I’ve recently tried lactose-free milk for the first time because I haven’t been able to drink real milk since I was a kid–and duh. It suddenly hit me a couple of weeks ago for the first time in my forty years that I should try the lactose-free stuff just for the hell of it, you know, on a weekend when I was going to be home in case I had to deal with any of the ‘side effects’ (aka: backside effects) that I get from regular milk. Well, it turns out that I get none of that from lactose-free milk! So I’m finally drinking milk again. Never again will I have soy milk in my Cap’n Crunch. The only problem is, as usual, we people who have to deal with food reactions are further punished by exorbitant prices! Lactose-free milk costs a fortune! You would think that, considering it is actually MISSING an ingredient, it would cost less! heh heh.
Meanwhile, today we’re taking our pups for a stroll and we see these two young children, a boy and a girl, neither of them older than, I’d say, six, standing on a corner, no adults in sight. I assumed they were our neighbor’s grandkids, who I consider nothing more than terror tokens to my kid-loathing dogs, so I don’t pay them enough mind to recognize them if their faces should they end up on the side of a lactose-free milk container, which isn’t a stretch of the imagination considering what happened next. I commented to Danny that it was odd that such young kids were out there by themselves. Seconds later, they’re waving to us and saying hello in their little kiddie voices, so we waved and said hi back. But then the little boy goes, “Are you strangers?” So Danny responded that yeah, we’re kinda strange, and we said bye.
Not exactly a comforting exchange. Think about it. Obviously, this kid has been told not to talk to strangers, but the rules weren’t ever clearly spelled out for him. First, he talked to us BEFORE realizing we ‘might’ be strangers. And then, he ASKED us if we were strangers. Now, what would he have done if we had said, “No, we’re not strangers, we’re friends of your grandpa”? See? ANYONE could answer that question to the kid’s satisfaction, making him believe he’s NOT talking to a stranger since he apparently doesn’t quite understand that a ‘stranger’ would be ANY person that he doesn’t know, not just someone who, when interrogated, is willing to admit they are a stranger. Scary stuff. It’s 1:41 A.M. as I write this. Do you know where your children are? And do you know if they understand the precise definition of the word ‘stranger’?
