A Book That Still Comes To Mind

And maybe we could use it to guide the schools.

To Kill a Mockingbird is the one. It’s the book that naturally comes to my mind when I’m asked on the sidewalk, when I‘m holding my sign, what are you trying to do? I don’t have a pat answer. I should, probably. Sometimes I’m agitated the rest of the day over a poor answer I’ve given. I get thrown off sometimes by questions that are too aggressive. When I’m thinking clearly, I say, among other things, that I want the kids, when they’re standing on the stage at graduation, if someone tossed any one of them To Kill a Mockingbird, to be able to read it as easily as you or I can. That’s the answer that says it for me. That’s what I’m trying to do.

In the fall of 1961 I’m at my desk in my room at a Catholic boarding school. I’m a freshman, a long way from home. I’m at my desk during mandatory study time, two and a half hours  each night after dinner, and I’m not studying. I’ve got the radio on real low and I’m straining to hear if Roger Maris is going to break Babe Ruth’s home run record.  There’s a lamp on my desk that lights the desktop up brightly. It’s a wide fluorescent lamp and it makes my radio all static-y, and I worry that I’ll get caught not studying by a sneaky-soled  Jesuit roaming the hall. Besides the stack of heavy  books I’m supposed to be studying (Latin was the big thing), I have a paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird that we’re reading in English class.  Over 50 years later I can still see it on the upper right corner of that desk. It was the first real book I’d ever been assigned in school. This was not a story in an anthology. This was not a school library book. This was a book adults were reading. It was all the talk. I knew it was important. The title alone was curious and magical. To say the title to yourself today still feels magical, and beautiful, and sad.

If the school system had the same wish I did, that every school kid at graduation could read the book easily, then they’d have a real goal to shoot for, and it would order the way they do things. Now I don’t know what their goal is. That every child go to college? I cringe when I hear that. It’s impractical. It’s so general. And it reeks to me of elitism. Better they teach every kid to read well. And see where that goes. Festooning the classrooms and hallways with Stanford pennants is nonsense.

Freshman year was probably too early to have read Mockingbird. Even for me, who’d come to boarding school from a small town in Western New York where potato farms were a big part of the landscape. I’d seen many  migrant workers. I’d seen the shacks they were put up in. I’d stare out of the back seat of our big shiny car window as we’d drive by some of those shacks when we’d be on our way to the next town over to get dinner or a root beer float on a summer evening. I’d see black kids playing out in front of the shacks in the dust with dusty toys or a tire. I don’t know what I thought.

If not every graduate was able to read the book easily if it were tossed their way, then that would signal something was wrong with the schooling they’d gotten in 12 years. If it came to be apparent that 12 years of schooling weren’t enough for some kids to be able to read that book easily, then maybe it would underscore how important pre-school was to reading development. Or maybe it would show that the curriculum had to be re-thought.  However many years it might take, or however many changes had to be made, it would have to culminate in the kids being able to read that book easily. If it took Saturdays, well then, Saturdays would need to be included. That book would have to be able to be read easily on graduation day.

There are the equivalent of those migrant shacks here in the big city of course. Whole communities of them. We seldom go by them on our way to our root beer floats. But they’re here, in parts of town where we never go on our bicycles that we can rent now when we need them like they do in Europe. You can’t see the shacks from the High Line either. From our tall apartments, we want a river view. We don’t want to see shacks. This is maybe 60 years after I looked out the car window at the migrant shacks in my home town. I guess I can’t be too hard on my parents for not doing something about it, when even now there are worse shacks here.

I wonder if the book means that much to black people. Is it college-boy presumptuous of me to think that Mockingbird is significant to everyone just because it was to me and the other white people? Or does the very fact that we like it so, mean that it couldn’t possibly be the truth.  I wonder.

I don’t remember much from the classroom in the boarding school I went to for four years.

Oh, I remember what the teachers were like and I remember who I sat near. I remember the announcement junior year during French class that President Kennedy was killed. I remember how chilling and exhilarating it felt that night that Bethesda Naval Hospital was just up the road from our school. But I don’t remember much subject matter. Almost none at all. Do you? All I really learned was how to read better.

The paperback copy of Mockingbird on my desk that night that Maris was chasing Ruth was of huge significance. It, along with folk music, spoke to me more compellingly about social issues than did the priests or my parents. I never looked back. Certainly not to the priests. My late-parents are another, ever-evolving, matter.

Mockingbird is symbolic and important to me.  But to the kids who are in high school now, there’s maybe some other book that would be the one. Let that be it then. But let it be read easily and well by any kid on the stage, should he or she be asked. The schools have to see to it that that’s the norm. It’s the most important ability the students can take from high school.

Why not teach every school kid to read well.

Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.

-Scout    Chapter 31

It’s Not Cheap (it’s $10 an issue at the

newsstand)

But I like the pictures                                          

I pay around $50 a year to get it in the mail. I’m not sure I get my money’s worth out of it. I thumb through it when I’m watching a game on TV. Very few games can I just sit there and watch with nothing else to do. I used to smoke.

Wallpaper* is from London. It’s about interior design mostly, but there’s also fashion and art. The photos grab me. The feel of it I like too. My only complaint is that there are too many ads for expensive watches. I haven’t worn a watch since I got one for my birthday in 8^th grade. I lost it a week later at the altar boy picnic. 

The Shiny Section

Some weeks you read it all, other weeks…

Only in the last month have I started getting the Times delivered. It’s five dollars cheaper a week than going out to get it. And you get unlimited online access. But I have a growing certainty that I’ll cancel it and return to going out to get it.

I don’t need unlimited online access. For what? And I like the smooth feel of the paper in a stack at the bodega where I get my orange and banana every day.  And I don’t need the magazine coming on a Saturday. It’s a Sunday thing you check to see is there among all the sections  when you buy your big heavy paper in the morning.

                                                

A book of wonderful photos of workers at disappearing jobs. Here’s a typesetter. 

Willie Mays Needs No Introduction

Unless you’re sending a book about him to three little kids a long way from here.

I rush things. I sent my three granddaughters in Wyoming a new kids’ book about Willie Mays. The oldest is six. She can now read, but she doesn’t care about Willie Mays. She’s never heard of him. Maybe it matters that I sent it though. A book coming in the mail. A book with cool pictures, even if they don’t know who #24 is. The book preceded me.  I went out there a week or two later. I just got back last week.  

You don’t think of Wyoming as a book place. You think of cowboys, or mountains, or elk. But the library in Jackson looks like one you’d think would  be in Palo Alto. Glass and stone and timber. Perfectly bright. It’s open till 10:00 on week nights. Shouldn’t ours be open that late here, where we all live in cramped apartments? Shouldn’t libraries be open till 10:00 on week nights in neighborhoods where there’s  no Barnes & Noble? Where do kids go after dinner to hang around together and do homework? Think about it, New York, us with our High Line and our new bicycle racks. What’s more progressive: making it so smarties can ride around on a borrowed bike like they’re in Amsterdam, or having the branch libraries open later?

The woman next to me on the flight back read a magazine the whole way. About four hours. It was the Entertainment Weekly summer movie special issue. She read every page thoroughly. Nothing else was on the pull-down tray.  I had the Sunday Times which I’d picked up during the Denver plane-change. I had a book. I had a notebook. My area was clutter.  She just had her magazine.  The exact magazine she wanted. Other riders were sleeping and/ or looking at a laptop of some kind and/or watching the in-flight movie. Planes are great places to read. She knew that.

If I ever get a tattoo, it’ll probably be # 24.

April was National Poetry Month. In the library in Wyoming there was an ambitious display of books of poems and books about poets. Prominently on display there was a Robert Pinsky book and a Sharon Olds book and one by Rita Dove, right by the complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Out the big window you could see aspen trees lit up by the sun. It’s a big country.

The  woman next to me on the first leg of the flight back was in Jackson, she said, to study frogs and toads. You wouldn’t have guessed that. She was a biologist. Divorced with an eight-year-old daughter.  They live in Fort Collins, a college town. She said they don’t have a TV. That you might have guessed. She had a Nook though, and excused herself so she could get back to reading a new novel by Barbara Kingsolver.

Now that my six-year-old granddaughter can read, I try to see through her eyes how opened-up the world must be to her.  The parents of kids in her kindergarten class were given a memo with a lot of information on it. One thing I noticed was that each pupil was expected to read three books every night at home. That’s kindergarten! And that’s Wyoming, where until very recently you could drive your car with an open can of beer between your legs.  Let’s go New York. Let’s get on it. What’s the excuse? Let’s go.

Willie Mays would have broken Babe Ruth’s record if he hadn’t missed two years serving in the army.

You can get the New York Times in Jackson, Wyoming. Thank God.  I‘m not much of a TV watcher.  But out there in the Painted Buffalo Motel I lay in bed at night and watched the Boston Marathon bombing coverage. You can just see the same images so many times and you glaze over.  Hear the same thing said. Holding a good newspaper the next day, and the whole week after, was what I craved. Not the online version either. A real paper. Even the kids, when I’d show it to them out at their house later in the day, liked the big movie ads and theater ads, and the feel of the big paper.

‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?’
― Emily Dickinson

I took a book with me. Hope Against Hope. It’s about poor kids in New Orleans and the schools they go to. It kept me connected to here and my sign (WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO READ WELL.).

We saw nine buffalo in a field one day driving into the Teton National Park. I saw some elk out by the Museum of Wildlife Art.  There’s a sign along the highway with electric lettering that says Elk Crossing Next 5 Miles. All this is fascinating to a New Yorker even after 30 or 40 trips out there. It’s also comforting to a guy who grew up in the rural snowy hills of Western New York.

I missed holding my sign and worried that the people who pass the sign and me every day would think I was some kind of dilettante, some kind of slacker, some kind of escape artist, who had left without leaving a note.  Life changes all the time. I wondered if they thought I was gone for good.

In high school and in college, I found myself in countless heated arguments with guys who thought Mickey Mantle was better than Willie Mays.

My favorite place to have a beer out there is the Snake River Brewery.  The beer they make is good and it’s fun to look at the people. It was still cold out there, so they had on all sorts of knit caps and beards.  The women working behind the bar and waiting table work out, you can tell. The vehicles in the parking lot all have ski racks on them. When you get out of your car and are heading toward the door, there’s a huge permanent outdoor vat that the brewer uses. It’s covered with stickers and decals that patrons have plastered on there over the years. Two years ago I slapped a ‘cityReader’ sticker about halfway up. This time my granddaughter could read it. I’ve been waiting for that.

Why not teach every school kid to read well.

Seems To Me, This Is The Book

If you want to (or think you ought to) read one book on the state of the schools

You may be tired of reading about New Orleans and post-Katrina. I thought I was. I’m tired of the Saints for sure. But I’ve always been drawn to books about schools and kids. And I saw the author, Sarah Carr, on C-Span. So I emailed my bookstore and ask them to hold a copy or get a copy for me, and they did.

I’ve been reading it exclusively on the short subway ride I take to and from holding my sign on weekday mornings.  It’ll take weeks at that rate.  That’s fine.

It’s about the schools in New Orleans and how they had to be repaired, and re-thought after the flooding.  It applies here. If you like to read about school things, this book is for you.

Rubber Meets The Road
A famous writer on running

I know they start lining up early when Haruki Murakami has a new novel hitting the stores. I’ve never read one. Younger friends have, and find him meaningful to their lives. I envy them.

This book though, What I talk About When I Talk About Running, I just read for the second time. It’s not a novel. It’s a memoir. About his writing and his running. It’s not self-centered. It’s clear and honest, and you learn things from it.

I’m gingerly starting to run again. Baby steps so far. This book helps.  I recommend it, even if you aren’t running. Sports Illustrated called it ‘a brilliant meditation’.