I’ve been away since just before my surgery, which was July 30. Since then, I’ve mostly recovered and begun to enjoy the improvement. I’ve also enjoyed a visit from my three sisters, which was super awesome. Do you know how long it takes four grown women to dirty twenty three towels?
Two and a half days.
You might think it would take longer than that, but not if they really put their minds to it.
It was a great visit. Even as I was folding towels and rinsing the vomit out of my trashcans, I laughed to myself about trying to draw a vending machine with my eyes closed, sunburns, stingrays, and the still-drunken ride to the airport this morning, or should I say, late last night. Flying at six a.m. means getting up before lots of folks have even gone to bed.
Anyway, after all that work today, I decided to pick my son up from school before the 5:15 snack and take him for ice cream and then to the library. After this we’re going to Sea World to catch the last Shamu Show and the sunset from the observation tower, since we have annual passes that include parking.
We got our ice cream across the street from a hoity-toity local restaurant, a veritable food-tique where you have know a secret just to get the bathroom door open. Forget turning on the water–you do it with your feet, and the men can seen your toes. Freaky.
Little Man saw the valet guy setting out the signs that reserve the streetside parking in front of the restaurant. He wanted to know what they were for.
“Those are signs that say you can’t park there. They only park the shiniest, fanciest, most expensive cars there.”
He thought for a second. “Is our car like that?”
Uh, negatory, ghostrider: “No, pal, our car isn’t like that.”
“But we can still go in there, if we want to? We just have to park somewhere else?”
I assured him that this was the case.
“We can like, park our car over here, and then look both ways, and then cross the street, and then go in that building?”
Yes.
But of course it made me think of times and places in which various people have been prohibited from entering certain establishments, like in the Jim Crow south, the caste system that makes some people Untouchable, or in the Ayatolla’s Iran, and then about elitism. The invisible lines. The truth is we could go in there, but the question might be whether there is some kind of barrier around the place, and if so, who exactly it is that’s openly unwelcome, if not expressly prohibited.
“Dress codes” are one way of keeping out the riff-raff. I often hear advertisments for nightclubs that say “Dress to impress, no sneakers, no athletic wear, no hats.” What they mean is “No thugs.”
I don’t know if this place has a dress code. If they prohibited pleated shorts with braided leather belts and hiking sandals, they could have saved me a less-than-stellar date once, but that’s beside the point. And that night turned out pretty fantastic once I said my thanks and took leave of that gentleman.
I guess I’m talking about some of the big -isms–racism, classism, elitism. I think it’s interesting that my four and a half year old has enough of a sense of how important it is to have freedom and to have access, both to the far away world so that we can dare to dream, and to what’s right in front of our facs, so we can feel dignity. I can’t imagine what it would be like for him to see a place, let’s say an ice cream place, and have him ask if we were allowed in and have to tell him,
“No.”
