The Thing About Pirates

I’ve told my eldest son several times that pirates are not real, which is pretty much true since the parrot-toting, one-eyed characters in his books don’t really exist.
The problem is, my son has caught on to the fact that pirates sure seem to be mentioned a lot in the news as of late. He doesn’t watch TV but he does listen closely when I try to get in a couple minutes of English-language radio every day. “You know mom,” he said, “I don’t think you’re right about pirates. Are you listening to this?”
Indeed, I was listening to the news and I regretted having left it on. I had two options. Tell my son the full, very complicated truth: These pirates are not cute little boys in costumes but poor and desperate people watching ships transport valuable commodities past their homes. They’re probably being manipulated by a bigger mafia that organizes the stints and leaves the “pirates” with as little money as big-time drug dealers do their errand boys. And, like drugs that eventually poison a community, the pirates even prevent aid from getting to their own shores. And do I tell him that these pirates don’t have swords and canons but Kalashnikovs that traumatize unsuspecting sailors? Or do I go with option two and sugar coat it?
I looked down at his excited eyes and opted for a combination of the two.
“Well,” I began. “They are talking about pirates but not the pirates you see in your books.”
“So?”
“So, I just mean that these pirates are different. They don’t have patches or hooks.”
“But they do have ships!”
“Well, they have boats.”
“Then where do they put all the gold?”
“They don’t have gold, they don’t have anything. That’s why they’re robbing the ships.”
“They’re robbers?” I saw a light in my son’s eyes dim. “Are they bad guys?”
I thought about all the times I told him to tell the truth, how lying would only get him into trouble because the truth always comes out. So was I lying when I told him about Santa Claus? He’s eventually going to figure that one out, unless reports of a fat man in a red suit start airing on the radio. But as I watched a report about the pirates on television, while my son slept, I realized the truth wasn’t completely true either. Yes, robbers are technically “bad guys” but then I remembered what one of the masked pirates told the TV journalist, “We won’t hurt the sailors and we’re not political. We’re just hungry.” This truth, I decided, was far too complicated for my five year-old.
“Not all of them are bad guys but they’re doing a bad thing by robbing the big ships,” I said. “That’s why they, er, that’s why they have to swing away really fast on the ropes.”
“So they can get away!” my son exclaimed.
I sighed. “Yes, so they can get away.”
“Do they always get away?”
“Depends on how fast they are.”
“And what about the parrots?”
“The parrots? Oh well, the parrots have it easy. They can just fly away.”
“Do you think Santa will bring me a parrot for Christmas?”
I cringed at the thought of the noise level such a creature would bring into our already loud house. “Well, maybe not a real one, they’re hard to find on the North Pole. But a stuffed animal parrot, I bet Santa could manage that.”
This text appeared originally on my blog on December 9, 2008 at http://currentsbetweenshores.blogspot.com