When the turtles take over

IMAGINE waking up one morning, opening your eyes, and seeing an assailant, blunt weapon in hand, looming over your bed, ready to bring the heavy weapon down on your head.

What would you do?

This actually happened to someone I know. To this day he tells the story of how he was preparing for some pretty intense college examinations while simultaneously juggling his duties as husband to a wife who worked shifts and father of an energetic three-year-old.

One Friday night, and into the wee hours of Saturday morning, this young man had sat hunched over his books cramming information into his head until it felt like his cranium would pop.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he consoled himself. “I can sleep in a bit and hopefully recover for the work I still have to revise.”

However, it was not to be. His Saturday morning sleep-in was about to take a dramatic and dangerous turn. These days he tells of how he was dreaming about boiling the water in the kettle as his three year-old son repeatedly asked for his morning tea.

“Just a minute son,” he said encouragingly in the dream. “Not long now and you will have your tea my boy.”

And it was around this time that the dream faded and something, a voice in his head – it must have been his guardian angel – told him to open his eyes.

His eyelids felt like sandpaper but he forced his eyes open, just in time to see his toddler, who had been asking, begging and finally demanding that his sleeping father get up to make his morning tea, about to bring a 1kg dumbell down on his dad’s skull.

Of course that was the end of the lazy Saturday morning.

A few minutes later, as his son happily sipped his tea from his sippy cup, while watching his Ninja Turtles cartoons, the grateful father rejoiced in the fact that he had woken up just seconds before all the information he had gathered the previous night was smashed out of his head.

But this youngster had other run-ins with authority.

One day as the family – mom, dad and son – stood in a queue at the supermarket … well, when I say “stood”, I mean that the parents were standing, and their toddler was weaving between them, darting around and causing a bit of a disturbance.

Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes widened and he pointed a quivering chubby finger at something behind his parents.

“Mom! Dad!” he cried out in excitement. “Look at the ninjas!”

No disrespect intended to my Muslim friends and family, but this young lad, with no filter on his mouth and no inhibitions whatsoever, had spotted two Muslim ladies elegantly dressed in black with their niqābs covering their faces.

His embarrassed parents tried to shush him, ignore him and even threaten him, but he was having none of it.

“Look, look! LOOOOOK at the ninjas mummy and daddy!! Look at the ninjaaaas!”

What could the blushing parents say to the amused Muslim ladies behind them but, “Sorry … he is obsessed. He watches a lot of TV.”

And as if that is not enough, then it was my turn. Yes, I too had a run-in with this little terror.

Knowing how much he loved the Ninja Turtles, I decided to take my nephew to the cinema to watch the recently released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie at the cinema. I should have taken his parents’ question more seriously when they, almost in unison, asked: “Are you sure?”

As it happened, it was a breeze … initially. We got to the cinema and he drooled over the poster. I got him his popcorn and snacks and he stuffed it into his face. The commercials and previews of coming attractions flashed onto the big screen and he sat transfixed, hardly breathing.

“This is going great,” I thought to myself.

Then the main attraction, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie started … and so, to my undoing, did my nephew!

He leapt off his seat and ran into the aisle, then down the aisle he rolled bellowing, “Unca Lance! The ninja turtles are fighting me!” He proceeded to the front of the cinema and started doing katas and other action moves … and, by the way, he did it very loudly!

Bellowing, rolling around, running up and down the cinema, it went on for a good 20 minutes. I kept telling myself, “When the turtles appear on the screen, he’ll settle down, surely.”

I was wrong. He didn’t even notice the turtles, he was in full rampage; even me telling him, pointing and turning his head to the screen didn’t work. He was having none of it. This wasn’t the day for watching the movie.

Today, around 30 years later, there are people probably still living in Kimberley, that have a vague recollection of how their viewing experience was ruined when they went to watch the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film on the big screen.

By the way, a year or so later the movie was released on VHS, and the young bugger would sit quiet as a mouse, eyes fixed on the screen without twitching a muscle, completely absorbed in (sigh) … his “favourite movie”.

What point am I trying to make, you ask? None, actually. I was just thinking about the lad, who has become a pretty stable, level-headed young man, as he celebrated his 34th birthday this past week.

If there could be a point to any of this, it could be that we ignore what we consider the small, weak, insignificant people at our own peril.

We can try to control them, silence them, manipulate them and try to make them see and do things our way because we think we are stronger, but at some point, when they have set their minds on what they want to do, we (and we know who we are) could be facing a real challenge.