This is a parable, as told by me, channeling Robert Greenleaf Leavitt.
A dog would not understand why you weed, yanking out and killing things he only sometimes eats. He doesn't understand the principle we weed by, to kill some so other chosen ones can thrive. But he doesn't object to the yanking, he just lays there watching or perhaps takes a nap. This is tolerance of what you cannot understand. One who bows his head to the floor to worship God is not always understood by the one who must imbibe or ingest his God instead. But both may tolerate one another by understanding the common need each has to relate to his divinity in some way, whether by imbibing or by bowing. Both are like dogs supining in the sun while the humans are doing their strange thing weeding, just laying there practicing tolerance.
This is my understanding of how Robert Greenleaf Leavitt perceived tolerance. He kept a Koran in his library and wrote about the similarities among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thought often. He was also according to my mother able to read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, so he must have thought about common concepts rooted in words the different religions shared. He focused on commonalities, not differences (citing always "do unto others" as a common adage among religions); and communication (citing how animals and humans could and did communicate.)
To him, a botanist, diversity itself might have suggested ecological health. But he was more than a botanist, he was also one who "talked to the animals." They communicated with him, and he with them; conceivably he learned much from them about tolerance--especially from dogs, horses and crows. He was always looking for commonalities between and among species as between and among religions. Hence my mother was raised in an atmosphere of proactive tolerance of differences between and among species and religions (though not politics--I trace this to the influence of Ida my grandmother.)
I think my children will find it is true of their own beliefs, such a strong traditional way of thinking about religious tolerance has existed in our family culture for so long-- along with a certain zeal (so currently manifest in our own Erika) for truth and justice. "Honest, scholarly, retiring" our family is declared in the town history. They were also highly tolerant people. Amos Blazo "attended no religious services," (though ministers of various denominations "were always welcome in his home");his father had come to America an apostate priest. His son married a woman raised by the Shakers. Their son Robert Blazo was a freewill Baptist, but even more that that he was a Stoic, which I know not only from his love letters to his fiance, but through the love of the classics he passed on down to his daughter Susan, whose son Robert Greenleaf Leavitt was, he whose childhood collection of birds' eggs, among everything else of his, has come to me personally.
By the time it came down to me through my mother from my grandfather, I was too trusting according to my mother. But I call it tolerance, that finding of differences in others as being okay, and focusing instead on commonalities amongst others; and I am happy to walk in my grandfather's shoes, whatever my mother may have said. It would be like Robert Greenleaf Leavitt to speak in terms of dogs or horses, and so I tried to do myself (above), in honor of his wonderful view on life he has passed on to us, his descendants, of tolerance, in which I have been lucky enough to have been steeped for a lifetime.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Time traveling with Star Trek
I saw Star Trek last night and saw my life pass before my eyes. I went to places never gone to before....For instance, before my very eyes young James T. Kirk turned into my son Stevie (!) Then there was Spock, and he turned into Stevie's younger brother and arch enemy Joey (!) My son Johnny was right next to me watching the movie with me, so I whispered these things in his ear when they occurred to me. He must know what I meant I thought, having been regularly placed between his two big brothers in the back seat of the car whenever we went anywhere to keep them from killing each other, but he only nodded knowingly. Maybe he didn't want to be interrupted by major flash backs going on in my head while I was watching the movie? I fell quiet.
It was the preview that had started the time travel for me-- Angels and Demons, directed by Ron Howard. I didn't care about the angels and demons part (ho-hum) but Ron Howard sure got my attention! Suddenly I was remembering watching Ron Howard as a young mother of two young children way back in the Sixties. Ron Howard was then just a small boy on The Andy Griffeth Show named "Opie"--who would have dreamed that this Opie would someday grow up and direct a movie?? Next thing I knew my mind took a quantum leap (warp speed) forward, and I remembered seeing Caccoon in the Eighties, and thinking Oh! ...he's all grown up now, and is a great director! I leaned over to tell Johnny all this stuff and then changed my mind. We wouldn't see Star Trek at all if I kept reminiscing.
But anyway, Star Trek was another series I loved to watch back then about the same time as I was watching The Andy Griffeth Show, and I was so disappointed when I heard they were going to cancel it after only three seasons. Nothing could possibly have made me realize then that it would not be cancelled, but instead recalled by popular acclaim and more amazingly, go on decade after decade to spawn many, many movies in its wake while actors aged and grew paunchy and finally had to be replaced, while Trekkies multiplied faster than Tribbles. Who would have guessed?
It was more than half the joy of the movie! I began to remember all the Star Treks going back forty years and more, and when I saw Leonard Nimoy's Old Spock confronting his Young Spock self it might as well have been me confronting my own young self when we all were so young and so unknowing of the future. The unknowingness of the future is what makes it later so astounding when the past is looked back upon from it, you see. No one knows now what is going to make a splash in the world in the future at all! Example--looking back you know Elvis Presley made a big splash--his fame is utterly universal. But I remember when Pat Boone and Elvis Presley were absolutely tied as to who was best in the private polls of me and my friends, and we were the ones deciding. Fats Domino was pretty good too--how could you decide? Of course now Pat Boone is best remembered for his white bucks (I had some), and Fats Domino is revered as he should be for his wonderful irreverent piano-playing and lyrics--but Elvis has evolved into this great mythical cult hero god who has been spotted hundreds of times walking the earth--just like the Greek heroes and gods of old did--decades after his death, still wooing women and giving little private showings to the Chosen few lucky enough to have run into him. Who would have guessed?
When you see something over and over again for hundreds of episodes (which you don't realize are going to be famous some day) the way I saw Star Trek in its original setting, the moves all become familiar. The way Captain Kirk sits in the captain's chair defines him; the way Spock and Kirk sort of stand there leaning toward each other facing you, having a little conference deciding what to do next--that's just what they do. As I was going into this movie (Star Trek 2009) I was thinking there was something that was just a little staged about the original they could never capture today in the age of specially effected realism, and something a little like Saturday Night Live about the way Spock and Kirk and the others--Scottie, Bones, Chekov, Sulu, Uhura--were with each other. They were clearly having fun--poking fun at themselves and getting into their characters in a wonderfully funny way.
But I was wrong to think they wouldn't, couldn't capture that! Star Trek 2009 does poke fun at Star Trek 1966! Young Kirk sits in the captain's chair, posed just as he did all those hundreds of times forty years ago, thinking, posturing, looking captainly...along comes young Spock (now he's the captain in this movie!) and says "Outta the chair!" It is hilarious! And at the end, the two together facing the movie audience, conferring with each other about what to do.....they captured it perfectly!
And another thing. They were the original Crew Diversity before it was a concept--this was the world of the future and we knew it had no money in it and was totally integrated as to both race and intergalactic species--which was the way we envisioned a new enlightened world being. The only thing I didn't like was the outfits the girls had to wear--they reminded me too much of Play Boy Club outfits I had seen in magazines! Oh well, you can't have everything, and Captain Kirk had to hit on someone, and girls in feministic outfits (whatever they were--braless maybe) wouldn't have fit the bill. They were still in the future, feminists were, you see. Uhura was the first maybe; she was strong and part of the crew. But she still had the old made-for-men-to-look-at outfit.
Oh Star Trek! What times revisited! What time travel!! I must see it again!
It was the preview that had started the time travel for me-- Angels and Demons, directed by Ron Howard. I didn't care about the angels and demons part (ho-hum) but Ron Howard sure got my attention! Suddenly I was remembering watching Ron Howard as a young mother of two young children way back in the Sixties. Ron Howard was then just a small boy on The Andy Griffeth Show named "Opie"--who would have dreamed that this Opie would someday grow up and direct a movie?? Next thing I knew my mind took a quantum leap (warp speed) forward, and I remembered seeing Caccoon in the Eighties, and thinking Oh! ...he's all grown up now, and is a great director! I leaned over to tell Johnny all this stuff and then changed my mind. We wouldn't see Star Trek at all if I kept reminiscing.
But anyway, Star Trek was another series I loved to watch back then about the same time as I was watching The Andy Griffeth Show, and I was so disappointed when I heard they were going to cancel it after only three seasons. Nothing could possibly have made me realize then that it would not be cancelled, but instead recalled by popular acclaim and more amazingly, go on decade after decade to spawn many, many movies in its wake while actors aged and grew paunchy and finally had to be replaced, while Trekkies multiplied faster than Tribbles. Who would have guessed?
It was more than half the joy of the movie! I began to remember all the Star Treks going back forty years and more, and when I saw Leonard Nimoy's Old Spock confronting his Young Spock self it might as well have been me confronting my own young self when we all were so young and so unknowing of the future. The unknowingness of the future is what makes it later so astounding when the past is looked back upon from it, you see. No one knows now what is going to make a splash in the world in the future at all! Example--looking back you know Elvis Presley made a big splash--his fame is utterly universal. But I remember when Pat Boone and Elvis Presley were absolutely tied as to who was best in the private polls of me and my friends, and we were the ones deciding. Fats Domino was pretty good too--how could you decide? Of course now Pat Boone is best remembered for his white bucks (I had some), and Fats Domino is revered as he should be for his wonderful irreverent piano-playing and lyrics--but Elvis has evolved into this great mythical cult hero god who has been spotted hundreds of times walking the earth--just like the Greek heroes and gods of old did--decades after his death, still wooing women and giving little private showings to the Chosen few lucky enough to have run into him. Who would have guessed?
When you see something over and over again for hundreds of episodes (which you don't realize are going to be famous some day) the way I saw Star Trek in its original setting, the moves all become familiar. The way Captain Kirk sits in the captain's chair defines him; the way Spock and Kirk sort of stand there leaning toward each other facing you, having a little conference deciding what to do next--that's just what they do. As I was going into this movie (Star Trek 2009) I was thinking there was something that was just a little staged about the original they could never capture today in the age of specially effected realism, and something a little like Saturday Night Live about the way Spock and Kirk and the others--Scottie, Bones, Chekov, Sulu, Uhura--were with each other. They were clearly having fun--poking fun at themselves and getting into their characters in a wonderfully funny way.
But I was wrong to think they wouldn't, couldn't capture that! Star Trek 2009 does poke fun at Star Trek 1966! Young Kirk sits in the captain's chair, posed just as he did all those hundreds of times forty years ago, thinking, posturing, looking captainly...along comes young Spock (now he's the captain in this movie!) and says "Outta the chair!" It is hilarious! And at the end, the two together facing the movie audience, conferring with each other about what to do.....they captured it perfectly!
And another thing. They were the original Crew Diversity before it was a concept--this was the world of the future and we knew it had no money in it and was totally integrated as to both race and intergalactic species--which was the way we envisioned a new enlightened world being. The only thing I didn't like was the outfits the girls had to wear--they reminded me too much of Play Boy Club outfits I had seen in magazines! Oh well, you can't have everything, and Captain Kirk had to hit on someone, and girls in feministic outfits (whatever they were--braless maybe) wouldn't have fit the bill. They were still in the future, feminists were, you see. Uhura was the first maybe; she was strong and part of the crew. But she still had the old made-for-men-to-look-at outfit.
Oh Star Trek! What times revisited! What time travel!! I must see it again!
Sunday, May 24, 2009
An essay on war and play
How I loved playing war on the circle as a child! Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, Americans and Germans ("No! It's the Russians now, Stupid, not the Germans!" ); booby traps, forts, ambushes, secret codes and well-laid plans, them against us. We played all over the neighborhood and in the woods. I imagined myself a marine crawling through the jungle thickets with a knife in my teeth. I loved being the lookout and spy on the enemy camp hidden behind a tree or bushes where they couldn't see me, bringing back to my side all the information. I loved bringing prisoners back to keep in jail too and was good at it. I would jump out from behind a tree or down from a limb or out from under a bridge and grab 'em and bring 'em in.
Some say war is necessary, that out of its great destruction always comes something good, something new, something symbolic, something delivered to men, like a gift after the fact, a better perspective on things. But are bolts of lightning necessary for making burning embers? There must be a better way to strike a match. I want to know from an ecological perspective what specific need large scale destruction of life serves.
Is war like some play we are putting on for ourselves which some of us just must attend or life wouldn't be worth living? An entrenched, intractable collective and subconscious belief in its innate and intrinsic worthwhilessness must be keeping it legal, for we do honor war as we honor nothing else in all our institutions. We call it sacrifice--sacred giving of life for a greater good. But what greater good would this be? Try to look at it scientifically.
It must be something more than burning embers which comes of war to make me believe it is needed and necessary for the world to proceed in a natural way, in the natural order of things. Somehow it has been included in the natural order of things, along with natural enemies pestilence and famine, and death. War is one of the four horses of the Apocalypse, which is itself a false paradigm: the fourth horseman, death, results from the other three and is not merely their fellow. Indeed death, which may be caused by spurious effect, and thereafter known as destiny or fate or providence, comes from the three horsemen of the Apocalypse and all the other horsemen too. Contrariwise, death may cause as well as be caused by the others. Cause and effect in nature are integral components of the same time space continuum--so much for destiny. Ask Frederick Turner about the time continuum's integrity (http://frederickturnerpoet.com/).
I am not talking about how we get as a species to the point of obliterating war along with disease and hunger, though this might seem an honorable ambition for mankind; I only want to establish that war is not necessary to our well-being as a natural occurrence built into the moral fiber of any ecosystem our species would need in order to sustain itself.. If the good of war, for example, is in the removal of excess population (read Dickens on this), then let us find a better way to control our excess. We do not need hunger, disease and war to keep us in check, because tsunamis, earthquakes and forest fires provide us plenty of relief in that area. We could, if we wanted, manage all kinds of beneficent exterminations short of war's infinitely more brutal, providence-fraught umbrella. Why do we regard the holocaust with horror and call World War II the good war ? They are twins of the same mother. Why is force of coercion given such respectability, why such honor delivered to its members, dead, live and maimed ? It is always said they had to go to war, because "a job" had to be done, someone had to do it and these honored few answered the call. Heed it well, need is expressed. But what need, I want to know.
'O reason not the need!' King Lear says wearily to Regan when she asks him what need he has of even one of his old comrades of war, his fellow veterans, now drunken and disabled and dependent on him as he is on them for his veracity, his identity as warrior. They can tell him who he is. " ...Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is as cheap as beast's." And of course by man he meant woman too.
Perhaps I am being Regan and do not see what need this seemingly superfluous gathering of old men in the comradery of remembering of life defined by death and love actually serves. Do we war then for love? Could we not then, should we not, play at war instead somehow? The way I did when I was little in my neighborhood in the Fifties?
Somehow we must get excessive population under control (I say tie it to credit), make war illegal, and transform it into play. Surely play is necessary to our well-being, a natural occurrence built into the moral fiber of any cultural ecosystem our species would need in order to sustain itself naturally. Cannot play, work, love and creation become the new four horsemen of the apocalypse, forces to bring low the evil rulers of the old world? It is in the name of reasoned necessity I declare it so.
Some say war is necessary, that out of its great destruction always comes something good, something new, something symbolic, something delivered to men, like a gift after the fact, a better perspective on things. But are bolts of lightning necessary for making burning embers? There must be a better way to strike a match. I want to know from an ecological perspective what specific need large scale destruction of life serves.
Is war like some play we are putting on for ourselves which some of us just must attend or life wouldn't be worth living? An entrenched, intractable collective and subconscious belief in its innate and intrinsic worthwhilessness must be keeping it legal, for we do honor war as we honor nothing else in all our institutions. We call it sacrifice--sacred giving of life for a greater good. But what greater good would this be? Try to look at it scientifically.
It must be something more than burning embers which comes of war to make me believe it is needed and necessary for the world to proceed in a natural way, in the natural order of things. Somehow it has been included in the natural order of things, along with natural enemies pestilence and famine, and death. War is one of the four horses of the Apocalypse, which is itself a false paradigm: the fourth horseman, death, results from the other three and is not merely their fellow. Indeed death, which may be caused by spurious effect, and thereafter known as destiny or fate or providence, comes from the three horsemen of the Apocalypse and all the other horsemen too. Contrariwise, death may cause as well as be caused by the others. Cause and effect in nature are integral components of the same time space continuum--so much for destiny. Ask Frederick Turner about the time continuum's integrity (http://frederickturnerpoet.com/).
I am not talking about how we get as a species to the point of obliterating war along with disease and hunger, though this might seem an honorable ambition for mankind; I only want to establish that war is not necessary to our well-being as a natural occurrence built into the moral fiber of any ecosystem our species would need in order to sustain itself.. If the good of war, for example, is in the removal of excess population (read Dickens on this), then let us find a better way to control our excess. We do not need hunger, disease and war to keep us in check, because tsunamis, earthquakes and forest fires provide us plenty of relief in that area. We could, if we wanted, manage all kinds of beneficent exterminations short of war's infinitely more brutal, providence-fraught umbrella. Why do we regard the holocaust with horror and call World War II the good war ? They are twins of the same mother. Why is force of coercion given such respectability, why such honor delivered to its members, dead, live and maimed ? It is always said they had to go to war, because "a job" had to be done, someone had to do it and these honored few answered the call. Heed it well, need is expressed. But what need, I want to know.
'O reason not the need!' King Lear says wearily to Regan when she asks him what need he has of even one of his old comrades of war, his fellow veterans, now drunken and disabled and dependent on him as he is on them for his veracity, his identity as warrior. They can tell him who he is. " ...Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, man's life is as cheap as beast's." And of course by man he meant woman too.
Perhaps I am being Regan and do not see what need this seemingly superfluous gathering of old men in the comradery of remembering of life defined by death and love actually serves. Do we war then for love? Could we not then, should we not, play at war instead somehow? The way I did when I was little in my neighborhood in the Fifties?
Somehow we must get excessive population under control (I say tie it to credit), make war illegal, and transform it into play. Surely play is necessary to our well-being, a natural occurrence built into the moral fiber of any cultural ecosystem our species would need in order to sustain itself naturally. Cannot play, work, love and creation become the new four horsemen of the apocalypse, forces to bring low the evil rulers of the old world? It is in the name of reasoned necessity I declare it so.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Doctorate--Part Two
I thought I was getting the degree to make myself more employable, period; but the degree itself was the least I got out of the doctorate. Even the jobs which inevitably ensued from acquiring it paled beside the real effects of what eventually came of actually doing it. It was a period of rejuvenation for me. I would go to school tired to death from teaching and housework and come home hours later completely refreshed and ready to change the world with new ideas. And I think this was because I was so happy that my "invisible" experience teaching was finally becoming visible to everybody.
The graduate-level courses I was taking did not phase me in the least because there was little I didn't already know about education, either in practice or theory. And this was specifically because, beginning with Donna and Erika in Duxbury way back in 1979, and continuing with their little brothers and sisters in Fryeburg and Monroe through 1989, I had been annually teaching, developing curricula, researching resources, administering assessments, and evaluating programs quarterly in an on-going process (grades one through eight) for eight years straight, topping it off with two more years in Islesboro in the public school system (grades seven through twelve). It was as though I had been in hard training for this particular doctoral-level degree for a decade and now I could finally just sit there and take it all in--and then take it to a higher level still.
Few realize what goes into implementing a home education program, but the superintendents who supervised my programs certainly did. It may as well as not have existed at all for purposes of finding teaching jobs; no more than raising nine children over a period of forty-two years qualifies you for credit in Child Development courses, or running a household for almost half a century earns any practicum credit in a Home Economics degree whatsoever. And this was a pity, because home education at my house went on all year long, day after day, with no breaks for holidays and summer vacation. But academia has its own milestones to pass, and schools hire (and states certify) teachers who have passed courses in college, not teachers who have mastered the same skills doing the same thing at home. I had, by 1976, two degrees in English, a minor in history, and was certified to teach science, history, and English in the secondary schools; in addition, I had had three years teaching in college (1969-1972). Yet I had little chance of being hired because I had "no experience" --teaching at home did not count, and my college-teaching experience was seventeen years old. To make it worse, one superintendent told me he had decided he couldn't even hire me as a substitute, because this would interfere with my home education program, wouldn't it? It had been very discouraging to me to realize that the very practice which was giving my children (to my mind) a superior education was the very thing which was preventing me from finding work to support them.....
Now all of that was changed. I was back in the system--"visible" again, so to speak--going to school with the well-defined objective of making myself employable again. What I didn't realize when I began was that the home education experience my children would be having while I got the doctorate would be greatly enhanced by it--and it by them.
I had always found raising children and attending college highly compatible, complementary activities. It didn't matter what I studied, I could always relate what I was learning to something about my children. Once, studying for my B.A, degree in Portland in 1968 (at what was to become USM), I used Evie and Rachael as case studies in an undergraduate course in philosophy I was taking. For example, I could see that Evie's dialogues (aged five) at home with me and her sister were those of a Continental Rationalist, and Rachael's (aged three) those of a British Empiricist. Accordingly I inserted pieces of our dialogues with each other into my term paper to make my points. To my surprise and delight, the professor got it!....and I got an A.
Now, twenty-one years later, I again found my children perfect case studies for my courses! I got permission from the professor to study my own children's use of The Writing Process as a formal class in my home education writing class. My five children (Margaret, Andrea, Johnny, Joey, and Stevie) ranged in age from three up to thirteen; they, and I with them, sat around the kitchen table and wrote.
From a board at the University of Maine I copied the three questions we used to critique what we wrote. These were: " What did you like best about it? What part didn't you understand? What would you like to hear more about?" Was Margaret (only three at the time) included? She was the best part! Unable to read or write, Margaret scribbled out her entire stories and then read them back to us each time it was her turn (usually a continuation of the story about a little girl in a bear's cave--we all loved her stories!) Then, just like the rest of us, she would ask everyone at the table in turn the three questions (" What did you like best about it? What part didn't you understand? What would you like to hear more about?") and get feedback. We evaluated each other's work and built up portfolios which in turn were turned in by me to the professor at semester's end.
The real result was not, of course, just the A I received for the course (the children cheered), but substantial practice for my children (my students) in writing and critiquing of writing, as a community of writers within a family of writers, practice which continued in this form for the next ten years (until 1998) as long as I had anyone home to teach. I could, at this point, relate multiple long term results of those five years of my life and its effect upon my children and their respective educations. But since we have glimpsed that of Margaret at three, it might be instructive to glimpse her resume at twenty-two, and use her example as representative of the rest. Leaving much out, it includes not only a B.A. in English from UNH, (3.6 GPA in the major), but also the fact that she is an unpaid senior online editor of mugglenet.com, author of numerous fanfiction stories online, even more offline, has worked in her university's Writing Center assisting other students with their writing assignments, and has had an editorial internship with Heinemann. As far as I know, she's written something every day since she was three, which is for the non-math people among you, no less than 6,935 days of writing. I repeat, the example of Margaret's growth as a writer is just one among many lasting, long-term results of that period of time when I worked (I thought) for a degree merely in order to become employable again.
It is hard to separate the mother student from the mother teacher in my mind. I am sure I was a better mother as well, because I was both a student and a teacher myself during those five years. Often it seems to me that the by-product of something one undertakes in life both outlasts and outbests the original undertaking's most treasured purpose by far--and that's the part (most mysteriously) which had not been planned for at all!
The graduate-level courses I was taking did not phase me in the least because there was little I didn't already know about education, either in practice or theory. And this was specifically because, beginning with Donna and Erika in Duxbury way back in 1979, and continuing with their little brothers and sisters in Fryeburg and Monroe through 1989, I had been annually teaching, developing curricula, researching resources, administering assessments, and evaluating programs quarterly in an on-going process (grades one through eight) for eight years straight, topping it off with two more years in Islesboro in the public school system (grades seven through twelve). It was as though I had been in hard training for this particular doctoral-level degree for a decade and now I could finally just sit there and take it all in--and then take it to a higher level still.
Few realize what goes into implementing a home education program, but the superintendents who supervised my programs certainly did. It may as well as not have existed at all for purposes of finding teaching jobs; no more than raising nine children over a period of forty-two years qualifies you for credit in Child Development courses, or running a household for almost half a century earns any practicum credit in a Home Economics degree whatsoever. And this was a pity, because home education at my house went on all year long, day after day, with no breaks for holidays and summer vacation. But academia has its own milestones to pass, and schools hire (and states certify) teachers who have passed courses in college, not teachers who have mastered the same skills doing the same thing at home. I had, by 1976, two degrees in English, a minor in history, and was certified to teach science, history, and English in the secondary schools; in addition, I had had three years teaching in college (1969-1972). Yet I had little chance of being hired because I had "no experience" --teaching at home did not count, and my college-teaching experience was seventeen years old. To make it worse, one superintendent told me he had decided he couldn't even hire me as a substitute, because this would interfere with my home education program, wouldn't it? It had been very discouraging to me to realize that the very practice which was giving my children (to my mind) a superior education was the very thing which was preventing me from finding work to support them.....
Now all of that was changed. I was back in the system--"visible" again, so to speak--going to school with the well-defined objective of making myself employable again. What I didn't realize when I began was that the home education experience my children would be having while I got the doctorate would be greatly enhanced by it--and it by them.
I had always found raising children and attending college highly compatible, complementary activities. It didn't matter what I studied, I could always relate what I was learning to something about my children. Once, studying for my B.A, degree in Portland in 1968 (at what was to become USM), I used Evie and Rachael as case studies in an undergraduate course in philosophy I was taking. For example, I could see that Evie's dialogues (aged five) at home with me and her sister were those of a Continental Rationalist, and Rachael's (aged three) those of a British Empiricist. Accordingly I inserted pieces of our dialogues with each other into my term paper to make my points. To my surprise and delight, the professor got it!....and I got an A.
Now, twenty-one years later, I again found my children perfect case studies for my courses! I got permission from the professor to study my own children's use of The Writing Process as a formal class in my home education writing class. My five children (Margaret, Andrea, Johnny, Joey, and Stevie) ranged in age from three up to thirteen; they, and I with them, sat around the kitchen table and wrote.
From a board at the University of Maine I copied the three questions we used to critique what we wrote. These were: " What did you like best about it? What part didn't you understand? What would you like to hear more about?" Was Margaret (only three at the time) included? She was the best part! Unable to read or write, Margaret scribbled out her entire stories and then read them back to us each time it was her turn (usually a continuation of the story about a little girl in a bear's cave--we all loved her stories!) Then, just like the rest of us, she would ask everyone at the table in turn the three questions (" What did you like best about it? What part didn't you understand? What would you like to hear more about?") and get feedback. We evaluated each other's work and built up portfolios which in turn were turned in by me to the professor at semester's end.
The real result was not, of course, just the A I received for the course (the children cheered), but substantial practice for my children (my students) in writing and critiquing of writing, as a community of writers within a family of writers, practice which continued in this form for the next ten years (until 1998) as long as I had anyone home to teach. I could, at this point, relate multiple long term results of those five years of my life and its effect upon my children and their respective educations. But since we have glimpsed that of Margaret at three, it might be instructive to glimpse her resume at twenty-two, and use her example as representative of the rest. Leaving much out, it includes not only a B.A. in English from UNH, (3.6 GPA in the major), but also the fact that she is an unpaid senior online editor of mugglenet.com, author of numerous fanfiction stories online, even more offline, has worked in her university's Writing Center assisting other students with their writing assignments, and has had an editorial internship with Heinemann. As far as I know, she's written something every day since she was three, which is for the non-math people among you, no less than 6,935 days of writing. I repeat, the example of Margaret's growth as a writer is just one among many lasting, long-term results of that period of time when I worked (I thought) for a degree merely in order to become employable again.
It is hard to separate the mother student from the mother teacher in my mind. I am sure I was a better mother as well, because I was both a student and a teacher myself during those five years. Often it seems to me that the by-product of something one undertakes in life both outlasts and outbests the original undertaking's most treasured purpose by far--and that's the part (most mysteriously) which had not been planned for at all!
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Growing up in racially segregated Virginia in the Fifties
No one ever talked to me about racial prejudice that I can remember before we moved to Charlottesville in 1949, but Virginia was below the Mason Dixon line, and although I was only five and a half at the time, I can still remember clearly my first experiences with it--not with prejudice, but with the result of prejudice so deep and so amassed throughout a whole population it had become law ("Jim Crow" I found out later these laws were called, which I still think is a strange name for a law.)
I myself of course was not in the least prejudiced--there were no "colored people" (the term used by polite whites for blacks in those days) in Morrisville, that I had ever met anyway, none at all in Maine that I knew of, and the first black people I ever saw were in Washington D.C. sitting in a big crowds on the stoops of buildings we were passing by on our way down to Virginia on a hot, hot day. I remember hearing my mother and grandmother talking about the terrible conditions of the buildings where the people sat as we drove by--their tones were sympathetic for the people I could tell. "Terrible" was my mother's term, which I already knew was her favorite term and the one she used for anything which she thought was wrong. But we drove on.
It rained in torrents on the way down. We were in our old Plymouth, the one before the gray '51 Dodge my mother bought which lasted us the whole time we were in Charlottesville. The windshield wipers kept stopping on the Plymouth and my brother, who always sat next to my mother in the passenger's seat when we went on long trips, had to keep reaching out the window and nudging them into action again so my mother could see. "I can't see!" she would say with great alarm and out he would reach and get them going again. I recently saw a 1948 Plymouth and it all came back, that memory. But we made it to Charlottesville. My brother must have been about twelve, my mother forty-one, and my grandmother seventy-seven. My grandmother and I always rode in the back seat when we all went somewhere together, especially when we drove to Maine every Summer and back to Virginia again every Fall.
In my family going to the movies was something we all loved to do, and so right away after arriving and moving in we went to the movies at the Paramount theater in downtown Charlottesville. We parked along a side street next to the theater and went to the box office to get our tickets. Oh oh! Something was wrong! The lady wouldn't give us our tickets--she kept pointing up the street and telling my mother we couldn't come in! She said something else to my mother I couldn't hear and then my mother said "Oh! I'm sorry!" and told us (my brother and grandmother and me, all waiting expectantly) that the entrance for white people (that was us) was around front--this was the entrance to the BALCONY where only Colored People could go--and we were not colored. I was SO disappointed! I really did want to sit in the balcony, since I'd never sat in one before. We went around to the front and sure enough, there was another box office with another lady (white) selling other tickets to the same movie. So we got our tickets and went in and sat down. I looked way, way back and up and sure enough there was the coveted balcony with lots of people in it--black people. I still wanted to sit up there, but it just wasn't allowed. And that was my first experience with Jim Crow.
But soon enough I got to know and see lots of "colored people." Mr. Gardner came and worked for us every Sunday--he was black. After my brother went off to live at Christchurch School on the Rappahanock River, there was only my mother, my grandmother and myself at home, so I imagine he was hired to do any heavy work that a father would otherwise do. One day he and my grandmother made soap in the back yard with the fat my grandmother saved from cooking. This saved fat gave my mother occasion to observe to me that "Germans never throw anything away!" --referring to my grandmother's ethnicity (German and Swiss). I suppose this is a sort of prejudice--to this day I still think of all Germans as being very thrifty like my grandmother and never throwing anything away.
Anyway, she and Mr. Gardner, who was a very tall, thin man while my grandmother was rather short and stout (though still taller than I was), were mixing fat and lye together in the back yard in a metal garbage can--the kind my friends and I used the lids of (for shields) when we were sword fighting--I was watching intently. They were getting along famously. They were laughing and talking together the whole time. He would always have to repeat whatever he said to her about three times before she understood him, because he had such a thick, strong Southern accent that sometimes even I couldn't understand what he was saying and would have to say "what?" to him until I got it. He was a very patient man and kept repeating what he said more slowly and more distinctly each time until we got it. I think he must have had a lot of funny stories to share with his family and friends about this family of Yankees he was working for.
Back to the soap-making: they put ashes into it after the lye and fat was mixed enough, and then poured the whole strange mixture (after warning me not to touch the lye because it would burn me...?) into a large cardboard box in layers. Each layer of soap was covered with a sheet of newspaper, in this case the funnies from the Sunday paper, The Daily Progress. (I loved the funnies, even before I could read, so I watched with even more interest.) Then this was all allowed to solidify and the newspaper peeled off and the soap cut in squares with a knife--I watched the whole process, deeply impressed. The very best part was that the funnies came off on the soap and we had soap with the funnies on it!
Mr. Gardner's first name was William, but both my mother and grandmother always addressed him respectfully as Mr. Gardner. My mother told me that the other six days of the week he worked as a janitor at the University of Virginia hospital. "How hard he works, just imagine!" she said to me once with great respect in her voice. "He works every minute to support his family!" His son was just graduating from high school at the time she said this to me, and she also made a point of telling me Mr. Gardner was very proud of his son for doing that. I could tell she admired Mr. Gardner in every way. Later on during the Sixties when the civil rights movement was getting underway I used to imagine that Mr. Gardner's son had joined the Black Panthers now, because his father had worked every single day of the week somewhere, either at the hospital or with us, to support his family, and I thought probably his son must have resented that just a little, not to ever get to see his own father. And of course I sympathized. I never got to see my own father either (my parents were divorced), but at least I got to see Mr. Gardner one day a week, while his own kids never did apparently.
Mr. Gardner wasn't the only black person who worked in the neighborhood. There was a nice black lady who took care of the baby of the family next door, and whenever I got on the bus there were lots of people who would be either arriving for or leaving from work on the circle, though none of them lived there, all black people who lived somewhere else ( or so I supposed--I didn't really know or give it much thought). Riding the bus was something we children liked to do for fun--ride the bus on its entire route and end up back home again; our mothers always let us do this. My mother told me when she was little she used to do the same thing with her friends on the trolleys all over Trenton.
Anyway, one day I wanted to ride at the back of the bus, and so I did. But all the black people who were sitting back there (I had begun to notice they always sat back there!) kept staring at me and moving over to make room for me--or away from me and not looking at me. I couldn't understand why--I wasn't doing anything wrong. I told my mother about it and she told me that there was a law that said that only Colored People were supposed to sit back there, no whites--and I was white. Well, she might have warned me not to try and sit back there in the first place. Once again I had run into Jim Crow!
We went to the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church in Charlottesville--it was about the only time I ever wore a dress, even though Betsy Glancy (my arch enemy in school) used to say I shouldn't wear dungarees or pants to school, but instead should be "a little lady." Ugh! I hated that expression and told my mother what she said. My mother just laughed at the expression, and looked a little haughty, and said "How silly!" and sniffed! She was on my side always; she didn't mind if I wore dungarees every day and played with the boys, and neither did Betsy Hennemann's mother. Betsy was my best friend on the circle. We played football and baseball with the boys all the time, no problem. Our mothers were educated and liberated I realized later--the two went hand in hand. Indeed, Betsy ended up becoming a lawyer after being a stock broker for a while. We both made fun of Betty Ann Rex, my arch enemy on the circle and Betsy's next door neighbor.
Betty Ann Rex always wore a dress--and she hated me. She pushed me to the other half of the street, or tried to, whenever she could (it was her side of the road she said). But I was always stronger and could push her back. Her family had a "family council" every Sunday to decide what they were going to do that week, and she and her sister had regular chores to do like polish the floor with floor wax and hang out the laundry "just so." Betsy and I sneered at her ways and laughed behind her back--our families did things like talk politics and read books, not get serious about waxing the floor and deciding when a first date could happen.
Years later, in our forties, Betsy and I talked on the phone and still we could make each other laugh talking about Betty Ann Rex! Betty Ann Rex did play the piano really well; and she had a television (in my family you were supposed to read); so I would always try to be nice so she would let me watch I Love Lucy week nights or Walt Disney or Lassie on Sunday nights. It was hard though (being nice.) This was class prejudice Betsy and I were practicing against Betty Ann Rex and she against us, but we didn't realize it; and when my mother and I laughed at Betsy Glancy's expecting me to be a little lady, we were being feministic in our attitude, but we didn't realize it. These ways of speaking had no such names in those days. Prejudice was prejudice and it had no classifications, people didn't point it out and talk about it. It was just practiced.
But anyway, to church I did wear a dress, much as I disliked it, year after year. And one night, the year after I came back from going out west with my mother, when I was twelve, I wore a really beautiful skirt to church in which to go Christmas caroling. I actually liked it! It was made of satin and had sequins on it. It even was my least favorite color--pink--and still I didn't mind. (Perhaps I was just beginning to think of boys in a different light.) So I arrived for caroling with other kids in the Unitarian Church, decked out in this beautiful skirt and very happy. But when we left to go caroling, instead of going down the street --the church was on Rugby Road, near the University--we were all herded into cars and taken to a place I had never been or seen before.
I was so surprised! It was a place which had mud on the ground, it was very, very dark there, and there were lots of shacks all crowded together in a strange, jumbled, disconnected way --think Slum Dog Millionaire. The shacks were not much taller than I was I noticed, and people were milling around us in the dark where we couldn't see them, not really coming up close to us.
Then I noticed all the people were black--colored people! We lined up and we sang, while my squined, satin skirt, which was below my knees as skirts were in those days, got really muddy all around the bottom. Of course I didn't care much about that. I just was surprised to see where we were and what it looked like there. We sang Silent Night and We Three Kings and Away in a Manger--all the songs I knew well--but in a place I had never even imagined existed before. It was dark, there were no electric lights, it was muddy, and people were holding candles, the only lights around. It was purely surreal. When we finished singing we heard claps, and "thank you, " and "Merry Christmas"--that was all; and then we drove back to the church, and my mother picked me up, and I told her all about it. She too was surprised and didn't know what to say. I don't remember ever wearing that skirt again. Maybe it was ruined in the mud.
Where that place in Charlottesville was, I do not know. I have come to realize gradually that all cities have such places in them where people live in shacks and tents and boxes on the city's perimeter, or near its dump, and the bigger the city is, the more likely you are to find one. This one must have been Charlottesville's. Two years later in 1958 when we moved back to Maine and I went to live at Kents Hill, I heard on the radio about the segregation laws in Virginia being repealed and I read an article in a magazine (Look? Life?) about Lane High School being integrated--Lane was the school I had gone to for the eighth and ninth grade. There were young people my age interviewed in that article who talked about how glad they were about the new integration laws. And I thought "I bet they were!" I was thinking that now Lane High School, which had the state's worst football team, would now get the black kids' high school's football players: Burley High School, the black high school in Charlottesville, were state football champions! Lane High was definitely benefitting.
But I also thought "Of course! Why not? No big deal!" It was a generation thing, much like gay marriage is now among the young--a non-issue. I also thought of my church and the caroling I had done in 1956, and realized I had been part of the change that had come to Virginia. I had no inkling at that point that a major Civil Rights movement was to come. I just knew that I agreed with the new law that made the schools the same.
Years later I saw a documentary of Bobby Kennedy encountering really hungry black families in shacks in the country down south, and being really disturbed by it. I remembered seeing such places and people myself, black people who looked ragged and discouraged standing outside of falling-down shacks; I saw them while riding in the car with my mother to go horse-back riding on the weekends on the outskirts of Charlottesville. I remembered Bobby and Teddy both went to UVA for law school, and I remember thinking that maybe, like me, they hadn't really looked into --just at--the lives of the black people who lived on the outskirts of town in the country. It must have made Bobby Kennedy feel good that he was actually in a position, as Attorney General, to do something about it.
My mother of course thought it (integration) was all part of a sinister Communist plot devised in Moscow to bring our country to its knees, this undermining of the rights of states to decide for themselves whether or not they would be integrated. "Separate but equal" schools were alright with her --in principle. She did not seem to connect the lives of black people she actually knew--people she liked and respected--with these new integration laws. But I did. I was part of a generation just coming to age which would throw out all sorts of things which were to us non-issues in judging others--war, race, religion, straight sex, conventional clothing, music, art, education, or English erudition. These things mattered to our parents and other adults--but not to us. There was a generation gap. It wouldn't be long before we would say so, and rather loudly.
The year I graduated from high school (1961), the Sixties generation was still in high school, all the boys had crew cuts, and the girls all strove to look "clean-cut." But we had had our eyes and, more importantly, our minds opened already just watching older people being intolerant. The major prejudice of the future--PCism, in which you had to be tolerant or you were not tolerated--was still in the future. In 1961 the Beatles were getting popular in Liverpool and Germany, Bob Dylan was writing "The Times They are A-Changin'," and Barack Obama was just being born.
Slowly, over the next four decades, even my own mother's prejudices were worn down and discarded. The Soviet Union self-destructed in 1989, and I was so glad she was alive (82 at the time) to see it. "Wonderful!" she breathed with a sincere breath of relief! How hard she had fought all her life, even spying without pay for the FBI, against the Communists for the sake of her country! But for me, her real changes were reflected in the way she accepted my friendships with actual black people, the way she came to feel the Vietnam War was all wrong, and the way, eventually, she actually saw black people as her equals, personally. I know this became true because sometime in the Seventies, maybe the Eighties, she reported to me she had met a young professional black woman in some sort of job situation, and "She spoke just beautifully!" I can hear her repeat it again to me, her amazement and admiration very evident in her voice. "She was very well spoken, and very well educated!" And again she repeated, almost in disbelief, "...she spoke just beautifully--and she had beautiful manners!"
It was an observation on class. For my mother, class had nothing whatsoever to do with money, but everything to do with language, education, manners, considerations of others, and moral rectitude. If I were ever to bring up a prospective boyfriend, her first question would always be "Does he speak well? Where did he go to school?" This young black woman she had met had clearly won her deepest respect and admiration, for she had proved herself on a par with herself! That was an almost unfathomable thought for me--few were on par with my mother, at least in her eyes, and it was always evident to me in her body language exactly what she thought of people in these terms--acceptable or not acceptable. For me, it was more profound change than the Iron Curtain crumbling, my mother reaching that point. I am so sad she did not live to see and listen to Obama.
I myself of course was not in the least prejudiced--there were no "colored people" (the term used by polite whites for blacks in those days) in Morrisville, that I had ever met anyway, none at all in Maine that I knew of, and the first black people I ever saw were in Washington D.C. sitting in a big crowds on the stoops of buildings we were passing by on our way down to Virginia on a hot, hot day. I remember hearing my mother and grandmother talking about the terrible conditions of the buildings where the people sat as we drove by--their tones were sympathetic for the people I could tell. "Terrible" was my mother's term, which I already knew was her favorite term and the one she used for anything which she thought was wrong. But we drove on.
It rained in torrents on the way down. We were in our old Plymouth, the one before the gray '51 Dodge my mother bought which lasted us the whole time we were in Charlottesville. The windshield wipers kept stopping on the Plymouth and my brother, who always sat next to my mother in the passenger's seat when we went on long trips, had to keep reaching out the window and nudging them into action again so my mother could see. "I can't see!" she would say with great alarm and out he would reach and get them going again. I recently saw a 1948 Plymouth and it all came back, that memory. But we made it to Charlottesville. My brother must have been about twelve, my mother forty-one, and my grandmother seventy-seven. My grandmother and I always rode in the back seat when we all went somewhere together, especially when we drove to Maine every Summer and back to Virginia again every Fall.
In my family going to the movies was something we all loved to do, and so right away after arriving and moving in we went to the movies at the Paramount theater in downtown Charlottesville. We parked along a side street next to the theater and went to the box office to get our tickets. Oh oh! Something was wrong! The lady wouldn't give us our tickets--she kept pointing up the street and telling my mother we couldn't come in! She said something else to my mother I couldn't hear and then my mother said "Oh! I'm sorry!" and told us (my brother and grandmother and me, all waiting expectantly) that the entrance for white people (that was us) was around front--this was the entrance to the BALCONY where only Colored People could go--and we were not colored. I was SO disappointed! I really did want to sit in the balcony, since I'd never sat in one before. We went around to the front and sure enough, there was another box office with another lady (white) selling other tickets to the same movie. So we got our tickets and went in and sat down. I looked way, way back and up and sure enough there was the coveted balcony with lots of people in it--black people. I still wanted to sit up there, but it just wasn't allowed. And that was my first experience with Jim Crow.
But soon enough I got to know and see lots of "colored people." Mr. Gardner came and worked for us every Sunday--he was black. After my brother went off to live at Christchurch School on the Rappahanock River, there was only my mother, my grandmother and myself at home, so I imagine he was hired to do any heavy work that a father would otherwise do. One day he and my grandmother made soap in the back yard with the fat my grandmother saved from cooking. This saved fat gave my mother occasion to observe to me that "Germans never throw anything away!" --referring to my grandmother's ethnicity (German and Swiss). I suppose this is a sort of prejudice--to this day I still think of all Germans as being very thrifty like my grandmother and never throwing anything away.
Anyway, she and Mr. Gardner, who was a very tall, thin man while my grandmother was rather short and stout (though still taller than I was), were mixing fat and lye together in the back yard in a metal garbage can--the kind my friends and I used the lids of (for shields) when we were sword fighting--I was watching intently. They were getting along famously. They were laughing and talking together the whole time. He would always have to repeat whatever he said to her about three times before she understood him, because he had such a thick, strong Southern accent that sometimes even I couldn't understand what he was saying and would have to say "what?" to him until I got it. He was a very patient man and kept repeating what he said more slowly and more distinctly each time until we got it. I think he must have had a lot of funny stories to share with his family and friends about this family of Yankees he was working for.
Back to the soap-making: they put ashes into it after the lye and fat was mixed enough, and then poured the whole strange mixture (after warning me not to touch the lye because it would burn me...?) into a large cardboard box in layers. Each layer of soap was covered with a sheet of newspaper, in this case the funnies from the Sunday paper, The Daily Progress. (I loved the funnies, even before I could read, so I watched with even more interest.) Then this was all allowed to solidify and the newspaper peeled off and the soap cut in squares with a knife--I watched the whole process, deeply impressed. The very best part was that the funnies came off on the soap and we had soap with the funnies on it!
Mr. Gardner's first name was William, but both my mother and grandmother always addressed him respectfully as Mr. Gardner. My mother told me that the other six days of the week he worked as a janitor at the University of Virginia hospital. "How hard he works, just imagine!" she said to me once with great respect in her voice. "He works every minute to support his family!" His son was just graduating from high school at the time she said this to me, and she also made a point of telling me Mr. Gardner was very proud of his son for doing that. I could tell she admired Mr. Gardner in every way. Later on during the Sixties when the civil rights movement was getting underway I used to imagine that Mr. Gardner's son had joined the Black Panthers now, because his father had worked every single day of the week somewhere, either at the hospital or with us, to support his family, and I thought probably his son must have resented that just a little, not to ever get to see his own father. And of course I sympathized. I never got to see my own father either (my parents were divorced), but at least I got to see Mr. Gardner one day a week, while his own kids never did apparently.
Mr. Gardner wasn't the only black person who worked in the neighborhood. There was a nice black lady who took care of the baby of the family next door, and whenever I got on the bus there were lots of people who would be either arriving for or leaving from work on the circle, though none of them lived there, all black people who lived somewhere else ( or so I supposed--I didn't really know or give it much thought). Riding the bus was something we children liked to do for fun--ride the bus on its entire route and end up back home again; our mothers always let us do this. My mother told me when she was little she used to do the same thing with her friends on the trolleys all over Trenton.
Anyway, one day I wanted to ride at the back of the bus, and so I did. But all the black people who were sitting back there (I had begun to notice they always sat back there!) kept staring at me and moving over to make room for me--or away from me and not looking at me. I couldn't understand why--I wasn't doing anything wrong. I told my mother about it and she told me that there was a law that said that only Colored People were supposed to sit back there, no whites--and I was white. Well, she might have warned me not to try and sit back there in the first place. Once again I had run into Jim Crow!
We went to the Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church in Charlottesville--it was about the only time I ever wore a dress, even though Betsy Glancy (my arch enemy in school) used to say I shouldn't wear dungarees or pants to school, but instead should be "a little lady." Ugh! I hated that expression and told my mother what she said. My mother just laughed at the expression, and looked a little haughty, and said "How silly!" and sniffed! She was on my side always; she didn't mind if I wore dungarees every day and played with the boys, and neither did Betsy Hennemann's mother. Betsy was my best friend on the circle. We played football and baseball with the boys all the time, no problem. Our mothers were educated and liberated I realized later--the two went hand in hand. Indeed, Betsy ended up becoming a lawyer after being a stock broker for a while. We both made fun of Betty Ann Rex, my arch enemy on the circle and Betsy's next door neighbor.
Betty Ann Rex always wore a dress--and she hated me. She pushed me to the other half of the street, or tried to, whenever she could (it was her side of the road she said). But I was always stronger and could push her back. Her family had a "family council" every Sunday to decide what they were going to do that week, and she and her sister had regular chores to do like polish the floor with floor wax and hang out the laundry "just so." Betsy and I sneered at her ways and laughed behind her back--our families did things like talk politics and read books, not get serious about waxing the floor and deciding when a first date could happen.
Years later, in our forties, Betsy and I talked on the phone and still we could make each other laugh talking about Betty Ann Rex! Betty Ann Rex did play the piano really well; and she had a television (in my family you were supposed to read); so I would always try to be nice so she would let me watch I Love Lucy week nights or Walt Disney or Lassie on Sunday nights. It was hard though (being nice.) This was class prejudice Betsy and I were practicing against Betty Ann Rex and she against us, but we didn't realize it; and when my mother and I laughed at Betsy Glancy's expecting me to be a little lady, we were being feministic in our attitude, but we didn't realize it. These ways of speaking had no such names in those days. Prejudice was prejudice and it had no classifications, people didn't point it out and talk about it. It was just practiced.
But anyway, to church I did wear a dress, much as I disliked it, year after year. And one night, the year after I came back from going out west with my mother, when I was twelve, I wore a really beautiful skirt to church in which to go Christmas caroling. I actually liked it! It was made of satin and had sequins on it. It even was my least favorite color--pink--and still I didn't mind. (Perhaps I was just beginning to think of boys in a different light.) So I arrived for caroling with other kids in the Unitarian Church, decked out in this beautiful skirt and very happy. But when we left to go caroling, instead of going down the street --the church was on Rugby Road, near the University--we were all herded into cars and taken to a place I had never been or seen before.
I was so surprised! It was a place which had mud on the ground, it was very, very dark there, and there were lots of shacks all crowded together in a strange, jumbled, disconnected way --think Slum Dog Millionaire. The shacks were not much taller than I was I noticed, and people were milling around us in the dark where we couldn't see them, not really coming up close to us.
Then I noticed all the people were black--colored people! We lined up and we sang, while my squined, satin skirt, which was below my knees as skirts were in those days, got really muddy all around the bottom. Of course I didn't care much about that. I just was surprised to see where we were and what it looked like there. We sang Silent Night and We Three Kings and Away in a Manger--all the songs I knew well--but in a place I had never even imagined existed before. It was dark, there were no electric lights, it was muddy, and people were holding candles, the only lights around. It was purely surreal. When we finished singing we heard claps, and "thank you, " and "Merry Christmas"--that was all; and then we drove back to the church, and my mother picked me up, and I told her all about it. She too was surprised and didn't know what to say. I don't remember ever wearing that skirt again. Maybe it was ruined in the mud.
Where that place in Charlottesville was, I do not know. I have come to realize gradually that all cities have such places in them where people live in shacks and tents and boxes on the city's perimeter, or near its dump, and the bigger the city is, the more likely you are to find one. This one must have been Charlottesville's. Two years later in 1958 when we moved back to Maine and I went to live at Kents Hill, I heard on the radio about the segregation laws in Virginia being repealed and I read an article in a magazine (Look? Life?) about Lane High School being integrated--Lane was the school I had gone to for the eighth and ninth grade. There were young people my age interviewed in that article who talked about how glad they were about the new integration laws. And I thought "I bet they were!" I was thinking that now Lane High School, which had the state's worst football team, would now get the black kids' high school's football players: Burley High School, the black high school in Charlottesville, were state football champions! Lane High was definitely benefitting.
But I also thought "Of course! Why not? No big deal!" It was a generation thing, much like gay marriage is now among the young--a non-issue. I also thought of my church and the caroling I had done in 1956, and realized I had been part of the change that had come to Virginia. I had no inkling at that point that a major Civil Rights movement was to come. I just knew that I agreed with the new law that made the schools the same.
Years later I saw a documentary of Bobby Kennedy encountering really hungry black families in shacks in the country down south, and being really disturbed by it. I remembered seeing such places and people myself, black people who looked ragged and discouraged standing outside of falling-down shacks; I saw them while riding in the car with my mother to go horse-back riding on the weekends on the outskirts of Charlottesville. I remembered Bobby and Teddy both went to UVA for law school, and I remember thinking that maybe, like me, they hadn't really looked into --just at--the lives of the black people who lived on the outskirts of town in the country. It must have made Bobby Kennedy feel good that he was actually in a position, as Attorney General, to do something about it.
My mother of course thought it (integration) was all part of a sinister Communist plot devised in Moscow to bring our country to its knees, this undermining of the rights of states to decide for themselves whether or not they would be integrated. "Separate but equal" schools were alright with her --in principle. She did not seem to connect the lives of black people she actually knew--people she liked and respected--with these new integration laws. But I did. I was part of a generation just coming to age which would throw out all sorts of things which were to us non-issues in judging others--war, race, religion, straight sex, conventional clothing, music, art, education, or English erudition. These things mattered to our parents and other adults--but not to us. There was a generation gap. It wouldn't be long before we would say so, and rather loudly.
The year I graduated from high school (1961), the Sixties generation was still in high school, all the boys had crew cuts, and the girls all strove to look "clean-cut." But we had had our eyes and, more importantly, our minds opened already just watching older people being intolerant. The major prejudice of the future--PCism, in which you had to be tolerant or you were not tolerated--was still in the future. In 1961 the Beatles were getting popular in Liverpool and Germany, Bob Dylan was writing "The Times They are A-Changin'," and Barack Obama was just being born.
Slowly, over the next four decades, even my own mother's prejudices were worn down and discarded. The Soviet Union self-destructed in 1989, and I was so glad she was alive (82 at the time) to see it. "Wonderful!" she breathed with a sincere breath of relief! How hard she had fought all her life, even spying without pay for the FBI, against the Communists for the sake of her country! But for me, her real changes were reflected in the way she accepted my friendships with actual black people, the way she came to feel the Vietnam War was all wrong, and the way, eventually, she actually saw black people as her equals, personally. I know this became true because sometime in the Seventies, maybe the Eighties, she reported to me she had met a young professional black woman in some sort of job situation, and "She spoke just beautifully!" I can hear her repeat it again to me, her amazement and admiration very evident in her voice. "She was very well spoken, and very well educated!" And again she repeated, almost in disbelief, "...she spoke just beautifully--and she had beautiful manners!"
It was an observation on class. For my mother, class had nothing whatsoever to do with money, but everything to do with language, education, manners, considerations of others, and moral rectitude. If I were ever to bring up a prospective boyfriend, her first question would always be "Does he speak well? Where did he go to school?" This young black woman she had met had clearly won her deepest respect and admiration, for she had proved herself on a par with herself! That was an almost unfathomable thought for me--few were on par with my mother, at least in her eyes, and it was always evident to me in her body language exactly what she thought of people in these terms--acceptable or not acceptable. For me, it was more profound change than the Iron Curtain crumbling, my mother reaching that point. I am so sad she did not live to see and listen to Obama.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Famous people I have dreamed of, seen, or written to
Famous people you meet in dreams don't really count, but if they did mine are heavy with political figures. Sometime in my twenties I met Teddy Roosevelt in a dream, and upon meeting him (he was flirting with me) I said "I remember you! You're the one that said 'speak softly but carry a big stick,' aren't you?" That was all. Another night (all these dreams seemed packed into a single week) I found myself hanging out with all the Kennedy women, kind of an entourage following Jack, Bobby and Ted around. It felt like being some Kennedy's significant other, because there they were and there I was, you know? That was it, unfortunately. But the best one of all, really the best, was the night I dreamed I met Henry Kissinger. I was introduced to him in the dining room (in the house in Parsonsfield), and as he bowed and reached for my hand, his hand slightly grazed my breast.....suddenly we were in the southwest bedroom upstairs (my bedroom). And then, facing each other, we began to take turns singing Dylan's song "All Along the Watchtower." I began "...There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief. There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief..." Kissinger took up the refrain without missing a beat: "Business men they drink my wine, plowmen did my earth. None of of them along the line know what any of it is worth..." --we definitely connected. But that was it for that dream.
Bob Dylan dreams also abounded. I was always meeting him behind the curtain between sets back stage, sharing my poetry with him, he'd be sharing his with me, what he'd written lately. Once we were out in the parking lot behind the auditorium riding bikes around. I always had a great time with Bob Dylan. Dreams of my friend Frederick Turner, whom I've never met in real life but only corresponded with, and who is not ubiquitously famous but academically so, surfaced similarly. Once in a dream he and I were out behind the Carnegie building on the University of Maine campus in Orono; Carnegie is the art and used to be the music building too. It was where I spent most of my time while my mother was going to summer school when I was little trying out all the instruments in the practice rooms and looking at all the art in progress and on exhibit. In the dream Fred and I were sitting on a stone bench side by side talking, and we were sort of leaning toward each other, our heads touching. The odd thing was that Fred had a head (though I knew he was Fred, as you do in dreams know such things) with a great crest on it, exactly like Australipithicus robustus--and he had not the gracile jaw of homo Sapien, but the huge chomping jaws (which would go with the crest of course) of robustus too! I wrote Fred about this and he said it made perfect sense, and alluded to his poem in April Wind "The Angry Man," a beastly alter ego of himself.
But dreams are not reality. In real life, one of the most famous person I have ever set eyes on was probably Louis Armstrong--it was probably 1955 0r '56 in Charlottesville, Virginia at UVA. My brother Robert took me to see him, and I was in the crowd getting pushed around, everyone talking, and suddenly the lights dimmed and a bunch of people pushed by us--"that's him! That's Satchmo!" my bother said in my ear over the roar of the crowd. I looked up to see Louis Armstrong about three or four feet away, passing right by us with the other musicians on his way to the stage. Everybody was cheering and clapping wildly--I had no idea who he was--I must have been 12 or 13, my brother was the one who was into jazz, not me. I was listening to Elvis and Pat Boone and Fats Domino at that stage. Anyway, once he was up on stage we stood so near I could see him really well. And the thing I noticed was that his lip went in in one place and out at another in a sort of circle whenever he took his horn away from his mouth--his horn fit to his mouth perfectly. And his cheeks puffed out like grapefruits were in them when he played! Yes, he could really play, and he was always sweating so much while he was playing he had to keep taking out his white handkerchief and wiping his brow with it. I had no idea he was so famous.
One day on Rugby Road my brother pointed to a man walking down the street (this was at the University of Virginia--Rugby Rd. runs right into it) and said "Look! There's William Faulkner!" I didn't know who William Faulkner was either, but later I learned he had given lectures there, and later I took my brother's advice and read some of his books--The River (experimental), and most recently As I Lay Dying, which I think is an amazing book. At that age I was into movies and had a habit of seeing the movie and then, in order to get more out of it, reading the book. Hence I did run into Faulkner after I saw Paul Newman in "The Long, Hot Summer"--my brother told me it was based on the Snopes Trilogy, whatever that was, and I tracked it down and read it. I liked the movie better--it had Paul Newman in it. Other books I read when I was twelve or thirteen because I had seen the movies were: Tea and Sympathy (Deborah Kerr), The Rainmaker (Burt Lancaster, Katherine Hepburn), War and Peace (Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda), Ten Angry Men (Henry Fonda), Night of the Kiawa Moon, a short story I found in an old Saturday Evening Post, the basis for The Unforgiven (Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn), Oliver Twist (Alec Guiness), Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier). If the movie came out in 1956-58 and I liked it, I read the book. So anyway, I saw the actual guy who wrote the book the movie with Paul Newman in it was based on. I would rather have seen Paul Newman, but it's all in your perspective at the time. The name William Faulkner meant nothing to me, but my eyes did behold him.
Then there are the correspondences with famous people who you do not know are famous at the time you are corresponding with them. Thus it was I wrote to and was written back to by Oliver Sacks without being aware in the least that he was the guy Robin Williams was playing along side Robert DiNiro in the movie "Awakenings," which I had of course seen--this was in my fifties I think, not too long ago. Anyway, I was reading a letter in Harpers from this guy Oliver Sacks (??? didn't know him from the man in the moon) and he was talking about how his whole family was into swimming in a big way--his father and himself. So that made me think of my mother and my grandfather (Robert Greenleaf Leavitt), how they would swim twice a day and never think anything of it. I wrote Oliver Sacks all about our family's swimming too, and even sent him pictures of me and my mother in our swim suits, several. And he so kindly wrote back, a nice long letter, returning the photographs too as he knew they were precious to me, and that was that. But then I told Evie I wrote to him and she screamed in amazement and delight and told me who he was, and then sent me his wonderful book Island of the Color Blind, and another one I can't remember now. Oh! He was the guy the Robin Williams character was based on?? So there it is.
I also didn't think much of it that I had a letter from Mrs. Joseph McCarthy (to my mother and grandmother) thanking them for their nice letter to her upon McCarthy's death. I gave these letters (from Sacks and Mrs. McCarthy) to Evie. It can be disconcerting when you are fourteen or fifteen and everyone in the world seems to be hating the person your own mother and grandmother thinks is wonderful, and I am ambivalent still about the whole era. Talk about a divided America. Supporting Joseph McCarthy then was sort of like supporting Rush Limbaugh now. I also have many letters from Herbert Philbrick to my mother--she wanted to be, and actually was, it appears now, a spy (though unpaid) for the FBI! Last of her letters, she was working on getting paid. She was spying on the good leftist members of World Fellowship in Conway, New Hampshire, because their leader, Mr. Willard Uphaus, would not give the membership list up to the House Unamerican Activities Committe ruled by McCarthy. My mother was convinced there were TWO Willard Uphauses, and while one was running World Fellowship in New Hampshire, the other was being a courier of messages to and from Moscow; and the FBI believed it! Maybe my mother saw and liked too many spy thrillers. Her spying consisted of listening to speakers at World Fellowship (with me) talk about how wonderful Fidel Castro and Raul were, then later taking down license plate numbers in the World Fellowship parking lot and then speeding home looking over her shoulder--it was very fun and exciting. One day I went rowing with a boy at Wold Fellowship and I agreed with everything he said! I didn't tell my mother.
I did get to see Bob Dylan up close. I saw him in the first appearance of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and--due to exceptional karma (another story)--got a front row center seat, with only 400 people in the audience, in Plymouth, Mass. Even better, I was invited by a friend to go to the party where he would be the next night at the Plimouth Plantation (the friend worked at the plantation so had an in with the people there)--I took Donna and Erika. This would have been 1974-75. But Dylan did not arrive. Then I heard he had had a falling out with a guy in the parking lot and had left in his van. Then I remembered, as I drove into the parking lot and pulled up, and heard my own van die (electrical system again), there was this big van next to me pulling out. That must have been Dylan! But anyway, I went to the party and Allen Ginsburg was there! They were making a movie for Dylan, and they interviewed me and took pictures of Donna and Erika dancing with Allen Ginsburg, and in fact filmed the whole party all night long. Later I heard that Dylan himself did all the editing for the three-hour-long movie he made from that. And so you see Dylan must have heard and seen me answering those questions the camera man was asking me (a HUGE movie camera it was!), and must have seen Donna and Erika dancing with Allen Ginsburg. Now, what do you call it when a famous person like Dylan sees you, instead of you seeing the famous person? Isn't that a whole different category?
Bob Dylan dreams also abounded. I was always meeting him behind the curtain between sets back stage, sharing my poetry with him, he'd be sharing his with me, what he'd written lately. Once we were out in the parking lot behind the auditorium riding bikes around. I always had a great time with Bob Dylan. Dreams of my friend Frederick Turner, whom I've never met in real life but only corresponded with, and who is not ubiquitously famous but academically so, surfaced similarly. Once in a dream he and I were out behind the Carnegie building on the University of Maine campus in Orono; Carnegie is the art and used to be the music building too. It was where I spent most of my time while my mother was going to summer school when I was little trying out all the instruments in the practice rooms and looking at all the art in progress and on exhibit. In the dream Fred and I were sitting on a stone bench side by side talking, and we were sort of leaning toward each other, our heads touching. The odd thing was that Fred had a head (though I knew he was Fred, as you do in dreams know such things) with a great crest on it, exactly like Australipithicus robustus--and he had not the gracile jaw of homo Sapien, but the huge chomping jaws (which would go with the crest of course) of robustus too! I wrote Fred about this and he said it made perfect sense, and alluded to his poem in April Wind "The Angry Man," a beastly alter ego of himself.
But dreams are not reality. In real life, one of the most famous person I have ever set eyes on was probably Louis Armstrong--it was probably 1955 0r '56 in Charlottesville, Virginia at UVA. My brother Robert took me to see him, and I was in the crowd getting pushed around, everyone talking, and suddenly the lights dimmed and a bunch of people pushed by us--"that's him! That's Satchmo!" my bother said in my ear over the roar of the crowd. I looked up to see Louis Armstrong about three or four feet away, passing right by us with the other musicians on his way to the stage. Everybody was cheering and clapping wildly--I had no idea who he was--I must have been 12 or 13, my brother was the one who was into jazz, not me. I was listening to Elvis and Pat Boone and Fats Domino at that stage. Anyway, once he was up on stage we stood so near I could see him really well. And the thing I noticed was that his lip went in in one place and out at another in a sort of circle whenever he took his horn away from his mouth--his horn fit to his mouth perfectly. And his cheeks puffed out like grapefruits were in them when he played! Yes, he could really play, and he was always sweating so much while he was playing he had to keep taking out his white handkerchief and wiping his brow with it. I had no idea he was so famous.
One day on Rugby Road my brother pointed to a man walking down the street (this was at the University of Virginia--Rugby Rd. runs right into it) and said "Look! There's William Faulkner!" I didn't know who William Faulkner was either, but later I learned he had given lectures there, and later I took my brother's advice and read some of his books--The River (experimental), and most recently As I Lay Dying, which I think is an amazing book. At that age I was into movies and had a habit of seeing the movie and then, in order to get more out of it, reading the book. Hence I did run into Faulkner after I saw Paul Newman in "The Long, Hot Summer"--my brother told me it was based on the Snopes Trilogy, whatever that was, and I tracked it down and read it. I liked the movie better--it had Paul Newman in it. Other books I read when I was twelve or thirteen because I had seen the movies were: Tea and Sympathy (Deborah Kerr), The Rainmaker (Burt Lancaster, Katherine Hepburn), War and Peace (Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda), Ten Angry Men (Henry Fonda), Night of the Kiawa Moon, a short story I found in an old Saturday Evening Post, the basis for The Unforgiven (Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn), Oliver Twist (Alec Guiness), Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier). If the movie came out in 1956-58 and I liked it, I read the book. So anyway, I saw the actual guy who wrote the book the movie with Paul Newman in it was based on. I would rather have seen Paul Newman, but it's all in your perspective at the time. The name William Faulkner meant nothing to me, but my eyes did behold him.
Then there are the correspondences with famous people who you do not know are famous at the time you are corresponding with them. Thus it was I wrote to and was written back to by Oliver Sacks without being aware in the least that he was the guy Robin Williams was playing along side Robert DiNiro in the movie "Awakenings," which I had of course seen--this was in my fifties I think, not too long ago. Anyway, I was reading a letter in Harpers from this guy Oliver Sacks (??? didn't know him from the man in the moon) and he was talking about how his whole family was into swimming in a big way--his father and himself. So that made me think of my mother and my grandfather (Robert Greenleaf Leavitt), how they would swim twice a day and never think anything of it. I wrote Oliver Sacks all about our family's swimming too, and even sent him pictures of me and my mother in our swim suits, several. And he so kindly wrote back, a nice long letter, returning the photographs too as he knew they were precious to me, and that was that. But then I told Evie I wrote to him and she screamed in amazement and delight and told me who he was, and then sent me his wonderful book Island of the Color Blind, and another one I can't remember now. Oh! He was the guy the Robin Williams character was based on?? So there it is.
I also didn't think much of it that I had a letter from Mrs. Joseph McCarthy (to my mother and grandmother) thanking them for their nice letter to her upon McCarthy's death. I gave these letters (from Sacks and Mrs. McCarthy) to Evie. It can be disconcerting when you are fourteen or fifteen and everyone in the world seems to be hating the person your own mother and grandmother thinks is wonderful, and I am ambivalent still about the whole era. Talk about a divided America. Supporting Joseph McCarthy then was sort of like supporting Rush Limbaugh now. I also have many letters from Herbert Philbrick to my mother--she wanted to be, and actually was, it appears now, a spy (though unpaid) for the FBI! Last of her letters, she was working on getting paid. She was spying on the good leftist members of World Fellowship in Conway, New Hampshire, because their leader, Mr. Willard Uphaus, would not give the membership list up to the House Unamerican Activities Committe ruled by McCarthy. My mother was convinced there were TWO Willard Uphauses, and while one was running World Fellowship in New Hampshire, the other was being a courier of messages to and from Moscow; and the FBI believed it! Maybe my mother saw and liked too many spy thrillers. Her spying consisted of listening to speakers at World Fellowship (with me) talk about how wonderful Fidel Castro and Raul were, then later taking down license plate numbers in the World Fellowship parking lot and then speeding home looking over her shoulder--it was very fun and exciting. One day I went rowing with a boy at Wold Fellowship and I agreed with everything he said! I didn't tell my mother.
I did get to see Bob Dylan up close. I saw him in the first appearance of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and--due to exceptional karma (another story)--got a front row center seat, with only 400 people in the audience, in Plymouth, Mass. Even better, I was invited by a friend to go to the party where he would be the next night at the Plimouth Plantation (the friend worked at the plantation so had an in with the people there)--I took Donna and Erika. This would have been 1974-75. But Dylan did not arrive. Then I heard he had had a falling out with a guy in the parking lot and had left in his van. Then I remembered, as I drove into the parking lot and pulled up, and heard my own van die (electrical system again), there was this big van next to me pulling out. That must have been Dylan! But anyway, I went to the party and Allen Ginsburg was there! They were making a movie for Dylan, and they interviewed me and took pictures of Donna and Erika dancing with Allen Ginsburg, and in fact filmed the whole party all night long. Later I heard that Dylan himself did all the editing for the three-hour-long movie he made from that. And so you see Dylan must have heard and seen me answering those questions the camera man was asking me (a HUGE movie camera it was!), and must have seen Donna and Erika dancing with Allen Ginsburg. Now, what do you call it when a famous person like Dylan sees you, instead of you seeing the famous person? Isn't that a whole different category?
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The 11+ Exam: Dialogue on children, community, and war
A friend of mine, identified only as F-- wrote me this in response to my description of the circle, the neighborhood I grew up in. He wrote:
Lovely memory. But I remember as the son of a poor beginning lecturer at Manchester University, living in a working-class neighborhood where everything was also out in the street, the dark side of community. When I aced the 11+, the old Brit exam that separated kids forever into white-and blue-collars, a bunch of the kids I'd begun to get to know waited for me and beat me up. So the basic ground rules have to be good or community turns into tribalism and witch hunt. The silent neighborhoods are a sad compromise.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To which I responded:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That 11+ exam I have pondered for decades--it's one of those things you learn about early and that is discussed a lot over here, especially in educational circles. Surely I would have failed it--though perhaps not. Though I spent my whole time in school day-dreaming, I was well instructed at home in everything which was considered important (history, literature, Latin, grammar--everything but math, and that I could do on my own). Maybe I would have aced it too.
I remember once all the kids ganged up on one boy (working class, despite the class system being supposedly nonexistent over here) and were pelting him with icy snowballs, and I (heroic class) took his side, though they were all friends of mine, and I was prominent among them, all boys--we, the pelted and I, remained friends always. It is indeed the ground rules that need to be understood, and those boys that beat you up probably understood them well. Now was the only time in their lifetime they would get the jump on you, I bet the underlying rationale was, condoned by their parents, but obviously not by yours--and you were the sacrificial lamb. I am thinking the 11+ exam is an example of the adult world interfering with that of children, justified with bias and abstract rationale having nothing to do with the relations among children and everything to do with what adults thought "best" for all concerned.
Just about that time (I was eleven exactly at the time you were, remember) Little League was invented over here, and all my friends (boys) joined. I remember looking at them through a chain-link fence--they were all sitting in a row on a bench with uniforms on and looking up and listening to an adult who was looking down on them and lecturing them. I felt so sorry for them! For one thing, they wouldn't have me, and I was the best batter and first baseman--and fastest runner-- in the neighborhood! (I had just heard girls weren't allowed--I couldn't believe it--that was really stupid of them, I thought) And for another thing, they had to sit there instead of getting up and playing! It was all wrong.
I do think the interference of adults in childhood's self-rule in community began what has ended in obesity and all sorts of other aberrations of human psychological development. My own kids agree with me, and tell me about fellow college students who are unsupervised for the first time in their lives. The lack of community in this age reflects, I think, a fossilization of habits, including habits of thought, which have outgrown the environment they were first spawned in. I love the way facebook (etc) is becoming the new community--youth will have an out!
As for the phenomenon of WAR--please explain its necessity to a STATE to me. Isn't it the height of wrong-thinking, force? (I was raised by a hawk and during this this last war struggled to justify it on your account ("If F-- concurs with Cheney, I must be missing something....) I struggled with it the way Robert Frost struggles with his dualities always. I want your thoughts on why it is ever justified. Isn't it something we as a species, given what we are, we can and should rise above? Isn't that the essential Christian message?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To which F-- replied:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
How wise you are about children, ground rules, and adult interference! But I think children are capable of cruelty on their own, too. Even if one doesn't believe in the Fall, or believes as I do that the Fall is the same as the creation itself, and started in the Big Bang, and is indeed a happy fall in the long run--freedom still implies that people can and do choose to do bad things.
Which also, when it comes down to it, is the only justification there could be for war. You went to war with snowballs when the working class kid was being pelted. One consequence of those boys ganging up on me--and two other incidents, one where like you I took the side of a Jewish kid who was being picked on, the other when I defended my younger brother B-- who got into trouble with some yahoos--was that I ended up preparing myself by martial arts to be able to defend myself and others, and since that time have never been bothered physically by anyone.
The Iraq war was a bitter trial for me. As you were being loyal to me, I was being loyal to B--, who was out there fighting. Although at first it seemed to be justifiable, as halting the atrocities of Saddam Hussein against his own people and other nations, I came to see it as a mistake on balance. Despite the fact that it looks as if our basic war aims are going to be realized--an elected government in Iraq, a sort of ally in a very dangerous part of the world instead of a bitter enemy, one possible source of WMDs eliminated--we lost far more than we gained and we got pushed into actions and justifications that were unworthy of our ideals. And many people died, and as a citizen and voter I have their blood on my hands, and have had to confess it.
But if we had stopped Hitler in 1933, maybe we would have saved 8 million Jews and tens of millions of other Europeans. Rwanda. Darfur. Do we have their blood on our hands too?
Perhaps this mortal condition is precisely the one where nobody has clean hands. Maybe the seeking of perfect cleanness, of perfect justification, is itself one of the great drivers of murder. Think of the Chosen People and the abomination of Canaan, that must be cleansed. The Crusades. Or ethnic cleansing. Or the purifying Holocaust, that would lead Europe back to its blond innocent heroic noble blue-eyed guiltless condition of Dasein. Or the noble ideals of the Gulag. If we accept that we are dirty and try to do the decent thing, knowing that whatever we do is going to have foul consequences, we may be less in danger of committing really huge crimes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I just thought it was a mighty interesting exchange!
Lovely memory. But I remember as the son of a poor beginning lecturer at Manchester University, living in a working-class neighborhood where everything was also out in the street, the dark side of community. When I aced the 11+, the old Brit exam that separated kids forever into white-and blue-collars, a bunch of the kids I'd begun to get to know waited for me and beat me up. So the basic ground rules have to be good or community turns into tribalism and witch hunt. The silent neighborhoods are a sad compromise.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To which I responded:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That 11+ exam I have pondered for decades--it's one of those things you learn about early and that is discussed a lot over here, especially in educational circles. Surely I would have failed it--though perhaps not. Though I spent my whole time in school day-dreaming, I was well instructed at home in everything which was considered important (history, literature, Latin, grammar--everything but math, and that I could do on my own). Maybe I would have aced it too.
I remember once all the kids ganged up on one boy (working class, despite the class system being supposedly nonexistent over here) and were pelting him with icy snowballs, and I (heroic class) took his side, though they were all friends of mine, and I was prominent among them, all boys--we, the pelted and I, remained friends always. It is indeed the ground rules that need to be understood, and those boys that beat you up probably understood them well. Now was the only time in their lifetime they would get the jump on you, I bet the underlying rationale was, condoned by their parents, but obviously not by yours--and you were the sacrificial lamb. I am thinking the 11+ exam is an example of the adult world interfering with that of children, justified with bias and abstract rationale having nothing to do with the relations among children and everything to do with what adults thought "best" for all concerned.
Just about that time (I was eleven exactly at the time you were, remember) Little League was invented over here, and all my friends (boys) joined. I remember looking at them through a chain-link fence--they were all sitting in a row on a bench with uniforms on and looking up and listening to an adult who was looking down on them and lecturing them. I felt so sorry for them! For one thing, they wouldn't have me, and I was the best batter and first baseman--and fastest runner-- in the neighborhood! (I had just heard girls weren't allowed--I couldn't believe it--that was really stupid of them, I thought) And for another thing, they had to sit there instead of getting up and playing! It was all wrong.
I do think the interference of adults in childhood's self-rule in community began what has ended in obesity and all sorts of other aberrations of human psychological development. My own kids agree with me, and tell me about fellow college students who are unsupervised for the first time in their lives. The lack of community in this age reflects, I think, a fossilization of habits, including habits of thought, which have outgrown the environment they were first spawned in. I love the way facebook (etc) is becoming the new community--youth will have an out!
As for the phenomenon of WAR--please explain its necessity to a STATE to me. Isn't it the height of wrong-thinking, force? (I was raised by a hawk and during this this last war struggled to justify it on your account ("If F-- concurs with Cheney, I must be missing something....) I struggled with it the way Robert Frost struggles with his dualities always. I want your thoughts on why it is ever justified. Isn't it something we as a species, given what we are, we can and should rise above? Isn't that the essential Christian message?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To which F-- replied:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
How wise you are about children, ground rules, and adult interference! But I think children are capable of cruelty on their own, too. Even if one doesn't believe in the Fall, or believes as I do that the Fall is the same as the creation itself, and started in the Big Bang, and is indeed a happy fall in the long run--freedom still implies that people can and do choose to do bad things.
Which also, when it comes down to it, is the only justification there could be for war. You went to war with snowballs when the working class kid was being pelted. One consequence of those boys ganging up on me--and two other incidents, one where like you I took the side of a Jewish kid who was being picked on, the other when I defended my younger brother B-- who got into trouble with some yahoos--was that I ended up preparing myself by martial arts to be able to defend myself and others, and since that time have never been bothered physically by anyone.
The Iraq war was a bitter trial for me. As you were being loyal to me, I was being loyal to B--, who was out there fighting. Although at first it seemed to be justifiable, as halting the atrocities of Saddam Hussein against his own people and other nations, I came to see it as a mistake on balance. Despite the fact that it looks as if our basic war aims are going to be realized--an elected government in Iraq, a sort of ally in a very dangerous part of the world instead of a bitter enemy, one possible source of WMDs eliminated--we lost far more than we gained and we got pushed into actions and justifications that were unworthy of our ideals. And many people died, and as a citizen and voter I have their blood on my hands, and have had to confess it.
But if we had stopped Hitler in 1933, maybe we would have saved 8 million Jews and tens of millions of other Europeans. Rwanda. Darfur. Do we have their blood on our hands too?
Perhaps this mortal condition is precisely the one where nobody has clean hands. Maybe the seeking of perfect cleanness, of perfect justification, is itself one of the great drivers of murder. Think of the Chosen People and the abomination of Canaan, that must be cleansed. The Crusades. Or ethnic cleansing. Or the purifying Holocaust, that would lead Europe back to its blond innocent heroic noble blue-eyed guiltless condition of Dasein. Or the noble ideals of the Gulag. If we accept that we are dirty and try to do the decent thing, knowing that whatever we do is going to have foul consequences, we may be less in danger of committing really huge crimes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I just thought it was a mighty interesting exchange!
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Doctorate--part one
Of course it did not strike, like lightning. The boat had a leak, and had had one for a long, long time, and the water was rising, and we were all going to drown if I did nothing. It was a long slow process and the conclusion, the doctorate, was the only logical conclusion. Here is how it began (while the bailing went on ceaselessly, year after year, as it had at that point for almost ten years).
I was in high gear from the minute Margaret was born--and had been for the nine months prior. I knew this would be my last time getting pregnant (a necessity beyond explanation, but a necessity nevertheless); and I knew nothing would change unless I got a job and somehow got more income in-coming. As much as Margaret was a necessity to me, the next order of business--income generation--was foremost on my mind. But I knew from having tried over and over to get a job in the local schools that chances of that happening were slim (Fryeburg would not have me because, they told me, I was home-educating, in short too busy to hire--even for a substitute! They made that decision for me). My references from the last time I worked were nine years old--too old to get a job in my profession, despite my Master's degree. The only solution to this, short of getting a job as a chambermaid or selling my novel (finshed in 1983), was going back to school and getting another degree--not because I needed more education, but because I needed current references and current skills--and educational loans to live on! School I could do.
So even while newly pregnant with Margaret, I enrolled in the Spring of 1987 in "Developmental Education: birth to five," a course in Special Education in the School of Lifetime Learning in Conway, an extension of the University of New Hampshire. I wrote a paper on Andrea's speech development--great course. That Spring of course I was also very actively involved in getting Donna and Erika into the colleges of their choice--Colby and Dartmouth. My plan was to get a second master's in Special Education, because all the schools had ads in the paper for Special Ed teachers--it was a very practical plan. I could have taught Special Ed of course without a degree beautifully, but state laws required certification--I had no courses in Special Ed, just English Literature, with a specialization in Elizabethan drama. I was in a pragmatic mode and my degrees didn't help me solve my problems.
That summer, after I had Margaret, and after Donna and Erika were happily looking forward to the fall term in the colleges of their choice, I took two more courses at the University of Maine in Gorham (USM), and enrolled in a degree program leading to a master's in Special Ed. Plan A was this: I would apply to teaching jobs while starting a new Master's degree. If I did not get a teaching job I would (Plan B) take a job as a Chambermaid and write The Great American Novel (and work on the second master's and take care of Margaret, Andrea, Johnny, Joey, and Stevie. Because Donna and Erika were going off to college! This last part made me very, very happy, because Donna was going to Colby! And Erika was going to Dartmouth! They were neatly stepping off the sinking boat into a brand new life!)
But surprise, surprise!! I got a teaching job!! I couldn't believe it! On the way to the interview, with Donna and Erika to take care of Margaret while I had the interview (on Islesboro), Donna read me Catcher in the Rye! I was to be an English, reading, and geography teacher for all the high school students grades 7 through 12 on Islesboro. I was hired! The house had to be sold, and we had to move to Islesboro, because teachers had to live on the island. I was saved! For the time being. Let me review: I had a baby, sold the house in Fryeburg, bought the house in Monroe, took two courses in Special Ed at USM, found a house to rent in Islesboro, filed FAFSAs, drove Donna and Erika off to the colleges of their choice, argued with Financial Aid Officers, and started a job teaching in Islesboro. That was just that summer.
To make a long story short and sweet, I had one very successful year on Islesboro. I wrote and got a State of Maine Innovative Classroom Grant ("Operation Microcosm") which brought the school $5000's worth of video editing equipment for the children to do all kinds of research with a video camera. The principal liked me and rehired me. The kids liked me and I was happy. It mattered not the boat was still leaking. Best of all I met Andii Pendleton--it was also the year I met Michiko, and began writing Frederick Turner. Donna and Erika survived their Freshman year and all looked well--it was 1988.
The next year everything changed. The New Principal Mr. D-- (as the Victorians would say) did NOT like me, he did NOT let the kids use the equipment the grant had bought us, and by school's end three teachers did NOT have their contracts renewed, including myself and a science teacher who had been teaching there at least twenty years (he had the kids build a cidar press themselves--I thought he was great.) Mr. D--did not have to say why he was not renewing my contract, because no reason had to be given for not renewing the contract of a teacher who had taught in the system less than two years--you could just let them go. Andii Pendleton was peeved (at Mr. D--) but I was beyond peevement. I was in a state of shock. I had two children in college and five children at home, a newly acquired house in Monroe which had to be fixed up (water, electricity, everything) before it could be lived in, and no job and no income. By FALL I had to have something in place! And there was no way I could get another job teaching when my contract had not been renewed--I just knew it, despite my successful first year. What was I to do???
I had an idea! I would at least continue with my master's in Special Ed and we would live on educational loans! (I had just realized that these were available--more income than I'd had in years!) But there was just one problem: there was no Master's Degree in Special Ed offered in Orono at the University of Maine, and I wanted a degree which would deliver a teaching job when I got through with it. I already had a master's in English--and there was no doctorate in English offered! I looked at the catalogue. There was a degree offered in Orono which I did not have yet and which would lead to references and to work--a doctorate in Literacy Education. And meanwhile, I'd start my poetry-writing business "The Muse"--which is how I got into Glamour Magazine (but that's another blog).
And that's how it "suddenly" struck me to get a doctorate. I applied, got accepted, and began my five year program. Which did, in the end, lead to jobs and yes, even a pension. The boat still had a leak, but I at least had a plan on how to keep on bailing for a few more years yet and keep all of us from drowning.
I was in high gear from the minute Margaret was born--and had been for the nine months prior. I knew this would be my last time getting pregnant (a necessity beyond explanation, but a necessity nevertheless); and I knew nothing would change unless I got a job and somehow got more income in-coming. As much as Margaret was a necessity to me, the next order of business--income generation--was foremost on my mind. But I knew from having tried over and over to get a job in the local schools that chances of that happening were slim (Fryeburg would not have me because, they told me, I was home-educating, in short too busy to hire--even for a substitute! They made that decision for me). My references from the last time I worked were nine years old--too old to get a job in my profession, despite my Master's degree. The only solution to this, short of getting a job as a chambermaid or selling my novel (finshed in 1983), was going back to school and getting another degree--not because I needed more education, but because I needed current references and current skills--and educational loans to live on! School I could do.
So even while newly pregnant with Margaret, I enrolled in the Spring of 1987 in "Developmental Education: birth to five," a course in Special Education in the School of Lifetime Learning in Conway, an extension of the University of New Hampshire. I wrote a paper on Andrea's speech development--great course. That Spring of course I was also very actively involved in getting Donna and Erika into the colleges of their choice--Colby and Dartmouth. My plan was to get a second master's in Special Education, because all the schools had ads in the paper for Special Ed teachers--it was a very practical plan. I could have taught Special Ed of course without a degree beautifully, but state laws required certification--I had no courses in Special Ed, just English Literature, with a specialization in Elizabethan drama. I was in a pragmatic mode and my degrees didn't help me solve my problems.
That summer, after I had Margaret, and after Donna and Erika were happily looking forward to the fall term in the colleges of their choice, I took two more courses at the University of Maine in Gorham (USM), and enrolled in a degree program leading to a master's in Special Ed. Plan A was this: I would apply to teaching jobs while starting a new Master's degree. If I did not get a teaching job I would (Plan B) take a job as a Chambermaid and write The Great American Novel (and work on the second master's and take care of Margaret, Andrea, Johnny, Joey, and Stevie. Because Donna and Erika were going off to college! This last part made me very, very happy, because Donna was going to Colby! And Erika was going to Dartmouth! They were neatly stepping off the sinking boat into a brand new life!)
But surprise, surprise!! I got a teaching job!! I couldn't believe it! On the way to the interview, with Donna and Erika to take care of Margaret while I had the interview (on Islesboro), Donna read me Catcher in the Rye! I was to be an English, reading, and geography teacher for all the high school students grades 7 through 12 on Islesboro. I was hired! The house had to be sold, and we had to move to Islesboro, because teachers had to live on the island. I was saved! For the time being. Let me review: I had a baby, sold the house in Fryeburg, bought the house in Monroe, took two courses in Special Ed at USM, found a house to rent in Islesboro, filed FAFSAs, drove Donna and Erika off to the colleges of their choice, argued with Financial Aid Officers, and started a job teaching in Islesboro. That was just that summer.
To make a long story short and sweet, I had one very successful year on Islesboro. I wrote and got a State of Maine Innovative Classroom Grant ("Operation Microcosm") which brought the school $5000's worth of video editing equipment for the children to do all kinds of research with a video camera. The principal liked me and rehired me. The kids liked me and I was happy. It mattered not the boat was still leaking. Best of all I met Andii Pendleton--it was also the year I met Michiko, and began writing Frederick Turner. Donna and Erika survived their Freshman year and all looked well--it was 1988.
The next year everything changed. The New Principal Mr. D-- (as the Victorians would say) did NOT like me, he did NOT let the kids use the equipment the grant had bought us, and by school's end three teachers did NOT have their contracts renewed, including myself and a science teacher who had been teaching there at least twenty years (he had the kids build a cidar press themselves--I thought he was great.) Mr. D--did not have to say why he was not renewing my contract, because no reason had to be given for not renewing the contract of a teacher who had taught in the system less than two years--you could just let them go. Andii Pendleton was peeved (at Mr. D--) but I was beyond peevement. I was in a state of shock. I had two children in college and five children at home, a newly acquired house in Monroe which had to be fixed up (water, electricity, everything) before it could be lived in, and no job and no income. By FALL I had to have something in place! And there was no way I could get another job teaching when my contract had not been renewed--I just knew it, despite my successful first year. What was I to do???
I had an idea! I would at least continue with my master's in Special Ed and we would live on educational loans! (I had just realized that these were available--more income than I'd had in years!) But there was just one problem: there was no Master's Degree in Special Ed offered in Orono at the University of Maine, and I wanted a degree which would deliver a teaching job when I got through with it. I already had a master's in English--and there was no doctorate in English offered! I looked at the catalogue. There was a degree offered in Orono which I did not have yet and which would lead to references and to work--a doctorate in Literacy Education. And meanwhile, I'd start my poetry-writing business "The Muse"--which is how I got into Glamour Magazine (but that's another blog).
And that's how it "suddenly" struck me to get a doctorate. I applied, got accepted, and began my five year program. Which did, in the end, lead to jobs and yes, even a pension. The boat still had a leak, but I at least had a plan on how to keep on bailing for a few more years yet and keep all of us from drowning.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Can two be easier than one? And how could that be?
What was it like to have Rachael after Eve?
Before Eve, I knew nothing about babies--what they looked and acted like, what their behavior was apt to be like in any given situation, what you did with them. I knew only what my own mother had done with me from a certain age on, but I couldn't remember back to when I was a baby! There were just two of us, my brother Robert and myself, in my family, and on the circle in Charlottesville where I grew up, there were many, many small children, but none which I really spent any time with. I hung out with my own gang, who were all my own age naturally. Babies were a total unknown, except for the one and only time I saw one breast-feeding at South Apartments.
These apartments were old World War II army barracks at the University of Maine in Orono, complete with ice chests, where summer students with families lived. It was where we lived every summer while my mother was going to summer school. In those days children wandered all over the place freely, and one day I wandered into the open door of a nearby apartment and saw a woman sitting there nursing her baby! She let me stand there and watch, fascinated, without much of an exchange of words until I had had enough and went back outside to play. I was probably eight or nine. I told my mother about it and she told me how the first time she saw a baby breast-feeding she had run and told her mother "Mother! The baby is eating Mrs. B--"--and we laughed so much. Then she told me when she was a small child riding the trolleys in Trenton when she lived on Model Ave., women often nursed their babies right there in front of everyone, nobody minded. My mother always shared her own experiences with me like this when I would share mine with her, and in this way over time I learned that all the babies in our family had always been nursed (not given "those terrible formulas" ), and that my mother always had wanted to have "at least" six children herself; and that Grandma Ruggli had had twelve children, and my grandmother (who lived with us) was one of them; and so on. But of course hearsay is not knowledge.
So naturally when it had come time to have Evie, I was not at all worried really about the birth itself. I was sure I could do it. I was very muscular and very confidant about my ability to do anything physical because I had always succeeded in anything I had ever tried that was athletic--and I was very, very strong. But I was terrified of not being able to change diapers!! That is how inexperienced I was.
I did not have time for postpartem blues or anything like that--I was concentrating on the diapers! (Real anxiety!!)...I was only nineteen after all--but, amazingly I rose to the challenge. Somehow I mastered the diaper-pin. Then I discovered it (being a mother) had nothing to do with diaper-pins and things like that. It's what you did with the baby that counted! Evie made being a new mother easy--she was the brightest, happiest little baby! And I spent every minute with her--every single minute. We walked and talked and learned names of flowers and discussed things (I didn't know how to talk to babies, so I talked to her the way I talked to other people and she naturally just talked right back). We went berry-picking, and swimming, and looked at trees in the woods and birds and insects. We drew pictures together, and watched tv together and discussed what we saw. She made up a song for a puppet on a puppet show on tv we always watched, and I sent it in and the puppet sang it, and she loved it! We went out in the sun every day and watched the rain together when it rained--we read books! "Ten little animals" was her favorite book. (This was all by the time she was two). She got sick with the flu once and it scared me to death but she recovered so I recovered.
Then I got pregnant again! I was twenty-one by now. I was no longer worried about the diapers, but I simply could NOT IMAGINE how I could possibly fit another baby into my day!!!! How could there possibly be room????
It seemed like a miracle. Somehow there was room for one more! Somehow, this new little baby, who looked at the world so calmly and yet alertly with her big brown eyes, looking and looking and tracking it all with her left hand leading, joined in it all effortlessly. She too talked and walked, and drew pictures, and sang songs, and made jokes, and ate berries and laughed at the world and noticed everything. It was not harder, it was not! It was somehow..... easier. And why was this? I did not really know, because it was just a feeling. Maybe it was that I was not so fiercely focused on the one, but instead was forced by love, and love's faithful attendants--curiosity, interest, and fascination--to focus on them both. I found, strangely enough, neither one of them seemed to be suffering for lack of the single focus; they seemed to thrive on the sharing of attention and discovered, finally, how entertaining each could be to the other. Fun! Even without me! Maybe I was learning, without realizing it just what good attention to a baby should be--not too little, not too much. Just right!
Before Eve, I knew nothing about babies--what they looked and acted like, what their behavior was apt to be like in any given situation, what you did with them. I knew only what my own mother had done with me from a certain age on, but I couldn't remember back to when I was a baby! There were just two of us, my brother Robert and myself, in my family, and on the circle in Charlottesville where I grew up, there were many, many small children, but none which I really spent any time with. I hung out with my own gang, who were all my own age naturally. Babies were a total unknown, except for the one and only time I saw one breast-feeding at South Apartments.
These apartments were old World War II army barracks at the University of Maine in Orono, complete with ice chests, where summer students with families lived. It was where we lived every summer while my mother was going to summer school. In those days children wandered all over the place freely, and one day I wandered into the open door of a nearby apartment and saw a woman sitting there nursing her baby! She let me stand there and watch, fascinated, without much of an exchange of words until I had had enough and went back outside to play. I was probably eight or nine. I told my mother about it and she told me how the first time she saw a baby breast-feeding she had run and told her mother "Mother! The baby is eating Mrs. B--"--and we laughed so much. Then she told me when she was a small child riding the trolleys in Trenton when she lived on Model Ave., women often nursed their babies right there in front of everyone, nobody minded. My mother always shared her own experiences with me like this when I would share mine with her, and in this way over time I learned that all the babies in our family had always been nursed (not given "those terrible formulas" ), and that my mother always had wanted to have "at least" six children herself; and that Grandma Ruggli had had twelve children, and my grandmother (who lived with us) was one of them; and so on. But of course hearsay is not knowledge.
So naturally when it had come time to have Evie, I was not at all worried really about the birth itself. I was sure I could do it. I was very muscular and very confidant about my ability to do anything physical because I had always succeeded in anything I had ever tried that was athletic--and I was very, very strong. But I was terrified of not being able to change diapers!! That is how inexperienced I was.
I did not have time for postpartem blues or anything like that--I was concentrating on the diapers! (Real anxiety!!)...I was only nineteen after all--but, amazingly I rose to the challenge. Somehow I mastered the diaper-pin. Then I discovered it (being a mother) had nothing to do with diaper-pins and things like that. It's what you did with the baby that counted! Evie made being a new mother easy--she was the brightest, happiest little baby! And I spent every minute with her--every single minute. We walked and talked and learned names of flowers and discussed things (I didn't know how to talk to babies, so I talked to her the way I talked to other people and she naturally just talked right back). We went berry-picking, and swimming, and looked at trees in the woods and birds and insects. We drew pictures together, and watched tv together and discussed what we saw. She made up a song for a puppet on a puppet show on tv we always watched, and I sent it in and the puppet sang it, and she loved it! We went out in the sun every day and watched the rain together when it rained--we read books! "Ten little animals" was her favorite book. (This was all by the time she was two). She got sick with the flu once and it scared me to death but she recovered so I recovered.
Then I got pregnant again! I was twenty-one by now. I was no longer worried about the diapers, but I simply could NOT IMAGINE how I could possibly fit another baby into my day!!!! How could there possibly be room????
It seemed like a miracle. Somehow there was room for one more! Somehow, this new little baby, who looked at the world so calmly and yet alertly with her big brown eyes, looking and looking and tracking it all with her left hand leading, joined in it all effortlessly. She too talked and walked, and drew pictures, and sang songs, and made jokes, and ate berries and laughed at the world and noticed everything. It was not harder, it was not! It was somehow..... easier. And why was this? I did not really know, because it was just a feeling. Maybe it was that I was not so fiercely focused on the one, but instead was forced by love, and love's faithful attendants--curiosity, interest, and fascination--to focus on them both. I found, strangely enough, neither one of them seemed to be suffering for lack of the single focus; they seemed to thrive on the sharing of attention and discovered, finally, how entertaining each could be to the other. Fun! Even without me! Maybe I was learning, without realizing it just what good attention to a baby should be--not too little, not too much. Just right!
Sunday, May 3, 2009
How I met N-- in D--in 197-- and spawned Obama
My daughter sent me some questions she wants answered pronto, so I better get going before I get swept into my daily addiction, on-line chess and (growingly) facebook--ah, the lure of socializing on-line! The following, please remember, occurs back in the dawn of time--1975 BC (Before Computers).
The Three questions were...."I want to know about your friendship with N-- B--. I want to know about what it was like to have Rachael after Eve. I want to know about when the idea of getting a doctorate struck you!" I will attempt the first one first (for once).
You will notice I have the protected the identity of my dearest and best friend N--B-- in the Victorian way, by replacing most of the letters in my friend's name with a dash. I have had direct access to the ways of Victorians. My Grandmother, who raised me along with my mother (a two woman household) was a Victorian, and of course I have read a good many (that's a Victorian phrase "good many") Victorian novels. The thing about Victorians is that they are very private--they cultivate secrets. They do NOT discuss sex or "our business"--I understood what sex was, but I never did understand what "our business" was, and why my friends would ever ask about it--why would they ask about something which I myself could not even imagine in the slightest? It is a secret within a secret this hush-hush stuff of the Victorians. Computer security systems have nothing on the Victorians. In Victorian novels , for some reason, the authors always protect the people they write about by replacing actual times and places with periods or dashes. Graham Greene, a writer I have just discovered (where has he been all my life?) had a father who must have been born the same year as my grandmother. He is always poking fun at them--and in fact their whole secrecy, privacy thing. In "The Root of All Evil" he writes "The events happened in 189--, as they say in old Russian novel, in the small market town of B--." So it happened that I met N.B in 197-- in the small seaside town of D-- , specifically in the vicinity of H--C--.
Or so we (she and I) remember. We met at Marie's--everyone went there, the little local coffee shop in D--. Marie was from some Balkan country (Che--? Yu--?), and every Christmas she would send her relatives back home lots of presents--there wasn't any war over there yet, the Soviet Union was still together, and Mr. Dexter's 1961 prophetic history lessons at KH on the Balkans ("They are always having wars in the Balkans") hadn't yet materialized (they would in the 90s).
Anyway, all the young people went there (to Marie's in 1975)--and one morning N-- and I began talking and found out immediately that we were just alike! We were 30 and 32 respectively and both felt really old! We both had experienced the Sixties and were really sad about how it had all gone downhill since then! We were both recently divorced, custody-case-fatigued mothers of young children, we both came from old professional families from Maine and New Hampshire with mothers who were arch conservatives, we were both now managing any way we could to support our children who were in the same grade --wait at minute!! What was the name of the teacher?? Hadn't we seen each other before? "That's where I've seen you!!" we yelled happily in unison (at Marie's it was okay to yell)--we had been the only mothers who had responded to our childrens' invitations to parents to come into school and help out with their projects. In fact, our children were already friends! N-- was an artist, I was a writer, we both played violin--and both of us loved, who else....Bob Dylan! It was quite an exciting meeting. We were indeed very, very much alike. We soon were over at each other's houses all the time and shared the same friends (Jimmy Fiddle, whose last name need not be dashed because we called him that--it's his violin I have now while he has mine--he was learning how to fix them, and mine stayed unfixed so he let me keep his; John G--, Steve W--, Bruce P--, David P--, etc etc. etc.). Later, when I moved from D-- to Fr-- Maine, we kept in touch, though sometimes it was several years (and in one case a whole decade) before we'd actually get together again in person. Always it was the same thing--it was as though just minutes had passed whenever we saw each other! We simply took up the conversation where we'd left off and compared events in our lives. Miraculously we always found we had experienced the very same events! And this was the beginning of when we began calling each other "twinny," which continues to this day. It wasn't just that both of us had left feet that turned in (we must be related!) We also noticed a pattern which had begun way back in D--. Our life experiences, always identical, always turned out positively for me--and negatively for her! For example, when I applied for permission in D-- to homeschool my children, the Superintendent beamed and said yes! But when N-- applied--same application and everything--he said no! And computers--naturally we had acquired them at the same time; but she would have a pc and I would have a mac. When mine broke down, mine would get fixed or replaced; when her's broke down, it wouldn't! It just wasn't fair, we concurred--at some point we must join our forces and balance out our karma input-output and correct this flaw in our celestial fate design. We are still working on that. Of course, her children loved me, and mine loved her--we are not surprised.
Any more questions? Glad to answer....(Yes, we were both amazed and perplexed when we discovered it was Ronald Reagan who gave us single mothers the power to go after dead-beat husbands in court in the 80s............hmmmmmmmmmmmm). We have been best friends and twinnies now, N-- and I, for almost forty years. (Yikes!)
Oh! one more thing! You know how all things are related to the Alpha and the Obama? Here's another. Each generation, it is said, produces its own president. Well, when it came time for us, The Sixties generation, to produce a president, we had Clinton and Bush. Noway Hozay!! One was Deceitful, the other totally lacking in the values we gave the world. Now you must know that Obama's mother, if you have read his book, was one of us--she had Obama in '61, the year I graduated from high school, and I had my first child two years later. Like N. and I, Obama's mom raised her child with the all the values N-- and I believed in and STILL DO!!! Obama's mother, N--, and I might all have met at Marie's at H--C-- in D-- in 197-- and realized we were triplets. Our generation believed in teaching our children well, and OBAMA is our generation's gift to the world! Crosby, Stills and Nash said it best:
You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.
Can you hear and do you care and
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.
Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
The Three questions were...."I want to know about your friendship with N-- B--. I want to know about what it was like to have Rachael after Eve. I want to know about when the idea of getting a doctorate struck you!" I will attempt the first one first (for once).
You will notice I have the protected the identity of my dearest and best friend N--B-- in the Victorian way, by replacing most of the letters in my friend's name with a dash. I have had direct access to the ways of Victorians. My Grandmother, who raised me along with my mother (a two woman household) was a Victorian, and of course I have read a good many (that's a Victorian phrase "good many") Victorian novels. The thing about Victorians is that they are very private--they cultivate secrets. They do NOT discuss sex or "our business"--I understood what sex was, but I never did understand what "our business" was, and why my friends would ever ask about it--why would they ask about something which I myself could not even imagine in the slightest? It is a secret within a secret this hush-hush stuff of the Victorians. Computer security systems have nothing on the Victorians. In Victorian novels , for some reason, the authors always protect the people they write about by replacing actual times and places with periods or dashes. Graham Greene, a writer I have just discovered (where has he been all my life?) had a father who must have been born the same year as my grandmother. He is always poking fun at them--and in fact their whole secrecy, privacy thing. In "The Root of All Evil" he writes "The events happened in 189--, as they say in old Russian novel, in the small market town of B--." So it happened that I met N.B in 197-- in the small seaside town of D-- , specifically in the vicinity of H--C--.
Or so we (she and I) remember. We met at Marie's--everyone went there, the little local coffee shop in D--. Marie was from some Balkan country (Che--? Yu--?), and every Christmas she would send her relatives back home lots of presents--there wasn't any war over there yet, the Soviet Union was still together, and Mr. Dexter's 1961 prophetic history lessons at KH on the Balkans ("They are always having wars in the Balkans") hadn't yet materialized (they would in the 90s).
Anyway, all the young people went there (to Marie's in 1975)--and one morning N-- and I began talking and found out immediately that we were just alike! We were 30 and 32 respectively and both felt really old! We both had experienced the Sixties and were really sad about how it had all gone downhill since then! We were both recently divorced, custody-case-fatigued mothers of young children, we both came from old professional families from Maine and New Hampshire with mothers who were arch conservatives, we were both now managing any way we could to support our children who were in the same grade --wait at minute!! What was the name of the teacher?? Hadn't we seen each other before? "That's where I've seen you!!" we yelled happily in unison (at Marie's it was okay to yell)--we had been the only mothers who had responded to our childrens' invitations to parents to come into school and help out with their projects. In fact, our children were already friends! N-- was an artist, I was a writer, we both played violin--and both of us loved, who else....Bob Dylan! It was quite an exciting meeting. We were indeed very, very much alike. We soon were over at each other's houses all the time and shared the same friends (Jimmy Fiddle, whose last name need not be dashed because we called him that--it's his violin I have now while he has mine--he was learning how to fix them, and mine stayed unfixed so he let me keep his; John G--, Steve W--, Bruce P--, David P--, etc etc. etc.). Later, when I moved from D-- to Fr-- Maine, we kept in touch, though sometimes it was several years (and in one case a whole decade) before we'd actually get together again in person. Always it was the same thing--it was as though just minutes had passed whenever we saw each other! We simply took up the conversation where we'd left off and compared events in our lives. Miraculously we always found we had experienced the very same events! And this was the beginning of when we began calling each other "twinny," which continues to this day. It wasn't just that both of us had left feet that turned in (we must be related!) We also noticed a pattern which had begun way back in D--. Our life experiences, always identical, always turned out positively for me--and negatively for her! For example, when I applied for permission in D-- to homeschool my children, the Superintendent beamed and said yes! But when N-- applied--same application and everything--he said no! And computers--naturally we had acquired them at the same time; but she would have a pc and I would have a mac. When mine broke down, mine would get fixed or replaced; when her's broke down, it wouldn't! It just wasn't fair, we concurred--at some point we must join our forces and balance out our karma input-output and correct this flaw in our celestial fate design. We are still working on that. Of course, her children loved me, and mine loved her--we are not surprised.
Any more questions? Glad to answer....(Yes, we were both amazed and perplexed when we discovered it was Ronald Reagan who gave us single mothers the power to go after dead-beat husbands in court in the 80s............hmmmmmmmmmmmm). We have been best friends and twinnies now, N-- and I, for almost forty years. (Yikes!)
Oh! one more thing! You know how all things are related to the Alpha and the Obama? Here's another. Each generation, it is said, produces its own president. Well, when it came time for us, The Sixties generation, to produce a president, we had Clinton and Bush. Noway Hozay!! One was Deceitful, the other totally lacking in the values we gave the world. Now you must know that Obama's mother, if you have read his book, was one of us--she had Obama in '61, the year I graduated from high school, and I had my first child two years later. Like N. and I, Obama's mom raised her child with the all the values N-- and I believed in and STILL DO!!! Obama's mother, N--, and I might all have met at Marie's at H--C-- in D-- in 197-- and realized we were triplets. Our generation believed in teaching our children well, and OBAMA is our generation's gift to the world! Crosby, Stills and Nash said it best:
You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.
Can you hear and do you care and
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.
Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.
Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
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