The first essay David Sedaris read had me second guessing the next hour and a half and whether it would be worth sitting high up in a hot opera house when I could be at home in fuzzy socks watching Scandinavian crime dramas. The people around me loved it. Released from the stuffy Balboa Theater into the oozing orange light of the Gaslamp’s Fourth Avenue at the end of the night, praise for the essay surrounded us. The praisers, to a person, were too old to be in the trenches. That is to say, currently rearing their own offspring between the ages of newborn to new adult. That is a generalization about a Sedaris audience, but it is no less keen an observation. If some of them did have young children, those children were created by feats of fertility performed by women past childbearing or women young enough to bear both children and the distaste of intimacy with men old enough to be fathers to them first. For that demographic, Mr. Sedaris’ essay was a homerun. For me, a Sedaris fan who got a babysitter to go to the reading, it was a miss, and not a near one.
Not only a Sedaris fan with kids at home but an LDS Sedaris fan who might be a skeptic about the religion’s claims of ownership on eternity, but not at all skeptical about the value of children. The essay reminded me of a recent ward get-together to welcome newcomers who moved in during COVID. Gathered in a member family’s large backyard, we ate plates of potluck at wooden tables under sturdy umbrellas. A toddler toppled one umbrella when she put her arms around its shaft the same way she would have wrapped her arms around her dad’s leg. The umbrella landed over the sister seated across from me. I say “landed over” and not “hit” because it covered her like a sunhat, the canopy shielding her from its ribs and runners. We said our thank goodnesses and went back to eating. The toddler was too young to know that she was the cause of the close call. Standing near her parents, she leaned against the base of the umbrella. Nothing happened. Nothing happened until a middle-aged sister, one of the newcomers we were there to welcome, stood up, walked over to the child, got down in her face, aggressively said, “No, no, no!” and shook her finger in the girl’s face. The child stared blankly at the sister who strode back to her seat saying, as she walked, “Sometimes a child just needs to hear the word ‘no.” It was galling.
My ten-year-old daughter, a personal favorite of the little girl, went into the bushes and cried. The girl’s parents chose silence instead of a confrontation that might alienate the new sister. I did not. Possibly sensing that her behavior had been distasteful, she slid down the bench ten or so minutes later and praised the behavior of my children. I told her that the parents of the toddler she berated were more than capable of managing their four children and that her uninvited intervention made my daughter cry. She blinked at my refusal to accept her compliment. “Parents these days are too afraid to say no to their children,” she said. “Not those parents,” I countered. What I should have said was that sometimes adults needed to hear the word no. That was one of those times.
Mr. Sedaris needed to hear the word no. He needed to hear from someone who has actual experience with modern child rearing. We briefly corresponded earlier in the year. I wrote him a letter. He sent a postcard with handwritten advice. I didn’t intend to pursue a pen pal relationship, but I couldn’t quiet the Mormon mom or the literary beast in me until I wrote and sent the following:
May 3, 2023
Dear Mr. Sedaris,
Thank you for the Katherine Mansfield postcard. It arrived at an opportune moment – sandwiched between rejections. I took your point about rejections signifying the need for harder work. I read “The Garden Party” and framed the postcard. I also attended your reading at the Balboa Theater in San Diego.
My husband and I were late getting tickets and were lucky to get seats together at the back of the top tier of the very packed house. Even with my glasses on, it was more the specter of you than the actual physical you. Perhaps your first essay (the one about kids, private school buses and parental folly) would have landed differently had I been able to hear it in sync with your facial expressions and mannerisms.
Today, the day after your reading, a kindergarten teacher at the elementary school where two of my three children are students, told me that a little girl in her class carries a breastplate in her backpack. Her parents bought it for her to shelter under in the event of a school shooting. Her pack weighs almost as much as she does, not to mention the weight of fear her parents lay on her shoulders day in and day out. Yet, I can’t judge her mom and dad. It is difficult to be a parent.
In the same conversation, another mom told us that there was a system malfunction at her daughter’s middle school a few weeks ago. “RUN FIGHT HIDE RUN FIGHT HIDE” was broadcast on repeat. Children jumped the fence and hid in the canyon. Others knocked on locked classroom doors whispering their names until teachers let them in. In the end it was a false alarm, but I can’t imagine how those children and parents felt in the days that followed.
School shootings are traumatizing enough. Today’s parents also manage the trauma of social media. Too much exposure and kids learn to loathe themselves. Not enough exposure and kids become isolated from their peers. If we don’t strike the right balance, we risk losing our kids to suicide or raising the shooters we fear.
If we praise our children too generously, it’s because the world is full of heartless, faceless, wireless presences who can’t wait to shoot them down. We fear the day when we won’t be able to praise them at all.
Last year my dear friend, the writer William Vollmann, lost his twenty-three-year-old daughter. I’m including a piece I wrote after her death. It won’t change your essay or your mind; I’m not sure I’m writing this letter because I think your essay or your mind need changing. Perhaps I’m writing because, even when I can’t see your facial expressions, I believe in your humanity. Your most sardonic words are counterbalanced by an undercurrent of human understanding. Parents need understanding. I know I do.
Many thanks
The Kids These Days
Bowl of Udon. New blonde hair. Converse high tops. Massage chair. The poem, as accidental as Kira’s death, came from forty-eight hours of parallel grief. Parallel because I was there, alone at home with Todd and Judy, one week after the death of their daughter, aged twenty-three.
Tornadoes in Texas kept me from my cousin’s memorial. Call it kismet, I was at the airport with a packed bag and a canceled ticket when Todd phoned. By late evening, I was on his front porch. Todd stood in the doorway with Judy behind him. The naked grief in his face was raw, and it made me afraid of his pain and scared of my own futility.
I couldn’t fill the void or play chaplain. I could only be there. The first night, I was there to look at Judy’s cellphone pictures of Kira’s newly bleached hair. She had it done a week before she died. In the photos, you see that she is old enough to be striking, the standout in every picture, but young enough to have that question in her eyes. The question is, “Is this hairstyle what will make the new me? Is this change the one that changes everything?” If you believe that to be hyperbole, you have never been female and twenty-three. The most painful part of the look is two-fold. First, that she, half Korean and half of Germanic descent, pulled off the blonde contrast beautifully, but for what? To take it to the grave? Secondly, the presence of hope behind the questioning look. Kira not only wondered if the blonde hair was a new beginning, she hoped it was.
The second night, I was there to burn the rice in Judy’s risotto and receive, in return, a bag of shoes. Judy puzzled over the Blue Bandana Patchwork Converse High Tops and why Kira didn’t take them with her to the aunt’s house where she was staying for an extended visit when she died. I didn’t know what to say about that, and I said nothing about the irony in the bag of shoes.
My dad died of a sudden heart attack when I was twenty-seven. My mom wanted to clean out his closet during the funeral week while she had her children there to help with the onerous task. It fell to me to carry a bag of my dad’s shoes, leather lace-ups that went with his suits, to the trash. At the time, the necessity of sending perfectly good shoes to the landfill sat right with me. Later, the remembered waste drove me mad. I believed in the power of possessions. My dead uncle’s mirror hung on my hearth. My dead grandmother’s pie server sat with the other utensils in the misfit compartment of the cutlery drawer even though I was more a burner of rice than a maker of pies.
The tea bowl on my bookshelf was found in the Chinese tunnels under the streets of Mexicali the summer that Todd and I went from shopfront to shopfront asking if business owners had heard of the rumored passageways. One godawfully hot day a shopkeeper said that the entrance to once such tunnel was in his storage room and proceeded to pull up a square of flooring and lift the door to a forgotten world. A Chinese immigrant girl gave me the dish after teaching me how to say the proper petitioning prayer, inviting the good spirits that accompanied the bowl to come home with me. That was the power of passing possessions on to others. Their spirits kept the story going.
I didn’t pray when I tossed dad’s shoes but walking in the dark with a garbage liner full of wingtips from the back porch to the bins by the fence that paralleled the alley became a series of lines in the longform poem I wrote about his death. My oldest wore Kira’s Converse to middle school the day after I got home. It felt full circle to see them on her feet. A life lesson successfully learned; how to do right by the shoes of the dead.
The massage chair that Judy ordered for Kira arrived just before the burned risotto and the bagged shoes. Once assembled, neither Judy nor Todd would try it. Separately and simultaneously, they urged me to climb in. After the tenth or so invitation, I realized that I wasn’t doing my job. My job was to be there. Specifically, be there in the massage chair that arrived too late to soothe the daughter battling demons. The chair was pod-shaped, and it meant business. After a thorough full body massage, Todd and Judy prodded me to try another setting. I thought the “stretch” option might do me some good. When the pod unfolded itself so that my calves were forced forward and down to the point that I felt my knee sockets disjoining while at the same time my shoulders were pressed flat and pulled past my ears, I traveled backward in time and felt what heathens felt in the moment before Inquisitioners turned the rack up from extreme discomfort mode to forced confession.
I confessed. I confessed to my role in Kira’s death. Mine. Yours. When we begrudge the generations that came after ours, we’re complicit. When we talk about the kids these days and how they don’t measure up to the people of previous decades, we join the world’s oldest, most senseless and most boring conversation. We dig our sticks into the mud and say, “If you aren’t a bicentennial baby who remembers seeing ET in the theater, the Iran-Contra Affair, the invasion of Kuwait, the excoriation of Anita Hill, the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and the fall of the towers, you don’t have what it takes to navigate the world.”
It is a line of thought that is disproven with every passing day. It is a constantly failing argument that lays bare the limits of the speaker’s intelligence. Worse, it kills. Twenty-three is a bitter age to die. It can also be a bitter age to be alive. It is old enough to hurt. Old enough to regret. Old enough to grapple. Old enough to fight demons and lose. The kids these days face perils that we did not, but the kids don’t fail. They never do. If they did, we wouldn’t be here.
After the risotto, the shoes, the “massage,” Todd went to bed and Judy brought down a lined notebook. It was the food journal that Kira kept for four months prior to her death. Devastatingly, the handwriting deteriorated from clean and youthful in December to clutching and spastic in March. Like she couldn’t quite hold the pen. Like she couldn’t quite see the page. The spacing got desperate. Letters didn’t join up to make words. Words tumbled down the page, pinning her last cohesive thoughts to paper before succumbing to gravity.
In an early entry, she drew a beautiful bowl of Udon. In the margin she wrote, “Like Kerouac, we were on the road all day. Unlike Kerouac, I did not generalize America.” Whatever else conspired against her, and for a twenty-something in 2022 the nearly limitless possibilities ranged from body image, substances, assault, intellectual malaise, mental illness, war, gender, debt, rejection and disappointment to name a salient few, Kira felt the blow of backhanded generalization from the generations that preceded her. Did it kill her? No. Did she survive it? No.
Of all the grave images turned poetic when I stepped out of parallel grief and back into my life left largely unscathed by Kira’s death, the food journal came to me most frequently. Kira’s marginalia were adroit and witty. “Does it count as lunch if I eat it at 3am?” “Does it count as lunch if I didn’t have breakfast and I won’t have dinner?” The renderings of noodles and focaccia and drawn-to-scale ingredients were intricate and lyrical. They wanted to leap from the page and know what it was to be and smell and taste like real food. They were like Kira in the photos with her new blonde hair, springy with hope and bursting to get free of one dimensionality. The shoes were what I had of her that retained dimension. On the shoe rack by the front door or on my daughter’s feet, they reminded me. It was my job to be there for Todd and Judy. It’s our job to be there for the kids these days.