Jaws

I have found myself engaging lately in an ever frustrating argument with Vaughn about differentiating fact from fiction, especially when speaking to other children’s parents. With his current fascination with ocean animals—sharks, squids and the like—Vaughn is going around playgrounds regaling other children’s parents about his many ocean adventures. His latest fish story is how he survived the attack of a woodland shark. I’m trying to be a conscientious parent and remind him that this is a story he is telling, but others might think it true, but “You know that it’s not true right? You know you haven’t been attacked by a shark, right?”

“Uh-huh. But I did get bit down at Grandma Nimmie’s. I got bit by a woodland shark.”

Yeah. Grandma Nimmie, who lives at The Coast with a lake in her backyard. Whatever. I finally give up and shamefacedly look away whenever I overhear Vaughn entertaining unsuspecting parents with his tale of the violent woodland shark attack.

It’s not that I have a problem with Vaughn’s being “creative with the truth,” but it’s not like he’s saying he’s been attacked by a dragon, and he’s just so emphatic about it, right down to showing off his healing microscopic shark bite (that I’m now informed is fading into a scar. I’ll take his word for it), and I don’t want to have one of those kids that just goes around telling people about how he barely escaped a house fire and his mom is an exotic dancer—I mean things that people might actually be led to believe.

Today, he comes back from playing at the river telling me that there were a bunch of piranhas at the river behind a fallen log. Right, like your bite from the woodland shark.

“Yes, but these were REAL! There really were piranhas!”

“Wait a minute…You mean there is no such thing as a woodland shark? You just made it up? Woodland sharks don’t exist?”

“No.”

I don’t like to think of myself as a particularly gullible person, especially a person capable of being conned by a 6-year-old, and before you think you have a bridge to sell me, keep in mind that I’ve read him all these different books on the myriad of different angler fish, squid, whale and shark species with names like coffinfish, tasseled wobbegong or the infamous cookiecutter shark.

I just thought this was yet another ocean species with a rather exotic name. I mean it seemed a little odd that one would name a sea creature a “woodland” shark, but I figured it must be some kind of fresh water shark that inhabits creeks and ponds in the forest or something, one of those obscure species that looks like an odd piece of wood (…land) or something, or had big, round, long-lashed eyes and resembled a cuddly forest creature. I figured it was like the Humbolt squid and that Vaughn just latched onto the name and it stuck in his brain, one of the exposés I missed on a Discovery Channel DVD. Now, I come to find out that he’s actually being fairly accurate about his encounter with the woodland shark—he has an invisible scar from a vicious fictitious assault by a mythical shark. Yep, Vaughn is the victim of an imaginary woodland shark attack. I guess I should have listened more closely when he told me that those pieces of wood down at Grandma Nimmie’s were the teeth of the woodland shark. I just thought he was embellishing his fish tale.

Well, at least I won’t have to sit in the background at parks anymore shaking my head sadly as I overhear him duping some other kid’s parents into sympathizing about his apparitional brush with death and showing off the scars to prove it. My conscience will be free. I won’t have to concern myself that I’m raising a child of tall tales. Rather, just a creative writer in the making. After all, it’s not my fault if some parent is so credulous as to believe in such a thing as a woodland shark. They probably still think Elvis is alive, too. Sucker. (Wait…Elvis is dead, isn’t he?)