At the PTA meeting regarding last Friday's second grade show-and-tell, Miss Farmer was paraphrasing. In place of my son's words, Adam's words, in place of his energetic pantomime depicting his weekend with "Rocky and the brown boys," Miss Farmer used her board-like posture and forced uncomfortable words like "racism" and "bl-uh-pardon-me-African-Americans" to express her concern. I dozed sometime after her suggestion for a "Hail to the Motherland Parade." I began to think about Adams' mother, how maybe, had she stayed, we could have been real parents (not impostors), maybe we could have taught him manners, could have made him walk the straight and narrow. I came to in the middle of Miss Farmer's presentation of Family Trees. She was proudly displaying, via PowerPoint, how she had traced her line back to a Marcus Anderson (she blew his name through her nose), the first bl-uh-pardon-me-African-American in Bridgetown, Illinois. She used the word "understand." She suggested that we all become more aware, that we all learn to love one another regardless of our skin color (I'm paraphrasing, of course). Maybe, I said, we should let them color more and give them a longer recess. Only blank stares returned.