`Our Curly, Dimpled Lunatics'

Some perceive the world in categories so rigid they might as well be deaf and blind. On Saturday, for two hours, I sat close enough to such a specimen to hear the sound of mouth breathing. My 7-year-old, a very ambitious Cub Scout, took a workshop at the natural science museum to earn a loop in geology. The instructor intoned the mantra of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic without thought for the meaning or appearance of such rocks, or the temperaments of second- and third-graders. Questions were an impertinence, suffered with much sighing and louder mouth breathing. When she asked why the Pacific Rim, with its abundance of volatile geological faults, was called the Ring of Fire, I said, “Because it was discovered by Johnny Cash?” Two of the eight adults in the room giggled and the instructor was not among them.

I enjoy geology and collected rocks as a kid, and my son enjoyed it until Saturday. In case of drones I carried a paperback Emerson in my hip pocket. Soon, I was holding it under the table and reading surreptitiously. In “Nature,” I found what I needed:

“The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic.”

We need teachers who are the fools of their senses. They understand our curly, dimpled lunatics.