Student Body

Community College Essay #1: Narratives

One was sleeping alone under a streetlight
by fourth grade. One slept under the porch
with the dogs to keep warm in winter.
One tried to sleep curled in a ball with her brother
in a pile of empty Pepsi bottles on the floor of the car,
hearing coyotes howl in the dark, waiting for their parents
to open the dealer’s door and come back to them.

One was randomly shot at nine years old,
walking home from the school bus. When he
realized no one was going to pull over
to help him, he got up and kept on walking.

One did the reading assignments holding her book
in the oven for light because her boyfriend wouldn’t
allow the overhead or lamp for anything as stupid
as going back to school. Many were beaten or raped
by uncles or fathers or neighbor boys, one when she
was just ten, bent screaming over a log in the woods,
warned not to tell or her family would die, then called
a whore when her mother found her bloodied underwear.

Most were told to sit down and shut up, or taught
that lesson the hard way, in schools that weren’t
much different from jail, to which they graduated.
A few miraculously found freedom in prison, in some
recovery program or writing class that random luck,
or grace, put in their path. More just found a new level
of pain to endure, or a reason to try opting out.
So very many went to war as the honorable alternative
to being dead-end poor, and ended up just dead—
or alive to things even harder to carry than body armor.

None of them expect help.
None of them ask for it.
None of them feel they deserve
to succeed.

They work so hard it makes my heart seize up.

What on earth do I have to give my students, beyond
teaching academic outcomes that look ridiculously
superficial on the syllabus of real life?

Maybe it’s as simple, and as hard, as listening. Maybe it’s
as unprofessional as refusing to red pen the sacred body
of their work. Maybe it’s as human as shared tears, as powerful
as the surprise of respect, striking their path—and mine—like lightning.

What is “higher education”?

MOOCs are slated to transform it, once corporations like Coursera decide how to “monetize” Massive Open Online Courses and once they figure out how to polish the rough assessment edges on peer review as a way of grading stuff that can’t be done via Scantron without having to pay teachers to (for example) read a paper. So in the brave new world, students will watch recorded lectures of famous professors–say from MIT, a MOOC pioneer–then work their own way through the reading, take tests, and earn credit toward a degree at a steep discount. University profits should soar because the inconvenience of having to hire faculty, or support bricks-and-mortar campuses, will fade. Lest you think this is some far-off sci-fi future, I will note that Bill Gates’ foundation is funding the effort, and that it will be marketed as democratization and accessibility, and that poor people will flock to its open door. But at what cost?

If someone changed your life, if someone believed in you before you believed in yourself, if someone inspired you to learn or to think or to hope, that someone was probably a teacher–and most likely a high school or community college English teacher, working in the trenches of real life, learning the names and faces and dreams of a few hundred students every term, and often keeping in touch with students over the course of a lifetime. This is the kind of higher education that no MOOC will ever deliver, let alone be able to assess.

Out of the blue, I got a message on my machine from my high school English teacher, whose name is, improbably, Ideale. I am sixty-five years old, and even though I’ve been in touch with him only a handful of times since we met at Hamilton High School in 1960, he is one of the most important people in my life–possibly the most important, if I consider the developmental aspects of what he taught me about life and about myself. Our conversations, decades apart, always begin with “I don’t know if you’ll remember me…”; of course I remember him, but the amazing thing is that he remembers me. “You were one of my best students,” he always says–and I soak it up like water in a drought, even though I suspect that every student he talks to makes that A list.

“I found some of your writing, and that drawing you sent me,” he says, “and I wondered how you’re doing. People from all over the world have been coming to visit me,” he adds, with that amazed delight that was always his default response to anything that happened to him. I remember he once told us in World Literature class that the course of his life had been altered when he was our age by falling in love with his wife, Sonia. “I would have become a juvenile delinquent without her,” he tells us, “but instead, I became the man she wanted me to be.” Then, in a moment of inspiration that would be stifled in today’s classrooms, he gazes out the window and tells us, “she had breasts like ripe peaches,” his Italian hands helplessly demonstrating what it felt like to reach for them.

They married at seventeen, I think, and when I asked him the over the phone the other day how Sonia is, he said, “Perfect! She’s always been perfect!” and I can hear his mouth shape into a perfect, glorious smile as he says it. Then he tells me, “Robert flew in–from Princeton! He’s friends with Noam Chomsky,” he adds, laughing. “He liked you, you know.”

“I know,” I say, thinking, my God–how does he remember even his students’ romantic interests, and picturing what my retirement years would look like if I had married Robert in high school. “Tell him I regret that I didn’t reciprocate,” I say, laughing too.

“You should come see me,” Ideale says, and I tell him I’m broke. “I’ll pay for your ticket,” he offers, and I know he means it, even if he says it to everyone. “There’s room for you here.”

“I’ll come if I can,” I say, knowing that I won’t, because I couldn’t bear to see him, because my heart begins to suspect why he’s really called me and is breaking because it’s suddenly clear that he cares enough about me–how does he even remember me!–to let me know that he will be moving on soon.

“How are you?” I say, and he tells me what a wonderful life he’s had, how perfect his two children are, how much he loved his forty years of teaching. He tells me how dismayed he still is by religion, and I smile to myself because this man is the most perfect representative of faith, hope and charity I have ever known; he’s obviously still up on current events because he asks me that the hell “legitimate rape” is, and I can picture him shaking his head. He’s been reading a seven hundred page biography of Mark Twain.

I ask him how old he is, and he says, laughing again, “eighty-six.” I photoshop the mental image I have, adding some Einstein white hair to the forty-year-old I knew who drove a motorcycle to school and parked it under the flag pole in some kind of effort at political balance.

“You should come see me,” he says again, “and don’t wait too long.” This is the part I’ve been afraid to hear, but I try to follow his rational lead as I brace for what I know is coming. He laughs as he adds, “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around–there are a lot of tumors.”

“Are you in treatment?” I ask, and he tells me no, there are too many this time. I tell him I will write to him, that I’ve become a teacher myself, that my life feels like maybe it counts for something at last.

“It’s a wonderful life,” he says, like a benediction. There is only joy in his voice–no trace of fear or regret.

How much longer will teachers like Ideale Gambera be around in your life, or your childrens’, once “higher education” is downsized and redefined to exclude human relationships?

This is what I wrote to Ideale:

I remember when Disa was maybe three or four—the same age I was when my father disappeared from my life—I came to your house one night, no doubt with some incoherent question strangled in my introverted soul, some need for guidance or more likely restraint, no doubt about some idiot I was about to get involved with. I remember coming to you without knowing why, with only a young woman’s vague sense of carrying a powerful current too strong for her body, feeling it lash inside of her like a live wire in a storm in need of being grounded.

I remember you were sitting in your living room chair, talking about the importance of living the examined life while your own daughter carefully peeled off one of your socks, looking up at you slyly with her saucer eyes so like your own. You didn’t make it easy for her, or hard. You kept holding forth about Socrates, with one dark sock puddling around your bare ankle and an elvish smile on the face of your daughter, the future scholar of medieval feminism. I remember how the current from father to daughter and back again lit up the room with unspoken delight, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

I remember taking various guys to meet you during the handful of times I saw you after high school, and I remember you coming to my house, incredibly, that one time when I was in my forties, and meeting my latest husband. They never measured up, and your presence made that suddenly, achingly, clear as a pain in the chest that I tried to dismiss as unrelated to heart disease. The attacks followed, though, and in retrospect, trying to heal, I was always grateful for the warnings that the contrast of your presence provided, even though I could not recognize them in time.

You never met the one man who loved me more than himself, who lived an examined life even as Parkinson’s disease claimed it. You would have liked Jay’s father, and he would have respected—in a wise man’s impersonal way—how you took our son under your wing, briefly, that one time in Eugene. It only takes one instance of enlightened witness to break the grip of this heartless Dickensian world, or so claims Alice Miller. I remember how, hearing that the new step-family had disowned my nine-year-old boy, you went upstairs in my fairy-tale house and woke him up to tell him he was invited to yours, anytime, and to Tahoe too, whenever he wanted to come. You told him to remember that, and he still does, more than twenty years later.

I remember how you have always loved people in your path indiscriminately, fully, generously, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

I remember that you believed in me, inexplicably, all along, and that you also—incredibly—remembered me.

I want you to know that your gift of recognition is still an unexpected grace in my life, and I want you to know that I have at last done something worthwhile with it. You said that my forties and fifties would be the most productive time of my life; as always, I am behind the curve—but in the end, I have become that English teacher who, like you, makes a difference in my students’ lives. At least that’s what they tell me. Like you, I teach community college students to live an examined life, even when what they must examine is difficult. I will attach something I wrote about that and read in one of my classes the other day.

My writing is the lover I bring to your door now, hoping not so much for approval as for completion of the circuit, hoping to give back some vision of what you have given me.

Thank you for having loved me.

I have loved you too, and always will.

One more Christmas present

I have been away from my blog and everyone else’s ever since I got the new job, because my work load suddenly tripled, my sanity level red-lined, and time to do anything beyond what’s absolutely necessary for survival dwindled down to a fond memory. Many things have suffered: I said to my son the other day, “I remember when I used to be nice to people.”

Nevertheless, since it’s Christmas, I wanted to take a few minutes in support of  friend, client, fellow writer, and Very Good Man–Jose Chaves–to let everyone know that for today only, you can download for free a Kindle version of his wonderful memoir, The Contract of Love.

This book is my last editing project, and even though I have read it many times over the several years and multiple versions I worked with, it still makes me laugh and cry every few pages. It’s one of those rare books that deliver at the end, instead of trailing off or falling apart–and that’s because it reflects the real-life trajectory of its author.

My son and I spent Christmas eve with Jose’s family last night–it’s the kind of house where kids, friends, and neighbors congregate spontaneously, with or without an invitation, where people laugh and sing and nobody cares whether it’s on key, where ten different conversations  about everything from philosophy to skateboarding are going on at once, where people are happy without being drunk, high without being drugged, and close without dishonesty or compromise.

I am giving away the ending of the story, but I don’t think that will spoil the read–because don’t we all want to hear about how someone survived the deep pain we are all familiar with, and even transcended it?

I know that every such story helps heal my own childhood damage, and that makes such work a particularly appropriate Christmas gift: it’s like a light in this dark world whenever one of us reaches for love, and finds it.

Click here for your present, and Merry Christmas!

12/28 update:

If you missed the Christmas giveaway, you can still get the Kindle book for free by clicking on the above link on January 12 (and only January 12). Happy New Year!

Well now I feel ridiculous

…because after my post about the job interview that went horribly wrong except for the fact that I discovered I could scream—well—I got the job. So okay, you kindred spirits: can we pause self-doubt and condemnation as the default tape for long enough to acknowledge that we aren’t all that bad?

Hard, isn’t it.

Perfectionism, high expectations, self-blame, punishment, shame—they’re like a pack of hyenas who know there’s still meat on the carcass, waiting to resume their meal even when driven off. You can hear them grunting and howling while they wait for you to start in on yourself again. And they are apparently as smart as primates, so don’t think that your success is going to deter them from going after you:

In a study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Dr Benson-Amram showed that spotted hyenas experimented with different strategies to open a closed box…. Some of the hyenas tried just a few methods to open the puzzle box while others used many, including biting, flipping it over, digging underneath it and pushing it around. Those that tried a diverse range of techniques tended to be more successful and once they had opened the box once, they were able to open it again more quickly…. Dr Benson-Amram added: “We found that successful hyenas got much faster at solving the problem over time. Eventually they learned the solution such that they would run up to the puzzle box and open it within seconds. …We saw some indications that wild hyenas were also learning about the problem by observing others solve it. One hyena, however, that could not figure out how to open the puzzle, learned he could position himself near the door so that when another hyena solved the puzzle he could get to the meat faster and eat it all.”

Yeah, really. (Sidebar to writers: trust the subconscious to offer up an image–even when it’s a cliche like that pack of hyenas–that turns out to be a scarier metaphor than anything mere intellect could provide!)

So trying to save ourselves with reassurance and repetition of all the wonderful things people have said about us (and people did say some unequivocally wonderful things about what I thought had been a complete disaster)—or even with a litany of past successes (I’ve had many)—is just an attempt to build a better, more hyena-proof, box while those suckers are just watching how you put it together and doing their reverse-engineering number all the while. Maybe that’s why they often sound like they’re laughing.

So forget about that! As I said in my original post, screaming was an excellent response to the hyena pack of inner critics, at least in the initial phase of the attack after I thought I had failed: it’s probably what drove them off, because prey that screams is still alive, and might thus pose a threat to their existence.

But what do we do with success? We can’t lock ourselves in our car, as I did when I thought I’d failed, and drive around town screaming all the time. Success, paradoxically, requires a more sustainable response, and thus success—at least for us damaged perfectionists—is a whole lot harder than failure.

Naturally.

Crap! We’re tormented when we fail, and even more tormented when we succeed, because all that’s changed is that the expectations are higher, so we feel weaker and more inadequate—and that kind of anxiety works on the hyenas like the scent of blood.

But if I follow this metaphor, as I advise my writing students to do, the solution is as simple and straightforward as the fear: instead of working to build a box around yourself that they can’t open, just step out and live. Scavengers, no matter how smart or resourceful, can’t pry you out of a box you have left behind–and they don’t have the strength to take on someone who is fully, simply, alive: making mistakes and good decisions, taking wrong and right turns, breaking and fixing things, trying and failing and moving on.

So here’s what I’m going to try to do: I’m going to try to remember that the gift of life isn’t dependent on performance, or worth—and that our potential isn’t measured by effort or good works, or even by DNA or environment: it’s all about what we love. When we love the good—for example, when we see someone in need and want to reach out a hand to them—performance doesn’t matter as much as intent. And intent does come across: so what if I couldn’t find the light switch, or work the computer, or even string together a coherent sentence in my job interview. I have loved the people I teach, and that’s the truth—and I’m lucky enough to work in a place and with people who value the same things I do.

That’s why I got the job. It wasn’t about being good enough, let alone perfect: it was about being alive and in love with my work.

The gift of life is often given and received blindly, but as we grow up we can increasingly catch a glimpse of what it means (through that glass, darkly) and be grateful. I’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating, if only as a reminder to myself: you can’t go wrong with gratitude. Appreciating the gift of life is one ability that increases with age, so that paradoxically as we move toward physical death, we can become more fully, imperfectly, alive every single day.

That—and laughing a whole lot more—is my plan for dealing with success.

Productivity

Has anybody noticed that as corporate productivity goes up, customer productivity goes down?  Can we get that on the record in the great balance sheet in the sky, along with other calculations of the real costs of doing business, like carbon footprints and toxic waste?

I’m talking about how many hours it takes on the phone with “customer service” just to get to the point where you finally have not only a human being on the other end of the line, but a Level 2 Tech, that mythical wizard behind the curtain who understands your issue but who can’t give out a direct phone number, and who puts you on hold until your call gets dropped. This is where much of my time goes when I’m not working—trying to fix  something that some company has screwed up. I have spent as much as two hours on one phone call, waiting to get to that Level 2 Tech so that I can start all over again. I’m sure you have too.

Then there’s the extra level of irony that while we’re hung up on hold, the profits of “productivity,” in the form of corporate wealth and outrageous executive salaries, are being spent on buying nutcase politicians who are going to make our lives even more miserable with plans like denying birth control to women, denying climate change as the world self-immolates, outlawing critical thinking (see the platform of the Texas Republican party), and projecting their psychopathology onto the poor—who are poor, they think, because they just want to be leeches on society.

In a conspiracy theory interpretation, it feels like a diabolically productive initiative to keep us busy and distracted while they finish us off, demolishing voting rights for poor people, students, minorities and old folks, so as to emasculate the inconvenience of democracy; outsourcing what’s left of our jobs; killing off the few unions that remain; shredding the social safety net; and completing Orwell’s vision: Please hold. Your call is very important to us.

Repetition

Sometimes my kids just hold up fingers to signal how many times I’ve told them that. They are grown men and sensitive souls, so they don’t intend offense. Most of our conversations are sporadic, minimal, our vocabulary as distinct as the difference between, say, English and Korean—except that, having grown up in the modern world, they understand English perfectly, whereas I’m lost in the sea of acronyms and references that separates us.

They talk to each other—repetitively, I might add—and tell me, convincingly, that they love me. When they’re really hurting, they spell it all out to me eventually, and to no one else, so I know there is a bridge across the chasm of age that separates us. But it’s a bit like the conversational equivalent of a one-way mirror.

There are so many things I want to say to them, but it would just be shouting against the wind across the void of time. They don’t want to hear it, don’t need to hear it, probably can’t and even shouldn’t hear it—so I’m stuck with banalities, and nagging warnings about ridiculously outdated concerns.

Maybe that’s why I keep having to repeat myself–not because my memory is failing, but because I keep feeling the impulse to reach back across time to give them something I know, something I’ve seen, some consolation they may not even need yet–but will need, oh yes.

Maybe old people gradually go silent because we finally accept that insight must be hard and singly won, that the key can only fit when the lock is discovered, when necessity drives—that the young will find their way, even as we must move forward, feeling our own way into the snowstorm of the unknown.

Performance

I had a job interview yesterday. The only good thing about it was that I can tell myself this is the last one I’ll ever have to go through–not because I got the job but because at my age and with my resume, full-time employment opportunities are as rare as wise decisions were during most of my life, when I was compiling that resume (I have many years of expertise in the world of alcoholic character actors, and cult leaders, for example–not exactly marketable skills).

Oh my God. It was horrible, even though a rational person would probably say I did fine. And even when it was over, I had this mental slime residue I couldn’t get rid of–all the things I shouldn’t have said, or the things I should have said, or the part when my mouth went obviously dry during the teaching demo (let me demonstrate what a panic attack looks like), the part when I couldn’t download the file properly or even work the light switch, the fact that time ran out when I wasn’t even close to being done, the way I managed to put my boss on the spot, the way nothing I said even made sense.

Oh my God.

All of you people out there who promised to pray for me–WTF??!?  Was the cell tower to God out of range? Because intermittently, I did seem to get hooked up to something that mattered–but then it was like, hello? Hello? Can you hear me now? How about if I move over here? It’s……not…….working…….Hello? God? Anybody?

Jesus! (He was asleep in the back of the boat, snoring.)

The worst part is this aftermath; it’s like compulsive instant replay of the move that lost the World Cup on a penalty kick: the goalee sees the ball coming a little too late, she jumps and reaches, but it sails over her head. Again and again.

Failure to perform.

Naturally, one obsesses: but is it always this excruciating? Do other people want to blow their brains out if only to shut them down? Or drink a fifth of whiskey? Or spend over two hours watching Snow White and the Huntsman? That was the method of oblivion I opted for, which turned out to be just a metaphorical replay of my interview, in which a perfectly good fairy tale devolved helplessly into a slow-motion fiasco: Really? Seriously? Fairies that look like Gollum, and a cartoon deer?

Even my escape was second-rate! A real writing teacher would have gone for the Jack, not a Skinny Girl margarita and a chick flick. So now I get a meta-level beat down from my crowd of inner critics, who, through long work in therapy, had been won over as fans or at least convinced to tone down the criticism, until this interview–I had won their respect, but then I disappointed them and now I…

Oh my God: shut UP!!!

It’s not even about whether I get the job. It’s all about punishing myself for not performing perfectly. I know I’m not the only one who does this, and I know I do it all the time–not just in high-stakes events like a job interview.

Reassurance is not a cure.

Success is not a cure.

Screaming, on the other hand, helped—and this was a revelation: on the way home from the movie, I realized I was alone in my closed-up car, winding through an unpopulated area at high speed, so I tried it. I believe it’s the first time in my life that I’ve actually screamed, so I had to experiment—but it didn’t take long for my first wimpy effort to accelerate into a throat-scarring banshee wail that sounded like an ice pick driven into my ear—followed by blissful, complete, mental silence.

Wow. I’m good at screaming. Maybe I could get hired somewhere to demonstrate this.

And now, with the whole thing receding into some reasonable mental space, no larger than it deserves, I’m thinking maybe those prayers worked after all: maybe what I needed was to give voice not to the perfect interview, but to a lifetime of perfect, desperate rage. I mean, think about it: sixty-five years old, and I had never screamed. Maybe God wanted to hear my voice, because I think it might have been loud enough to reach, wherever he is–loud enough to wake Jesus up in the back seat, because suddenly there was silence and the mental storm ceased, just like when those guys in the boat woke him up and he calmed the waters and asked them where their faith was.

Maybe some version of the next miracles he performed will also follow: freedom from the compulsion to cut oneself with stones, freedom from long and mysterious bleeding out, freedom from the lifetime nightmare of being misunderstood and misjudged, which is the trauma that seems to give rise to this whole thing. As in that last miracle—when Jesus woke up the little girl who was supposedly dead—the people who raised me thought I was dead, maybe because they had worked so hard to kill me, and in subsequent roles over the course of a lifetime I had been cast as the silent good girl, or the victim lying flayed open on the table in some real-life version of CSI.

But it turns out I was just asleep. The first thing I did when I woke up was to scream, like anyone would upon having her chest wall slit and peeled back to expose the heart to being measured, weighed, analyzed and rated. That’s what it felt like every time I was sent to a different home, a different family, when I was a child. My life was on the line if I failed to perform, and screaming was not an option.

Now, though, it’s apparently a whole new world—and in a weird synchronicity, I notice, today is also Independence Day where I live. God only knows what will come out of my mouth next.