October 01, 2004, 7:56 a.m.
On Several Misunderstandings...

Under a new arrangement I now retrieve and give lunch to a playfellow of Phoebe's from nursery school a couple of times week. She is a sweet little person adored by my children whose speech, unfortunately, I find it rather hard to understand. As a consequence, my contact with her is disconcerting and humbling.

"Is there barits at your house?" this tiny person inquires one day after I've buckled her into our car beside Phoebe. My eyes flick about slightly, in the manner of a presidential aspirant searching for a warm, neutral response to a baffling question from the moderator.

"Baritz?" I ask with a quizzical smile." What's a baritz? Do you mean barrettes? Or, ha-ha, Biarritz?"

The little girl looks at me. Her hair is in pretty red ringlets. Her baby-blue dress is smocked and embroidered. "Bare-itz," she says, slowly and clearly, as to the foreign-born.

"Oh, bareitz," I try again. Still blank. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'm afraid I don't understand."

Both girls are staring at me now.

"Is there bareitz at your house?" Phoebe's friend repeats, loudly this time, as to the hearing-impaired.

"Bareitz?" I echo hopelessly, "Maybe. We might have some. I don't know."

"Yes, you do," Phoebe puts in irritably.

I cast a look of appeal to my daughter. "What does she mean, bareitz, Phoebs?"

"She means parrots."

"Parrots?" Phew. "No, we don't have any parrots at our house!" On secure thematic ground, I proceed confidently, "Wait, that's not entirely true, we do have a stuffed parrot, a toy, but as for — "

"No — !" Phoebe expostulates, as to the witless, "Not parrots. Paris."

"Oh. I see. No, Paris is still at school." My poll numbers in the crucial two-to-three-year-old block of urban toddlers are plummeting irretrievably. I am glad the viewing public is not here to witness my embarrassment.

Behind me, Phoebe and her little friend get into a laughing match. "Happy birthday to tree...!" Hardee-har-har-har.

Amid the din I imagine Jeff Greenfield's rueful assessment: "...had been popular with pint-sized constituents...nice touch with the plastic baggies of cheddar goldfish...unfortunately, 'bareitz'...clearly not in touch with these toddlers' core concerns..."

At a stoplight I rummage through Phoebe's backpack and find a note from the school, asking parents to send in supplies of nonperishable foods and stuffed animals to feed and console the children in the event of an emergency.

"Happy birthday to house! Happy birthday — "

On the radio, Ted Kennedy is saying something about a mushroom cloud over American cities. I flick the radio off in irritation, preferring their laughter to his canned hysteria. Still, I'd better bring some toys to school. Maybe that parrot.

— to lamp post...!"

As we drive home, an enormous white lozenge appears in the sky ahead of us, then disappears silently behind some trees. This is the "security blimp," an airship apparently loaded with all the latest whiz-bang terrorist-sniffing technology that has cruised the skies of, among other places, Kabul. It is still humming vigilantly over our streets when it is time to fetch the older children from school that afternoon.

Molly and Paris jump into the car and off we go again.

"I need to bring a pan of clear Jell-O to school tomorrow," Molly says urgently. "For science. We're making — "

Paris cuts across her, "Where is Jesus buried?"

My mouth falls open in the manner of a yokel hitting Broadway for the first time.

"I mean, in Washington...Virginia...Maryland? Where?"

" — models of cells using candy — "

"Wait a second. Listen, Paris, Jesus was buried, for three days, in Jerusalem," I tell him. "But then He rose from the dead, remember? On Easter? So He's not buried anywhere. Although Daddy once went to a village in Hokkaido where people said — "

"Oh, right," Paris says lightly, "I forgot."

"But it has to be clear Jell-O, like lemon — "

Phoebe unslots her fingers from their customary place in her mouth. "What's Hawkaido?"

"A place in Japan."

"Oh," she says, slotting her fingers back in, and I wonder what she thinks "Japan" is.

That night, many hours of homework later, Molly is the last to go to bed. Outside, the lowering skies have resolved themselves into a dew; at any rate, it is raining.

"Oh, don't forget the Jell-O, okay, Mummy?"

"Remind me what that's for?"

"Well — " she begins, and out of my arts-and-letters daughter pours a sudden and astonishing enthusiasm for the petri dish and all that it entails. She is positively rapturous about the structure of plant cells:

"...plus there are ribosomes and peroxisomes, and I'm always confusing them, aren't you? And the googliman — "

At least that's what I think she says. Evidently it shows, for Molly pauses and an expression of surpassing kindness crosses her face. "Mummy, you know what a Golgi Body is, right?"

"Don't talk dirty to me," I say gamely. Molly laughs.

"Well, the Golgi — "

It is hard to believe now that it was once a source of pride to me that I made it through high school and university without acquiring the rudiments of chemistry or physics or calculus or astronomy. I happened to be at school in the years when it was fashionable for students to be relieved of creaky old distribution requirements. This meant I could read all the literature and history and languages I liked, with as few nasty numbers as possible. O lucky me! Or so I thought.

"The amazing thing is, that plant cells are shaped like this — "she mimes a box" — because plants obviously only grow in this sort of direction — "she mimes the up-and-outward growth of plants. "Whereas animal cell — ." Molly's eyes are shining in the rainy pink light of the street outside — "they're shaped like this — ." She makes a circling motion in the air above her bed. I nod tolerantly in the manner of an old professor before a radiant freshman.

"But that is not the most amazing thing," Molly continues. "You know what a vacuole is, right?"

I bob my head up and down; not enough to say, pshaw, obviously I know what a vacuole is, and not too little to suggest that I am as much in the dark as the room around us is, which is, in fact, the truth.

"Ok, well obviously a plant cell is smaller than that," — she points to a tiny gem at my throat — "but in terms of the plant cell itself it is as big as, say, a baking pan."

I nod again. She continues, "But the vacuole in the animal cell is very small. Isn't that neat?" She yawns hugely. "Goodnight, Mummy."

As I am leaving the room, she calls out. "We're making ours out of jellybeans. You know, the vacuole."

"Oh, right," I say. "That sounds perfect."

— Meghan Cox Gurdon, an NRO columnist, lives in Washington, D.C.

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