This all started, I now can see, when she concocted herself as a victim, somewhere along the line. Yes, we cruelly took away her “normalcy,” she’d tell her attorney in a more perfect world. She thinks of herself as Anne Frank, without the nasty Holocaust bits. We are “Nazis” who removed an 11-year-old girl from her pre-teen society and stole from her the experience of the latest movies, gossip, TV programs, rap releases, celebrity and fashion magazines, and other moronic diversions of her age and time in America. We gave her no other option than to amuse herself without any electronics except a laptop computer, a GameBoy, and of course everyone’s all-time favorite, a light bulb, under which she has read so far (and still counting) fifty books by authors as diverse and difficult as Dickens, Peter Carey, Le Carre, Kingsolver, Golding, Salinger, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling. Thus feeling pitifully deprived, she designed, decorated and flew paper airplanes off balconies, SCUBA dived on the Great Barrier Reef, sailed the Malacca Strait, snorkelled reefs around Bali and French Polynesia, explored exotic Indian souks and bazaars, rode camels in Rajasthan and elephants in Zimbabwe, canoed down African rivers, ate weird foods, skied an active volcano and a Southern Alp, and rafted white water Andean rivers. She acquired knowledge without even knowing she was. In two words, she was feeling tortured and deprived.
For her lost normalcy she turned for succor somewhere around our visit in Sumatra to a computer program named “The Sims–The People Simulator from the Creator of Sim City,” in which she controls the life of a cyber family (The MacPhersons, in this instance), their comfort, social life, energy, bladder function, fun, food, hygiene, life and death, and so on. With The Sims, Molly has made herself no less than God–which she feels is her rightful pre-teen status (and higher, anyway, than the one she enjoys outside her cyber world, so far).
“My God, won’t he ever learn to flush the toilet without being told?” she shouts at the computer. “Did I leave the seat up?” I ask myself furtively.
It amazes me how Molly and Fraser, who also has discovered The Sims, operate differently. Fraser buys pinball and espresso machines for the MacPhersons cyber family and forgets essential furniture like beds and chairs. He bought us (and only incidentally, himself) a maxi-width TV screen, which required him to move our other sticks of furniture on the lawn. “What if it rains?” I asked him. “It doesn’t,” he replied. Molly, on the other hand, frets over “feelings” and whether we are fed and warm, comfortable and secure. She rearranges our cyber furniture, while facing our laptop in an Auckland, New Zealand, motel room that doesn’t contain enough furniture to sit on, let alone rearrange for real. (In the news today, I must sadly report that The Sim’s Social Services operatives took away one of Molly’s adopted children; apparently the infant was starving and filthy. Social Services came right back to her, however, to offer her another adoption. All right by me in America!)
We have lived as a family an entire year in a mobile environment that makes Molly’s Anne Frank comparison partly apt. We were not quite in Anne’s attic cupboard together. But living in close quarters–often the same room, or two rooms, not counting the bathroom–has made us marvel at how we survived and with such aplomb. Indeed, we ride together, sightsee together, travel together, play together, entertain together, eat and sleep together, until at certain times the rats-in-a-maze reaction is triggered, turning Molly and Fraser to The Sims for breathing space.
What we have learned–and oh, how we have learned! We do not need nearly the space in our own house at home. We do not need cell phones, or phones at all, pagers, DSL, TVs in three rooms, three bathrooms, a guest bedroom, or two late-model cars–OK, maybe two cars but one car should be a $100 jalopy. We now know we only thought we couldn’t live without, until we lived without. We don’t know what we’ll do in 2,300 feet of living space when we move back in. This belief, that less is OK, is shared, thank God. So we aren’t simply freaks. An old friend named Guy Griscom, who has lived in remote foreign places and now hangs his panama in Florida, e-mailed us: “Two absent parents working to buy an ever-bigger home and an SUV bigger than the homes most families in the world live in, and someone else’s initials on all their clothing down to underwear, just makes no sense to me. The greatest thrill for my kids this summer has been watching the turtles climb out from the ocean, waddle up the beach, and lay eggs after digging the perfect hole. Cost $00.00.”
Maybe The Sims is a symptom of our family’s apprehension about getting home after a year of footloose travel. My worry heightened to a swooning delirium today when I read in the New Zealand Herald that the U.S. Supreme Court has had to decide whether a handicapped golf caddy can or cannot employ an electric golf cart in tournament play. I was shaking my head at this only to turn the page to read that Japanese lawmakers are hopping mad because whales are eating their fish. So maybe it’s not just America. I wonder, though, what we as a family have wrought. Will we welcome the tort-dominated American Way, where someone else must be blamed even for our own abject stupidity and loss of judgment? We have taken pride in risking sheer cliffs, without railings or U.S. Park Service Rangers shouting at us that it’s dangerous. After 12 months of “home” schooling, will Molly and Fraser have the chance to learn at their own pace in a system that, by law, must wait for the slowest, rather than cheer on the fastest? Will we be tolerant of shelling out 20 times more money for the same goods and services we bought in 10 other places for that much less? Will we be able to ignore the aggressive and coarse language and ubiquitous references to sex and violence in America that we have lived without this year?
Our plates back home will be full, and since we crossed the International Date Line in the middle of the Pacific yesterday on a day that gave us two Friday the thirteenths, we probably should heed warnings and expect the richness of the diet back home to make us a little queasy. But could we end up deleting ourselves, not as Sims but for real, from a society that may not feel that much like home to us anymore?
