Of Elephants and Verbs

Daughter is at a fascinating moment in her development right now, where she has simultaneously a strong sense of sequences of events and a delightfully flexible notion of the relationship between the past, present and future.

She knows quite clearly, for example, that on the rare occasions when we actually have juice in our fridge, the rule is "first milk, then juice." She knows that after you go potty, you don't pull up your own pants until you shout "Mama! I'm ALL DONE!!" and someone comes to wipe your buns. She knows that after you "plant the flowers with a shovel," you water them, and then they grow.

But for anything that takes more than a few hours to accomplish, time becomes fuzzy. At dinnertime, she is unsure whether she went out onto the playground at school yesterday or this morning. It's a reasonable confusion: there was some sleeping that happened in between the playground time and the pick up time. And, on top of that, she tells me often at bedtime, "I don't want to take a nap," which obviously means she has no idea that she sleeps eleven hours at night and only one or two at school.

She also has no clear concept of things that will happen days away. She knows that when she is "a grown up girl" she will get my "red ring" (a little antique garnet that I have and of which she is enamored). But becoming a grown up is some amorphous event in the future which doesn't require--indeed, perhaps doesn't even allow--quantifying. We are going to New York later this spring, but the trip could be four days or four weeks or four months away and it wouldn't make any difference to her. She knows it won't happen tomorrow, and that it will happen before she's a grown up. Everything in between those two markers is a blur of time for her.

Most endearingly, she has developed a verbal trick that compresses past, future, and her imagination in amazing ways. Yesterday in the car, we were talking about where Daddy was (already at work) and where Mama was going (to grade papers) and what the children would do today at preschool. Daughter sighed knowingly and announced, "When I was a grown-up Daddy, I could go to work too." There is a phenomenal wrinkle in time there; in her past life as a grown man, she might have the possibility of doing something as delightful as going to work.

The collapsing of past and future doesn't only signal her sense of what it means to be an adult. She has said, as we are talking about how elephants' trunks work, "When I was a elephant, I poke my food from my trunk and pick it up to eat it too." And ever since that conversation, she regales us with the occasional tidbit of information about what she used to do back when she was an elephant.

Although you might be tempted to think that she just doesn't know her verb tenses, especially given that she doesn't describe the events of the past in the past tense, I don't think the explanation is that simple. To be sure, she has told us that she was, in another apparent past life, a puppy, and gone on to describe how "I wear a collar." But the way that she describes these events is not as if she is currently doing them, nor as if she is hoping someday to do them, but as if she has already done them, and is simply narrating them. She may not have the verb tense right for describing a past event, but the introduction, "When I was a puppy," seems in her mind to set the stage for that past occurrence, as surely as do her knowing and detailed explanations of what she did back then, even if those explanations are phrased in the present tense. If you ask her if she is a puppy now, she will laugh heartily at you, and say, "Noooo! I'm a little girl."

"But," she will continue, noticing a movement out the window facing our back yard, "when I was a bunny..."

And we're off into another tale.

I'm sure a linguist who studies language acquisition has an explanation that centers on how children learn to delineate the past from the future in terms of language. However, the dreamer in me prefers an explanation that might be concocted by Madeline L'Engle. I love to think that my child is still young enough to imagine possibilities for herself that become so real that she convinces herself she has actually experienced them. She watches pachyderms with such rapt fascination that she can imagine becoming one; she can feel the lengthening of her own nose, intuit the sensation of using it to pick up objects. She can imagine so strongly that she can make real. And then, because she has no clear sense of the distinctions between her past and her future, because any time far away from the present must be all the same time, she is quite sure that she has already done these things she imagines.

It is as if time for her is circular. Her spot on that circle is the now. Her past arcs behind her, her future ahead, and both meet at some point as far away as it is possible to get from her in this moment. She might move forward into the future, but if she goes far enough, more than 180 degrees away from now, she might run into her past. Conversely, if she thinks back far enough into her past, locates herself in experiences that pre-date her three years, she might end up in her own future.

"When I was a big kid," she said yesterday, "I wish I could eat a brownie."

I know that in a short year or two, the grammar of past and future will be solidified in her mind. And a year or so after that, she will have a pretty firm grasp on what it means if some long-anticipated event is an hour or a month away. She will, in all probability, stop telling us stories of when she was a puppy, even if she still plays "pets" with her brother.

A little part of me hopes that doesn't happen too soon. For, truth be told, I am delighted by not just her fancies but by her ability to imagine that when I tell her she can "become anything she wants when she is a grown up," the realm of possibility includes elephants.