IT WAS JUST days before Christmas, and 16-year-old Keah Moore hadn't the faintest notion of what gift to get for her mom.
It's not that Keah, a junior who recently transferred to Woodlawn High School from the private New Mark of Excellence Academy, is a last-minute shopper. She's more like an almost-the-last-minute shopper.
"She was out last night buying presents," Dolly Moore said Monday night of her eldest daughter. Better, perhaps, to go on a gift hunt with three shopping days remaining until Christmas than on Christmas Eve.
So Keah headed to the malls and shopped for friends, her kid sister, godparents and their children, but was still at a loss about what to get for her own mom. What was she to do?
How about paying a prose tribute? Keah is not like today's average teen. Where you'll find others glued to video games or television sets or trolling malls or partying, Keah can be found at home snuggling up with a book.
"My mother said I started reading when I was 2," Keah said at a Christmas party for the Youth Congress on Monday night. "That's what I do all day, every day. I'm not the type of person who likes to go to parties or the mall. I like to stay in the house and read."
Keah sounds like National Basketball Association superstar Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers, a bookwormish sort who's been criticized by his teammate Shaquille O'Neal for his "weird" ways of eschewing partying, hanging out and "good times" for book reading.
"That's what my friends say about me," Keah said. It probably wouldn't hurt Keah's friends - or Shaq - to crack a book every once in a while. Shaq can start with any book that gives instructions on how to shoot free throws.
Keah's favorite books are Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever, both novels. The Bluest Eye is Nobel Prize in Literature winner Morrison's first novel. Sister Souljah's work of fiction has drawn praise from sources as varied as Publishers Weekly, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Nashville Tennessean, Seventeen magazine, hip-hop magazine The Source and alleged rap artist Sean "Puffy" Combs.
Those who love to read, as a rule, write well. So what more fitting gift for her mom, Keah figured, than something her oldest daughter wrote. Keah penned it in longhand on a writing tablet and called it "And the award goes to ... " Here is Dolly Moore's 2002 Christmas gift from daughter Keah.
"And the award goes to Dolly Moore, for always doing her best to provide for her children, for all the days and nights she cried because she could take no more, for all the meals she sacrificed so that myself and my sister could eat.
"For going for years without a new outfit or a pair of shoes because her kids needed school clothes. For struggling with her bills so she could put me, her eldest, in private school to ensure I get the best education possible.
"For all the days, weeks, months she spent in the hospital because the stress was too much to bear.
"And the award goes to Dolly Moore for her pain and suffering, for her patience and kindness, for her sacrifices and virtue, for her struggling and straining. But most of all for the love she had that made our house a home.
"On behalf of all who know her, I would like to present the mother of the year, of the decade, of the century award to Dolly Dolores Hudgins Moore."
It's a gift not anything like the clothes and shoes Keah bought her mother last Christmas and the Christmas before that. But Christmas 2002, Keah decided, would be different.
"I wrote it because she does so much for us," Keah said, "and a lot of times kids forget to thank their parents."
Thanking a parent? Is this kid only 16 and living in the America of 2002, where many teens (and, alarmingly, a few adults) view parents as the enemy? Is this Keah Moore for real?
You'd better know it. At the end of August, Keah attended Baltimore City Councilman Melvin Stukes' forum that sought to hold blacks accountable for their, not white folks', use of the N-word. While her elders railed on about the nonexistent historical figure Willie Lynch, Keah made a plea for schools to teach some real black history.
Last year, she was parliamentarian for the Youth Congress, a teen organization that seeks educational and juvenile justice reform and gives a much-needed voice to young people. This year, Keah's the president.
After she graduates sometime in 2004, Keah hopes to give her mother another gift: Keah's acceptance into Fisk University. Her ultimate goal is to be a pediatrician. But her immediate goal, a 2002 Christmas gift for mom, has been attained.
Merry Christmas, Dolly Moore.