Recollections of Springtime in the Frozen Tundra

I'm going to take the plunge and order Marcel Proust for my Kindle. It used to be that buying Remembrances of Things Past made you a weightlifter. Now, thanks to technology, no more lower back pain when reading the masters.


I don't know which came first -- this blog, or my tendency to travel around the different epochs of my life. This is what prompted my Proustian meanderings. (Who am I kidding? I've been reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for what seems like an eternity. How am I ever going to get through Proust?) Today, as I made my way from the Technology and Training Center, where my office is located, over to the Administration Building for a meeting just next door, something hit me. I'm not sure if it was a breeze, a ray of sunshine, or a combination of both. Maybe it was the sound of that breeze as it worked its way through the canopy of trees that surrounds our complex, or the scent of a budding flower. I think it had something to do with being in a campus-like setting during the time of year when the weather starts to take a turn for the better.

Suddenly, I flashed on a patch of dirt and grass across Marshall Street from the Generic Bar in Syracuse. We called it something with the word "Beach" in the title. It was either just "The Beach," or "Generic Beach," or "M-Street Beach." Something. We would go into the Generic, buy our beers and cocktails, and then take our places on that patch on the other side of the street and watch the world go by on M. Street. We were peaceful, so the cops never gave us any trouble. I remember my friends Jem, Kenny and I once joking drunkenly at the expense of our number-one basketball star at the time, Dwayne "Pearl" Washington as he walked by with his entourage. We couldn't help noticing that he had a huge rear end, something we hadn't quite realized watching him work on the Carrier Dome floor. "Hey, Jane!" we slurred, just quietly enough so that he couldn't hear us, "get your books outta your butt. Why are you carrying your books in your butt?" No one else got the joke, but it killed me, Jem and Kenny.

It was such a joyous time, as that iceberg of a campus turned into one of the most beautiful places you'll ever visit in the warmer months. I'm no meteorologist, but I'm guessing that the same lakes and glacial formations that make for arctic freezes and record snowfalls also somehow account for the crystalline blue skies of summer up there in Central New York.

There were a few spots where we gathered during the thaw. The Beach was only one of them. Others included Fraternity Row on Walnut Park, where beer flowed and bands often played in the spring and summer. The quad is an obvious one; I picture sitting on the steps of Hendricks Chapel, or throwing frisbees, shirtless. There was Thornden Park, overlooked by some students, but to me one of the great treasures of that campus, and even Oakwood Cemetery, where I took many pleasurable walks during my time as an undergraduate up there.

College is such an important time in a young person's life; it leaves an indelible impression on the soul. I wonder if my friends who do college counselling -- Tara, Eva, Erik, and the rest -- think about this much, as they send their kids out there into the world. Knowing them as I do, and knowing they are all such good souls, I have no doubt that similar images of springtime on campus come up each time they shepherd another one off into the Great Unknown that will help determine the rest of their lives.

Oscar Night

Over three hours after it began, the 2011 Academy Awards have finally come to an end, and just like every year, I was riveted by every moment. There were a number of good ones, including a surprisingly lovely speech by Christian Bale (although I noticed they're saying on Facebook that he forgot his wife's name; I think he chose not to say it, for some reason known only to him), and the "F-bomb" coming from Melissa Leo, who I loved in "Treme" and "Homicide, Life on the Street". So happy for both of them, and it's clear that I'll need to go see "The Fighter."

I'll obviously need to see "The King's Speech," as well.

There will be cynical reactions to Kirk Douglas's piece, but I was touched to see him on that stage. And, as my wife (what's her name? Oh, yeah, Jeanette) said, James Franco and Anne Hathaway were "forgettable" as co-hosts. In my opinion, Anne came off as trying too hard, and James came off as not having prepared all that much. (In fact, he'd flown in for rehearsals on the weekends, due to his workload as a PhD student at NYU.) There were the usual clunky bits that you can't help but think should have been cut to avoid the inevitably long run-time. This year, the "musicalization" of "Harry Potter" and "The Social Network" was a time-waster, although I'll admit the "Twilight" punchline "Doesn't this guy own a shirt?" was good for a chuckle. I always find the "In Memoriam" bit moving. This year the experience was odder than usual, however, as my five year old, Jackson, sat next to me, astutely saying, "Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead," after each person's image was flashed on the screen, until I asked him to stop. The ones that made me saddest were Pete Postlewaite, Dennis Hopper, and Patricia Neal.

Throughout my life, Oscar night has been a big deal. My mother used to pop popcorn and make fudge for us. More recently, before leaving New York, Jeanette and I got into Oscar Pools and we hosted a memorable party for the awards the year before we moved. I used to actually see all the movies before the Oscars, but nowadays, my life is a little too hectic, and movies are a little too expensive, so I no longer know anything about the films, other than the buzz that's out there. I saw "127 Hours," which impressed me, and solidified my admiration for James Franco. I bought the DVD of "The Social Network" and enjoyed it; however, I have to confess I don't see it as "best movie" caliber. That being said, I'm happy for Aaron Sorkin, who was an undergraduate at Syracuse University during the years I was up there. Go Orange!

I know it's fluff. I know it's emblematic of a decadent culture. I know there are other, more important things the money could be spent on. But I can't help it. I have always watched the Oscars, and I probably always will. Next year, Jeanette and I are hoping to host our first Austin-area Oscar party. So don't make any plans for Sunday, February 26, 2012....

Damn Yankees

I'll probably never really know just how much my father loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. He talked about listening to the games on the radio as a boy in Larchmont, and I think he may have even ventured into Brooklyn and caught a few games. I did come close to understanding his devotion to that team fully, I think, during a visit to Little Rock, Arkansas of all places. We were there visiting my mother's parents, and my father came into our hotel room after having been out at the pool. His face was barely recognizable. He looked like a kid.

"I don't believe it. Ducky Medwick is here! At our hotel!"

My brother, mother and I all looked at each other. We had no idea what he was talking about.

"He played for the Dodgers. When they were in Brooklyn. He was one of my favorite players. I just met him. I just shook Ducky Medwick's hand."

I think we may have met Joe Medwick, former Brooklyn Dodger at that point. He may have flashed a big, fancy World Series ring. It's one of those things that either happened, or I "filled it in" to make for a better story. To this day, I'm not sure what he was doing in Little Rock in the middle of summer. It wasn't the kind of heat you wanted to be in if you could avoid it.

Like many, my father was disappointed by the Dodger's departure from New York. He explained that back then there was a class thing going on; the pinstripes of the Yankees represented the pin-striped suits of Big Business, whereas the Dodgers were the team of the people. It's well documented that they used to take the streetcars and buses down Eastern Parkway, where they lived among their fans, in order to get to the park.

The Yankees were the enemy. They were the rich cousin who always made the Dodgers look bad in their many battles for the world championship. (Except for that one, lone victory in 1955, the one bright spot for Dodger fans in that storied rivalry.)

This rivalry created a generation of Yankee-haters. It seethed from my father's pores. He barely allowed us to watch the Yankees. In our home, it was Channel 9 and the Mets only. We didn't dare switch to the Yankees on Channel 11. I'm not sure what he would have done. My father was a gentle man, but there was something about his demeanor that told us this might change if we ever flicked that dial two clicks clockwise. So we never did.

He was a National League loyalist who always rooted against the American League during the World Series. Those two back-to-back losses in 77 and 78 had my father feeling the despair of his youth; you could see it on his face. The 1981 win over the Yankees brought back a bit of that 1955 adulation for him.

I say all this to preface my brief love affair with -- dare I say it -- the Yankees. The 1996 team was hard not to love, even for someone brought up as a hardcore Yankee-hater. They were homegrown young players like Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera, and they were a lot of fun to watch, because they seemed to be having more fun than everyone else out there. I also had a great time going to games that year with James Savoca, a long-time Yankee fan. When I showed up at my dad's place in Irvington for dinner one night, he saw the Yankee cap on my head and said, "What is that?" as if I were wearing a satanic head dress or something.

Flash forward to my Dominican father-in-law, Daniel Reyes, another Yankee lover. He was convinced, when I married his daughter, that I was a Yankee fan like him. I started dating his daughter right around the time I had my brief love affair with his team, so I can see why. Of course, now he's figured out the truth. He enjoys rubbing my nose in Yankee victories, but in his polite, smiling way.

And it's true, since the acquisition of numerous big-ticket superstars who will remain nameless, I've kind of gone back to being a Yankee hater again. I get a deep joy from seeing them lose -- something that must go back genetically to my father's painful experience as a Brooklyn Dodger fan. Sorry, suegro. It's just the way I was raised.

Movie Memories: R-Rated Flicks of My Youth

This morning, as I enjoyed my day off from work, I surfed the cable channels until I happened upon a movie I hadn't seen since it came out in theatres in 1973. It was the first R-rated movie my parents ever took us to, Day of the Jackal. I got caught up in the story, thanks mostly to some good acting by Edward Fox, who plays the title role. The story pulled me in, and I remembered almost nothing, except for a couple of details, like how he tightened a rope around his arm, a tree and the high-powered rifle, so he could get a steady shot, (see photo, above) and how once he had adjusted his sights, he placed one of the bullets he intended to use on President de Gaulle, and the melon he was practicing on at two hundred yards blew to smithereens when he hit it, dead on.

What I do remember is that my parents' attempt to introduce us to adult cinema at ages 10 and 8 respectively was considered a grand failure and something of a joke. It's mostly sex that got the movie its rating; there's hardly any real violence in it at all, other than the implied violence of what may or may not happen in the climax of the film. And the way that Mike and I responded to the sex scenes was with abject boredom. As the story goes, when Fox is just about to bed down yet another woman he is using as cover, 8 year old Mike says, at the top of his voice, "Oh no. Not again." Apparently it brought down the house.

The problem may have been in the timing. I'm not sure if it was a busy night in the baby sitting pool, or what. But when I think about it a bit, I realize that I may have given my father a reason to think I could sit through two hours of suspense and intrigue and very little action, other than the sex. I had started staying up later on Saturday nights in order to watch Mission: Impossible with my dad. I enjoyed pretending to understand the plot-lines, until I saw the joy it gave my father to explain them to me.

I didn't care much what was going on in the story; I just liked the time with my dad. It was horror movies with my mom and spy movies with my dad.

But I wasn't ready for all the intrigue and, well, "naked ladies," as I referred to them then, The Day of the Jackal had to offer.

My other embarrassing R-rated movie story is the time my mother and I decided to go see An Officer and a Gentleman together. The sex scenes in that movie are extremely graphic and realistic. (Who can forget Debra Winger's famous line, "Pass me a towel, will ya?")

I sank as far down in my seat as I could and waited for the end credits to roll. Of course, it's a great film, but not one a 20 year old dude wants to see with his mom. Oh, God! I shudder thinking back on it all these years later.

Now when I see Day of the Jackal or An Officer and a Gentleman on HBO or wherever, all I want is just one more chance to sit down with either or both of my parents and get their responses once more, the comments I can no longer recall. Like everything else, these movies make me miss my parents. But they also provoke a smile and a sense of gratitude that they've brought the departed back into focus, if only for a moment.

Frequent Flier and Still Freaked Out

Okay, so I'm not exactly at the George Clooney level, but I have racked up a bunch of miles since going to work for Region XIII as a grant manager a little over a year ago. No one is going to put my name on the side of a plane, unless I decide to spray paint it myself, and that just sounds very risky. I think they've got a few laws against that sort of thing.

On average, I make two round-trip flights a month, and when I say I'm still freaked out, I mean that on a couple of different levels. For one thing, I am just freaked out to be "that guy." When you spend the bulk of your career as a classroom teacher, you're pretty anchored to one place. The only flying you tend to do is during vacations, with the exception of the occasional education conference here and there. I'm sure some of you who work in the private sector will laugh at my claim that two round trips a month makes me a frequent flier.

Still, it's not something that my career prepared me for, and the "glamour" of it, such as it was, faded a long time ago. I'm the guy whose kids have to tell their friends, "Oh, my daddy's on a business trip." I'm the guy whose wife has to fend for herself with those same children twice a month, every month. Never thought I'd be that guy. It freaks me out.

The other thing that freaks me out is flying itself. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm afraid of flying exactly; that would be absurd. It does, however, often make me physically uncomfortable, and I've taken to downing Dramamine more often than not. In addition, I never studied physics, so I just don't get it. The whole flight thing baffles me. I mean clearly, the thing weighs tons and tons. It's in the air and it's fucking flying. That just makes no kind of sense. This moment comes at least once on every single flight. I look out the window of the airplane, and I think, "How is this possible?" Now, I'm sure someone out there reading this could send me an explanation, with words like "lift" and "thrust" and "resistance" and all of that, but I'm still like a monkey with a TV set at some point during all my air journeys.

There will likely come a time before too long when I am more grounded (no pun intended, really), either in my present job, after the grants I'm on run out in a year or so, or in some other, more "place-based" position. The monthly travel will become a thing of the past, a fading memory, something I smile about as it flashes into my mind while I do the dishes. So I suppose I should simply try to enjoy it, right? Rack up the miles and the free flights and drink coupons. I'll do that, but it will always be with both the odd sensation of feeling like I'm living someone else's life and the incredulity of the monkey, scratching at the banana on the TV screen as I wonder just how the hell the whole thing works in the first place.

Coming to Terms With Race Down Here in the South

A few years back, in the late 1990's I accompanied friends to Town Hall in Manhattan to see Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have a conversation about race. I had read (and taught) Race Matters which I thought was profound and original. I wasn't familiar with Dr. Gates, except for maybe a couple of op-ed pieces in the New York Times.

I was immediately impressed by Dr. West's delivery; he has become something of a celebrity now, as one of Bill Maher's favorite panelists on his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher. He speaks with a cadence that makes you think of jazz music, often riffing, but always returning back to his point, the way a jazz musician keeps the melody as a through-line through every tune.

Cornel West had recently started working with Dr. Gates at Harvard University, where the two joined forces as a kind of Dream Team of African-American Studies professors. Their traveling interview show was the modern-day equivalent of a barnstorming tour, and I was captivated.

It wasn't just the way in which Dr. West spoke that made me feel that way. He said a number of things, as did others that evening, that challenged my thinking and made me grow as a citizen of the world. As an example, at one point Cornel West looked out into the audience and asked us to raise our hands if we were racists. He did it in his kind, warm fashion, but it was still jarring, and no one quite knew what to do, especially because his own hand was up in the air as he asked the question, suggesting that he considered himself a racist.

He explained that in his mind it is impossible to come up in a racist society like ours and not be a racist.

"But you see," he said, his finger in the air, his eyes widening, and that gap-toothed smile peeking out from an overgrown beard, "I am, however, a recovering racist. Can I see the other recovering racists in the house?" Of course we all put up our hands. After this kind of back and forth went on for a bit, Dr. Gates opened the discussion for questions. A young African-American man got on the mic and said, "I'd like to hear what the two of you think about Charles Barkley and the fact that he's supporting Republicans on the campaign trail. These are the same Republicans who prevent Dr. King's birthday from being recognized as a holiday in Arizona. As a man of color, I'm offended by this."

At that point, another of those exciting, surprising and unforgettable moments came up, when filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles stood up (he was only a couple of rows in front of us) and said, "I'd like to address that young brother who just asked the Barkley question. You see, that's racist. By saying that Charles Barkley has to be any kind of way, due to his blackness, you're being racist. Any man should have the right to be and say whatever he wants, whether it fits into what you think he should be or not."

There was a deep silence then, the kind that comes when someone has said something that has made a whole room full of people think. That evening, and the ideas that came forth from it, changed me, made me better, and gave me valuable ammunition as a teacher.

I'm thinking about it now, because last night, sitting and eating a nice meal at a place called the Inlet Crab House in Murrell's Inlet, I looked up and saw a sticker on the wall that said, "I Don't CARE If That's What They Did Up North" with a picture of the Confederate flag on it. It was small enough to be "subtle," but I was still startled by it and it served to remind me where I was and to realize, sadly, that I would probably not be comfortable bringing my wife and kids to this place. Of course, no one gave me a second look. I looked just like them. I could have voiced my distaste and I could have left. Instead, I stayed and finished my meal, and the key lime pie was the best I've ever had anywhere.

I'm not saying any of this makes me, or South Carolina "evil." It doesn't. I'm just grateful that my eyes are open to these things, and that I can be self-reflective and constantly strive to fight against those tendencies that this society ingrains into all of us, almost from birth.

The Importance of Stories in Education

"Keep Telling the Story" -- Hanno Fuchs

There's an interesting confluence happening in my life right now, with this notion of "storytelling" smack in the middle of it. Obviously, this blog shows a renewed interest on my part in telling stories, as do my daily "morning pages." The blog often concerns itself with stories that want to fill in the blanks -- the missing or fading pieces of my family's past. And my morning pages are usually an exercise in capturing any worthwhile stories from the day before, among anything else that crosses my mind.

The idea of "confluence" comes in because I'm seeing and hearing the word "story" more and more in the professional circles in which I work. As a kind of backlash to the "data-driven" push of the last ten years or so in public education, more and more people are calling on that other kind of data -- the anecdotal or qualitative variety.

It came up first in the book Influencer that is central to the work I'm currently doing. The book posits that stories, when told well, allow those whom you are trying to influence to take a leap of faith. Good stories let you imagine a different reality and thus make you more likely to take steps toward change.

I can buy that. It certainly seems to be true of the kind of professional development I have always responded to as a learner. I like it when people teach me through stories. It feels personal. Intimate.

It feels real.

The most fortuitous of all these coincidences is the fact that tomorrow morning I will be sharing the stories my six subjects tell in my video That Safe Space. It will be an easy connection for the people who come and who have been attending this conference for the last few days. I'm hoping that those who come will enjoy the film; I'm confident that they will. My only concern is that because it's the final slot before the farewell lunch, many participants will have already left for their flights home.

But that will be their loss. At this point, my attitude is "Let go, let God." It will be what it will be. Those who stay and choose to make their way into my presentation will hear some touching, important stories. My hope is that they will be inspired by the stories that they hear, and that they'll be inspired to go back home and create, and gather their own stories.

In my father's words, I'm hoping they will keep telling the story. It's in this way that we will change education for the better.