Wait till your Dad gets home!
Grownups know everything, everything and always
I remember when I was about four I had a set of wooden blocks, and one day I had built a church with a very high steeple. The church itself was only a few blocks high, but I had to stand on the table to put the last blocks on top of the steeple. And Mum had to walk very gently and she was not allowed to set the dinner table until Dad had come home from work. Imagine if she knocked it over accidentally before Dad had had a chance to admire my church!
That same winter I wanted to glue something together out of paper. I don't remember what it was, but it was going to be very special. Only when I asked Mum for the glue, she told me to wait while she was peeling potatoes in the kitchen. I could not wait, so I went to the cupboard and got a finger full of glue out of the paste pot. When she came in, I showed her my finished work. I was so proud of it!
She looked stern: 'Where did you get that glue? Wait till your Dad comes home.'
Dad also looked very serious: 'Didn't your Mum tell you to wait? Where did you get that glue?'
Then I told a fib: 'I found some.'
'Where?'
I looked around and lifted up a corner of the carpet. 'Here', I said. 'There was some glue here under the carpet.'
'I don't see any glue,' Dad said.
'No, I used it all.'
'You're not telling the truth.'
For a long time, I wondered how Dad knew that it wasn't true. I had shown him where I found the glue and I had even explained why there was none left when he looked. How could he have known, when he hadn't even been there at the time? Then I decided that grown-ups knew everything, everything, and always. One day I would be old enough to go to school and one day I would be a grown-up too. One day I would be a Mensch, as Big Oma used to say. (Years and years later I learned that 'Mensch' is Yiddish for adult, and not Oma's way of saying 'mens': Dutch for human.) And I wondered what it would be like to know everything. It wasn't until the first day of the war that I discovered there were a lot of things grown-ups didn't know. [1]
[1] 1940