When Fruvous was very little, his babysitter, Betty, used do activities with him from the Sesame Street Magazine, which was colorful magazine full of matching exercise and mazes and other things graspable by pre-reading age children. In the corner of the exercises was a little box filled with the instructions for the exercise. The idea was that the adult would read the instructions, then do the exercise with the child.
One day, while Betty and little Fruvous (still boring old Michael then) were doing an exercise on the sounds that letters make (Which one goes B-b-b?). And during the course of the exercise, young Michael had an epiphany. It tasted so good, he ordered a whole case. (Start again.)
And during the course of the exercise, young Michael had an epiphany. It seemed as though all the little bit of information about the English language he'd been soaking up congealed into a whole all at once, and suddenly, it all made sense. He could
Angels wept, blind men regained their sight, dogs and cats played tag and the lion laid down with the lamb, and even more amazingly, the lamb was in no way freaked by this. Just goes to show, get'm while they're young. And the eagle and the dove did make their peace, and embark upon a fulfilling differently-oriented-but-in-no-way-inferior relationship based on mutual trust and respect and free of the patriarchal speciesist systems of yesteryear, with a solid understanding of each other's oneness, personhood, and boudry-having, although perhaps not too keenly aware of the basics of geometrical anatomical compatibility. But so be it.
Eager to apply his new knowledge, Michael began to read aloud the instructions to the exercise he was doing. This understandably shocked his babysitter, Betty. First, she got him to read a few other things, to make sure this wasn't a fluke. Then, breathlessly excited, she called Michael's mother, her own mother, and pretty much everyone else she knew, to tell the tale of the amazing reading two-year-old.
Talk about giving a kid a swelled head.