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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The age of Aquarius
By Fayza Hassan
I am an old-fashioned girl. I like things to remain the way they have always been. Any sort of change unsettles me. I have always remained a faithful Abba fan: when, 20 years after disbanding, they became fashionable again, I could only smile smugly. I still linger in front of displays of cuddly toys, racking my brain to find someone who would be overjoyed by a teddy bear just like the one I used to have. I was therefore duly alarmed by the abundance of electronic gadgets in my daughter's kitchen and the absence of any teddy bear menagerie in my grandchildren's bedrooms, when I visited them for the first time in the States.
My daughter pretended not to understand the relationship between children and teddy bears. Could she have forgotten her inordinate passion for the chubby, burping Paddington Bear we purchased for her in London, complete with bright red plastic boots and green felt gardening hat? I insistently tried to remind her of the time when, on our way to Alexandria, we had to return to Cairo upon discovering at the Rest House that old Pad had been left behind. She smiled vaguely to humour me and recounted that she once bought her then baby-daughter a rag doll, but the child had been scared out of her mind by the sight and had developed awful nightmares. Baptised Night of the Living Dead by my son-in-law, the object was relegated to the back of the laundry cupboard until it could be given away. "And what has she been sleeping with since then?" I had asked rather sternly. "She sleeps in a water bed and likes real things," my daughter had answered patiently. "I told you to buy her a gold bracelet." I secretly congratulated myself for having been wise enough to listen to her, and to have resisted the purchase of the beautiful, veiled Moroccan doll I had so admired at Casablanca airport.
Over the years, I have become better acquainted with my grandchildren. My granddaughter "needs" lots of makeup, costume jewellery and clothes; she is her own doll, spending the best of her time trying on clothes and different hair styles. When she turns 18, she will have her belly button pierced, she keeps telling me. My grandson plays computer games; the last time I saw him, his best friend was Pokemon, a deformed creature in a little box. It has beady, bulging eyes, crooked ears, and the body of a toad. It moves sideways and backwards in its cage and gives you a dirty look at the touch of a button. Its owner is mesmerised, and keeps asking for more Pokemons, which to me all look exactly alike. This particular gadget has ousted the disgusting fetus -- also in a box -- which inhabited the little boy's pocket the summer before last. When I inquired about the obviously jilted predecessor, my grandson smiled. "Oh! him... he was a virtual baby," he said in a rather condescending tone. "I don't play with him anymore, that's for the little kids."
Every year, when I return to the States, I cannot help watching the children for signs of mental damage. How can a child be normal if he/she has nor been given the benefit of owning a well-worn fuzzy toy? Surely something essential must be missing. Until now, however, I have not detected any threatening symptoms; only a little strangeness, perhaps, but then again the children belong to a new, improved, hi-tech breed. Last time I saw them, my pretty 14 year-old granddaughter was baking cakes from cake mixes then dyeing her hair red and green with the leftover food colouring; she now had her own junior line of makeup, which included dark green and black lipstick; for a treat, she begged her mother to offer her a professional French manicure which entailed sticking false polyester nails, cut square then airbrushed a sickly off-white, over her own. I obliged, and she promptly bit the freshly sprayed plastic extensions exactly as old-fashioned children bit their unadorned nails at her age.
Expensively dressed to look like a vagrant, my exceedingly skinny nine-year-old grandson was on a fat-free diet to copy his schoolmates. He was still fascinated by sea horses, bugs and reptiles. Recently, he has been busy training a snail to do tricks; from what I have been hearing, progress is somewhat less than encouraging, but at least he seems over the awful Pokemon.
Both children went around with pagers in their pockets, blissfully ignorant of the fact that not everyone owned cordless and cell telephones, a fully-automatic car, a television in every room and a lap-top on which to do their homework. There were still no favourite books on their bedside tables, but they ably looked up information on the Internet, exactly like others, not so long ago, opened an encyclop¾dia. More than ever, their notion of a day out was a trip to the mall.
As I was preparing to leave at the end of my holidays, my grandson watched me pack silently. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Did Pokemon throw up his breakfast?" The sad little face lit up and, in a rare show of affection, he hugged me. "I don't want you to leave," he whispered. "Come on," I told him, as gaily as I could, "I'll be back before you know it, and I'll bring you a nice present. What would you like this time?" Surreptitiously wiping a tear away, he inquired politely: "Would it be too much trouble if I asked you to bring me a virtual pyramid?"
