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December 20, 2007
paying it forward
Allie's toddler, Lily, was seated next to me the other night, showing me her vast collection of stickers. On one of the stickers was a brown cow.
"Lily, do you know where milk comes from?" I asked.
The look on her face was familiar to me. A plastic jug, you effin' moron. But then she brightened. "A COW!" She pointed to the cow.
"That's right. And do you know where chocolate milk comes from?"
She clearly had never considered this, so I went on.
"Brown cows."
She nodded. That made plenty sense.
"Don't listen to a thing he says, Lily!" her mother injected. "Just because he believed this until he was 10..."
This is true. This, dear reader, is what having much older siblings is like. Chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Ellomenopee is the 17th letter of the alphabet. "Poles" are so called because we descended from tadpoles, not apes. Nazi Germany was ruled with an iron fist by the Burgermeister Meisterburger. And so on.
I was a disaster at school. Yet I can't resist re-perpetrating such disinformation on poor Lily. I like to think of myself as more evolved than my siblings, but sometimes I wonder.
Oh, and skim milk? Comes from skinny cows.
posted by john at 7:56 AM • permalink