DADWAGON

A friend recommended the website Tiny Art Director to me today. Please, go check it out. First, I think the name is awesome, mostly because it reminds me of Tiny Elvis, which is just plain funny (what’s wrong, Tiny E?) Now, that’s comedy. But so is this site.

Basically it’s all drawings by this illustrator, Billy Zeman. He shows his drawings to his daughter, and she critiques them. Here’s what she looks like:

Does she remind me of my girlfriend, my mother, or my boss? All three. One thing she doesn’t remind me of is my son. Perhaps it’s a gender thing (girls develop faster than boys, it seems), or just JP, but my boy’s an easy critic. At least at this age, he’s not capable of reacting to one of my magazine articles in any way. By contrast, consider this exchange that Zeman has with his “art director.” Bear in mind that they are discussing a drawing of an airplane, which said critic has deemed a “poo-poo airplane,” and that, at least for the purposes of the site, Zeman doesn’t go forward with a drawing unless his daughter likes it.

Kid looks at photo: Can you just paint one poo-poo in a frame? The poo-poo is an airplane.
Her Critique: Good. I want a treat.
Job Status: Approved

Thank God that’s not us. I don’t think I could take it if JP thought I was a hack.

Last week I went to 112th and Lennox in West Harlem to see the universal pre-K program at P.S. 185.

I’ve been looking at pre-K programs throughout uptown Manhattan ever since we discovered that we were too poor for private school but too rich for Head Start. It’s been a frustrating process; as I’ve written before, underfunding has left just 406 spots in District 3, which covers the Upper West Side and West Harlem. Some schools have ten applicants for every spot. Siblings get first priority; the rest get in (or not) through a lottery.

At least one school wouldn’t even give us a tour because the odds are so long. Our zoned school isn’t doing pre-K at all this year. The next closest school is just three blocks away, but when I visited, I found the classrooms cluttered and chaotic, with a computer video blaring in one corner while kids tried to play/work elsewhere. But even there we would have little chance of winning a spot for our daughter.

P.S. 185 was completely different. Monika Vargas, the parent coordinator, was welcoming, even solicitous. The classrooms were spacious and uncluttered. The kids were wonderfully calm and attentive as their teacher read a book to them. After the tour, Monika said the school always had a few spots open, and she all but guaranteed us a place for Dalia if we filled out an application and ranked them no. 1 right then.

But I hesitated. I left without filling out an application. I still don’t know if we’re going to apply to the school at all. Why? Because every single one of the kids in both pre-K classes is black. And Dalia (as you might know) is not.

I know, I know. Harlem schools have black students: not shocking. But still I wasn’t prepared for Dalia to potentially be the only kid who wasn’t black. And even though America has been magically postracial for 415 days since Inauguration Day, I’m still not sure what to think about the idea.

[Let’s break here for my humble rendition of the “Some of my best friends are black” disclaimer that white people like to use before talking about race: Actually, none of my Best Friends are black. I suppose a couple of the next tier—the Very Good Friends—are. It is also true that my aunt is black, as are my (half-white) cousins, although family is family and not really divided by race, especially in this past year, when my uncle was killed on his motorcycle by a fucking scatterbrained soccer mom driving a Honda Odyssey and all of us who survived him ceased being black or white for a while and were just identically useless and heartbroken and angry. Now that shit is postracial.]

Here’s one reason why sending my girl—who is equal parts Mexican, Jewish, Japanese and German (she’s pale, if not exactly white)—into an all-black classroom could be problematic. Four-year-olds are just programmed to be blunt about differences. Dalia has never really asked her mom or me about skin color, but she does ask loudly why that man has no legs, or if the “fat woman” is going into the same store as us. Her school this year is mostly white kids with some Asian and Hispanic kids; she’ll notice the change and she’ll ask loud questions about it. The other kids will ask their own loud questions of her and about her. Children are innocent, but not ignorant (that’s why it’s a bad idea to feign colorblindness).

But will those questions ever go beyond curiosity and become something that keeps Dalia from feeling like she truly belongs with the group? I don’t know. Would a black 4-year-old girl feel like she had more in common with Dalia (another girl) than with a black boy in the class? Seems reasonable.

Another confounding variable is black Harlem’s own diversity. I say that the both classes were all black, but I just saw their faces. I have no idea if those kids were born in Harlem or in Haiti, if they’re from the South or from Senegal. The one other parent I met in my brief time there was from the Ivory Coast. Some of the kids could have been Hispanic, which would again give Dalia something in common with them (the Spanish language) that might trump any difference in skin color. Same goes with socioeconomic status: Harlem is financially diverse, and the school might be as well.

I could be analyzing it too much. After all, I imagine that a lot of black people (not just Michael Steele) often find themselves alone in a roomful of white people. In theory, reversing those roles should be a good thing. But that’s a heavy trip to lay on a 4-year-old. I dream of a world where color doesn’t really matter, but Dalia is going to have to go to school in the real world, and I don’t want her to have to pay for my daydreams.

By the same token, it’s just a year, even if it doesn’t work out perfectly. And it certainly could be a positive thing, getting exposure to kids who are (at least in superficial ways) different from her. And the school’s next group may just naturally be more diverse—I ran into a Filipino-American mom who was also in love with the school, and considering putting her kid there. Maybe Dalia wouldn’t have to break the color barrier alone, though we wouldn’t know until they hand out assignments in the summer.

So, readers, what would you do?

UPDATE: On rereading this post this morning, I realized I made it sound as if this were there perfect school, just the wrong color. Actually, one aspect of the pedagogy didn’t quite agree with me: the curriculum seemed pretty rigid. All the 4- and 5-year-olds wore uniforms. They learned writing through practicing writing, same with numbers. They were assigned homework. It was the least progressive of all the schools I visited, though that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker in and of itself. Oh, and that Filipina mom? She said she might put her kid there if she could get at least one or two other other friends who weren’t black to enroll with her. So that’s unclear still…

 

Gourmet has gone under, Bon Appetit is hanging on for dear life, and the TV Food Network has turned into the all-travelogue channel, with barely any actual cooking instruction taking place. But never fear: The Stupid-Magazine specialists have leapt into action, and we will shortly all be introduced to Deen Bros., the cooking magazine for men. MEN, dammit, who aren’t afraid to incinerate a pork chop on the backyard grill. Being the principal cook in our household–and a man with neither backyard nor grill–I call bullshit, on three principal points:

1) I was not aware until now that cooking instruction was gender-specific. All this time I was working off Cook’s Illustrated and my old food-flecked copies of  Julia Child; turns out I may as well have been wearing a frilly lace dress and skipping rope.

2) I also thought that Paula Deen, the charming if slightly crazy-eyed southern-cooking specialist on the Food Network, was a pretty minor success. Apparently she and her buttery pie crusts are a smash, though, because these two guys are her sons, who appear on her show. That’s right: Even two bit players on a basic-cable cooking program can now get their own magazine. This speaks loud and clear about the state of the publishing business. (I should point out here that three of the four Dadwagoneers work for major magazines with lofty editorial ambitions, and all three of said magazines are laying people off and/or running in the red.)

3) I haven’t seen a copy, and I am jumping to conclusions here. But I have a very strong feeling that its first issue will have a big section on dry rubs, and will include the phrases “fire up the grill” and “comfort food” at least four times.  There will be virtually no baked goods, vegetarian options, or anything involving bok choy.

At my dentist’s today, for a small and painless procedure: He noticed on a recent visit that I had a little crevice on one molar, one that threatened to turn into something worse. (“You have a teenage cavity–very exciting,” he told me.) So he flowed in a plastic resin–a sealant, they call it–to smooth out the groove and keep bacteria from getting a toehold. And, as he finished up, he remarked to me that my son would most likely have similar sealants put on all his back teeth, probably as a matter of course, once they came in. “They’re 93, 94 percent effective now,” he said. “That plus New York’s water, which is fluoridated, means nobody gets cavities anymore.” Really? Really? “They’re going to be an antiquated disease, like diptheria.”

You know, there are times that I question how much medical advancement I want in my life, especially as I get old. Ten extra miserable and diminished and painful years added to the end of your life are not necessarily a bonus. But this seems to me an unmitigated delight. You spend an hour in the chair when you’re 10 or 12, for a procedure that is (I can report firsthand) FAR less irritating than most dental work, and that’s it. My god! Can you imagine life without the prospect of the high-pitched drill, the smoky smell, the post-novocaine ache? Ever? One in which dentistry is solely the province of the elderly or the vain? Terrorism, shmerrorism: My son may actually have lucked into a good time to be born, after all.