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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Great Things

Posted September 09, 2008
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"Would you rather be able to fly or be invisible?" Ben asks millions of questions like this, exactly the way I did at his age -- always with some urgency, as if the choice at issue may really come to pass. As if maybe one day you'll die, and there will be a heavenly questionnaire all filled out already: "Okey doke, it says here you wanted to be deaf instead of blind and to live in a candy store with a hundred cats. Welcome to heaven."

"Hmm," I say. "I'm worried that if I picked invisible, all I would do would be bad things: spy on naked people, maybe, or eavesdrop. I picture just sneaking around everywhere. So I guess I'd rather fly, since then I could get where I wanted to go, and feel that soaring feeling, which must be awesome."

Ben is looking at me the way he sometimes looks at his five-year-old sister -- like I'm a cross between a criminal and a zoo gorilla. "Oh," he says, serious. "I was kind of thinking that if you were invisible you could stop crime, or help the police solve different cases. And I was thinking that if you could fly, it would be really easy to rescue people."

"Or that," I say, laughing. "Right. Being a good person! I forgot!" And Ben laughs too.

I love it when the children's morality surpasses mine. I sometimes worry that it's hard to grow up with a profound commitment to justice, when we're so comfortable in our lives. Certainly the kids see us take care of our friends and family, take care of our community and worry about the world. But they also see us talk passionately about politics and social change, they hear us hold forth about Martin Luther King or Tibet, while we're sitting around on overstuffed couches munching Corn Nuts.

I want them to aspire to greatness, on the one hand, but also not to feel lame about their own humanness -- not to feel like they're scurrying, greasy little mice thinking about wax lips and plastic ponies while everyone around them is a majestic sunrise, courageously illuminating the whole world. "Ali's reading To Kill a Mockingbird," my brother once said to me about my best friend, when I was maybe ten or so. He'd come upon me lying on the floor with a bowl of Fritos balanced on my chest, chortling thickly out of my nose into the pages of my book. I turned the book in my hands so that I could see what he was seeing: 101 Uses for a Dead Cat. So? "Stick a pencil in a dead cat's butt," I told him, "and crank the tail. Pencil sharpener!" You know, that or a Pulitzer-Prizing-Winning novel about racial inequality. Either way.

I can see it in Ben already. We still read Children Just Like Me all the time -- that awesome DK book that profiles kids around the world in a really beautiful, non-intrusive way -- and Ben is newly amazed by it. Maybe it's because most of the kids are 8 or 9 ("Those children are just like me!" he always cries, comically), and Ben is identifying with them anew. "Wow," he says, "the kids always want to grow up and go into politics, to make the world a better place. They're so amazing. I always picture the page about me in the book, and it would be like, One day Ben wants to own a sandwich shop where he can only serve lunch so he won't have to work too hard." Self-ironizing is a past-time that seems to come early in my house. "I want to want to be president," Ben sighs. "But it just seems so tiring. And like I should probably leave it for someone who really wants it." I like how he makes presidential candidacy sound like it's the last waffle on a plate.

But then again, self-mocking wit is its own kind of courage, isn't it? Understanding the relationship between one's aspirations and one's weaknesses. It's not quite like Harry Potter's slaying the basilisk, it's true, but it might yet lead to greatness. Even if it's a small kind of greatness.

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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