Dad, Politics and Magical Vocabularians

Well maybe it started when I found the book of poems by E.E. Cummings. I used to love reading poetry by him, even put one of his poems to music when I was in high school. I found a book of his poems for a song, so of course I bought it. And there we were driving to be with my dad on Father's Day, and Sam was driving, so I used the time to compose a poem, untitled at the time, but referring to

The Art of Dadding. You know, it talked about Daddity, and Dadness, and how to dadden and dadify, and the importance of Dadship, and it really felt right to me, that words could expand to mean more than we realized if we just experimented with them more often...

Meanwhile, on a previous trip, I had gone to see old friends from high school. It was an incredible afternoon, in the course of which we got to talking passionately about vocabulary, or more specifically, phonology, but with a focus on vocabulary, a subject I am immensely fond of. So as we spoke about the word bank of the average 4 year-old, what it should be but actually isn't in some cases, from the perspective of Gina who has been working with such children for as long as I've lived in Mexico, and as I threw in my perception of things from the standpoint of my present job which is coaching middle-school and high school students in a program focused on creating self-study habits through tutoring software, a picture began to emerge. This picture showed how the lower echelons of society do not necessarily have the tools to keep up with those who can afford to be in the right place at the right time to acquire such and subsequently use them. So they get left behind and you can see this in each new generation. Things like deficiencies in reading ability, speech, creating ideas with words, making oneself understood and understanding others through words... We are truly in need of a new profession I would call Vocabularianism... I would like to offer my services as a Vocabularian as a matter of fact. I'm still trying to come up with the specifics of the job, but it would definitely have to do with opening up new avenues of communication through words. We've got imagery down, but what about the words to describe it!!! Like lovely old country roads, they are getting swallowed up in the huge freeways of video-streaming.

Finally, in the most recent trip to visit my parents, I got into a talk with my dad - that father I described in my poem as being "the daddest of all Dads" - about politics, and he mentioned how there is a debate going on about raising taxes in order to fund more Pre-K programs - which was what Gina had been talking about that day of our reunion - and suddenly all the pieces fell into place. Thanks to my father, who is such an upbeat octogenarian and so knowledgeable about the world that I listen to him enthralled whenever he shares his points of view with me (which is not to say I agree with him on everything, but rather that I am in awe of his grasp of the big picture in many cases), I finally understood that it's truly a full circle kind of thing. Here are the young children in the lower socioeconomic sector, not reaching their full potential by far, having the phonology level of children much younger, all because their parents don't realize what they can do to prevent this: mainly talk to their kids, discuss things with them, read and talk about what they read together, debate and listen to their opinions... these things do not happen often in the homes of families who have spent generations working to build up a comfortable life. As Gina says, once you get there, it's easy to stay poor. You get your material needs down - shelter, t-shirts and tennis shoes, TV and videos, cell-phones and iPods, fast food and prepackaged food - and you talk at your kids, not with or to them. Get this, do that, see you here, meet you there, no Q&A about ideas or meanings or ideals or wonderings.

So of course, the gov't feels a need to make sure the whole society doesn't disintegrate into non-intelligible beings, and that means: let Pre-K do the parenting!

Gina, I want to tell you, you have the right idea trying to get to the parents and asking: is this what you really want? You can avoid the need for Pre-K, or enhance the whole experience of it if you help your children discover their powers of reasoning and creating ideas from the moment they begin to speak to you.

Dad, I thank you and Mom for making sure we found ours... and to my own kids, I hope Car and I have helped you find yours... because it’s not about power... although being able to reason, create ideas, and express yourself certainly are powerful tools, but more than power, what you can discover and pass on through words - spoken, written, read, heard, sung, devoured, spit out, but most importantly, understood - is magic!
P.S. Sam, that's what I tried to say in the song I wrote last week!