Paying respects to the rain gods

There is a tradition that occurs every week amongst my children. When we walk to church we pass a large concrete vault with a steel grate on top. If you were to peer inside you would see and hear a torrent of water gushing through it. Every week we do the same thing.

Shelby stops and I say "Don't pick up a rock!" Shelby picks up a rock. I say "No! don't..." As Shelby tosses it through the grate. Then she looks back at me like "I am sorry, I couldn't stop myself, it just happened!" The following week we repeat.

Then the thought occurred to me that we had formerly been in a then-getting-serious drought a few years ago, about the same time my children started offering sacrificial rocks. I wondered if it wasn't similar to the offering of a virgin to the volcano to appease it's fiery belchings. I wondered if I couldn't convince them that they had helped. I decided that I would stop bothering my children about this, because if there is one thing I want my children to learn is a bizarre and unfounded system of intricate superstitions and hopefully a healthy fear of inanimate objects.

I also realized that children will also do exactly the opposite of what you tell them to do. So, they will probably stop throwing rocks in the grate and... we will enter into another drought.