Precocious

This morning I noticed two essential differences between the US and Germany. 1) Pre-schoolers are taken on strolls through graveyards and 2) German squirrels have shockingly long ears.

I discovered the first item as I was walking through the cemetery near my house. I’ve been looking for wooded places to perambulate since coming back from Virginia, but the cemetery is tough to take first thing in the morning, particularly when the sky is the color of a fresh tombstone. The preschoolers seemed unfazed by this; they jostled along in pairs, happy to shove and trip each other among the dead.

Red squirrels were out in droves as I parted from the toddlers and headed to the southern edge of the cemetery. I hardly ever see squirrels in Berlin, and when I stopped to examine one, I was alarmed by the squirrel’s unsquirrely behavior: rather than run away, it started hopping around me, like a boxer about to take his first punch. I found the squirrel’s ears disturbingly long, although on closer inspection this seemed to be the result of long, tufted ear hair. That would be disgusting on a person but is mostly winning on red squirrels.

These important cultural differences (morbid preschool activities, freaky red squirrels) aid in seeing: had the preschoolers been shoving each other off of slides, or had the squirrels been gray and timid, I would barely have noticed them. Their strangeness (to me) made them pop from the landscape.

Similarly, a video my friend Nasia Anam sent me yesterday, of a kid named Mark commenting on his video to Disney World on public access TV in 1992, is outlandishly visible in its world of difference from today’s films: the shoddy production value, the laughable cuts, the cheesy background photos. But there’s another reason you can’t stop watching it: Mark is utterly familiar, he might as well be you, or, lest I be projecting, me. The double-take occurs from a place of deep recognition. Before I say anything else, here’s the video, which you kind of have to watch:

http://www.foundfootagefest.com/2013/12/disney-world-one-kids-opinion/

Right? There’s something about Mark’s precociousness, that works for a while and then completely fails him, that I can remember so well from this age. He can mimic adult gestures – the smarmy smile at the camera, the cool sip of water – but the charm quickly flashes to panic, irritation, and dorked-out confidence; and the sip of water becomes Sahara-style chugging. I don’t really know how this made it from a back-seat performance in the family minivan to public TV, but I’m endlessly grateful that it did. It also gets across how untranslatable individual experience is: I have no idea, after my fourth viewing, what any of the rides Mark took at Disney World felt like to him. But it evokes, all too well, what being twelve felt like.