For the love of the children.

I’m going out on a limb here, but Trinidadian parents have got to be the most ignorant in the world. Not ignorant due to lack of knowledge you understand, at least not in all cases, but rather because you stand the risk of personal injury in the event you are misguided enough to comment unfavourably upon either their offspring or their parental skill.

I didn’t realise that Prestige Holdings’ greasy fingers had grabbed a hold of another piece of Arima with the opening of a Long John Silver’s restaurant along with Pizza Hut, TCBY, and an additional KFC until earlier on this year. But although Arima is now officially cinema-less, you can still stare at some inane movie while sending your cholesterol level through the roof, via the flat-panel television screens that hang from the ceiling. And all those years those bouncers spent blocking movie goers from sneaking KFC into Windsor. Ha! Well we’re eating KFC in the at least what used to be the cinema bitches. Whatchoo gonna do now, huh?

So I’m at a table munching on some fries and wondering if, with all the renovations, they ever got rid of the roaches that had made the Windsor, in all its dank, urine-(and God knows what else)stained glory, their personal utopia. Of course it’s hard to stick to a chronological, coherent train of thought as there is an inordinate amount of seemingly unsupervised children engaged in vigorous physical activity all around me.

Now the good people at Prestige Holdings have supplied a playroom for the children presumably to encourage the whole ‘family friendly’ aura or to provide a place where the little fuck-trophies could burn off all those large servings of trans-fats. What the playroom does however is turn an otherwise routine bout of digestive tract abuse into a mental dissertation on the benefits of mandatory sterilisation.

’Member ting like licks? ’Member how like ah arse yuh used to feel after yuh get a good boff from mammy and daddy because yuh was playing de arse an embarassin dem in front ah everybody? Remember discipline? Parents nowadays are pansies. I’m sitting there listening to children refuse to leave when their parents call them and I’m seeing the parents concede defeat without even making the effort to straighten out the little buggers. Hell, there were so many kiddies running wild and unsupervised that if I were a paedophile, I would have been in heaven.

A woman at a neighbouring table decided to take God out of her thoughts and brought a couple’s attention to the antics of their female progeny:
“Da’s yuh chile? Buh look she missin ah shoe. Come dahlin, wha yuh do wit yuh shoe?”

“Hello, hello! Dat is not your chile. Leave my chile alone. I go deal wit she. I cyah onerstan why allyuh cyah leave odder people chirren alone yuh know!”

“Buh yuh cyah see de chile runnin arong wit only one shoe?!”

“Well she fadder here an he go handle dat. D_ look M_ lorse she shoe.”

“Oh gorsh. Doh jumbie de chile nah. Mih mudder go sen a new shoes fuh she.”

And that was it. The whole issue wrapped up nicely without once having to bother little M_ and having to divert her from her busy schedule of scampering behind a budding bandit.


I don’t know if the headache was brought on by my body’s exertions to assimilate partially hydrogenated soybean oil, dehydrated potatoes substitutes and whatever other crap Long John’s fries are made of or if it was because of the knowledge that same situation, albeit at ritzier locations and with more hybrid accents, is echoed throughout the country almost constantly.

So I left. And I thought of little M__ and her lost shoes. And I thought of her parents hostile reactions to a stranger who was trying to help. And I thought of the general lamentations of how today’s youth have no sense of responsibility, no sense of sacrifice. And I thought of how when we were younger we would take care of the two pairs of shoes we had (school shoes and ‘going out’ shoes) because we knew “mammy and daddy were working hard to feed us and provide for us and send us to school so we would get and education and make something of ourselves”. And I wondered if that litany would have any meaning to the children of today and I am tempted to try it out, but I don’t want to be the one hundredth and somethingth person killed for the year and over a shoe no less.

I leave de people dem chirren alone.