687: Small Things Considered
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Of all the things from the movies that could happen to you, and there's so many, right? I think getting shrunk down to a miniature size, I think that is one that nobody would ever choose. It seems dangerous, it seems frightening. How Marvel Comics ever thought that shrinking could be a superpower that is really totally beyond me? Turning yourself into a person the size of a pencil eraser, it doesn't make anything easier. Everything is harder. In the movie Ant-Man, the first time Ant-Man shrinks, he's instantly in mortal danger. Water in a bathtub nearly drowns him. People dancing in an apartment almost crush him with their high-heeled shoes, a rat tries to eat him. It's a ridiculous superpower. The writers actually have to cheat and give Ant-Man a whole second power, mind control over armies of ants, or he'd never get anything accomplished. But these stories of tiny people, you know, honey, I shrunk the kids, the borrowers. When I was young, I loved the film Fantastic Voyage. I do get the appeal of them. They give this feeling of what if. What if I was so small that I could stand between the wafers of an Oreo cookie that I could climb onto an insect? Last year when she was in fourth grade, Chloe thought about this a lot. She's getting suburban New Jersey. Now that she's in fifth grade, she finds this a little embarrassing. But last year, every night when she'd go to bed, she'd prepare for the possibility that magic might strike while she was asleep and that you would shrink down to the size of her dollhouse. There's preparations included. I would sleep on the edge of my pillow. It's like the very top of my head is on the pillow and then the rest of my body is on my bed. That way if she shrunk in the middle of the night, she would be on the bed and not on the pillow, which seemed way more treacherous to her. She also took a slap bracelet which, you know, can stretch out like a ruler and positioned the ruler very carefully like a little bridge from the edge of my bed to the edge of my bedside table. And why? To walk from my bed to my bedside table, where I had the little hammock. The little hammock, which she made for herself to sleep on, which is basically a bracelet of intertwined rubber bands suspended in air on a frame of cute tips. And then I also had a little couch and the couch is on the bedside table. So you walk past the ruler, you turn left, you'll see the couch and then if you go a little beyond that you'll see the hammock. Under the hammock was a calculator that she could step on like a little foot stool to get up onto the hammock and next to the couch was a post-it folded in half with a note to her parents, explaining that she had shrunk, all ready to be unfolded when this really happened to her for real. And finally, every night when she went to bed, I took some of the really important things to me, put them in a blanket and then held onto the blanket every night, hoping that
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