Step in Time
Wednesday, October 12, 2005 at 12:32PM All parents, I presume, have thoughts on what their kids will be when they're no longer kids. Some see their little one as a doctor. Others envision a lawyer.
Me? I picture The Toddler playing third base and leading the Chicago Cubs to a World Series in 2028. That’s a two-part fantasy, and I’m not sure which part is more plausible of a scenario: my son playing major league baseball or the Cubs playing in a World Series.
But The Toddler has another dream. He wants to be a chimney sweep.
Not to say that chimney sweeping isn’t a noble profession, and you hate to dash a young one’s dreams, but I must admit that I am not-so-secretly hoping that my son will reconsider his chosen line of work. Fortunately he’s only two, so he’s got a few more years to think about it.
How does a two-year-old come to the conclusion that he was born to be an ash man?
The answer can be traced back to just a couple years after The Toddler’s Daddy was born.
In 1964, Walt Disney brought Mary Poppins to life on the big screen. A little over forty years later that whimsical tale of a nanny who flies in with the wind to wherever she is needed has caught my son's fancy.
More precisely, it is a fourteen-minute sequence of that one hundred forty-minute film that turns The Toddler into a miniature version of Bert the chimney sweep (Dick Van Dyke).
You see, at the moment Bert calls out in his on-again, off-again Cockney accent from atop a London rooftop: “It’s all me pals…Step in time!” The Toddler is literally swept away.
Before The Toddler reintroduced me to Poppins, I had only vague recollections of it. Some of the songs I remembered: “Spoonful of Sugar,” “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” and, of course, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”
Strangely enough, none of the songs that I knew strike any kind of chord with The Toddler. To him they are inconsequential parts of the story which, thanks to the magic of DVD, can be swept aside.
“Step in time, Daddy,” he repeats like a broken record.
“How ‘bout ‘Spoonful of Sugar’? That’s a good song,” I argue.
“No, Daddy,” he says dismissively. “’Step in Time.’”
If you don’t know the lyrics, they go like this:
Step in time, step in time
Step in time, step in time
Never need a reason,
Never need a rhyme,
Step in time, step in time
We step in time.
But it’s not so much the song that seems to have captured The Toddler’s imagination as it is the lively dance number that takes Bert and his soot-coated mates on an acrobatic tour of London’s rooftops. 
The Toddler has taken to mimicking the rubber-limbed dance moves wherever I take him. At the park, he no longer wants to play on the swings or the slide. No, he wants to jump on and off the wooden beams surrounding the park while singing, “Up on the railing, step in time.”
As best I can, I try to explain his behavior to other parents. “He’s a Mary Poppins addict,” I say. They nod decorously. 
The Toddler mimicks Dick Van Dyke
Me, I figure he’ll grow out of his Poppins fixation soon enough. It’s just a step in time, after all.
Reader Comments (6)
I had the pleasure of seeing The Toddler's rubber legged Chiminey Sweep dance step and only wish we had a chimney to sweep - oh wait, we do....! Does he have any available appointmnts?
(www.thewiggles.com)