Exchange Program
Posted on July 8, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys, summer camp, bitching and moaning, summer |
So summer’s been on for fourteen days and, already, I have tired of hearing I hate swim team and it’s too hot for tennis and piano lessons suck. It’s a repetitive loop of thankless bitching, constant complaint. Mostly from my eldest, my naughty by nature son. He has deemed this Country Club Summer, all the lessons and sun block applications and snack bar purchases and lifeguard whistles, somehow sub par and he affects a sort of can’t be bothered attitude there beside the pool, wincing and moaning through planned activities and complaining about the recent change over from matchstick fries to thicker steak fries. I remind him that we all must suffer the deep-fried transition and it’s important to handle such disappointments gracefully.
I find myself uttering the hackneyed phrase you don’t know how lucky you are, daily, sounding like my parents and their parents before them and wondering when I turned into my Nana, convinced that I’m but moments away from donning a bathing cap and doing the breast stroke in the lap lane. And, like all children the world over, since time began, my children successfully ignore my reprimands and scolding, my attempts to remind them that in other parts of the world, hell, in other parts of town, whole families live in tents and share bedding with their sisters.
It strikes me that lucky is a relative concept. There is always bigger, better, more and until a person experience smaller, worse and less, true understanding is just not possible. And so it is that I am contemplating developing a Fresh Air exchange program in which we invite lower-income children from Detroit, Trenton and the Bronx to come to our town for the week and work on their butterfly kick, their golf swing and the proper construction of a sand mansion while my kids take their places in their inner-city neighborhoods, delivered there by Greyhound with only a knapsack and twenty dollars stuffed in their pockets. There they will learn about dodging street fire and they will come to know the stench of urine in the stairwell on a humid summer afternoon. They will play among the shards of glass and look forward to neighborhood children yelling ‘Narcos’ whenever the police ride ’round the block to hassle the petty dealers. There they will learn to associate the summer evenings with the sounds of sirens and car alarms and the occasional domestic dispute that has spilled out into the hallway. Maybe then, when I get them back, a little strung out, sleep deprived, a whole lot wiser, will they get what I mean by lucky.
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