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Larkin and Toy

Can I call time out on the serious for a moment and discuss how strange, how surprising, how hilarious it can be to talk with a two-and-three-quarters-year-old? Sometimes conversation with Larkin has this Abbott-and-Costello, "Who's on first?" quality. Other times it's way more Dada...as in the surreal, Tristan Tzara kind of Dada.

Usually she isn't trying to be funny. It's just the language machine, cranking into high gear in a child her age, producing backfires and wheeling around in wild circles. Does a toddler use language — or vice versa? Molly and I laugh ourselves silly.

Like at her dead-on mimicking of us. Finding my clothes draped on the purple chaise lounge she likes playing on, she scolds, "Dada, take this stuff away, and please don't leave your things on my couch!"

Sometimes a hilarious line comes from nowhere. "I smell skunk!" she will say, wrinkling her nose furiously. Or she'll prance into the living room, where Molly and I sit reading, and announce, in a suspicious sing-song, "There's something fishy going on around here..." Sometimes her observations are sadly true. In the park one day we sat on a bench and I played an idle game with a stick, tossing it and letting Larkin run after it. "This is like fetch!" she said, and indeed it was. When had I begun treating my daughter like a puppy?

The more exasperating conversations often involve what a friend of mine calls "the why chains" – those endless loops of interrogation with which a toddler turns the simplest statement into a philosophy class run amok. Last summer, during a week away at the shore, I went out to get gas in the car, taking Lark with me. "Where we going, Daddy?" she asked. "To get gas." "Why?" "Because the car's almost empty, and we don't want to run out." "Why?" "Because we have to go home." "Why do we have to go home?" "Because vacation is over and we have to go back to work." "Why?" "To make money." "Why?" "Because if we don't make money, we won't be able to buy food or pay the mortgage, or fix the leaky roof, and when it rains the water will come in through the leaky roof and get the rugs wet, and then the rugs will stink, and no one wants to live with stinky rugs, right?"

"Oh," she said, "OK." (Important lesson: Simple answers will almost never break a why chain. You need to throw a lot at it.)

Then there are the curious conversations that spring directly from a toddler's preoccupations. Between two and three, kids begin to contemplate the existence of evil, violence, and other scary things. Verbalizing helps them relieve the fear. But it also makes for strange, Freddie Krueger-like exchanges. Recently Larkin's imagination got caught up in some kind of recurring rabbit-violence motif. One day I found her in the dining room carefully cradling her stuffed bunny, Nugget. What was she doing? I asked. "I'm cuddling him very gently," she said, "so a monster doesn't come along and bite his HEAD off!" A few days later we saw a little cottontail out in our yard at sunset. Isn't that cute? I said, as it scampered away.

"I want to cook him for dinner," was Lark's response.

"You want to what, honey?"

"I want to chop him up in little pieces and put him in a pot and gobble him down!"

OK, well, let her work that one out.

At the other end of the spectrum are those moments when a toddler lands unexpectedly on some poetic utterance. One morning when I got her from her crib at 6 a.m., Larkin told me she'd had a dream. What was it? I asked.

"It went away," she murmured, "into the dark, dark night."

Another day, in late October, I took her walking through the rose gardens at Elizabeth Park, where only a few last hardy roses still clung to the trellises. "Daddy," she said contemplatively. "I don't mind if the roses die a little bit."

"No?"

"No, because they will still be roses. And they'll come back next year."

How much do two-year-olds understand what they're saying, really, and how much is just words? One morning I'm reading the paper with Larkin on my lap when she suddenly takes my face in her hands. "Dada, I don't want anything to happen to you," she says solemnly. "You're too precious to me. I want to keep you forever."

"I wiped a booger on you," she says, cheerfully. "Sorry, Dada."

In the end, all of us who have little kids put up with a certain amount of daily grief, so we might as well take away some entertainment value as well. I want to enjoy Larkin's wacky word experiments while they last. Soon enough, she'll be three, and competence with conversation will be simply normal; and these crazy-salad language days will fly away into the dark, dark night, like that disappearing dream.