Spent an hour with a three-year-old last night, talking about bears, and was again reminded that the purest of people is a three-year-old. Gender makes no difference. They focus, you know? If they like bears, you are into bears for the foreseeable future, and nothing gets in the way of bears.
And it turns out there are a lot of things you can talk about when you talk about bears. There are bears of all sorts of colours, probably more colors than we have words for colours, when you think about it, because bears have been around longer than words have been around.
Bears have been around since before there were even pencils, as my young friend said, which is a remarkable sentence, and inarguably true, and not something I had ever considered before.
He drew some bears, with a pencil, to show me the sort of bears he was talking about, which looked roughly like black bears. I told him I once saw a black bear in Canada, on the side of a mountain near a glacier, and we talked about all this for a while, the ideas of Canada and glaciers being new to him, but not mountains, he knew mountains, mountains were in his dreams, where they spoke to him, they have deep voices, like bears.
This was another new idea for me, that mountains and bears might have similar voices, probably from being around each other for many millions of years.
I mentioned that I had once read that bears appear to have been around for about 40 million years and probably began quite small, about the size of your dog, but then over the years some species got to be whopping huge, and we agreed that this was pretty cool, and drew some more bears for a while, before he decided that running one million laps around the house was a good idea, and away he went.
I thought about bears on the way home, and how when we are children we feel a certain friendship and camaraderie generally with bears, partly because of the whole teddy bear thing, but also because they are large and hairy and independent and strong and no one messes with them, as a rule.
I wonder if part of the reason we so like bears when we are young is because we would like to be like bears, eating anything we want and sleeping where we want