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Paul Chapman

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Speak Up

My teenage daughter walked out onto the deck into the bright warm summer sun that we so richly deserve after that long, cold, wet winter and spring.

On her face was a pair of sunglasses with lenses the size of two hockey pucks rimmed in white.They made me smile.

“What,” she asked in a suspicious tone, “are you laughing at?” “A father can’t smile at his daughter?” I responded innocently, trying to cover my true motivation.

“You weren’t smiling at me, you were laughing.

What are you laughing at?” she insisted.

“I was admiring your glasses, and thinking about how hard you are going to laugh when you see pictures of yourself in twenty years,” I replied honestly.

It wasn’t the brightest move in the parenting playbook when talking to your teenage daughter.

“Your sister wears glasses like that too, kind of like bug eyes,”I added, making a clumsy attempt to mitigate the damage, and not single her out.

Unfortunately, it seemed to have the opposite effect.

“These glasses keep the sun out of our peripheral vision, not like the old geezer glasses you wear, and they look great,” she scolded, then adding for good measure: “And what do you know, anyway?” “I know more about common sense than I do about fashion sense,” I retorted,” but I know that when we look at pictures from twenty five years ago, we laugh when we look at them now.”

“They’re not laughing at your fashion,” said my daughter.

Unh, oh. I had left myself wide open, and she was about to take full advantage of the opening.

“They’re laughing at your hair. I know why you are happier with no hair.”

She was smiling now.

“And besides, sunglasses like these were in style before, so when I look at pictures in the future I will see how fashionable I was.”

She was now finished, brusquely dismissing my insight as ridiculous.

Clearly I was losing this verbal sparring, and so I thought it best to get out before I crashed and burned entirely.

“Just leave your old man his amusements,” I said.

“It comforts to know that someday you will laugh, and your kids will call you old, and you will look at pictures and laugh at the fashion of the day.”

“Sure, Pops.”

Her response was as if she had stopped listening, which she had. She was now getting ready to lie out in the sun to tan.

Resisting an attempt to tell her that such exposure to the sun was not healthy, I went back to my work – all the while smiling at how much I sounded like my parents.

Paul Chapman is a local freelance writer.