Tag Archives: reading

Pat Day 2020

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Social distancing

Every year, well actually a lot more than that, I think of Pat, the champion mother and unsung iconoclast, not that one usually sings about iconoclasts. March 15, her birthday, she would have been 91, it’s a day I will always mark, a day I will hold in high regard.

This year, this crazy fucking year, I cannot not think of Pat. She would still be getting newspapers delivered, probably. But, she’d also subscribe to Apple News or something else. Not just surfing news websites, she’d be swimming in news sites. There would be too much news to risk missing it.

Her hatred of Donald Trump would be full of righteous rage. She wouldn’t stop pointing out all of the pasty smug faces of evangelists selling their souls within Trump’s orbit. The whitest of white, holier than holiest roller Pence, I think she’d just mock his weasel face and feel bad for his wife.

Pat would remind us all of the decades of Trump horribleness. She’d remember the ugly divorces in detail, and remind us all of the things that Marla and Ivana said back in the day.

Morons were never safe in her laser sights. But this, the president, I’m not sure there would be enough words in the language for her. In short, in one of her favorite words, she’d be livid.

All of the news and politics and questioning the sanity of the voting population and railing at the GOP aside, and the grumpy old men vying for the Democratic Party nomination also aside, there would be the pandemic. I really wish I could talk to Pat about COVID 19.

As a teacher, at various times with middle schoolers and little, little kids in elementary school, Pat was a hand washer extraordinaire. She packed hand sanitizer before it was ubiquitous and certainly before it became a target for price gouging.

Many of Pat’s extracurricular contributions to the classroom were straight up common sense with a soupçon of ancient crone wisdom. Some kids came to class without basic lessons like hand washing or shirt tucking, and Pat marched them to the sink and the mirror for lessons. She had tissues and wipes as her personal arsenal against kids who came to school sick.

Over the years, she had a lot of colds and at least one case of pinkeye. I’m certain she fought off mountains of contagions, though, more often than she succumbed. Sick days were for wimps.

But, what I truly miss from Pat’s not being here for all of the news headlines of today, the voice I would love to hear, the missing wry observations would be her total embrace (and she was not one for embracing), her enthusiasm for social distance.

I can hear inside my head that phone call. The glee in which she pointedly would tell me (and anyone else who called) to stay away. With books, crosswords, the TV and news, Pat would be just fine all alone, at least until the coffee ran out.

So, for Pat and to spite the president for whom she absolutely would not have voted, wash your GD hands. And stay home.

Holy, holy, holy

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I really don’t know how to feel, so I’m doing the only thing I ever learned to do. I’ll write. Badly, maybe. Thoughtfully, possibly. With futility, definitely.

Today the closest I ever had to a father figure left this mortal coil. A true mensch, a sensitive soul, my uncle Ron died today.

I thought about writing a euphemism for died, but for all the poets, madman and philosophers seeking the truth, I couldn’t do it. Ron was the first person I ever met who talked about the Beats, Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs. For all of them, the word is death, and today it’s Ron’s word, too.

The first thing I remember about Ron is that he was the first grown up that spoke to me like an adult. I remember real conversations, or rather they were very real to me. Given that I was about 6 years old and he was in his 20s, his mileage no doubt varied on what he got from the dialogs.

I dogeared and wore thin the pages of a picture book he gave me way back when.

That mean man, who shared his chicken pox but never his jelly beans, deserved his score of mean children who made him live unhappily ever after.

It was its non-treacly story and non-kiddie flavor that made it long a favorite after I was past picture books. The book traveled to college and crisscrossed various moves and apartments. I regret not knowing where it landed.

When I came home tonight, I pulled open drawers and scanned shelves to find a tiny gift I never gave Ron over the couple of Christmases we didn’t return east. I meant to give him a small badge from the Beat Museum, an earnest little storefront in the heart of North Beach.

Long before I ever moved near the San Francisco Bay, walked down Grant Ave. to Columbus and by Jack Kerouac Alley, North Beach existed in my imagination. Ron’s love for books and the Beats taught me where City Lights Bookstore and the Condor club are, and I hoped that someday he’d come out here on a visit and see for himself.

As a placeholder for that visit, I picked up the pins from the museum. “Holy! Holy! Holy!” and “Starving Hysterical Naked.” Now they will hold a place of remembrance on the bookshelf by my desk.

I want to say so much more. Ron was the adult who extolled the virtues of “Exile on Main Street” above all other Stones albums. He was jazz records and quoting postmodern analysis of just about anything. He was the babysitter not knowing how to handle an unruly brood of five letting my brothers smoke a novelty cigar. He was nerdy passion for books, art and music in equal measure to a passion for sports, even though a natural athlete he was not.

Coincidentally, my aunt, his wife, told me a story about my father and his influence on her as a kid that I thought I could have said about Ron. My father to Nancy was someone who tried the new, bringing gadgets and food and whatever to her Dorchester, a neighborhood not known for exploration. Ron was that to me in my suburban world.

He listened to rock and jazz and read books that raised eyebrows. He spoke to me and my siblings and his high school students like a real person, including innuendo and jokes. He admitted to having inhaled way before it was asked of presidential candidates.

Ron and my aunt Nancy were Newbury Street in the 60s, urban life and walks in the Public Garden to feed the ducks after reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” I met my first hippies and interracial couples and a gay man through them. I tried new foods, like the exotic pita bread suddenly appearing on store shelves next to the Wonder Bread.

I got to take a sip of wine and beer, and instead of soda was allowed sophisticated drink mixers like Squirt from the corner store.

Every perception I had as a kid in the sixties and early seventies was influenced by what seemed at the time a Ron and Nancy’s counterculture lifestyle to my mom’s post-war mainstream self.

Ron was also after school adventures and schemes with Pat, my mother, as they both used their school teacher afternoons pretty well.

There is a part of the non-conformist me that I think I owe to both of them back in those afternoons. I learned about shy adults with passions bubbling under the surface. Early on I talked about writing with Ron, a closet writer who said his stuff wasn’t good enough to see the light of day. I am sure that he was wrong.

Perhaps most of all, Ron taunted a kind of affection and sensitivity in me, giving me the hugs that were not second nature in my family and speaking out loud about feelings. I modeled behavior that he showed and eventually I’ve gotten better. Ron and Nancy were the most couple-y couple in my world as a kid.

Now, I use his “take care” as a goodbye (which actually works pretty well in California.)

That’s all I have right now, and it’s not nearly enough. Maybe instead, I’ll just re-read Ginsberg. Ron and everything are Holy! Holy! Holy!

Remembering a dream I had

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Recently, I remembered a happiness I could never achieve despite my belief that some can attain it. For me, it will never be a reachable star.

Many moons and a couple of thousand of miles ago, I sat in a classroom. There, in the front, sat color-coded file boxes. They were the slick, good cardboard, shiny like magazine covers. Contained within were shiny cards, a bright color band on top, each with a different story or puzzle or game.

The product was called SRA. The acronym may be for Standardized Reading Aptitude. Or maybe Symbianese Reading Army, as it was the 1970s.

Each kid in the classroom was told what color they were, and they got to cluster around their colored box selecting an activity. As we moved through the weeks and months, we would development and be given access to a new color in the series.

Warren and I weren’t assigned a color. Within that classroom we were relegated to a strictly black and white world, no color codes for us. Black letters on white backgrounds, the text of books.

Together we walked to the front of the class and asked the teacher for our color. She was nice about it, but she clearly laughed at us. “Red, I guess. It’s the last color in e series.” We spent the rest of the afternoon amusing ourselves with a game or two that focused on vocabulary and comprehension skills we already had.

I loved being an early reader. Books brought me a sense of an entire universe that I couldn’t see from my window.

To this day, I remember the special vocabulary lists my second grade teacher wrote out just for me and tucked into new books I hadn’t tackled yet. Most definitely I learned the word “extraordinary” from Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

However, I also noticed something as I occasionally popped my nose above the pages and looked around the classroom. The other kids, the slow readers, always seemed to be having a raucously good time. They played loud and boisterous games, even when we were supposed to be quiet.

I was slower in learning how to make a triangular paper football and flick it over the goalposts of a friend’s two hands.

Worse, I got extra assignments. No matter how quickly I completed my work, the teacher always had a pile more waiting for me. Thin books moved to heavy tomes that tore away at the straps of my book bag.

In my childish brain it seemed so unjust. Purely because I could do my work, I was given more work to do.

My fantasy, therefore, was wishing that I never learned how to read. Or, maybe, more realistically, that I only ever could read at a minimally acceptable level. My whole life would have been different, as teacher after teacher passed me a long but never expected particularly much from me. I’d have more free time to master kickball and twisting a paperclip into the perfect missile to be launched from a rubber band.

Sometimes today, a fully grown adult, I still feel that way.

People expect more from me in some situations. I had a recent spate of meetings in which coming in or going out the door I got buttonholed for a couple more comments from the powers that be.

Meanwhile, I find myself shoulder to shoulder with the kids who never even made it to the red box, the last in the reading series. These kids, now adults, color-coded green or yellow or orange, get to leave meetings on time.

Happily, they go back to their desks. They work next to me, unaware, that I’ve just been handed an extra report to write and don’t understand why I like meetings even less than they do.