Black Box Album

I went to see Album at LaGuardia’s Black-Box theatre last Friday night. It was a simmering evening depicting the high-school years of four teen-aged men and women. The picture above was the set for a stunningly complete emotional depiction of adolescence.

Jocelyn Catasus was the supportive friend who knew too much without being a know it all. I wish I had had friends like her when I was in school. Her performance was alive without showiness; her Peggy was the teen in control who you could still see the insecurity in.

I knew “a Billy” like Aaron Berke’s Billy, but that was at Cambridge Friends’ School (where I went to repeat 6th grade). The patina of experience he spread on the basically insecure character covered like cream-cheese on a bagel.

Bridget Giuffrida’s Trish was the most teen. In her I saw my daughter. From the opening strip poker scene where she was self-consciously modest to the pure terror she showed looking around the cheap motel room after her character had run away with Boo, she was vulnerable in a way that totally supported the “Brian Wilson monologue.”

Christopher Diaz’s Boo reminded me of my own insecurities in Highschool (though I tried to embody a cross between the hockey shy player Bobby Orr and paisley-psychedelic George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic [oil and water: do not mix]). When he put on the horn-rimmed ray-bans and affected the tones and cadences of Bob Dylan I was back in the commune I grew up in in Boston with insecure and pretentious posers all around.

When the last scene came together at the Quarry and they had all reached the “biological-growing-up” they had so frantically sought throughout and receded to the Album of the title like a year-book of HS nostalgia I felt the bitter-sweet youth I lost so long ago trying to grow up too quickly. These young men and women brought four awkward years to life with this exceptional play and I think that having the writer as the director made this all the more special.

CODA

I went to see the play with my almost-in-high-school-daughter who had rehearsed with them one day because she was using a monologue form the play for her High-school auditions (applying to HS in NY is akin to applying to college in the rest of the country, but that is another story). The play-write and director, David Rimmer, had generously invited Chandler to come sit in with them one day at rehearsal. He said that she was really helpful because she was the age of the cast in the opening scene and brought a lot to the truth of the play (chronologically). Watching the play with my daughter made me aware of how important first love, biological and emotional, –so long lost to me– shapes the rest of our lives. I want to thank David Rimmer, Jocelyn Catasus, Bridgit Giuffrida, Aaron Berke and Christopher Diaz for bringing this all alive to me.

Hope Wins

Where to begin?  I was up and at the polls before they opened and there were 20 people there waiting at 5:45 am.  By the time they opened the polls in Woodside, where I vote (at 6:08, don’t get me started), there were 100 people there.  Excitement lit up the foggy pre-dawn darkness.

The machines were cranky as they started and the people in the 47^th district had to wait until the most experienced blue-haired old lady came and jiggled a lever on the back just so to get the machine back into order.  I was seventh in the 47^th district, 007.  You’ve seen the picture.

Teaching and grading papers all day there was a strange air of camaraderie and hope.  Spike’s dad put it into words as we watched our kids practice soccer last night before the results were in: “It’s like Nine-One-One, everyone has feeling of secret connection.”

Indeed, as the kids played soccer at McCarren Park two Hasidic men came up with their gloves and joined the Latino guys who were playing softball in the warm November evening.  Only in New York do you see Orthodox Jews shagging fly balls with strangers.

As Mason and I drove back to Queens NPR called Pennsylvania for Obama, and one of the wags said: “I can’t imagine a path to the Whitehouse for McCain that doesn’t include Pennsylvania.”  Before we got over the Greenpoint Bridge they were calling Florida for Obama, and Mason took my cell and excitedly texted Linda that news (and Dole’s SC Defeat).  I came home and ate with supreme hope.

During the day I got an email on my phone from a friend from the 70s who had lived with me in Boston and known me in my messenger days.  We had been through a fair amount together and he contacted me out of the blue as a way –I assume– to reach out of his white New England life and celebrate with a dear old friend (of color).  I had similar calls and emails from Australia, Ireland and Northern California.

This impulse, this digital coming together is, for us progressives, like coming out after a storm.  The last 8 years have been hard.  Personally, I have felt “occupied” like I did as a young non-white man in Boston in the 70s.

So these contacts made because of the HOPE of the Obama campaign feel especially good.  To be reminded of the good and decent whites who were my dear friends during the horror of bussing in Boston in the 1970s, the people who reminded me that I was a man, a friend, a  person of value “un-adjectivized” (not a black man) has begun the thawing.

Before Mr. Obama’s election I was still in my shell.  I was a bit jaded and cynical about friends from the “way-back-machine” contacting me and asking me to drink the Kool-Aid.  I didn’t want to HOPE because I didn’t want to be disappointed.  I have been stand-offish.  But their naïve enthusiasm was touching.  It reminded me of going to anti war marches and Pete Seger concerts with my parents in the 60s.  I don’t think that the 60s, in light of the Republican avarice we’ve lived through from 80 onward, were all that great.

SO last night, and all day yesterday I felt like we had finally become a nation again.  I felt the possibility of Human Companionship.  On September 11^th, 2001 we all receded to our livingrooms to watch our lives and country on television.  We got the “Dulce et Decorum Est” romantic version of America.  All of those grand Ken Burns PBS documentaries seemed more real than playing baseball or listening to jazz.  I feel like our nation slipped into a massive communal state of DuBoisian double consciousness, alienated from ourselves by our image of ourselves as something else.

When Spain was attacked on March 11, 2004 the nation came outside together.  After 9-11 we went into our living rooms and isolated.  They re-established their humanity in the most basic way.  I have been jealous of that European land for these four years.  Yesterday we came out.  We came out in the millions.  We got a 9-11 mulligan and we chose to participate instead of isolate.  The contacts from Europe, Australia, California and Vermont are contacts from our higher place.  America can stop fearing.  We can HOPE again.

One of my colleagues has called this the moment that America becomes Post-Colonial.  We have stepped (a little bit) beyond the colonial and imperial traditions we’ve inherited and begun to live up to our constitution.  The whole world is breathing a sigh of relief because we can choose someone who has a vision of a greater America that doesn’t have the 1945 and 1992 unipolar American power in mind.  “We don’t have to subjugate/ in order to be great.”

America has returned to the dream by electing Mr. Obama.  From Dakar to Dushembe, from the steppes of Mongolia to the factories of Viet Nam there are people who are seeing the America of FDR, JFK (neither of whom were angels), the America of hope and individual opportunity, the America of the Great Society, the America of freedom to be (not to earn), for the first time.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

See Cabaret at LaGuardia Community College

5/10/2008 8:00 AM

I went to see LaGuardia Community College’s production of Cabaret. Now I’m not much of a theatre aficionado, but I had a great time. I am strongly recommending that, should you read this before their run ends, you go and check the kids’ show out.

So when I went into the little theatre and heard Rashisda the Emcee start with the tune “Welcome,” which I had only heard John, the campy waiter from the Magic Pan sing before I was sold. I was ready for a new experience that resonated with the others, but was completely original. Ms. Rashida, in addition to singing well, moves marvelously, and her dance and stage presence was a fun thing to watch on top of the play. When she would do turns around the stage during different parts of the play she would invoke everyone from Groucho Marx to Cab Calloway (the swallowtail jacket didn’t hurt).

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention. Oh Yeah, And Will K. can turn, the little bit of dancing he did was amazing, in its octogenarian way.

I want to give a general shout out to every member of the cast, who I watched with constant interest. They were all wonderful to look at and hear, and I often found myself looking back into the chorus line and at the “extras” marveling at the wonderful courage and diversity of these LaGuardia CC students. Whether it was Mr. Footman as the cabby looking for his money, Jocelyn Catasus as Frauline Kost (cost) and her many sailor/suitors, Mr. Ochoa as the drag queen, or any of the lovely lads and ladies of the chorus line, there was plenty of multi-cultural-multi-talented “eye-candy.” I am far too repressed to admit how beautiful all of the young women are and too homophobic to admit the same about the men. I also have to say that I love hearing live music, and the production got a lot of mileage out of the horns, keyboards and drums they had tucked away above stage. This was a great way to Spend a Friday night, and I highly recommend catching it if you can.

Ernst, the Nazi who opens the play was a surprisingly convincing actor and I have to say, though his role of scoundrel was exposed in the second act, his bonhomie from the first act made him hard not to watch, even when he was the Nazi, in a krystalnacht redux, beating down Darryl Sorrentino as our Harrisburg Hero Clifford Bradshaw (who was good in his role as the idealist cuckolded by the torch-singer Veronica Palazzo as Sally Bowles).

The voices were all good, the show was really exciting, and since I had never seen any version of it before, neither the Queen Latifa version nor the Joel Gray jammy, it was fresh and I really wanted to know what was going to happen. Now, I’m not sure that having the plot spoiled by previous versions would have stolen anything from this show because, like I said, the music and actors were all really present and engaging.

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention.

I have to confess that I have never seen Cabaret in any of its guises before. I remember back in the 70s when it was a play and all of the theatre majors from Emerson College with whom I worked at The Magic Pan would go about belting out the tunes from the show while we did sidework. Then I recall the movie coming out and another surge of popularity, and hearing the tunes “Cabaret” and “Money Makes the World Go Around” floating into my pop-culture-world. I think there was a disco version of the $$ song (it was right about then that NY NY with Robert Deniro and Liza Minelli; Frank Sinatra stole the song from the film, but that’s another sad, sad, story).

It was a great pleasure to see Cesar Mack, a student from my ENG101, Professor Raven Blackstone and, most of all, Gail Mellow who is always there to support our students. IF you can, go ask any of them how they liked it, and I’m sure they’ll say that this show is a Must See.

The Kids Right Now

4/21/2008 5:57 AM
Here is another gem from Lennox to keep with the “Daddy remembering is like fish talking” zinger that she announced at the park the other day. Speaking of Mason “pulling the girls legs,” or teasing, about something or another, Lennox observed, when he exclaimed “I’m joking,” in a deadpan tone with the slightest roll of the eyes: “a joke is when people laugh afterwards.” Miss Lennox is quite the witty little thing and really enjoys saying things that make people laugh.
Now Mason is a witty guy, his ability to frame things in new ways with his excellent 11-year-old vocabulary is legendary. It began when he was younger than Lennox when he tacked onto one of his parents’ bromide about “when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade,” the coda “and sell it!” at dinner one night. He used to get so angry when Linda and I would crack up at something he said, some little witticism (which I cannot remember any of right now [see “fish talking”]) because he thought we were laughing at him.
Chandler, never much of a joker, is the best linguist in the house. She saves her parsing for two main categories of utterances: requests and commands. She can detect, with annoying and unerring accuracy the slightest hint of resentment, bossiness or command in the day-to-day talk of a house. “Put water in the pitcher before you put it back in the ‘fridge,” is a statement where the tone, syntax or intention can embed an insult potent enough to stop the morning in the tracks. “I would do that but you cannot just boss me around like I’m some sort of nitwit. I have my reasons for not refilling it, and the way that you ordered me will NEVER get me to do it. I’m so mature that we might as well have restarted the Hattfields and the McCoys up for a century of good Appalachian vendetta: hillbilly omerta in Woodside.
When we think to frame our utterances in the form of requests, “Chandler would you change (meaning clean) the guinea-pig cages today?” “Sure” she’ll reply. But in that request, framed in a way so as not to rankle Honey, Rocky and Buttercup’s “mommy,” is enough wiggle room for her to not do it until bedtime; her chores become late night filibusters against bedtime. All day long, as we politely remind her that the cages need attention we are parried, feinted and dodged with grammatical explications, “I said I would, and I will, just not right now.” Chandler’s quiver is filled with arrows that any semiotician would be proud to use. Her ability to “lawyer” will be wasted on the law because with the silicone slickness of her linguistic abilities and the cudgel of her willingness to take offense remains untouched by discipline in the old-fashioned 50s sense (most recently enacted in the 1970s on the Brady Bunch), which she reminds us came with primitive behaviors like corporal punishment.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”

In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.

I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”
A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens

Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer

The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River

The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology

Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out

Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos

Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam

Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by

Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency

When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass

The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths

Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter

Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built

By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood

This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.

Physical Therapy and Abu Ghraib

So I’ve been undergoing physical therapy twice a week for a while now. Some of you might notice the photo above from an earlier post. as I am stretched and pulled, massaged and exercised I am for period of ten minutes each time left alone in a cubicle with electrodes strapped to my ankles. My ankles are then wrapped in ice-packs and the power is turned on. This increases bloodflow to the recently “exercised” joints and I think is helping (I am getting better). During those lonely twenty minutes a week I have been composing poems on my crackberry:

As I lie in my curtain-cubicle
Stretched and stretching out
Upon the insurance company wrack
Tring to revive my ligaments

I feel the gentle surge
Of the curative electrodes
Taped to my lower extremities
As I stare up at the curtains

That separate me from
The other patients with
Other infirmities
Stretched shocked wrenched

Each of them must feel
The tears of their own flesh
Rehabbing looking up
At the fluorescent

Curtains that separate us all
Hanging from the tracks
That segregate walls
For our own lonely cures

Stretch (This one is a revision of the first that speaks more directly to an imagined interrogation instead of the isolation that I feel in that cubicle and in the medical world.)

In a hyper-clean cubicle
On a Plynth Three Section Table
Model sixty-four-eighty-five
Sold only to prisons and HMOs

Lies a man Bound by zip-ties
Lies a man who does not speak
The language of his “providers.”
He is to undergo “truth-therapy”

At the hands of a good Hoosier
Raised on corn and bologna
Jello, macaroni, potatoes and
Bread that you can make balls out of

As concerned about march madness
As he is with homeland security
He puts medical electrodes
On the depilated scrotum

Telling the patient patient in poor Urdu
What he is doing just like a real doctor
He explains the range using the LCD readout
Then he connects the wires

He illustrates the discomfort of the number two
With his military training school Urdu
The LCD reminds him of the scoreboard
At McCracken that Hoosiers venerate

Lost in thought he wonders about
The bracket he filled out in the px
And if there were any upsets in the first round.
Then he reads the first urdu question typed on the sheet

There in the hygienic curtained exam room
Two men speak in Urdu one of whom
Is thinking about college basketball
And the other of his flaming balls

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

 

Happy New Year (Rat)

Stockhom Syndrome and the ACT Prep Intensive

My class takes the ACT today and I feel like the Stockholm Syndrome is reaching critical; I’ll miss them, but I’m glad the cops are coming to free us all from each other. I have one student who has been handing in incomplete practice exams all through the class. If she would a) stop writing the perfect seven sentence intro and b) start with and stick to an outline she’d be through much more quickly and efficiently. There are another couple of students who have such amazing words and language problems that correcting them all puts more of my writing on the page than theirs. I want to use the fact that they originally spoke languages other than English as an excuse, but they are actually caught at a more profound level since they both speak English better than they write it. I’m not sure what it is about writing that makes them “write” (scrawl, scribble, or “tag”) convoluted words that they would never utter. There are, of course, the students whom I can’t imagine why they didn’t pass the damn test. I feel a special twinge of sadness for them because had they learned the tricks of the ACT they’d have passed easily, but they probably thought about the question outside of the (training wheel) ACT paradigm and were punished for writing a thoughtful and balanced essay. There we are, all locked in the vault together. But just for today. Just for one more day.

Update and a Quiz

1/26/2008 6:23 AM (sorry, this is a long one)

Yesterday, Friday the 25^th of January, 2008, Lennox came home with a flier about the upcoming 100^th day of school (2/7/8). She is encouraged to bring 100 objects: “Please help your child to choose 1 item and count 100 pieces of that item.” So last night Lennox was counting out 100 pennies from the penny jar and insisting on a “bigger, the biggest ziplock bag, because there are 100 I need to fit in here,” with characteristic eye-rolling, intensity and sarcasm. (The bag she wanted and got is big enough to fit her head in and use as a space helmet.)

I wish that 100 pennies still meant as much to me as they do to Lennox. I fear that Even Mason and Chandler have relegated the copper penny to the economic trash-heap, not worth bending over for unless they are heads’ up. Sigh, I remember when you could get three peach pits for a penny from the (unsanitary) jar on the counter of the corner store kitty corner from the Rice school on Appleton and Dartmouth Streets. A nickel would sugar up all of your friends for a game of baseball or ring-alevio (all-ee-all-ee-in-come-free). They have new and wondrous things in their childhoods, but my kids, trapped in this new city and new apartment, who haven’t discovered their peers and places, lack the independence that we had in 19-and-sixtey-nine. (God, I sound like Abraham Simpson!)

(MMMM-excellent coffee this morning)

Chandler is just loving her school. Everyday she comes home with another anecdote –that can’t wait- about the antic in her classroom. I wish that I had paid closer attention so that I could tell you of the antics of Abla, Chewmaka, Andrew, and Aniqa (accuracy). Mr. Binyaris had them write a poem in Math Class (so the “no-child” tests must be safely in the rear-view and they must be back to their usual talented and gifted antics). Rarely does Chandler come home when she is not excited about the day’s goings-ons, whether it is her latest 90-something exam, some difficult (and interesting) word problem, or some logical ditty that a teacher tossed to the class at the end of the day to keep them busy. So when I meet her, with her 30 pound back-pack (and I don’t think I am exadurating) I take the bag from her shoulders and the stories from her day and walk home in paternal bliss.

Mason is, I think, bored to tears by PS150. He listens to Chandler’s after-school update with seeming blasé-ness, but can always recount the characteristics of the players in her stories if asked. He can often answer the brain teasers that Cha-Cha has brought home, and he usually responds with stories of the incompetence and knuckle-headed-ness of his classmates. He is so ready for a school that challenges him that I can see it like an aura (or the curly half-fro he declines to cut that shoots tendrils towards heaven like a vine thirsting for knowledge).  He’s been home, sick with a fever, for the last two days and we’ve been keeping him from watching the Disney Channel the whole time.  I caught him reading The Outsiders in front of a tivo’d repeat of Zack and Cody (the one where they cut school and end up in a rock video).  When I came in the room he hid the book and pretended to be paying attention to the TV.  I need to remember this when I rag on them about watching too much Cathode Ray.

I’ve been teaching an API (ACT Prep Intensive) for seven days now.  It runs (or crawls) from 9:15 to 12:45 everyday.  I have given an ACT practice exam each day, and we are all really tired.  INTENSive is the right word.  They are so sick of writing body paragraphs, introductions, elaborations, re-writing criterions and examples that I hope none of them has access to guns.  And the worst part is that every time I give them a practice ACT Exam, which gives me an hour that I don’t have to drill, cajole, entertain or teach them, I have to grade it.  It is like a western, where the good-guy is forced to dig his own grave.  Practice exams are good, they teach them how to write a passing essay (or that they are not yet writing at a passing level), and they show the student what is missing from their essays.  But they all need to be graded.  I need to grade them.  I am paid to grade them.  Everyday I go home with 19 ACT Exams to grade.  Now I know the shortcomings of each of the writers six exams in, but I still have to read and mark all of these problems in the hope that they will start to stop making those mistakes.  I like to think of it as erosion, or the _____ (insert non-white-ethnicity here) water torture, but I’m not sure whether it is their compositional defects that are being eroded, or my sanity: drip-drip-drip.

 I spend so much time with them that I feel like we are all victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. I think we all have an unhealthy identification with each other over the stress of this exam and the 4 hours a day we spend together. I am even rooting for the students who don’t “play nice” (do as I say) to pass this exam. The plus side is that we are functioning like a cult; we are the fraternity of true ACT-Test-Takers (Western Queens Council). On Wednesday they will take the test and we will all miss our bank-vault-prison and the captors that put us there.

Today I was working on the Black Literature Series Committee’s Scavenger Hunt: Here is one of the questions I’ve composed:

 

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 Narrative

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the

(Choose one to complete the passage)

a. most hypocritical and avaricious, in the south.

b. meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

c. greediest and neediest of all Americans.

d. generally most Christian and charitable in all of this, God’s land.

 

I think I’ll try and exercise a bit before the kids and Linda wake-up, thanks for reading (and drop me a comment).

Offspring Update

Mason’s Cameraphone Portrait

The kids have been on my mind lately, as much as I have anything on my mind. Chandler, Mason and Lennox are growing and developing in wonderful and exciting ways as they refuse to go out into their new neighborhood and make friends.

Mason was confident after the Hunter Entrance examination test. He was excited and amped up after being such a good young man, following instructions and orders, making it through a Board of Ed (Bored of ed?)  hazing gauntlet.  Sitting the exam with over 1000 kids, he was gripped -I think- by his growth since he moved to NYC as a suburban Cali boy.  He is a great kid and wanted to talk all about it, though he is narratively challenged; most of the explanations and anecdotes he shared didn’t make too much sense.

Chandler called me the other day to explain where the car was as they led me down and out by a few minutes and her instructions were more confusing than the IRS instruction booklet. Her directions had a bout six sentences, none of which told me where the car was, though I could have followed them and gone “out the door to the left, but not all the way to the left, the one with glass, but not just a window of glass, but the whole door.” I would have found it if I had walked out either door because the car was right in front of the building, but the instructions were one of the first times she spoke to me since my Friday Transgression where I failed to pick her up after school.

Lennox has taken to qualified sycophancy. “Dad, you’re the best cook in the world,” she says earnestly looking up from her chocolate chip pancakes. As she finishes chewing that bite she continues, “and I’m not saying that just to be nice, I really mean it.” Variations on this like,  “you’re handsome,” “you don’t look like you are 48,” and other such heart-warming-trifles come out whenever she is warm, well fed and well rested.  And each compliment, with sincere eye contact, slightly raised brows and her trade-marked too-little-teeth-smile, she always adds the caveat , “and I’m not saying that just to be nice, I really mean it.”

In this little qualification or explanation she is showing her awareness that her utterances might be manipulative and be discounted as such.  It’s like she’s read pillowbook and doesn’t want to be grouped with R***r, “the unreliable narrator.”  This meta-awareness is a sigh of her new self-awareness.  She has obviously seen someone use sycophantic flattery and loose credibility somewhere in Kindergarten or after care when the flattery was challenged.  She sees the resultant cost of being tagged an “unreliable narrator” so she uses this catch phrase to inoculate herself against the harsh judgment of the adult world.  Even as she puts on chapstick and holds her lips in a self-conscious kissable partition so as not to “remove the gloss” in a pure naïve princess innocence, she is also aware of truth, accuracy and perception as perishable commodities that must be nurtured, supported and protected.  I wish her father was as good at reading quotidian political situations.