Sue took this picture yesterday at our place while Louis was setting up the Netbook we all gave him for his fifteenth birthday. I've reproduced it a bit large here so you can all enjoy the shit-eating grin on SweetLou's face. (He wanted a skateboard.) I don't have anywhere near the dough to buy one of these and so Sue and Enrique helped me buy it. They also did most of the search, since they know a lot about computers and I know practically nothing. We have become a truly odd family: me, my young latin hottie wife, my father-in-law who is my best friend and five years younger than me, and the Haitian son we've all adopted. I have posted here about the looks we get in the mall. Louis has been calling himself my son. I wish I could deserve that. I bust on my friends in here about their kids, but really, they're all doing something I can't. Fortunately for me, Louis is doing all the hard part himself.
The choice of a high-tech writing machine over a skateboard reflects my continued blind believe in the power of words and writing. Louis is a smart kid, and, like I say, he's really taking care of his life all by himself. My interest here is that he has started at Sun Coast High School, which means he has a real shot at college and the sort of professional life many of my students take for granted and most of the people in Lou's world don't even believe in. I think -- I passionately believe -- that as Louis learns to master the skill sets involved in writing (he needs to learn to type, to spell; he needs to imagine a grander vocabulary) the opportunities and hopes of the mainstream will open up to him. More importantly, the world we share will become his world as our words become words that he can manipulate with some comfort and elegance. I guess the short way of saying this is that I love Louis and I love the world and that I want them to live in some sort of harmony.
Sue is learning to be a Speech Therapist and is coming home almost daily with amazing stories about the world-sharing power of word skills. She makes me remember that Aristotle says imitation is the greatest pleasure we know. Just now, I've been watching on the tube the scene in Apollo 13 where Tom Hanks explains to his young son that the space flight will be safe, that "they" have fixed all the problems on the space ship. It caused me to remember how deeply satisfying it was to imitate my father when I was only four or five years old. Most of my memories of my parents and family are dark and brooding, and so this was a bit of a shock this morning. "Be sure you're right, and then go ahead!" my father would say to me (he got that from the actor Fess Parker, who played Davey Crockett on the Walt Disney series in the 50s); and I can still remember my solemn repetition of those words, and even trying to live by them in a back yard kid sort of way. I learned to talk as a child by wanting to sound like my father.
And I learned to talk like an academic by wanting to talk like the great scholars I heard and read. I think I repeat the same stories to my students over and over again because this sort of repetition is a mantra that lets me share the world with everybody else. This morning also, I got an email from my oldest friend, Al Shoaf, notifying me about a new web site he is building. I can remember listening to Al talk about literature for hours while I was still in the circus in France. When I started school at age 35 I remember being giddy with the idea that someday I would be able to talk like Al. (I still can't. Who can? But I also can't begin to tell you all the things I stole from him! In my EZ Rules for Writing on this site my infamous phrase "Never say anything with one word when you can say it with Nine!" is something Al was saying back in the late sixties.) This is the wonderful and terrible lesson words have to teach. George Carlin used to do a bit about being told just to say it "in your own words": "I've just been using all the same words as everybody else," Carlin said. We learn to be ourselves by first trying to be somebody else.
