Where have all the CPs gone?

Liam and I drove Amita to the New York Public Library this afternoon. She was doing some footwork for a friend in India who's studying the impact Gandhi had on African-American thinkers and writers like Hubert Harrison and Langston Hughes. We delivered her to that enormous building on Fifth and 42nd--a place I'm proud of, and proud to show off--and she climbed the steps and applied for a library card, and got far enough in her poking around to discover that the Langston Hughes books could only be had at the Harlem branch. Ditto, it turns out, all titles in African-American Studies/Literature/Ethnography.

Did you hear that? You've got to go to Harlem to read Langston Hughes in the New York Public Library. OK, I get the whole space issue, and I'm sure you could request a book to be sent down from one branch to another. But I sent this Indian into our awesome city library because I was proud of it, and she finds that they don't carry Af-Am books in Midtown.

Chris Rock jokes about how every time there's a murder covered on the evening news black people silently pray, "Please don't let it be a black man, please don't let it be a black man." And when it is, they wince. I get it.
* * *
Maisie couldn't sleep tonight. Had to come down to confess that over the weekend, at her Dad's house, she'd felt frustrated about something and took it out on some kid she didn't know at a Chinese New Year celebration. "I was really mean," she said, and wouldn't tell me more. I told her that it was good her conscience was troubling her--that conscience is what tells us what kind of people we really want to be, even more than our parents or grandparents or teachers do. "You learned a good lesson," I told her, and smiled, signaling that she could let it go now.

I was silently glad she'd still tell me such things; I remember worrying that my parents only liked the kid I was pretending to be--not the nasty one I was underneath all the piano playing and good grades. I'd rather have an authentic rotten kid. Any day.

* * *
E.O. Wilson was on the local public radio program this afternoon. The lovable ant guy from Harvard. Listen here, if you've got half an hour to kill someday. Fascinating stuff.