Last day… loving students

I wrote the following on the last day of class. For some reason I never published it. So here it is, three weeks or so late!

_____________

Reading final papers is always interesting. It’s the moment when I get a sense of whether or not what I’ve done over the quarter has been worthwhile. In my 70 class, which is two classes below collegel level, I tried a different approach, and wasn’t so happy. I don’t think the final papers were as good as I’d have liked them to be, but a couple of students wrote well, and as always I learned something. One student, working on his draft, wrote the following sentence about a fire that had almost destroyed his home:

“Then the police officer took me to the back of my house. There he found a graffiti that read F*** You Scrap 187 with a seventeen being crossed out. Scrap is a word used to insult the set we claimed. By crossing out the 17 is how the rivals disrespect your numbers.”

He was a former gang member. (OK, for some inexplicable reason WordPress has changed my font, and I don’t know how to change it back!) The fire, set by rivals, which came close to killing family members, had been targeted at him personally (17 was his gang number). At the moment he saw the words on the back of his gutted house, he realized how destructive his life style was. Now he is back in school, sitting quietly in the back of the class, taking notes, smiling shyly when I call on him to read. He tells me he read Monster by Walter Dean Myers, and that it changed his life. (It’s now on my list to read. I love to learn more about my students.)

Given where I live, his story is not uncommon. In the developmental classes, where I ask for more personal writing, I hear stories of gang membership, drive by shootings, initiation rituals. I’ve seen scars from bullet wounds, met the babies of young girls who left the gangs when they found out they were pregnant, read one paper that began, “Most people have firefighters or police officers as their heroes, and if that’s what their dads are, they’re proud. I was proud of my dad too, but he wasn’t a fire fighter. He was the leader of one of the biggest gangs in L.A., and I wanted to be just like him.”

Sometimes I see these students for one quarter, and then they disappear into other English classes, or they drop out, or they transfer. Sometimes I follow them as they pass through some or all of my classes, and watch them mature and change, and eventually graduate. When I read their stories, I feel privileged to know that I’ve been a small part of what gave them the courage and confidence to continue in the face of the odds that would have stopped many less determined people.

Esperanca’s book

“Here,” Nada told my sister, Ruth May, on Christmas Day. “Did you see what Adah gave Esperanca for Christmas?” He held out the book I wrote for his daughter and had published at Lulu.com. It looked like a real book, a trade paperback with a glossy bright cover and numbered pages. Ruth May turned away, pretending busy-ness, and didn’t even look. Her boyfriend didn’t look either. Nada put the book on the coffee table and we went on with our Christmas, but all I could think about was Nada’s family, how when Esperanca opened the present at his house on Christmas Eve, they erupted with joy. They passed the book around reverently, opening it with careful, loving fingers. They traced the picture of Esperanca on the cover. “Wow,” they said. “You wrote this? For Esperanca? That’s beautiful.” His brother told me, afterwards, “I don’t generally read books, but I’m going to read this one.” His aunt and mother asked where they could buy their own copies. They called his sister and his other brother to tell them.

I was surprised, totally surprised, at their reaction. I didn’t expect too much response, except perhaps from Esperanca, who set to reading immediately. And now I’m embarrassed, afraid it won’t be good enough. I knew my family wouldn’t be interested. They never have been. Ruth May has never read the book I wrote with my mother about having breast cancer together. The others show little interest in my writing, my life, except for Leah who has a kind and generous spirit, although she is troubled. Over the years, she is the one I find myself most empathetic towards.

I didn’t expect Nada’s family to be so welcoming of Esperanca’s book, to thank me so eagerly for such a great present. I love them. I cannot get over people who accept me so readily and warmly. I expect them, every day, to lose interest. Their continued love and support amazes me.

How odd the past month or so has been. I look through my window at the patio upon which birds fight, at the winter-bare tree branches and the massed clouds behind the hills on the horizon, at the narrow slant of yellow sun that lies across the dead grasses on the walkway. It is all cold and still; even the birds stop in mid-peck and look up, as though awaiting something.

I have been working a little on the book I wrote with my mother, imagining I can publish it on Lulu for those who might be interested it, family friends, though not family members. I begin it with Obadiah, because Obadiah is the thread that links the story through the years.

And now I remember Mum didn’t want us to withdraw from one another, didn’t want us to turn our backs because we see things differently. Ruth May’s disinterest in anything I do is simply who she is, absorbed in little Liam’s first months, lacking curiosity. She has always been thus. She is still my sister. Obadiah holds us together, not a book for someone she’s never met.

Jack Kerouac’s Advice

“He just stopped coming one day,” R.C. said. “He said, ‘I gotta go on the road.’ And he did.”

The college reading group was in the middle of discussing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This morning, before the meeting, I Googled the Beat writer, brushing up on his life in preparation for the discussion. Wikipedia noted his 30 steps to better writing. I paste them below.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

I don’t want to be good any more. I want to write without editing, without censoring. I’m afraid of words in ways I never used to be. Locked myself away from the freedom of them, wrapped in rules, in advice, in teaching “how to.” I used to just write. Goddamit I want to write like that again. But there’s ice there in the place where the words reside. I want to be warm. I’m tired of winter. It all pulls, this way, that way this way that way this way this way this way no way. No way.

Too much comfort. One paper left to grade, and grades to post, and then the break, and a workshop to get ready for, and two new class preps, and ice in my throat, melting from too much comfort.

“Here,” he said in my ear, softly. “Right now.” Years ago, a dark stairwell, his hand, light filtering from behind a grill that blocked our way. The warehouse mall behind us, around a corner shoppers and security guards. The dark our blanket, but for that one glimmer ahead of us. I remember. I am in the center of remembering when the Old Guard speaks.

“I’ll take your recommendation any day,” he says, this crusty man who grumbles about everyone’s choices . He’s taught where I teach for more than four decades. He sat in on a class on Irish writers I taught when I first started there. “Those books in your class, they were excellent. I’ll go with your recommendation.”

I’m surprised. They’re all longing for Kerouac’s wildness to bring them back to freedom, to the illusion they can live in that melancholy wild desperation till they die, and that it will be romantic and beautiful even as their livers explode from cirrhosis. I think, There will be angels. I love that title: Desolation Angel. The only kind. But now they turn and look at me, the good girl, and I have the power to decide for the group. I don’t know what to say. Someone prompts me. “You’re the expert,” he says. “That’s why I thought we could do a Barry book.” The expert.

I know the author, went to dinner with him, interviewed him, wrote an article that was published in the Irish Literary Supplement. He called it a humdinger of an article. I love that he’s a mystic about his writing. I love the way he is “submissive to everything, open, listening,” the way he is a “crazy dumbsaint of the mind.”

Expert. I laugh. It’s not true. I haven’t read his most recent novels, not for lack of desire, but for lack of time and energy and the compass that points me. But still. “Yes,” I say, and suggest, and they accept my suggestion.

I am obtuse. I know it. If you want more, you can explore. The clues are there. But none of that matters. I just want to write, to not be good, to confess.

To confess.

Demanding birds

I got my birds feeders up late this year. Most weekends I was gone to my dad’s three hours away, and during the week I was running Zeke around and reading papers and trying to get my book finished for Esperanca (it arrived yesterday, a book that looks real, novel-sized, with a cover and numbered pages and my name on it!). Finally a couple of weekends ago I was looking out the slider window at the chaotic mounds of half-melted snow and sodden decaying leaves all over my patio, and I saw birds lined up on the fence, looking in at me with dark, accusatory eyes. When they saw me looking, they jumped around and flew back and forth and cheeped loudly. Now, the very first year I moved here and put a feeder up, it took weeks for the birds to find it. I had almost given up before the first tentative bird approached and began to peck, then disappeared eventually to bring back a few friends. Over the years, the numbers increased until last year two dozen or more birds would fight regularly over the grain, and I never had to wait for them to find it again. As soon as the weather turned and I put the feeders up, the birds were waiting.

This year, though, they told me in no uncertain terms that I was negligent. I looked up and down the fence at the condo where I live. No birds on any fence area but right in front of my place. The feeders haven’t been up since March or April or so, and yet here the birds are, waiting, demanding.

So I spent the morning cleaning the patio and taking down my hanging baskets with their  burden of dead flowers, and replacing them with clean, filled bird feeders. As soon as I went back inside, the feeding frenzy began and it wasn’t just a couple of dozen birds, either, but maybe 50 or more. Some are plain, lightish brown, with delicate patterns on their wing feathers. Others have a grayer tone and black heads. Those are the two dominant species. They’re tiny and spunky and they fight and bicker over spilled grain. Now I need a bird identification book. I’m really quite horrified at how ignorant I am. I know what magpies and American robins and crows are, but that’s about it. In the meantime, it’s hard to concentrate on reading in my chair when right in front of the window the birds put on such an entertaining show. Well worth the two to three bags of bird food a week I’ve been feeding them.

Facebook

My sister in Ireland asked me to subscribe to Facebook a few weeks (months?) ago, so I did. It’s a strange place. When I signed in, it asked if I wanted it to find my friends. I said yes, and a list of people popped up. All but one I knew in some way or another. It brought home how everything we do is connected via the internet if we’re online at all. I suppose it pulled names out of my email address book in order to connect me with people all over the word whom I’d emailed at some point or another.

So I added my “friends,” and pretty soon my friends and sisters were sending me things: pink ribbons and hugs, astrology charts and video invitations. Today I got a “Funwall” message from my sister, so I clicked on the link and found myself at a page that was asking me to draw something. I drew a ridiculous stick figure of me looking frantic, with a pile of papers as tall as me to my side. Well, that’s what it was supposed to be, but I’m not known for my artistic talent, especially drawing right-handed (I’m left-handed) on the trackpad of a MacBook. It was really more of a scribbled mess that will remind people that I should have been locked up in the loony bin in Dundrum years ago (For any Irish readers out there!) rather than let free to impose my “art” on the world. Still it was sort of fun. But I meant to send it to Leah, not to everyone in my “friends” list, which I did by accident (a problem of Facebook seems to be that it defaults to sending things out to everyone rather than easily letting you pick which friends to release your hugs or thrown snowballs or hideous art or whatever to. Or maybe I’m just Facebook-incompetent.)

I don’t have much time, so I don’t visit it often — only when Leah or a couple of my friends send me things to look at (Which is more and more often). But I do wonder at how the internet and public forums like Facebook and Myspace (and blogs) are transforming the way we interact. My daughter’s Myspace seems to be a forum for vindictive venting about minor feuds between friends, which then develops into transnational warfare. I don’t think my daughter participates (she is open about sharing what she’s doing on her MySpace account and shows me her profile, photos and blogs on a regular basis), but she does tell me of how public her friends’ fights have become. A small disagreement is broadcast on MySpace. Everyone’s “friends” find out and post multiple public bulletins about the fight. Pretty soon people take sides, championing one or the other of those in the original fight, and then petty side fights break out on all sides. Such jockeying for position in high school happened in the past, of course, but on a much smaller and more personal level. Now someone who has never actually met the original fighting pair, and may even live across the country, is choosing who to back, posting bulletins, directing friends to spam the non-favored one, and so on. And the argument, that in the old days might have lasted a day or two, stretches out for weeks, permanently captured and witnessed by hundreds of people, maybe more, across the state.

Which, weirdly enough, weirds me out about blogging! But I have to get ready for work, so I can’t say why just now….  Next post, I guess.

Playing chess with my mother

My mother called me last night. I was preparing to visit a friend, and had chosen to wear a dress she’d given me, a silky flowing dress, very elegant, something she had worn often. It was a coffee brown, a perfect match to a coat I wear for work that she gave me before she died. It took me years to wear the coat, because it was too expensive, too consciously classic, for me to feel comfortable in it. And it was brown, my least favorite color, the color of my school uniform from the old days in Ireland. When I finally put it on, a few months ago, I was surprised at how good it felt, the expensive material soft and almost suede-like, though it was not made from any form of animal product. It was warm, and it fit me perfectly. So there I was, dressed in a coffee-brown, silk dress and my elegant coat, planning to visit a friend, and as I was trying to pass through the door, my phone rang. I fumbled to reach it, pockets, purse, backback. But I couldn’t find it, and it went to voicemail, and then I heard my mother’s voice. She was narrating a chess game. “Pawn to b3″ she said. “Knight takes d7.” I threw my purse down, tore off my coat, ripped open my backback, desperate to find the phone. But every time I thought I’d found it it was something else, a book, a stapler, a turtle paperweight, my dog’s leash. And my mother’s voice droned on, part Tennessee accent, “nahn,” she said, “fahv.” Part Irish. “Tomahto,” she said. Not tomaydo.

And then the phone clicked off, and she was gone.

The chess game was good, though. I could see all the pieces, see the skewers and pins and forks. Color-coded lines mapped out the game, the best moves, the potential mates three or four moves down the line. It reminded me of a chess computer game my friend and I have been playing. I always liked chess, though for years I knew nothing more than the basic moves and how to castle, but my friend has taught a fair few people how to play, and last week he bought a chess set for the work release program where he works so the inmates can play. He’ll teach them, patient and thorough as he always is, and maybe some of them will learn something beyond the basic moves, will be caught up in the intricacy and challenge of it and pledge to work to become better.

My friend taught his nephew, who became state champion in high school and is now a more consistent and thoughtful player than he is. It’s a race these days, to see if my friend can improve his game enough to beat his nephew regularly, and as he’s learned so have I.

But why my mother? I’m unsettled today, thinking of how clear her voice was as she spoke those words that would have meant nothing to her. I was so desperate to talk to her, and then she disappeared, and I woke into a world dominated by chess sets. Then they floated away, and only the gray morning light remained, my sleeping dogs pinning me to the bed, and my hand reaching for a phone that doesn’t exist.

Finished!

Finally, yesterday, I laid down the final words for the story I wrote for my friend Esperanza (I should spell her name Esperanca, with a funny little squiqqle under the C, because she is Portugues and that is the Portuguese spelling for the word for Hope. Having called the character Esperanza for years, I changed the spelling after an internet search gave me the Portuguese word. I was glad. I didn’t want to give up the word Hope, but I wanted it in Portuguese. The internet is a wondrous thing.)

I wrote the book as though I had joined that “Write a Novel in a Month” site with a name I can never remember. You’re supposed to write every day, and I did, pretty much. It’s not long, not even the length the site recommend (50,000 words), but it’s long enough for what it is. It’s a series, after all. If Esperanca likes it, I’ll start the next book.

Then I spent some time figuring out how to format it for Lulu.com. There’s some issue with the transfer of fonts, with “layering.” You’re supposed to “flatten” it. I have no idea what it all means. The site has a conversion tool that will take your document and convert it to a PDF file, but if you get too excited with the fonts weird things happen. In the end, I stuck to Time New Roman for everything. The final version, 6×9 pages, space and a half (27 lines a page), with page numbers and a header that’s different only on the first page because I couldn’t figure out how to make it different with every chapter heading, is 142 pages long. I think it’s exciting enough to keep a kid’s attention, what with a talking dog and mystical otter and strange glittering doorway in the middle of a river that leads you to God knows what crazy adventures. But it’s filled with references to mythology and religions from around the world, so it’s deeper than just fantasy. For example the dog is Bran, from Irish mythology, a dog belonging to the famous Finn MacCool (anglicized spelling to help you a little with pronunciation!), and I’ve already told you who the otter is.

I’ve added Blake’s words, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite,” to the dedication page, which is, of course, dedicated to Esperanca, “without whom this book would never have been written.”

I made a cover, added a picture of Esperanca, and gave it a title. It looks fancy on my page at Lulu.com. It could fool me into believing I’ve written a real book, that real people might search for it and plunk down money. That their kids might read and enjoy it, and that the parents might read it and say to each other, “Oh, and don’t you think Nd*ll*h represents….?”

But I know it won’t look professional. The PDF file shows some warping of a line or a word here and there. I couldn’t get it all crisp and clean and so I finally accepted what I’d been given. Too many hours searching the internet looking for solutions and being hit with phrases like

1. Command = put exe filename here (e.g. C:\\gs\\bin\\gswin32c.exe)
2. Arguments = put arguments here (e.g. -sOutputFile=”%1″ -c save pop -f -)

And references to ghostscript and and “CutePDFwriter.” (What is that?? Can I meet him?)

And as for flattening: Isn’t a piece of paper already pretty flat? How can I flatten it further? Oh, wait, it’s the transparencies that have to be flattened. Oh, it’s all clear now. Transparently clear.

I did find Don’s site somewhat helpful, but not enough to decide I wanted to embed and flatten and otherwise shape my book-for-three-people into something mass marketable. So I stuck with Times New Roman, and accepted a little minor distortion here and there (still readable, if not always beautiful), and shut my computer with relief.

Still, I can’t wait to hold the finished product in my hand, to wrap it and put it under the tree, and to watch Esperanca’s face as she finally gets to see the book she’s been begging me to write for three years.