DADWAGON

We had the kiddies listening to some Elvis Costello yesterday because, well, screw the Wiggles. But it led to a conversation with our five-year-old daughter about what the song “Alison” is really about. For those unfamiliar with the song, here’s the second verse and chorus:

Well I see you’ve got a husband now.
Did he leave your pretty fingers lying
in the wedding cake?
You used to hold him right in your hand.
I’ll bet he took all he could take.
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking
when I hear the silly things that you say.
I think somebody better put out the big light,
cause I can’t stand to see you this way.

Alison, I know this world is killing you.
Oh, Alison, my aim is true.
My aim is true.

Clearly, I don’t even really understand some of that myself. But my wife dutifully explained as best we could: the song is about a guy who used to be with a woman, and now they’re not together, and she’s married and he’s not and both of them seem kind of unhappy.

Good kiddie conversation for a summer afternoon, right?

But here is the genius of the passionate pre-k mind: this was not just a beautiful bummer, as it is for  this was, for Dalia, a call to action. Kids, man, they really take their stories seriously. Good and evil aren’t abstractions for the under 40″ crowd. If something is wrong it must be made right. I don’t know if this is a function of all the facile happy-ending moralizing storybooks they’ve read, or if there’s an innate sense of justice they haven’t yet lost. Either way, Dalia asked a few questions to be sure she understood exactly what had happened–that the woman had a husband now, leaving poor bespectacled Declan MacManus, err, Elvis Costello, all alone.

She thought for a moment, then leaned in with her big doe-eyes narrowing and said, “I’m gonna kill that husband.”

Happy Monday, all.

With almost no exceptions, my experience with Ellie’s nanny, who has been with us for about four months, has been great. The baby loves her, Tomoko respects (and likes) her, and I find her calm to be an entire separate, and reliable, infrastructure in the system of our parenting.

But I did have one whopper of a chat with her the other day. She is from Trinidad, of African descent, and very proper. I learned a little earlier that she was in the process of splitting with her husband, and had in fact moved out and was living withe her sister (with her two young children).

After offering my sympathy, I asked her what sort of arrangement she managed having with her ex with the kids, and she told me she assumed that they would be with her. In fact, she said, she wouldn’t be totally surprised if her husband cut off relations with the kids and just moved on. I expressed some shock at this—up to this point her description of him had been rather good—and she frowned at me.

“Let’s be honest, Ted,” she said. “We’re all adults. The truth is, black men are more likely to leave their families than men from any other race.”

No need to go into the class, race, and gender weirdness that plays into hiring someone to look after your kids. We happen to be very lucky, our nanny is superb, but it’s still an adjustment on a daily basis.

I just had no idea what to say to that one. I tried mumbling something appropriately liberal about poverty and the alienation it causes (which, I admit, was kinda condescending), but she batted it away as if I hadn’t spoken. Black men, she knew, were no damn good.

I let it go at that, we joked about finding her someone Jewish, and then she went home.

Any thoughts out there? A difficult one for me.

From the lovely and glamorous designer/translator/DadWagon-spouse Jean, comes the answer to yesterday’s bar riddle. The sign shown here was, in fact, a Father’s Day tribute, from the semi-sleazy bar Touch in Nanjing.

Here’s Jean’s translation of the billboard:

A father’s love is an unassuming love. It’s an emotion that can’t be defined. Only people who look closely will understand. People say a father’s love is like a mountain, because it’s the same as a mother’s love, which is unconditional. This Father’s Day, Touch Bar has gathered mysterious gifts to give to every stressed-out dad—and dad-to-be!

Spend $1000 you’ll get $500 styling gift card:
Spend $2000 you’ll get $1000 worth of gift box, and $398 beauty gift card;
All that and more at Touch Bar!

To which I say, let that be our collective goal before next Father’s Day in June 2012. Every “stressed-out dad” should make  a vow to spend $2,000 at their local pub, in order to unlock “mysterious gifts”. Let our love for liquor be like a mountain!

I just got back from a somewhat too-short five-day trip to Nanjing, China. I did not, alas, find any turtle prick dumplings (sorry, Theodore). Nor did I see the Great Wall, or any gymnasts, or tiger penis aphrodisiacs. I did see lots of army folks, some powerful exhibitions about the Nanjing massacre, and lots of traffic. Nanjing has a reputation as the cultural and historic heart of China, so I was expecting at least moments of quaint-old-village. But like everywhere in China, the city is on a steroidal growth tear, now numbering eight million residents. So the old parts are there, but they are at least partially hidden behind the trappings of yet another would-be megapolis.

Things I liked about Nanjing: their willingness to eat every part of the duck, except, it would seem, for the actual meat of the duck. Blood, kidney, heart made for surprisingly good soups. Also, I loved the universities in town: walking around Nanjing University and Southeast University was a chance for unusual calm.

Things I did not like about Nanjing: no Facebook, no Twitter, no Google Plus, no YouTube, etc., etc. DadWagon reader CuteMonsterDad wanted to know if his blog was banned in China, and though I didn’t get a chance to check, it may well have been. Nothing seems too innocuous to escape the all-seeing censors. And the crackdown is worsening: China’s top investigative journalism team, to take one example, was shuttered this week.

But you, dear Chinese-speaking DadWagon readers, can help me answer a much more important question. See this advertisement in the picture up top? It was in front of a semi-seedy bar in the 1912 district call Touch 2. And it’s very clearly about Father’s Day (even with June 19th written in English). Look, there’s a picture of a dad with his child on his shoulders. But what would a bar be advertising Father’s Day for? Does DadWagon–with our lust for taking our children on pub crawls–have a kindred spirit in Nanjing’s bar district? If anyone can figure out what this all means, I’d love to hear about it.

In the meantime, I’m going to be tweeting my ass off today. Because in the US of A, I can.