So I am sitting next to this ten-year-old kid on a plane while his parents are arguing over something trivial in the seats across the aisle. The boy is holding one of those intricate electronic video games and he has no interest in his surroundings.
I say, hi, a little after takeoff.
He says, I don’t talk to strangers, my parents have forbidden me.
I say, that’s good advice but seeing as how we are cooped up here for four hours whizzing along at 31000 feet we might as well be friendly.
He shrugs indifferently and says, thirty four thousand, didn’t you hear the captain, and it won’t be four hours, if we get tail winds we should cut back thirty minutes, ETA-ing at zero forty five.
Determined to establish some rapport with the now generation I press on. Your parents and you on a holiday, I ask.
No, dad’s on business, Mom’s meeting relatives, I am tagging along.
That’s nice, I say.
It isn’t, he answers, I have no choices, parents win, they use parent power, it should be banned.
Over the next hour he and I talk of several things. Whip smart, up to the brim with information of all sorts, great savvy laced with contempt, a complete pain in the neck.
Precocious, rude, ill-tempered and tiresome in the long run.
Frankly, just because this type can download data into their fuzzy little brains and talk like adults doesn’t mean a thing in my lexicon. Parents might think it is a sign of genius and I am all for the pursuit of knowledge but I balk at making kids grow up before their time. In fact, well into the flight I began to feel sorry for this walking encyclopedia. How sad to lose your childhood to technology.
There is a whole generation of these pre-teen sophisticates and they’ll never know the pleasures of being scruffy little kids. I ask him, stupid me, if he has ever played marbles and felt the excitement of exchanging ‘marbs’. He looks quizzical, as if I had asked him the wrong sort of question. Would kids like this build tree houses, play soldiers with pebbles, wind string around a top and challenge the reigning champion. Would they learn to use a yo yo and play cops and robbers and have scratched knees and scuffed clothes and have their own imaginations as their best friends, never lonely, never bored, never jaded and certainly not so worldly.
My way of seeing things, at ten, you should be wonderfully ignorant of the politics of life, a child doing childlike things, turning a plank of wood into a speedboat, a Formula One car, a jet fighter.
This kid would scorn such nonsense, switch on his computer and sit at the simulated controls of an F22 with real sound and move his ‘Made in Taiwan’ joystick.
You ask me, that plank of wood had its own edge.
It wasn’t just that we were left to our own devices. We were not anywhere near so eloquent or cocky but we were polite and we made a good impression ... not like this lot with their super clever snottiness so foolishly certified by parental approval ... see how he back answers?
I got off the plane bemused. Convinced that parents were pushing kids too fast to satisfy their own vanity. Isn’t our kid smart, look how much he knows, he’s computer literate, he’s a whizz in quizzes, and he’s only ten.
That’s just the point.
Me, I wouldn’t change that plank of wood or my lucky marble or my dinky toys and my rosewood top for knowing how much tailwind there is ... not at ten.
