We’re totally taking the cover. Mostly me.

Part 1: Apparently we’re raising a racist.

So, apparently Sarah has joined the Klan.

Imagine the scene: we’re out for lunch on Saturday, having our usual meal at Tarek’s, which is very busy at lunch, with a very ethnically diverse crowd. It’s a Turkish place, and it’s great–we’ve been there most Saturdays for the last couple of months.

Sarah walks through the place to get herself a straw, walks back to our table, and then–in a very loud voice, clearly audible throughout the place–announces “Dad, I don’t like those brown people.”

I’m stunned.

“What?”

“You know those people who have brown all over their skin? I don’t like them.”

I was ready for “where do babies come from?” I was ready for “why are those two men kissing?” I was not ready for this.

I mean, she’s four, so I think it was a comment that, in her mind, was about the same as “I don’t like people with red sweaters”, but still I was floored. Doesn’t she know we’re a sensitive, liberal family?

So we then had to have this very serious conversation about it. Imagine trying to explain this in terms a four-year-old will get.

And while we’re talking, and I’m struggling to translate the issue into terms that she has a chance to understand, all I can think of is that everyone in the place is finding my every metaphor and example another instance of Whitey Not Getting It. And, as an added bonus, I probably sounded just as cloying and trite as an after-school special.

Part 2: PsyOps on your own child

Sarah and I always listen to audiobooks in the car. Over the past couple of years we’ve been through Droon, Geronimo Stilton, The Magic Treehouse (39 volumes!), The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Junie B. Jones, Coraline, Winne The Pooh, The Wizard of Oz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a lot of other things.

Since it’s getting towards the end of October, I got some Halloween stories and put them on my iPod for Saturday’s various bits of driving. “Alfred Hitchcock’s Scary Stories For Young People”, “Christopher Lee’s Fireside Tales”, “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”, stuff like that.

We were all driving to Sarah’s dance lessons on Saturday morning, and started listening to them. After two stories Trish declares that there will be no more of this.

Surely, she says, Sarah will have horrible nightmares.

I laugh. I openly mock her for being over-mothering. This, I reply, is the same kid who has watched the entire good Scooby Doo corpusBy which I mean all three seasons of Scooby Doo Where Are You, and all three seasons of What’s New Scooby Doo, and none of the other crappy runs.. A child who has watched Monster House with no problems. A child who has read a lot of ghost stories. She will be fine, I grandly declaim.

None of which would have mattered, of course, except that Sarah then joins in and very happily tells Trish that she loves the scary stories, but she knows they are just stories, and they won’t make her scared at night.

So Trish relents and we listen to a bunch of them as we’re driving about our errands on Saturday.

Fast-forward to Saturday night, when I am heading out to a ribs/poker/birthday thing. I pick up a friend, and we stop to get some beer. While in the liquor store, my cell phone rings. It’s Trish.

This is the “I told you so” call.

She explains that Sarah is crying her head off because she’s so scared.

She then points out that I have created this problem, and then left her to deal with it while I am off playing with the guys.

Then she asks me to talk to Sarah and calm her down.

So I take the phone and start to talk to Sarah. I’m all ready with my “there are no monsters, it’s just stories, and even if there were they might be friendly like in Scary Godmother” line. I don’t really get to use it though. Sarah is hysterical. And she immediately begins begging me to come home because Mom can’t protect her and “ghosts can slither under doors and through keyholes!”

Trish then takes the phone and apologizes–she didn’t want Sarah to guilt-trip me, she just wanted me to try to calm her down. So she says she’ll try to calm Sarah down, and if she can’t she’ll call me back.

No call.

So about an hour later, I called home to see what’s what. Apparently Trish got Sarah to go to sleep by putting my housecoat over her like a blanket. Trish couldn’t protect her, but my housecoat apparently would keep the ghosts away.

The only funny part of the story was Sunday when Sarah bold-as-brass asked for more scary stories and attempted to negotiate for them. This time the negative answer was firm, but you’ve got to love her for trying.