They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I can also say that a word is worth a thousand pictures. The sum of the pictures is a story, and there is a story behind each of the words that Boo Boo has begun to say.
Take ANT, for instance.
“An,” he says, but we get the picture, especially if we’re on a stroll and he squats in the middle of the sidewalk to point at a tiny little ant. I guess one of the benefits of being so close to the ground is that it’s easier to spot bugs. He follows the ant with his finger. I tell him he can look at the ant, but please don’t squish it. He obliges.
I think once I tried to squish an ant when I was a very young child, perhaps because I had seen flies being violently splattered against the kitchen wall with fly swatters, but I was implored to spare the ant. I asked why and was told–by my mom or dad or both–that the ant was on its way back to its family. Besides, the ant didn’t bother us and live in our home like the flies did, and I assumed that flies didn’t have families since I was actively encouraged to kill them. I didn’t want to smash them–cleaning them up would be extra work–so I stalked them. I would usually wait until they started rubbing their front legs together, as if in some sort of manic prayer, and then while they were distracted I would capture them under a cup. I slid paper under the cups, usually one of my most recent drawings, then dropped the flies into the toilet. I imagined the flies holding their breath as they shot through pipes that lead to a tropical sea, for when you are a kid that is the only kind of sea, where they swam to a small deserted island.
Anyway.
Boo Boo has not yet learned the difference between ants and other things that crawl on the ground. One night he squatted on the kitchen floor and started pointing to the tiles.
“An! An!”
“Hmmm, you think there’s an ant here?” I said as I casually strolled over, imagining I’d see a smudge of food or a coffee ground.
Instead there was a cockroach. I cursed and smashed the cockroach with an envelope that was lying around, which elicited extended belly laughs from Boo Boo.
He started pointing at the ground again. “An!”
“WHAT! REALLY?” I scanned the ground. No, there were no more cockroaches. But Boo Boo laughed anyway. Now that he had trained his parents to bang things on the floor and make loud noises, he wanted to do it again and now he’s become the boy who cried ant.
***
This is the first in a short series about Boo Boo’s words. I hope you enjoyed it! What are the stories behind some of the words you know? Feel free to share!
Please Don't Lick the Taxi 
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