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.

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.

Moving Impotence

12/14/0710:46:52 AM

So the movers are packing away and Linda is away at the other apartment cleaning and accepting deliveries of new furniture. “The game is afoot,” as Holmes often said. Things are happening fast and I’m not sure how much I can write here. I am useless now that I’ve washed the dishes and tightened the cheap Ikea chairs that are always falling loose. There is a feeling of impotence that accepting (or paying for) help causes. I want to have meaning in this whole process which I don’t seem to feel just paying for it. I am too 19^th century. I feel like if I don’t put my shoulder to the wheel in this move I am not actually helping. Of course that is ridiculous because Linda and I are the “first movers” of this whole show. These three strong Latinas would not be here if we were not paying for them to be here.

It is strange having people in your house touching all of our stuff. Now I don’t know these women in our house singing away to the popular music they have thumping from our boom box as they yell questions and comments back and forth. I guess this adds to the strange feeling of helplessness that I feel not helping. Here are three total strangers doing what in the past only our dearest (and most willing) friends had done. But they are not Richard Heller, Joel Stanger, Trevor Turner, John Mercer, or any of my Berkeley friends who helped with the last three moves. Interestingly the last move here we were helped by Miss Misti H and the one two moves ago involved Dennis Wolf. Both of those people are out of reach to me now and I am sad that they have been replaced by paid professionals.

Neither am I participating physically (no heave-ho), nor am I intimate with the workers. I am slipping out of my life during this move. In this journal, a sign of my increasing alienation from my life, I am recording my increasing feelings of alienation from my life. The skrittch of packing tape sounds like fingernails on the blackboard of my life as I sit in a house with people working incredibly hard as I sit here and diddle on the computer. I guess the root of it is that I am uncomfortable with and unused to my new status as bourgeois middle class sub-gentry (I can’t even own up to the fact that I am indeed a well paid middle class professional with a post graduate degree and a good union job [I'm prayin' for tenure]). I want to live in my imaginary hey-day of a working class youthful messenger. Sigh. If it was that good I’d have never gone to college.

If I insist on continually romanticizing my youth I will always be unhappy, looking over my shoulder at some thin hungry horny bachelor. The truth of the matter is that he was miserable and empty. I was lonely and bored except when I was misbehaving and in grave peril. The life I fantasize about was the life of a young man with few coping skills and a lot of misused down time. I guess I should be proud of one thing. When I was bored, lonely and venal I at least painted and wrote and some of those drawings and writings still exist. Two moves ago, from one place in the village to another I went through my “archive” and looked at lots of my letters and paintings (that wasted time alone justifies the cost of this packing). Up in the attic are two huge tubes of my work from the early 1980s that are testaments to the fact that there might be something to this nostalgia thing. But if you count out how much time I’ve lived and subtracted the time I “created” you’d still have each and every waking hour of a misspent youth.

So I think, against my better judgment I’ll post this now because I’m tired of writing.

 

When I was trying to stay out of the packers way I thought of a poetic way to characterize our move, but I think I’ve lost it: “from the intimate proximity of the gardens to the phallic modernity of the Big Six. ”

 

Thanksgiving Inflation

11/23/07

So Wednesday we went to see the Balloons blown up for the Thanksgiving day parade over by the Museum of Natural History. This is the second year that we’ve done it and I hope it becomes a family annual tradition. There were clock-management issues and Lennox was carried off and on for the last mile. But let me start at the beginning.

The evening started with a subway ride to the upper west side where we waited for about 20 minutes to get a seat at La Caridad. The food was, as usual, great and I had it in my head that it was Friday and consequently had a hankering for Bacalau. I have anew favorite dish there because they brought me, perhaps as an act of mercy, huevos mesclado con bacalao with red beans and yellow rice. I might stil have to go there tonight, the real Friday night for the Bacalao Guisado, but that is another story. We all had our usual favorites: chuletas fritas, arroz amarillo y frijoles negros, aroz amarillio con camarones, aguacate, platanos maduros, cebollas y ajo (mas ajo por favor). I like to eat at La Caridad because no one ever wants desert or walks away half full.

Because we are moving we had an errand to run before we went to the balloons. We went up to Aunty Odella’s house to see the wood floors that she installed over the linoleum of her Mitchell Lama apartment. This was a beautiful warm fall evening walk up Broadway to 92^nd street. I love to walk about Manhattan and see all of the people out. This is one of the reasons, I think, that we wanted to move our family to New York. Walking in Manhattan is a grand parade of the mad rush of humanity that is New York.

The families, couples, singles, and lonelyhearts parade cheek and jowl with servant class, homeless, shopclerks and underclass in an interesting pastiche of humanity found only in major cities with pedestrian cultures. I think my favorite are the lone wolves who parade around on the New Upper West Side, tied to a neighborhood they no longer fit in with or understand by their rent-controlled leases. When we walk around Queens we get a different sort of diversity, but that is for a different entry.

The kids, though seemingly unaware of the parade of humanity in all of its nuances, watch and learn from these excursions. I think it is important to expose them to the life of Manhattan because they can see people living in the complex harmony of this city. When we take them to Paris or Barcelona or London (which I hope we do) they will see much the same thing in different flavors. There is nothing like the grand stroll in a major metropolis.

As we walked after Aunty Odella’s (Auntie Mame in this tale) down Columbus we started to see the exodus of families kids from the inflation. The closer we got the more there were with their faces lit up in amazement, or red with temper tantrums. Restaurants were full of kids being fed whatever was handy, pizza, foccacio at upscale restaurants, sandwiches from delis and Mickey-D’s was packed. This was the opposite sort of mismanagement of kids’ evenings. We went and got them good food first, while others had their kids done and fed them whatever afterwards. The classic kid management issue: too tired or too hungry. You cannot avoid it unless you are a Von Trapp type operation with rigid discipline and absolute obedience. Such families are said to exist in Utah and Alabama where conditions are harsher.

Lennox was staggering with exhaustion but the sight of the Balloons perked her up a little bit. When she saw the first few balloons she was excited, but by the time we got to the giant Ronald McDonald laying prostrate before a 20′ earth in some sort of weird tableau of globalization she was through.

http://gothamist.com/

She gamely endured the rest of the balloons, that we all find amazing (the Koons silver weather bunny was my favorite this year) and continued her bleary eyed forced march with as much dignity and good attitude as you can expect out of a kindergärtner who had gone to school 15 hours before.

In the crowd there were a few characters worth mentioning. There were the two “models” tall women with lots of make-up and perfume who wore super high heels that Chandler drew my attention to. In the crush of we dowdy breeders they seemed particularly out of place. I don’t think that Chandler noticed that the women were probably closer to my age than hers and seemed a bit long in the tooth to be clacking along in designer wear on precarious shoes with war-paint on. Right after they sashayed away from us in the crowd we saw a grandfather there with his kids. He had a full white Santa beard at least 6” long, a strong hard Christmas belly, an infectious white ethnic laugh and a Harley-Davidson-Viet-Nam-Vet type vest. Mason gestured with his mouth to get Chandler to recognize Santa in his civvies and they shared a wry laugh together as Santa snapped a picture of his grandkids with their haggard parents. I think that the trip to the Balloons was Sargent-Major Santa’s idea, but I could be wrong.

I think most important for me was watching the very tall father with bright red hair seethe repeatedly between clenched teeth “There are going to be serious consequences for this. There will be dramatic punishments for this behavior,” and a few other impotent bromides in a Möbius strip to his two tall think red-headed kids who were delighting in the spectacle of Schreck. I have been that tall gangly wannabe ruler of my children. But on thanksgiving eve, I was not. We had a wonderful time.

More Missing Amir Hassan

Chandler, the youthful scribe of our broken hearts, wrote another letter that I discovered in her room. I found it when we were looking for Halloween Costumes lost since we bought them: the confusing luxury of living life. Though the kids aren’t speaking about the tragedy much, there continue to be silent signs of Amir’s passing. Mason’s weekly essay (which he covered with his arms when I asked about it) is about Amir. Lennox alone is undamaged in our house in Sunnyside.

Here are some youtubes of our lost prince: Amir in a revival of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Stick with it, these flickering images are all we have left outside of our hearts and dreams.

When I watch this Recorder Recital at Emerson I am reminded of my lack of patience at the kids’ performances and recitals. I am going to try and treasure them from now on. Even the kids who don’t die untimely deaths are only children for a few years. I am going to try and stop rushing Chandler, Mason and Lennox through their childhood and savor our todays.

Today is October 21, 2007; Thank you GOD.

Chandler’s Letter to Amir

I found this dry-erase letter in Chandler’s Room when I was up there.  I think that its medium, its very impermanence, says as much as Cha-Cha’s eloquent  words.

Amir Hassan

I realize that this post might have been an enigma for many (or any) who stumbled here (and a lot of good this will do people who’ve already left), but it is about Misti and Amir Hassan. We knew Misti and Amir from student housing in UC Village. I’ve known them these last 9 years or so. I saw them the last time I was in Berkeley. When we moved Misti minded the kids and cleaned the house as we moved our belongings onto the truck to come East. Misti, it seems, killed Amir. This is not, in the least, about me. This is all about Amir’s Death and Misti’s “survival.” I think that she has entered a new. deeper. more profound level of hell with this heinous and pathetic act. For some -the troubled- there is never enough pain, scorn or opprobrium, though I think Misti’s found the mother-lode.

From My Journal:

Amir Hassan is dead. He was found dead with Misti, his mother, who had numerous non-life-threatening self-inflicted wounds. The word is that they will charge Misti in Amir’s death. I cannot begin to process the grand scale of this horror. I am so sad. He was a good person, and I wish that this hadn’t happened to him. I am overwhelmed by the finality of death. I am shocked by the capricious nature of murder. I am terrified by the possibility of filicide (killing your child). If anyone can do it, we all could do it. I won’t do it, but now that I know one who has the idea has gotten out of the genie’s bottle of possibility.

A small consolation is that there are lots of good and kind words floating around the ether (internet) about Amir, our lives in the courtyard, Misti’s pain, and the gaping maw that Amir’s death leaves in the world I knew before 7:43 pm yesterday. But there will never be Amir Hassan at my door, playing light saber Jedi with Mason, swinging a wiffle bat, studying at Chandler’s kindergarten; the world is forever incomplete.

 

Misti always was a self-mutilator. I remember talking to her about it. I reckon that I was probably less kind than I should have been, judgment being my character defect of choice. I tried to share my experience strength and hope, but you need a willing and hopeful person to “catch” this optimism. Misti was not that person. I know when I’m “yessed,” I think. I recall that she told me that the cutting was a way of punishing herself and reminding herself that she was alive. I know that there was a positive veneer that she put on the act of slicing her flesh. I think that I believed her. I was into the vainglorious masochism of riding my bike up Grizzly Peak repetitively at that time, so I loved pain too. It reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me that I have a choice, and that I can make anything happen, as long as I can feel: pain or pleasure.

My understanding of this whole thing is incomplete. While I can relate to the self-mutilation, self-abnegation, and self-denial, it is all based on my, well, myself. I have always had a good strong sense of my perverse sanity. While I have red-lined my life for months and years to the point where I was temporarily crazy, I was never at the point where a good night’s sleep, food, and a touch of sobriety wouldn’t clear things up. I always saw the importance of the self in society, you know, the id and the ego, the me. When I was “Thinking of committing some dreadful crime” I always had the safety net of a basically sound mind to fall back on.

I knew that Misti was trying to find that when she was cutting herself. I am sure that the sobering pain and scarlet blood of the slices on her arm always brought her back to what passed for the quotidian, the daily, the mundane. I could imagine the secret satisfaction that cutting yourself would bring when dealing with the commonplace people and problems of suburban single parenthood. (“Yes, I’m fighting for my child-support, talking with other parents, taking my kid to karate, alone again, but I can, after he’s asleep, open up this flesh that people take so seriously [Misti is a handsome woman, never forget that] and look at the inner workings and liquid mainspring that keeps it all going. I do not respect what can be seen without pain. I am deeper. I look inside.”)

My suspicion is that the pain stopped bringing her back. Simple cuts of her arm stopped bringing her back to the pedestrian world she was forced to inhabit with us. She became, I imagine, inured to the daily cuts and bruises of her little life. I am sure that she needed a bigger pain to bring her back. I know that as the little deaths of arm-wounds stopped working she began to worry that she would lose the little prince. The idea of not having your alpha and omega readily available is the most terrifying concept imaginable. Once in a while I let my dark mind go there and battle and fight the evil forces that I’d imagine could rob me of my family, but always my rational self returns, asserts supremacy and banishes the paper-maché mad fears that I build in the cave of my mind. I cannot imagine what it would be like if the “self” that I relied on stopped coming and I was left with the terrors I had created.

When Misti’s blood stopped calling her “self” back, the monsters of her mind, no doubt, became unstoppable. To rescue Amir from those who do not love him as well as she did, in the exact way proscribed by her mania, she had no choice but to send him beyond pain. To think of your child sitting in someone else’s house, at someone else’s table, on someone else’s couch, dancing to someone else’s music, while having poison poured in his ear about you, his mother is a fate to terrible to conceive of.

God I know just how the awful child-welfare-horror comes together. Stephen King writes the civil service test and holds meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order. I know just how it feels. I can imagine the very linoleum, fluorescent lighting and cubicle where custody would be lost. I can picture the cursor on the outdated software which will perform the coup de grâce. When people say that they cannot imagine how a person, a parent, a mother could do something horrible, I say that they don’t want to know. I can imagine. It is not that Misti did it, it is that all of us could do it.

The Semester Begins (Summer Ends)

We went to Riis Beach for one last splash this weekend in between the madness of the kids’ first week of school and Mom and Dad’s first day teaching. The water was warm and we were there at high tide so the waves came up and were really impressive to look at and play in. We got there in the afternoon and the kids and the cousins stayed in the water for three straight hour, until we beached them (pulled them out of the water as unwillingly as mermaids and a merman). It was a wonderful end to the summer of Jacob Riis Beach visits (and Aunti ‘Neene couldn’t make this one). I guess I should mention also that we might not be able to ever go to Coney Island, The Coney Island of yore again: and I’m sad about that (Sigh).
I’m getting excited about my new classes, though, again the “new preps” are spelling lots of reading and extra new work. In a strange way I’m excited about teaching new classes in new ways, but it is always a lot more work. I wish that I had just settled down and done my regular preps, but I think that that is just a way to stagnate. While I want to improve my ENG099 skills/practice and get my ACT pass rate back up to where I started, developing a whole new prep for the common reading like I did last year just doesn’t excite me like trying these new classes.

At Opening Sessions I was talking with President Mellow and I mentioned that Dr. Katopes once published a book of fiction. I, somehow, ended up saying that I’d read it and send her my review. Getting a hold of it will be one of the problems that I have to overcome here: me and my big mouth.

When I started blogging my tentative syllabi for the coming semester I got some interesting hits from people who’ve taught the same books, been taught the same books and are interested in the graphic novels I’m teaching. The dialogues that began as responses to the posts went on as ecorrespondences that have given me interesting ideas and pointed out problems I might face. The internet can be helpful.

Oh Yeah, And I’ve got to give a quick update on the kids: Lennox is a big Kindergarten Girl at PS150 now. She, on Friday, left me at the door for the first time. I think she’s full of her new status as a big Public School Girl, and the wry pride I see on her face as she turns to say goodby one last time at the PS150 Kindergarten Annex on Across the street from our house is priceless.

Mason, who is still at PS150 is full of his new status as a 6th grader. That is big at the school and he has the upper-classman-swagger that is nice to see after a summer with girl siblings, girl cousins and a girl world that didn’t fit him. He also started Soccer on Saturday, and I see the life coming back into him each moment. The Schoolyear is a rebirth for all of us.

Chandler is just so great. She is growing into her new role as seventh grader like a beautiful garden. She has her metrocard and rides the subway to and from her school (chaperoned) every day seeing the world of the New York commute like, well, a New Yorker. Everyday she has a) tons of homework, b) complaints about the subway and commuters, and c) some really keen observation about the world she’s out there witnessing. I think that this exposure is making her more comfortable here in New York. I know that this independence will pay dividends, though I am nervous about her spreading her wings.

Yesterday Auntie Elena got tickets for a Broadway play for Linda and Chandler so Mason Lennox and I went to the Museum of Natural History. We all met up at La Caridad for dinner afterwards. The play was a great experience for Chandler and Linda, who chattered on about detail after detail of the matinée. We went to the mythical creatures show which the kids were really into (though I was a bit disappointed by). For me the real fun was when we got lost looking for “Dum-Dum” (at the end of the Margeret Meade hall) where we saw all sorts of animals and exhibits we never look at when we come with a plan. I think I’m going to stop getting maps when I go to museums to let the hand of fate guide me through the exhibits. It was great.

They are all growing well, Thank You God.

M____. Seven Years Ago

 

More from the way-back machine:  They were so cute when they didn’t have wills to challenge us with.  He is still a great kid, but things aren’t so easy now.

M. is cool-dino-mad these days.  Everything is cool.  Cool this, and cool that but most of all: “mean dinosaurs are cool.”  I wish that I could write “cool” like Mason pronounces it when he says “That’s cool,” or “that’s not cool.”  COO-el, or better COO-wel is the best written pronounciation I can come up with.I know that it is the generic little boy way of saying those words, but watching it on my little three and a half year old son’s face, with his enthusiasm and emphasis, just makes me melt.  He is just so invested in the coolness of the denizens of the Jurassic, through cretaceous epochs.  If it is less than the size of a school-bus, or younger than 65 million years old it just doesn’t rate (unless it is Jason Giambi the first-baseman for the A’s [hey he was with the A's then]).  

I don’t know if he is cuter when he asserts coolness on something, or seeks approval for the coolness of something.  I do know that the denial of coolness is always intoxicatingly cute.  “That’s not cool!  T-Rexes are cool!”  In this little assertion, lisped in juvenile assertiveness, is all the confidence and certainty of the shorter set.  Doubt never enters the mind of the absolutely positive M. S. G.  When he is like this even his big sister’s assertions of the order of things don’t matter.  He knows.  He is right and sure and good.

I vaguely remember trying in vain to convince my parents of the coolness of Batman’s utility belt on one of the benches facing west in Tompkins Square Park. I remember looking to the congueros as their beats washed over us from the central benches and tables one sunny afternoon. It must have been a weekend because my Dad was there, and couldn’t wrap his mind around the absolute coolness of all of the things which came out of Batman’s utility belt, just when he needed them.  I am sure that he agreed with me so that he could get back to the Sunday Times, Pall Mall and container of coffee.  But I knew he didn’t really get how cool the yellow utility belt was. 

Even though I get down on my knees and play dinosaurs with Mason, and show him the claws, or teeth, or speed, or meanness that I think is cool about his t-rex, or carnotaurus, or velociraptor, or deinonychus, I know he is unconvinced about my ability to really understand the essential elements of coolness.  When I get too enthusiastic he gets a bemused expression on his round face and says, “naw, Daddy, that’s not cool!”  He is kind in his amused sadness about my complete inability to understand even the most basic tenets of coolness.   I think he knows that I am just trying to “be down” and that I cannot possibly understand the terms, conditions and limitations of coolness.  He sees my sycophancy for what it is, a desperate attempt to be a part of my son’s life.

Angel, his crony and thick gossip understands (and defines) cool in ways that I will never ever get in a million years of trying.  (Not that any of us have anywhere near that time with our ever-growing offspring.) So when I see the two of them playing at daycare and I try to insinuate my way into their circle of two they tolerate me, knowing that grown-ups just don’t get it.  Even if we are the ones who read them the books which give them the expertise which undergirds dino-cool, we can’t seem to use the special little boy decoder ring which translates it all into cool.  This decoder-ring, as precise and accurate as the enigma machine, and twice as hard to crack is forever on a shelf grown-ups can’t reach.  I can make the exact same observation about a pachycephalasaurus’s head as Angel a minute before him, and it is still “not cool” until Angel encodes it.