Skinny Man in a Diaper
Skinny Man in a Diaper, Or, Your Child is Safe in MY Hands!
The kid’s only four and already I’m in trouble every time I babysit - like I was the other night when he came for a sweet little sleepover with Poppa and Grandma TT.
Faithfully-attending Unitarians though they be, his two moms are NOT, to say the least, big fans of the bloody rites of traditional Christianity. I, meanwhile, am a Dr. Spock-raised Woodstock girl who grew up believing all children’s questions are good and should be answered promptly and honestly and so when Eddie pointed to the wall above my bureau and asked what “that X” was, I went right over and got it down.
“Well this is actually a cross, or, technically what they call a crucifix because see there’s this skinny many on a diaper on it…”
“But who IS he TT?” said Eddie and I thought Uh oh.
“Ah! Well his name was Jesus and um everyone just loved him because he was like the nicest person you ever met!” I twinkled.
“But what’s happening to him?” asked the child, appalled by the sight of the twisted, head-bent figure and what could I say? That sometimes if you're TOO nice you can kind of upset the applecart and the next thing you know they’re coming for you with torches in the night? Could I say instead ‘Oh I just have this crucifix here because it hung inside the satin lid of my mother’s coffin 20 years ago and by the way I still have the clothes she died in and would you like to see them? Noooo. So I said, “How about that fun bath you were going to have with the spray bottle and the watering can?” and the bullet was dodged… UNTIL, for his bedtime story, he rummaged through every children’s books we have in the attic, relics all of our own kids’ childhoods back in the 80s and came up with this cartoon book of Scripture called The Beginner’s Bible.
The Beginner’s Bible is a small fat book with very large print, and the characters all look really harmless with these large googly eyes and when our boy Michael was around eight he read it from cover to cover and pronounced it awesome.
So. We started with the Creation story, which takes up seven or eight pages. Eddie’s remark: “Where are the dinosaurs?” Then we turned to the page with what western Civilization calls The Fall of Man, here labeled “A Sad Day." I began wildly editing as I read, leaving out all kinds of things around the picture of the cartoon angel holding aloft a flaming sword as he kicks Adam and Eve them out of Eden.
But Eddie knows menace when he sees it even though he doesn’t watch television: “Who is that knight and why does he have a weapon? “ he asked, looking worried. "Oh! Well, he’s lighting their way out of this garden because they’re moving to a lovely new place!” And then doesn’t he wants to go on to the story of Ark and Noah and what, I’m going to read how God takes a notion to just destroy the world because he’s in a bad mood that day? But lucky for us all humans we’re quick when we need to be: I fanned through the pages to get to Jonah, glided past the Big Man’s threat to flatten Nineveh if those Ninevites didn’t shape up NOW, and also past Jonah’s reluctance to be the one who warns them, his attempt to high-tail it on out of there and get as far from Nineveh possible etc etc , - even past the falling-overboard part until AHA!! I got him inside the whale - where I could start talking about Pinocchio - who of course also did time inside a whale and darned if this didn’t work because I just happened to PLAY the Puppet Who Becomes a Real Boy at Camp Fernwood in the big Parents Weekend play by the same name the summer I was six and so there was my salvation. I tossed aside that children’s Bible, leapt from the bed where we were reading, sang “I Got No Strings to Hold Me Down,” every single line and the chorus too and did a little jig besides.
“Oh TT!”, Eddie smiled when I got done. Then we picked up the original Winnie the Pooh book with the funny old pen-and-ink drawing and had another go at bedtime.
