When your kid just won't give it a rest

It’s a scene that I haven’t witnessed lately, but I’m sure it still takes place across the country and even, I daresay, around the world.

A mother is out shopping with her kid. The kid is usually a boy, and the time is usually the afternoon.

It hasn’t been an easy day for the mother (as if mothers ever have easy days), and the kid isn’t making things better. He isn’t doing what she’s asking him to do. Or they’re in a mall, and he wants to go to a certain store, but she doesn’t. Most likely she has to go home to make dinner. Quite possibly she’s still trying to figure out what the family is going to have for dinner. (My own mother was famous for saying “I wish someone would invent some new kind of meat!”)

Finally, when the kid’s tantrum has raged to the point where her blood pressure exceeds the national debt, she looks at him and says the fatal words: “When we get home, you’re taking a nap!”

She’s pouring gasoline on a fire, and she knows it, but how much more can the poor woman stand? The kid is yelling even more, the crowd around them is getting bigger, and if they were in Sicily, Mount Etna would be taking notes. Finally she drags him away.

Part of me wishes I could have taken the kid aside and tried to reason with him. But another part of me knows this would, at best, have done no good.

“Look, kid,” I always want to lean down and say, “she’s doing you a favor. Someday, when you’re an old fart my age and have work to do and bills to pay, you’ll wish you could take a nap. You’d sell your soul for even ten or fifteen minutes of extra slumber. And of course you’ll be on intimate terms with the snooze button.”

But I know that if I were to lean down and say this to the kid, I would have to duck.

And I always think of one time when my mother tried to get me to take a nap.

We were home. I’m sure I wasn’t behaving badly, little angel that I’m sure I was. But mothers can tell when you need a nap — it’s part of their DNA — so she tried to cajole me into bed. I must have resisted at first, because I remember her telling me that when I got up, “we’ll go to the T&H Market!”

That did the trick. Wow — a trip to the T&H Market!

Never mind that I had never heard of the T&H Market. It sounded like a marvelous place, and as I drifted into the arms of Morpheus I could just picture this fancy emporium, loaded with God knows how many wondrous goodies.

After I fulfilled my part of the bargain, my mother began to escort me to this Shangri-La.

But as our journey progressed, I began to realize I had been rooked. This land of plenty was really the corner store! The corner store my family had been going to for years! The corner store that I, now a stripling of 70, still go to when I really need something!

The store is at the corner of Teall and Herbst avenues. T&H — get it? Well, I sure did. (T&H Market, my ass — there was no sign saying that!)

I must have felt the way Ralphie, the kid in Jean Shepherd’s “Christmas Story,” felt when he found out that the messages that his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring spelled out were merely ads for Ovaltine.

And I can imagine Ralphie’s mom watching my mom and me approach the store, then nodding and whispering “Well played, Mom!”