Parentology by Dalton Conley

Author:Dalton Conley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Important members of the Little Red School House progressive community then ( above ), from left to right: Angela Davis ( Photo by Nick Wiebe ); Kathy Boudin; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ( Sources: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. ); and now ( below ): Christy Burns (Turlington) (the tall one) with E to her left. E really impressed Christy, who gave her a shout-out during her speech.

Never mind that I, myself, had researched and written extensively about American poverty. I swallowed hard and escorted the kids to their interview. Or, rather, to their “trial enrollment,” where they were paired up with a current student and went through the motions of an entire school day, winding up with a formal interview with the director of admissions and, as it happens, a classmate of the teacher at Calhoun I knew from childhood. (They had both gone to the “other” downtown progressive school, Friends Seminary, which itself recently broke ties with the Quakers due to the religious group’s uneasiness with the income homogeneity in the student population.)

Shortly after E and Yo did their rounds, we, the parents, also met with the school leaders. Natalie showed up on her Roller-blades—as is her habit to get from meeting to meeting with the minimum of tardiness. She also carried a paper coffee cup, with her hand over it. At first, I thought that she was being extra careful not to spill her tea on the carpeted office of the director of admissions. But then, every so often I heard a chirp. Finally, I asked her to turn off her phone. “It’s not my phone,” she admitted, blushing. She lifted her hand as if she were a magician, and we all caught a glimpse of the injured sparrow that she had brought along in her morning tea cup. Now that the bird was out of the bag, so to speak, she must have reasoned that she might as well attend to the poor creature. So to my shock, she reached into her own cheek and pulled out a pinch of what I can only guess to have been sunflower seeds that she had chewed into a mush of sorts. “Here you go, darling,” she spoke to it in baby talk as she dropped the nourishment into its hungry little beak. “Sorry,” she turned to the rest of us, “I had to rescue it on the way over here.” 3 The sunflower seed mash did the trick, and the bird quieted down enough for us to finish the interview. As we walked out, I figured we were going to have to homeschool our kids not only in the formal curriculum (which was fairly easy for a couple of professors) but in the hidden curriculum as well (which wasn’t second nature for folks who carry injured birds around in their coffee cups).

As it turns out, our seminar on the dramaturgical theory of Erving Goffman had done the trick and both kids were offered slots at the Little Red School House.

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