Do The French Have A Name For It?
When it comes to teaching poor kids to read well, it seems they don’t.
The French guy gets it. He looked at my sign this morning. I’d never seen him before. He stopped and said, ‘Exactly. That is an excellent sign. We have the same problem in France where I’m from. They don’t seem to recognize that unless the poor children are taught to read, they can’t do the other school subjects. Why don’t they know that?’ We talked for a few minutes. Both agreeing with each other that the kids need to know how to read well, before they can even know how to write. Reading is the foundation for all of it, we nodded together. We each took off one glove in the cold and shook hands.
I take an hour walk in the afternoons along the East River.
Yesterday I had an NPR show in my ears. I couldn’t listen to sports talk
yesterday with all the predictable groaning over the Jets and the Knicks. The
NPR show had on the author of a book about Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Jane. Jane
wrote many letters to her brother. The host asked if young women in those days
were taught to read and write like the young men were. The author replied that
they were definitely taught to read, so that they could read the Bible.
We had a Bible in our house when I was a kid. It had a soft
light green leather cover and the edges of the pages were shiny gold. It had my
parents’ wedding date in the front and the birth dates of the three kids. I
stared at my mother’s perfect handwriting in it many times. It was on an end
table in the living room and sometimes I would pick it up by the spine and
dangle it with the pages facing the floor. It was very thick and heavy and I
liked the way it felt holding it that way. Not one word of it was ever read in
our house. Not by me or my sisters or my parents or my grandmother who lived
with us before she died or my aunt who lived with us for awhile. We were
Catholics, and Catholics were not encouraged to read the Bible. Protestants
read the Bible. Not Catholics. We weren’t supposed to learn on our own. We were
supposed to hear the priest read passages from it during Mass on Sundays, and
then tell us what it meant. I wonder if Jane had been Catholic if she would
have been taught to read so definitely.
On the #6 train a week ago my eyes landed on the stunning cheekbones
of an Asian mother reading a book to her pre-school daughter. It was a paperback
chapter book and the mother read it so purposefully that the child, even as she
slid around on the slippery subway seat, kept her eyes glued to the important book
and her mother’s voice. The mother didn’t put the book in her big canvas tote
bag until the train stopped at the last station. A young black kid,
junior-high-age maybe, in a Yankee cap and basketball shoes, with nothing in
his hands, across the aisle from them, watched the angel mother read as
appreciatively as I did.
Sometimes when people walk by the sign and me, they’ll smile
a full, warm smile and say, ‘Ain’t that the truth!’, and I’ll say back, with
total assurance, ‘It could change the world.’ I don’t always think to say that.
But that’s what I wish I’d have said to everyone who’s made a comment. It’s
what I believe. It’s why I hold the sign. This will be my third winter standing
with the sign for an hour every weekday on Chambers Street. Some of the
passers-by who haven’t seen me till this year are surprised I’m there in the
cold weather. I like being there in the cold. This morning I had a dull headache
from the Guinness and the Jameson I had last night at a tavern across the
street from my Third Avenue apartment. I went there to watch all the games on
the big screens, after I’d read another chapter in Donna Tartt’s spectacular
new novel, The Goldfinch. An earlier me might have skipped class on
such a morning after or taken the day off from work. But a little headache is
nothing now to a guy who thinks his sign’s message could change the world.
Here are two paragraphs from Tartt’s book. In them,
13-year-old Theo has come from the Upper East Side down into the Village,
looking for someone who might have an important answer:
And so it was that around half past eleven, I found
myself riding down to the Village on the Fifth Avenue bus with the street
address of Hobart and Blackwell in my pocket, written on a page from one of
those monogrammed notepads Mrs. Barbour kept by the telephone.
Once I got off the bus at Washington Square, I wandered for
about forty-five minutes looking for the address. The Village, with its erratic
layout (triangular blocks, dead-end streets angling this way and that) was an
easy place to get lost, and I had to stop and ask directions three times: in a
news shop full of bongs and gay porn magazines, in a crowded bakery blasting
opera, and of a girl in white undershirt and overalls who was outside washing
the windows of a bookstore with a squeegee and bucket.
Last Sunday morning two young women and a guy-friend of
theirs came to my apartment with a movie
So, they set up their lights and put the camera on a tripod
in front of me, sitting there on my couch in one of my everyday long-sleeve
blue t-shirts, with a bad haircut. The one girl asked questions while the other
two monitored the focus and the sound. I talked for the better part of two
hours. It was like Freudian analysis. I was allowed to talk without interruption.
I learned things, as I said whatever came to mind. I said I loved the poor city
kids and was outraged that they weren’t being taught to read. I said it was a
sin that they were being denied the chance to be full members of our culture. I
said the sign says I love them, and the French guy loves them too. So do other
people who smile at the sign in a certain way. Sometimes my eyes almost water
when I see a warm face connect with the sign.
When the young filmmakers packed up their stuff and said
thank you, we’ll be in touch, we shook hands goodbye. And after I’d closed the
door behind them, I broke down in tears for a few seconds.
