Author: Mohamed Marwen Meddah

Today, I went to the dentist’s for another one of my seemingly endless appointments for dental work. Sometimes I feel like I have some sort of membership card.

Anyway, as I entered the waiting room, I found this cute little 9 year old kid who was flipping through a French magazine, mainly focusing on the many pictures, flying by some and looking closer at some others.

I said hi and sat next to him and pulled a magazine from the stack too and started flipping through it myself.

The boy came across this perfume ad with a guy holding up this big snake, and he asked me: “How can he do that?”
I answered that I didn’t know, to avoid getting into the whole issue of it being a non-poisonous snake and how they can tell if a snake is poisonous or not, and I added that it looked scary, feeling a bit of responsibility there and not wanting him to go and try it if he comes across a snake someday. He agreed, so I felt reassured.

He then started pretending to read, even asking me about a word that I explained to him.

He continued flipping through his magazine, until he came by a picture of the president. He then told me about how he was in the car with his father the other day when they stopped them for the president to pass by.
And he asked me “Why can’t everyone meet him at anytime?”
I didn’t know what to answer, as I didn’t want to get into how and why the president is a very important person and all the security issues involved with his job, so I just told him that maybe there are certain times when he receives people and other times when he’s too busy.

He went on flipping through the pictures until he came across a picture of an American soldier holding a weapon in what looked like a war zone, maybe Iraq.
He asked me “Do you watch TV at night?”, pointing at the picture.
I said: “Do you mean the news?”
He answered “Yes, do you watch all the explosions and shooting?”
I said: “Yes, sometimes I do watch the news and I get to see things like that.”
He said: “I don’t like to watch it. It scares me. I like to watch cartoons.”
I said: “Cartoons are the best thing to watch. I like cartoons too.”

I then asked him what grade he was in at school, and he answered that he was in the third grade. Which made me know that he was a 9 year old, for you who wondered how I knew his age earlier.

He asked me: “And what grade are you in?”
I answered: “I finished school and now I work.”
He asked: “What do you do?”
I said, trying to stay as simple as possible: “I work with computers, I’m a programmer. Do you know the internet?”
He nodded, so I said: “I work on things on the internet.”
He asked me where I worked and so I told him that it was in the Lac region which he said he knew.

I then asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he answered that he wanted to be a dentist.

Seconds after that his father walked out from the dentist’s office and the boy said bye and ran away to his father to go home, leaving me thinking about our litte conversation.

I admire how children think, how they analyze things, how they try to understand everything, how they break the barriers between people and start a conversation, how they’re not afraid to ask the questions in their minds, how they are spontaneous and just speak their mind, how they’re instinct guides them to know what’s wrong and what’s right, how they are very peaceful, how they seem to know what they want in life…etc.

I wish we would all listen more to our children and try to be more like them, for they really have more wisdom, purity and innocence than we do, they speak the truth as they see it, they hold our human values by instinct, they see the world the way it should be, they haven’t been twisted and changed by life, they’re simply what a perfect person should be like.

The world would be such a better and more beautiful place to live in if it were ruled by children or at least people who thought like them.