Explaining the unexplainable

I promise that I don’t sit around comparing my boys to each other all day long, regardless of how recent entries are carrying that theme. Today, too, though, I once again found myself recalling Sam as I worked with Gabe and found that things are really different this time around.

We went over to Sam’s school with a bag of canned food in hand, ready to join the students on a trek down the street to a local church’s food bank. It was quite an impressive sight: the entire student body of his elementary school, strung out in a line over several blocks, each with a small bag of food in hand to deposit in the cardboard boxes inside the church. I heard some of the kids talking about what they were doing, obviously parroting what they’d been told: “This is so people don’t have to be hungry for Thanksgiving.” Gabe trotted next to me, mittened hands waving in the wind and tiny reddened nose poking out over the fabric covering the lower half of his face. He had no idea what we were doing, despite my efforts to explain.

On the way home, I tried again. “There are people in our town who don’t have any food to eat.”

GABE: “Not in their refrigerators?”
ME: “They might not have refrigerators at all. Maybe not a house.”
GABE: “Oh. They should get one.”
ME: “But they don’t have the money, sweetheart.”
GABE: “…”
ME: “Can you imagine if you didn’t have any food in your fridge?”
GABE: “Did they steal our food?!”

Now, see, even at this age, Sam would have been practically in tears at the thought of people being hungry. Gabe is a more typical four years old, self-centered as a rule. I’m not sure how to explain charity to him effectively, or even if I can do so. I’ll keep modeling it to him, hoping osmosis will work, but words are failing me right now. At least he didn’t try to grab boxes of mac ‘n cheese from the display shelves of the food bank; I saw his eyes light up at the sight of them.