Traveling with Kids

Actually, it’s not just a flight. Due to the vicissitudes of the global economy and our resulting (and oddly unshakable) penury, the best and cheapest way to transport the family from New York to northern Germany, where we will spend some vacation days relaxing with old friends in Vorpommerania, is this: flight from New York to Reykjavik. Reyjkavik to Amsterdam. Train to some backwater transfer station, another train to Berlin. It’s not quite travel by steamship, but in all it will take 22 hours, if we nail every connection.

So I’m busy right now charging up every electronic entertainment device I own, so that perhaps all of us can follow my son’s lead and wear diapers and zone out watching Star Wars over and over while urinating en place.

But here is a plea to all you more veteran travel-with-family travelers: is there any hope for us once the batteries run down? Any old-school tricks for transporting a two- and five-year-old across endless time and space? I’ve got time for one more trip to the store in my neighborhood. Should I buy beef jerky? Red bull? A copy of Marie Claire and three bottles of glue? Any suggestion not just welcome, but madly desired.

God save us all.

The day I learned to write cursive was the day my handwriting—and probably all semblance of fine motor control over drawing implements—died. It was 1982 or 1983, and I was living in Brighton, England, an 8-year-old temporary American transplant to the British state school system. Until then, I’d learned, as most kids do, to write block letters, and was very comfortable doing so.

But in school, they kept trying to teach us some other form of writing: cursive, I guess. I didn’t get it. What was the point?

And then, suddenly, at home one evening, I did. I realized that I could keep my fountain pen (required by the school) on the page and connect the tail of one letter to the beginning of the next. Just like that, I was writing cursive.

Of course, my penmanship was atrocious. And if I’d been any other student, I’m sure my knuckles would’ve been rapped, my hide caned, until I could scrawl like the Queen ‘erself.

But I was an American, and I told my teachers this was how it was done in America. Since I was going back there at the end of the year, they decided not to teach me cursive the right way.

And yet, the next year, when I was home in Massachusetts, I played the same card with my new teachers. My awful cursive penmanship, I said, was the British style. And my gullible instructors bought it. They backed off. I continued to write an illegible cursive that no one—now, not even I—can read.

That same year, however, was the year I discovered computers and began to learn to type, first a speedy hunt-and-peck, much later a structured approach. Pretty soon, I was far more comfortable typing than writing by hand, so much so that my fifth-grade teachers misinterpreted my hatred of the physical act of writing as some weird learning disability, and temporarily placed me in the slow-kids’ English class. That didn’t last long.

I’m reminded of all of this by the local newspaper, which frets in its own special way, over the impending death of cursive:

The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.

Might people who write only by printing — in block letters, or perhaps with a sloppy, squiggly signature — be more at risk for forgery? Is the development of a fine motor skill thwarted by an aversion to cursive handwriting? And what happens when young people who are not familiar with cursive have to read historical documents like the Constitution?

Guess what, Gray Lady? I have answers!

1. Maybe, but might people who write proudly and frequently in cursive be more at risk for computer-based identity theft?
2. Yes.
3. They read widely available digital versions. Or they puzzle out the documents letter by letter.

To be fair, the article doesn’t spend that much time moping about the death of cursive. Mostly, it’s full of people like this:

“Schools today, we say we’re preparing our kids for the 21st century,” said Jacqueline DeChiaro, the principal of Van Schaick Elementary School in Cohoes, N.Y., who is debating whether to cut cursive. “Is cursive really a 21st-century skill?”

Soon, I predict, writing cursive—indeed, writing by hand at all—will become one of those retro trends that only hipsters engage in, like riding bicycles or eating vegetables. I offer myself as exhibit number 1, for I, in recent years, have found occasional joy in writing things by hand. Now, from time to time, I write in “small caps”: capitals at capitals, lowercase as smaller-font caps. It looks nice, and I can even read what I’ve written.

And, of course, like any writer who dreams of one day publishing a book, I’ve developed a decent signature, sharp and swooping and dramatic. I particularly like signing it on the backs of checks. And so, if you’d like an example, please send me a check. I promise to sign it and return it to you (via your bank) as fast as humanly possible.

Okay, this has nothing to do with Passover, or parenting, except that I thought of it when I saw some photos my friend David put on Facebook of his seder, and he has a lovely new daughter, Georgina.

He was seated at the table with his guests and they were all wearing little paper hats (along with yarmulkes), each one embossed with the name of a plague. I couldn’t make out which one was his in the photo, so I’m just going to typecast and go with lice.

Anyway, this made me think of the summer in college that David and I shared a little house in New Orleans. We had very little money so, as might be expected, the place was a shithole. It wasn’t far from Tulane, and the landlord rented it out in during the year to students. In the summer it was under repair. This meant there were no locks on the doors, no doorknob on the back door, and a hole in the bathroom floor large enough to see the ground.

Still, we had fun. I got a job as a fry cook at Fat Harry’s, a popular bar in Uptown. David and our friend Gregg used to come in while I worked and I would feed them all evening. When I wasn’t working I was drinking beer, pretending (badly) to be a pool shark, and striking out riotously with women. Things could have been worse.

The only problem we had was that the landlord never respected our space. He was trying to get the place rented for the upcoming school year, so his agents always used to stop by unannounced to show it. This was a problem for me: my shift at the bar was from 10pm to 8am. I needed my sleep, and if strangers were tromping around the house during the day I wasn’t going to get it.

David, for some reason, seemed to take this worse than I did. He would get irate each time someone came, and finally he announced that the next time anyone showed up without notice he’d fix them.

This happened shortly thereafter: an agent came by with two young men around noon. I was asleep, but I woke up to let them in. David happened to be in the kitchen frying pork chops, and when realized what was up, he told me to stall them in the living room for a minute and then send them into the kitchen.

This I did, chatting drowsily with the agent and not neglecting to mention the stellar plumbing. Then I told them not to miss the kitchen–it was fantastic.

They went in and things were very quiet for a few moments, the only noise being an astonished “Oh, my,” from one of the guys looking at the apartment. Then they burst out of the kitchen and made for the street, the agent promising to call in advance from now on.

When the were gone I walked into the kitchen. David was at the stove, buck naked, frying pork chops.

“Hungry?” he asked.

Playground Juarez

“Mexicans were aware that when they talked about children, they tended to talk about nonsense.” –Roberto Bolaño, 2666

There is plenty left to say about the trip I just finished to Juarez and the Texas borderlands (yes, I’m back home). In large part, I suppose, most of the information will come out in the pages of Tiger Beat, the magazine that sent me there to report.

A joke, of course, a joke. As the NY Times knows, Tiger Beat reports on the president, but not about the bloody drug war playing out on the border. Tiger Beat and Bop should have a Juarez correspondent, though, given the fact that vast majority of American adolescents are, by definition, current or future drug users. It might well be instructive for them all to learn about just how much blood their weed is dragged through on the way to their parents’ basement.

But I am not here to wag a finger at drug-hungry preteens. It’s the fault of both governments, as much as anyone else, that the drug war is as bloody and futile as it is. So instead I’m thinking at the moment of the children of Juarez, a city where there were 3,111 murders last year, four or five times the per capita rate of the worst U.S. cities.

There’s a photo on the wall of the Editorial Director of El Diario, the leading paper in Juarez, of a handful of kids, all younger than ten, looking at a pool of thick, clotted blood on the sidewalk. There’s no shock on their faces, just something between sadness and indifference. One can imagine that they looked like that for only a few moments after the picture was taken, and then they ran across the street to play soccer in some empty, scrubby lot.

But what is really going on behind the numbness?  A UN report almost 15 years ago talked broadly about the impact of war on children:

In Sarajevo, where almost one child in four has been wounded in the conflict, UNICEF conducted a survey of 1,505 children in the summer of 1993. It found that 97 per cent of the children had experienced shelling nearby, 29 per cent felt ‘unbearable sorrow’, and 20 per cent had terrifying dreams. Some 55 per cent had been shot at by snipers, and 66 per cent had been in a situation where they thought they would die.

Another survey in 1995 in Angola found that 66 per cent of children had seen people being murdered, 91 per cent had seen dead bodies, and 67 per cent had seen people being tortured, beaten or hurt. In all, more than two thirds of children had lived through events in which they had defied death.

But there was a note about how children rebound that struck me, later in the report

In all cultures, one of the most important factors [in healing] is the cohesion of the family and community, and the degree of nurture and support that children receive.

And in this regard, the children of Juarez might have an advantage. Because Mexican children are still, even in the middle of all these crises, at the center of the community.

That focus on kids can have some unintended bad consequences. For example, Mexican law genuinely treats minors with faith and leniency–they would never sentence children to life in prison or even to death the way we do in the U.S. But one result of that leniency is that children, as young as early teens, are recruited to do the killing in some cases, because the cartels know they will likely receive light sentences. And because children are so central, they’re being used as bargaining chips. When one journalist I know was threatened in an extortion attempt, the caller didn’t say they’d kill him; they threatened to kill his children, to cut their heads off. The threat worked, in a sense. It forced him to leave town.

And yet. I took the rather crappy picture above outside a withered and sun-scarred colonia called Villa Residencial. It’s one of the bleaker corners of this bleak city, and yet, improbably, there was a playground there. And even more surprising, looking impossibly small in the distance, was the boy in the red shirt. Playing.

I’ve been looking at that picture a bit. I can’t decide if it is gutting me because it’s he’s there alone in this forsaken place next to that broiled playground equipment, dwarfed by the slide and the electricity towers and the concrete gully covered in graffiti. Or maybe it affects me because it’s so ridiculously beautiful, the idea that a kid is out there playing in the middle of all that wantonness.

You know: Juarez will get better. The level of violence is literally unsustainable (as one friend put it somewhat jokingly, “sometimes I wonder how they keep finding new people to kill”). And kids, who have been so wonderfully adaptive that they’ve learned to kill because it’s time to kill, will learn to heal and to thrive when it is time to do that. Godspeed.