Mornings After

The morning after my father’s funeral, the women of the family gathered around the kitchen table for breakfast and ended up talking for hours. I wondered if my grandfather’s name would come up and, suddenly, it did. Just as suddenly, my sister and cousin clutched their arms over their chests and jerked away from the table as if to protect themselves from an impending threat. My sister said, “He scared me.” My cousin said, “I never liked him.”

I was 42 and I’d never told anyone, but I decided this was the time. When I was about 5, we visited my grandfather in the boarding house where he lived in his retirement. My sister and I spent the night in his bedroom. Mom and Dad were across the hall.

I remember it as being “my turn”. I can only assume that’s what he told me, but that morning after my father’s funeral at the kitchen table, my sister indignantly said it certainly never happened to her. My mother said it couldn’t be true because my grandfather always gave her such nice presents. My cousin said our grandfather had molested the housekeeper who raised her following her mother’s death. The only other comments were on the times my grandfather was found alone with elderly women in the nursing home where he spent his last days.

My own memory is selective. My grandfather’s bed is against the wall; my sister is sleeping across the room. The bedroom is dark – the hallway is dark- the wide steps down to the front door are dark. The images from the bathroom are vivid and, thankfully, filled with light - black and white checkerboard tiles, a pedestal sink, a claw foot tub. However, the knowledge of this night is present in every second of every interaction I have ever had with every other adult male until this minute in my life, sitting at this kitchen table at age 42.

The morning after, my family walked across the street to the diner where my grandfather ate breakfast each day. He sat at the counter with other men from the boarding house. The four of us found a table in the crowded restaurant and ate while sunlight flooded through the windows.

But, light can’t expose everything.

Moving Pictures

Our son Will is moving, from his student apartment in Spartanburg to an upperclassmen dorm at Winthrop University. The transition is marked by boxes and crates, dirty laundry, and computer equipment painstakingly delivered to safe storage. Tomorrow, we will fill cars and make the two hour drive to Rock Hill to deposit everything that now sits in our hallways, our family room, our garage. Well, probably not everything. The boxes he leaves behind will remind us that he still calls this home.

Our children do tend to come and go. Will, of course, is still a student. Geoff works at Yellowstone National Parks and comes home for the extended closures that mark the seasonal transitions from wheeled vehicles to treaded vehicles for use on snow. Geoff’s visits home are commemorated by piles of ski bibs and boots in the spring and hiking boots and camping equipment in the fall.

George and I are headed for a move ourselves to what was once a Better Homes and Gardens feature home but is now a dilapidated abandoned house that we clearly see as a dream retirement home. The house waits to see the renovation that will mark its return to a home for a family that really wants it. We will have garage sales, make drop-offs at Goodwill, donate items to our favorite school, and throw out trash – lots and lots of stuff that once held some value in our lives. A lot of items won’t make the cut – resources for teaching careers, odd family plates, the few pairs of heels left in my wardrobe. We will ask our sons to help with our boxes and crates, leisure clothes favored by retirees, little boys’ pictures lovingly delivered to safe display, Legos for future grandchildren, and our faithful family dog who will patrol her new borders, bark at new neighbors, and delight in the number of squirrels just begging to be chased.

The Family Craftsman

My husband George recently built a table of antique year old heart pine reclaimed from the ceiling of an abandoned cotton mill in Enoree, SC. The mill was the sole employer in that small community for more than a century. A friend of ours delivered a load of rough pine boards and beams, blackened with decades of grime and tufted with cotton lint, and asked George to transform them into a coffee table for her brother. After George pulled handmade nails and spikes, planed and joined the planks, the rich red veins of the wood were exposed as clearly as the day when the trees were cut and milled at the site of construction.

George is teaching himself woodworking and intends to become a craftsman, evidenced by the growing collection of woodworking tools and machinery in our garage.

He’s made several small pieces for his students in the Family Learning GED program. These include stands for the family fish tank, a coffee table for a family room, and several small work tables sized for a child and parent to play together. His adult students dropped out of high school to marry early, have children early, and go to work early – like many of the generations who preceded them in the mill-based economy that once sustained the South.

They now hope to earn their GEDs so they can find better jobs or continue their educations, but, more than anything else, they hope to break the cycle of school failure before their own children become the newest family members to be entrapped. They bring their infants and preschool children to an early childhood classroom next door to his. Each day the parents, children, and teaching staff meet for lunch and for parent/child activities which help prepare the children and their parents to meet the challenges of the long years of schooling that lie ahead.

George’s tools at work include math textbooks and a guitar, test prep problems and play dough, resources on opening family businesses and picture books. Like teachers everywhere today, he must measure progress by student practice test scores. But he also notes with delight the child who took his first steps or spoke his first words during the day.

Recently one of his families took their two year old son to see Santa. He asked for “Georges” for Christmas.

Two Women

Today in the lobby of the theater, I eavesdropped on two men with all the answers to the problems of public education.  For twenty minutes they went on about the way America’s children were actually being “retarded” by their teachers.  They’ve seen the research to prove that public school teachers not only don’t know how to teach, they don’t know the subjects they are supposed to teach.  I watched while I listened.  They never once looked at their own children, who began to amuse themselves as children do when  nothing else presents itself – by arguing, pushing, fighting for fun.  One of their wives followed the group of kids from water fountain to stairs to theater doors while these two men single- handedly analyzed the failures they could so clearly see.  The mother did her best to put an end to the children’s fighting, but she was always one step behind them, always reacting to situations that were already a reality while the two men were unwilling, perhaps unable, to acknowledge any of it.  I debated whether to approach the men and defend what I believe to be a more accurate picture of public education.  But, truthfully, I was more curious to know what that mother had to say, how she sees the problems that affect children and discipline and management and organization and delivery.  I wonder if she has the time to contemplate those challenges in the daily struggle to do what she can in the face of realities which other people either don’t want to see or are truly unable to see. I suppose that is the more accurate picture of the problems facing public education today.  Without some direct experience in meeting the realities which our children face, we cannot comprehend the totality and complexities of the problems.  We cannot isolate one problem as “the problem.”  We cannot rely solely on our understanding of our own school careers or those of our own children to provide either enough experience or the diversity of experience required to comprehend the ranges of abilities, needs, and possibilities schools must now meet.  And we can’t claim to have any possible answers at all without becoming involved it their application.  We can’t stand aside and speak with authority about the weight of the facts while someone else shoulders the burden.  We need to develop multiple solutions and be willing to risk using them, to test them, to evaluate their possibilities, and to assimilate whatever we’ve learned into building a dynamic system of education.  We all need to be involved, as teachers, as parents, as community members, and as Americans, but, most of all, as active learners ourselves who are willing to risk turning needs into challenges and realities into opportunities.  

To Geoffrey

Just yesterday
You took your first steps
Across a barbershop floor
And defended a fort under the branches of a fir.
You smiled with a broad grin
Under Buster Brown bangs
And the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.
You invested your days in blocks and books and ideas
And drank from the world with the thirst of a child.

Today
You stand before me
Eye to eye,
Still a child, not yet a man.
But, the man is there, waiting –
His time will come.
Sometimes, I’d like to send him away
To prevent the loss of someone precious and still too fragile –
Someone I will never be able to replace.
But, more often now, he tempts me
To share new ideas and dreams –
To rejoice in the discovery of the man he will become.

Graduation

We graduated from elementary school at the end of the seventh grade. We had been told we would be leaders in high school, that we would excel in college. We celebrated with our first dance, on the threshold of young adulthood. I had a pale blue dress made of hand-embroidered material that my aunt had gotten in Jamaica or the Bahamas (or more likely K-Mart, knowing my aunt). I left my elementary school days behind the moment I split the entire back out of that dress at that dance, the one and only time I ever wore it.

To Carmen

I remember the only black child in the class on the first day we painted. The other children tried lots of colors on the paper and made all kinds of shapes and designs. Alexander went to the easel last, interested only in white paint. He held it on the brush and looked at it and never looked at the paper. He began to paint his hands, first the palms carefully, then fingers, and finally turned his hands over to coat the backs with thick while paint. I suddenly realized that he was not using the paint “correctly”, even though I had been as absorbed in what he was doing as he had been. I said, “Alexander! What are you supposed to be doing with that paint?”
The teaching assistant rushed past me to interrupt and say, “Look, Alexander, look at the way it covers your fingers and fingernails.” She talked with him, and with me, and together we helped him paint his arms up to his elbows, almost up to his shirtsleeves. I can see the concentration on his face as he pressed his white handprints on a sheet of paper. And I can feel his excitement as he washed the white paint off with lots of soap and rushing water, free again to choose the person he could be.
I left that day strengthened and reassured in my new role, a new educator in a child’s world, free again to be the teacher I choose to be.

Timothy

In the moment that I watched him,
I saw him change –
A child of a limited reality
Became a child of possibility.

The discovery was his own.

My attempts to “teach” him had little to do with it,
Except to encourage him to try again.

The moment was right for him –
He was ready
And interested
And the task fit his need.

The power of a single moment –

The power to reshape our thinking –
To organize our experience
Into the beliefs and values and knowledge
Which guide us for the rest of our lives.

Thousands of moments a day…

We live and grow
And learn
And have little time to appreciate
The impact of a single moment.

Freedom

My bike was my first taste of real freedom, the key to unlock the entire world. I remember starting at the top of Keswick Drive and flying down the long gradual hill to the end of the street – probably close to a mile.

From there, if I was lucky, I could just make the turn onto Cold Springs Lane, down that shorter, steeper, hill before I had to begin to pedal to pay for it all.

I was never without a friend once I learned to ride that bike.

I never shifted gears, rarely used the brake, and probably tore up lots of pairs of shoes.