This essay was first broadcast on National Public Radio in 2004, when my daughter Maddy was nine and I was struck, almost all the time, by what she already knew, especially compared with what I knew when I was nine.
I’m not counting things I couldn’t have known in 1962, when I was nine, like how to operate painting software or a TV remote. Or the things she knows by travelling, which we couldn’t afford back then. Or the things I’ve taught her. I’m amazed by what she’s learned by herself.
She’s alert to the world in a way I never was–smells, colors, textures. She can recognize the scent of camomile, or rosemary. In the fabric shop I asked her to distinguish between the blue of her shirt and the blue of a fabric. “I’d call this cobalt blue. This is more like cadet blue.”
She knows clothing, she is unafraid of fashion. This week the leading edges of her hair are purple, her assortment of clothing–long blue skirt, spaghetti-strap top, bandanna, sandals–has a junk-shop chic I’d never have dared. All my life I waited to dye my hair, and now it’s too late.
She knows her way around. She notices signs and arrows, remembers directions. She knows the date, she can estimate time. “Shouldn’t we be going soon?” she asks, a polite reminder.
She’s aware of responsibilities. She looked out of the window the morning after torrential rain caused minor mudslides, and called me over. “I think you’re going to have to drain the pond,” she said, after a downpour and a minor mudslide. “It’s the color of tea.”
At her age, what did I know? I knew the fighters and bombers and battles and battleships of World War II, the capitals of the world. I knew that my father, my brother and I should use the same bathwater in turn, our family and all of Britain still living in the shadow of the war, the austerity years. I knew to turn lights off and shut doors, to get off the phone as quickly as possible. I knew to eat liver, heart, tongue, kidney. I knew not to complain.
I also knew that knowledge was a weapon. Adults used it against children, punished children for lack of it. Our teachers set us against each other in the fight for knowledge. I learned to use knowledge to get ahead, to put others down.
Maddy’s greatest achievement is to know that she should follow a different curriculum. When I started seeing colored flashes in the corner of my eye and was terrified that this meant another round of retinal surgery, she knew to curl up next to me and hold my thumb in her small hand.
For my part, I’ve been learning from her. The other day I lay on the rug and she lay back against me as if I were a pillow, or a grassy bank. “After I had the best education in the world,” I said, “I grew up to be a backrest for my daughter.”
She chuckled and slapped me gently, as she does when I make a bad joke. But I wasn’t joking: that moment was the perfect trajectory for all I knew.
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