When I was 9 I was asked to leave Sunday School because I became obnoxious about my questions. When I was around 11 I got into a fight with a ruffian, because I kept talking to her on the playground and asserting what I believed. When I was 13 I spoke my mind so forcefully to a teacher that, when word got back to my parents, my father drove me to the teacher’s house and waited in the car until I had knocked on the door and apologized.

I blurted what I saw. I was frequently shushed. Still am.

That’s the point I wish to make. Still am. In fact, the older I get the more frequently I note a disconnect between popular perceptions and what I recognize as reality. Instead of a fine tune there’s a squawk in my head, almost a Bronx cheer, when I encounter the contradiction between what is and what is said.

This progress seems natural to me. I’ve learned to modulate the tone of voice and facial expressions (mostly? a bit? OK: a work in progress), but I not only didn’t lose the ability to detect dissonance or delusion; I’ve improved at it. And the truth is, the quality was about as rare in the kids around me as it is among the ambient adults.

So I can read The Emperor’s New Clothes, but I think the tale is so exaggerated that it’s silly. I mean, everyone wants the biggest cookie, right? And a young child won’t yet have learned the social inhibition that restrains her from acting on that impulse. But that’s not a lesson for any of us to learn. The art, I think, is to acknowledge the greed, lightly and with humor, and reach for that cookie if it’s really important to you, but do so without sneaking.

The emperor is neither fair nor free,
but his the biggest power is to hold,
for he can choose to grant a subject’s plea
or doom him to perspire in the cold.
The emperor has fawns instead of friends,
who girdle him with words of empty air,
so round the purple seat deceit depends
and affectation whispers everywhere.

The fable says the emperor was nude,
apparelled in the vapor of a lie,
until a child, pure in attitude,
gave language to the image in his eye.
And though the moral’s innocence and youth,
it takes an age to recognize the truth.