What’s The Deal With The Sign?
Or how inspiration came to a 64-year-old guy at home on his couch.
There’s a man in a plain London Fog raincoat. The collar’s
never up. I see him lighting a cigarette every morning in front of the Dept. of
Education Building on Chambers Street where I hold my sign. It’s where he works.
It looks like it’s a special cigarette time for him. Like it’s his first of the
day. He doesn’t smoke it casually. There’s a delicacy about it. He looks like a
quiet doctor. European-born maybe. An introvert for sure. He’s a curiosity to
me. Who waits to light up until they get right in front of their workplace,
just before entering? You usually smoke
on the way to work and then flip the butt out into the street, like you’re
heading into an AA meeting.
I noticed him for the first time four and a half years ago. Seeing him again today got me thinking about this sign thing I do.
I’d for years thought about kids and reading. I loved to
read when I was young. Mostly sports pages and sports magazines. Whether at the
kitchen table under a warm yellow overhead light enhanced by the white light
from the window that the table was right up against or in the big chair in my
father’s office where he read from when he got home from work until he went to
bed or in my bed with the radio playing on the nightstand and the gooseneck
lamp lighting up my pages like a big flashlight.
I loved playing sports and was good at them, but when I got to high school, a Jesuit boarding school of all things, I stopped playing them after freshman year. It was during that year that I’d discovered Ray Bradbury. It was a whole new life after that. I couldn’t spend every afternoon in a gym or on a field. I needed time to read and think about things in a new way. The Maharishi says the mind goes to what gives it the most pleasure. Books gave me more pleasure.
When I got to college, I spent more time reading books I was
drawn to than going to class and reading the assigned chapters of books that
didn’t seem as relevant to me as titles
I’d found on bookstore racks and shelves. It was the late ‘60s. The racks and
shelves were filled with exciting books. You could fit a Kurt Vonnegut
paperback in the back pocket of your jeans.
Fast forward past a young marriage and three children and an
early divorce while teaching school to beat being drafted to go to Vietnam, and
then running a bookstore, and then starting a weekly alternative paper. I eventually, inevitably came to New York 20
years ago with an idea of starting a national book magazine, like a Rolling Stone for books. I couldn’t make it happen. Too much money
was needed. And money was a sport I wasn’t good at. I worked on and
off for some weekly papers here. Tried again to start that book magazine. Taught school. Read a lot. Looked for the
right thing to do.
Five years ago I started this newsletter.
It’s the greatest thing for me every month to walk around
town with a backpack filled with newsletters and drop off copies at some
libraries and bookstores and coffee shops.
The theme of each issue has remained the same: The sinful
failure of New York City’s public schools to teach the kids in the poor parts
of the city to read. And it’s not just
my take on things. The numbers on tests show it. Year after year. The numbers are so bad, that the issue seldom
gets talked about in the papers. Or on TV or on the public radio shows where
they ought to talk about it all the time when they aren’t talking about
restaurants. It’s not that schools aren’t talked about. It’s that reading
isn’t. And to me it’s the only thing to
talk about when talking about schools. Eva Moskowitz and her charter schools
here wouldn’t exist if the public
schools had been teaching kids to read.
One afternoon six months or so into putting out acityReader,
an inspiration, what else to call it I don’t know, came. I’m sitting on the couch where I’m
sitting now and the image of a sign comes into my mind and it says ‘Why Not
Teach Every School Kid to Read Well.’ With a period, not a question mark. I
said it once to myself. It sounded right. Exactly right. I emailed the woman in
Brooklyn who lays out the newsletter every month and asked her to format a sign
with that sentence on it. She did, and I took the design up the street to
Kinko’s and they showed me how they could make a sign for me.
The next morning I took the #6 train downtown to the end of
the line and took the sign out of the big Kinko’s bag and stood in front of the
building where the Dept. of Education is housed. This was totally out of
character for me. I don’t have a public self. Neither of my hands is a glad
hand. But the sign wanted to be held. I
would do it. At 64 years of age, I had a mission. I would go there every day. I
would hold the sign for an hour from 8:00 to 9:00.
One of the people I noticed that first day was a guy in a
trench coat lighting a cigarette, with a match, not a lighter. He looked like
an unlikely smoker. I wondered what I looked like to him.
The way the light hits the cars that go by me as I stand
there on the sidewalk keeps me from seeing in the windows. Some drivers must sense this. They’ll roll
their windows down and give me a thumbs-up. Others will sometimes honk their
horn a couple times. Mostly the sign is angled so the people walking by me can
read it.
When my alarm goes off at 6:14, I get up like a kid, eagerly
like it’s Saturday morning. I meditate like the Maharishi‘s followers in
Lakewood, Ohio instructed me 40 years
ago. Eat something. Throw on some
clothes that I think make me not look too bookish or at all like a politician,
and grab my sign and head out the door, knowing it’s the best thing I’ll do all
day. Who knows what will come of it? I
like not knowing.
Recently the guy in the London Fog has been acknowledging me. In
his reserved way. Before he heads into the big building.
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country
