"Absolutely Not."

A couple of days ago – Valentine's Day – walking east on 123rd I passed a man on the phone with his daughter. He had her on speaker, or they were Facetiming, and as I passed I heard her say, "Dad, yes, they can." The voice and intonations of an eight-year-old Black New Yorker, high and forceful, swinging, confident.

The father replied, "Absolutely not. A boy cannot give another boy a valentine. Absolutely not."

The girl, even more forcefully: "Yes, they can."

And the father, "Absolutely not. Absolutely not."

They continued in this vein; soon I was out of earshot, Central Harlem mixing their voices into the city's howl.

I texted my brother Nathan. Understandably, he seemed less charmed than annoyed. He said, "Good lord. Turn around and say, your daughter is right."

"Or," I proposed, "my brother does it, so apparently they can."

I continued on to my friend Brad's up on 129th. From there down to Nomad, then over to Chelsea; eventually, home. The argument between father and daughter forgotten.

But this morning, finding it difficult to sleep, I remembered their exchange and found myself thinking about that father's "absolutely not."

In the first place I was struck by its futility. Plainly we do live in world – certainly we do in New York City – where boys can give valentines to boys. I thought, I was listening to a man defend a world that no longer exists. His daughter lives in the real world – in the actual world. And he was trying to get her to live in his world, a defunct world, the world of the past.

I suppose this experience – realizing that one lives in a world that no longer exists – is one of the horrors of aging. That horror might explain why so many older people become, relative to their younger selves, conservative, reactionary, and grumpy. In any case, their particular argument is enacted daily in various forms by millions of kids and their parents.

But beyond that, I thought, his "absolutely not" captures the horror of conservatism generally and its determination to compel us to live in a nonexistent world. To deny the world's fluidity, the permanence of change, in short: reality. The world. That little girl lives in the world. Her father does not.

My reaction at the time, having not been oppressed by that father's particular "absolutely not," was to find their argument charming and reason for hope. Nathan, who understands that "absolutely not" all to well, who has heard it ringing in his ears all of his life, wanted a fight. One must defend reality, the hard-earned world-as-it-is, against those who would have us live, whatever their reasons, in a world that no longer exists.