“Mommy? When we get home I want to take some [polyfill] stuffing and put it on the back of the couch. Then I will pretend the couch is a mountain and climb it.”
This sentence from Gleek was spoken into the silence of a long car ride. Fortunately I was able to recall a conversation from the week before which made sense of the odd proclamation. On the prior occasion Gleek had noticed fluffy clouds sitting on a mountain top and expressed a desire to climb the mountain and get a bag full of clouds so that she could make them into pillows. The idea kept stewing in her brain until she came up with this other option.
My kids do this to me all the time. They burst forth with an exclamation, or question, or comment that is completely apropos to their train of thought, but for which I have to scramble to make sense. Like the time that Patches declared “One day I saw a fish.” The phrase “one day” can mean anything from “earlier this morning” to “years and years ago,” so that wasn’t much help. Also not particularly helpful was the fact that we were standing in the middle of the Seattle Aquarium looking at tanks of fish when Patches made his pronouncement. I could tell that this time of seeing fish had reminded him of some other time when he saw a fish. I was never able to determine what that other time was, because Patches’ train of thought had moved onward to go see the octopus.
I call these experiences “trains out of nowhere” because it is very much like standing still as a train barrels past. Sometimes I can figure out where the train came from and where it is going. Other times all I get is a glimpse of the train. It is a reminder that each of my kids has a whole world inside their heads. Their ideas and thoughts are in motion constantly and their experience of an event will be very different from mine because even though we are standing next to each other physically, we are worlds apart in our brains.
I understand that perfectly
I still do that, actually. It drove my mother to distraction when I was a kid, and it drives friends and co-workers batty to this day. I am perfectly capable of continuing a train of thought like it had never been interrupted despite there being 2 or 3 weeks between when the thought first occurred and the time it comes back to me.
I also am capable of remembering something today I was trying to remember last month and failing. You know, just walking along, and go :”Aha, bananas! that was what I wanted at the grocery store.. uh, last week, um, last month?” It gets even more amusing when something will pop into my head that I know I was trying to recall for some reason, and now I no longer no the reason. My friend hates me for that. We’ll be talking or whatever and I’ll suddenly say something off the wall, “Hey, April 5th!”. “What about April 5th?” “No idea! But I’m sure it was important at some time in the past.” “Sigh, have I told you lately how much I hate that?”
I tend to thing in unconventional lines. This annoys some people I know to no end. Some times I find myself thinking about something and I have to run the train all the way back to the station just to make sense of it all for myself. I have no idea where my thoughts will go next.
Ona