Them Bones, Them Bones

After making a 300 mile round-trip drive today to assure a client that his problem is my problem, I arrived home in time to make some dinner and get the littlest angel off to his school play.

"What are we having for dinner?" demanded the middle son.

"Hamburger Helper."

"Woo-hoo!" yelled the middle son, whose dietary preferences are limited to sugar, imported Parmesan cheese, and processed "food."

"Are we really eating that crap?" asked the oldest.

"It's all I've got," I said. "Besides, it's made with the good beef, the stuff we got from P.'s friend."

"What a waste," said the oldest. He had a point, but with thirty minutes to get them fed and get back to the school, I wasn't particularly interested in debating ethical eating choices.

Last year, the grade school play was about "Melton, the Warmhearted Snowman." My son, who played the lead, now calls him "Melton, the Dorkhearted Snowman." A big thanks to his brothers for ruining another nice memory.

Tonight, the play, a musical really, was about the human body. Not "O Calcutta." It had to do with bones and muscles and what not. My kid played a nerve.

"I suppose that's because you get on everybody's nerves," someone said to him last week.

"That's weird," the kid replied. "I've been hearing that a lot."

I ran into a friend of mine, a guy from India, before the play started. His son's playing a doctor. "That's stereotyping," I told him. "He should be playing an Italian grocer or something. You could sue the school district." My friend looked interested. He's getting acculturated.

The play itself was that odd combination of endearing and painful unique to elementary school productions. There was a lot of first-class wiggling by the nerves, a fine narration by a young lady destined to be the star of the 2014 high school play, and quite a stirring soliloquy from the neighbor girl I would have pegged as least likely to give a stirring soliloquy.

Most interesting, aside from my child's obvious and inherited talent, was the make-up of the cast. We live in what almost anyone, including me, would think of as a white city in a white part of a white metropolitan area in a white state in a white part of the country. It's a wonder we don't consider mayonnaise too spicy.

But there, up on stage, in addition to my Indian friend's son, were children with backgrounds ranging from Vietnam to Ethiopia to Nicaragua to a good part of the rest of the world. If they'd had a role for a penguin I think all seven continents would have been covered. Based on an admittedly rough count, my very white son might not have been in the minority, but it was close.

Afterward, I picked him up in his classroom, said hello to his teacher, talked with a few other parents. His classmates break down along similar lines, many of them with hard to pronounce names, some of them with accents I have trouble understanding.

Good.

My grandparents came to this country. They didn't speak much English when they got here, and by the time the immigration men at Ellis Island got done with it, their names were pretty hard to pronounce. My parents went to school in big cities with other kids from all over, then grew up and went to college and moved not far from here, to a white city in a white part of a white metropolitan area in a white state in a white part of the country.

When they bought a house, someone in the neighborhood circulated a petition to keep them out, because their name was hard to pronounce and their parents used to have accents that people had trouble understanding. My parents knew about it, but they moved in anyway, and after a while the rest of the neighbors didn't even notice anymore and my parents made friends that last to this day, and after I was born, so did I.

Now, my boys and their friends are on a stage, in a classroom, playing football, doing these things with kids who have hard to pronounce names and troublesome accents. None of them seem to think about it much, to consider skin color or nationality to be much different than eye color or a fondness for smoked fish. They're just things that make each of us who were are.

When I think the world is going to hell, and that's something I think a lot, I try to remember that.