Shamed Again By A Stranger Telling Me My Boys Need A Jacket

(or, feigning confidently unfazed by failure)

This morning, walking to the library to return the Collected Short Stories of Hemingway¹, which I never even opened, and Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, which I stayed up late to read the day I checked it out - this old man, pushing a cart overflowing with plastic bags, told me my boys needed jackets, which when we lived in Guangzhou, I heard from Chinese grandmothers all the time about my daughter, but rarely have I been bothered in the United States about my sons, and never before by the presumably homeless! In China, my daughter usually wore multiple layers and boots and gloves and the grandmothers were crazy. This morning, the bagman was right, it is cool and breezy and the playground by the library has a lot of trees which shade the slides, lessening the warm-up-in-the-sun spaces. My boys don’t seem to mind. They’re gaga for squirrels and bunnies which are scampering everywhere here.

I was reading an email on my phone when the old man stopped me, my daughter was assessed for gifted services in her school and deemed ineligible, which is fine, maybe even expected, but like my recent Paris Review rejection, I had hoped maybe we’d get lucky and her lack of paying attention would be judged as an expression of higher intelligence. Whatever. I still love her. Yesterday, a light fixture fell from the ceiling in her classroom and she was the first in her class to dive under a table. 

1. I’m never going to get around to writing my Hemingwayesque werewolf story before some robot beats me to it.