I have trained my children.
Nothing as useful as to pick up after themselves, or as impressive as table manners, but to perform.
It started with Esther.
It would have started sooner, but Esther spent the first few years of her life wholeheartedly objecting to doing something as mundane as speaking.
However, when she finally did decide to take that step, I started the training.
I would ask my 4 year old daughter ( in front of people, of course, all performers need an audience), “Where did I get you?
To which she would reply, “Kmart- blue light special!”
With Aaron, it was Happy Birthday.
I trained him to sing happy birthday, which took a huge number of cupcakes, and us celebrating someone’s birthday everyday for 11 months- but we got there.
You see, Aaron is deaf.
Oh yeah, I think I mentioned that.
And when he left the Deaf School, he started having to sing Happy Birthday in class for all of the birthdays, and getting invited to all these birthday parties, and having to sing it there, as well.
It was a social skill, and I decided that, since it is the most often sung song, we would do a dog-trick and teach it to him.
A dog trick….that is when you teach someone to do something that doesn‘t demonstrate intelligence or even skill, it just fools people into thinking the performer is either smart or skilled.
So, Aaron really had no sense of music, or of what he was doing, he had just repeated it often enough that he could do it, when the occasion arose.
And, he wouldn’t‘ even know anyone else was singing Happy Birthday, unless you told him that is what they were singing- so you can see why this counts as a dog trick. I won’t’ give more examples, now, but I also want to explain that s the kids have gotten older, they have taught one another dog-tricks, and they have even taught themselves some.
Aaron in particular. It has something to do with his off-center sense of humor.
I think.
One of the things that he does is answering “Baruch HaShem” to teachers in school, when they ask how he is. He says, “I’m fine, Baruch HaShem.”
If you are not in the loop, tat means “Thank G-d.”
This is a dog trick, since , Aaron doesn’t’ always pronounce things correctly, and teachers are usually loath to embarrass him in a situation like that, so they won’t ask “what did you say?” They will just nod and smile. Even though they have no idea what he said.
Another is that he has a phrase he says with great rapidity, I forget the first par of it, but it goes “….My brother from another mother.”
This is something he has picked up from some of this friends, and it is always unexpected from hi, because, unlike his friends, he is considered “white” and he says it so rapidly that you have to think a second to catch it. Especially when it is attached to the first part of the phrase.
All of this is truly amazing, if you understand what he took for him to learn how to do that, but it takes us off the strange path I was taking towards tonight’s’ Story of the Day.
You see, Ms. Esther, my 20 year old, is planning on moving “off campus”, next fall. She is looking around at rental houses with a group of 4 other girls.
We have heard of various places and the ups and downs and stresses of the hunt. We have also listened as the group of girls got whittled down from 7 to 5, and may now end up getting whittled down, again. But there might also be a dog, so what does that do to the count?
It takes me back…way , way back, to my first off-campus place.
I , my last year at Penn, moved off campus into an apartment that was the second floor of a converted Victorian house with a friend who wasn’t yet a friend.
She also wasn’t yet a relative, but time - the months we lived there, altered that.
It was not an especially auspicious beginning.
Her father drove her up to the Perry palace ( it hadn’t yet been named for the Perry’s who were our landlords, an elderly woman and her 50 ish son who would also be honored at the building’s annual Perry picnic, to which we did not invite them.)
Her father, on seeing the steps that weren’t quite attached to the house, and my brother, who was quite visibly stoned and standing out in front of it…actually, in the street, said, “Oh my G-d.” And it wasn’t in a positive way, either.
At this point, Lynne adds :
“ and you might want to point out that my father 1) did not believe in a deity and 2) had never uttered that phrase before or since and 3) didn't say anything else the entire 30 minutes he stayed “Lynne and I had been matched up by her boyfriend, who was a friend of mine.
We were both looking to save some money- and , each year, the dorms kept going up and up in price- like the rest of the college’s expenses.
I was there for three years. The first year, tuition was $4,000.
This was in the Dark Ages of man, about 1978- and that was a normal price for an Ivy League school. My third year, tuition had risen to $9,000 a year- and I was glad to be graduating and not needing to see what the cost would be for the following year. Actually, I was paying grad school tuition, my last two years there, so , it may have been a little higher than undergrad, but not by a lot.
At any rate, moving off campus meant saving some money- and both of us were desperate to do that.
An unforeseen complication occurred just as we became roommates, that fall. Lynne broke up with Howie- who had fixed us up, so he was no longer a fixture eat the apartment.
I must mention here, though, that he did me a great favor. You see, I never knew that I had a relative named Lynne, and wouldn’t’ have, if not for his matchmaking. Lynen and I quickly took to calling one another “Mom”, since we were basically providing the care and nurturing the other required, and we later expanded our relationship to being sisters. This became necessary for us to have a logical relationship with one another’s children- since , obviously, her son is my nephew.
At any rate, Lynne is my sister from another mother- even though neither of us has exactly ever phrased it that way….well, except in her ASL homework project.
So, as Esther fast and furiously emails us about 19 times a day, I wonder what relatives she will discover in this off-campus odyssey.
I should possibly also warn her about neighbors. Our upstairs one who tied his girlfriend up on the porch before beating her….or the drug dealer, who was really the best of the lot, and then there were the downstairs neighbors with the mice.
Well, they soon became our mice, too- but they couldn’t’ understand why the little creatures liked to run all over the last 2 mos worth of dirty dishes that they had laying over every inch of their kitchen.
Of course, according to the landlady, Mrs. Perry, it was the fault of the upstairs neighbor- since he had a cat. Well, as she informed us, everyone knows that having a cat attracts mice…..
