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.