When I was a little kid we lived a relatively short drive from my mother's adoptive parents' house. From time to time, usually around various holidays, my dad would drive us up there and drop us off, almost never even getting out of the car. The one time I do remember him setting foot in the house, he hung around in the basement for a while and then ducked out before sundown. At the time I thought this was a bit odd. Then twenty years later I got involved with Jennifer. Now I understand perfectly.

It's not that there's anything wrong with Jennifer's family. But Middle America makes me feel like a space alien. Especially during the holidays, which is usually when I'm down there. I'm already out of place surrounded by chain-smoking elderly white women with Long Island accents; throw in a bunch of traditions from a culture and religion I don't share and I feel like I'm sitting there with the word "ETHNIC" tattooed across my forehead.

And it's not that I'm ostracized — quite the opposite. I sort of have to participate, because if I skip too many of these holidays in a row then it's like I'm telling these people to piss off. Most recently it was Christmas, since I had a business trip to NYC on the 26th and 27th and so couldn't exactly bail on making the rounds on the 25th. Now, here are three things that make me really uncomfortable: gift-wrapped presents; presents from people I don't know well; Christmas. This has been made known to Jennifer's family. Perhaps they have misunderstood this message as a martyrdom sort of thing — "oh, you don't have to get presents for li'l ol' me, I'll be all right without them, etc." But it's really not. I don't like being put on the spot by being given a present (especially if I'm expected to open it right there). I also find receiving inappropriate presents really humiliating. But on top of all that, I am not a Christian. You can say that Christmas is secular, and maybe it is if you don't have "ETHNIC" tattooed across your forehead, but I am not white and I am not from Middle America and it is not secular to me. And I do not want to participate in celebrating the birthday of someone I believe to have done much more harm to the world than good. Yet nevertheless they give me Christmas presents. I realize their intentions are good but I wish they'd accept that the best way to show those good intentions would be to please leave me out of it.

There was one really bright spot to the trip, however: the best laugh I've had in years. It probably won't translate to this format, but here goes. First, some backstory, which I'm actually a bit unclear on. Jennifer has a step-nephew and a step-niece, who are toddlers. It seems that recently the step-niece was getting out of a chair when it fell to pieces under her, leaving the tyke bawling with shock. In any case, that's what I gathered from the conversation leading up to this exchange between Jennifer and her brother Scott:

Scott: Yeah, it was a real Incredible Hulk moment. Next she'll be smashing through the wall.
Jennifer: Like Kool-Aid Man.
Scott: Except Kool-Aid Man never burst through the wall and then collapsed into tears.
Jennifer: He did at Jonestown.

I laughed so hard I literally fell out of my chair and couldn't get to my feet for a good couple of minutes. I had to stagger off to one of the bedrooms to recuperate. Good heavens, but I love that girl.

After Jen went home and my business meeting wrapped up I found myself with a few hours to kill before my train arrived so I went over to the Whitney to check out their exhibit of 100 or so recent gifts of postwar American art. It was a good show, with lots of really interesting and beautiful pieces. But the highlight for me was when I was reading one of the little note-plaques and heard voices behind me. It was a pair of sisters, one about four years old, the other maybe six or seven. Here is what they said:

4-year-old: This doesn't look like it was painted by hand.
6-year-old: *sigh* That's because it's Jackson Pollock. He always dribbled paint onto the canvas.

And as I listened to this exchange I found the plaque I was reading starting to get a little blurry. See, probably the primary criticism leveled at Ready, Okay! was that the kids talked like grad students instead of high school students, that especially in the flashbacks when they're supposed to be quite young they sound unbelievably sophisticated, and so forth. Me, I thought I was just capturing the conversations I had as a kid. Then recently I started subbing at local high schools, and the lack of intelligence on display — and the kids' utter lack of interest in remedying this — left me so disheartened that I quit... and it made me start to wonder whether I'd just been imagining things, recasting my childhood memories with an educated vocabulary...

...but no, dammit. There are first-graders out there who expect their younger siblings to possess a working knowledge of Jackson Pollock — even if 99% of the students at South Hadley High School don't. There are kids out there who are BRIGHT! Later on I ran into the girls again, this time in the company of their parents, and they were having a conversation consisting of dog barks — not loud ones, just, y'know, conversational barking. "That's enough woofing," their mother said. "I don't want to hear any more woofing, or meowing, or any animal noises."

A beat passed. Then the 4-year-old asked, "If I said, 'Polly want a cracker,' would you consider that a parrot noise?"

If I could have, I would have adopted her right then and there. I tend to waver on whether I want to have a kid someday; I don't know whether this is a world I'd want to bring a child into, nor whether it's right to create another mouth to feed, and on top of it all I find babies fairly repulsive. But adorable moppets who can toss off sentences like that? I must have one.

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