Monday, November 20, 2006
Sunday, November 19, 2006
HOW TO PICK UP YOUR KIDS FROM SCHOOL
a. Send the driver: At the end of the school day, the AISB parking lot jams up with every stripe of Mercedes, lovely BMWs, top-end black sedans and massive SUVs. (Who knew that Porsche, BMW and Audi would find a need to build one? Or that anyone in crowded Bucharest would find a need to own one?) Soon the lobby fills with men with no necks, generally disinterested large Romanians who seem to have all the time in the world to pick up their kids from school. Of course they are all talking on cell phones, but what Romanian is not! How did all these guys get their money, I wonder, for vehicles like that, a school like this, and leisure to pick up your kids in the middle of the afternoon? Since then it has been borne in on me that these are not dads at all, but drivers and bodyguards of the kids that attend here. The actual dads are out big-business-dealing it in sundry world metropolises. Hence the Porsches, this school, the drivers (the nannies, the maids the housekeepers….) the list goes on.
b. Give your kid a cell phone, and have him call the driver himself. One of these kids (age 15), whose family came out of the post communist chaos not too badly, owns a not-too-shabby Maserati Quattro, replete, of course, with driver.
c. Give your kid subway fare to take the metro and then the local bus home. This is the reality for most of our local Romanian scholarship students.
d. Here is the last word in how to pick up your kids: Phone ahead to the guards to be sure the school gates will open for you just as you come roaring into the school yard in your SUV accompanied by an unmarked dark vehicle with dual flashing blue lights atop it. Have five men in dark glasses and suits get out and methodically look around. (Think 'nerves of steel'; we've seen it before in the movies.) Have one of them walk over to the guards in the gate house, and perform the universal "everything's cool" gesture, that is, casually light a cigarette as you walk. Have two of the suits open the SUV trunk and throw in the back packs of the 2 kids that arrive, open the doors for the kids to enter, have the remaining four men take a slow last look around, get back into both vehicles and drive back out through the gates, blue lights still flashing, leaving the cigarette man chatting to the guards. No analysis here; just one of our every-day scenarios.
But do I feel guilty for having “made” my kids walk home from school every day? Not one little bit.
- Ed
b. Give your kid a cell phone, and have him call the driver himself. One of these kids (age 15), whose family came out of the post communist chaos not too badly, owns a not-too-shabby Maserati Quattro, replete, of course, with driver.
c. Give your kid subway fare to take the metro and then the local bus home. This is the reality for most of our local Romanian scholarship students.
d. Here is the last word in how to pick up your kids: Phone ahead to the guards to be sure the school gates will open for you just as you come roaring into the school yard in your SUV accompanied by an unmarked dark vehicle with dual flashing blue lights atop it. Have five men in dark glasses and suits get out and methodically look around. (Think 'nerves of steel'; we've seen it before in the movies.) Have one of them walk over to the guards in the gate house, and perform the universal "everything's cool" gesture, that is, casually light a cigarette as you walk. Have two of the suits open the SUV trunk and throw in the back packs of the 2 kids that arrive, open the doors for the kids to enter, have the remaining four men take a slow last look around, get back into both vehicles and drive back out through the gates, blue lights still flashing, leaving the cigarette man chatting to the guards. No analysis here; just one of our every-day scenarios.
But do I feel guilty for having “made” my kids walk home from school every day? Not one little bit.
- Ed
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