THIS MORNING THERE WAS A BIG DELIVERY TRUCK parked with one leg up on the sidewalk right by where I stand with my sign. When that happens—and it’s happened more than a few times—I think I’m just adding to the narrowing of the sidewalk space for people heading to work or school. I think about going home. I think about going to the diner for breakfast lately. Since the election, I think about eggs and toast and, hash browns and ketchup a lot. The hash browns mostly. I must crave some comfort from the warmth and texture. After 9/11 I found myself craving Jameson Irish whiskey. I’d go up to a bar near me in the East Village every night that first week and order a shot of Jameson with my first pint, which was not the normal schedule. Sometimes two shots. A couple weeks later I read somewhere that bars noticed how many more shots they poured after 9/11.

I stayed my hour today. The truck was there the whole time. I’m glad I stayed. I sense from the faces, that since Wednesday, the sign is maybe some people’s Jameson, some people’s warm breakfast.

I WENT TO SLEEP LAST NIGHT with the election outcome in doubt. I knew I had to get up at 6:00 to get ready to go out with my sign. I hoped what would happen was that I’d wake up at like 4:00 in the morning and reach for my phone and find that my team had won on a walk-off home run. That’s happened to me more than a few times. I was counting on it happening this morning. But the phone had a CNN alert on the screen that led with the words Donald Trump. No joy in Mudville.

Downtown where I hold my sign for an hour each morning in front of the Dept. Of Education Building, I knew that some of the people who I see every day would think I’d have some special take on the election results. Some walked by me with exaggerated faces of sadness thinking I’d reflect a similar look back at them. They think I’m Mr. Activist because I’m there with my sign. Some flash me peace signs. Some raise a black power fist, which says to me how few people are activists anymore, that I get mistaken for a radical, which I’m not, at least by my historical definition.

A few people stopped and wanted to talk about last night. If I had been in a bar and I still drank, I’d have talked all day about it. But all I said was, I’m not going to give him my day.

I stood there today especially focused on why I was there and on what my sign said. Sometimes my mind wanders for a minute and I bring it back and set my feet and hold my sign straight. Today because I’d just read J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, I thought about Seymour, and I held it for the Fat Lady.

VOTING DAY TOMORROW. No school here, so no holding the sign. My daughter will take her twins with her to her voting place in her neighborhood tomorrow. Historic day, she thinks. It probably will be. I hope Hillary is good for the school kids who the sign is about. 

DAY TWO AND I’M ALREADY INCLINED TO skip what I said might be an everyday blog routine. I held my sign of course this morning for almost an hour. It was cold for just a crew neck sweater and a knit cap. It’s colder downtown. But I didn’t wear my gloves. I had them in my Patagonia bag that I keep just off the sidewalk, but I like the way the edge of the sign feels on my fingers. I try to hold it mindfully for an hour. Mindfully is a trendy concept now, but it does describe what I try to do with the sign. The sign is everything. I’m just the guy with the easy, small-town demeanor holding it. Three people today asked if they could take pictures of me with the sign. 

SOME YOUNG WOMEN, SOMETIMES YOUNG MEN, pass by the sign and me, with strollers to

take their younger kid or kids along, while they drop off their older child at the pre-school on the block. One tall mother--Indian, I’d say almost certainly--stopped in front of me yesterday and, with a British accent that made me throw my shoulders back, asked about the sign. I told her that the sentence on the sign came to me on my couch one afternoon and I felt it was my duty to pass that message on. She nodded, and immediately mentioned Black city kids. She recognized, she said, after just being in the states for six months, that the ‘achievement gap’ was a pressing issue, and rightly assumed that my sign was mostly aimed at that ever-present disparity.

She said she’d recently seen some short documentary film on TV showing the differences in the facilities between a middle class white school and a poor Black school. It was startling news to her. I said, probably too cynically, that such reports were things we’ve been seeing and reading about for decades here. I told her that’s why I hold the sign, hoping that its message might penetrate the system and make the system put reading at the very center of everything. It would give direction to the whole enterprise. Whatever was needed to make certain that every kid was taught to read well would be implemented. The schools which now seem ‘underclass’ would have to be brought up to high standards to get the job done. The school system could not wait until society’s inequalities were brought into balance to make the transformation to a reading-well-before-all-else curriculum. In fact, I said, equality will not happen until this reading success is achieved. Which is what I believe most of all. Which is why I’m there every day.

She and I will talk more I think. 

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.

Only in books do we learn what’s really going on.

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

By Its Cover

The joy of going with your instincts

I’m not a big museum-goer. Twice a year maybe. I seldom go to the galleries in Chelsea. More out of inertia than anything else.  Or maybe I just like to look at art in books more than I like walking around rooms of art.

I like to read about artists. Especially if they live in places like New Mexico, off by themselves.  Agnes Martin fills that bill perfectly.  This book was everything I was looking for, everything the design of its cover implied.  Now I’m looking forward to the big show of her work coming to the Guggenheim in the fall.