I witnessed something exquisite halfway through 1996, when my daughter didn’t graduate from Whited Elementary School, on the edge of northeast Santa Rosa’s Rincon Valley, but was promoted out of it. (It was apparently important that we parents not cheapen the word graduate by using it prematurely.) There was a little ceremony in the gymnasium in which each promoted student was called up to receive a little document and a congratulatory handshake from principal Mr. Coleman while his or her parents beamed proudly. It seemed that three-quarters of my daughter’s female classmates were named Ashley.
It was of course right around the time that the kids would cease thinking of their parents as those who loved them most, and come instead to view them as sources of excruciating embarrassment. Three months later, I would accompany by daughter to her first day at Rincon Valley Middle School, and she would hold proudly onto my hand as we located her first classroom. Within a couple of months, though, when I met her on Friday afternoon after school, she would get into the car either snarling at me, or pretending that the car had driven up from San Francisco (her mother and I were divorced) on its own. There was no one on earth she wanted less to be seen with than me, and it was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life.
But back to three months before. There were a couple of black kids at Whited, and several Latino kids, many of whose parents worked at the nearby wineries. There was in my daughter’s class a very-large-for-her-age girl called Pilar, who my daughter said was extremely shy, and extremely hard-working. As her name was called, a man I assumed to be her dad, who’d been standing in the entrance to the gym in jeans and a white T-shirt, the clothes of manual toil, walked toward the principal, self-consciously swiping tears of what I took to be pride and joy from his face. After Mr. Coleman shook Pilar’s hand, the man presented Pilar with the helium balloon on a stick he’d brought for her. Happy Birthday! it proclaimed. My guess is that wherever he’d bought it hadn’t had any that said Congratulations On Your Promotion to Middle School, but that he’d wanted to give her something special. The tears came faster then he could swipe them away as he and Pilar embraced, ever so briefly, and Pilar returned to her classmates. I nearly cried myself.
I felt paternalistic doing so, as he might have been one of the Spanish language’s most celebrated novelists, for all I knew, but I imagined Papi having been deprived of an education himself back in Mexico or Guatemala or El Salvador. It even crossed my mind that the balloon said Happy Birthday because he couldn’t read, and had been too shy to ask the casher at Walgreen’s, or wherever he’d bought it, to tell him what it said — not that there were any Latinos at Walgreen’s.
When we’d get far enough away from her school for her classmates to see her acknowledging my presence, my daughter would relax a bit, and actually speak to me. I told her one Friday afternoon how much Pilar’s dad’s obvious love for her had moved me, and asked if Pilar had remained the shy, dutiful kid she’d been at Whited. My daughter snorted in disdain and informed me Pilar had in fact turned into a bully who hung out with the pants-nearly-falling-off crowd, the hip hop badasses.
To hearing that, I’d almost have preferred my daughter being even surlier when I picked her up each week.
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