Natural Disaster

Once upon a time, somewhere between Brooklyn and Danbury, two very fraught parents tried everything to get their child to stop crying.

It was late, and very past that child's bedtime, and it was Christmas Eve. Now this child wasn't brought up celebrating Christmas, but she was well aware of its existence. To keep this child from kvetching they gave her a candy cane. Being hyperactive, the child didn't get to eat much candy -- this was back in the day when they thought candy made hyper children freak out.

This worked on the little girl for awhile. Sitting in the front seat of the Rambler between her parents, she peeled down the plastic wrapper and began to suck on the candy cane. She kept the wrapper on the candy, only moving it down a notch now and again when it was absolutely necessary. This little girl did not like getting dirty.

The radio was on, and Wolfman Jack was introducing Christmas carol after Christmas carol. The little girl knew all of the words to these popular, yet decidedly goy songs, and normally she would have sung along, but something was about to go very wrong.

As if by design, the candy cane got stickier and stickier with every pull of the paper, and at once, it happened - the little girl realized that her fingers were sticky. Her well-meaning parents, fearing a meltdown, suggested to the child that she lick her fingers to get the sugar off. The parents must have been sleepy too, as they neglected to realize that the child's mouth was sticky from the candy. Licking her own fingers made matters worse.

The parents had no time to prepare for the disaster to come: Out of her mind with stickiness, the child begins to scream, and she flings her candy behind her, only to hit one of her older siblings in the back seat. The older children begin to complain.

Rather than resorting to the usual strong-arm tactics to resolve disorder, the father turns up the radio and suggests that the children listen to the radio - they're tracking Santa! He's over Greenland! No, no. The little girl wants to go home and take a bath. She's sticky. The poor, frazzled parents try to explain to the girl that she is on her way home, and if she would just calm her OCD ass down, she'd be in her own bathtub in just under an hour. "Please," the parents begged, "just listen to Santa! He's flying around the world."

This curly haired ball of fury was not going to be tricked into listening about Santa - a man, her parents had painstakingly explained, did not exist any more than Bugs Bunny. She was not going to listen, she just wanted to be home, home in her bath. Why nobody kept the girl from putting her candy-coated hands in her otherwise clean hair remains a mystery.

Several years later, when Walter Cronkite was freeing children all along the east coast from eating their green leafies until it was understood just what was going wrong on Three-Mile Island, the little girl's parents did not fear. They had already survived one core meltdown. They knew that the world would be saved, not by confection, Santa Claus, or even Wolfman Jack. It would eventually be Mr. Bubble who would save the day.