Kids really love sour things. They’re crazy about sour candies that I find somewhere between repulsive and inedible. They blissfully suck on phosphorescent powders with a radioactive aroma that make me shudder from the smell alone.
Why do kids love sour so much?
It seems to me it’s because missing out hurts them less. The sour taste doesn’t scare them. As far as they’re concerned, everything is possible. My son Paran plans to be a firefighter and a pilot and a lizard catcher and the guy with the paddleboard we saw at the Kinneret and that green one from PJ Masks — and all that only until age five, because at five Daddy’s already buying me a motorcycle. That’s what he tells his friends. And he’s not putting them on. He really believes it. Life, as far as he’s concerned, is a giant supermarket of opportunities, and he plans to grab as many as possible — and what does he care if he misses out on one product or two? He’s got a whole supermarket, after all.
We are already veterans of missed chances. We recoil from that sour taste, and we already know there are entire shelves in this supermarket of life that will never be ours. They belong to the better-looking, or the braver, or the stronger, or simply to those whom fortune favored.
And even the shelves that seem within reach we approach with caution, because missing something that’s close hurts much more — so we simply won’t try. Anything to avoid the sour taste. Better dreams in a drawer than a glorious, sour-tinged failure.
And on the drive my sweet ones began to fall asleep one by one: the firefighter, the fighter pilot, the great scientist and the champion of Ninja Israel.
And I stopped at a roadside kiosk and bought the sourest sour candies there are, and put one under each of their pillows. To keep them healthy.
