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Last night I was taking a picture from our roof of the party going on across the street and the sun setting across the river.

Someone called out to me from across the street–a man from the party who’d gone up to the roof to catch the view: “hey! I’m gonna take a picture of you taking a picture of me!”

It’s tempting to look to our children for confirmation of the things we want to believe about ourselves. Maybe it’s impossible not to. I certainly don’t fault my father for looking to me to to provide evidence that he was smarter than his career of academic failure would indicate. And I don’t blame myself for watching the way my older daughter moves through the world and thinking, yes, she takes after me: solitary, calm, stoic in the face of turmoil, graceful in the face of disappointment. 

But this second kid—who turned 7 today—gave the lie to that myth. From the moment she breathed oxygen she made it clear that she was her own person, not a cipher for us to read as proof of our own virtues. She forces me to reckon with my shortcomings. She is determined, fierce, demanding, willful, certain. She cannot be understood as the combination of some fraction of Jennifer’s personality and some of mine. And she’s made me think again about how I identify with her sister, and her mother, and everyone—she’s made me think about how much more there is to be gained by withdrawing myself from my understanding of other people and trying harder to see them for who they are.

Running a restaurant forced me to learn parts of the city that I’d never even visited–Maspeth for emergency paper supplies, industrial Brooklyn for pieces of custom stainless work, the South Bronx for pre-dawn fish. It was all part of an education for me in what makes the city work for the thousands (millions?) of folks whose only interaction with the service ecosystem was at the point of sale. It made me feel like I’d spent my first 6 years in the city as a kind of tourist, blithely unburdened by knowledge of what went into making possible the simplest little transaction, like buying lunch. If New York was a great show, now I was standing backstage. And like any backstage, it was a lot less glamorous than what was going on on the other side of the curtain. But it felt cool to be there anyway–it made me fee anchored in a way that little else had.

Zettie & I just got caught up in the middle of a police chase–about 10 cops, on foot and in cars, driving both up and down a one-way street, speeding through the bike lane, coming around every corner so fast I couldn’t believe no one got run over. They were chasing a kid who, under the circumstances, seemed incredibly composed, even placid. If you didn’t notice the police bearing down on him you’d have thought he was out for a stroll.

He ran straight to us, then doubled back when a patrol car boxed him in. A white guy next to me was walking his dog and yelled at the cops–“you want me to help get him?” He tried to hand his leash to an old woman pressed against the window of the drug store next to us, but she let it drop to the ground, no interest in helping this would-be vigilante act out his fantasy.

The police didn’t need his help anyway–they took the kid down on the sidewalk across the street (and to my eye were pretty measured about it given the adrenaline in the air) and put him in the car after going through his pockets. (Apparently he was a suspect in an armed robbery–I got that from Twitter, though, and I didn’t see a gun).

Anyway, I was pretty shaken by it–the cars driving so close so fast, the threat of violence that loomed over everything, the terrifying eagerness of a bystander to jump into the fray. And I was worried about what it would all look like to Zettie, how scared she would be by it, how confusing it must have looked. I was shaking as we walked away from the scene, holding Zettie’s tiny hand as much for my comfort as for hers. After a block she said, “so anyway, daddy, you were telling me a story….”

Monday evening, Chester looked to be hours from death It came on suddenly–wouldn’t eat, couldn’t stand up, twitched spastically, couldn’t focus, couldn’t stop panting. We gathered round him on the floor and said goodbyes, afraid he wouldn’t wake up in the morning. The girls slept next to him in our room and I lay awake wondering what we would do with his body if he died hours before the vet opened. He hung on through the night, but didn’t look much better Tuesday, and I called the vet to have him checked and–surely–euthanized.

The vet was out on Tuesday, though, and the soonest they could see him was Wednesday night. They asked if I thought he could wait that long and I said I supposed so, he didn’t seem to be able to tell night from day anyway, what would it matter, but again I fretted all night about what to do with his corpse if he died in his sleep.

Wednesday morning, what was to be his last day, I woke up early and came into the kitchen. I made coffee and sat down to work. Minutes later I heard Chester’s claws clicking on the floor, and I turned to see him trotting into the room as he has a thousand times before. He pawed at his food bowl indignantly. He whined for his bed, which I brought to him. It was as though the previous two days had never happened. When the vet opened I called them to say I didn’t think we’d be needing the euthanist after all, and oddly I worried they’d think I’d lost my nerve. But they know this dingbat well enough to know that he’s one resilient beast. He’s back as good as he was last week, demanding, ornery, contrary as hell, here to stay, at least a little longer. #dog #chestermcfester #mrwiggles #pigglesmcwiggles #whattheshitchester

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“That’s how you can tell someone’s poor.” My babysitter pointed slyly at the neck of the boy sitting ahead of us in the bleachers. We were at a basketball game at her high school, a small public school in a small Virginia town where pretty much everyone was just one shade of poor or another.  

I don’t know why she’d taken me to the game, but I felt important and nervous, the only kid there who wasn’t with his parents. I was paying careful attention to everything, afraid I’d do something to give away the fact that I was a 5th grader and not a sophomore, young enough to believe that people couldn’t tell the difference. I wasn’t sure where I fit in. I stared at the boy’s neck, unsure what I should be seeing. 

“They cut their own hair. They don’t get that peach fuzz on the backs of their necks.“ It was light and soft, like the hair on a never-shaved cheek.

When I cut my hair now, I shave my nape blind. I cut myself about half the time.

Just inside the gate of a garage in Greenpoint, a wiry man with gray hair and a deep-set scowl sits on an upturned bucket. He spits on the ground as I approach. “I’m not fucking sheep!” he yells, shaking his head and glancing at the man sitting across the door from him. “Do I look like a ewe to me?”