Move over, Speed

A friend of mine gave me a copy for me of a children's film for the boys. It is about a little boy named Pluk. The conceit is that Pluk rides around in a little tow truck looking for a place to live. Ultimately he finds an empty room on the very top of an apartment building. He has many adventures trying to understand the adult inhabitants of the building and to get them to accept him as a part of their little community. The kids all like him fine. He has some adult supporters and some opposers, and a lot who sort of don't care as long as he doesn't attract attention. But Pluk always comes up with plans. Sometimes they work the way he expects and usually not, but that Pluk, he sure can come up with a plan.

He's very, oh, plucky.

I have had it for some weeks and never put it on for them, one thing and another. Then Dowue was sick and Daan had a day that, well, shall we just say that he was very unhappy that his favorite playmate was not up to snuff and responded by bugging the life out of everybody. He raised harassment to a fine art. When I came in and found him sitting on top of Douwe bouncing up and down, I figured I had better do something or he would not see the age of 4.

Daan cannot stand it when Douwe is sick.

Luckily my eye fell on the Pluk film and I put it on in hopes of distracting the little beas- er, darling. It certainly did do that, Daan likes Pluk just fine. He especially likes the verrrry long horse, which is long enough to hold six people at once and has a wheel in the middle to hold up its belly. He thinks it is cousin to Dr. Seuss's seven hump wump.

But Pluk, well, Pluk may have even displaced Speed Racer in Douwe's fantasy pantheon. Douwe now has a cap just like Pluk's, we had to go buy it today. It replaced the Speed Racer fleece hat he has been wearing when he was being Speed. It turns out Nel had a copy of the book about Pluk, on which the film is based, which she had saved becasue it was a little old for the boys. Now it's Pluk every night and he has to have the book in bed with him.

Pluk's quest is for a "place for Pluk". This is made twice clear in the film, as the theme somng goes, "A place, a place, who has a place for Pluk?" (Well, ok, it's in Dutch, but that's what it means). This story has struck Douwe exactly where he lives. To say he likes the film and the book is to beggar the experience -- he is quite literally galvanized.

It has led to any number of conversations about his own feelings of course. Some part of me is sad I think, that Douwe is hunting for his place. Some part of me thinks that, at 5, he should not have to worry about his place. But, well, there is probably a reason it's a popular book, eh? It is sort of an eternal paradigm, innit?

And some part of me is just very pleased that he now has a paradigm, a structure to start to talk about it more explicitly. It's as though Pluk gave him permission to talk about that.

And some part of me is, I suppose, aware that he's not the only one looking for a place of his own.