The Myth of Wile E

Locavores

As the robot dinosaurs waited nearby for their cue to devour the land, a family rumbled up to my poetry stand in an old peace-stickered Volvo that smelled deliciously of hot French fry oil.

The driver turned out to be a pale woman with fuchsia hair and so many rings in one eyebrow she could have been a spiral-bound notebook. With her was a man who had long fuzzy golden dreadlocks that reminded me of this hanging cactus I saw once. Also he was covered with so many colorful tattoos it looked like he'd been shrink-wrapped in superhero comics.

The couple were accompanied by three kids—a boy and two girls—who looked bored.

The kids were very tidy in proper-looking, "picture day" or elderly-relative-visiting clothes, the sort of stiff, itchy attire that Dougie and I always had to be bribed to wear. The boy even wore a tie. The oldest, he seemed to be somewhere around that middle school tweenage range, right before squeaky voices and greasy hair kicks in. All three kids wore serious-looking eyeglasses and serious-looking expressions.

The adults introduced themselves and I could have sworn the woman said she was a "Sioux chef," but I might have heard her wrong. She didn't really look Native American to me. She said she worked in a restaurant popular with "locavores," which I gathered meant "crazy eaters."

The tattooed man said he was a homemaker. I wondered what kind of homes he made.

"We're homeschooled," the woman said, with a neck-jerk toward the rest of the group. I think she was speaking for the kids this time. (I guess that's what you call using the common We.)

"Actually," said the tattooed man, "un-schooled, some of us feel, is the better term."

"Oh," I said. I told the kids that I myself had kind of gone to un-college, but had not really graduated yet. I asked them what their favorite un-subjects were.

The oldest said, "Economics."

The second oldest said, "Accounting."

"And piano!" the mother said. Then, a bit pleadingly, "You like piano."

The youngest said, "Finance."

"Finance!" the dad said, with a deep sigh. "You're seven!" Then, to me: "She's seven."

The dad turned to the kids, and said—in that loud, stagey way adults talk to kids, that's really meant for nearby adults—"Now, kids, remember, we can be anything we want to be!"

The kids looked doubtful.

"That's right," the mother chimed in, also over-loud and stagey. "You can be a marine biologist! Or a chef!-but no pressure! Or a . . . a unicyclist. You can even be . . . I don't know, a llama farmer! It's all okay!"

"Or, maybe, a drummer!" the dad said. "Wouldn't it be cool to be a drummer? I always wanted to be a drummer. But nooo, Grandpa wanted me to go to law school."

"I want to be a stockbroker," the oldest kid said, crossing his arms.

"No, silly, you don't want to be a stockbroker," the dad said, glancing at me with this flummoxed look, like, See what I have to put up with?

"I want to be chairman of the Federal Reserve," the second oldest said, with a spirited nod of her head.

"What would you want to do that for?" the father said with growing dismay. "You can be anything you want to be."

"What I want to be is chairman of the Federal Reserve."

"I wanna manage a hedge fund," the youngest piped up.