“Did you hear it?” a child shrieked ecstatically from the front yard. “I heard it!” shrieked another child out of a second floor window.
“It’s here! It’s here! The ice cream truck!” everyone yelled, and within seconds a team of crack negotiators had cornered the Authority Figure in the kitchen. The dreaded pied piper’s melody floated in on the soft evening air.
“It’s the first ice cream truck of the year –”
“Please, oh please, oh please!”
“We won’t take a bite until after dinner, we promise –”
The Authority Figure shook her head. As far as she was concerned, the fact that the great harbinger of summer vacation had taken to the streets again in no way obliged her to part with relatively large sums for confirmedly unhealthful frozen treats.
“We won’t even eat it tonight,” one of the children tried.
“We’ll put it in the freezer,” another supplied.
“Just this one time –”
“We’ll use our own money!”
“Just because something is for sale does not mean that you need to buy it,” the AF lectured, feeling rather boring and grown-up but nonetheless unmoved. It wasn’t certain that anyone heard her over the clamor, so she shook her head again and said loudly, “Absolutely not. No ice cream.”
There was a moment’s pause before the appeal started again. Though still unmoved, she couldn’t help being rather impressed by the ease, swiftness, and utter cynicism with which the negotiators were changing tactics.
“Why not? Just give us one reason.”
“I bet other mothers are going to say yes.”
“Anyway, it’s our money –”
Where had she heard this before, this ever-varying line of reasoning? At home, of course, with these exact children, but somewhere else as well. Was it a story? A book? Something to do with a bird?
In a flash, she remembered: She’d read it in “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus,” the Caldecott Honor-winning picture book by Mo Willem in which a pigeon desperately tries to inveigle the reader into letting him take the wheel.
“Please? I’ll be careful,” the pigeon wheedles. “I’ll be your best friend! How ’bout I give you five bucks? No fair! I bet your mom would let me. What’s the big deal? It’s just a bus!!! I have dreams, you know. Fine. LET ME DRIVE THE BUS!!!”
The book captures not just the nimble and conniving minds of the young, who will cheerfully exploit the slightest weakness in an adult’s position, but also the need for adults to maintain utter vigilance.
If you want to buy everyone dessert, lovely; they will crow and praise you for it. But oh, if you don’t, it takes only a moment’s inattention to weaken, to surrender a fateful “maybe” that leads inexorably down the slippery slope to “Say, what do you mean there’s no change left?”
Outside, the song of the ice cream man grew louder and louder —
“Please, oh please, oh please –”
And then it receded. The danger was past. For this one evening, at least, no pigeons would be eating ice cream.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
