their sense of where they’re going to the bathroom. Without a tail a cat will just go all over the place, not knowing, like dogs who leave their dog leisures here, there, and everywhere.
Nory didn’t even know the word for elbow back then, when she was one. They had a video of her first learning ‘elbow’ in the yard, much later on. Really almost the only thing she kept with her from Boston was a tiny scar on her nose that she got in the bathtub when she picked up the plastic razor that her mother used to shave her legs and looked at it, and somehow, before she knew it, presto, she had cutten herself with it. Even that tiny scar was gone, almost. And now Littleguy knew the word ‘elbow.’ He said ‘Elbows help you jump!’ and he would then jump to demonstrate. He was right, elbows do help you jump, especially if you jumped the way he did, with a lot of arm motion to make it seem like a very high jump.
Littleguy did not seem to know the word ‘ankle,’ however. Babies learn the words for their feet and toes and fingers quite early because they can hold them close to their faces, and they learn about their eyes and nose and mouth because they are on their faces, but for some reason they are never terribly interested in their ankles. The word is weaker in their mind. That might have something to do with the strange myth of dipping Achilles.
It wasn’t Hercules who was dipped. Nory learned his proper name in another Classics class — Achilles. Achilles’s mother was unhappy that Achilles wasn’t completely immortal, so she dipped him head-first into the Watersticks. The Watersticks led from the Alive to the Unalive, in other words to the Dead. She held him by pinching hard on the back part of the foot, above his heel. ‘But wouldn’t that hurt the baby tremendously?’ Nory wondered to herself. ‘Wouldn’t there be a big chance of it falling right out of your hand?’
She imagined a tiny naked baby hanging by one leg, terribly frightened, bright red in the face from screaming, kicking the other leg wildly. The cold water would make the poor thing gasp desperately and it would pour right up its nostrils, because they would be upside down. Water in your sinuses can be really painful. If the goddess really loved her baby, she would have gotten in the water herself and then gently lifted the baby by its waist from the shore, right side up, one hand on either side, and lowered him in, and where her hands were covering his skin, once he was almost floating, she could just let one hand go for a second, then close, then let the other hand go, then close. You have to be careful to hold up the head, too. The ankle was just not a practical or safe choice of place to hold a newborn child.
But they were much less careful about things like safety in ancient times. Nowadays safety is a major concern but back then the sky was the limit with danger, really. Nory’s first school was called Small People, and one of the first things they learned at Small People was the safety tip ‘Stop, Drop, and Roll.’ That was what you were supposed to do when your clothes caught on fire. If you ran, the flames would flare up, and you would probably get a third-degree burn. A third-degree burn is when the skin is black and charred.
‘Should you hide from the fireman?’ the teacher asked.
‘No,’ said the kids.
‘If he has a big mask on, should you be frightened into thinking he’s a space alien?’ asked the teacher.
‘No,’ said the kids.
‘And what do you do if your clothes catch on fire?’ asked the teacher.
‘Stop, drop, and roll!’ the kids shouted.
At first Nory was very happy to know that rhyme, but then she was taught it again at her next school, the Blackwood Early Focus School, where three firemen came by for a visit. That teacher was not in a good state of mind and shouted all the time, because the class was so wild. One kid spent every minute of his day rolling around on the floor, so there wasn’t much need to ask him to drop or roll. Stopping might be nice, though.
Nory’s parents took her out of that school, which was a public school, when they noticed that Nory had learned to write one more letter in three months, G. One letter in three months was just not acceptable, they said. So they put her in the International Chinese Montessori School, and presto, the alphabet was in her brain in a jiffy and she was learning songs in Chinese about Sung O Kung, the ancient monkey.
And then one day a fireman came in with some blankets and had two kids hold a blanket low to the floor. The blanket stood for the thick, thick smoke that you were supposed to crawl under. Crawling was fun but it also gave you a panicky feeling because you could imagine being in a room and unable to know where the window was because the smoke was so thick, except for a tiny layer just above the floor. How would you possibly know where the windows were? You’d need to tape a card with an arrow on it pointing up at the window, so you’d know that there’s where you’d need to take a breath and plunge up into the hot smoke and smash out the window with a pillow. ‘And what do you do if your clothes catch on fire?’ asked the fireman.
‘Stop, drop, and roll!’ shouted the kids.
That and don’t smoke, don’t take drugs, don’t talk to strangers, and the rainforest is burning to the ground, were the things that it seemed like every kid was taught over and over and over, to an endless limit. You got told them so many times, on TV ads as well — wasn’t there anything else in the world that kids should know? For instance other safety things, like: Be careful when you play with your little brother because his head is quite hard and it could break your nose. Or, don’t run in fancy black shoes because their soles are nine times out of ten extremely slippery. Or, don’t try to pull down a wooden Chinese-checker set from a shelf above your head because it can fall straight on your toe and make the toenail turn dark purple and almost completely fall right off. Or, don’t chew too wildly or you might bite your tongue, which really hurts.
Or what about things that were not about safety at all, such as for instance salting meat, or about the three layers of the tooth, the inner layer, the middle layer, and the outer layer, called the crown, or the three layers of the coffin in Egyptian times, the layer of gold, the layer of silver, and the layer of something else, like bronze? Everybody’s gotten the idea that when somebody died, the Egyptians mummified them. Well, does that mean everybody got to be mummified, or does that mean ten out of a hundred? Why not spend some period of time answering that kind of question, rather than endlessly ‘Stop, drop, and roll’?