When ranchers and rangers drove a large, closed General Motors/Chevrolet vehicle based on a truck chassis, the vehicle was called a "Suburban." As soon as actual suburban moms and dads started driving the same vehicle, its name was changed to the range-friendly "Yukon XL." Fantasy becomes reality becomes fantasy. U.S. history in a nutshell.
Please send other pithy illustrations of our great nation in fantastic action. What about us tickles you?
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
Today
Arrive at school a few minutes before 8. Greet teachers, students, staff. Some students have work for me—late, but better than never. One teacher is planning a field trip to the Holocaust Museum, and needs to check arrangements. We gather for a teachers’ verse at 8:15, then disperse. I don’t teach first period, so I can check weekend email, make photocopies for my two morning classes, answer the Office Manager’s questions. We have applications on which to follow up, an upcoming visit from the building inspector, a fundraising dinner, a tennis team to put together. A parent shows up, unannounced, to ask for a few minutes. I just don’t have them, so we agree to meet tomorrow morning. 9:05, precalculus class. We just finished sequences and series, so we’ll take a couple of weeks for SAT review—mostly strategy and tactics, but it will also show what topics we could fruitfully review before the end of the year. The kids are in a good mood, first day back from a week off, colds mostly healed, happy to see each other again. Then Morning Meeting at 10—students circle the room and shake each teacher’s hand; announcements for the day and the week; sign-ups for a parent-provided hot lunch two days a week; welcome a new student who joined our 11th grade—that’s three new students for the spring semester. Our little school is growing. Then Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star,” which we’re learning as a school, students and teachers together, and Rudolf Steiner’s morning verse. Then fifteen minutes to sip coffee and review notes for a seminar (100 min. class) in cell biology. Class starts, everyone present, and we’re off. Prokaryotes, eukaryotes, bacterial diseases, oil-spill clean-up, fermentation, surface-area-to-volume ratios. An unplanned digression to discuss scale, to try to give some sense of a micrometer and then a nanometer. Then another digression into meaning—a cell is a “unit,” but only has meaning if we understand the context in which it functions. I used to stop class for misbehavior. Now I move kids around if necessary, and don’t stop the class for much. Pick up the pace and everyone has to pay attention. Then lunch time. I’m alone at the desk for a few minutes, and can catch up on phone messages and email, then 15 minutes, literally, to eat some egg salad and have another cup of coffee. Then pile the 9th and 10th graders into the bus to drive to a nearby athletic center for volleyball. I drop them, and head for the local community college for a meeting with the director and one of our trustees—we’re looking into renting space from them as we grow. They have an art room we could use. What’s the rent? Can we use storage in the back? Will our schedule mesh with theirs? I worked for this college ten years ago, and the director is the same. We chat—her son was a part-time policeman then, now a chief-of-police. The director will retire next year. Then a brief strategic planning meeting, and off to pick up the kids from volleyball. They spend the last fifteen minutes of the day cleaning the school, so I walk around checking their work. No paper towels in the downstairs bathroom. Who’s job is that? We need a substitute to clean the blackboards. The senior class is in charge, and they find someone to do it. Then handshakes good-bye all around, lock the school, and drive six students to the elementary school to catch buses home. I get home around 3:15 to snack and spend another hour and a half returning phone calls and answering emails. I change, drive to the gym for an hour and a half, then home to cook and eat. Janis is here to help, but she has a planning board meeting this evening, followed by a case study for grad school, which she started this spring. I have notes to write for classes tomorrow, but, because it’s the start of a new seminar, no student work to correct for a change. Hence, time to write this. The TV is on in the background—I love 30 Rock re-runs. Bed around 10:30—I’m reading Jesse Ball’s The Way Through Doors and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and Rudolf Steiner’s The Christian Mystery and this week’s New Yorker. Lights out before eleven. With luck, I’ll sleep most of the way through the night and do it all again tomorrow.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
What I Learned at the Gym
For the past couple of years, I’ve been a regular at a “Cross Fit” gym in my town. My experience there has me thinking about teaching and learning. (To a hammer, the world looks like a nail; to a teacher, the world looks like a lesson?) Here are some of the areas in which I believe work at the gym informs work in a school:
1. Our gym is not full of testosterone and abs; I don’t know the exact split, but it seems that at least half the members are women. Ages range from high school students to retirees in their 70s. Abilities range from outstanding college athletes to some for whom “working out” is their first experience of exercise since high school gym class. Regardless, everyone does the same workout. Each does not do it with the same weights or expectations—workouts are scaled or modified to suit the individual.
Can we teach, say, math classes this way? Every teacher knows that every class has a range of abilities and a range of prior experiences and a range of learning speeds and learning styles. Everyone is learning the same material, but some master it easily and do more, while others move more slowly and focus on the basics. In the gym, one coach works with the whole group, regardless of age or ability. Can teachers handle such a range, or is it necessary to track students by (perceived) ability, teach them one curriculum, expect them to perform on one set of expectations and problems, and then censure them in some way when they don’t measure up? (Really, despite political or administrative expectations, no real teacher does this anyway; we’re all human beings.)
2. We can all deadlift—lift weight from the ground to hang at arm’s length. We can learn proper technique to maximize efficiency and minimize the risk of injury. If we are inflexible, we can work on flexibility and, in the meanwhile, start a lift with the weights raised on blocks. Regardless of where we start, we can learn, practice, and develop technique, flexibility, and strength to improve.
This begs a question about educational standards. I’m very strong, but I can hardly jump at all. I would do very well on a standard that asked me to pick up a heavy weight, and very poorly on any standard that asked me to jump over a bar. To the extent that physical gifts mirror gifts of intelligence or memory—the sorts of things we pretend to write academic standards about—the same criticism clearly applies. The important thing is not that I jump over some arbitrary high jump bar, but that I work hard with good coaching to improve my jumping. And, needless to say, I simply cannot improve every year. I will reach my limit, I will plateau several times in approaching this limit, and, with time, I will decline.
Clearly, we could write a standard that says that everyone—or nearly everyone—must be able to jump, let’s say, four feet. We could study ourselves to learn what percentage of us can already do this, and then set a goal that a higher percentage will be able to do this next year. We can train everyone in the high jump. This is all very reasonable on a macro scale. It’s unreasonable on a micro scale. All the training in the world may not enable me to meet the standard, and no training at all may be necessary for someone else to exceed the standard.
3. This raises another point, one made well in Baumeister and Tierney’s recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. We suffer too often from two (additional) fallacies in our approach to education. The first is the prejudice that intelligence is innate—I’m born “able” to do math, or not, to draw pictures, or not. Other cultures—Baumeister focuses on Japan—take a different approach (one that is closer to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of talent than to our own, by the way; something that we can improve with effort, not something somehow genetically programmed into us): intelligence is malleable. With willpower, and help, you can learn stuff. Yes, there are prodigies, but the vast majority of us simply need to apply ourselves to learn something. Once we are old enough that we have to think for ourselves, spoon feeding won’t work. As I’ve said to algebra students for years, tongue in cheek, “Millions of students dumber than you have learned this stuff.” No one in the gym says, “I can’t.” The point is to start where you are and learn.
4. The second fallacy is the belief that we can learn without error, that we can learn by stepping only from success to success. We won’t try a math problem until we know how to do it and know that we’ll get the right answer. It’s embarrassing to the point of being unacceptable to struggle or fail, or to be seen to struggle or fail.
In the gym we fail all the time—often (not always), the point is to work to the point of failure. That’s where real learning and real progress are made. (I’ve taught skiing and swimming in the past, and this is true for these, as well. Do drills with your students until their technique begins to fall apart, and you pinpoint what needs working on—balance, weight distribution, head position, you name it. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And they wouldn’t call it work.) Trying to learn math? If you’ll only attempt a problem you know already that you can do, your progress will be slow. If the expectations of your school and your teachers and your classmates and you of yourself are that there’s something wrong with getting the wrong answer, you’re simply not in a situation that can maximize learning.
Imagine that, as an infant, you said to yourself, “learning to walk and to talk are too difficult. I’m not good at them. I give up.” You’d crawl through life, babbling gibberish. Well, it may come to that. In the meanwhile, we can recognize—as the gym does—that learning and improving include hard work and lots of failure.
5. At the gym, we write our names on a white board and post our results for the day—times, rounds, weights, whatever measure is appropriate. We acknowledge publicly our achievements. Some are successes—including personal records, “PRs,” which friends post with exclamation marks—and some are less-than-stellar. We all have bad days and bad weeks; we all need to take it easy once in a while. The posts are objective statements—there’s no particular shame or triumph in them; they are what they are.
Imagine if we had the same approach to school work. Instead of glancing at a test grade, then hiding the test in your book bag, the teacher posted all grades, all achievements, daily, next to your name. You could see how you did and how everyone else did. You might have to develop a more realistic view of your own achievements, and you might develop the resolve to do better next time. You and your classmates could see each other striving and support each other, while recognizing that some are better at some things and others have to work harder for small gains.
6. Work at the gym is not boring or repetitive. It is, by design, “constantly varied.” Imagine a classroom that was constantly varied. You know walking in, within limits, what will happen, but you have no idea what. At a Cross Fit gym, you don’t know what you’ll face each day. A long run? Power lifting practice? Gymnastics? A combination of all three? Your body and mind can’t grow too complacent or settle into a deadening routine that will drive you to skip a workout and routinize your body so that it’s actually more prone to injury, not less. Work at the gym involves learning—learning new techniques, honing new neurological pathways. Practice is necessary, but routine is a killer.
There are no fancy machines, no gimmicks or fads. Weights, pull-up bars, gymnastic rings, lots of open floor space, some rowing machines. That’s about it. There’s a parallel with education here, too. Just as we are not more physically fit than our ancestors, despite elliptical weight machines, programmable stationary bicycles, and fad diets, our education is not better for computerized learning, expensive textbooks, and faddish trends. At a certain point, close to the source, education is about the relationship of a knowledgeable teacher and a willing pupil, and not much more.
7. Work at the gym is holistic, at least physically. Good diet and sleep demonstrably improve strength, endurance, and fitness. When a coach talks about diet and sleep, we listen. We participated in a 40 day “clean eating” challenge that might better have been described as a “clean living” challenge—we earned points for sleeping eight hours or more, eating right, and drinking enough water. Yet, when teachers try to talk to parents or students about the same issues—sleep deprivation is equivalent to a reduction in IQ; low blood glucose is directly connected to a loss of impulse control—their pleas often fall on deaf ears. Why are you trying to control my life, or my child’s life?
Good teachers know lots of this already, and lots of teaching is not like a gym at all. Work in a gym may be quantified—weight lifted, time run. Important aspects of our work with our students are not quantifiable—how do you measure initiative, creativity, character, diligence, open-mindedness? Even aspects of teaching that we treat as quantifiable—learning algebra, for instance, are not as clear-cut as we might wish. A good student with a high grade is not necessarily the most insightful. Getting all the problems right may not demonstrate conceptual understanding. It’s possible to win a spelling bee without knowing the definition of any words.
On the other hand, it’s good to remind ourselves, especially in the bleak days of February, of what we can learn at the gym:
• We’re not all the same but we can still share a classroom, a curriculum, the enterprise of education. We don’t need to segregate students based on ability in order to teach them.
• External standards can be idiotic.
• It’s good to be objective. It’s okay to quantify what is quantifiable.
• Failure, in the right context, demonstrates limits, not shame.
• At a certain point, routine is the enemy of growth.
• We are wholes. What is good for the body is good for the mind.
• If we put our minds to it, we can improve.
1. Our gym is not full of testosterone and abs; I don’t know the exact split, but it seems that at least half the members are women. Ages range from high school students to retirees in their 70s. Abilities range from outstanding college athletes to some for whom “working out” is their first experience of exercise since high school gym class. Regardless, everyone does the same workout. Each does not do it with the same weights or expectations—workouts are scaled or modified to suit the individual.
Can we teach, say, math classes this way? Every teacher knows that every class has a range of abilities and a range of prior experiences and a range of learning speeds and learning styles. Everyone is learning the same material, but some master it easily and do more, while others move more slowly and focus on the basics. In the gym, one coach works with the whole group, regardless of age or ability. Can teachers handle such a range, or is it necessary to track students by (perceived) ability, teach them one curriculum, expect them to perform on one set of expectations and problems, and then censure them in some way when they don’t measure up? (Really, despite political or administrative expectations, no real teacher does this anyway; we’re all human beings.)
2. We can all deadlift—lift weight from the ground to hang at arm’s length. We can learn proper technique to maximize efficiency and minimize the risk of injury. If we are inflexible, we can work on flexibility and, in the meanwhile, start a lift with the weights raised on blocks. Regardless of where we start, we can learn, practice, and develop technique, flexibility, and strength to improve.
This begs a question about educational standards. I’m very strong, but I can hardly jump at all. I would do very well on a standard that asked me to pick up a heavy weight, and very poorly on any standard that asked me to jump over a bar. To the extent that physical gifts mirror gifts of intelligence or memory—the sorts of things we pretend to write academic standards about—the same criticism clearly applies. The important thing is not that I jump over some arbitrary high jump bar, but that I work hard with good coaching to improve my jumping. And, needless to say, I simply cannot improve every year. I will reach my limit, I will plateau several times in approaching this limit, and, with time, I will decline.
Clearly, we could write a standard that says that everyone—or nearly everyone—must be able to jump, let’s say, four feet. We could study ourselves to learn what percentage of us can already do this, and then set a goal that a higher percentage will be able to do this next year. We can train everyone in the high jump. This is all very reasonable on a macro scale. It’s unreasonable on a micro scale. All the training in the world may not enable me to meet the standard, and no training at all may be necessary for someone else to exceed the standard.
3. This raises another point, one made well in Baumeister and Tierney’s recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. We suffer too often from two (additional) fallacies in our approach to education. The first is the prejudice that intelligence is innate—I’m born “able” to do math, or not, to draw pictures, or not. Other cultures—Baumeister focuses on Japan—take a different approach (one that is closer to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of talent than to our own, by the way; something that we can improve with effort, not something somehow genetically programmed into us): intelligence is malleable. With willpower, and help, you can learn stuff. Yes, there are prodigies, but the vast majority of us simply need to apply ourselves to learn something. Once we are old enough that we have to think for ourselves, spoon feeding won’t work. As I’ve said to algebra students for years, tongue in cheek, “Millions of students dumber than you have learned this stuff.” No one in the gym says, “I can’t.” The point is to start where you are and learn.
4. The second fallacy is the belief that we can learn without error, that we can learn by stepping only from success to success. We won’t try a math problem until we know how to do it and know that we’ll get the right answer. It’s embarrassing to the point of being unacceptable to struggle or fail, or to be seen to struggle or fail.
In the gym we fail all the time—often (not always), the point is to work to the point of failure. That’s where real learning and real progress are made. (I’ve taught skiing and swimming in the past, and this is true for these, as well. Do drills with your students until their technique begins to fall apart, and you pinpoint what needs working on—balance, weight distribution, head position, you name it. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And they wouldn’t call it work.) Trying to learn math? If you’ll only attempt a problem you know already that you can do, your progress will be slow. If the expectations of your school and your teachers and your classmates and you of yourself are that there’s something wrong with getting the wrong answer, you’re simply not in a situation that can maximize learning.
Imagine that, as an infant, you said to yourself, “learning to walk and to talk are too difficult. I’m not good at them. I give up.” You’d crawl through life, babbling gibberish. Well, it may come to that. In the meanwhile, we can recognize—as the gym does—that learning and improving include hard work and lots of failure.
5. At the gym, we write our names on a white board and post our results for the day—times, rounds, weights, whatever measure is appropriate. We acknowledge publicly our achievements. Some are successes—including personal records, “PRs,” which friends post with exclamation marks—and some are less-than-stellar. We all have bad days and bad weeks; we all need to take it easy once in a while. The posts are objective statements—there’s no particular shame or triumph in them; they are what they are.
Imagine if we had the same approach to school work. Instead of glancing at a test grade, then hiding the test in your book bag, the teacher posted all grades, all achievements, daily, next to your name. You could see how you did and how everyone else did. You might have to develop a more realistic view of your own achievements, and you might develop the resolve to do better next time. You and your classmates could see each other striving and support each other, while recognizing that some are better at some things and others have to work harder for small gains.
6. Work at the gym is not boring or repetitive. It is, by design, “constantly varied.” Imagine a classroom that was constantly varied. You know walking in, within limits, what will happen, but you have no idea what. At a Cross Fit gym, you don’t know what you’ll face each day. A long run? Power lifting practice? Gymnastics? A combination of all three? Your body and mind can’t grow too complacent or settle into a deadening routine that will drive you to skip a workout and routinize your body so that it’s actually more prone to injury, not less. Work at the gym involves learning—learning new techniques, honing new neurological pathways. Practice is necessary, but routine is a killer.
There are no fancy machines, no gimmicks or fads. Weights, pull-up bars, gymnastic rings, lots of open floor space, some rowing machines. That’s about it. There’s a parallel with education here, too. Just as we are not more physically fit than our ancestors, despite elliptical weight machines, programmable stationary bicycles, and fad diets, our education is not better for computerized learning, expensive textbooks, and faddish trends. At a certain point, close to the source, education is about the relationship of a knowledgeable teacher and a willing pupil, and not much more.
7. Work at the gym is holistic, at least physically. Good diet and sleep demonstrably improve strength, endurance, and fitness. When a coach talks about diet and sleep, we listen. We participated in a 40 day “clean eating” challenge that might better have been described as a “clean living” challenge—we earned points for sleeping eight hours or more, eating right, and drinking enough water. Yet, when teachers try to talk to parents or students about the same issues—sleep deprivation is equivalent to a reduction in IQ; low blood glucose is directly connected to a loss of impulse control—their pleas often fall on deaf ears. Why are you trying to control my life, or my child’s life?
Good teachers know lots of this already, and lots of teaching is not like a gym at all. Work in a gym may be quantified—weight lifted, time run. Important aspects of our work with our students are not quantifiable—how do you measure initiative, creativity, character, diligence, open-mindedness? Even aspects of teaching that we treat as quantifiable—learning algebra, for instance, are not as clear-cut as we might wish. A good student with a high grade is not necessarily the most insightful. Getting all the problems right may not demonstrate conceptual understanding. It’s possible to win a spelling bee without knowing the definition of any words.
On the other hand, it’s good to remind ourselves, especially in the bleak days of February, of what we can learn at the gym:
• We’re not all the same but we can still share a classroom, a curriculum, the enterprise of education. We don’t need to segregate students based on ability in order to teach them.
• External standards can be idiotic.
• It’s good to be objective. It’s okay to quantify what is quantifiable.
• Failure, in the right context, demonstrates limits, not shame.
• At a certain point, routine is the enemy of growth.
• We are wholes. What is good for the body is good for the mind.
• If we put our minds to it, we can improve.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Landscape and Inner Life
I wonder about the relationship of landscape to inner life. Specifically, I wonder if each of us has an internal landscape. For me, the landscape of my childhood forms a part of my inner life, a larger part of my inner life than any other landscape, before or since.
When I was eight, my mom moved us to rural upstate New York, more than a mile up a dirt road, near the top of a hill, no other houses in sight. Our little red house perched on a knoll facing south. The valley, a mile down the hill, cut from east to west. Indian Brook ran through it, past the cemetery where my mom now lies. Rising beyond it was a long row of hills, the tallest of which had a fire tower at the top, visible in different lights as a faint “thumbs up” on the mitten of the landscape. To the southeast, through a gap in the hills, you could see, faintly, Fog Hill and then a blur of other hills leading toward Massachusetts. I let a kite string go in a fierce wind once and watched the kite disappear over that gap. To the southwest, virtually at my feet, Rattlesnake Hill rose on this side of the valley, a bump with portent just because of its name. I hiked it years later and found lots of rusty junk—the remains of a model T, pale glass fragments, and other refuse of the early 20th century—but no rattlesnakes.
Before the house, stretching down the hill and south for a couple of hundred yards was a broad, grassy field. My grandfather mowed it once a summer with a brush cutting bar on the back of his old International Harvester tractor. When he died, my mom did the same. We moved before it was my turn. At the bottom of the field was a thicket of sumac and thorny vines, probably blackberries, although we didn’t spend much time down there. The field was crowned, sloping down to the east and to the west. A hedgerow bounded it on the east, and another field, not ours, peeked through. We never planted our fields, but the field to the east grew cow corn each summer, gradually altering the backdrop beyond the hedgerow from rich brown to pale green to gold. To the west, the land was forested. When the leaves were off the trees in winter, and the sun was low, orange on the horizon, violet sky overhead, you could see a beckoning glint off the ice on the Hudson River, fifteen or twenty miles away, and you felt, standing on our tiny back porch, like you commanded vast and beautiful realms.
If you headed west and downhill you found an old logging road that curved north, down to a stream. A pocket of huge glacial erratics, at least five of them, sat in the woods just off the road before you got to the stream. The largest, squarish and flat-topped, was nearly the size of a house. You could scramble up from two of the four sides and sit on its mossy top, reading comics, playing cards, examining the lichens, or lying on your back watching clouds slide past the waving branches of the trees all around. Another, smaller rock was shaped like the Matterhorn. You could straddle the top like riding a horse, and climbing it was a challenge, seeking hand and toe holds for routes up. Another rock was balanced across two more, creating a small cave—or tunnel, really; you could enter at either end, but it was pretty dark and sheltered in the middle—with a floor of oak and maple leaves. We melted candle bottoms to a ledge inside, but it wasn’t really dark enough that this was necessary. We stored Mad magazines and comic books in a cranny, but they got dirty and damp, so we removed them. One winter the snow was deep and soft enough that we hurled ourselves off the largest rock, ten or twelve feet down, into drifts of snow, over and over.
Northwest from the house, a trail ran down the knoll to an old pump house—no longer used—next to a swamp full of cattails, dragonflies, and mosquitoes. We stayed away in the summer because of the bugs, but in the winter the trail was a perfect toboggan run. We started on a slant-roofed cistern next to the house, shot off the side onto the knoll, and then plunged down, shot to the left, and curved to the right, all the way to the pump house. A few runs packed it down, and then it was ready for wooden sleds with metal runners, face down watching the ice scream under you, or sitting up, steering with your feet, flying through a tunnel of winter. At the end of a run you could hop right up and run back to do it again, or you could lie in the snow, catching your breath and wondering if that lazy feeling was the onset of a numb death by freezing, which you’d read about. Then you’d trudge back up, towing your sled. When you peeled your jeans off in the bathroom, later, your thighs were dyed indigo blue over the bright pink of your cold skin.
Straight north, at the foot of the knoll, was the foundation of an old barn, cut into the hillside and now penned in for chickens. Running just east of that was the tractor road up the hill to the north past a row of pine trees, planted as a windbreak. Another field stretched north almost a quarter of a mile to a birch woods at the top. From the top, you couldn’t see the house. You could hear wind in the trees overhead, the rustling of birch leaves, and the shushing of the long grass. You were alone with your thoughts. We spent hours building miniature villages at the edge of the birch woods, using twigs, pebbles, moss, birch bark, and little red-capped British soldier lichens. We didn’t destroy these settlements; we’d leave them and repair them the next time we played there, or watch them disintegrate as nature took its course.
Another logging road ran into these woods, heading straight north, but then gradually curving around west and down as the woods changed from birch and moosewood back to oak and pine. After a few hundred yards, you left our land, but the trail was unused and there were no houses for a long way. We’d walk it to the backyard of an old hunting shack, skirt that clearing, and wend our way back, across the stream, up past the glacial boulders, and home.
On the east side of the north meadow was a strange grove of pine trees, planted in a grid, eight feet on a side, about ten trees west to east, and many more south to north. Perhaps the former owner, a retired Colonel, had planted them out of some military conception of tree planting. If they had been a different breed, they might have been forgotten Christmas trees, but they were far too ungainly and scraggly. The lower branches died and broke off—often with our help—creating interesting sight lines through this geometric forest. Once, we decided that a square of these trees near the center could be the corner posts of a fort, and we nailed branches on three sides to create low walls, but these never rose more than a couple of feet, and we abandoned the project. The floor here was bouncy with inches of pine needles, and the place smelled wonderful. Walking out, your hands would be mottled brown with pitch and dirt.
Just to the east of the house was a grassy lawn with our swing set—nearly 20 feet tall, built out of galvanized pipe. I’ve never seen a taller one, at least not for kids, and one arc on the swing took several seconds. We had a sandbox there, under a large pine tree, and a basketball backboard and hoop, although nothing but grass around it. We could shoot, but we couldn’t dribble the ball. Although this was an area created for us, as kids, it was the least interesting and the least alluring. The rocks and the edge of the birch woods were our real playgrounds, and, although I doubt I’ll ever see either again, my mind rests there frequently, calm and happy.
If an education consists, in part, of meaningful experience from which we draw sustenance, then my mother’s moving us to that little red house and giving us years of that landscape was one of the greatest educational gifts I received.
Years and years later, when my mom was dying of lung cancer and living in my house, she and I talked a lot, about life, memories, and, toward the end, less about this world and more about her perceptions of the world she was entering. Hallucinating or not, she could see the world to come for several days before she left us, including her happy parents. Her assurances then have fairly removed any fear of death I may have had.
During one of our talks, I thanked her for the landscape of my childhood. I didn’t quite know how to say it—I’ve tried to put it in words here—but what I said was that I believe that that landscape is now a part of me, something on which I can rely; that, because it had been “out there” during my childhood, its richness and beauty are now “in” me. I can’t remember what she said then, but I wanted her to know, before she left, how much it meant to me.
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