Seven Red

babygirl is under the impression that the ceiling fan lamp is God. In fact, babygirl points at any overhead light source and intones, very seriously, “Gaw.” We first noticed this when we were back in Pennsylvania, reading the masterwork Spot Goes to the Beach (in which our hero, well, goes to the beach with a monkey and a hippo, and has many adventures). So, you read Spot and ask babygirl to identify various items on the page.

“What’s this?”

“Baw!” (ball)

“How about this?”

“Daw!” (dog)

“What about this one?”

“Bow!” (boat)

Pointing at the sun, “And what’s this?”

“Gaw!”

The what now? Is babygirl saying God? The first time babygirl did this, she called me in, saying “I’m really alarmed. babygirl’s calling the sun ‘God.’” Hmm, I say. I wonder what they’re teaching her at that daycare. You see, babygirl, despite being born to a couple of raging atheists, went to an uber-Christian daycare center. When we went looking for daycare, it was the cheapest and the closest to our home. And there were tons of kids there, so we figured it can’t be bad. And it was clean, and the people were really nice, and the credentials were good and all that. Did I mention that it was the cheapest? The one concern we had was that the center was located physically in a fundamentalist church.

We ain’t church folk. I mean, seriously. I don’t even know what it would be like to go to a church (or any religious institution) once a week ever. I can’t even imagine it. Now, I backed off my “angry college student atheism” long ago. That’s the kind where you’re constantly trying to provoke religious people so that you can get into an argument with them. I realized that this was a waste of time, but more importantly, I realized that I truly do not care what they think, as long as they’re not bothering me about it. In “angry college student atheism” (a species of “sophomoric college student theory guy”), you feel oppressed. In my more laid back version (and hell, I’d even get behind some version of a secular Gaia principle or even Buddhism, if it came down to it), I find these belief systems more amusing than anything else. Call it religious libertarianism. I’m sure I’ll get angry again when they try to get babygirl to pray to Sweet Jesus in the public schools, but for now, I have no enthusiasm for religious confrontation.

But this daycare in the church thing did raise some issues, not least because it was one of those fundie churches, or so it seemed to me. If I do have a religious heritage, it’s old school urban immigrant Catholic, which always struck me as at least pragmatic. Plus, there’s booze. These protestants with their body-is-a-temple prudery annoy me more than the drunk old Irish priest, who always seemed to be just kinda phoning it in, which anyone with any sense can get behind. Truth be told, I don’t even trust these new-fangled suburban Catholics, who seem like a strange variety of Protestant fundamentalists all their own (I won’t even get into the weirdo Latin mass characters). But, point being, the daycare was in a church, and a fundie church at that, so we were a bit nervous. When we asked about the affiliation with the church, we were told that there was a strict division between the church activities and the daycare activities. OK. That’s settled. It turns out that we were reading “division” somewhat more metaphorically than intended. Where we thought the director meant an organizational division, she just meant that they locked the connecting door. She quite literally held the keys to the kingdom, apparently. Damn Protestant literalism! So there was babygirl, going to daycare with the Noah story and all these Bible toys. she had to pinch me every time I jokingly whistled “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world…” when I walked into the place. But again. Laid-back atheism. Besides, babygirl is only a babygirl, so let them proselytize! Whatever, right?

“And what’s this one?”

“Gaw!”

No doubt, we shall soon teach babygirl that the ceiling fan lamp isn’t the creator of all things seen and unseen. And, indeed, the people at the fundie daycare were quite wonderful, and we know she learned so much from them. We actually ended up loving the fundie daycare, and the people there, as did babygirl. And, for a final positive note, it may just be that babygirl is a wonderful materialist. she posits that the fundie daycare people showed her one of those absurd images with light breaking through clouds and taught her that that was God. So babygirl performed the remarkable abstraction: light source from above = Gaw. So, I expect, when faced with one of those very grungy, very dark noir scenes in which the naked lightbulb dangles from a stripped wire in the filthy, neon-strobed hotel, babygirl would point to that lightbulb and intone, very seriously, “Gaw!” Maybe there’s something to that Protestant literalism after all. I can live with that…

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