Child’s play but it’s not just kids’ stuff

Gaston de Rosayro

A child’s world is often the envy of imaginative adults, although I am willing to wager my nappies that they will not be too quick to admit it. I, for one, have found kids a decidedly ingenious passport to places where my solitary presence would have been perceived as preposterous.

Believe me, in my quest to relax I have been driven into some very embarrassing indiscretions. But no matter: if asinine adventures are to bring a bit of zap into my uneventful life, I am stoically prepared to pay the price. Hopping aboard a transport of delight, such as a push-and-leap merry-go-round on your own would make one of my mature years look like a retarded anthropoid. I may even discover I am even as the character in the old doggerel:

‘See the happy moron?

He doesn’t give a damn.

I wish I were a moron :

My God, I think I am!’

But if having fun and giving into a chance to unwind seem to be my predestined condition, what the hell! I would not really mind being classified a moron.

I once had the temerity to take along a three-year-old on a sight-seeing tour of Bangkok’s red-light district. Stupid move? Guess again, buddy. The advantages in such a ploy outweigh the loopholes by more than a boxful of G-strings. For one, hordes of skimpily clad bar girls left their doorways to tousle my little companion’s hair and pat his cheeks.

So, nonchalantly, I thrust my hands deep into the pockets of my slacks while my young partner’s cheeks glowed at the attention they were getting amid a host of equally glowing but noseless other cheeks revealed deliciously to my delight.

Another rather significant advantage which struck me with astonishing clarity later was that I did not, repeat not, have to visit to my physician in Hong Kong after my Bangkok tour. In Hong Kong, I used to saunter over sometimes to a children’s amusement park with a couple of kids for company, or rather as the cover for me to indulge in my fantasies.

For me, the park was charged with excitement. I love the myriad coloured lights that give cheer and enliven the place. Besides, there is no telling what might happen.

On one occasion, I noticed an obese male waddling along with a girl on either arm. I did all I could to keep my three-year-old female companion from calling him “Georgie Porgy.”However, the girls obviously did not spurn the guy, who seemed so engaged making so much whoopee that he fortunately did not hear the taunt.

I had decided not to take her anywhere near the bumper cars. That is after a recent incident where a four-year-old maniac named Joy I had taken along had the other participant kids swerving out of his way. Some of them lost their nerve completely and hightailed it out of the circuit with our kamikaze brat hot on their heels.

But this time around it was not long before my little spitfire led me to the most addictive game of skill known to every man with a penchant for throwing, meaning the Tin Can Alley stall. The objective of the game is to knock down the tower of stacked tin cans off the shelf with five tennis balls.

The trick is to hit the bottom tins, ballasted with sand, that form the base of the pyramid. I knocked all ten tins down like ninepins! It seemed all too easy and in the next round I did it with a ball to spare. The attendants closed the stall after my throwing arm had won two adorable cuddly toys for my companion!

Gallons of ice creams and soft drinks later, I find the family cherub involved in a vigorous argument with the attendant at the shooting gallery who maintains she is too small to handle a gun. “Shoot him!” she orders me in the strident tones of a Calamity Jane defending her honour. Despite my attempts to play peace broker she snaps at him, “Bugger off!”

Amazing, really, because these arrogant personality traits never appeared in my family. A while later I am sitting in the ferris wheel and pretending to enjoy every moment of it, while all the time feeling like an astral idiot canned in a cosmic convertible.

Being spun around in dizzying circles is bad enough even for seasoned astronauts - that is what they are paid for anyway. But hung upside down every now and again, with a nipper’s squeals of delight turning rapidly into screeching demands to “wee wee,”calls for superior ingenuity.

I am grateful for small mercies. Inexorably, the wheel ground to a halt and I cajoled my charge to “hold on.”I duly thanked Heaven for little girls, and The Maker for their amazingly retentive bladders as we located the “Ladies” in the nick of time. I managed to convince the little fury that I simply could not go in with her as I helped her out of her extremely sophisticated ‘undies.’ “Okay, but promise not to move,” she ordered before leaving me holding on to her diminutive lace underwear.

The wait seemed interminably long as I stood around those feminine preserves expecting every moment to be accused of being a voyeur. I was subjected to a few giggles and stares but stood my ground firmly like the boy on the burning deck.

I hurriedly pocketed the frilly unmentionable at the sight of an old lady who attends the same church as I do, approaching. “Waiting for your wife?” she asked politely. I said she had not come, but old ladies being old ladies don’t usually give you a chance to elaborate.

“It is terribly hot,” she said. “So it is,” I answered truthfully fishing for my handkerchief and ending up wiping my brow with the frilly lace panty. I have never seen a fossilized female move as fast as she did.

Life can be so unfair, particularly with geriatric gadabouts and their trigger-happy judgemental dispositions.Her withering and contemptuous look indicated that I had been tried and convicted in the whisper of an instant.

Home again with a sleeping child smiling seraphically in my arms, I am confronted by my wife who says: “See, you must have tired the little angel out. I cannot imagine how she can wake up for church tomorrow.”

I am willing to wager that Someone up there has a great sense of humour. I shall try forever to retain mine in this crazy world.

But you do understand, don’t you, why I don’t go to church any more?

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