And Yet More Presidential Anecdotes From A Toddler

Just a few thoughts here, after coming back from Avondale library with The Boy, who spotted an odd, early-1900s  etching hanging from the library wall as we were leaving. Some guy with a mustache, never identified.

Boy: Who is that?

Me (scanning for inscriptions): It doesn’t say.

Boy: Maybe James Garfield?

He’s three now, by the way. And I am willing to be that no one in the last century has looked at that painting and said, hey, could that be James Garfield? (Which, I am confident, it was not.)

 

Random Presidential Anecdote #2….

A while back, we were at the McWane Center with my sister-in-law, Betsy,  meandering around the archaeology section, which has a room full of various skulls and bones. The Boy pointed to one skull and said, “That’s a person skull.”

Betsy: The sign says it’s actually a chimpanzee skull.

Boy: Oh. Ronald Reagan would like that. You know, he acted with a chimpanzee before he was president.

 

And Presidential Anecdote #3….

One day we were playing doctor–he is always Dr. Brian, his pediatrician, unless we alternate and he becomes the patient. This particular afternoon, I was the doctor first, and I examined him and told him he had an ear infection. (Our standard diagnoses are ear infection, fever, or having swallowed a butterfly.) So I gave him invisible antibiotics, and then he examined me.

Me: I have a headache. Right here. And my throat is sore.

Boy: Let me see. (Pulls out various tools, listens to my heart and looks in my ears and mouth.)

Me: So can you tell me what’s wrong with me, doctor?

Boy: Well, you have polio.

(This is only funny, I realize, if you get the FDR connection.)

 

Okay, one more–it’s hard to stop once I get started. We had a friend coming over to dinner, and The Boy asked if Mr. Mattey had a beard.

Me: I think he has a goatee these days. You know, a little beard.

Boy: I was thinking it was more of a Ulysses S. Grant.