Crazy Crap #260: The part where Jack suckers me in

There are three things you need to know about Jack Casey. He is 8 years old. His favorite show is Bear Grylls' Man vs. Wild. (Incidentally, he does a remarkably adept Bear Grylls impersonation). He has taken the Dangerous Book for Boys as his own personal Bible.

And so it was that this past weekend, when we held a block party in honor of his and neighbor Emmet Calto's first communion, Jack came to me with not-entirely-unexpected request.

"You need to help me make a knife. I have the instructions. It's for survival."

In previous years, I might have jumped in without looking on this one. A knife? Let us proceed. But five years of watching the small ones of Norwood fall from trees, collide on scooters, and endanger each others' safety--sometimes with my unwitting encouragement--has led me to be a bit more discriminating in my indulgences.

So it was that I took the tactic of delay and indirection.

"How would I know how to make a knife?" I asked.

"I have instructions." Jack laid the aptly titled Dangerous Book open on the grass. "It's for survival."

I indicated that I could not participate in the construction of any knife without the sign-off of his mother. Disaster averted.

Or so I thought. Ann's response, "Sure, if Kay's helping you, you can make a knife."

This was unexpected.

So now, I had to make a knife. We examined the two proffered designs. The first, carved entirely from wood, made entirely no sense to me. "Why," I asked Jack, "would they give you directions for an improvised knife that required you to have a knife so that you could carve an improvised knife?"

Jack, skilled logician that he is, immediately grasped the paradox and agreed to follow the other design. All we needed, he pointed out, was something sharp, such as a sharp piece of metal, or a sharp piece of glass. Sighting an empty beer bottle (this was, after all, a block party), he posited that we could simply break the bottle.

"We are not breaking the bottle," I assured him, and steered him to the safer option of searching my rotting, tumble-down, rat-invested garage, now with Emmett in tow.

This promising setting offered surprisingly little fodder for knife building, so I offered that locus of all bounty, my basement. A search of said environ yielded a tile, which I broke into a small piece, and a very promising fragment of plaster which had chipped, presumably, off the wall. Emmett located a paperclip, and suggested it would make a good handle. I gently dissuaded him, as his suggestion in reality, made absolutely no sense. We gathered a few stick-like items, thinking one might serve as a handle, and nice length of rope. Grabbing a roll of electrical tape for good measure, I ushered them outdoors for construction.

At this point, we realized none of our handle options were workable, and the boys scavenged for better options. At last, Emmett brought forth the most wondrous of items--a stick of sturdy diameter and length, cunningly split by the elements at one end. I felt he had redeemed himself from the embarrassment of the earlier paperclip suggestion.

I took Jack's hunk of plaster, wedged it into the split, then wrapped the end of the stick with black tape. Emmett and Jack were duly pleased.

Jack took it from me with a palpable sense of awe, brandished it, then announced, "Let's go attack the princesses!"

"I thought this was only for survival." But I said this only to the back of his head as he skipped merrily and murderously away.