WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, and still trying to make sense of the world, my mother told me one day that my father was going to build me a sandbox.
I remember being very excited about this, though I'm quite sure that I had no idea what a sandbox was at the time.
My mother seemed to think it was an exciting prospect, so I did, too.
Looking back, I'm not at all certain that my mother had asked my father about this idea before announcing it to me.
If she did, it's possible that she misread his reaction.
I don't actually remember ever having a sandbox while we lived in that little house on the farm. At the very least, a long time (as a toddler counts time) went by after my mother's announcement: with no sandbox in sight.
One day, my father was working on some project, and decided to make a run into town. He asked me if I wanted to go with him to "buy some sandpaper".
I was, by this time, in great anticipation of the promised sandbox—and I had no more idea of what sandpaper was than I did of what a sandbox was.
But I was semantically advanced enough to recognize a common root.
Sandpaper and sandbox. Obviously the two were related. (All the more because they were the only two connections in which I had ever heard the morpheme "sand".)
If my father needed sandpaper, he must need it to build the sandbox!
I went with him happily.
When we got to town, and he bought the sandpaper, I asked him what it was for.
He explained that it was for rubbing on wood, to make it smoother.
This confirmed my expectations. It had all the earmarks of being involved in building something (and what else would he be building?).
I don't remember if I ended up asking when the sandbox was going to be ready, or if I realized my mistake on my own.
I do remember being disappointed when I understood that the paper had nothing to do with the box.
And, I remember, sometime later (I'm not at all sure how old I was, or whether we still lived on the farm) when I saw my first sandbox, being surprised at what it actually was—a sort of shock of recognition and understanding:
Oh! So that's what a sandbox is!
