"Are you acting white?" said the witch to this third grader at the New Year's Eve luncheon at the club on the golf course where families had gathered to enjoy the unseasonably warm weather and share a meal and good times.
This kid is in the same pod as her daughter so I guess she's seen him around, and he sorta knows her too.
The kid looked like he had accidentally run into a wall. Breathless and cross-eyed then wide-eyed and red-faced, he said, emphatically, "NO," and ran after his dad to go get the cart and clubs.
The witch explained to those within earshot, and she sounded slightly tipsy, that this Hawaiian kid sang a Perry Como song for the 3rd grade talent show and won, and now he's learning to play golf while wearing a t-shirt with the stars and stripes on it, at the country club, and don't we get the joke?
They moved here from Hawaii, mom's a doctor, dad's a colonel, his dad was also in the military, retired a general, like his father before him, and his father before him, which makes the kid military blue blood, if such a concept exists. What the rest of us see in this child is a scion of a very patriotic and successful family who is likely a patriotic and hardworking kid himself.
As for the 'Hawaiian' reference, his great-grandmother was Japanese, his
mother is Mexican-Argentinian American(daughter of diplomats, who
studied medicine here in the US), and produced a kid who is part
Catholic, part Jewish, part Buddhist, part nothing at all (his dad's
agnostic), who is somewhat brown, and has lived for the last three years in Hawaii.
And the witch wants to know why he's playing golf wearing a stars and stripes t-shirt?
I really wonder what goes through an eight year old's mind when an adult behaves this way.
- SDG
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