Today, in made-up crimes...

I don't know what the hell wandering is, but apparently it's a crime mostly committed by girls, and can end in STDs and pregnancy. Consider yourselves warned.

Whose flesh?

This post at Shakesville reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a friend regarding the flesh-coloured crayon in the Crayola box. (Wikipedia tells me that Crayola changed their 'Flesh' to 'Peach' in 1962, but I was born almost 2 decades later, and there was definitely a 'Flesh' in my box. Man, the Caribbean really did get the oldest, broken-down sh!t as imports.) So my friend and I were talking about our confusion as children over the Flesh colour in the box. She never bothered with it, she said, because Flesh was an odd name anyway. It's true. Even leaving the shade of the thing aside, who wants to use a colour called Flesh? It's like colouring with Meat. Or Carcass.

I, on the other hand, thought that by Flesh they meant tissue: the deeper layers of the skin. It was because whenever someone got a really bad gash on the playground, we'd all ooh and aah over the fact that you could see beyond the top layer of skin and blood, down to the flesh! That was what we called it, and that was an indication that this was a Very Severe Wound, and the sufferer might die, or at least miss an afternoon of school while he got 10 stitches. Thing is, that 'flesh', the bit of ickiness that was exposed with a bad laceration (which was probably fat, or something equally tame), was very nearly the colour of Crayola's Flesh crayon. So I, as a 5-yr-old, thought the crayon manufacturers oddly precise and a bit morbid (what 5-yr-old was hanging out drawing pictures of gaping wounds?), but didn't really think much else of it.

That was until teachers and camp counsellors started insisting that we use the Flesh crayon to colour in the skin of the people we drew, at which time I had to point out that the people I was drawing were not that colour; they were brown, like me; and, actually, like the teacher.

"No. That's the one you use to colour people. See? It says 'flesh', meaning skin."

In the interest of getting on with my masterpiece, I was willing to make a concession:

"Ok, well Maria (the light-skinned Black girl) can use it then. For her people."

"No. It's for all people. That brown is too dark. The people you see in pictures aren't that colour."

Indeed. This was part of the problem. I eventually got out my Ken and Judy book, and showed this woman that actually, a couple of the people you saw in pictures were that colour. I could have shown her a mirror. That would have worked just as well. Or perhaps not, since I'm assuming she had one at home but still hadn't managed to figure out what shade her skin was.

But the Flesh Dilemma was of course not limited to Crayola. As most people of colour know, Flesh means White flesh, and this notion was reflected in many of the products around us. No one I knew could wear Flesh panty-hose. My mother's shade was Cedar Brown, and if you were any darker than that, you had to settle for this kind of off-black thing that made you look as if you had just been rescued from a house fire. Going bra shopping with my mother, I noticed that bras came in black, white and flesh. The idea of brown as a neutral is strictly a 21st century concept, at least in my world, and one that has in some places not yet caught on. I know this because I overheard a woman describing her New Year's outfit recently. She was close to my complexion, and mentioned that she had worn flesh-coloured shoes "so nothing would clash". Flesh? Her friend asked. Yes, like this, she said, and pointed to a taupe wall.

They're not just crayons. Some of the messages we internalize as children, about our identities and the very visibility and validity of our person, never go away.

State-sanctioned abuse is not 'discipline'

Last weekend, when I grabbed the newspaper from the little old man who is so gingerly perched on the island in the middle of traffic that I'm nervous to move too quickly lest everything topple over and throw him to his demise in front of a sugar cane tractor, I was alarmed. Not by the newspaper man - he's safe - but by the enormous front page photo and the story that accompanied it. And so I became caught up in a frenzied clack-clacking on my computer, filled with outrage and wonder, which I then had to suspend because of other work. And alas, the outrage has not returned in sufficient measure to pick up exactly where I left off. But here's the photo in question, with my own description excerpted below, as I began to write it last weekend.



(The front page picture of a senior teacher at a local secondary boys' school who made the decision to wait at the school gates and publicly flog any student who arrived late. Do you need to re-read that? I'll give you a minute. The photographer went one better than that, though. He included in the shot not just the teacher with his cane or stick or whatever it was, but him actually taking hold of a student and beating him. Another minute? Take your time.

The above shot was taken from the online version of the story, and was not the one used on the front page of the paper version. In this one, the child is taller than the teacher, and is glancing disdainfully at the man as if to say "dude, do you know how long it took me to fix my pants like this? You're really harshing my look here." So it's an offensive image, but not as immediately jarring as the front page photo of the smaller child who looks about 11 and taken quite by surprise.)

Since that story was published, the debate has opened up quite a bit about the legitimacy of flogging in schools. And you know what? I don't understand it. I don't understand how we get into heated arguments around whether it is an effective disciplinary measure to engage in the state-sanctioned beating of other human beings when we've already answered that question in the negative. Remember? We used to have this monstrosity called the cat o' nine tails with which we beat convicted criminals? And this and all other forms of judicial corporal punishment were formally declared inhumane and consequently unconstitutional by the Barbados Supreme Court?

Yet, in 2009, pastors and educators and Matthew Farleys abound, writing articles and giving interviews contrasting crime and social statistics and all manner of 'moral indicators' - whatever those are - in countries where flogging is banned with those where it is still practiced, and arguing on this basis that beating the crap out of children represents the yellow brick road to Utopia. And I used to get all caught up in those arguments myself. I used to yell from my side of the aisle about how Caribbean societies seemed so well-behaved because 1) children who are systematically beaten often don't manifest learned, violent behaviours until they are much older, making it harder (also because of high numbers of migration) to draw a straight line from a beaten child to his criminal behaviour; 2) becoming an offender within the judicial system is not the only manifestation of being generally screwed up; and 3) there are plenty other factors at work keeping our 'moral indicators' as the moral majority would like than corporal punishment - just give a glance to the 'crimes' still on the law books, like homosexuality and dressing like a woman, as opposed to those not on the law books, like marital rape. And on I would go blah-blahing within the parameters of reasoned insanity.

I once even got my bristle board and Sharpie out and picketed the headmaster's office at my school, because he was about to flog (behind closed doors and with no one else present) a teenaged girl who had filled condoms with water and distributed them to her friends to have a laugh.

FLOGGING OF FEMALE STUDENTS IS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN!!

That's what my sign said. I was 15 years old, and traumatized by the notion that a grown man was going to splay a 16-year-old girl across his desk and beat her, and we were saying that was alright because she happened to be on a school compound between the hours of 9 and 3 and he happened to be called Headmaster.

But these days, I hardly get that far into debates about whether flogging works as a disciplinary action, because I find it absurd that it is even an option. Sure it works in the short term to rule and silence a population with fear, violence and intimidation. We have countless examples of that throughout history, and even today; and we condemn them all. What changes when the population in question is below the age of 18? I would think we'd be more indignant and less willing to do harm to those we're meant to protect.

And how can we draw so neat a line between child abuse - with which this region is struggling more and more every year - and flogging in schools? I hear all kinds of silly little differentiators: "Flogging should not be done in anger, and only by principals and senior teachers." Because that's not at all inhumane. Let's pencil the offending student in for a 2:00 p.m. flogging, yet expect her to be academically productive in the meantime, and then march her off to headteachers' chambers at the appointed hour for a detached, methodical beating. Yeah, that's much better. Then there's the old "I was flogged as a child, and it didn't do me any harm. I turned out great!" Yeah, you turned out great alright. You turned out to be an adult who thinks it's ok to hit children. Well done, you.

I was flogged as a child, and it did me harm. It did me harm to realize that the people I trusted not to hurt me could not be trusted after all, and that their kindness and care were conditional upon certain behaviours that I was still learning. That horrified me. It did me harm to watch my neighbour and primary school classmate walking up the street from school, limping, and when we, concerned, pulled back her skirt, to see her fair skin black-and-blue and purple, bruised, swollen and tender from a teacher's bamboo rod. I cried for her that evening, and had trouble sleeping for days after. It did me harm to have to stand up for myself as an 11-yr old, to tell the principal I would not, in fact, allow him to hit me because I had gotten one problem out of 100 wrong (one strike per wrong answer), and then to feel the victory seep away from me after I sat down again and realized that no one was going to defend the students who had gotten 10 wrong, or 20, or 30. It did me harm to watch my sisters awakened in the middle of the night and struck for some newly-discovered transgression, like reading the wrong type of book, or saying hello to the wrong type of neighbour. I love my parents, and had some great teachers, but the fact that I'm not currently incarcerated for murder doesn't mean none of that did me harm.

Human beings have short memories. So sure, we feel fine now. But children's worlds are small, and the adults who occupy them very, very big. It's time for us to stop finding ways to justify organized, state-sanctioned abuse, get off our lazy asses and parent our children.

Nandy is taking off for a few days

I'm travelling to some meetings this week, so posting will be lighter than usual, if you can imagine that. (You'll notice that I'm yet to re-establish my minimum one-post-daily schedule. That should be followed by a 'but' or 'because', I suppose. I don't have any of those. Life is happening and I'm going with it, keeping the old daily schedule as the goal.)

In the meantime, and for no reason at all, here's the opening sequence from one of my favourite childhood shows, Cro, a short-lived TV series whose character narrator, Phil, is a once-frozen woolly mammoth thawed out in the twentieth century by archaeologists. Phil uses current science problems to draw parallels with his old life among the other mammoths and his human friends back in Woollyville.



The story-telling was great, and the encouragement to have fond memories of people or times we've lost was a great message for children. Women on the show were scientists, warriors and caregivers, and there was very little pink, which was a welcomed break. Also, one of my dear friends - back then and to this day - used to call me Nandy, a female character on the show, because he found my arms 'freakishly long'. Little did he know that I was severely flattered, because Nandy was awesome.

Some day, I'll locate all the old episodes of this thing and have a cheesy nostalgia marathon.

Pillow fight! (Ok, not really)

This is the long, Spring bank holiday weekend and I'm heading off early for an old-fashioned slumber party at my girlfriend's place. I haven't had one of these since I used to run off to my best friend's house on weekends when I knew there was a party my mother wouldn't let me go to. Best friend's mum was (and still is) lovely and a very involved parent, but she wasn't rule-obsessed like my mum, with her "You went to a birthday party 2 weeks ago. Stay home and have some quiet time" and "No sleepovers this weekend. You'll make people feel we don't want you or can't feed you. You live somewhere!" I swear I thought the woman was crazy. (She was, a little.) But most of that was cleverly-disguised wisdom.

Still, missing the parties of the year would never do, and best friend's place was my second home. so I would rush in from school on a Friday and breathlessly yell "(MUMBLE) HOMEWORK (MUMBLE MUMBLE) SWIMMING CLASS (MUMBLE) TOO LATE (COUGH SNORT) GET A RIDE (MUMBLE GROAN) EXAMS SCHOLARSHIP (she liked that one) NEED TO SPEND THE NIGHT!!!" And most of the time, that worked. Of course, at some point I'm sure our mothers talked and mine pretty much had my whole game sussed out. But at the time, I thought myself quite clever.

There's no need for intrigue these days, since my behind is grown. (Shame.) But I'm quite looking forward to a weekend of shopping, movies and copious amounts of goofing off. Unless something remarkable happens that I'm compelled to post about, like they discover a lost, never-before-seen season of Fawlty Towers, I'll be back with my game face on on Tuesday.

¡Cuídense mucho!

And finally, a bit of musical nostalgia in honour of Mother's Day

So my mother got us the Little Shop of Horrors video back in the day, and she, my sisters and I watched it together somewhere between 9 172 and one meelion times. The following clip was one of my favourite parts, because even though "Feed Me" and the crazy dentist bit with Steve Martin and Bill Murray got all the attention, Skid Row had all the vocal chops. Tichina Arnold and Tisha Campbell-Martin are so much more than Pam and Gina in this film.

I know every part of this production: every single lyric, bit of dialogue, harmony. It gave me pleasure. My mother would sometimes come into the front house (that's 'living room' for you outsiders) and say "Want to watch the plant?" which of course meant the film. And duh(!) we always wanted to watch The Plant. Who wouldn't want to watch The Plant? So watch this bit of The Plant with me. Sing it, Gina:

In which I promptly remember things I had just forgotten

Also, my mother worked for many years at a care facility for young people with special learning and developmental needs. For some of the others who worked there, it seemed it was just a job (which is fair enough); but for my mother, it was an opportunity to build really special relationships. Some of the children didn't have parents in their lives, and weren't very acquainted with a home life that was different from the slightly regimented, honestly boring as rocks care home. So sometimes my mum would bring them home for weekend visits or have them come out with us when she felt we were doing something they would enjoy.

One of the boys fell in love with her, and vice versa. He came to stay all the time. And at first, even though we had been taught to be polite to everyone, we really didn't care for him. He was about our age, so he wasn't cutesy to us the way a baby might be. And he was loud. He also had a lot of love to give, which was kind of the point, what my mother was trying to give him an outlet for, but we didn't really want it. He was very talented - he sang and played the keyboard - and was always making something with his hands. He had been born with a condition that caused the digits on his hands not to form or move separately, and was also born with one leg and wore a prosthetic limb. Sometimes the prosthesis would hurt, because he was still growing, so he would remove it and drag it around the house behind him.

Some of this was shocking for us at first, and once or twice when we complained to my mother about his noise or effusiveness, she would explain to him that sometimes people needed a little quiet time, or remind him about inside voices. But for the most part, she was having none of it from us. She knew it was our privilege talking - our unwillingness to be made in the least bit uncomfortable. And she gave us a huge, steaming pile of 'get over it'. She didn't have to say much. But I think the fact that our whole lives, we were shown that you have to share your world and your space and your kindness with other people, that she removed any sense of entitlement from us by opening our home up to others that she also entitled to what we had, was one of the most important lessons of my childhood.

That was 20 years ago. My mum is still working with children and still taking them home. We warn her that this is a different time, and one has to be careful of misunderstandings that might create a difficult situation with parents or authorities. Because even with the best intentions, it has been known to happen. All she says is that she hasn't had a misunderstanding yet. But she has enjoyed and helped a lot of wonderful children. And we can't really argue with that.

In which I boast about my pet goat, my library tickets, and my inimitable mamá

It occurs to me that since Sunday is Mother's Day (Mothering Sunday in the UK was March 22, but my family celebrates the May Mother's Day. Also, Mothering Sunday is kind of a creepy name. It sounds like we're all meant to go out and nurse and diaper whatever we can find - maybe a frog or the postman or David Hasselhoff), I should say something inspired about motherhood, or name my favourite mother characters in film or TV, or write a poem, a skit. Something.

My best friend just became a mother, and I was moved in unexpected ways when I heard that her daughter was born. That should give me an angle, right? Not so much. It does give me a beautiful new child in my life, and another person to call on Sunday, but no useful angle for a Mother's Day post. (I don't so much like the Mother's Day phone call, because after the somewhat weak "Happy Mother's Day!", you feel like you're meant to keep talking about motherly stuff, and I'm not sure what that would be. And it's a bit like that birthday call where you ask "So what does everyone have planned for you today?" and if the answer is "nothing", what can you say besides "I'm sorry your kids suck"? So I stick to calling only people I'd want to talk to anyway. The others get overcompensatingly exuberant e-cards.)

So I thought and I thought about my own mother and all the things I've learnt from her and what has changed about our relationship and all those things we've all thought about millions of times. I thought about how she always made all our clothes for special occasions, and about how that was the treat, not store-bought clothes. When my mother decided she could find the time to make us an outfit, then sat attentively while we described how we wanted a side zip but under no circumstances was it to be a back zip, and a scrunchie to match - the scrunchie was very important - and other ridiculous but crucial details, it was like Christmas. And I thought about how she would wake us in the middle of the night to make sure it fit because she wanted to sleep too, you know, and she wasn't the one going to Andre's birthday party tomorrow. And we would drip out of bed bleary-eyed and (silently, of course) grumpy, wait for the clothes to be pulled on, and then watch in gleeful amazement as we were transformed before our very eyes into Sheena Easton or Lisa Lisa or Ashley from Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Which was of course what we were going for.

And I thought too about Saturday morning trips to the library, when my mother would hang about talking to the library staff about what new books they had gotten in, while we chose our reading for the week. And then we would check the books out ourselves with our very own tickets and feel important because other people's parents were choosing and checking the books for them and wouldn't even let them keep their own tickets. I mean...pfft..what kind of amateur night were they running?

These two habits and passions of my mother's, clothes and books and everything associated with them, were without doubt passed on to me. Less lasting was her interest in farming and gardening. My mother was big on family food security and earning extra for our well-being, which is why I got all warm and smooshy inside when I saw Michelle Obama planting her White House kitchen garden - what we also called our backyard plot. But my mother didn't stop there. she never stopped anywhere. Soon we had chickens, pigs, sheep and all manner of livestock, and quickly realized that this was our deal too: bringing the sheep in from pasture (incidentally, black bellied sheep are given to running around your legs in circles when they're on ropes. So yay for surprise sheep games after school!); helping kill and pluck the chickens; choosing which piglets we would sell on and which we would keep. And when I started to question the whole canine/livestock inequality dynamic - whereby dogs ended up in our photographs and sheep in our stew - I was given a pet goat named Mars, helped my father build a pen for it, and was invited to explore the kind of relationship I might have with pet livestock, which wasn't as exciting as one might imagine.

And I realize that the thing most striking about these examples and about our relationship overall, is the amount of agency and personal responsibility that was involved on our end, as children; the extent to which my mother showed us that it was our thought, our imagination, our creativity and work that would determine the kind of outfits we wore, the food we ate, the kinds of journeys we could take through books and relationships, and the kinds of lives we would live. Even though we were young, we had a space to collaborate with her, and input that was valued. Of course, it was a lot less valued when it came to say, what time we could come home at night, but it counted in the important places. And my mother isn't my best friend these days, which might sadden some. But I don't think she has to be. I have lots of great friends; but there's only one woman on earth to whom I feel an unspeakable connection borne of the independence that she both taught me and allowed me in those early years. And wherever our relationship goes from here, for me, that is something whose value cannot be measured.

Carol Thatcher disgusts me

In February of this year, Carol Thatcher, daughter of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was dropped as a roving reporter on BBC1's The One Show after calling a black tennis player a golliwog in the show's backstage green room, and then refusing to make a full public apology over the remark. In the aftermath of her sacking, the BBC received over 3 000 complaints against their decision to fire her, and the mayor of London Boris Johnson publicly declared that he thought it was the wrong decision.

Thatcher was back on the air last week on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show, and not only defended her use of the word - which is not surprising given that she refused to apologize in the first place - but also made two statements which I found indefensible. She first informed us of the many letters of support she received and of the fact that her golliwog collection had now greatly increased since like-minded people had included the keepsakes in their fan mail; and she suggested that the whole brouhaha was a result of people being overly sensitive and politically correct.



Now, I'm going to try and keep this short because we've had an extended conversation about this before, and because this kind of wilful racism does not stand up to argument. But the fact is, just because you grew up seeing golliwogs on the side of your jam jar as you sat at your breakfast table with your white, wealthy family and friends, does not entitle you to decide for another group of people what they are and are not allowed to be offended by. Carol Thatcher is a white woman, who was never the subject of the racist taunts of which the word 'golliwog' was a part, and who clearly does not understand that even the origin of the figure as a blackface minstrel is in itself far from flattering and arguably racist. As Labour's Jennette Arnold pointed out in response to Boris Johnson's defense of Thatcher's position:

"The symbolism of the golliwog is colonialist, racist, and harks back to time when black people were dismissed as slave, servant, and figures of fun.

"It is an image associated with the demeaning of black people. There are no second chances when anyone in public life uses such offensive language.

Boris Johnson seemed to think that Thatcher should have been disciplined internally with a small slap on the wrist, arguing that [emphasis mine]:

"The way to deal with it is if someone says something a bit offensive in a green room and you're the producer of the show and everybody else has taken umbrage and feels uncomfortable ... you take that person on one side and say: 'Listen, you've got to understand we've got to work together and you've got watch what you say and you've got to be sensitive,' but I don't think you fire someone. I really don't."

I often wonder how it is that people's self-censorship mechanism fails to engage in these situations; how it is that they do not realize that as people outside of the group whom this directly affects - and worse, part of the group that has perpetrated the racism in question - they don't get a vote. Now Boris Johnson's comments are less to do with whether the word itself is offensive and more to do with corporate equality policy, which is an important debate for everyone to have, but the fact that he calls the expression 'something a bit offensive' gives us a clue about how damaging he thinks this language really is (not very), and in fact, he should just have shut up.

I was disgusted by Thatcher in this Andrew Marr interview, because alarmingly, she seems to be part of this club of golliwog collectors who think their quaint little hobby is more valuable than the historical and current subjugation of an entire group of people; and worse, she is also one of those who has assumed the role of victim because The Man wants to take away her right to hurl racial slurs at people. And the rest of us should just get over it so she can have her golliwog fridge magnets and make fun of black people.

The issue of whether the term 'golliwog' and its image are offensive seems to be a recurring one. And for me, it is simple. As a small child, one of my favourite Enid Blyton series was The Three Golliwogs. I adored the characters, Wiggie, Waggie and Wollie, and saw them as just three toys come alive who got up to mischief. Of course, I grew up in Barbados. By that time, no one had ever called me a golliwog, and I hadn't yet learnt about the practice of blackface or really any of the history of slavery. As I got older and learnt more, no one needed to point out to me that these characters were a product of a racist time and tradition. It naturally became apparent - even before I learnt that one of the original names of the golliwogs was 'Nigger'. So just because you found a name or image harmless in childhood, either because you were part of a privileged group towards whom it was never directed, or because, like me, you were black but lived in a society where that kind of nomenclature was not a common form of attack against your group, that does not mean that the word or image was not harmful or racist. Both sets of circumstances can obtain, and in this case, they do. And here's what I also find problematic: it is not alright to say "well, people at the time were racist. So what can you do? I'm going to continue to read this book to my children because people nowadays are way too sensitive." You can do that, but if you do, be aware that you are in fact perpetuating racist stereotypes, and be prepared to be called a racist when someone comes to your house and sees your little golliwog fridge magnets. Because the fact that you know better and still refuse to adjust your behaviour means that that's exactly what you are.

A few months ago, I went exploring a closeby neighbourhood in search of cheap hangers on which to store my ridiculous amounts of clothes. (I'm always buying hangers, because apparently we have a hanger ghost who cannot cross over until she has hidden all of mine under bushes and brambles far and wide. Either that or I should stop shopping. My money's on the ghost.) I came upon this home supply store with cheap hangers of all materials and colours and as far as the eye could see! It was some kind of hanger paradise! So as I was scooping madly, my eyes happened upon the back of the store, which seemed to be where they stored the toys, and against the entire back wall, from floor to ceiling, were all kinds of toy golliwogs, their hundreds of black faces, white eyes and red lips grinning back at me. I have to say that I was horrified. I immediately felt vulnerable, because if these were the kinds of people who would so unashamedly offer these items for purchase, what, I thought, would they do with a real, live black person (I was the only one) in their store? Because clearly, they weren't worried about seeming racist.

It must have been people such as this who sent Carol Thatcher their letters of support, people who are banding together to protect their right to display icons of the racism they practice when they think no one's listening. Well, carry on with your crusade. But don't be surprised if you lose your job over it.

The Case of the P.I That Never Was

When we were growing up, my oldest sister, G, wanted to be a private investigator. We watched all kinds of sleuthing shows, from Murder She Wrote (which, incidentally, I still watch because Jessica Fletcher is hard core) to Magnum P.I. And my father, scoffing at what passed for detective/mystery drama in our day, was always at the ready with stories of Columbo, McCloud and Steve Austin, who wasn't even a police detective but - judging from the silly grin and the slow motion running reenactment - was clearly far too exciting for my father to exclude. But my sister wasn't feeling employment by The Man. She wanted to run her own ship, keep her own hours, and possibly also fly around in a helicopter and wear tiny white shorts.

Whatever her reasons, one day, she announced that she was going to be a P.I., and we believed her. She was always quick on the draw with the "butler did it" conclusions, although, to be fair, she had 3-5 years brain development on the rest of us. And when you're seven years old, that qualifies as an unfair advantage. My mother probably believed her the most of all of us. She took her teaching of "you can be whatever you want" extremely seriously. When I was 11, I told her I was going to be a journalist. She said "Ok," and then called up the newscaster and told him I was going to be a journalist and he should give me an 'internship' because I was fabulous. Did I mention that I was 11? So he gave me the 'internship', which consisted of following everyone around the newsroom and studios for two weeks while they told me how everything worked and talked to me as if I was a real, grown-up person. Then I spent the rest of the summer pointing at the newsreaders saying "I know him!" to all who would listen. Of course, since this was Barbados, everyone pretty much just rolled their eyes and said something like "Yeah me too. He plays cricket on the pasture behind my house."

But still, my mother believed we were serious about our ambitions, so she got a bit concerned when G said she wanted to be a P.I., and spent an entire afternoon counseling her that she would support her, of course, but that this might not be the best idea because private investigating was dangerous work, and lonely, and probably didn't pay all that well because the ones on TV pretty much just slept in their cars and ate sandwiches. Meanwhile, my other sister was looking at us as if we were all insane, and muttering that it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard because how much work did G think there was in Barbados for a P.I, there was barely anywhere to hide and peek at people, and anyway where would you even go to school for that?

I, however, was excited. I was picturing lots of cool stories of voyages far and wide to uncover the Mystery of the Unearned Urn (yes I read lots of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys. What? I was very little) or similar exploits. So I was looking forward to this career path. Sadly, it never materialized. G, still possessed of her wonderfully probing and analytical mind, is now a therapist. A therapist is decidedly not a private investigator. And it occurs to me that I feel extremely cheated.