John’s Garden: Losing John Tinker to Cancer, November 2010

Late August, when I saw John Tinker at the cancer support group meeting, I told him, “It has been a privilege knowing you.”

He sat there, looking his usual slim self, with his rosy-cheeked face.  His hair was greying at the temples. His eyes were alert. 

This was what he looked like ever since Dan and I had been attending these meetings at UCSF in spring 2009, soon after John and his partner Adrian started coming. John just kept showing up, after every creeping back of the cancer into his body. His appearances meant a new day, a new chance at life. Even through pain he was a fixture, one of the main members of this collection of people in various stages of colorectal cancer.

He wore his thick hair a bit longer in the front and short around his neck and ears, reminiscent of the F. Scott Fitzgerald era. The contemporary part of him wore jeans and a button down shirt, and glasses. He and Adrian both seemed like they were from another time. Adrian, skilled in the decorative arts, painted intricate designs on harpsichords, furniture, and walls. He was soft-spoken, humble, with a little pointed beard and twinkling eyes.

They finished each other’s sentences, and when their words would collide, they would ask each other, “Do you want to say it, or should I?”

This was the last meeting I could attend before my semester started, since I was assigned a Thursday night class. We all sat in a circle. The one couch often held either Marsha and RaeAnn or John and Adrian or Dan and myself, couples. Vittorio, the leader, sat in the same chair he always did, but the rest of us alternated. The room was vacated of the usual traffic by our 6pm start time. All the desks were empty, as were the other rooms with tables and chairs. On a shelf to one side were photos of a couple of women who had died of breast cancer, their names inscribed on the frames. On top of another shelf hats were piled up for women who had lost their hair due to chemo. On top of and in cupboards were balls of yarn and knitting needles and crochet hooks for people to make the hats.

John had expressed many times that he was dying, yet this time seemed different. His pain was worse, but too, the cancer was invading further. All of us did our best to respond in some way, and it turned into praising him and showing him gratitude.

“We wouldn’t have met, even though we we’re both English teachers,” I said.

We went in different circles, even though we both helped students with their writing and were both writers. He worked for Stanford and I for Laney. He directed the writing center there, taught literature. When I had looked him up on the internet, I found that he had written papers on a writer I never heard of. The cancer transformed not only his life, but his writing. In between various surgeries, emergency room visits, chemotherapy, and other treatments, he worked on a book written from the perspective of a cancer patient.

It’s not often that one gets the chance to thank someone to their face, to say things that you would otherwise end up saying after their death. But this was a facet of the group, where we practiced the extraordinary.

Three years ago, in fall 2007, John fell down in a grocery store, writhing in pain. He went to his doctor, who did tests and told him he had colon cancer and would need surgery immediately. John balked in disbelief. Cancer? Out of nowhere. He was in perfect health—exercised, ate right, was of sound mind and body, lived daily as a vital person. After the denial wore off the next week he went in for the surgery.

We joined this group as we were doing research around Dan’s own cancer. Dan had been diagnosed with rectal cancer that spring and we had gotten two recommendations for radical surgery from inside Kaiser and one outside, at UCSF, from the new head of colorectal cancer there. The group helped us navigate the terrain. We found people with experience and a leader who moderated the conversation well and with humor. Everyone was frank, which made sense, as we ourselves had already entered into the realm of “too much information” being de rigeur, where bodily descriptions were not tasteless, but necessary.

At first, while waiting for the meeting to start, John and I would talk about our teaching programs. As he vanished from that world, he would ask about my work, and I gladly shared, knowing he understood and appreciated the details of my composition classes, which always benefited from an airing out.

Another connection I had with John was writing. Dan and I were waiting for a surgery date in June 2009 and I could not write. In between semesters, I was drowning in the limbo of not knowing and not having any control. I was anxious that Dan’s surgery would be in the midst of my summer teaching schedule, which was much more rigorous and condensed than a regular semester. We bandied back and forth with Dan’s surgeon about the date to no end, because he would forget what we requested and scheduled a date that had to be pushed back.

It was John who prodded me. He said I must write. John inspired me because of his own writing—not only little essays he was working on in spite of his physical condition, but the book about patients’ attitude and experiences with the health system. He wanted to affect change with this collection. His own positive attitude was the catalyst. The book would be available as hard copy, but also free, online, his gift to everyone and anyone. Thanks to John I put pen to paper, and that grew into writing over 100 pages about the steps and stages from Dan’s diagnosis to his surgery, the hospital stay, recovery period, and beyond, diagramming in words a partner’s experience with the medical system, an arc of a relationship.

John had gone on a leave of medical absence from his teaching position before we met in the group. By the time he had retired for good, a few months into our association, he declared that he did not miss work and did not understand how he could have spent that much time doing it. He was once passionate about teaching, but now a nice day consisted of waking up to Adrian’s touch and a little gardening. His priorities had changed. He and Adrian would have a nice dinner after hearing a new, even more devastating diagnosis, or brunch at the Cliff House.

“What else can we do?” they said to us all, with smiles on their faces.

We were all impressed with John’s attitude from the start—how he had been dealt this hand, yet he was approaching it positively, frankly, step by step. He was not “battling” cancer, as the medical profession wanted him to do; rather, he treated it as much as he could, and then accepted it. This does not mean he was passive. He had undergone surgery and rounds of chemo. When the cancer spread to his sacrum at the base of his spine, John had the new-fangled “cyber knife” treatment, lasers attacking the very spot where the cancer was hitting the nerve. In fall of 2009, he said he didn’t think he would live to the following summer. He took valium to mediate the pain, as the cancer was touching the nerve. Then he tried morphine, but it left him too out of it to pursue his creative outlets, like writing. Then methadone.

He and Adrian were unable to control the actual disease, but they controlled how they experienced the disease. The “we” here is significant, because it means that he and Adrian were dealing with this together. I understood the “we,” having gone through Dan’s cancer, where sometimes the line between patient and partner blurred in the work and emotional investment I put in which involved in attaining the right answers, treatment, and care for Dan.

More than working together to attain an end, because of the recurrences and complications, these two were living more fully than anyone I’d ever known, in spite of setbacks which left John taking the various pain killers, and making an emergency visit to the hospital because of a blockage in the colon. He led a life of laxatatives to avoid further blockage, before he ended up having a colostomy, which deprived him of wearing his nicely-fitted blue jeans, similar to Dan. John’s experience kept turning corners, and we would hear tales of something new all the time.

At the garden party they hosted in September, it was clear that this was a farewell party for John, despite the delectable sheet cake someone brought for his birthday. Adrian explained, as he welcomed us through the house and down the backstairs towards the garden, that John might have to lay down at some point, because he tired easily. Fall was approaching and he only had at most a few months to live since the cancer was uncontrollable and all they were doing at this point was trying to mitigate the pain.

Baroque music from a string trio flowed through the air from under the canvas cover at the corner of the garden, the hire of the musicians a gift from one of John’s friends for the event. A bowl of lemonade stood in another corner, next to the house, along with some chips and guacamole. We were introduced to some of John’s Stanford colleagues, as well as some friends from the Quaker church Adrian was a member of and which they both frequented.

We wandered back upstairs, to the dining room table, where an assortment of French breads beckoned, handmade by another friend who was taking a baking class, along with a platter of Mediterranean finger foods and the brownies I had brought. Then back out to the garden, where at second glace we could take more in.

The variety of growth paled beside the height of some of the plants, such as a couple of olive trees, pink roses climbing a trellis, and the pink holyhocks, in full glory. These mixed with tropical plants and low-lying grasses and flowers in yellows and purples. It seemed like a mad disarray, but the closer you got, the planning became apparent, as you walked on one of the little paths, or sat on a stone wall to enjoy the music more closely, avoiding the prick of a cactus here and there.

Sitting on cast iron furniture under the mid-afternoon sun, Dan and I spoke to a friend of theirs who had a studio near Adrian’s, in the same area, Hunter’s Point. She explained how Adrian drove past the house to his studio and saw the “For Sale” sign. We told her how we knew the couple, and she listened intently as we spoke of the support group experience, of John’s health. Dan, who didn’t readily open up, spoke to her of his cancer. 

As this conversation waned, Marsha and RaeAnn from the group appeared. Like John and Adrian, they had lived most of the years of their relationship in separate dwellings and recently moved in together. Marsha said they had visited this house, and explained their joy at the new picket fence at the front which replaced the chain mail one.

He and Adrian had bought the house together a little before John was struck down by the disease. At that juncture, they had already lived together for 14 years, and had been together as a couple for three years before that. Theirs was one of the oldest houses in San Francisco, and a wreck, which they spent considerable time and effort renovating into the Victorian jewel it once was. Adrian used his skills as an accomplished decorative artist to restore the décor. They selected the right furniture to complement the era. They kept all the old pictures that were already in the house, of people they did not know, and propped them. They re-upholstered. John took on the backyard, finding old and new plants and flowers to make a lush, enveloping garden, a legacy for Adrian and John’s friends.

The other connection between John and Adrian and Dan and myself was what cancer gave our relationship. It was a gift. Dan and I realized how committed we were to each other in the midst of the cancer, over lunch down the block from the hospital, during a day of many doctor appointments. We married in April 2010. John and Adrian had their marriage ceremony near the time Dan had his surgery, summer 2009, in Mendocino. These relationships have been the richer for this disease entering our lives, like a secret garden that needs a key.

The meetings I could not attend in September and October, Dan informed me of. He said that John and Adrian were looking into hospice care and discussing the details of John’s death. Adrian so openly talked about John’s death right in front of John, it felt weird and unusual, but it was also mark of their frankness with each other and their openness with the group. Adrian wondered if he could accompany John’s body to the crematorium. John expressed how he had prided himself on his body, and how he had lost control over it.

Cancer has made us seen who are our friends and who are not. It has shed a light on priorities, values, and love, in the same way that death does. When my father died over a decade ago, his absence cast a shadow and made everything clear—my love for him, the balance of my parents’ relationship. Cancer, too, reveals all—what is important in life.

In the face of John’s death, questions come to the front. Why does one person die, while another’s life is spared? Just because Dan’s cancer was caught in an early stage? Why must Adrian deal with this loss? Longing comes up—how I wish I had known John more, better, for more years. Was it enough to see John in group? I picture John’s face and want to hug him as I did the many times after a group meeting.

Knowing someone through a support group is different than sharing their everyday life—it is no better or worse, just more concentrated. I didn’t think of myself as a close friend of John’s because I did not share this everyday life, and because outside of one event they invited us to, we only saw them in group, in a controlled setting with rules, with others around. What the group allows is divulgence of the deepest information—the physical breakdown of the body, cancer cells multiplying and destroying a life. The physical.

In John’s case, the cancer became something spiritual too. His beliefs had helped steer him to a positive outlook of acceptance. His spirituality was, as he told us, something that he went towards to nurture himself in these times. When, however, during one session, he broke down and told us his strength was nowhere to be found, that even his spiritual center couldn’t be found, what could we say? He couldn’t be cured. His optimism failed. He was going to die and was in constant pain. We were there as witnesses to his pain and his struggle to remain optimistic.

As with anyone I love, I found myself wanting to reach out and grasp the pain, removing it for good, along with every part of the cancer, but all I could do was remark on our meeting and knowing each other under these unique circumstances. It was particularly hard to watch someone like John go down because he kept returning to the group, because of the depth which he saw and understood his own predicament, because of his expression of that to us. He was an illusion even before his death.

John’s positive attitude, though it may have waned, was an inspiration, like the garden he left behind to be enjoyed, plants both old and new flowering in the sun and bending to the force of the wind. If there is a way of not “battling” life, but accepting it, recognizing what can be controlled and what cannot, John found it. The garden stands for the connection he felt to the living world, but also his connection to something beyond.

My Name

Inspired by Sandra Cisneros “My Name” 
from The House on Mango Street

Laurel wreath, sharp points, not serrated, not smooth, not round, but oval. Why did she name me after a leaf, a tree, that strong smelling, good for stew, good for sauce, hard to pronounce in some tongues, an “l” at each end, a name so un-Jewish, unlike my middle name, Sara, after her mother? Sara no one would mis-pronounce, Sara, no one would startle, then halt, before diving into a pool, the “el” just about to leave the tongue.

Fragrant laurel leaves making the winner’s wreath without thorns, clearly defined leaves with a point at each end. Nothing hurts. Then why is it so sad, so quiet, unlike my brother, who could be loud, with the “k” at the end of his name—Mark—the end defined with no chance of falling into the water.

I used to think about changing my name to Lauren, Laura, Laurie, making accommodations to the world to be accepted, to blend in, because I wanted to be out of the way in a ponytail, invisible unlike my brother who created a storm out of a room, our parents whirling around him trying to contain him, hiring other people to make sense of him, though our father was a social worker.


My name was too much for me. I wanted something quieter, to fit how quiet I had to be—there was only room for one of my brother. I was nice. I was sweet. I was Laurel wanting to be Lauren, Laura, Laurie, writing those names in cursive in elementary school, learning the order of the letters in case I could change my name. I loved my family, felt safe but hated the yellow, hated who I was, closing the door to my room and stuffing my ears. My mother’s diets gave me a vision of my own body. Not having a high IQ, while members of my 4^th grade class went down the hall to the “gifted” program, gave me what I was worth. Positive negatives.


Only after I could be bad, did Laurel make sense, disappearing during lunch from temp jobs, stealing from stores, hallucinating in my dorm room, colors exploding, drinking the hard stuff in a car bound for downtown, with my housemates screaming “Louise” each other. Even with all this, I remained innocent on sugar overloads during the walk from 29^th Avenue home towards the ocean and park.

I grew into my name, because regardless of child or adult, always the child. It’s not enough that others say it. I grew into the “els,” framing me like a gate.

Winds at My Back: My Mother, My Teacher

Everyone who has gone through the process of education can tell of someone or something that pushed him or her on, and the challenges. In Burro Genius, by Victor Villasenor, he talks about the idea of a weed, that it may not get water, or concrete is poured over it, but still it survives. He struggles with his Spanish in an English-speaking classroom. He is a weed, fueled, rather than drowned by poison and dryness; he goes on, survives, peeing in his pants in front of other kids, wetting his bed, and later, as an adult, endures the hundreds of rejections on his writing submissions.

My mother watered me, tended me as a flowering plant in a garden, but I also felt like a weed, not good enough, different, the one blonde child on a bus-full of black kids going up the hill, sitting stiff on the tall dark green seat with the straight back, my hair in two ponytails, one behind each ear. My transparent bag with a colorful flower pattern showed everything I had inside.

My mother taught me to read and write before I went to school. As a children's librarian, she was experienced at reading to a room full of children. She was my teacher, and I have followed her footsteps, not in becoming a children’s librarian like her, but first becoming a children’s bookseller, and then becoming a teacher at a junior college.  But going through higher education wasn’t a straight line. Partly, it was due to motivation. I was always a B student in high school, by my own choice. I would rather do homework in front of the TV, or sit in the blue chair in the living room with my feet up listening to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto or Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony. Only later, when I went back to complete college after years in the working world, did I strive for As, putting my GPA on track. Only then could I see myself as worthwhile, a bright flower, talkative rather than silent. One doesn’t have to suffer language discrimination to internalize pain in the classroom. Home life shaped who I became in public. I was mostly invisible as a child. I had to be, because my brother was a hyperactive, demanding, yelling, hitting boy. So when I went to school I demonstrated the same behavior I adhered to at home. Be good, be nice.

My parents expected me to go to college. They were both the first in their New York Jewish families to attend. My mother wanted to be a doctor, but only one cousin in her large family was supported to do so, and he was male. So she studied biology before attending Columbia library school in a special summer program. My father went to college gratis of the service after WWII ended. I dropped out after a couple of years, directionless. Twenty years later, and after my father’s death, I returned.

I teach the power of language to my students in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Malcom X, Gloria Anzaldua, Jonathan Kozol, and Aleen Pace Nilsen, as well as Richard Rodriguez. We examine language and how it is used to exert power over people or or influence them, how it is gender-related, and how a person can change with mastery of language. But I know only one language—empowerment through knowledge, through knowing who you are, where you come from. 

The Letter: My Father & Education

After leaving my long-time bookselling job and traveling in Europe by myself for three months, I found a job in the city at a small bookstore. I wanted to reinvent myself, find a new career, but was unable to make the jump. I was still figuring it out, I told myself.

It was early November and already the leaves had started crumpling up on the sidewalks of 24^th Street, and riding home on Bart I could see the sun setting over Mt. Tam around 5 o’clock.

The newspaper clippings started funneling in from my father around then, and that’s when I decided I finally needed to stand up to him. The articles were about individuals finding a job with a good future and good benefits, but I didn’t need to hear it.

At my previous job, where had I worked for years at a large general bookstore in Berkeley, I considered it my career, but all he could do was suggest other occupations and careers; for instance, that I go to school to become a physical therapist.

One afternoon he and my mother met me at the store and we walked up the street to have lunch.

I saw the words in his brain form, saying “get a real job,” as the juices from my taco dripped onto the plate and sounds of children ricocheted off the walls.

I loved that job, meeting with children’s book publishers and ordering the books, having a constant dialogue with co-workers and customers about history, art, travel, the world past and present. But it wasn’t an honored profession with a future, according to my father.

He was a social worker. He spent his hours steering people in a direction. He knew how to counsel couples and families, and his clients were so devoted to him, he received gifts, such as a painting, a stained glass lamp, and free meals at one couple’s café where a sandwich was named after him, “The Benjamin.”

Calls came to our house asking for him, his patients asking for help, but he wasn’t there in the afternoon and evening, as he scheduled his appointments then. So I would write down the name and number. Once, as a teenager, I counseled a suicidal woman because I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t hang up.

He grew up on the idea that you create your own foundation. He enlisted at the beginning of WWII so he could pick his position, to train as an aircraft engineer. Stationed in North Carolina, he also did coursework in Texas and other places. And later, when the war ended, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College on the G.I. bill, and continued to get his B.A. He drove a cab to support himself. His landlord wanted him to marry his daughter, but my father had other ideas.

He was inspired by the settlement houses he had seen in New York, in poor urban areas, where volunteer middle-class people would live and share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The idea of helping people rise out of their disadvantaged situations had burned into him.

So he moved back to Brooklyn to live with his father and stepmother in their third floor walkup apartment, pushcart hawkers yelling their wares below on the crowded streets. He drove upstate to attend classes at Adelphi University to get his MFCC when he wasn’t driving a cab on the New York streets.

My father was the only one of his siblings to attend college. His father, Ben Zion Benjamin, or “B.B.”, came from Russia. He was a paper hanger and his children went into trades, either following their father’s work, or selling cars, or doing clerical work. My father wanted something more. In turn, when he became a father, he wanted something more for my brother and me as well. It was impossible to get around it.

That’s why I dropped out of college—because it felt like a large empty structure that had no meaning, no point. I don’t know where I derived any motivation of my own, with his force always present.

When I succeeded in music, as a young oboist, I felt like it came in spite of my parents. I got no guidance, no encouragement, heard no applause from them. I got Bs in high school without trying. I studied with the T.V. on, listened to Mozart and Beethoven with books on my lap.

The letter I sent him was serious and long, like my ever-expanding narrative poems, like the essays forming in my brain, like my dreams, never-ending stories with light and shadow, symbols, a beginning, middle, and an end. I told him the truth—that I needed to find my way—that he should trust me.

My mother called immediately. “You really hurt him—he is only trying to help.”

I didn’t hear from my father. My parents went away for Thanksgiving, celebrating without me.

My brother had already written his letter to our father years before, and since then they enjoyed a successful interchange. My brother told me they would have a conversation, each taking something positive from it. The proof was the music played sometimes in the car, a tape my brother made for him, of Jeff Beck and other rock guitar players, which our father would never listen to on his own.

They were like a sailboat with both people steering. My father even attended an EST seminar while my brother was immersed in that group, which many called a cult, as it was accused of brainwashing its victims. My father would listen as my brother divulged the inner workings of the sessions, the deeper details which inspired him.

The objective, I realized, was to not lose my brother to this group’s hungry claws, so my father extended a hand rather than possibly seeing him drown.

For me, my father was trying to steer my small boat and not let me have a hand in it. When, over the years, I was cajoled into having breakfast out at Sambos or Carrows by him, I would sit and listen in my shorts and t-shirt, the orange upholstered booths sticky under my legs. I thought, why are you counseling your own daughter? Communicating with him had never been easy, and I had been eeking out the words for years, a couple here, a few there, but they had not been heard. I was the quiet child alongside my brother’s noisy hyperactive ways, and needed to speak.

The cheese I brought to my parents house to celebrate my father’s birthday December 15th was his favorite, its veins a messy bright blue against the smooth ivory wedge. Stilton. I had told them I would come by after my shift ended.

My father and I sat calmly reconciled, somehow, enjoying the cheese together around the coffee table while my mother finished preparing dinner. It felt easy rather than awkward. There was hope.

 

When I got the call five days later, I was sitting on the couch in my one bedroom apartment with the cat on my lap.

My brother’s voice wavered. I didn’t know why was calling from a hotel room in San Luis Obispo. My parents and brother had driven to LA for a family wedding.

He explained that at the wedding, everyone was worried about our father because he was usually so talkative, but instead, he just sat off to the side looking pale. Later that day, he said, they spent four hours at the hospital in LA, but the doctors found nothing, so they decided to come home, my brother driving. They just pulled into a gas station in San Luis when our father had seized up.

“How is he?” I asked.

There was a pause. 
"What's going on?" I said.
“He’s dead.”

I had to stand up, my footing uneven as I took the cat off my lap and rose from the couch. It didn’t make sense, didn’t seem real. His doctor said he was in perfect health. How could this be true?

He said, “Mom won’t talk to me. Can you come down. I can’t drive her back alone.”

I needed a ride, so called Michael, my ex-boyfriend, always ready to help. In the meantime, I called my friend Lisa to come and sit with me.

I poured myself a glass of scotch, because I thought, that’s what you do when someone dies. Instead of knocking me out, which it should have done, it only made me feel more normal.

My life has been centered around written communication—poems, stories, and letters—the quiet, methodical structure of language. The spoken word comes less easily, but it comes, none-the-less, while teaching a class or talking with a friend. And, hopefully, it comes not too late.

Community Through Poetry in Albany

Tonight is the final Second Wednesday Poetry Drop-In Workshop with Alison Seevak at the Albany Public Library from 7-9 p.m. Alison has been leading this for ten years. It is free and open to all ages, and I have met people from ten to 85 years old, all with something to share of their lives, their perspective. Alison calls herself a “facilitator,” and that term more than anything else defines the session. The library website calls this a workshop, but technically it is not; rather, it is a place where people produce ideas and share them with a small and diverse community of writers.

She tells newcomers, “We’ll write and then share. Even if you think you don’t want to read, you might want to consider it.” She talks about the power of hearing oneself read aloud, that “you never know—it might be something someone else needs to hear.”

There is no feedback, which is a boon for those of us who just want to write and not be judged. What this does is create an open atmosphere. Alison’s matter-of-fact approach and her passion come through, as she is someone who is as comfortable with dealing in poetry as she is with breathing. After she has everyone say his or her name, she stands up with a stack of paper and then walks around the donut-shaped arrangement of desks where we sit facing each other, to distribute the prompt. The prompt changes—once it was a strawberry, once we chose from her selection of postcards, and sometimes she takes us through a scaffolding process of making a list before writing.

Tonight, the first prompt is a poem about what’s in a boy’s head. There are just under twenty of us, but the number has been larger or smaller, with a core group of regulars. One of the regulars, sitting next to me, Frances, who spins gossamer out of language, makes a sound of recognition at the author’s name, a Czech poet, who I’ve never heard of, and Alison makes a comment to Frances. Once everyone has the poem, she reads it aloud. Then we all write for 20 minutes, including Alison, because she always participates, always shares. This is the best model of teaching—facilitating and sharing. People learn best from each other with someone to guide them. And she is a professional teacher, to kids, and in her own life is a mother to a little girl.

We have already introduced ourselves, but when we read aloud, we mention our names again, upon the request of Tom, another regular. We all know he is going to ask. Elsie has not come with him this time—they are both older and I feel concern when she doesn’t appear, because she seems frail. Tom comes from the school of rhyme, and his poems are always tied together perfectly. He reads first, and we all laugh, because he builds humor in his poems.

Then we work around the circle. Someone new, Carmen, has focused deeply on dental floss and popcorn—her poem is like an onion—you keep peeling and it continues. It is the polar opposite of my style, I realize, which tends to go outwards. Her dark brown, almost black hair frames her face sharply, capping her head, with thick blunt cut bangs over her eyes. Everyone is rapt as she speaks, murmuring surprise and delight, but not saying anything, honoring her space. We continue around the circle, hearing the variety, what each person has gleaned from the prompt—to say what’s inside our head, or if we want, inside our heart, or our body, or whatever else. Most people have gone with the ‘head’ prompt, and all sorts of things pop out—stuffed animals, the natural world, literature, the minutae of daily life, childhood. There are laughs, there is silence, there are moist eyes and smiles, the range of human emotion.

After everyone reads, we take a ten minute break to enjoy the goodies some of us have brought. Usually Alison brings some cookies, but tonight we want to celebrate her. And tonight before we began, Ronnie Davis, the head librarian, came to thank Alison for her dedication with a bouquet of flowers.

One regular who used to come for years but hasn’t lately, Liz, asks me, as we much on cookies, “so is anyone else taking this over?” I say I don’t know. I only heard from another regular, Emmy, that this was the last session. “It’s about community,” says Liz. “Yes,” I say, realizing that for the first time that it is more than about writing, that this ties us together. Liz starts talking about the first Thursday open mic here at the Edith Stone room, for years, which is scheduled after a poetry reading. I go to the readings, but leave before the open mic, but that is Liz’ passion, reading aloud.


Poetry has figured prominently in Albany for a while. We have a poet Laureate, Christina Hutchins, who leads the open mic. She was selected for the position in summer of 2008 by the Albany Arts Committee.

As stated on the City of Albany web page:  “The year 2008 is Albany’s Centennial year and is thus a fitting time to begin a Poet Laureate program that will help us celebrate our shared history and community. The honorary position of Poet Laureate is given to a writer who uses poetry to express and celebrate a spirit of community throughout the year and to foster a love of poetry and literature among citizens young and old. “ 

Christina is another leader in the community, then. In a time where values seem to head more towards money-making than the arts, a time when the arts have little funding in the U.S., Albany has made a statement in supporting them, a model for other cities to reckon with. The fact that Albany has supported the writing group with Alison for ten years is considerable enough, let alone the fact that we have a poet to represent us to the world.


We do one more round, as Alison hands out another prompt and we write for twenty minutes, and share. Before we leave, I thank Alison for being a “facilitator,” praise her for being unique. Others join in. I ask her about her decision to leave. She explains that she is just taking a break, that the program is not ending, and that the library did not initiate this. They don’t necessarily want a substitute or replacement because they have built up a relationship of trust with Alison. She is unique, as the library of Albany is. As Ronnie Davis says, “we have always supported poetry in the community.” And in that, the library has brought the community together.

The Golden Cage: Un-Documented Students

My student says she’s living in a golden cage as an undocumented immigrant, “the gold representing the opportunities immigrants do have, such as public education, the simplist thing as being able to go out and spend ten dollars in food. Back home (Mexico), those ten dollars are needed to pay rent, bills, and put food on the table for a whole family.”

If you are a child who is brought to a new country by her parents, you don’t have a choice. If you attend high school here for three or more years, graduate from a California high school or receive the GED, enroll in a community college, a Cal State, or a UC school, and sign a statement with the college saying that you will apply for legal residency as soon as you are eligible to do so—if you do all this, you can become an AB540 student, where you pay in-state tuition fees.

What the students really hope for is the “Dream Act,” where undocumented young people could be eligible for a conditional path to citizenship in exchange for completion of a college degree. They must also demonstrate what is termed “good moral character” to be eligible for it and stay in conditional residency. At the end of the process, the young person can finally become an American citizen. The Dream Act is one piece of the large pie of immigration legislation, and some say they should just push for it to be passed by itself since the Obama administration isn’t making immigration their top priority.

As my student says, “the gold doesn’t give us our liberty; we are still trapped in the cage with limited freedom.” Not only is this student an exceptional one in my class, but she is at the top in achievement of all the students I’ve had. She is not only able to look close up as with a magnifying glass, but also look at the larger picture of whatever we are reading or discussing in my English composition class.

I teach at Laney College in Oakland, in the heart of Chinatown, where a diverse population comes together, including local African Americans who have gone through the Oakland public school system, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Chileans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Indians, Africans. The list goes on. But the classes I have been teaching since spring 2009 have been in the Puente Program, which attracts mainly Latinos, but is open to any other students. I initially took the course over from another teacher who was going out on maternity leave, so didn’t consider what it meant to teach in this program, set up almost 30 years ago by a couple of people at Chabot College in Oakland who were concerned about the Latino failure rate. Because of economic and political conditions and lack of support, these students were at risk. So the program developed with three arms: an English class, a counseling class, and a mentorship. The same group of students would be in both classes and each student would have her or his own individual mentor, someone from the community to ask questions of and seek support from. The program now boasts a high transfer rate, higher than students in other programs and higher than the larger population of students who are not in any program.

My first semester teaching in the program in spring 2009, with only one week’s notice, I didn’t have time to adapt my pedagogy, so used my normal materials, and didn’t have an idea of who this population of students were. Attending an afternoon session at College of Alameda, put on by Edy Chan and her Diversity program, focusing on Latino students and family dynamics, helped flush out the picture for me. When the father lost his job, the student would be expected to find work to help out. When the mother needed the daughter at home, she would be told she couldn’t go to class. These families were tightly knit, protective, and perpetuated traditional roles. Further, the family unit was a model for how the program was conducted. Students would be in their own “familias” in class, though I did not use that model as the teacher of the counseling class did. I was supposed to co-coordinate the program with the counseling teacher, though at this point I still felt like I was temporarily taking over someone else’s class. I did not buy into the “familia” model entirely, because I thought, if the family model isn’t working at home, why bring it into the classroom?

It wasn’t until the following semester, fall 2009, that I began to understand Puente. Again, with a week’s notice, as the same teacher decided she was going to take time out to spend with her young son, I adapted the syllabus a bit, providing more Latino readings, as was dictated by the program. I used the same reader I had ordered for my regular composition class, but changed the focus, and supplemented this with six chapters from Sandra Cisneros “The House on Mango Street.” I devoted an entire unit to the chapters, assigning a group to each one to do a critical and personal interpretation. What I gave, I received back ten fold. Each group presentation was a revelation. The students spoke of their fears and their joys—they opened themselves entirely for the class and for me. With “Hips,” the group of women asked two women students from the “audience” to walk up and back in front of the classroom swinging their hips. Then they asked two men to do it. This elicited laughter from everyone. With “Alicia sees Mice,” the group talked about the scary father in more hushed tones. One group looked at the imagery in the language of another chapter, unraveling its dense poetry.

Along with the presentations, for the same unit I assigned three personal writings: the photo assignment, where a student writes about a family photo—the day it was taken, what was going on, etc.; my name, where the student writes about where her/his name came from; and the quotation exercise, where the student must pick out a quote that inspires her/him. I was stunned by the honesty and living color of these writings. I compiled them in a word document and had the students read from them at one of our program gatherings shortly afterwards. For each student, I had picked one of the three writings to put in the booklet. To hear them read aloud to a roomful of fellow students and mentors at this luncheon was moving, but it was more of an echo of what I had just experienced with the class presentations—they were a breakthrough because I saw the benefit of a class that is tightly knit, attending two classes together in a supportive environment. The idea of the “familia” made itself known to me.

Other benefits of the program for students, along with being in two classes together and having a mentor, are activities such as visiting four-year colleges and doing lunches, as well as attending community cultural events. More central to the classroom, students stay with the same teacher for two semesters in a row, not typical for a college level class and not otherwise dictated or even encouraged. The fall semester is the pre-English 1A level class. At Laney it is called 201. Then in spring, the class moves into 1A, the four-year transferable class, if they passed 201. My main complaint about this pacing was that normally at Laney, students are required to do two semesters of 201. Why then, I wondered, was the Puente program accelerating students through it in one semester, and a lot of them second language speakers who could use more time than this hurried pace allowed? This was considered a benefit? I couldn’t comprehend it. As various teachers stated at a Puente conference I attended, “the model isn’t broken, so don’t fix it.” It was their mantra.

What I realized when I was planning for the spring semester, finally with enough notice to know I was going to teach it, was that I didn’t have to repeat everything I had taught them the previous semester. Sure, there would be reminders and a few exercises to strengthen what they had learned, but I wouldn’t need to build a house from the ground up. Usually at the beginning of an English 1A class I lay foundation in summary, paraphrase, and quotation, for instance; this time, I did a review of the first two and distributed samples of quotation from the previous spring Puente class, which I had the students read aloud in class. Instead of doing an entire day’s worth of paragraph study, we did a brief topic sentence exercise. Their organization on the first essay assignment was better at the beginning of the semester than most English 1A classes I’ve had. This model, then, seemed like a good one, after all, going from one semester of 201 directly into 1A. Additionally, by having the same teachers, the trust was already built, and could be made even stronger. The students felt even more comfortable in the larger class discussions, confident that their voices mattered. Students helped each other without my suggesting that they do so. They were teaching each other, the foundation of teaching in action.

I encountered the word “undocumented” the first semester I worked in Puente, in spring 2009. We were talking about immigration. It came up, of course, because it will come up in a Puente class, as it is related to everything. We were talking about the American Dream, and one student revealed that she was “undocumented,” a term that I had heard before, the new term for “illegal immigrant.” The idea is that people who have come here against all odds and work and live their lives here would like to be legal, and therefore, are not criminals. Rather, they do not have the proper documents. When the student revealed her status, it was like a secret had just come in with the wind. I saw that more than being ashamed, she was afraid. It would take me some time to understand the importance of her revelation to me fully, and it would not happen that semester. Her classmates knew, obviously—it was with me that she was taking a risk, a new Puente teacher. To her credit, she ended up writing about the undocumented in her research paper.

These immigrants are consumers who pay into the U.S. economy, yet are taken advantage of by employers who pay them less than minimum wage. When my grandparents came to the United States, from, on my father’s side Russia, and from my mother’s side the Austro-Hungarian Empire (what is now Poland and the Ukraine), they were treated as second-class citizens. Whoever made it past Ellis Island was a new citizen, and as Jews escaping persecution they were happy to be here and start a new life, however difficult that was. My step-grandmother’s sisters, who had come before her, sold their wedding rings to bring her here, their father watching as she faded into the snow, away from him. Those who did not immigrate eventually died in the concentration camps in WWII. The Jews, along with the Irish and Italians, started from the bottom and built themselves up, and eventually moved out of tenements into more surburban dwellings. Both my parents were raised in walkup apartment buildings in Brooklyn.

There are other examples of immigration. The Chinese came over to pan for gold and to build the railroad and were treated like animals. Early Mexican migrant workers in the California valley had no rights and worked intolerable hours until Cesar Chavez stepped in. What is the excuse for the crime being committed today, every day? Why can’t we come farther in treating people as equals in this country which prides itself on equality? As another student in my class says, “They have the proof from Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., but I’m still not equal. They said all men are equal, but I guess that’s false for immigrants. So then the land of new opportunities is false too?” What he means about proof is that others have blazed a trail of hope for equality, and he wonders why this doesn’t extend to him. He tells his own story: “I was three when I arrived in Oakland. I went to school like everyone else, had the same education, felt totally equal, until my class organized a trip to Mexico. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait. Until my mother told me I couldn’t go. She came up with the lamest excuse—I had a dentist appointment—and I thought, well, just re-schedule it. She ended up telling me many excuses until I asked her why she didn’t want to let me attend the trip. She said she wanted me to go, but I couldn’t. Not because they could afford it, but because I wasn’t equal.” What he means is that if he had gone to Mexico, he wouldn’t have been able to return to the U.S. because they came here illegally. As he says, “I’m really happy for my parents. They brought me here for a better future. But I sometimes wish they could have came four years earlier than they did.” Then he would have been born here, an American citizen, with all rights afforded to him.

It has taken these students’ words to make me understand what it means to be undocumented. And now I understand why they need a program like this. What it means to be “at risk,” means that without the program they won’t have the support they absolutely need with teachers who appreciate their situation, teachers who won’t balk if they have to go with their parents to see an immigration lawyer; if they have to get a job to help support their family; if the mother keeps the daughter home out of concern that she’s getting a cold. Latinos are the largest population in California, and we need this generation to be highly skilled, to enter the workforce and be a full part of society. Many of the parents of AB540 students—students who have a legal right to attend school here—have gone home to Mexico, Honduras, or Guatemala, leaving the young person alone. What are we going to do with all these children? We are creating a nation of children without families. As one mentor in the mentor-student luncheon last week said, “You have to find the golden key to open the golden cage. It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, it will be discouraging, but you must keep trying. It can be done.”