She had a point. I said, "Are you basing this on our visit to the office?"
"Yep."
We'd taken the bus into town - I can't drive - and called into my office. I thought it would be a new experience for both of us, because she hadn't seen it before and I'd forgotten what it looked like. I work from home. It'd been a while since I visited the newspaper's downtown headquarters. Everyone is always very nice, very friendly, but this time they seemed a lot nicer, a lot friendlier.
She was wearing denim shorts and a blue T-shirt with upside-down pink flamingos on it. Her aunt Shirley had recently cut her hair. As a blonde, she'd worn it long and straight for years, and it was a bit of a shock to see it cut short.
"You know," I told her the day after her haircut, "you're actually quite beautiful."
She said, "What, you didn't think so before?"
There were Halloween-style cupcakes for sale in the staff kitchen. The white icing was in the shape of a ghost. I bought her one and she merrily stuffed her beautiful face with it as we did the rounds. "This is Michele ... This is Linda ... This is Fish ..."
They were charmed. One or two colleagues wanted to talk about work - there's one or two like that in every office - and I gave her a notebook and a pen to pass the time. On the way out, I asked her what she'd drawn. In fact, she'd written an acrostic poem about the office. It was part fact ("Excellent cupcakes") and part fiction ("Dedicated journalists").
I ate more of the hacked pig, and said, "I don't know about the 'nobody'. I'm a well-known author! I have a new book out."
She said, "So? If it wasn't for me, people would say, 'There goes that old grump who writes books.'"
I said, "I'm not a grump."
She said, "Well, you're grumpy now."
She had a point. I was already feeling on edge. The last time I'd taken her to Sylvia Park was with one of her friends, and our outing was remarked upon on the Whaleoil blog. It was by Cameron Slater's partner, who wrote, "Today I spotted a very recognisable face at Sylvia Park and was torn as to what to do. I had bought his book for Cam and have chatted to him briefly online. I wondered, should I go over and say hello? He was standing close to me ordering from the same place in the food court. What was I to do? What was I to do?"
She didn't do anything. She writes, devastatingly, "He was with his young children or grandchildren, so in the end I decided not to approach him."
Grandchildren! I was more upset about being mistaken for old than being regarded as a complete nobody, and scowled over my pork. My daughter finished her noodles and spring rolls - she became a vegetarian at the age of 6 because she couldn't bear the thought of eating an innocent pig - and sighed, "Look at you. Just a grey-haired old man eating in a foodcourt." Was she reading my mind?
I didn't want to run the risk of being spotted by Mrs Whaleoil again, and we left the mall to catch the train back to Auckland.
"Let's have a race," I said.
"Okay!"
The deal was she'd take the stairs to the train platform, and I'd take the elevator. The truth was that I didn't have the puff to climb the stairs. She won easily. The elevator was as slow as a wet week. By the time it creaked up and down and got me to the platform, the train had pulled in and pulled out. We had to wait 20 minutes at Sylvia Park station for the next one. All because I was too old to climb the stairs - actually, the real problem was that I couldn't drive. I was one of life's passengers.
"It's all because," she said, reading my mind again, "you can't drive."
"Hey," I said. "I wonder what the teachers are doing!"
"Probably playing on the playground!"
"Or drinking vodka shots!"
"What?"
The train arrived. It's a nice ride on the eastern line - there are horse paddocks at Glen Innes and a mangrove creek at Meadowbank that you can't see by road. It's very scenic, very soothing, and I contemplated the truth of my daughter's lunchtime thesis.
At a profound level, she was absolutely correct. I'm nothing without her. All children change their parents' lives to the extent that sometimes they replace it. After the birth of his eldest child, poet C.K. Stead wrote that enduring line, "I do not want my life back." We serve to protect them. They become the central fact of our existence. Food, warmth, love, junk from Smiggle - we break our backs to shovel it their way, and hope they say nice things about us after we're gone.
Her observations were also a comment on fame. But fame is so average these days. I'm more fascinated by anonymity. "I'm an average nobody," sighs Ray Liotta in his great role as Henry Hill in Goodfellas. It's right at the end of the film, when he's given an assumed identity as part of the witness protection programme, and relocated to some suburban hell. It's saved his life, but he misses the glamour and excitement of living life as a gangster - of that intense kind of fame. "I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."
I am that schnook. I like being a nobody. I'm all good with anonymously going about my business as just another 55-year-old middle-class homeowner and taxpaying parent. There's too much fame in the world. The world needs solid citizens, the quiet majority, to hold the system together. I'm done with trying to impress. I'm so over vanity.
The train pulled into Britomart. "I'm actually going on TV to talk about my book," I said.
"What show?"
"Good Morning."
"Can I have a muesli bar?"
We called in at the office for another cupcake, and caught the bus home. I got on the wrong bus and we had to walk about half an hour from the stop to our house. We walked through her school, and she discovered a new trick on the jungle gym. It was about 4pm. The teachers had finished with their mysterious initiations, and the carpark was empty.
"Mum!" she said, when Emily came home from work. They cuddled at the top of the stairs.
"How was your day, darling girl?"
"Good. Me and dad had lunch at Hungry Wok. It was yummy!"
