"Not From a Good Family"

I have a teenaged daughter: smart, funny, well read, multilingual, intensely patriotic, acerbic or charming as needed, and--woe is me--pretty. Lots of drama, of course, as teenaged girls seem vying for Oscars 24 hours a day. They all carry the Meryl Streep gene.

Having such a daughter creates a four-letter problem for me, to wit, boys. I don't like them around her; I don't want her talking about or to the vile creatures. I know what boys are like . . . sigh . . . probably a losing battle. Since, therefore, it seems highly unlikely that we will get rid of the boys, the least the Diplowife and I can do is make sure she dates one from--drumroll--a "good family." How to tell if the daughter is dating someone from a "good family"? That is the topic of today's 99% politics-free post.

A warning: After all these years, my memory is an improperly scraped and reused palimpsest. Bits and pieces of the previous mix in with the later. Hard to keep it all in exact chronological order, but here I go.

The place, Guatemala. The time, 1989-91. I worked at the Embassy for a terrific political appointee Ambassador--now sadly deceased--and had a great job, great friends, great guns, and an adventuresome life for a relatively young man. The political situation in the country was highly unstable. We didn't know it at the time but the big Communist guerrilla movements were in their death throes; what we saw was that they still created a lot of mayhem both in Guatemala and in neighboring El Salvador. I remember one visit to El Salvador: warm tropical night,  floating on an air mattress in a friend's pool, smoking a good Honduran Don Tomas, watching the helicopters overhead pumping tracer rounds into the mountainside while a Special Forces buddy floating next to me explained, between drags on his cigar, what was happening. In Guatemala, too, I remember eating at a nice outdoors restaurant in Ciudad Vieja, while a T-33 dropped bombs on guerrilla positions in the nearby hills. War as a spectator sport; war as pre-entre entertainment; war as a vignette. No real thought about real people killed and injured.

Guatemala City lay under a thick fog of unease, more than the usual for that troubled place. The guerrillas had hit the power lines, causing intermittent blackouts; the death squads were very active; ordinary criminals were taking advantage of the unrest; home owners and businessmen were taking the law into their own hands, setting homeless men on fire, and having hit men kill street urchins and vagrants. We had the kids sleep on the floor because of the nightly gunfire, most of it from drunk or spooked guards in neighboring houses. To add to the festivities, somebody had brought crates of Chinese grenades. These soon began showing up in the oddest places. A store got held up at "grenade point." In another store, the owner defended his establishment by throwing a grenade at the would-be robbers. One morning somebody in a passing car flung one of the things at the Embassy; it hit the perimeter wall, bounced into the street and went off with a window-shaking roar. Who was behind it? Nobody knew. Lots of theories; lots of explanations; no resolution. The grenades continued to go off.

So what does one do under these circumstances? Go out to dinner. Guatemala City had an amazing number of superb restaurants. One night, the Diplowife and I were having such a dinner at an excellent Mexican restaurant in the city's "Zona Rosa," when we heard some shots, and a very loud crash followed by a blast. The mariachis stopped playing, and the waiters froze . . . for about a second, and then the music and serving resumed. We had finished eating and were paying, so the Diplowife said the appropriate thing to do was to go see what had occurred. We walked down the street towards the El Camino Real Hotel; a crowd had gathered at the entrance, cars, police, military . . . and us.  We made our way to the front of this crowd. Two cars had collided. The driver of one was dead in his car, apparently shot by hotel security. His passenger had flown through the windshield and landed in the street. The grenade this passenger had been carrying had gone off, blowing away his hand and shredding the side of his head. He lay face down in the street, his pants part way down his legs.

The Diplowife surveyed the scene and offered her professional verdict, "He did not come from a good family. He is wearing red underwear. "

So now, my friends, you know. Before you allow your daughter to go to the movies with that kid she met at school, you check the punk's underwear. If it's red, throw him out. If, of course, he happens to be carrying hand grenades, you might also use that datum to question your daughter's judgment in boys.

I provide the above as a free public service for the parents of teenaged daughters.