Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (17 page)

But soon it begins to pall. They hunt around for someone to leave their egg with so they can go to the movies. Some of the guys try to talk girls into tending their eggs. One boy I read about hard-boiled his egg and then carried it around blithely in his pocket. I’m nervous about his prospects as a father, but I’m convinced he’ll become a United States senator.

By Monday morning the eggs are broken.

We rarely admit that carrying something fragile with you, in your hands and your heart every minute of your life, is one tough task. I wonder sometimes how the fourteen-year-old and her dim friend wound up managing it, or if they did. The thing I find most annoying about this Mommy-To-Be doll is that she has a smile frozen on her face. Take off her big belly, pop out her baby, and she smiles and smiles. Motherhood is a snap. So simple. So easy. No stretch marks. No varicose veins. No potbelly. No problem. No way.

NAUGHTY AND NICE
December 21, 1991

Dear Mr. Claus,

Yes, Santa Claus, there is a Virginia. And despite everything you’ve seen on television and read in magazines, the amazing thing about her is how little she’s changed since she asked for an orange in her stocking so many years ago. The boy you mention is exactly the sort who once would have said, “Your mother wears army boots.” He would not have said it in front of you, however, because he believed that you knew who was naughty and nice.

The world they live in has changed plenty. Master Mall probably learned that word at home. A lot of us moms are more loose in our language than in the days when my mother once said “Oh, hell!”—she probably had just broken her toe at the time—and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

Our children’s speech is anatomically correct, which seems like a good idea until the moment, in a crowded restaurant, when a two-year-old announces stereophonically, “Grandmom, I have a penis!”

Today’s children inhabit a far harsher place than the world in which I waited for you each year. Five million of them under the age of six are living in poverty, which means that their toys may come via some church collection program rather than the traditional chimney route.

Fifty years ago teachers said their top discipline problems were talking, chewing gum, making noise, and running in the halls. The current list, by contrast, sounds like a cross between a rap sheet and the seven deadly sins: drug abuse, absenteeism, alcohol abuse, vandalism, assault, teenage pregnancy, suicide, gang warfare, rape, and arson.

But let’s not fall prey to good-old-days-ism. Let’s not pretend that none of the children you visited fifty years ago had abusive parents or empty stomachs. Let’s not pretend that the world of Bedford Falls was perfect. I grew up safe, secure, and insulated in a suburb in which a Protestant was a rarity and a black family an impossibility. At this holiday season, my kids consider it one of my great shortcomings that I am ignorant of how to spin a dreidel.

This is a good thing.

They grow up faster, Santa. Too many of the Virginias of the world have babies when they are still babies themselves. Too many of them equate maturity with cynicism and hope with disappointment.

But there is a part of many of them, even some of the most superficially sophisticated or the most deeply scarred, that accounts for the continuing existence of you in a world that
seems at odds with everything you stand for. It is that sense of infinite possibility, the genuine “Wow!” It is that sense that the blinds are not yet drawn between the windows of their eyes and the houses of their hearts.

The preternatural maturity we see in so many of them comes from us adults. It is our response to raising them in a world in which people die from sex and kill for pennies. It is to protect ourselves—we trade their innocence for street smarts for our own sake.

The Virginias of the world will tell you they want a Madonna cordless microphone and a pair of hoop earrings. But it is amazing how many of them still sleep with a tattered fur thing, part bear, part bunny. You may be conscious of how many of them no longer believe. I marvel at how many of them do.

I marvel at the pain it causes even the toughest customers to see beneath your beard and discover you are only a man in costume. It will be many, many years before some of them understand that you are a stand-in for what is best within themselves.

Those are the Virginias who grow wise but never weary. My New Year’s resolution is to try to be one of them.

May your days be
merry and bright,

Anna Quindlen

ENOUGH BOOKSHELVES
August 7, 1991

The voice I assume for children’s bad behavior is like a winter coat, dark and heavy. I put it on the other night when my eldest child appeared in the kitchen doorway, an hour after he had gone to bed. “What are you doing down here?” I began to say, when he interrupted: “I finished it!”

The dominatrix tone went out the window and we settled down for an old-fashioned dish about the fine points of
The Phantom Tollbooth
. It is the wonderful tale of a bored and discontented boy named Milo and the journey he makes one day in his toy car with the Humbug and the Spelling Bee and a slew of other fantastical characters who change his life. I read it first when I was ten. I still have the book report I wrote, which began “This is the best book ever.” That was long before I read
The Sound and the Fury
or
Little Dorrit
, the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries or Elmore Leonard. I was still pretty close to the mark.

All of us have similar hopes for our children: good health, happiness, interesting and fulfilling work, financial stability. But like
a model home that’s different depending on who picks out the cabinets and the shutters, the fine points often vary. Some people go nuts when their children learn to walk, to throw a baseball, to pick out the “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano. The day I realized my eldest child could read was one of the happiest days of my life.

“One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion,” the English novelist Anita Brookner writes in
Brief Lives
, her newest book. “One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions—sorrow and anger—adequately. Attempts to recapture that primal spontaneity are doomed, for the original reactions have been overlaid, forgotten.”

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting—often unwilling—recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most surefire ways of doing that. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. That would give them an infinite number of worlds in which to wander, and an entry to the real world, too; in the same way two strangers can settle down for a companionable gab over baseball seasons past and present, so it is often possible to connect with someone over a passion for books.

(Or the opposite, of course: I once met a man who said he
thought
War and Peace
was a big boring book, when the truth was that it was only he who was big and boring.)

I remember making summer reading lists for my sister, of her coming home one day from work with my limp and yellowed paperback copy of
Pride and Prejudice
in her bag and saying irritably, “Look, tell me if she marries Mr. Darcy, because if she doesn’t I’m not going to finish the book.” And the feeling of giddiness I felt as I piously said that I would never reveal an ending, while somewhere inside I was shouting, yes, yes, she will marry Mr. Darcy, over and over again, as often as you’d like.

You had only to see this boy’s face when he said “I finished it!” to know that something had made an indelible mark upon him. I walked him back upstairs with a fresh book, my copy of
A Wrinkle in Time
, Madeleine L’Engle’s unforgettable story of children who travel through time and space to save their father from the forces of evil. Now when I leave the room, he is reading by the pinpoint of his little reading light, the ship of his mind moving through high seas with the help of my compass. Just before I close the door, I catch a glimpse of the making of my self and the making of his, sharing some of the same timber. And I am a happy woman.

MR. SMITH GOES TO HEAVEN
April 7, 1991

Jason Oliver C. Smith, a big dumb guy who was tan, died March 30 of lung cancer and old age. He was thirteen years old and lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the back section of the minivan, behind the kids’ seat.

He was the son of somebody or other, but it was probably somebody with a name like Champion Snowfall’s Big Brown Bear or Lancelot Smith of Sunnybrook. No one knew what the C. stood for, although there was speculation that, like Harry S. Truman’s middle initial, it was an attempt to seem more dignified than he really was. He was called Mr. Smith only when he was reprimanded for eating the coffee cake off the kitchen counter and when he went to Washington.

He was born a golden retriever, although he never appeared in a Ralph Lauren ad, never gamboled through a field of daisies and high grass by the side of a slim woman with a picture hat in a television commercial for feminine-hygiene products.

He appeared in only one music video,
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
, and fogged up the camera lens by licking it.

His pedigree was a source of some discomfort for his people, who acquired him just at that time when everyone who had been born between the years 1950 and 1955 and who had a four-wheel-drive vehicle and 2.2 children was acquiring a retriever. They were concerned lest other people think he was a status symbol. Luckily his behavior belied such a thing, and it was with great pride that they occasionally heard people say, “Gee, he acts just like a schnauzer.”

With his passing, his people took stock of the relationship between man and animal and considered that people acquired dogs for the purposes of keeping in touch with their distant ancestors and of learning to remove hair from napped fabrics. People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.