so, that’s how it is

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I’m standing by the kitchen window, looking out at the trees and the pure blue sky, drinking hot chocolate and eating challah smeared with Smart Balance. My daughter’s voice drifts in from the living room, where she is reading a book to my grandson, who is sprawled on the couch nursing a fever and a cold. The book is one I bought her when she was a child — “Grandma and Machek,” about a Polish grandmother who tells her granchildren the story of her living in Poland as a little girl and how her friend Machek (who became their grandfather) outwitted a wolf. They are doing a home school unit on making a family tree, and we have just finished looking at two fading photograpsh of my 1940s extended family — one that includes more than 50 people. I showed him the ones who came over through Ellis Island. He is interested in every detail.
Such is my life without care(giving).
But in a few minutes, I will be leaving to go back to the turmoil of the other part of my family, where my mom, who is in her nightgown day and night, needs better care than she is getting when I’m not there.
I visited a nursing home yesterday that’s located 1.3 miles from my daughter’s house and has a secure dementia unit with an enclosed outdoor courtyard. The bedrooms are big and sunny, with room for personal furniture etc. Unless my brother hires someone to come in and help with my mom during both this transition of my leaving and my actual departure, I will fight him for her guardianship and power of attorney. She deserves better than she gets from him; and I just can’t give any more. I could see myself volunteering at the nursing home a couple of mornings a week and visiting her several days a week, at least until she gets acclimated.
My brother wants her, but doesn’t know how to give her the kind, patient, consistent care that she needs. I just want to see her get good care. And I need to take care of myself for a change.
And that’s how it is, as I go from this place of peace to that place of war. It never had to be this way, but that’s how it is.

old time teachers

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That’s what we are now, I guess, to today’s kids. We were educated to be teachers more than 40 years ago, before MTV, before rap, before Marshall McLuhan, before school shootings, and definitely before the Internet. We saw ourselves as professionals and dressed and behaved accordingly. We spent a lot of time preparing for our classes and saw ourselves as the guiders of young minds — inspirers and role models. And we worked hard to make learning exciting and fun for our students.
Some of us eventually moved into other fields; most of us are retired, now. Schools and kids have changed so much that I know I could never handle one of today’s classrooms.
That’s not the case for my old friend, John Sullivan, who, although retired from the CIA and a published author, still manages to do substitute teaching. The other day, I got this email from him:

Earlier this month, when I began subbing, I hadn’t taught a high school class since I was in graduate school in 1969. During the time our two sons were in high school, I became aware that things had changed, but this awareness didn’t prepare me for this new age high school.

One of the two schools in which I subbed is the same high school from which our older son graduated, and there are still some administrators and faculty there whom I know. The student body includes the entire socio-economic spectrum as well as students who, according to the principal, speak 75 languages. There are hints of Blackboard Jungle there, but only hints.

One of the teachers for whom I subbed left a note about one of the classes, to wit: “John, this is the class from hell, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” I went into the class a bit nervous, to say the least, and was very surprised at how well it went. At least half of the kids are Latinos, and for whatever reason, we hit it off. I talked to the teacher the next day, and he kept pointing out that he just couldn’t communicate with them, and he was obviously afraid of them.

One of the seniors in one of the AP classes I had is a borderline genius, has a serious stuttering problem and has been accepted to Harvard. A girl in a Freshman AP class came back from lunch, and in reply to my quetion, “how was lunch”, said, “It was ok, but some Jewish guy tried to stick my head in the toilet.” When she said she hadn’t reported it, she also said, “I took care of it. I beat him up.”

The only semi serious problem I had was with a disruptive Afghani kid, but it worked out.

One of the bigger adjustments I have to make is the almost slovenliness of the male teachers. Some of them are unshaven, dress like rag pickers and look more like students than teachers. The desk, and working area around the desk of the teacher for whom I subbed yesterday looked as if it had been hit by a tornado. Papers, books, CDs etc. were strewn everywhere.

All of this being said, and as tiring as it was, I have gotten some great feedback from the kids and other faculty with whom I worked. At the end of my last class yesterday (a Freshman AP history class), the kids gave me a spontaneous ovation. I liked it.

I’m sure that there are some young “old time” teachers out there, and I have the utmost respect for them. I watch my daughter, who is home schooling my grandson, carry on the tradition of this family as she stimulates a love of learning and a curious intellect in our energetic six-year-old.
Encouraging changes in the teaching and learning of today’s schools is an essential part of President-elect Obama’s plan for improving education. But government can only do so much. The dedication of parents and teachers to creating and providing exciting learning environments is key. And school bureaucrats need to retool themselves into committed educators as well.
Meanwhile, teachers like John will continue to make a difference, one classroom at a time.

five things

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Ex-Lion Tamer tagged me for posting five interesting things about me.
I had to do some serious thinking about this, since these days, my life is about as interesting as a bowl of cold oatmeal.
1. I once accidentally left a pink satin teddy in a bed at a New York City hotel where my daughter was waitressing/singing.
2. For more than twenty-five years people assumed that I had curly hair because I always had a perm.
3. Last night my mother and I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching “Lilies of the Field,” and I realized that I had never seen the movie before! Sidney Poitier was totally HOT!
4. I hardly ever read non-fiction. I am usually reading two fiction books at the same time and listening to a third on my MP3 player as I fall asleep. Understandably, I often don’t remember the stories a month later.
5. I started two craft businesses thus far in my lifetime, doing craft fairs and selling to folks who found out about my wares by word of mouth. The first I called “Self-stones,” and I turned tumbled stones into various simple accessory items and packaged them with a description of the magical lore and healing properties associated with those stones. The second was called “Sass & Chic,” and I sold shawls that I crocheted in a spiral from a pattern that I designed. Here’s a photo of four, two of which I embellished with washable pony beads.
shawls.jpg
Of course, I never really made any money from either craft business. But I had fun.
I need to figure out how to have some fun in the future.

this circular life

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It’s hard not to feel mired in the moment today, as I wander around my current living space, stepping around half-filled boxes and over piles of belongings about which I have to decide whether I still want them belonging to me. Or me to them.
Getting a phone call from my college roommate (through undergrad and grad school) helped to remind me what I’ve blogged about before — all my life’s a circle. The friends I have made, both online and off, are still out there, and inevitably they circle back into connection.
{Ah, the phone is ringing again. It’s one of my long-time close friends in Albany, checking in to see how I’m holding up. We make arrangements to meet for lunch on Tuesday, after I pick up the laptop I crashed from my geek wizard on my way through Albany to my daughter’s.}
Two days ago, I got a comment left on my blog from a former colleague with whom I lost touch more than a decade ago. She found me on Google. Once, on the spur of the moment while we were both still working, we flew out to Key West for a week. I usually don’t do things like that, but she does, and we had a great time. I took a bunch of photos with my feet in them and put them into an photo album I titled “Footloose in the Last Resort.” I had the energy to be creative, then, despite a very demanding job.
This has been an unusual spurt of re-connections, of giving the becalmed circular motion of my life a jump start.

Paglia for Palin and phony baloney

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Camille Paglia, in the November Salon.com issue, has this to say about Sarah Palin in a lengthy piece that also deals with Barack Obama and a lot more:

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

The U.S. Senate as a career option? What a claustrophobic, nitpicking comedown for an energetic Alaskan — nothing but droning committees and incestuous back-scratching. No, Sarah Palin should stick to her governorship and just hit the rubber-chicken circuit, as Richard Nixon did in his long haul back from political limbo following his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962. Step by step, the mainstream media will come around, wipe its own mud out of its eyes, and see Palin for the populist phenomenon that she is.

Years ago, I read Paglia’s books — blogged about her version of feminism here. Paglia almost always takes the devil’s advocate position on issues — which always stimulates heated (but worthwhile) discussions.
While I don’t really agree with Paglia’s assessment of Palin’s political potential, I understand that there’s always a possibility. Who really knows what fuels Palin at her core; she was played and used by her party and the press.
And, it turns out, it wasn’t just Palin who was played. According to the New York Times, both the press and the public were played into believing the lies about Palin put forth by a fake expert and phony think tank.

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

There you have both the power and the terror of the Internet.
Given Paglia’s comments and the hoaxers’ success, I’m much less inclined, now, to look at Palin as a bubble headed hockey-mom. Granted, she was not ready to be vice-president. But, if she really has any smarts, she has learned from the fiasco of her campaign, and she has learned something about whom to trust and not to trust. Certainly, she had all kinds of cards stacked against her this time.
Meanwhile, here are some links to articles about the phony baloney web site and the tricksters who pulled it off.

Huffington Post
The New York Observer
And don’t forget the Times article link above.
The hoaxers’ website is here. When you go there, you will see that “Einstadt” claims that he really exists and is not a hoax.
And so we’re confronted with the dilemma of whom to trust out there on the Internet.
Whom do you trust/believe of those you read on the Internet, and how do you know their trustworthy?
Maybe it’s all just phony baloney. Like the stock market.

stuff and responsibility

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Today was supposed to be my official move day, but I’m bogged down by stuff and responsibility.
So, instead, the move has become a slow one as I sort and pack and dispose of. At the moment, my car out in the driveway is packed with household stuff that I will take to the Salvation Army tomorrow. And then, next week, I will pack the car with another load that I will drive out to my new space at my daughter’s.
Actually the slow move is working out OK because I just can’t shake my responsibilities to my mother, especially since she has suddenly become very weak and wants to sleep a lot. And so I spend a week here taking care of her and then drive out with my packed car to spend several days setting up my space and playing with my grandson. The drive out is like a mini-vacation in and of itself — I have several hours all to myself to think and surf between NPR and country western music stations. Sometimes, I even sing out loud, moving my shoulders to the steady beat while cruise control takes over.
Stuff and responsibility. I’m carrying a lot of baggage.

a father’s words
a daughter’s pictures

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After the death of her father, Melissa Volker discovered some uncanny similarities between her photos and the poems in a collected, unpublished work of his.

As a tribute and a tether, she brings them together here — a poignant sharing meaningful to parents, children, those who have lost, those who love.

Word and pictures. Together a common vision.

The above is the description of my daughter’s book, which she is publishing online through Blurb.com.
The title of this book of her dad’s poetry and her photos is the title he gave his collections of poems: “Seeworld: visions from the wonderground,” and you can get a preview of it here.
The poems are as much for children as for adults. They are filled with unique images that reflect the simple wonders of nature. The photographs visually capture that simplicity and that wonder, adding to the delight of the poems themselves.
“Seeworld” would make a great holiday gift for any family that treasures the special relationship that a daughter can have with her father.
(Of course, this proud mama just can’t resist plugging the publication.)

a father’s words, a…
By W.A. Frankonis an…

neither here nor there

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In my slow fits and starts move to my daughter’s, I usually listen to my NPR station as I make the the two a half hour dirve in a car loaded with bins and boxes. Yesterday, the Writer’s Almanac featured this poem:

Lucky
by Tony Hoagland
If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.
Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.
Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.
Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,
amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.
And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
and she begged me like a child
to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.
If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy
because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.


The peom really got to me — maybe got to my guilt because that’s not how I feel about my mother, who, with moderate dementia and more aches and pains than one would think possible, is 92 and as demanding as a spoiled toddler with a cold. There is no sitting by her bedside reading a book. She still feeds herself, although more and more often she doesn’t like what I cook for her.
As I sit here at my daughter’s computer, I worry about how she is doing with only my brother to care for her while I’m gone. She panics if she is left alone — or even if she can’t see you (even though you are in the same room). I will be back there again for a few days, and then after a few days, I will cart more of my belongings out here until all that are left of my life with her are my cat and my plants and my computer. They will fill up my car on my final out to my new life..
As my mom gets adjusted to someone new to help with her care I guess I will have to be both here and there for a while. Love and punishment. Neither here nor there.

Is he black?

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My 92 year old mother is up late since I am watching the election returns. Obama has won and is about to speak.
“Look, Mom,”I say. “That’s the new president of our country.”
I’m never sure she hears me and/or understands. But this time she looks hard at the television screen, taking in the crowds, the shouting, the man.
“Is he black?” she asks.
“Yes,” I answer, explaining (now that she seems to be paying attention) that his mother was white and his father was black, and he is now the president of the United States.
She continues to look intently at the television screen as Obama begins his acceptance speech.
“Can you make it louder?” she asks and moves to a chair nearer the tv, where she sits and listens and watches until he’s done.
I’m not sure what it all meant to her, but I sure know what it all means to me. We have a truly democratic leader as president.
On my daughter’s blog, she reflects on her feelings about the election and tells of how this election has been a unique “teachable moment” for my grandson:

This morning I explained to my son why this is so historical. Why it’s a big deal that an African American could be President. To do so, I had to introduce slavery as part of our history (mind you, he’s only 6 and in first grade)…he askes SO many questions. “Why did men take them from their homes?” “What do you mean, can you explain more about how they were treated badly?”

And as I explained the best I could in appropriate terms for a 6 year old, but also without sugar-coating the truth, I saw tears fought back in his eyes. Our SIX YEAR OLD felt the injustice those men and women must have felt. Our child felt the horror and sadness of it. “Just because of the color of their skin?!”

He was aghast and stymied. Disgusted and outraged.

The only way I could make him feel better was to assure him that in the end, other men felt the way he just did. Which led to teaching him a bit about the civil war, Abe Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. It helped a bit, but there was no totally shaking him from the sadness he felt to learn how human beings had been treated.

I told him I was proud that he cared. Proud that it mattered to him. And that in the end, that is why it was historical today.

Don’t tell me kids can’t get it. And don’t tell me a kid can’t help direct his learning. Homeschooling rocks!

And my son b!X parties in Portland, missing his Dad, who would have been overcome with joy at the reality of President Obama.
Yes, mom. He’s black and he’s our president.