Water Under the Bridge

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
-Gaston Bachelard

This last weekend was very pleasantly spent with our friends in Maine. They treated their two and a half year old son to the gift of an enormous plastic dinosaur- according to his current obsession- that walks, shakes its tail and roars as it waddles.
This particular child uncommonly likes bathtime, and is used to having his growing collection of creatures- the inanimate ordinary ones of course- in the soapy water alongside him.
Imagine his grief, then, when told that the new acquisition could not, for the sake of its longevity, be submerged in bathwater. It could not be permitted to share any part of bathtime with the little fellow and as a grim result he grew increasingly loud, his distraught sobs causing many a riptide in the tub and many a ripple in his parents' hearts.
Eventually the boy was made to understand, if not the fact of the dinosaur's certain destruction, then at least the word 'no' and soon he was paddling and splashing merrily, with half a thought on the new toy that awaited him afterward.
All the while that bathtime was in progress, I could only sit and think of the devastation I had unleashed upon my brother many years ago.
He was nine and I six; he had been given a remote-controlled army tank for Christmas which I liked very much. I admired the sturdiness of the toy, was intrigued by the exotic nature of how it could be propelled forward and backward, and wistful, so wistful of the fact that it was not my own.
I thought that I would like to know how it worked, and, too, to see it move underwater. So, on a quiet afternoon shortly after Christmas I plugged up the bathroom sink, filled the basin to the top and set the tank on what I imagined to be the ocean floor.
It took little time for me to understand that the tank was in trouble and, more worryingly, so was I.
It sputtered and the wheels churned water before it wound down with an alarming sigh.
My brother might easily have dismissed the toy as an unfortunately faulty piece of equipment, and I might have got away with my escapade- except for the water that was continuously leaking from the sides of the tank and cruelly betraying me as the only possible culprit.
I wished I could buy him another, or fix it, or leap through time and advise myself not to put it in the sink in the first place.
He was so unhappy, and I felt dreadful long after the occasion had passed.
I am sure my brother has forgotten all about it by now, more than twenty years later, but it strangely seems that the one who causes the trouble has to carry the burden of it for the longest time.
It only took a walking, talking dinosaur to remind me once again.