This New Generation

Last night some neighbor kids were over hanging out.  A newly minted 5 year old stepped up to the piano to play us a tune.  She sat regally on the bench, flounced her hands out a little, then turned, eyed the 'crowd' and said, "Do any of you have cell phones???  Turn them off!"  Here she is, just a couple of hours into being five, and she's got the new drill down.
It reminded me of something that happened on our canoe trip down the Namekagon this summer with 8 of my most favorite kids.  We spent much of our time on the river tackling ye olde '2 minute mysteries'.  If you don't know what these are, they are kind of like glorified 20 questions.  Or gorified.  Because they almost all contain a story of death or dismemberment.  For example, the person in charge of the mystery might give out the line, "The music stopped and she died".  And then the solving crew has to ask yes or no questions to try to figure out how she died.  In this case it just so happens that she is a blind circus performer on the highwire and she knows that she is at the other end of the wire when the music stops, but some jealous co-worker wants her out of the picture and so stops the music early, she gets confused, stops, and falls to her death.  That is seriously the answer.  And the thing is that the questioners will get there.  It never fails to amaze me.  Another one starts with just these facts: "A man goes into a restaurant, orders an albatross sandwich, takes one bite, then jumps up, runs outside and kills himself."  Solve.  And they do.  Once you get into the groove with these you know what kind of questions to ask to get you to the (often grisly) conclusions.  But here's the thing about this new generation:  they have a whole new set of questions that they think to ask.  Such as, "Were there weapons of mass destruction involved?"  or "Did he use biological weapons?"  These questions, when posed by an innocent looking 8 year old lounging in a canoe in the middle of a fabulous wilderness, can be disconcerting.  And NO!  of course there are no WMD or biological whatevers, there are only ice cubes and shipwrecks and circus workers.  These mysteries were connocted in an more an innocent era, when murders were accomplished with icicles or umbrellas.  But now I feel like I've given too much away.