Peace Frog

My neighbor’s 9-year-old granddaughter runs into my yard and proudly displays the melted chocolate on her fingers.
“Look, we have chocolate,” she tells me.
“No kidding,” I respond, warning her that she had better not get chocolate on her good clothes. Her 7-year-old sister is right behind. She also shows me the chocolate on her hands.
“Are the boys home?,” the older one asks.
When they were younger, I would take the two girls on a tour of my house, spending the most time in Michael and Danny’s rooms.
“Look they didn’t make their beds today,” I’d tell the two tiny girls as they looked in awe at all the trophies, medals, baseballs, posters, instruments and other stuff in the bedrooms.
Since then “Are the boys home?” is really code for “Can we go inside and look at all their new stuff?”
I explain that Danny is at a baseball game and that Michael had four wisdom teeth pulled less than 24 hours before and is trying to rest.
Ending my sentence, I notice the black “peace sign” earrings dangling from the 9-year-old’s ears.
“I like your earrings,” I tell her.
She twirls them proudly and tilts her head to one side the way girls sometimes do when they receive a compli-ment on what they are wearing. We did not have a discussion about the evolution of the peace sign over the past 50 years. When her grandmother overheard me complimenting the earrings, she remarked that she didn’t even realize the strangely-shaped earrings were a symbol for peace.

The day before, a peace sign T-shirt on a boy who couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 caught my attention. Just before the girls with the chocolate on their hands had come over to see me, another neighborhood girl was playing tennis in the street wearing a tie-dye T-shirt.
Children wearing symbols of the 60s and having no idea what they are is nothing new. For some reason, the earrings, the T-shirt and the tie-dye made me feel a little nostalgic. Born in 1963, I was not a member of the 60s generation. As someone who came of age in the late 70s and early 80s, I did admire a lot of 60s music, fashion and philosophy.

“Alexis had the cutest peace sign earrings on,” I tell my wife later.
“All the girls wear them,” she explains.
Danny, 15, is curious about why we find a child wearing peace sign earrings so interesting. Everyone wears stuff with the peace sign.
I explain that when I was a child the peace sign was not a child’s toy. Wearing a peace sign was too radical for a young child. It symbolized all kinds of things to the silent majority, including possible “anti-American” leanings.
“Isn’t it silly that people could get others so angry by wearing a symbol for peace?” I ask my wife and son.
Mary agrees.
Danny doesn't respond.

Let me know what you think.

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