My son Dave and the grandkids spent last weekend at my house, and over breakfast we got around to talking about all the important things, like what kind of super power we’d like to have.
My grandson Jack jumped immediately to telekinesis, the power to move objects with his mind. “Well,” I said, “of course we’ll have to have some limits to our powers, right? I mean, I’d hate to find that you plunked the moon into my back yard.”
“OK,” he said, “what are my limits?”
“Let’s say you could have the mental power to move anything you can move physically. If you can lift a hundred pounds with your arms, you could do it with your mind.”
“OK,” he said. “So if some guy wanted to fight me, I could just pick him up mentally and hold him in the air.”
“Right,” I said. “But not indefinitely. Only for as long as you could hold him physically.”
He thought about it and decided that it didn’t sound like such a good deal after all.
“If it’s just conflict you’re trying to avoid,’ I said, “how about the super power of being so super-charming that nobody would ever want to harm you or make you feel bad?”
Jack thought about it and shook his head. I had to admit, it would be a pretty lame super power for a 13-year old to pick. “OK,” he said, “maybe teleportation. The power to travel anywhere instantly.”
“But let’s limit it,” I said. “Only one mile at a time. But of course you could teleport somewhere else from there.”
“Instantly?”
“Clap three times,” I said.
He thought about it a moment before deciding that teleportation was sounding pretty skippy, and labor-intensive, too. “Time travel?” he said.
“Where would you go?”
“The future,” he said. He wanted to bring back a bunch of advanced gadgets and future technology that would seem like super powers in our current time, which I had to admit would be pretty cool. But then he said, “Or maybe back to the Big Bang. I’d like to watch that happen.”
“But if you went back to before the Big Bang, before any matter in the universe existed, would you even exist?”
He paused and thought about it. This was getting hard.
His dad weighed in. “Laser eyes,” Dave said.
“Really?” I said. “Weaponry? Or are you looking for some peaceful use of laser eyes, like a career as a lazy lumberjack?”
“Cooking steaks and burgers without a grill,” he said. “How sweet would that be?”
I had to admit that it would be pretty handy, but there’s always a downside, isn’t there? “What about the vegans?” I said. “They wouldn’t be very happy if you walked around with a Captain GrillMaster emblem on your chest.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but what could they do? Who’s going to mess with a guy with laser eyes?”
By now, Jack was back in the game. “I think I’d like to have the super power of always making the right decision.”
“Good one!” I said. “You’d be safe everywhere you go. You’d never get in a car accident.”
“No,” he said, “other people could still make bad decisions and crash into me. I wouldn’t be able to control that. That’s the limitation. But at least I’d never make a decision that would be bad. That would be a good power to have.”
“But,” Dave said, “what if, as soon as you got the power to always make good decisions, you realized that it was a bad decision to choose that power, instead of laser eyes?”
It was a good point, and I guess it would be true of any super power you might choose. After all, if you could choose any power at all — but you could choose only one — it would be disappointing to spend the rest of your life realizing that you might have gone a different way that would have made your life so much better.
Trust me, I know.
I think of that every time my non-laser eyes catch a glimpse of that dirty, greasy barbecue grill that would be so clean if I could just go back in time to when it was brand new, or if I could teleport it to the dump without having to touch it, and I wonder: “Why, oh why, did I just have to be so doggone charming?”
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
