Dialogue from the back seat as we drove home from my office:
(At a red light.)
Alex: That’s the biggest truck ever! Hi, truck!
(Light turns green.)
Alex: Bye, truck! Bye bye! See you next week!
Lea: You don’t talk to stuff. You only talk to people!
Alex: Bye! Bye, truck!
Lea: No! You don’t talk to stuff! You only talk to people! Not stuff!
(Silence. A small, perfectly calibrated silence.)
Alex: (loudly) Goodbye, trees!
The best part of this is, I really think Alex was making a joke, playing off his demanding little sister. He cracked up after saying “Goodbye, trees!” — that kind of kid’s laugh where you start to worry about how long the human body can go without breathing. I’m not saying he’s ready to start writing for Letterman, but if he really was making a joke, needless to say, that is totally awesome.
You can’t talk to stuff? But what about this internet thingy–I mean “Eric Berlin” isn’t a person is he?
Congrats to Alex and his joke. Lea sounds like she wouldn’t like my favorite tree joke either. (A: Ask me if I’m a tree. B: Are you a tree? A: No)
Lea, I should mention, is perfectly capable of being silly, up to and including talking to inanimate objects. But sometimes it’s simply more fun to reprimand one’s older brother.
Getting the silence right is tough. Kudos to Alex.
Here’s one of my favorite tree jokes, written (if you can call it that) by James Ernest, before his Cheapass Games days:
A: What kind of a tree is that?
B: That’s a hemlock.
A: Really?
B: Yeah, whatever.
I’m reminded of the Smothers Brothers take on the song from Paint Your Wagon, “I Talk to the Trees”. (“Hi there, stage! You used to be a tree, didn’t you?”)