Just as a semi-philosophical playground conversation reached its dramatic height, someone would pause and say “My grandpa once told me …..”
This was well before I was a grandpa and realized that grandpas are just a bunch of guys who wear paths to and from the bathroom at night.
More recently, that realization about myself has frightened me and left my wife in a state of panic.
In a few short years, one of our grandsons will be waxing philosophical on the playground, come to that conversation and only be able to remember the thing I’ve most often told them: “Close the door and put the toilet seat up.’”
(Did I mention that my wife has frequent nightmares?)
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But recently – and blessedly — I’ve begun to see a brighter future for the boys.
Because I have come up with something else to tell them. That ignorance really is bliss.
The truth is, grandsons aside, my ignorance is my steadiest source of bliss.
Take, for instance, what was on my mind in the original opening of this column.
It involved a shining bit of wisdom from W.C. Fields, the old vaudeville and early movies comic: “It seems everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening.”
Then I did a fact-check.
And, in fact, the saying didn’t originate with him.
It came from Alexander Woollcott, a member of the Algonquin Circle.
They are famous group of gifted and talenteds who in their youths hastened the hair loss of the many school principals who had to deal with them.
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To return to the point: My mistake – this morsel of ignorance – yielded a rich harvest of bliss.
The fact-checking exposed me to several W.C. Fields quotes I’d never encountered. And while I recommend you go online for his treasure trove, here are two PG entries.
“I like children. If they’re properly cooked.”
“I never drink water. That’s the stuff that rusts pipes.”
And it’s not just laugh-aloud moments that give me bliss.
I remember watching a David Attenboro nature documentary years ago and listening to a jungle bird with a talent for mimicry reproduced the sound of a power-drive camera.
I also picked up a magazine that told me one of the masterpiece paintings of the French Renaissance has another picture behind it – one that the artist painted over because he didn’t like the first.
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Memorable, too, is the program that explored how scientist are using the ancient Japanese paper art of origami to design molecules with shapes that allow them to carry drugs through the walls of human cells.
On the unblissful but astounding side, I also discovered that the managers of massive Chinese factories have strung nets around their buildings to catch those who regularly jump off upper platforms desperate to end their tortured working lives.
I apologize for the mood swing I threw at you in that last example.
But it does allow the opportunity to recall that, in a world that continues to marvel the mind, there remain those harsh realities that confirm the blissful aspect of ignorance.
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