W. BRUCE CAMERON 5/19/11

May 19, 20110

Father and Daughter Speak: A Translation

W. BRUCE CAMERON

Communicating with teenage girls is easy unless you’re an adult, and then it’s like having someone take a pair of pliers and, one-by-one, yank off your fingernails through your ears. As a parent, though, there are times when you simply must talk to your teenage daughter, if only to ask her when she is moving out (something you start to wonder about when she’s, oh, 13.)

Let’s say it is a Saturday and you’ve decided, in a misguided burst of nostalgia for those days when she was your little girl and she loved being with you, to invite her to see a matinee with you.

“I can’t,” she replies, meaning, “I don’t want to.”

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” you say, meaning, “It would have been fun a few years ago.”

She makes no audible response, but her eye roll in your direction indicates you wouldn’t know “fun” if it took you surfing in Hawaii.

“Or I suppose we could stay home and work in the yard,” you say after a pause. You’ve thrown three abhorrent concepts at her in one sentence: “we,” implying, “Our fates are linked together”; “stay home,” meaning, “You can’t go anywhere even though it is the weekend”; and “work,” which means you are ruining her life.

“Dad! I said I’d meet Hillary at the mall!” she protests. To not fulfill this obligation would be like letting puppies drown. She hasn’t seen Hillary since school yesterday, unless you count going out for pizza last night.

“She can come with us,” you respond. You personally feel that Hillary is about as smart as the wad of gum she always has in her mouth, but in a movie she presumably would stop talking, something you’ve often felt you’d pay money to experience.

“Dad, she just broke up with her boyfriend,” your daughter hisses. This is meant to impress you with the critical nature of your daughter’s Saturday engagement — Hillary needs help, this is a massive trauma. Based on what you’ve been able to overhear, however, Hillary changes boyfriends the way you change socks. She should be OK once she’s gotten some new gum into her.

“Yard work or a movie,” you say pleasantly.

“Fine!” your daughter says, meaning “not.” She stomps off, making strong emotional appeals to heaven to please let her grow up so she can move out as soon as possible. Alas, you’d like to tell her, prayers on that matter so far have not worked.

After half an hour of silence from her room, you call out. “Almost ready?”

“Yes!” she yells, meaning “no!”

More time passes. “How much longer?” you inquire.

“Ten minutes!” she yells through her door, meaning you’ll have time to cut the lawn and paint the garage.

Eventually, you go down and tap on her door — since she turned into a teenager, you spend far more of your time speaking to it than you do to her. “We should go,” you say.

She yanks the door open. “OK,” she says, meaning, “I picked the shortest dress in my closet and maybe the universe.”

“So, is that what you’re wearing?” you ask numbly, meaning, “Are we going to a thigh convention?”

“What?” she challenges, telling you that you’re the one with the ridiculous idea the two of you should spend the day together, so you’ll just have to deal with it.

“OK,” you sigh, thinking that once the lights are down in the theater no one can see her, and before that you’ll just have to stand between her and everyone else.

In the car, she hunches over her cell phone, texting, “OMG I have to go to the movies WITH MY DAD!” All of her friends sympathetically text back except probably Hillary, who can’t multitask because she’s spending the afternoon unwrapping gum.

The theater offers original films based on comic strips and sequels to original films based on comic strips. You buy popcorn and settle in. The lights going dim. As the movie starts, you share the popcorn and glance at each other and smile. And, in that moment, you’re not combatants — just a father and daughter, watching a really bad movie together.

It’s pretty nice.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

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