TRANSDUCER

Mom, what’s that chair, the one that electrocutes people? — I still haven’t figured out where or why they came across this particular lovely tidbit from our culture, so there’s currently no one to blame. I now have to writhe over my peanut butter banana and find a way to answer them. I’ve already taken so many passes today, telling them to ask Daddy about why King George was mad, what happened to Amelia Earhart, why the Orange Man doesn’t have to go to the calm-down chair, and how old you have to be to drive an army Jeep, that they’re going to think I’m made of cardboard and cotton batting.

One trick I’ve learned is this completely insane move of providing facts and seeing what happens.

—It’s called the electric chair. They nod. This makes sense. —What’s it for? Yeesh. I had hoped they might wander off before this part. —It runs electricity through the body, I say. Are they going to do it? Are they going to get grisly? —How does it kill people? You bet, you bet they are. They’re six and Encountering the Terrible is one of their passions.

—I think it probably stops the heart from working, I say. I have no idea if this is true, but my children understand busted things. They nod. —It’s for bad people, only bad people? I nod, choosing to skip, for now, greater accuracies that will lead to greater difficulty. They run off.

*

I was foolish enough to get myself a nice set of shin splints while running a few months ago (no, you cannot be in your forties and just decide to run fast downhill on pavement one day for fun AND I KNEW THIS), so I had to take about month off from my most desired mileage range.

This meant that in order not to go batshit nuts I had to pull the bike machine up from the basement, one of those back-wheel mounts that you clamp your road bike into and then stare at the coffee table while you drip sweat onto the rug. I was bummed about this scenario because a) I don’t especially like biking and b) it took up a lot of the already cramped interior space we have, sending out 45 degree angle legs specifically designed to bark shins with laser precision.

My son was thrilled.

The repurposing of household items is one of my children’s specialties: a picnic basket becomes a veterinary clinic; every single piece of produce in the fridge becomes “Ratty’s Restaurant”; biking shoes become ice skates for lost kittens; potatoes are a chance to make sure all boots are cornucopias; my criminally expensive skincare oil becomes a stuffed cheetah’s fur tonic.

In this case, though, it was the bike machine that was to receive their finest imaginative treatment.

“The electrotransducer” with Ratty in it

They carefully wound the supporting brackets into position so that a favorite stuffed animal, Ratty himself, could be placed inside it, and announced with very loud glee that we now had an “electrotransducer.”

I asked what it did, bracing myself for the worst explanation, the most grisly explanation, the most in-need-of-tremendous-finesse-and/or-outright-blacklisting-as-an-activity explanation. They explained with the maniacal verve of used car salesmen that this thing was going to turn ratty into a dragon!

I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved to move from Shawshank Redemption into Frankenstein. It was as if these kids had said, “OK, we have a powerful machine in our knowledge base now, one that changes aliveness to deadness, so obviously that thing could also change a rat into a dragon.” Other options for Ratty’s transformation included “school bus,” “axolotl,” and “poop.” The machine had significant versatility.

When they tired of “transducing,” which was to be undertaken only with the help of “Ivan Mectinprofen” (which I believe has anesthetic properties), the transducer doubled as a ratmobile by the addition of magnetile train cars beneath its grounding points.

Did I mention the transducer weighs about thirty pounds? And requires fairly regular positional interventions from Mom?

Anyway, while it can be useful to have a machine that affects transmogrification, it turns out the machine itself is not especially necessary, in the end, when you are the one who came up with it to begin with: the mind that invented the machine can also go directly to the work of invention itself, and let the machinery slip away.

A few days after the invention of their machine, my kids left its bulk behind in favor of a machine-free transformation, in which they changed their magetile set into a “habitat” filled with about ten pounds of extremely quietly and quickly bogarted outdoor sandbox sand.

Their dream, as they reported it, wasn’t so much to play with the habitat itself as to commune through the ether with their favorite YouTube content creator, Jaime the aquarium info specialist, by their creation, thereby affecting a relationship in which “we can go see Jaime one day, where she lives, I think in a place called Chicago!”

They love this girl they’ve never met, with a net worth of something like 300 million from her ad revenue, who makes habitats for animals, and this was their way to reach towards her. They were sure I’d send a picture; they were sure she’d respond; they were sure of their future friendship with the person who embodies so much of what they love most (small animals, ridiculous constructions, manic enthusiasm).

Here are my takeaways, since so often I can do little more of use but learn from my small and vigorous humans:

—horrifying creations are evidence not only of our darkest parts, but also of the human capacity for invention itself; the balance is in the interpretation.

—invention can be achieved through material means, with more literal consequences, or it can unfold across the dreamscape that rises from the efforts of the hands, right into the mind of another.

In other words, there is invention for the purpose of destroying, invention for the purpose of creating, and then there is the invention that brings into being the invisible, longed-for bonds of relationship.

I had assumed that the Very Bad Story, of the electric chair, could really only end in a sobering, if not terrifying, sense of the outcomes the invention had affected for my children. What my kids did instead was see the parts of the story that were interesting, that had potential, that signaled a latent capacity for more worthy processes and outcomes, and then take the whole thing from machinery of death to reinterpreted machinery to earnestly enthusiastic experience of connection.

Everything we most need to know right now, I am increasingly persuaded, swirls somewhere in the many galaxies of the child’s mind.

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