The first notion I had of humanity’s vulnerability probably came when I was 3 from a Tom & Jerry cartoon. I dimly remember, every weekday, between 2 and 3p.m., plopping myself down in the brown bean bag in front of the TV. Baby blanket in hand, I’d will away the Calgon and L’Oreal commercials, just to hear the soothing swell of canned orchastra rise from our 24” screen. The Tom & Jerry theme song pumped the equivalent of black coffee into my 3-year-old veins, and it worked nicely to gear me up for a wonderful afternoon of cartoon violence at its best.

As I got older, it struck me how speedily Tom would recover after he took, say, a cannon ball blast to the stomach. The very next scene, there he’d be again hot on Jerry’s tail, no arm sling, no 9-1-1 calls, no emergency squads, just business as usual. It was amazing! Had this happened to your typical human, he’d certainly be dead, or at least severely maimed–but cartoons had it different, I guess. They had the remarkable ability to throw themselves back together again and start where they left off. A 1000 volt shock, where Tom’s skeleton would flash like a strobe light, did little but maybe slow him down a bit. He’d still be good to finish out the rest of the episode. Cartoons held the key to violence without repercussion.

And this is exaclty why Tom & Jerry was not a show for kids…or actually…it was, but, perhaps, it shouldn’t be for today’s kids. Hardly able to discern between fantasy and reality, today’s kids seem compelled to immitate what they see on TV. I, however, was immune to such urges. A cat chasing a mouse in circles with an ax hardly influenced me. Nor was I tempted to pull a similar stunt on my sisters whenever Jerry caught Tom in the mouth with a cast-iron skillet, breaking his teeth to the sweet song of shattering glass.

Although, in all honesty, I must mention here that my record isn’t completely clean. One day I caught myself employing a basic Bugs Bunny tactic–but only this one time, I promise. If I could take it back I would, but at the time, I was 5 and the temptation took a near-supernatural hold on me. Even now, I try to push my delete-memory button as I watch my cousin hanging precariously from the porch banister. I cry out to him, try to warn him of myself, who is moving across the width of the porch toward him. My cousin, so sadly trusting, pays me no attention. He reaches for the Matchbox car I had so wrecklessly flung off the porch and into the shrubs three feet below. Wishing not to pass up the opportunity, I go right to work peeling each of his fingers, one-by-one, from the banister. (You know, like how the cartoons do it. Except, he hung from a porch banister instead of the way-up-high I-beam of a skyscraper, or a cliff.) 

He looks up at me, startled, confused. E Tu Brute?  His irises are swallowed up by two black pools of pupil. I can almost see my cartoon grin in them. My cousin’s pleas for me to stop falls on deaf ears. I just finish working loose my cousin’s second to the last finger when I watch him roll off the porch side. His delicate blond hair disappear into the scratchy, tangled mess below. Tom & Jerry couldn’t have done it better. What a dreadful little boy I had become.

The results weren’t nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped. I felt stangely empty inside. It must have been my first taste of remorse. He did not briefly stand on mid-air with a funny face and wave to the camera before he fell, leaving a humorous, smoky plume behind. No, gravity did its job right away. And further to my dismay, he must have hit his knee on a stump or a root or something, because an ear-splitting cry immediately rose from his new hiding place. I thought for sure it was the end of him. So, I did what any normal kid that age would do and ran like heck. The rest of the day, I stayed inside grandma’s house, across the street, where I peeked through the window curtains. Any minute I expected to see my uncle’s furious face emerge from the front door of their house across the street. I dared not come out until my parents said it was time to leave. And then I lay low in the backseat until we were at least a mile outside of town.

“Just sleepy, mom.”

On a good note, my cousin must have made it out of the bushes okay, because no police ever showed up to arrest me. And besides that, many years later, I attended his wedding. Even better, there appeared to be no physical damage from his fall. I detected no limp, no new stutter in his speech.

Unfortunately, my cousin had to learn a hard lesson that day (and maybe I did too): people aren’t cartoons. Fact: this world is rough; people get hurt. That’s just the way it is, or at least until heaven comes to earth, and maybe then we can live like cartoons, never feeling pain or hurt. But for now…were stuck here, with frail bodies and the rest of the package deal that came with the Fall of man. 

Anyway, after that little experiment with my cousin, I vowed to never mix cartoon behavior with reality ever again. That is, if you don’t count the little trick I picked up from The Little Rascles that gray Sunday morning, when I socked my sister in the nose, but in a funny, little-rascal-sort-of-way. After the shrieking and crying died down, I decided the same goes for Buckwheat and reality. … Okay, I shouldn’t ever be allowed to watch TV again.  

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