What’s Your Sign?

Thinking back on a conversation with a young woman about the meaning of things.

I should let the sign do the talking. It says exactly what I think. But sometimes people ask me about it and I have to say something.

Last week a young woman who works for the Department of Education, whose big building I stand in front of on the sidewalk every morning for an hour with my sign, approached me and said she sees me there and don’t I think they’re doing that, teaching the kids to read?

I rushed out an answer; something about how the numbers we read in the paper, the reading scores, show that, no, they certainly aren’t teaching the poor kids to read well. I said it too hurried probably (there were people passing us there on the sidewalk and I wanted them to see the sign), which, I’m sure, made me seem distracted and aggressive. I felt glum later that I’d poorly represented my thoughts to her. Which is of course why writers write: to give a more extended answer/critique/suggestion to the things they see wrong with the world.

Here’s what I should have said. I should have said how dare the department begin yet another school year without a plan to attack the sinful lack of ability to read well that so many of their students suffer from? I should have said I hadn’t read anywhere that some new plan was in place to rectify that. If she’d said the Common Core curriculum was going to do that, I’d have said, no it’s not. Not that it’s a bad idea for a program, but it’s just not meant to tackle the tough stains. Something stronger is needed for that.

I thought about taking my sign to the debates the candidates for mayor have been having. But I decided to keep holding it in just the one place I hold it in the morning on Chambers Street. I wasn’t going to chase down the pols. I don’t think much of this batch at all. None of them has spoken about the problem I see as the most urgent: teaching all the school kids to read well. These candidates are an unimaginative group of people.  How could they not see that as the biggest problem? It really is the crucial problem. Solve it and almost everything else will fall into place. Sometimes when a person walking by my sign will say, I couldn’t agree more, I’ll say, it would change the world. They almost always nod in agreement.

Just before Labor Day I took the train to Chicago to meet up with one of my sisters and my niece to drive to Northern Michigan to my other sister’s cottage. I like the train. I like looking at the Hudson River out the window. It’s a long ride, but I take a book with me and some magazines and a notebook. You can walk through the cars and look at people. The poor people sleep almost the whole way. They bring old pillows and sheets. They don’t read. They look at movies on their screens when they aren’t sleeping. Their kids aren’t reading anything either. They’re restless and you hope you aren’t sitting across the aisle from them. If I had a chance to talk to the young woman again, I’d tell her about the train.

The book I took with me, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I’d read 40 years ago when I was a teacher in Cleveland. I taught school to get out of going to Vietnam. A lot of young men did that then. It wasn’t only to avoid the draft that we did that. It was an idealistic time and teaching in urban schools was a way for us to change the world. The book evokes that era. It brings back vivid, wistful feelings. It’s not lost on me that I still say teaching poor kids to read well could change the world. I believe it. It’s tragic that that mission is still not being accomplished. Forty years later. My hair’s turned gray. I have five grandchildren.

Here’s the first paragraph of the book.  I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of my cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon.

Reading is our best, most enduring pastime. TV and movies are stimulating in their way. So is listening to music. So is noodling around on the computer. Sports and exercise excite parts of us. But reading is that quiet, deeper pleasure that talks to us privately. It makes us dream our dreams. I’d like to have said to the young woman the other morning that we’re taking dreams away if we don’t teach kids to read well.

What she really should do is hold my sign for a week. She’d see the faces on people who look at the sign.

I just hold the sign. I take no credit for its message. That came to me from I don’t know where. Maybe in a dream I had.

Another school year is beginning.  I’m excited. Kids will be back on the street where I stand with the sign. College kids. High school kids. Little kids with parents or nannies. Some in cute uniforms. Some of the little ones will try to read the sign. They’ll keep looking back at it as they pass me. You should see their faces when they work their way through the words and decipher the message. They’re very proud of themselves.

There are some adults who also look back as they pass. They couldn’t read it at a glance. You wish the young woman could see that. You wish she would tell her next department meeting what she saw.

I take the 6 train in the morning, with my sign and a book and some of these newsletters, from where I live on Third Avenue in the 20’s down to Chambers Street. It’s a quick trip and I maybe get three pages read each way. I’d get more read if I didn’t look around at the other riders so much. Many, maybe most, of the people are the same every day. I like to see what they’re reading. More people than I would have guessed are reading the free paper they hand out at the subway stops. Some people are reading a daily newspaper. Some have Kindles. Not that many though, which surprises me. The people I stare at the most are the Asian mothers or fathers or grandparents with little kids. They make sure that the kids have something to read, or they give them word search pages and a pen or pencil to pass the time till they get to Canal Street. If I had not been in such a hurry when I was talking with that young woman the other day, I could have told her about that train ride too.

Highway 74 Revisited

On the road again

I read it on the subway. In the morning when I’m coming and going with my sign. I get at most three pages read each way. The book will last me a long time at that rate. I want it to.

It already has lasted a long time. It came out in 1974. I read it that year  or soon after when it came out in paperback. It was a small paperback. A pocket book, they called them. They could fit in your Levi’s back pocket or your coat pocket.  You could tap a song against them in your coat pocket.  Your cigarettes were in your other pocket.

This book is extraordinary. Then and now. 

The Great Outdoors

A stimulating way to help keep it great

You don’t have to be green-all-over to think this is a very good magazine.  In fact, if you aren’t all that green but are concerned, Sierra is a good place for you to jump in.

It makes you think.

You can get it free six times a year with a Sierra Club membership. Or for $15 if you’re not a member. http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra

Your kids will like it too.

                                   September 13 issue.

The Morning After

Remembering the freedom of getting out of college, and the

freedom to read as I pleased.

It may have been the freest day of my life. Or let me at least say it was the first free day of the rest of my life. I can still see part of it. I can see the outside of the campus bookstore I was heading into. It was mid-morning. The windows on the front of the store reflected big trees and a clear sky. Or maybe it just looks clear in my mind now.

I was 21 years-old. A little hungover. I was almost certainly smoking a cigarette. About to flip it anywhere it landed, as I approached the entrance to the store. It was 1969. You could flip a cigarette wherever you wanted then. Maybe you could smoke it in the store; I can’t remember.  I know you could smoke in grocery stores.

There was hardly another customer in the store. It was dead. No surprise. It was the morning after my college graduation. Everyone had headed out of South Bend, Indiana already, or was still sleeping off their last college beers. I’d been up for a few hours already. I lived off campus.  Unlike my buddies at our all-boys school, I lived with a wife and a week-old daughter 15 minutes away. It would be a few days before I’d get to put college in my rear-view mirror.

For four years I’d roamed around the second floor of that bookstore. The first floor was all notebooks, and pens, and slide rules, and T-shirts and sweatshirts with a two-fisted leprechaun on them. The second floor was books. Mostly heavy, dust jacket-less textbooks which I had no interest in reading, and usually didn’t. I wasn’t alone with that attitude; the late ‘60s upended a lot of conventions, like studying outmoded received ideas. What I went up there for were the few rows of trade books, as they’re called; the books you buy for pleasure, and for your own real education. That’s what I was after. I went up there all the time. I picked up new hardbound books and turned them over in my hands, aching to read them. I handled, and often bought, paperback books by writers like Thomas Pynchon, and Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut. Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice showed up my junior year. I would stand there by myself, my buddies weren’t drawn to books like I was, and wish for a time when I didn’t have the tedious pressure of schoolwork hanging over my long-haired head. A time when I could read any book I wanted.

That’s why I was heading into the bookstore that liberating June morning. Finally the day had come when I could buy books I wanted without thinking I shouldn’t, that I should be reading my heavy school books instead.

Two weeks ago I read in the Times a summary of Bloomberg’s years in charge of the schools here. It said that only 22% of the city’s high school grads were ready for college.  I think that’s a sin (the Times didn’t call it that; I don’t know why) that so few kids are prepared to go to college. Which says to me that the city’s school kids don’t read well enough to do college work. That they can’t read well enough to keep up. They can’t read well enough to enjoy the material or participate in class discussions about what they read. It means they can’t write well enough either. You can’t write very well if you can’t read very well.

What was all that about all these years then, all that talk about schools and preparing the kids for the future? They were our future. That was said all the time. And now to find that a mayor who’s had three terms to make a mark, has not done any better than 22% of the kids he’s been responsible for being prepared to go further in school than high school where they didn’t read very well at all. Ike Davis got sent down from the Mets to the minors for only getting hits 22% of the time.

All the guys in my college in 1969 could read well. Even the guys who were still sleeping off beers that morning after could read well. They might have spent more time reading the Chicago papers in the student center over coffee and cigarettes with Steppenwolf playing on the juke box than they did reading their airless text books. And they might have skipped class to read about the Warren Commission or to finish reading Portnoy’s Complaint. But they could read well. It wasn’t a question. It was effortless. The kids who didn’t do well in college slept through their 8:00 classes, or drank too much, or didn’t care about reading what was assigned and chose to read other stuff.  It wasn’t that they couldn’t read well.

What do you do with your life if you can’t read well? What does the mayor think about that? What about all those kids who can’t read well enough to go to college? What are they supposed to do? And it’s not just that they’ll have to face life and the job market and the dating market without a college degree; it’s they likely can’t read well enough to get even a decent job, not a great job, a decent job. What can you do without an ability to read? You can go through your head now and think of the jobs available to those who can’t read well. A lot of people who are relegated to such job choices aren’t by nature cut out for them anymore than my old buddies would have been.  But my buddies could read well, and had more options available to them, assuming they made it back from Vietnam, or had come up with some way out like I did.

Later that week after graduation, my wife and teeny daughter and I drove to Cleveland where my wife was from and where I had found a job in the inner-city teaching English to 5^th grade kids. That was my way out of going to Vietnam.  Not long after I got there, mail started coming to my new address from my college. I was an alum now and so got applications for football tickets, and letters with fund-raising appeals. Four times a year the alumni magazine came. The issues were—still are—all good.  I’ve looked forward to them for almost 45 years.

One issue made an impression on me, or I should say, one guy, in one issue, made an impression on me.  It was a couple years after I graduated. There was a small piece with a small photo. The guy in the photo was holding a can. That’s all he had, as I remember it anyway. Maybe there was a little sign, or something on the side of the can, that said he was collecting money for the people who were being devastated by war and storms in Bangladesh. He had a plain white T-shirt on and khakis. No slogans anywhere. No two-fisted leprechauns. The article said he stood with the can in front of either of the two dining halls when guys were filing in to eat. It mentioned who he was and why he did it and how much money he’d raised.

I’ve thought of him often over the years. I thought of him when I decided to hold a sign that says: WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO READ WELL. I've kept that photo of him in my mind, through divorce, through the deaths of my parents and of some of my friends from college.

Not My Kind Of Town

This gossipy new book reminds me why

In spring when the trees in my New York neighborhood are full of buds, I think of Washington where I went to high school. At my age I get wistful for things and places from my youth. Each spring I tell myself I’d rather be in DC. 

After reading Mark Leibovich’s This Town, I won’t waste time with such thoughts again.

It reminds you that the guys who ran for office in high school (yours and mine) are the guys who run DC. The guys who made posters for themselves. This book is all about them, with their insecurities and their vanities. It’s full of good bad-stuff. Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for the ‘New York Times Magazine’. The book is like a good magazine article that lasts a nice long time. 

The Tipping Point

America’s first bestseller

Thomas Paine published Common Sense in January of 1776. It pushed a lot of American colonists to seek independence from England instead of some kind of settlement that would allow them to remain subjects. There were around 2.5 million people in the colonies then. 100,000 of them bought the pamphlet. That’s a huge bestseller. (It may be the all-time bestseller when you consider the small population then.)  More than that no doubt read a friend’s copy.

Paine didn't care to profit from it:

‘As my wish was to serve an oppressed people, and assist in a just and good cause, I conceived that the honor of it would be promoted by my declining to make even the usual profits of an author.’