Story #2: Party Trick

I took BART into the city on the afternoon of New Year’s Day to chat, eat, see, and be seen at one of my favorite events of the entire year: the First Day party at a friend of mine’s house. I had a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth since the last time I went to this party, two years ago (hard to go for 01.01.2008 since I was in, you know, Jerusalem) I met a boy and it was fun and he was smart and we went out for sushi a few days later and I wore a cute outfit for our date and in the end it was a complete disaster. But I reminded myself that lightning never strikes in the same place twice and I went and it was, of course, fabulous.

I rang the bell downstairs and got buzzed in, letting myself into the apartment and ducking right away into the bathroom to wash the BART off my hands. Plus, I like to ease into situations like this slowly. I wasn’t quite ready to walk into the roiling, teeming kitchen or even the lounge-y living room so I took off my coat, put some stuff away in my bag, you know.

It didn’t take long for the hostess to find me, since she is one of the most fabulous hostesses I have ever known and her Sixth Sense that someone was in the house and had not yet been greeted or given a plate of food or flute of champagne had been activated the moment someone buzzed me into the building. She showed me where to put my things away in the bedroom and led me to the kitchen to pour me a glass of this party’s annual tradition: The Eggnog.

I was not even out of the hall when someone came to find me and say hello. “We’ve been talking about you, we’ve been waiting for you to get here because we have a question for you,” he said. Oh, my. Right away I knew what was coming...Sarah’s Party Trick.

Looking back, I am not even sure how this got started. I think it was one chilly, foggy weekend morning when the two of us were going to the Post Office out on Geary to check his mail. I remember parking the car and crossing the street, where we found the door to the building’s lobby inadvertently blocked by a woman with a small girl. The woman was kneeling on the ground, tying the girl’s shoe, and the girl was clutching a huge (well, for her) pile of mail. We stood there and waited while they got organized, because there wasn’t much else to do since we couldn’t go inside. Soon the woman stood up and, seeing us for the first time, apologized repeatedly: “OH, I am so sorry, I didn’t even see you there! We should have done that somewhere else, how inconsiderate of me—I hope you weren’t waiting long, oh, I apologize…”

Walking through the lobby, he said something about the kid needing to learn to tie her own shoes or else get ones with Velcro. “Aw, come on,” I said. “She’s only three, you can’t expect her to deal with her own feet yet because she can barely even bend down to reach them without losing her balance and falling over.”

“How old was she?” he wanted to know.

“She was three,” I replied, becoming mostly uninterested in the conversation and wanting to see if anything cool had come in the mail.

“But, are you sure? How do you know?” he persisted.

“Think about it,” I said. “I spend six hours a day, five days a week, with kids. I went to college and graduate school with the sole professional purpose of learning about children and how they develop…and, sometimes, how they don’t. I can watch any kid anywhere for one minute and tell you how old they are. It’s my own useless life skill, I guess.”

Since then my expertise in learning styles, developmental timelines, and age identification have become my badge of honor. Just last week I fielded a phone call from someone I know who’d gone home to celebrate the life of his childhood friend’s mother at her funeral. What did his friend’s 3-year-old son understand about what was happening, he wanted to know? When do children begin to comprehend ‘death’?

And such was the case at the party I’d just walked into, also. Armed with a stiff glass of egg nog-y goodness, whipped cream on top, in my hand I was led back to the living room where another friend was enjoying one of the few premium spots on the couch. “Oh! Good, you’re here,” he exclaimed as the woman next to him nodded definitively. “They’ve been talking and talking about you and this party trick of yours,” she said—kind of awkward since I had never met her before and had no idea who she was, whereas she was apparently a total expert on me and my supposed superpowers.

“So,” my friend asked eagerly as we all sat down to a coffee table spread with everything from nut mix to shortbread, glasses of egg nog and champagne in hand. “At what age do kids begin to recognize sarcasm?”

Obviously this party was about to get a lot more interesting now that the child development guru had arrived…