Big Words

August 4, 2004

It's true that I only visit my parents once in a blue moon, but since Saturday was a bona fide blue moon , I had little choice but to visit them. Besides, even though I wasn't looking forward to the drive, I thought a trip away from the city might help me get over the flu I have.

The Garden State Parkway was bumper to bumper the entire way, and It took me nearly four hours to drive 85 miles, but I made it. My sister and her 15-year-old daughter were visiting as well. (My sister has two daughters, but the older one was helping her boyfriend recuperate from a recent car accident that left him with a steel rod in his leg and 32 stitches in his face.)

My sister and her kids recently moved from the New Jersey suburbs to the Pennsylvania backwoods. They had been living with my parents in the same house I grew up in, but when my parents decided to retire to the Jersey shore, my sister and her daughters had to relocate as well. Through a complicated sequence of events, they wound up moving to a deceptively cute little town in the hills of Pennsylvania.

The center of their new town is a harmless little artsy farsty tourist trap, and their street is safe enough, but one block away from their house puts you right smack dab in the middle of white trash crack shacks. My oldest niece is 20. She has a boyfriend, a decent job, and most importantly, a car, so I don't worry about her very much. Although with a boyfriend who drives into trees, maybe I should. But anyway, her younger sister -- the one who was visiting with my parents this weekend -- well, she's another story. Because she has to face the hell of entering a new high school. In less than a month, she'll begin her sophomore year, and she has to start thinking about her schedule already. As everyone sat in the living room listening to my father play songs about the moon on the piano, I talked to my niece about what classes she was planning to take.

"Will you be taking any art classes this year?" I asked.

"Mm. No. I already took them all."

Okay, wait. What? She was only at her new school for three months -- finishing out her freshman year before summer vacation kicked in -- but she already took all the art classes? I was confused. "What did you take?" I asked.

"Ceramics."

"Oh cool, that's fun. Did you make anything good?"

"No, we didn't actually make anything."

"What do you mean? No ashtrays? No lopsided coffee mugs?"

"Um, no."

"Well, what the hell did you do all semester?"

"Okay, well, this is how backwards this school is. For our final project, we had to paint a piece of pottery."

Now say what you will about New Jersey -- and believe me, I say plenty -- it's a fact that their public school systems are regularly ranked among the best in the nation. And the little town that my family left behind always ranked well within the state. So maybe she was a little spoiled. "Oh well," I shrugged. "I guess you could almost consider that ceramics. Decorative painting on pieces of pottery. I mean, I guess. "

"No," she corrected me. "We didn't paint on pottery, we painted pictures of pottery."

"Huh?"

"Yeah. The teacher told us to find a picture of a vase or a bowl in a magazine or something, and then we painted a picture of it."

"And this class was called Ceramics ?"

"Yeah."

I studied her face to see if this was all some practical joke. "Seriously?"

"I know," she said. "It's so dumb."

"Well, how about the other kids? Have you made any friends yet?"

"Mm. A couple," she shrugged, "Only boys, though. The girls all hate me."

Within the first week of moving there, she got accused of trying to steal a girl's boyfriend away. "I don't know what this girl was mad at me for," she said. " He was the one talking to me. "

The bullygirl rounded up a bunch of her badass girlfriends, and they bicycled from crack boulevard to confront my niece outside of my sister's new house. The gang threatened to rip my niece's hair out. Aside from the whole boyfriend incident, they didn't like her hair anyway. "We don't wear our hair all spiky around here," they told her. As my niece told the story, she ran her fingers through her hair and said to me, "I mean, look at this, it's not even spiky."

Not being one to back down from a bunch of Pennsylvania hill rats, she stood her ground and listened as the torments went on and on. Eventually, my sister noticed the commotion and walked outside to shoo the kids away. "Is that your mother?" the ringleader asked my niece.

"Yes."

"Tell her I'll punch her in the face, too."

My sister has been in two abusive relationships and barely escaped being murdered, so she's not easy to intimidate her. (Wait. Now that I think about it, maybe the town they left behind wasn't much different after all.) Anyway, my sister went down the hill to the curb and told the kids to get lost. Eventually, they did. But not without the last word. "Did you know you live next door to a couple of fags?" one of the badasses said over her shoulder. My niece relayed this story to one of her new guy friends, and as she did, she marveled at that last statement. "How is that even relevant?" she asked the guy. Her new friend thought for a moment, looked at her, and said: "Do you always have to use such big words?"