Have Fun Driving Your Kid Nuts Plus What Angels Sing When They're Terrified

RTT turns out to have a talent for public policy, an ability to extrapolate from statistics and scattered research, figure out from that how best to protect and serve the interests of a mostly ignorant body public. Who woulda thought that? Not his mother.

His first semester policy project involved designing an Open Campus policy for New Roots so that qualified seniors could escape school premises and the nauseatingly wholesome Farm To School lunch menu, eat cheap pizza and find back alleys where they could smoke.

His second semester project involves an investigation into a substance sold in local headshops under the name “Spice.” Spice is a designer drug, a synthetic cannabinoid. There are something like six head shops on the Ithaca Commons; it’s the one business model in the economic downturn that seems to be thriving as more and more people give up on the future, resign themselves to a life where “ambition” means finding the best way to get high. Spice is sold as incense. But RTT has been marching into these shops, asking the store clerks, “So, like if I smoke this, will I get high?” and recording the results.

Yes, in New York State, you can legally record conversations without both parties’ consent.

Synthetic cannabinoids apparently have been linked to blindness and incurable lung diseases. RTT is now thinking along the lines of drafting actual legislation that would make it illegal – a difficult thing, actually, because a fair amount of specificity is involved in the prohibition of pharmaceuticals: Change one molecular bond and Spice will not longer be Spice, it will become something else, requiring its own legal definition.

The Director of Syracuse University’s public policy program dropped on by RTT’s classroom Tuesday while RTT was presenting his project, and was so impressed that he personally invited RTT to apply to the program – which presumably means RTT would get in, though I don’t know how much money they’d throw at him. Syracuse University is expensive.

“Plus, you know, it’s too close to Ithaca,” RTT fretted as we drove home.

“Too close to your parents, you mean?” I asked. “Well, I won’t be living in Ithaca anymore. Your Dad will be, but I think he remembers enough about what it was like to be a young male living away from home for the first time not to fret and fuss over you too much –“

“Oh, it’s not that,” RTT said. “It’s that if I’m within driving distance of my friends, I’ll just come back here and get drunk all the time.”

“Not if you decide not to,” I said carefully.

“I’ll decide not to and I’ll do it anyway,” he said. “No, I have to go to college some place far away from my friends.”

There’s that Prince Hal flash moment again.

It’s exhilarating but also daunting the first time you realize your kid is probably smarter and more capable than you are.

###

Since RTT has come out of the closet on the issue of his own intelligence, I’ve decided to stop mollycoddling him generally on the issue of substandard writing. He’s applying to the SUNY Purchase creative writing program. One of the pieces of the portfolio supporting his application is a 500-word essay on My Strengths and Weaknesses As a Writer:

If I had to put my strengths and weaknesses in a t-graph, each one on a parallel size, I’d feel a bit embarrassed. I think most authors would, the rich and wonderfully successful included; with as many different styles and ways of writing out there, it’s almost impossible to be perfect. But when I stop to think how much influence one person’s voice can be, I suddenly look past the negatives, towards the positives. The art of being a word smith is no trek in the park, and in retrospect, I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life writing.


I read this part aloud to him. Then stopped. Looked at him.

He looked back.

“Well?” I asked.

“It’s a college entrance essay, Mom.”

“But what do you hear when I read it to you?”

“I heard a college entrance essay.”

“It’s horrible,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s worse than horrible. It’s boring.”

He made a face.

“For instance: a walk in the park is not only a cliché but a cliché derived from playing golf, which makes it particularly insipid.”

“How do you know it derived from playing golf?”

“I read the Oxford English Dictionary for fun." (Sadly, this is true.) “But not content to leave the insipid cliché alone, you feel the need to tweak it, much as Milo in the forest, coming upon an unexpected nest of turds that did not originate from within his own bowels, feels the need to pee in a preemptive semicircle around them –“

Robin glares at me. Okay, I'm pretty over the top by this point. But hey, I gotta amuse myself somehow.

“— No walk in the park for you! You must trek through the park, but see, that gives the cliché exactly the opposite meaning you intended –“

“What are you talking about?”

“A walk is something effortless,” I explain. “A trek is an arduous journey, often involving steep uphills and narrow chasms."

“Trek: to journey on foot!” RTT snaps. Shows me the definition he looked up in MS Word.

“Was it Simon Winchester who said the Microsoft spellchecker was the beginning of the end for the English language? I can't remember.”

RTT is definitely peeved now. “Now you're just showing off. Look, I wrote this in like maybe 20 minutes –“

“And what I'm trying to tell you is that it shows. You don't have the craft yet to jot off something good in 20 minutes. Look, Robin, you probably think I’m picking on you. I’m not. Actually I’m paying you the huge compliment of critiquing you as rigerously as I would critique myself. You write really well when you write fiction. There’s no reason why you can't write equally when you write essays. I want to read you something else now out loud now –“

I read him the first few paragraphs of Christopher Buckley’s beautifully written remembrance of Christopher Hitchens from The New Yorker. Prose with very specific allusions designed to tell a specific story, and though the ripple of subtext is there from the very first paragraph – It occurs to me that “benison” is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else – the prose never slips into sentimentality or self-referential pretentiousness.

“Can you tell that’s good writing?”

“I guess."

“What did you hear when I read that to you?”

“He varies the length of his sentences. He uses contrasts – Obama supporter versus Bush supporter. He builds up a portrait with little dabs of information.”

“Okay then,” I say. “Okay. So let’s get started critiquing your essay sentence by sentence. Since the middle of my third grade year, writing played a huge reoccurring role in my life. What’s right with that sentence? What’s wrong with that sentence?”

He makes that face again. “Well, I write a lot. So it’s accurate.”

“You’re still writing, in other words?”

“Obviously.”

“Then the use of the past tense is incorrect. You want to use the continuous past tense: has played. What else?”

“Nothing else. God, you're annoying.”

“Adjectives? You know, Hemingway thought adjectives were effeminate --”

“Would you just stop? Just cross out huge and reoccurring --”

"Well, I don't necessarily agree with Hemingway. He shot his mouth off about a whole lot of things. Reoccurring is actually an interesting adjective --"

“You know what? I’ll just rewrite the whole fucking thing!” he snaps. Which, of course, is what I’ve been angling for all along.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll take more than 20 minutes?”

“Oh, at least 21,” he says.

But sarcasm is lost on single-minded maternal units.

“Well, okay then,” I say. “Okay. I will send you that link to the New Yorker piece. Read it through before you start writing. I think you might actually like Christopher Hitchens.”

This, of course, is why our four months of home schooling while we traveled on the circus was such a disaster. The Tibetans and our Monopoly games notwithstanding, I’m really a bad teacher and no one should let me near anyone who seriously needs to learn something.

###



I woke up this morning and it was snowing. First real snow of the season, meaning first sticky snow.

Can’t really complain: it’s been a long fall. Just yesterday I’d taken Milo on a five mile hike, over the defunct railroad route and through the woods, and noted the eerie wrongness of the landscape. Grey trees. Swamp like a lusterless mirror. Sinister, dead stalks of that final invasion of thistle and golden rod. It needed some other element to make it look right. It needed... snow.

The singing birds have left for warmer climes, so this hike is generally silent. But yesterday I heard the sounds of traffic from a road half a mile away, and it seemed to me that crammed into the upper registers of those sounds was an entire choir of terrified angels singing a Christmas carol by Elvis Costello:

And the whole family tree you neglected to bury,
Are feeding their faces until they explode.

I heard it most clearly.

Of course, I’ve been reading Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks beautifully written and endlessly fascinating exploration of the neurological origins of earworms, musical hallucinations and the like. So that probably accounts for it.