On our walk the other day, Marcia and I were talking about teaching and I was put in mind of the one guitar lesson I had in my life.
I took up the guitar in 1970 at the age of twenty-one when I found myself itinerant and on foot and unable to bring a piano with me. I bought a nylon-string guitar with a very fat neck for seven dollars in a mercado in Guadalajara and carried this guitar around America and Canada for a couple years, teaching myself to play.
Returning to California in 1972 I got a room in Santa Cruz in a former motel retrofitted to be a boarding house and continued my self-directed guitar playing, though in my travels I’d met other guitarists and tried their guitars and was painfully aware that my guitar was not a good one and the monstrous neck, among other things, was an impediment to my playing well.
I dreamed of one day accruing enough cash to get a better guitar. In the meantime, I went to visit my folks in the Bay Area and accompanied them to a gathering at the house of their friends who had a troubled sixteen-year-old son known to be an excellent guitarist. When he made a brief appearance to get some food, I told him I was teaching myself to play the guitar and he invited me to come play guitars with him in the bedroom he shared with a half-dozen excellent guitars.
He handed me a beautiful slender-necked guitar and asked me to play something. I played a simple song I’d composed and he played along on another of his guitars and made the song sound marvelous. Then he played a gorgeous jazzy song he’d composed made of dozens of chords I’d never dreamed of making, and I raved about the song and his playing.
Pleased by my praise he said, “Here’s a chord that
will change your life.”
He played the chord and held his fingers in that
position for me to imitate.
When I had successfully played the chord, he said,
“You can use this same fingering anywhere on the neck and make wonderful chords.”
I tried the fingering up and down and all around the neck, and he was right; wonderful chords abounded.
When I returned to Santa Cruz, my guitar playing improved by leaps and bounds and I wrote dozens of new songs.
A few months later I bought a slender-necked steel string Ovation for fifty bucks, started a trio, and ere long we were the weekend band at Positively Front Street, a pub near the municipal wharf.
Which is all to say, a good teacher can change your life.
Marcia and I just finished making our second batch of lemon marmalade this year, the big beautiful Meyer lemons we used coming from our two prolific lemon trees.
42 lemons
This is the first time we’ve had enough lemons to make marmalade since I planted our two lemon trees ten years ago. Why did our trees take so long to grow enough lemons for us to make marmalade?
washing lemons
Because I was arrogant and profoundly stupid when it came to growing lemon trees here. And thereby hangs this tale.
clean and rinsed lemons
When we moved here to Skunk Hollow, the current name for our two acres carved out of a redwood forest a mile inland from the town of Mendocino, the forest still extant all around us, I was told by every local gardener I talked to who had ever tried to garden in close proximity to redwood trees that I would be foolish to plant my lemon trees in the ground, that they would be choked to death by the water-hungry redwood roots; and I was given the same advice about growing vegetables in this ground.
cutting and de-seeding lemons
For some reason I thought I could do what no one else had ever done, and so I planted two lemon trees in a patch of ground on the south-facing sunny side of our house, making sure to plant them in big deep holes from which I removed an enormous amount of redwood roots.
18 cups cut up and de-seeded lemons to soak in water overnight
And lo and verily, the little trees did grow into healthy-looking green lemon trees, and I foolishly thought I had succeeded where no one else in the history of the world ever had.
lemons into the cauldron
After the trees had been in the ground for three years and were four-feet tall, I thought they should be making blossoms by now as had all the other lemon trees I’d planted in my life in Santa Cruz and Sacramento and Berkeley, but these lemon trees did not make blossoms.
beginning the cooking down
So I fed the little trees blossom-encouraging food, and carefully dug out redwood roots all around them while being careful not to damage the lemon tree roots, though such roots were not plentiful or robust.
lemons cooking down
And lo and verily in Year Four each of the two trees, growing about ten feet apart, made blossoms, which is to say each tree made one blossom, and these blossoms soon wilted and died and fell away.
adding sugar to cooking down lemons
In Year Five, each tree made two blossoms, and one of these four blossoms was pollinated by a honeybee who somehow found the lonely little flower, and a tiny lemon formed, which is how all lemons begin their lives.
lemon marmalade into half-pint jars
But this tiny lemon, which I named Tiny, did not grow much and remained tiny all her days, and when I harvested her several months later, she was barely yellow and smaller than a thimble and of juice she had none.
lemon marmalade in jars
Year Six, no blossoms were made, despite copious food and water given to these trees. Year Seven, ditto.
getting air bubbles out of marmalade in jars before putting lids on
And I finally admitted reality and dug up the two lemon trees and discovered they each had miniscule root masses, and by miniscule I mean barely any roots at all.
using a magnet to gets lids out of boiling water to put on jars
How had these trees survived for seven years? I don’t have a clue.
jars of marmalade ready to boil
I had given up growing vegetables in the ground after five years of backbreaking labor three times a year clearing my vegetable patches of tonnages (no exaggeration) of redwood roots and resorted to big tubs, the results marvelous and provoking frequent grateful tears.
boiling jars
So I bought two 100-gallon tubs, filled them with soil and manure and compost and ashes and plant food, and therein planted the lemon trees And lo and verily after a year in the tubs they did blossom, and the bees and bumblebees and hummingbirds came to them, and it was good.
honeybee on lemon blossoms
This is Year Three of those marvelous amazing lemon
trees living in their tubs free of redwood roots, and this year, despite a
troubling absence of honeybees, they produced over 200 big juicy delicious
sweet lemons from which we just made our second batch of fantastic organic
marmalade.
And guess who pollinated our lemon trees this year in the absence of honeybees? Hummingbirds!
hummingbird pollinating lemon blossoms
If I had listened to the people who knew a thing or two about growing vegetables and lemon trees in close proximity to giant redwoods, we would have been making marmalade from our lemons years ago.
jar of 2022 Skunk Hollow lemon marmalade
Moral: Listen to those who know the ways of the local nature gods.
Joan’s is the only stationery store in the town of Mercy on the far north coast of California, and if sales continue to decline as they have for the last few years, Joan’s won’t be open much longer.
“Why do you call this store Joan’s when you’re Turk?” asks Ramon Castañeda, eighteen, holding his phone out to record Turk’s reply.
“I don’t own Joan’s,” says Turk Arslan, sixty-nine, big and mostly bald, a former Mercy deputy sheriff. “I just work here four days a week. It’s called Joan’s because the woman who started it eighty-seven years ago was named Joan.”
“She dead now?” asks Ramon, a standout on the
Mercy High soccer team and devilishly handsome.
“Yes,” says Turk, chuckling. “She died forty years
ago. You can find her headstone in the town cemetery. Joan Mirzoyan. Pink
granite.”
“Seriously?” says Ramon, half-frowning and half-smiling. “Sick.”
“Rudy Contreras owns Joan’s now,” says Turk, unsure if by sick Ramon means great or
horrible. “Rudy bought it from Maggy
Spencer who bought it from Jane Minasyan who is also buried in the town
cemetery just a few headstones away from Joan Mirzoyan.”
“Awesome,” says Ramon, who has to write a report about
Joan’s for his Social Studies class.
“I’ll check it out.”
“You may be interested to know,” says Turk, who started working at Joan’s a few months after he retired from law enforcement two years ago, “that Joan Mirzoyan opened the original Joan’s in her house on Manzanita Lane and ran the business out of her living room for ten years before moving to a storefront on Main Street where Joan’s was until twenty years ago when Maggy Spencer bought the business from Jane Minasyan and moved it here to Mill Street.”
“You just wrote my whole report,” says Ramon, turning off the audio recorder on his phone.
“Don’t you want to know why I work here?” asks Turk, giving Ramon an inquisitive look.
“Sure,” says Ramon, reactivating the audio recorder. “Why do you work here?”
“I’ve been shopping here ever since my sister and I moved to Mercy twelve years ago,” says Turk, looking around the spacious store. “I write lots of letters and this was the only place in town with a large selection of note cards and postcards and good pens and excellent paper and envelopes, so I came here all the time. Then when I retired from the sheriff’s department and the job here came open, I thought I’d give it a try, and I love it.”
“Epic,” says Ramon, squinting at Turk. “Hey do you remember when you busted me for speeding on Main Street?”
“I do,” says Turk, vividly recalling the terrifying moment when fifteen-year-old Ramon drove three blocks through the heart of town going seventy.
“I was an idiot,” says Ramon, grimly. “Coulda killed somebody.”
“You almost did,” says Turk, trembling as he remembers. “Helen Morningstar was just stepping into the crosswalk when you went by. You missed her by inches. And if you had hit her… well… thank God you didn’t.”
“If I had killed her,” says Ramon, bowing his head, “I wouldn’t want to be alive.”
“Life is full of close calls,” says Turk, putting a hand on Ramon’s shoulder. “I was a cop in Fresno for thirty years before we moved here, and every day was one close call after another.”
*
On a sunny Thursday morning in April, Rudy Contreras, the owner of Joan’s, enters the store and wishes for the umpteenth time he’d never bought the business or the old two-story building the store occupies. A short rotund man who wears expensive three-piece suits and goes to his barber once a week to maintain his impressive silver pompadour, Rudy owns several other buildings and businesses in Mercy, all of them vastly more profitable than Joan’s.
When Turk is done selling a customer a birthday
card, Rudy approaches the counter and says to Turk, “How’s business?”
“So-so today,” says Turk, who likes Rudy despite disagreeing with him about much of their inventory. “I’ve had two more people ask about custom framing today, and two more people wanting higher quality oil paints than what we carry. So I’m wondering if you’ve given any more thought to…”
“I’m closing the business and selling the building,” says Rudy, interrupting. “Sorry to break it to you so abruptly, Turk, but I just came from my accountant and he says this is unsustainable.”
“Sorry to hear that,” says Turk, stunned by Rudy’s news. “How much are you asking?”
“Nine hundred thousand,” says Rudy, guessing that’s nine hundred thousand more than Turk has. “I’m selling cheap because the place is a fire trap and whoever buys it will have to do a compete rebuild before they can open anything new here. I’m essentially selling the lot.”
“When will you put it on the market?” asks Turk, about to cry.
“Two weeks,” says Rudy, looking around the store. “If you win the lottery before then, I’ll sell it to you for eight hundred thousand.”
“Shall we have a Going Out of Business sale?” asks Turk, unable to quell his tears.
“After the building sells,” says Rudy, turning to go. “We’ll keep things going until then.”
*
That afternoon Turk is standing behind the counter staring into space and wondering what he’ll do with his life after Joan’s closes, when the poet Helen Morningstar, Turk’s great pal, enters the store and it’s all Turk can do not to shout Helen! Rudy’s closing the store and selling the building.
A beautiful woman in her mid-fifties, Pomo on her
mother’s side, Latino on her father’s, Helen and Turk are both crazy about fine
stationery and both worship Ricardo Alvarez who plays piano every Thursday
evening at Big Goose, the pub Helen
owns with her husband Justin Oglethorpe.
“Got your call, Turk,” says Helen, breathlessly. “Came
as soon as I could.”
“Here they are,” says Turk, bringing forth a box
containing four large notebooks of exquisite writing paper from France. “Price
went up quite a bit since the last time I ordered these for you. Sorry about
that.”
“No problem,” says Helen, opening one of the
notebooks to caress a page. “Nothing in the world takes ink like this paper.”
Now she brings the notebook close to her face and
inhales the scent of the blessed parchment.
*
Alone again, Turk resumes grieving the death of Joan’s, and he’s just about to close up shop an hour early when two of his favorite customers come in, the siblings Tenaya and Tuolumne Larkin.
Tenaya is twenty-three and gorgeous, her long red hair in a ponytail, and Tuolumne is twenty-one, a dashing hunk, his long brown hair in a ponytail, too. They were raised on a homestead ten miles from Mercy and home-schooled by their parents Donovan and Cass, who themselves are the grandchildren of beatniks and hippies who settled near Mercy in the 1950s and 60s when land around here was practically free and half the houses in town were vacant – a far cry from the real estate madness of today.
Neither Tenaya nor Tuolumne ever watched a movie or used a computer until five years ago when they convinced their parents to let them go to Mercy High for a year, after which Tenaya spent three years in New York City studying art at The Cooper Union before returning to Mercy where she works as a waitress at Big Goose and creates exquisite handmade signs for local businesses. Tuolumne went to UCLA intending to become a filmmaker, found academia and city life stultifying, and after nine months in Los Angeles returned to Mercy and restarted his apprenticeship to Bertram Hawley, a master wood sculptor.
While Tenaya pays for several large sheets of poster
board and Tuolumne waits to buy a sketchpad and two fine-tipped black ink pens,
Turk smiles sadly at them and says, “You two wouldn’t want to go in with me and
buy Joan’s and this old building,
would you? We can get it for eight hundred thousand if we come up with the
money in the next two weeks. Otherwise… no more Joan’s.”
Tenaya and Tuolumne exchange wide-eyed looks and
Tenaya says, “We were just talking
about that. Right before we walked in.”
“I told her about how you want to offer custom framing,” says Tuolumne, grinning at Turk, “and that got us fantasizing about what else we’d do if we owned Joan’s. This is amazing.”
“Fantasizing
is the key word here,” says Turk, wistfully. “I could come up with fifty thousand,
but…”
“Oh we’ve got the money,” says Tuolumne, nodding
assuredly. “From our grandmother. The question is can we make this business
profitable? We don’t want to throw our inheritance down the drain, so to
speak.”
“You wouldn’t be,” says Turk, shaking his head. “The
building is worth at least a million, and if we bring it up to code it’ll be
worth twice that. You know there are two big apartments upstairs we could rent out
once they’re made habitable, and there’s a huge storage area up there that
could be converted into something. Or two somethings.”
Tenaya and Tuolumne exchange even wider-eyed looks
and Tenaya says, “We’ll talk to our parents. My gut feeling, however, is we can
do this.”
*
Tuolumne and Tenaya’s father Donovan is fifty-two, a renowned maker of dulcimers. Tall and lanky with long brown hair he habitually wears in three braids of various lengths, Donovan is also renowned for telling stories composed entirely of non-sequiturs. Their mother Cass, forty-five, is a shapely redhead who usually wears her long hair in a single braid. A singer songwriter, her instrument the zither, Cass handles the business of selling Donovan’s dulcimers and also sells honey, beeswax candles, rabbit-pelt berets, and slender leather belts.
Their ten-acre homestead surrounded by a vast
redwood forest boasts a spectacular half-acre garden, two big greenhouses, three
houses, two barns, three workshops, and a quarter-acre pond teeming with tasty
trout. They grow almost all the food they and Tuolumne and Tenaya and Cass’s
parents need, and they also have a big flock of chickens for eggs, seventeen
beehives, and every year raise a pig to butcher and freeze.
When Donovan was seven, his mother Alice divorced
Donovan’s father Kyle and moved to Los Angeles where she married a man who
owned a chain of car washes. When Alice died three years ago, she left a million
dollars to Donovan and a half-million each to Tuolumne and Tenaya, and this is
the money they would use to buy Joan’s
and the Joan’s building if that is
what they decide to do.
*
So a few days after Turk broached the possibility of buying the Joan’s building with Tuolumne and Tenaya, Cass and Donovan come to town and meet with their kids and Turk in Joan’s to consider the idea.
“I love this store,” says Donovan, who has a profoundly deep voice that carries far even when he speaks quietly. “Where is everybody?”
“Business has not been great lately,” says Turk,
apologetically. “Most people nowadays buy what we have to offer online.”
“Tragic,” says Cass, gazing tragically at Turk.
“The end of community. The end of the actual. The final fraying of the
collective fabric. No wonder things are the way they are now.”
“Yet people long for the actual,” says Donovan, gesturing
expansively. “They long for three-dimensional connection. We sell my dulcimers
on the Interweb, it’s true, but why not sell them here? Why limit our concept
of store to stationery and art
supplies? Why not make this a general
store in the sense of an eclectic depository for myriad objet d’ soul?”
“A sofa here,” says Cass, moving to a sunny corner
at the front of the store adjacent to a rack of notecards. “A place to sit and
read poetry with one of the store kitties on your lap.” She beams at Turk. “We’ll
sell books of poetry. Songbooks. Scarves and slender leather belts and
rabbit-pelt berets. And stationery, of course. The foundation of connection.”
“Huge
money in poetry and rabbit-pelt berets,” says Tuolumne, winking at Turk. “So
you like it, huh Mom?”
“Love,” says Cass, smiling out on the sunny day.
“I’m madly in love. We’ll give concerts here and poetry readings and…”
“Oh buy the place,” says Donovan, taking a large sketchpad off a shelf. “And I’ll buy this sketchpad and a box of envelopes. What’s not to love?”
*
So Tenaya and Tuolumne buy Joan’s and the Joan’s building, Turk keeps his four-day-a-week job, and a new and exciting adventure ensues.
*
When Turk joined forces with Tenaya and Tuolumne, he had no idea they were both excellent and indefatigable carpenters. Nor did he expect their parents and grandparents would come to town every day to work on the Joan’s building, which they do, arriving in the wee hours of morning and working until the late afternoon six days a week.
Cass’s father Max, seventy-three, a master carpenter, explains to Turk one Thursday morning, “Yes, technically, Tenaya and Tulo own this place, but in truth we, their extended family, own it, too. They’re fourth generation hippy communists, you see, and this is how we do things.”
“And now we’ll have a pad in town,” says Louise, seventy-two, a massage therapist and beekeeper. “Is this groovy or what?”
“This is groovy,” says Turk, who previously eschewed the word groovy and now finds groovy an entirely appropriate and accurate descriptor for what’s going on here.
A moment after Louise and Max go upstairs to work on the apartments, Diana, Turk’s best friend and soul mate, dances into the store. A comely gal in her fifties, her graying auburn hair in a ponytail, Diana is a waitress at Big Goose and Turk’s main reason for getting up in the morning.
“Hey T,” says Diana, giving Turk a splendiferous hug. “Place is a veritable beehive of activity.”
“Three generations of hippy communists hard at work,” says Turk, never in a hurry to end a hug with Diana. “Rudy came by yesterday and said he must have been crazy to sell this place for so little.”
“Brokered by angels,” says Diana, kissing Turk’s
cheek. “We on for tonight?”
“Wild horses etcetera.” says Turk, blushing. “Meet
you at the Goose at six.”
“I’ll be there,” says Diana, dancing out the door.
*
Twenty minutes later, Tuolumne enters the store with his mother Cass, both of them wearing tool belts, work gloves, and mauve Donovan’s Dulcimers baseball hats. Tuolumne is carrying a pry bar, Cass a vacuum cleaner.
“Turk,” says Tuolumne, after Turk finishes selling
Jack Ziskin a box of purple ink pens and three Fred Astaire notecards. “We’ve reached
a major turning point in the renovation.”
“Do tell,” says Turk, giving Tuolumne his full
attention.
“We have come to the moment when we must close the
store for a few weeks,” says Tuolumne, looking at his mother for a
corroborative nod. “We need to bring lumber and sheet rock and all manner of
material through the front door, and we have to completely rebuild the inside
staircase. And while we’re at it we might as well renovate the ground floor, too,
replace the windows with the latest and greatest, install a much grander
entrance, rewire, sand the floors, repaint the walls, build new display cases,
and so forth.”
“And then the grand re-opening,” says Cass, her
eyes sparkling. “The rebirth of stationery.”
*
So Joan’s closes not for three weeks, but eleven weeks, and on a Friday afternoon in September, a party is held in the spectacular new store, a party to which the entire town is invited and to which most of the town comes.
At the height of the festivities, Tenaya rings a
big brass bell to quiet the crowd for Donovan to proclaim basso profundo, “Everybody please traipse outside for the unveiling
of our fabulous new sign.”
The hundreds of revelers obediently go outside and
watch Tuolumne pull on the rope attached to a big white tarp covering the large
new sign over the gigantic new glass front door – the crowd gasping and
cheering when they see the new sign does not say Joan’s but Turk’s, and
Turk gasps loudest of all.
*
On a rainy Thursday afternoon in late November, Turk’s is jammed with Christmas Hanukkah Solstice shoppers buying cards and calendars and scarves and notebooks and beeswax candles and pens and colored pencils and volumes of poetry and rabbit-pelt berets and slender leather belts. Tuolumne and his grandfather Max are manning the busy custom-framing counter while Tenaya and Cass are expertly operating the two new cash registers on either end of the magnificent wide-topped counter.
Turk and Diana are restocking the shelves with fast-selling
art supplies, and Diana stops what she’s doing to look at Turk for a moment.
“What?” he says, looking up from a box of tubes of
the finest oil paint and blushing as he always does when she gives him a look of
love.
“Nothing,” she says, meaning everything. “Just looking at you.”
Morris Green teaches Video Production, Film History, and Computer Graphics at Mercy High in Mercy, a small town on the far north coast of California. When he started teaching at the high school eighteen years ago, cell phones equipped with video cameras were not yet on the market and Internet platforms for sharing videos were just being established. Nowadays everyone who has a cell phone can shoot videos, and watching videos via the Internet is an integral part of virtually every American’s life.
A soft-spoken bespectacled man of medium height with
wispy reddish brown hair, Morris began teaching at Mercy High when he was
twenty-five. He is now forty-three and married to his former student Melanie
who fell in love with Morris when she took Computer Graphics and Film History
from him her senior year at Mercy High, which happened to be Morris’s first
year on the job.
Melanie did not attempt to seduce Morris when he was
her teacher, though several of her classmates tried without success, nor did
she initiate anything with Morris beyond friendly hugs when they would meet,
seemingly by accident, around town during the summers between her years of
college. But when she graduated from Sacramento State with a degree in Computer
Graphics and moved back to Mercy to launch her Graphics business Please Identify Yourself, she immediately
initiated seduction procedures which Morris was helpless to resist.
Now Morris and Melanie have a twelve-year-old son
named Orson and an eleven-year-old daughter named Escher, both of whom are
video-making computer graphics prodigies and zealous Frisbee golfers like their
father. PleaseIdentify Yourself has seven employees and does a huge online
identity-package business, Melanie’s clients ranging from individuals to large
companies. Morris continues working at the high school, though much of what he
teaches has become uninteresting to him because most of his students would
rather interact with their phones than with him.
Even Film History has lost its luster for Morris, as
the films he considers of great importance are of little or no interest to the
vast majority of his students for whom anything made more than a few years ago seems
irrelevant to what matters to them today – and what that is, besides getting high
and getting laid, Morris hasn’t a clue.
*
Enter Tuolumne and Tenaya Larkin.
Tenaya, eighteen, and Tuolumne, sixteen, were born
and raised on a remote homestead ten miles inland from Mercy and homeschooled
by their parents Donovan and Cass, whose folks were tree huggers who settled in
the Mercy watershed in the 1960s. Tenaya and Tuolumne never watched television
or used a computer or a cell phone or even went to the movies until just a few
months ago when they finally convinced their parents to let them go to Mercy
High for a year before they venture forth to seek their fortunes.
As is often the case with bright kids who have read
hundreds of excellent books and plays while being homeschooled by smart parents
and thoughtful grandparents and wise neighbors, Tenaya and Tuolumne find most
of what Mercy High has to offer of little interest, but they both take to Video
Production and Film History like ducks to water.
Tenaya, a beguiling redhead, is hugely popular with
legions of young men at Mercy High, and Tuolumne, a dashing hunk with long
brown hair, is a big hit with myriad young women on campus. However, romance is
of little interest to either of them compared to their burning passion for the
aforementioned subjects taught by the aforementioned Morris Green.
*
“They’re amazing,” says Morris to Justin Oglethorpe in Big Goose after school one day in late October, Justin the longtime bartender of the Goose as that largest of Mercy’s three pubs is known to locals. “They’re like supernatural versions of some of the kids I had in my classes when I first started teaching here. Intellectually sophisticated, blazingly creative, and they get my jokes, which none of my previous students, even the smart ones, ever got. But Tuolumne and Tenaya do.”
“I know their folks,” says Justin who is fifty-four,
six-feet-six, and has carrot red hair recently cut short for the start of the Mercy
Rec Center basketball league, the Big
Goose team always formidable with Justin, who was on the San Jose State
basketball team, playing point guard, and five-foot-seven Pablo ‘Jumping Jack‘ Valdez
dominating the paint. “They’ve been bringing Tulo and Tenaya here once a month
since they were little kids to hear Ricardo play piano on Thursday evenings. Donovan
is stupendously ironical and makes much-sought-after dulcimers, and Cass is the
Rock of Gibraltar with a fabulous sense of humor and a singing voice
reminiscent of Joni Mitchell. She plays zither.”
“Now if I were to say Rock of Gibraltar or Joni
Mitchell or dulcimer or zither in any of my classes, no one
would know what I was talking about, except for Tuolumne and Tenaya.” Morris gulps
his half-pint of Mercy porter. “When I screened TheMaltese Falcon a week
ago for my Film History classes and asked my students to write responses to the
film, all of them, I’m not kidding, fifty
students each wrote a few sentences, the gist of which was they found the film
excruciatingly dull, and several of them used the word excruciatingly, which I’m sure their writing software chose for
them, except for Tuolumne and Tenaya.
They both wrote long gorgeous handwritten elegies to the movie, and I don’t use
the words gorgeous or elegies lightly. Can I read you a couple
excerpts from their responses?”
“Nothing would please me more,” says Justin, who
is also one of the owners of Big Goose,
which allows him to have Miguel take over behind the bar while he, Justin, takes
a break to hang with Morris and let the good man debrief.
They sit at a small table away from the growing
hubbub as five o’clock approaches, and Morris reads first from Tenaya’s
response to The Maltese Falcon, that
iconic template for a thousand subsequent murder mystery suspense thrillers,
minus the horrific violence and moronic dialogue that eventually overwhelmed
the genre.
“‘Bogart’s face, oh his face,’ reads Morris, passionately.
“The sublime sorrow of a man shaped by his awareness of the falsity of hope. His
sorrow is etched in his face from the corners of his eyes to the corners of his
mouth, vestiges of tenderness only apparent when he smiles, and even those
vestiges are tempered with bitterness. Whatever else the movie is about, Bogart’s
angry despair is the engine of this movie.”
“Wow,” says Justin, impressed.
Morris nods. “Wow, indeed. Listen to this from
Tuolumne.” He puts down Tenaya’s seventeen-page opus and picks up Tuolumne’s
ten-pager. “‘Surely Beckett saw The
Maltese Falcon. He must have. And wouldn’t Bogart have made a sublime
Vladimir and Lorre an incomparable Estragon in Waiting For Godot? The profound absurdity of people for generations
throwing away their lives and the lives of others to possess an illusion left
me breathless. Did Hammett know his book was homage to meaninglessness? Did
Huston know he was translating Hammett’s
allegory into visual shorthand of grief born of greed? Is this a meditation on
the fruits of deprivation? The movie is made with such care, such sincerity.
Indeed, it is this unfettered sincerity that amplifies the absurdity into a
maelstrom of tension – about nothing!’”
“Wow again,” says Justin, smiling at Morris. “You
must be thrilled.”
“I’m reborn,” says Morris, gazing wide-eyed at
Justin. “I care about teaching again. I have a reason to go to work. I want to
share a thousand things with them every day. And glory of glories they seem to
be infecting the other kids, challenging them to think beyond the blur of their
numbing media to grok the miracles of the classics.”
“Hallelujah,” says Justin, clinking his coffee mug
with Morris’s glass of porter. “All is not lost.”
*
In November, Morris takes his two Video Production classes to the Fletcher Gallery in Mercy to see the latest show of local artist Bertram Hawley’s life-sized and uncannily lifelike wooden sculptures of naked women and naked men. Bertram is eighty now. He used to show annually at the Fletcher Gallery, but has slowed down in his old age and this is his first show of seven new works in almost three years.
Virtually everyone in Mercy goes to Bertram’s shows,
and most of the kids in Morris’s Video Production classes have not only already
seen this year’s show, they grew up going to Bertram’s shows with their parents
and friends. Even Tuolumne and Tenaya have gone to these shows since they were
little kids, their parents eager to expose them to excellent works of art and
music.
But this show of Bertram’s sculptures, five women
and two men, has such a powerful impact on both Tenaya and Tuolumne, they
decide to contact Bertram and ask if they might film him speaking about his art.
*
A slender agile man with snow white hair neither long nor short, Bertram was born in Los Angeles to British parents, moved to England as a teenager, and stayed in England until he was forty when he returned to America with his British wife Alison who is exactly his age. An actor of some success in England, Bertram gave up stage and screen for sculpting after surviving a terrible car accident that rendered him prone to severe anxiety and panic attacks, his emotional condition much improved since moving to Mercy where he and Alison have lived for thirty years now, Alison a psychotherapist.
*
On a sunny Wednesday after school, armed with an excellent video camera and tripod and audio recorder on loan from Mercy High, Tuolumne and Tenaya arrive at Bertram’s big airy studio adjacent to the house where Bertram and Alison live a mile inland from Mercy. They find Bertram having tea at his work table with Eliana, the lovely seven-year-old daughter of Bertram and Alison’s good friends Zeke and Conchita, Zeke a gardener who works for Bertram and Alison once a week, Conchita a real estate agent.
“Welcome,” says Bertram, coming to greet Tuolumne
and Tenaya on the threshold of the studio. “You’re just in time for tea. I am
having black, Eliana is having mint. We just made a pot of each.”
“Thank you,” say Tuolumne, bowing graciously. ‘We’re
honored to meet you.”
“Truly,” says Tenaya, bowing, too. “We’re in awe of
your art.”
“They’re so real,” says Tenaya, gazing around the
studio – an as-yet-untouched pillar of oak, seven-feet-tall and nearly
three-feet-wide standing under the central skylight on the carpeted platform
where Bertram does his sculpting. “So alive.”
“A friend who owns a few of my pieces says he talks
to them,” says Bertram, leading them to the work table, “and believes they listen
and sympathize.” He gestures for Tuolumne and Tenaya to sit. “Eliana this is
Tenaya and her brother Tuolumne.”
“I know who you are,” says Eliana, who is not
British, but being a preternatural mimic has an impeccable British accent whenever
she spends time with Bertram and Alison, which is often. “You sometimes come to
the Goose with your parents on
Thursday evenings to hear Ricardo play, and your father has pints of dark beer
and your mother has glasses of red wine and you have lemonade.”
Tenaya sets up the tripod, mounts the camera
thereon, frames her shot so the worktable and those around it are the center of
attention, and activates the camera before sitting down.
“I thought you looked familiar,” says Tuolumne,
smiling at Eliana, her long black hair in a ponytail. “You played a duet with
Ricardo the last time we went. You were fantastic.”
“Ricardo is my piano teacher,” says Eliana, returning
Tuolumne’s smile. “He sometimes humors me by letting me perform with him. I do
little flourishes in the high notes while he does everything else. I’m very
lucky. He only has three students because teaching piano interferes with his
composing and practicing. He earns his living as a waiter at Campeona and occasionally gets residuals
from a movie he played the music for. Isabella
Remembers. I’m in the movie, too, and so is Bertram. I was only
four-years-old when they made the movie. You really should see it, and I’m not
just saying that because we’re in it.”
“We’ll rent it immediately,” says Tenaya, delighted
by Eliana.
“No need,” says Bertram, enchanted with Tenaya and
Tuolumne. “I’ll loan you my copy.”
“Ricardo,” continues Eliana, looking at the camera and
arching her eyebrow, “is composing a quartet for piano, cello, violin, and oboe
that is so beautiful I can hardly believe
it exists. He’s such a genius, and so
is Bertram, though they both say they are merely well-practiced.” She laughs a deep
hearty laugh one might expect from an adult, not a seven-year-old. “Aren’t
geniuses funny?”
“Yes, aren’t we?” says Bertram, winking at Tuolumne.
“So tell me about yourselves.”
“Well,” says Tuolumne, placing the audio recorder in
the center of the table, “we hope to interview you and shoot some footage for a
school project and…”
“It’s all just a ruse to meet you,” blurts Tenaya, gazing
at Bertram as if seeing a miracle. “I feel like I’m in the presence of… I don’t
know… Picasso.”
“Oh dear, no,” says Bertram, emphatically shaking
his head. “We are told by multiple reliable sources that even at eighty Picasso
would have been chasing you around the studio intent on ravishing you, whereas
I was never that sort, though you are
lovely. Don’t get me wrong.”
“You mean…” says Tenaya, frowning. “Picasso was a
womanizer?”
“Famously so,” says Bertram, tickled by Tenaya’s innocent
dismay. “Which just goes to prove that one’s art isn’t necessarily a reliable representation
of one’s persona. I, for instance, carve statues of naked people, yet I’m
terribly shy about letting anyone other than my wife see me naked, and even
with Alison I feel more comfortable with at least some clothes on. Most of the time.”
“When we were in the gallery with our class,” says
Tuolumne, giving Bertram a mischievous smile, “I couldn’t help imagining all of
us spontaneously taking off our clothes to be naked with your sculptures. They
seem to want us to be naked. Do you
know what I mean?”
“I do know what you mean,” says Bertram, his eyes
twinkling. “I think your vision would make a wonderful short film, and you have
my permission. I’m sure we could arrange something with the gallery.”
“Oh no,” says Tenaya, solemnly shaking her head.
“Our wonderful teacher Mr. Green would get in terrible trouble if we made a
movie with naked students.” She sighs. “Though it is a lovely idea.”
“What about this?” says Eliana, holding out her arms
to the camera. “We see a bunch of people going into the gallery wearing
clothes, grown-up people, so wonderful Mr. Green won’t get in trouble, and then
we see them walking around looking at the sculptures, and then a little while
later we see them coming out of the gallery naked except they’re still wearing
shoes and hats.”
“Or it could be a couple, a man and a woman,” says
Bertram with a gleam in his eyes, “who come into the gallery and move silently
about, slowly disrobing, one item at a time, until they are both naked and cease
to move and become wooden sculptures of themselves.”
“Or,” says Tenaya, her eyes wide with excitement, “a
lonely man and a lonely woman enter the gallery separately and are mesmerized
by the sculptures, and after some suspenseful wandering around, they meet each
other next to those two statues, the man and woman you’ve posed together, and
they gaze at the two statues for a long time and then turn to each other and
slowly disrobe and assume the poses of the statues and then we dissolve to them
leaving the gallery together, wearing their clothes again and holding hands.”
“Or,” says Tuolumne, too excited to stay sitting,
“it could be a class of high school
kids who come in being loud and joking and making childish sexual comments. But
seeing the sculptures quiets them and we only hear occasional snickering until
even that stops and they’re all lost in wonder, and then each of them says
something self-revealing and when they leave the gallery we can tell by the
looks on their faces they’ve been changed.”
Bertram looks at Tenaya and asks, “Did you film us
saying all that?”
“Every bit of it,” she says, nodding.
“And I’ve been recording audio since we walked in,”
says Tuolumne, beaming at Bertram.
“Brilliant,” says Eliana, raising her teacup as if
to make a toast.
“You know what I’d like to do?” says Tuolumne,
carrying his cup of tea to the pillar of wood in the center of the studio –
Tenaya expertly tracking him with the camera.
“What would you like to do?” asks Bertram, joining Tuolumne
at the pillar and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in a shaft of silver
sunlight.
“I’d like to film you carving your next nude from
start to finish,” says Tuolumne, reaching out to touch the pillar of wood. “We
could stop by on our way home from school and shoot a few minutes every day,
and when the sculpture is done we’ll make a time lapse movie of your nude
taking form. With comments from you and a soundtrack of Ricardo’s piano music.”
“I like the way you think,” says Bertram, resting a
hand on Tuolumne’s shoulder and not
telling him the future he has just foreseen – Tuolumne becoming his apprentice
and working with him as far into the future as Bertram can see, which is at
least another few years.
“Aren’t they exquisite together?” whispers Eliana to
Tenaya.
“Exquisite,” says Tenaya, loving her shot of the two
men, one young, one old, contemplating their futures together.
This year I grew a kind of lettuce I’ve never grown
before. Green Salad Bowl. I got the seeds from Territorial Seed Company. For
growing in our tubs a mile inland from the coast in Mendocino, Green Salad Bowl
lettuce is a wonderful lettuce for both taste and prolificacy.
We harvest our lettuce by cutting the leaves when
they get big enough for salad greens rather than waiting to harvest whole
heads. In this way, the plants continue to produce new leaves for several weeks,
and a small patch of lettuce plants will produce dozens of salads, the leaves
constantly tender.
lettuce flowering
One of my pleasures is letting varieties of vegetables we like go to seed so I can harvest those seeds and sow them next season. If the vegetable is not a hybrid, the seeds will breed true and we’ll get the same vegetables unless during the growing season the plants happened to cross with another related variety growing nearby. Then we might get nothing or something quite different than the original.
This season I let one patch of the Green Salad Bowl
lettuce go to seed. I’m now in the process of harvesting seeds from those
plants. We had two unusually early rains in September, which we’re glad about,
except the rains came right as the lettuce flowers were in the latter stages of
making seeds.
Thus most of the lettuce flower blooms succumbed to
mildew before they could produce fully developed seeds.
Fortunately, every day in early October I’ve been
finding white puffs amidst the mildewed growth that are the end stages of flowers
successfully gone to seed.
I pick these puffs and carefully extract the seeds.
What was her name? She modeled for him twice. The
four paintings he made of her sold before the paint was dry. Something about
her angularity – a hunger in her bones. Or was it the sorrow in her eyes – the
first glimmering of old age?
A gigantic face looms before him, startling him.
“Hello Boo Boo,” says a voice coming from enormous lips on their way to press a
kiss against his cheek. “You poopy? Need a change?”
Huge hands close around his middle, lifting him from
the cushioned chair. He moans softly, a sound his mother hears as the beginning
of language.
I’m Walter Casey he tries to say. The artist.
But only the most primitive sounds escape him, his
brand new larynx yet untrained.
Helpless on the changing table, his mother frees him from his itchy pajamas and lifts away his soiled diapers. He sighs with relief to have his bum free in the open air. She wipes him clean, cooing as she pulls the string on the musical bear – Twinkle Twinkle Little Star playing for the thousandth time.
Mendelssohn he tries to say. Mozart. Anything but this ice cream truck twaddle.
She sits with him in dappled shade, chuckling at how
ravenously he feeds on her.
Maria. That was her name. She wanted
to make love with me. All I had to do was ask. But I was too arrogant. No.
Afraid.
His mother pulls him off her nipple. He begins to
shriek in despair.
“Hold on, Boo Boo. Switching breasts, that’s all.”
He falls asleep and drifts through layers of time to
a snarling dog lunging at him
his father saying You Are No Son Of Mine
forms appearing on his canvas as if by magic
mother clutching his hand as death takes her
his lover kissing his throat
*
The man who comes to visit every day is not the
baby’s father. The baby’s father is bearded and stays in the house throughout
the night. This other man has no beard. He only stays for an hour or so,
speaking out loud to the baby, but conversing silently with Walter Casey.
How are you feeling? asks the man.
I forget more than I remember now.
Yes says the man. Soon you will
forget almost everything that came before this life.
But I don’t want to forget.
What do you wish to remember?
Everything.
Choose one thing.
The baby laughs. The man laughs, too.
*
The
creek tumbles down through the wooded gorge – a sensual chill in the air.
Yellow leaves drift through slanting rays of sunlight and settle on the forest
floor. Walter stands at the water’s edge, the tip of his fishing rod pointing
toward the sun, his line disappearing into a deep pool. Tomorrow is his
seventeenth birthday.
His mother appears on the ridge above him. She is
small in the distance, lovely and strong. She waves to let him know it is time
to come home for supper.
Walter waves back to her and reels in his line. Now
he looks up at the falling leaves, at the branches of the aspens, at the
billowy white clouds in the gray blue sky, and he begins to weep.
“Don’t cry, Boo Boo,” says his father, lifting him
from his crib. “Here we are. Don’t be afraid.”
I am not afraid. I was remembering the
happiest moment of my other life.
“Don’t cry, Boo Boo,” says the gentle bearded man. “Mama will feed you. Everything is okay.”
One of my hobbies is randomly reading bits from the massive one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia. Lately I’ve been finding entries I think would make successful Broadway musicals now that Hamilton has made historical musicals popular again.
*
Entry #1: Salomon, Haym 1740-85
American Revolutionary financier. A Jewish emigrant from Poland, he was
imprisoned in 1778 by the British in New York City for aiding the
Revolutionaries and was condemned to death, but he escaped to Philadelphia.
There he started a successful brokerage business. He aided Robert Morris in
obtaining loans from France and pledged his own fortune to the new government
to maintain its credit. Salomon was never recompensed and he died impoverished.
*
That little blurb verges on untruth
given how much it understates Salomon’s role in financing the American war
effort against the British, and how in the last two decisive battles of the
Revolutionary War, Salomon provided huge sums of money to compensate the French
troops who fought on the American side, and
pay for the supplies needed by the American fighters. Throughout the
Revolutionary War he was the go-to
guy for funding the war effort.
And then he was not recompensed and
died in poverty.
One wonders (not really) why Haym’s story isn’t widely taught in American schools, though my brother tells me his Fifth Grade teacher imparted some information about Salomon to my brother’s class. My brother also suggested Salomon’s story would make a musical a la Hamilton, and the first title that came to me was Fiddler on the Roof of the American Revolution. (Needs work) Oh the pathos!
Songs from the musical include: Escape to Philadelphia, The Go-To Guy, the
heartbreaking Never Recompensed, and
the mega-hit Revolutionary Financier.
I’m a revolutionary financier
I lend money to the rebels without
fear
With my money they buy ammo and beer
I’m a revolutionary financier
*
Entry #2: McAllister, Ward 1827-95, American society leader, b. Savannah, Georgia. He was a wealthy San Francisco lawyer who moved (1852) to New York City and married (1853) a millionaire’s daughter. He established a second residence at Newport, Rhode Island and soon became arbiter of the New York and Newport social set. McAllister chose (1872) the “patriarchs”, a group of leaders from prominent New York families, and sifted out (1892) the Four Hundred – people whom he deemed members of “true” New York society. It was McAllister who groomed the famous Mrs. William Astor for her role as queen of New York society. He wrote Society As I Have Found It (1890).
*
Further research into McAllister reveals he was the undisputed king of the elite set in New York until he published his book Society As I Have Found It, and the revelations therein so displeased the Four Hundred he died in disgrace.
*
One wonders how McAllister became the arbiter of anything, and why so many people cared so much about his opinions. In the Broadway musical The Four Hundred, the songs will be in the talking/singing style of later Stephen Sondheim tunes, and the plot will hang on a series of creepy kinky scenes showing how McAllister gained his power over so many rich people. The play will climax with a gala ball at the Vanderbilt mansion, after which McAllister brings out his book and becomes a pariah. Oh the pathos!
Song include: A Millionaire’s Daughter, Arbiter of the Social Set, The Patriarchs,
Queen of New York, Died in Disgrace,
and the show’s big hit Who Gets In.
You’re in, you’re out, you’re a Yes, you’re a No.
Why? Because I say so.
And why you may ask do I get to decide?
Oh wouldn’t you like to know?
*
Entry #3: Noyes, John Humphrey,
1811-86 American reformer, founder of the ONEIDA COMMUNITY b. Brattleboro,
Vermont. He studied theology at Yale but lost his license to preach because of
his “perfectionist” doctrine. This took its name from Mat. 5.48 and was based
on the belief that man’s innate sinlessness could be regained through communion
with Christ. At Putney, Vermont, he formed (1839) a society of Bible
communists, later called Perfectionists. In 1846 they began the practice of
complex marriage, a form of polygamy, but this so aroused their neighbors that
Noyes was forced to flee. In 1848 he established another community at Oneida,
N.Y. (and later a branch at Wallingford, Conn.) where he developed his
religious and social experiments in communal living. By 1879 internal
dissension had arisen and outside hostility became so strong that Noyes went to
Canada where he spent the rest of his life.
Oneida Community: a religious
society of Perfectionists established (1848) by John Humphrey NOYES. Members of
the sect held all property in common and practiced complex marriage and common
care of the children. The community prospered by making steel traps and
silverware. In 1881 it was reorganized as a joint stock company, and the social
experiments were abandoned.
*
Okay. This has got everything successful
musicals require. Religion, idealism, polygamy, raising children in common, and
the manufacture of steel traps, climaxing with our hero and a few of his complex
marriage partners fleeing to Canada. The music for The Perfectionists will feature a mix of heavy metal ballads and
tantric sitar solos with sexy choreography featuring scantily clad polygamists.
Oh the bathos!
Songs include: Bible Commies, Perfectionism, Children In Common, Complex Marriage,
Escape to Canada, and the mega-hit Neighbors
Aroused.
In a blog entry from 2010, I wrote: Mrs. Davenport, my Third Grade teacher at Las Lomitas Elementary School, was from Oklahoma and proudly one-eighth Cherokee. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in all my eight mortal years. She was astute, funny, musical, athletic, and she enjoyed using words somewhat beyond the official Third Grade vocabulary. We loved Mrs. Davenport because she loved us and had great empathy for our collective predicament: being eight-year-olds.
Today I will add to that description and say she was tall and slender with raven black hair usually worn in a bun, her lipstick ruby red. She was the first teacher I ever had a crush on, despite her being married, if we were to believe the Mrs., which of course we did. She wore glasses, and when she took them off to clean them she was beyond beautiful to me. And every once in great while, she would let her black hair down to redo her bun, and in those moments she was a full-blooded Cherokee goddess.
Mrs. Davenport liked me, and
in contrast to my First and Second Grade teachers did not often punish me for
speaking out of turn or talking to other kids during class. She understood the phenomenal
energy of little kids, and when I and others would become restless from too
much confinement and the mental strain of sitting quietly and listening, she
would say, “Todd, Jody, Wendy, Diana, and anybody else with ants in your pants,
run to the oak tree and back. Right now. Go.”
We would walk out into the
day knowing not to run until we were beyond the wing of classrooms, and then we
would dash across the concrete playground and the grassy playing field to the
largest oak tree in the world, as far as eight-year-old Todd was concerned, the
round trip a good quarter-of-a-mile. One lap usually sufficed to calm us down
for another half-hour of confinement and study, unless Mrs. Davenport discerned
any lingering restlessness in us, in which case she would send those of us in
need on another run to the oak and back.
As far as I know, Mrs.
Davenport was the only teacher at our school to employ this most effective
therapeutic technique, which rendered Attention Deficit Disorder a non-issue
for those of us under her care, though I know
had I been born twenty years later I would have been the poster child for that
popular psychological disorder of today and made to take the requisite drugs.
I never had homework until
Third Grade and it seemed to me that confinement from eight in the morning
until three in the afternoon was enough to ask of us. Why should we sacrifice more hours of our precious lives working
math problems and writing definitions of words? Thus I did not do homework
except sometimes a little right
before school in the morning, which usually sufficed.
Mrs. Davenport did not give
us much homework, but the one assignment she was adamant we work on at home every
day was undeniably worthwhile, yet abhorrent to me. Every day she would write
five words on the blackboard and we were to copy these words into special
binders full of lined paper she’d given us, each word to be printed, then
written in cursive, then looked up in the dictionary, the definition written down,
and the word used properly in a
sentence. As Mrs. Davenport told us time and again with her mild Oklahoma
accent, “If you do five words a night, you’ll have three hundred words done in
three months and be very glad you did.”
A week after our class
began this massive vocabulary-building undertaking, Mrs. Davenport checked our
special binders to see how we were doing. The pages in my special binder were
still pristine. Mrs. Davenport looked me in the eye and said, “You should have
twenty-five words done by now, Todd. I want to see forty-five words done by the
end of next week when I check your binder again.”
In spurts on the bus to
school in the morning, I managed to get about thirty words done by her next
check, and I had not done them well. She wagged her finger at me and said,
“Come on, Todd, buckle down here.”
But I did not buckle down, and my not buckling
down coincided with her ceasing to check our progress for many subsequent weeks,
though every day she would write five new words on the chalkboard and remind
us, “Now be sure to do your five words after school today.”
Then suddenly there came a
Friday when she informed us our vocabulary binders were due the following
Monday. Three hundred words were supposed to have been looked up, their
definitions written down, and each word used properly in a sentence. I had done
a total of forty words. Maybe. So did I buckle down and sacrifice the weekend
in a valiant attempt to do three months of work in two days? No. I waited until
Sunday afternoon and managed to do about thirty more words by the next day, and
I did them poorly.
What I remember most
vividly about Mrs. Davenport’s reaction to my disgraceful vocabulary binder was
the pained look on her face, her genuine anguish at my betrayal of her trust in
me.
My dismal performance
prompted Mrs. Davenport to have a meeting with my mother, after which I was
chastised by my parents and for a few weeks made to sit at the dining table before
supper every night to do my homework, except I rarely had any homework after the vocabulary binder debacle, which binder,
for some reason, I was not made to complete.
Mrs. Davenport soon forgave
me and life went on. I continued to adore her and she continued to be her
charming self and send me running to the oak tree and back a couple times most
every day. She continued to smoke cigarettes on her breaks, I soon forgot about
my vocabulary binder failure, and my mother stopped making me sit at the table
before supper to do homework I rarely had.
I remember one especially
exciting day that year when Mrs. Davenport and another woman teacher intervened
in a fight between two big Eighth Graders, the two toughest scariest guys at
our school. I was not an eyewitness to the fight, but I heard many stirring
accounts of the fight from those who claimed to have seen the bloody drama
unfold.
The two big guys were
having a slugfest and Mrs. Davenport waded in between them to break up the
fight. One of the boys, swinging wildly, struck Mrs. Davenport on the cheek
under her eye. She tackled him and threw him to the ground before more teachers
arrived to help contain the brawlers. For a couple weeks after she broke up
that fight, she sported a big bruise under her eye, and I thought she was the
bravest person in the world.
Those were the days, the
1950s in northern California, when school was not pre-formatted. Every teacher
had his or her own way of doing things and covering the subjects they were
supposed to cover in that year. Mrs. Davenport had a way of teaching that was
ideal for eight-year-olds. I liken her methods to kindergarten for older kids.
That is to say, along with sometimes
sitting at our desks learning arithmetic together and listening to her read
stories and collective things like that, we were very often not all doing the same thing, the
classroom more like a big artists’ workshop. A group of kids might be working
on a mural about California Indians, some kids might be drawing pictures, some
writing stories, and some reading.
And at recess a couple
times a week, for those kids who didn’t want to go out on the playground, Mrs.
Davenport would sit with the Fireside Book
of Folk Songs open in front of her, singing in her gorgeous voice, and four
or seven or ten of us stood around her singing with her.
She understood that more
than facts of dubious value, kids need experiences that challenge the mind and
inspire creative thinking. Or at least that’s how I choose to remember how I
learned and grew under her guidance sixty-three years ago when she was my
teacher and I had a big crush on her.
