2/25/2009

New Jersey 35, or Love Note: Teachers

In no particular order.

1) John Kenny, 5th grade Social Studies/History. You became my hero on the first day of class, when you pointed to the smoke detector in the ceiling of your classroom and announced that you'd fitted it with a cootie detector. And then, to drive home the point, you pointed out that it hadn't gone off yet, and hence, nobody in this class had cooties. So anyone who accused another student of having cooties was a bold-faced liar. You taught American history with so much love, you sweated and cried through the unit on slavery, which you'd taught 25 times by then. On cold days, or hot days, or days when we just couldn't pay attention, you gathered us on the big rug and red out loud to us. You didn't even mind when I recited the book along with you. Your jokes were sarcastic, dry, plentiful, and just on the border of inappropriate. I wish I knew what had happened to you.

2) Donna Mejia, college, Middle Eastern Dance/Tribal Fusion. You lead by example, and do it so well, it was as if you were telling me not to give up on this dance form. But of course, you weren't. You don't work that way. In the beginning, I was looking so hard for that extra attention, that little whisper of encouragement, and it never came. I got the same silence as every other student, the same lectures, the same level of patience. You were only willing to celebrate me when I was willing to celebrate myself first - and your smile was genuine when you cried, "Look at you, lady! That *is* a perfect maya" At the very end of school, after I'd written the poem that proved I finally understood what you'd been teaching all along, you told me you were going to keep an eye on my doings. I wish we were in touch. I wish you were still my teacher.

3) Dee Matthews, post-college, Poetry. I call you teacher to your face, with good reason. You made me believe in the power of positive feedback again, called each woman in our workshop to rise to her feet and spit as hard as she could. Later, in another place, at another time, I watched one of your own pieces break you down as you struggled to get through it in the privacy of a messy hotel room. I was so honored to be able to witness that, that you opened yourself up and let me see some of the mess.

4) Jean DeRosa, middle school, Social Studies/History. You were the first person who ever called me Woman! You gave me extra credit for drawing political cartoons satirizing our school on the backs of my history tests. You sat with me for hours after school, letting me talk about all the craziness and offering nods and concerned faces. In class debates, you always put me on the side I disagreed with. You didn't put up with bullshit, not from me, not from anyone. You threw an essay in my face once, and told me you wouldn't take it until I could look you square in the eye and tell you it was my best work. You read my poems. You gave me my only major acting role and laughed through rehearsals. You came to Passover at our house one year, and sang Go Down Moses before I knew why we weren't supposed to, but damn, you have a good voice. I hear you're still there, in my elementary school, kicking ass.

5) Marisa Januzzi, high school junior, English. You were my everything - my teacher, adviser to the gay/straight alliance we started, employer (when I babysat your kids), cheerleader, mentor, and eventually, friend. I've tried to write poems about you, unsuccessfully. You let me get away with bloody murder when I was your student. I turned in my final paper the day after school ended. I lived in your classroom. You once told me "don't give up digging, just because you've discovered a famous literary critic in your hole - be glad for the company and see if you can get deeper." You wrote me a three page recommendation letter for college. The only times I see you now are when I show up at your house uninvited with a bagful of apples and make pie with your children. I have daydreams about opening a school with you, and watching your kids grow up. And gardening. And cooking.

6) Bill Oram, college, Shakespeare and Milton. You gentle old bear. In all honesty, I doubt we were that special to each other. You keep an iron guard on your personal life, at least with me, but still happily let me tantz into your office whenever you had a moment. Your old Bess was usually there too, all bone and soft ears, gently nuzzling whatever visitors you had. You listened to my poems, took me seriously, and gently poked my essays. You read Shakespeare out loud in class, beautifully, powerfully. In fact, your readings show just how much you usually hide of yourself from the universe. And then, when the other professor was sick and you took over my Milton class - just like that. As though there were nothing you'd rather do than discuss Paradise Lost at nine in the morning. And for you, I wrote the very best paper I wrote as an undergrad. So good, in fact, that I spent a whole second semester working on it, like a thesis, even after you'd given it an A. And that's your way. Gentle. Subtle. Genius.

And there are others: Angela Rodin, who was so patient with my professed hatred for science. Floyd Cheung, who gave me the best semester-long homework assignment - a quote book. Justin Cammy, who demanded vigor, rigor, humor and stubbornness. Alexandra Drazniowsky, who imparted a love of European history like only a Russian can. Laurie Kneeheart, who never tried to make me play with Barbies.

And you? What teachers have shaped you?

2/23/2009

New Jersey 34, or More Fairy Tales

A.B. asks:

Is there drama in house ever?
How did you and Jo get together?
Who has children and where did they come from?
What are your weekly meetings like?
What are the challenges of living together?
What are the religious persuasions of the members of your community?


Easy questions first - of course there's drama in the house! Sometimes it's ridiculous drama, like Arlene-hates-dishes drama, and Cindy's obsessive cleaning rampages drama, and your-thesis-is-getting-in-the-way-of-my-dinner drama. Sometimes it's more serious. After Jo's father died, two years ago she dropped out of the world for awhile. She spent hours and hours chopping wood, and disappearing into the woods. She started drinking more heavily too, which is when the real drama started. I had various meetings with different neighbors, trying to figure out what to do about it. Eventually, there was an intervention, and Jo agreed to go to counseling and quit drinking for awhile. But it took awhile to get there - at least a few months - and everyone was talking about it, trying to figure out what to do.

And sometimes there's ego drama, and communication drama, and the general pettiness of day-to-day life. Everyone's got a list of the neighborhood rules somewhere in their house, which keeps a lot of the stupid things at bay. The rules are simple, basic, and hard-and-fast: Act with permission and consent of owner (of house, of yard, of tools, of body). Respect each others' voices. Say what you need. Respect your neighbors' needs, and work to meet them. Everything else is negotiable.

Religion: well, there's Jews, agnostics, Unitarian Universalists, pagans, Catholics, Muslims and atheists. One good thing about being out in the middle of semi-nowhere is that we've all been called upon (at one time or another) to act in community with one another religiously. When Jo's dad died, we had a minyan every night - nevermind that only 4 of us were actually Jewish (me, Jo, Rebecca and Henry). Same for Eli's bris (though the circumcision debate beforehand was something to behold). We've all taken part in solstice and equinox rituals led by Diana and Thunder, and and Esperanza sometimes asks people to come over for Mass. Just so she can have it, and not feel alone. We've even been called to Maria's particular brand of atheism, which involves meditation and campfires.

There are 7 children, 3 of which have been born since the neighborhood was founded. Esme's daughter Carmen (8), was born just barely three months after we'd all moved in. Michel and Travis fought long and hard for adoption rights (a mixed-race, agnostic/Muslim gay couple has a tough time, even in Massachusetts in the future!), and got Ella (6) two years later. And Henry and Rebecca's younger child, Eli (4) was born right here. I mean literally, here. Maria delivered Eli in our living room in front of the fireplace during a horrible thunderstorm. Good thing she was their midwife anyway.

The other four were born before the neighborhood was formed - Rachel's daughter Maia (11), Rebecca and Henry's other child, Sara (9), Eirik's son Nathan (9), and Diana and Thunder's kid, Scout (10), who doesn't quite have a gender, because ze hasn't chosen one yet.

Weekly meetings are part horrible, part wonderful. The wonderful part is the food, always, especially in summer when the days are long and the tomatoes are plentiful. The other wonderful part is seeing everyone gathered around the table, and listening to the kids check in about the week's projects. Everything else is, well...it's a house meeting. You know what that's like. Debates about community funding and how it should be spent and who-stole-my-hammer and let's-talk-about-last-time-I-think-there-was-some-sexist-stuff-going-down and whatnot.

The important part is that we keep going. Knowing that some weeks are going to be awful like that, but the neighborhood is important, we are important to one another, and pointing out the rules when things get tense. Respect each others voices. Help your neighbors get their needs met. There is no reason any of us should be hungry or cold. That's why we're here.

As for the story of me and Jo...that's a longer entry. For later. If you're really good.

2/18/2009

New Jersey 33, or More Fairy Tale

MJB asks:

What's the layout of your house? What are the colors, the decor, the feel?
When random people walk in, how do they feel?
What do the kids actually learn about? How do they spend their days?


The house was once a farmhouse, and contains a lot of rooms that were added over the generations, giving the place a sort of patchwork feel. The front door leads into the living/cooking/eating space - the cooking part of the kitchen is painted in cobalt and dandelion, and the walls around the couches and wood stove are barn red. It's not quite as jarring as it sounds, but Cindy and I were definitely going for the cheerful look. Some of Jo's drawings are framed on the walls, and a collage of newspaper clippings Cindy made for Arlene, which highlight her academic accomplishments. The furniture in the living room is cozy and broken-in. The couch was originally mine, a sweet corduroy giant the color of garden soil, which can fit up to six kids or four snuggly adults. Nobody sits in the recliner by the stove without Arlene's permission, except the cat, who we call Cat. Jo's old futon is there too, doubling as an extra couch, and Cindy made the coffee table, which is really an old refurbished trunk that holds blankets and extra pillows.

The front door is hardly ever used, and the side door hardly ever locked. The side door comes straight in by the refrigerator, which is how I like it - people going straight for the kitchen, the heart of the house. We set it up so folks would have room to stand around and socialize without getting in my (or any cook's) way. The counters are all butcher block, the refrigerator is covered in kid-artwork, and one wall is a chalkboard, which we use to scribble notes and lists. Right now, it reads: "light bulbs, cinnamon, hot paprika, CELERY SEEDS!, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, nails, toilet paper, peanut butter", "C - can you fix the wobbly leg on our night table, will love you forever - D","REMEMBER FRIDAY'S MEETING!"

I hope people feel welcome when they come in. That's the idea, anyway. There's a shelf in the fridge labeled "guest" that folks are welcome to raid. It usually has iced tea, at the very least. Sometimes there's cookies or what-have-you. Sometimes, not too often, I come home to find someone sprawled out on the couch, fire roaring, coffee in hand. I like it when that happens.

The kids are homeschooled, or "unschooled" - the parents among us have rejected the idea of school as an institution, and are allowing the kids to collectively guide their own education. What this looks like is every month or two, we have a meeting to decide what projects the kids are going to pursue for the next several weeks. Each kid decides what they want to study, and for how long. Sometimes they double and triple up, wanting to learn together. Or they decide on a theme - like this month's "working with hands" - and figure out a series of projects to do around that theme. The "term" usually ends with some kind of presentation, or finished product. I'm hoping by the time this unit is over, we'll have new veggies to eat, and new dishes to eat them off of.

The kids have to spend at least a few hours each day dedicated to their projects, and at least one or two hours a day doing chores. Chores can be stacking firewood, helping me clean the pottery shed, spending time in the garden, cleaning their own homes, helping Esme put together mailings, or whatever else is going on. There are systems to hold them accountable, but on the whole, they're really good about pitching in. Sometimes, I wish I'd grown up here. And then I think - nah, if I'd grown up here, my rebellion would've been awful. I would've become a Mormon investment banker in a high-rise or something. I keep waiting for the day that the kids start to rebel. But they're all under 12 still, so maybe we have a year or two yet.

2/08/2009

New Jersey 32, or More Pieces of Fairytale

J.G. wrote to me:

who does the cooking in your house?
who are the people you know who come over?
what do people expect when they come to your house?
who are you to the people in the soup kitchen and the home for waywards?
to the farmer down the road who grows strawberries with mexican labor?
to the kids who accidentally play in your yard?


I cook when I can, sometimes the others. The only one who really doesn't cook much is Arlene, but that's only because she's usually commuting when the cooking is happening. She does make a serious gumbo though, and that comes straight from her grandma. Don't get in her way when she's making gumbo. The cats and I learned that the hard way. Cindy's vegan, and the rest of us are carnivores - Jo keeps kosher, and Arlene and I love bacon. I sometimes test new recipes for the kitchen at the House for Waywards - usually when a new vegetable has just come into season, and we need to use massive amounts of Brussels sprouts or tomatoes or something. I'm the one responsible for our house's weekly potluck contribution, and I usually make something with pasta. I still never make desserts - that's Cindy's thing. I don't know what it is about that woman and vegan cupcakes, but she does something magical to them. She's the most relaxed vegan I've ever met though - she does live in a place where we eat all sorts of meat right under her nose, and she's never complained.

Our house has an open-door policy, with one exception: when Arlene's working on her thesis, she hangs a picture of a stack of books on the door, and that's a sign to stay on the porch, or to knock, if it's an emergency. On any given day, the kids are in and around the house during school hours because of the pottery shed - there's an unspoken rule that says if the kids are learning at your house, you're in charge of lunch. Since our house has the pottery and one of the bigger gardens, the kids have been in and out a lot lately. There's seven of them that belong to us - the community - and sometimes there are more, depending on who's at the House for Waywards.

The House for Waywards originally was supposed to be half writing school, half retreat center. But then Esme started volunteering at the domestic violence shelter (about 40 mintues away), and she came to us proposing to make it a safe house in connection with the shelter, which took forever to reach consensus on, but officially opened to its first family about a year ago. When famlies come in, the neighborhood trickles in like a welcome wagon, bringing food, company, support. We invite them to be a part of the neighborhood while they're around, which usually takes awhile, but that makes sense. We've had about four families since, and we've been lucky that most of them have been really open to us - their kids sometimes join ours for school, and it was one of the moms who stayed there that started the soup kitchen idea. It's not a traditional soup kitchen, because street folks don't usually get out as far as we are. Instead, we make meals and deliver them to shelters and hangout spots around the area about once a month.

Rebecca works as a counselor in connection with the women's shelter, and serves as the social worker for some of the families that come through, and is on call as the emergency contact for the families that come in. She's working to expand the soup kitchen into a small catering business, since we have less time for the corporate retreat guys, less money coming in.

As to the farmer down the road who grows strawberries with Mexican labor...it's complicated. We're neighbors, in the way people have to be neighbors when there's no one else around. Maria delivered his wife's second kid during a blizzard three years ago. When his pickup was the only thing to get through the mud last April, he took Jo to the hospital when she broke her ankle. He offers us boxes of strawberries during good years in exchange for asparagus and raspberries. But the relationship is exactly just that - neighbors, only in the most superficial circumstances, and the most dire ones. I don't like to admit it, but I keep an eye on him, watch for any signs of him treating his workers badly. I don't know how or how much he pays them. Sometimes, I see him out in the fields with a pile of water bottles on the back of his flatbed, passing them out. He speaks Spanish well, and all the workers wear the same wide-brimmed straw hats for sun protection. I don't know where they stay or live. He brings them in on the truck every morning.

We've talked about it at neighborhood meetings - is it our business? If there's no signs of abuse, do we have a moral obligation to report him for having undocumented workers? Is it our obligation to confront him about it? Esme's dead against it - her dad was an undocumented worker in California for years, and thinks nothing good will come of reporting him. It'll only mean that his workers get deported and he'll just bring in more where they came from. Henry says we should try and talk to the workers, to see if he's paying them a useful wage. Jo says our relationship as neighbors is a delicate balance that must be maintained for everyone's good, because if we can't count on our neighbors, who can we count on? Meanwhile, I walk past his place ever week - it's not far past the House for Waywards - and keep my eye out, telling myself if I see or sense something I don't like, I'll bring it up. To someone.

In the meantime, his kids play with ours - not often, as they go to school in town - but they know the rules (no playing in the yard of someone who's not home, only big kids are allowed by the stream alone, no touching the kiln, the power tools or using the kitchen without permission), and they generally get along well with the others. Jo rounded up the kids last week to stack firewood and, after some complaining, turned it into a race, full of shrieking and giggling by the side of the house. They sounded like they were having so much fun that Arlene actually put her book down and headed outside to join them. After a quick rinse-off in the stream, they came thundering into our house, dug into the fridge for the pitchers of iced tea on the "guest" shelf (sweet tea for Arlene and Jo, just lemon for me and Cindy), and spent the afternoon digging through Jo's collection of comic books that span all the way back to 1992 and debating the merits of Spiderman vs Batman vs Superman and the Hulk.

2/06/2009

New Jersey 31, or A Piece of a Fairy Tale

The fairy tale doesn't begin at the beginning, but it will end at the end. Because the beginning hardly matters. It gets forgotten by the time you've gotten to the good part in the middle, but no one forgets an ending - happy, sad, cliffhanger, dissatisfying, whatever. This one - this ending - leaves me content enough to fall asleep at night. In fact, sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of the story, just like you're supposed to.

Arlene, Cindy, Rachel, Rebecca, Maria, Esme, Travis, Henry, Thunder, Diana, Esperanza, Michel, and Eirik are my neighbors and housemates. We met at a secret plot to take over the universe that was disguised as a multi-culti community organizer training. Half of us were there, sent by our various nonprofit employers, the other were doing the training. I was there as neither, incidentially - the organizers wanted me to do a poetry set to complement the hours and hours of workshops. After the performance, a group of people lingered, talking in the back of the room, sprawled out over the folding chairs, and I went to join them.

Fast foward to the good part. The part where we live on two long dirt roads in a not-entirely-distant corner of Massachusetts in a bunch of houses that got foreclosed on during the big recession. We'd had this plan, the group of us, to take over a neighborhood in one of the major cities and become a sort of Rainbow-Coalition-Meets-Black-Panthers-Meets-Neighborhood-Watch-Group, but the plan got shut down when Arlene got tenured at the university near here. So we bought the houses collectively, figured out who was living with who (Jo and I were sort of the main couple by then, but we didn't want to live alone, and the others were starting to pair up, and trio up and negotiate all that), and decided the remaining house was going to be the Home for Waywards, which was part guest house, part soup kitchen, part writing school, part counseling center, part corporate retreat center. I mean, something had to bring in money.

Jo, Arlene, Cindy and I got the best of the houses - the one with the biggest kitchen. I painted it blue and yellow, and turned one wall into a chalkboard, for grocery lists and teaching. Cindy built a massive butcher-block table, and it became the center for all our meetings, craft parties, concerts, teach-ins, homework parties and potlucks. Arlene and Cindy got the two downstairs bedrooms, and Jo and I took one of the two upstairs. It was small, but it had the most light, and we were happy up there. Arlene hardly lived in her room anyhow - her research was taking up half the kitchen table, and I sometimes still find her asleep next to her coffee mug in the morning.

My pottery shed's out back. I'm slowly working on learning how to make enough stuff so that we can eat everything from homemade pottery. Henry thinks this is way hippie-dippie of me, and likes to poke fun at my efforts, but that's only because he learned pottery in art school. I'll get him to teach me how to make plates one of these days. The walls of the shed are crammed with projects - at the last planning meeting, the kids decided they wanted to do more work with their hands, so the curriculum this spring is pottery, auto mechanics, gardening and woodwork. I've decided that nature writing counts as an extension of "working with one's hands." Jo just says I'm too much of a wimp to get axle grease and mulch under my fingernails. I threaten to give her a nice scalp massage the next time I come out of the pottery shed, and she immediately backs up a few feet, shielding her perfectly spiked hair as I chase her around the kitchen until I let her catch me by the stove.

In between kisses, she mutters into my neck, "Not when I'm having this good a hair day."

2/05/2009

New Jersey 30.5, or Placeholder

Dear virtual universe,

This is a placeholder with which to hold myself accountable. I promise in the next day or two, I will write you a fairy tale.

Love,
~Dane