I felt like was Miwok too
When my parents weren’t tanked, we had plenty of fun family times. We drove up to the Russian River and canoed around, carried kites and hiked up into Tiburon hills, straight up from our house, crossing rusty barbwire fences through pastures on the way. My father loved hiking, and we made up funny songs while we walked, poems and skits for each other, gut busting laughs. It almost seemed to make up for unpredictable drunk ugly. Continue reading “past changes” »
I was a thief
Have you ever thought about the difference between a moral and an emotion? I thought they were the same, and operated my life using emotions as an excuse for my behaviors. I’m scared, so I yell, type of thing. Continue reading “moral or emotion?” »
I hope she climbed onto the rainbow
Aunt Pru was my namesake, my mother’s sister, and she died of lung cancer fifteen years ago this month. I’m remembering her. Our powerful relationship through the years was mostly good, but we had serious confrontations, too. This story is about the mystery unfolding for me at end of her life.
Aunt Pru was a master gardener, and her yard showed her loving efforts with loads of colorful flowers.
The day she left on a rainy Saturday, my seven year-old son, Joey and I drove over to her house that afternoon to say goodbye. I shared a memory about how my cousin and I sang the folk song, “500 hundred miles’ as a duet when we were young, and how Aunt Pru loved to hear us sing it. I wondered whether or not my cousin and I would sing it for her one last time, at her deathbed.
“How many miles to Heaven?” Joey asked me. I still don’t know an answer.
Heading down the hill toward San Rafael, we felt enchanted to witness a massive complete rainbow that extended across the sky, and it seemed to end above my aunt’s house.
She was unconscious when we arrived, and I sort of remember singing with my cousin. I do remember taking my aunt’s hand, saying, “There’s a rainbow over your house right this moment. I want you to get on it.” She passed away later that day, and we still feel her loss.
As I drove to my teaching job the following Monday morning, I was thinking of Aunt Pru, missing her. I also remembered about how much I love lacey old-fashioned white iris and their delicate beauty. I earnestly wished to see some of those beautiful iris on my commute, but didn’t see any, so I thought no more about it.
Five hours later after teaching my last class, I stood at the art room sink, cleaning up after students. One of my students burst into the room, holding an entire blue iris, complete with roots, that he plucked out of someone’s yard on the way to school. He walked over to me and handed it over without any explanation.
In church the following Sunday, my rector gave a sermon. He started it by saying,
“The goddess of the rainbow is the iris.”
Everything lined up for me when he said that. The warm presence of life, the flow of cosmic energy I do not understand. I don’t have to understand.
Truth does pass all understanding.
How about Jerry Colonna?
My dad worked in the radio business, and he brought home a lifesize plastic fake jukebox record player, a fabulous little space man who came to live with us. Its silver plastic chrome lit up bright red when I plugged it in next to the green couch, one speaker blaring. Continue reading “the coolest” »
let the light in
Constantly fixing myself gets old, and I’m trying to let go of always trying to ‘be better’. I’m sick of focusing on what doesn’t work in my life. I’m tired of feeling like a victim from life’s struggle. Let’s go with new thinking! Continue reading “working on growing up” »
I love Taylor Mali and his fabulous response to what teachers make. It’s true. Teachers train hard for a career which prepares them to work with students and develop teaching skills. Teachers need support for what and how we teach. We need to be heard.
Students have different schools these days than before. Corporations, like Educational Testing Services control a tremendous amount of how a teacher teaches, and politicians are taking over with their philosophies.
For example, today’s American Standardized tests in English focus more on non-fiction than fiction. This is a crucial shift. Think about this.
A teacher on NPR radio opinion said it plainly this morning, “Out with Shakespeare, in with the New York Times.” Students are not being taught to respect their imaginations in school much anymore. Current politics has succeeded in ‘taking the teacher out of teaching’.
The teacher told about his students responding to Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” in a more compelling way than if they read historical documents about the Viet Nam war. More than ever, students are taught to pass a test, instead of how to grow their character.
O’Brien wrote a collection of short stories about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. His third book is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division, 3rd Platoon. The powerful memoir vividly captures personal stories, but it is considered fiction. It took O’Brien over twenty-five years to write his memoir, relying upon a technique called metafiction, or verisimilitude. The reader becomes more involved with events because they feel real, deep connections with real characters as if they are true. These are the connections that truly teach about the Viet Nam war, not just statistics.
With non-fiction, we might get dates and events, but we do not get emotions that linking fiction brings to history. So we can’t use O’Brien, because it’s ‘fiction?’ Which content changes the world? The facts or the people? Does studying for a test make us compassionate individuals?
Someone once said, “Genius is the person who makes connections” and fiction can do that for each one of us. Students can read O’Brien and become part of the Viet Nam story. That is learning. Students learn to love reading and learn about their past, their humanity.
I respect teachers. We know what we are doing, and most of us do it well. We want students to remember both facts and use their imagination. How we learn does change the world. Student by student. Not test by test.
Our students deserve to go deeper into themselves with a blend of fiction and nonfiction, to learn who they are in American History and have it mean something.
My parents and me arriving in San Francisco
Mental illness is much bigger than most of us. Hospitals are full of clinically diagnosed people like my best friend, who spent her entire life in them and knows nothing else.
We have undiagnosed mental illnesses that cause those who suffer from it to self-medicate, with substances like drugs and alcohol. There’s behavioral mental illness, like gambling and overeating. Many of us suffer from more than one kind. Continue reading “mental anguish” »
TV was as real as a relative who came to live with us
TV was the most important visitor in my family. I was five when we got our first one, and my father made local TV commercials. He once drove the family Pontiac onto a television lot so he could slap its front fender to punctuate his pitch: “Now YOU can trade this jalopy for a new Chevrolet from Ellis Brooks, on the corner of Bush and Van Ness.” I remember watching and thinking, “What a star!” as his voice rang out on our tiny little black and white TV screen up high on a table in our living room. Continue reading “Why we’re different from our parents” »
Hastings cutoff was a tragedy
Every Californian knows the Donner Party’s unsuccessful struggle to get over the winter Sierra mountains of 1846 and 1847. The party believed that taking the Hastings Cutoff would save them three hundred travel miles, but that was not the case. Hastings deceived pioneers. Hastings had never traveled the route, but he made bogus maps that many pioneers tried to follow, and he made money writing his map. It was not a short cut. Cannibalism and horror are the Donner party’s story because they believed Hastings. Continue reading “The ultimate deception” »
trajectories
Where do the words go when we have said them? Margaret Atwood asks that question, and I have also asked it before. Some people don’t even think about where words go or where consequences split away from our thoughts. I also want to know what happens to consequences that we don’t get from choosing different behavior? Continue reading “considerations” »