No, I didn’t title this post with the intention of drawing in thousands of innocent readers who typed “lick the pole” into their favorite search engine, but who meant “pole” metaphorically. My apologies. I’m talking about an actual pole. A tall, thin, metal, cylindrical pole planted in the ground. In this case, with a stop sign at the top.

Some kids must have recently seen A Christmas Story, because at my son’s bus stop this morning a boy called out to him, “Lick the pole!” You know the scene. A boy’s tongue freezes to the pole because it’s so cold out. Comedy ensues.

My son hasn’t seen the movie yet. So when the boy yelled, “Lick the pole!”, my son, a second-grader, just looked at him. Amused. Or bemused. Why would he want to lick a metal pole? The boys at the bus stop weren’t clever enough to use the movie’s famous powerful persuasive tactics — there were no triple-dog dares. There wasn’t even a double-dog dare. Just shouts of “Lick the pole!”

It was like a strip club. Okay, it wasn’t anything like a strip club, except there was a pole. And not the brightest assortment of males.

I told my son that there’s a movie in which a boy’s tongue freezes to a pole. My son’s friend, our neighbor, a nice, civilized girl who has seen A Christmas Story, then entertained him by telling him about the movie and the lamp that looks like a leg.

Meanwhile, half a dozen boys took turns, pretending to lick the metal stop-sign pole, building up their courage and getting closer and closer until one of them chanced it and touched the pole with his tongue. Nothing happened. It wasn’t that cold this morning. A bit windy, a chill in the air, but not cold enough for instant freezing of a tongue to a pole, which is indeed possible, based on the most reliable source I know of for such subjects.

Soon enough, all the boys were taking turns touching the pole with their tongues. One after the other touched their tongues to the filthy pole. Then another boy, in kindergarten, walked up to the pole and licked it, like it was an ice cream cone. A full lick. It shined in the strip where he’d licked it, one clean spot. Licked clean.

“Why’d you do that?” someone asked.

“They told me to.”

His father, who’d told him not to go near the pole just a minute earlier,  and had looked away for only a couple of seconds, was not pleased. It only took a couple of seconds for this quiet, nice boy, who shyly stood by his father’s side each morning waiting for the bus, to lick the pole, and the only reason he did it was that older boys had told him to. A brief lecture on not doing what other kids tell you to do began.

But of course, that was the reason they all were doing it. Rarely do people lick a pole when they are not around other people. It was a scene of one-upmanship, of machismo, bravado, the boys egging each other on, showing off to each other. The girls had no interest. None of them went anywhere near the pole. Or looked at it. Or at the boys. Girls certainly have their own peer pressure to deal with. It just doesn’t usually involve making that kind of ass of oneself in public.

The bus arrived and the little girl, our neighbor, turned to get on the bus. Clipped to her backpack was a small container of hand sanitizer. These things are everywhere, and in school kids are also being taught to cough into their elbows to prevent the spread of germs. Out of habit now, my son does automatically cough into his elbow pit and not into his hands. 

But then I thought about the boys all licking the same pole. Whether it’s avian flu, swine flu, or whatever else animals come up with next to try to wipe us humans out, if the future of our species depends on children not spreading germs, we are in a lot of trouble.

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: family & parenting, movies // 2 Comments »