Today, having unoffically finished high school, Middle Daughter jumped into her summer job as my assistant, and joined me in my humble enterprise of trying to save the poor and disadvantaged from crappy housing, a handful at a time.
This endeavor was my brainchild, but it's one facet of a larger agglomeration of real estate enterprises that comprise a family business (another oxymoron if ever there was one). And the current wisdom is that you involve the next generation early, but you make it clear to them that what you're doing is educating them, not providing them a tenured position for which they're nowhere near qualified.
She showed up, brightly made-up and nervous, after the last class of her high-school career, with an eager and somewhat terrified Marlo Thomas-like smile cemented to her face.
Seeing that smile, I recalled, instantly, my first job, as a reporter for the Hyde Park Herald, after my freshman year in high school. I was sent combing through wire service reports, and compiling a list of every single business in our community, which became part of a neighborhood guide book.
One day, though, I was sent to "cover" an informational seminar on home security for senior citizens, offered by the Chicago Police Department. I was not prepared for the ham-handed tactics of our city's finest, so young and naive was I. Two cops showed slides of heroin addicts freshly dead from overdoses, horrible torrents of mucous having clogged their mouths and noses; of the corpses of single women, stabbed and beaten in their beds, their blood still moist, their unlocked windows easily accessed; of helpless elderly dead on their floors, heads stove in with a lamp or a frying pan, bureaus ransacked.
I felt it necessary to query the policemen in some stern, reportorial fashion: they had clearly enjoyed the shock value of their slides but weren't quite making clear why we needed to see them. But how did a snot-nosed cub reporter for a community rag pose a tough question to a Chicago cop?
"I assume," I said, "that you'll tell us why we needed to see all this blood and gore?"
The cop sized me up for a moment and said, in his Chicago brogue, "Young mee-aaann, when you assume, you make an ee-ass of you and me."
This got a collective, coughing guffaw from the assembled seniors, and a crimson blush from me. And just like that, I understood: adults are playing the same games kids are playing; they've just added a few tricks to their bags.
I hope Middle Daughter will learn a lot this summer. I hope she'll add a few tricks to her bag. I hope she learns why I do what I do; I hope she'll take a good look at the family business.
And then move right along.
--T.A.
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