Have They No Legs?

One of the benefits to teaching in a reasonably affluent community is the generosity of the families whose children I teach. I make no secret of my fondness for grande lattes, so largesse will often come in the form of a Starbucks gift card. This has the dual advantage of giving me enough energy to teach the little cherubs and underwriting my passion for writing where my feet don’t get in the way of the vacuum cleaner.

I can be found every other weekend or so, propped up at a corner table at one of various cafés around town, typing up random thoughts into some semblance of cohesiveness. I magically swipe my plastic card and a perky co-ed or underemployed actor hands over a steaming paper cup of high-octane go-juice. It’s a wonderful system.

Every so often, I don’t have time to stop and smell the beans. I have to grab a joe to go and make my way to my next fun-filled function. I’m in a hurry. Starbucks has clearly recognized this pattern among their caffeine-addicted clientele and gone the way of the ubiquitous fast-food chains – the dreaded drive-thru. Call me old-fangled, but back when I was in school, ‘through’ was a seven letter word. No longer. It has gone the way of lite beer and e-z money - away from the Queen’s English and into misspelled main street purgatory.

Just this morning, I headed out to procure the daily jolt to my nervous system. I found myself at a new Starbucks store, one armed with the dreaded drive-thru. I also found something else, something truly incredible. There were nine, count them, nine cars in line to order at the faceless little box by the side of the coffeeshop. I could not believe what I was witnessing. And none of them had switched off their engines. All were spewing poisonous gases into the atmosphere. I could choose to get in behind a blue Ford Expedition or maneuver to one of several empty parking places. Hmm, tough choice. I selected the latter.

Did these people have no sense? I’ll give one, maybe two, of these drivers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were somehow incapacitated and unable to perform the strenuous task of getting out of their car and walking the seven yards to the door. Perhaps they had no legs, though I saw no handicapped stickers. I’ll also assume that one or two had a kid strapped in one of those complicated carseats which take an advanced degree and a good few hours to release and re-capture. They may be forgiven. But the rest of them?

I decided to conduct an unscientific experiment. I had a little time this morning. I went inside, bought my latte and a newspaper, took a seat by the window, checked on the time, and waited. It had taken me exactly one minute and forty-two seconds to get from my car to the table, coffee in hand. In that time, the first car in line had moved on. There were still however nine in line, as now a silver Volkswagen had snuck in behind the Ford. This would have been my place in line.

The paper had some interesting stories. The coffee tasted wonderful. The VW soon went out of view as it slowly snaked its way around the building, only to emerge thirteen minutes later on the other side. It was now only three cars away from the all-powerful window. I was onto the business section, with only an inch of milk and espresso left in my cup. Wow, the stock market fell again. My retirement plan was suffering. I hoped the driver in the silver car was too.

Another six minutes went by before the barista finally passed him his beverage. That’s nineteen minutes with the car idling to get a twelve ounce cup of coffee. Apart from the sheer waste of time that each of these drivers had just experienced (nine drivers times nineteen minutes equals almost three hours of wasted time) I couldn’t even imagine the environmental impact.

So, later that day, when I had a few minutes of my own to waste, I conducted a little research online. Took me no time at all to discover (thanks to www.greenyour.com) that every “two minutes of car idling consumes the same amount of gas required to drive approximately one mile. If a driver idles for one hour, one gallon of gasoline is wasted.” Not only that, I hear you ask, as you question the wisdom of not turning the engine off to save gas, the website went on: “contrary to automotive myth, restarting a car doesn't damage the engine and, in fact, ten seconds spent idling consumes more fuel than restarting the engine.”

So my friend in the German import had used approximately one third of a gallon, or roughly forty-two fluid ounces, in pursuit of his twelve ounce java. Not only that, I discovered that for every gallon of gasoline burned, whether driving and idling, a car releases twenty pounds of carbon dioxide into our air. Nineteen minutes of waiting at Starbucks translated into about six and a half pounds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a third of a gallon of fossil fuels wasted. That’s some footprint.

And what about the driver’s other footprints, the literal kind? What would the cost be to get off his butt, out of the car, and walk? Next time I’m at the gas station, I’m going to reuse my grande latte cup. I’m going to fill it up with eighty-five-octane gasoline, the cheap stuff, walk back to the Starbucks and offer it to the ninth person in line. It’ll save the driver a whole lot of trouble.

A Lesson In Real

I stop at yard sales. I enjoy poking around other people’s cast-offs. I’m softhearted when it comes to haggling over price, but I’ve picked up some wonderful books and great costume items for my theater productions. I like going with my young daughters. A trinket catches their eye, they ask a price, and invariably the kindly people trying to dump this stuff give it to them for free. If only I was that cute.

The best kind of yard sales feature a cherubic-faced child selling lemonade and cookies. I always buy, even if the lemonade is over-sugared and over-priced. I’m a sucker for misspelled signs – Limonaid 50 sents. I can’t resist. And I’m still waiting for that once-in-a-lifetime bargain. The painting for which I shell out $10, that I then take to Antiques Roadshow and discover it’s worth thousands.

The hardest sales to stop at are estate sales. A lifetime of memories at discount prices. Quite often, the family of a lost loved one has kept the choicest items, leaving the things nobody wants on the sale table. ‘We loved grandma, but none of us had a need for the crocheted bedspread or the china swan statuette.’

In some cases, there is no family, or none nearby, and the estate has commissioned an independent company to swoop in and sell off everything. These are sad sales. They’re great if you’re in the market for some antique crystal or collectible vinyl records, but I find it depressing to find price tags on a framed wedding photo or on the cans of soup or half—used garlic powder in the kitchen cabinets. You can feel the presence of the deceased. It’s only been a few weeks, but it feels as if they’ve just taken the dog for a walk.

I was at one of these sales recently. It was the last day of a three-day event. The antiques had been snatched up, the jewelry sold. The estate sale company was slashing prices – there were bargains to be had. Not much inventory left. Knick-knacks, some linens, assorted kitchen utensils, a box of Christmas decorations. I scored big on a circular saw that I found on a shelf in the garage.

On a table in the living room, between a silver-handled hairbrush and a porcelain creamer, was a small pile of papers bound in a rubber band. The hand written note on top caught my eye: “In Case Anyone Wants To Write Our Family’s Story, Not Just Last Names”. Clearly in the hand of an older lady, the invitation intrigued me. I picked it up and revealed a few newspaper clippings and a dozen or so envelopes containing letters dating from the years following World War Two. I was intrigued. An invitation from the past. A collection of correspondence which might reveal anything. My imagination soared. The old lady knew she had a story here and she just needed someone like me to come along and share it with the world. As a writer, I could not pass up the offer and secretly hoped for something juicy, a story I could turn into a series of magazine articles or, better yet, a bestselling book. An author’s version of the garage sale find on Antiques Roadshow: scandal, fame, fortune, love affairs, treachery, deceit.

The sellers gave me the papers for nothing, threw them in with the power tool. I was excited to open and read my findings. What kind of story would I find? I retreated to my favorite coffeeshop, almost drooling with anticipation. As I sat down with my steaming latte to unveil the package of papers, my eye caught a poster on the coffeeshop wall. Cups and words intertwined with the phrase: “Behind every good cup of coffee is a barista and a good story.”

How true this is. Behind everyone, there is a good story. We all have great stories. Some folks may lead more adventurous lives than others, some may be more widely traveled, their days populated by more colorful characters, but when we sit down to listen to each other, when we ask the right questions, when we take the time to be interested and to dig a little deeper, we all have good stories.

Turn on National Public Radio. For every David Sedaris, with his tales of Crumpet the Elf from New York city in SantaLand Diaries, there is a Bailey White, a small-town first grade teacher from Georgia who lives with her mother. For every news reporter painting a picture from the front lines of the war-torn Middle East, there is a new father telling tales from the front lines of Diaperville. Stories are not about the breadth of our experiences. They are about the richness that we choose to experience in our everyday lives.

A retired friend of mine bemoaned the fact that, despite owning aspirations to write, he may not have followed through, in his words, ‘due to the somewhat limiting outlook under which he lives’. I think that’s just an excuse. Not only are there interesting observations and stories unfolding every day in his walks in the countryside and in the characters he meets, I happen to know about quite a few hair-raising adventures in his lifetime. He’s told me of them. Great stories, all of them. When I tuck my children into bed at night, they are just as thrilled by the seemingly mundane true stories of my school days, as by the crazy capers I invent.

Robert Fulghum once wrote a whole book based on the premise of asking people to open up about their stories. He sat in a bar with a sign around his neck asking people to tell him their tales. He got spectacular results. I think about the ways that stories have come to us – from cave walls, animal hide, parchment, ancient scrolls, and simple oral tradition. It is hard for me to imagine writing my stories with out my computer, but the greatest books of countless generations were either handed down by word of mouth or written out in long hand. Everything from Homer to the Gospels to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

And now, sitting at the coffeeshop, I had in my hand a potential treasure trove of stories, found on a table where everything must go with an invitation to a writer. I opened the envelopes and read.

What I found was simple delightful sharing to a mother from her recently married only daughter. A newspaper clipping informed me that the mother, Lillian, was a twin born in 1891. Her daughter Betty writes often giving her news of her growing family. The letters are filled with benign chatter about everyday life in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There are frequent references to the state of the garden – how high the peas and sweetcorn are, how well the radishes and asters are doing.

Mother and daughter are clearly close, often seeing each other at the weekends despite the seventy miles separating their homes. Betty enjoys telling her mother about the social functions she attends and the clothes she wears to each. She writes about her young sons and the challenges of new motherhood. Both the subject matter and the language hark back to a simpler time. Some samples: “What are you going to do the fourth? We aren’t going anywhere because of so much traffic.” (June 28, 1949) Little did she know what was coming to the area over the next decades.

“Our trip to Dinosaur was less than we’d hoped for…about three days of driving for a 2-hr look in the museum. The scenery was horrible, the heat worse, the roads even worse, the dry ice in our refrigerator carbonated the milk, the campground was full, both boys were sick, we forgot the camera; other than that, it was swell.” (July 17, 1951) I laughed when I read this. It helped me appreciate how much simpler it is to take the family on vacation today.

Many parts of the letters were about the weather or the seasons. “Gee, I hate to see autumn come. Life is so simple in the summer.” (September 5, 1953) and “This beautiful spring weather sure makes me eager to get out and do yard work.” (February 4, 1954)

Later on, Betty became a little more feisty in her opinions. “We also enjoyed the Republican dinner. I was sorry that Michaels couldn’t be there, but this Edwin Bridges spat the vitriolic phrases about as well.” (February 22, 1954) or “I’m back to reading Steinbeck again. He’s nowhere near as vulgar as you would believe (Grapes of Wrath possibly an exception) and as a craftsman he’s unexcelled in my experience”. (May 1, 1954). I was pleased to read these – it put a little more meat on the bones of Betty’s character, although she also shared the sensibilities of the typical housewife of her era. After a visit to Central City, Colorado: “They’ve re-decorated a lot of the Teller House – you’ll really enjoy going up just to look. That’s the thing about those Victorian rooms – they’re swell to look at with their carving and brocade and satin – but what a chore to clean!” (May 13, 1954) Always thinking practically!

The adventurous writer in me was disappointed. There were no real stories here. Just the daily ramblings of a young mother sharing her life. It was not what I expected or hoped for. The letters were not exciting or filled with intrigue and mystery. In one sense, their greatest value may be the collectible 3c postage stamps on the outside of the envelopes.

However, in another sense, these letters are priceless. The surviving family may have chosen to discard these artifacts of their past, but here they were in my hand. Concrete evidence of a daughter’s love and her commitment to staying connected.

As I log onto Facebook in 2009 to stay in touch with my family and friends, as I send out another batch of impersonal e-mails into vacant space, I wonder when was the last time I put pen to paper and truly shared about my life in longhand, in a format that could stay with the recipient forever. It’s been a long time.

One of my favorite stories is Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit. The rabbit yearned to become Real. His dream only happened when he had been around a really long time and had been truly loved. The wise old Skin Horse had experienced life. He knew all about being Real. He told the rabbit “You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

It’s the same thing with the author and recipient of these letters. Betty and her mother Lillian may not have lived the adventurous life of the Skin Horse, but they were around a long time and they knew love. Perhaps their descendants or the folks from the estate sale company didn’t understand. Their letters are a gift. They did not provide what I initially imagined, but they lead me somewhere else. An appreciation of what is real and what lasts.

Author's note: The photograph shows the pile of papers I found. I have changed the names to protect the innocent....

A True Story

Overheard at a holiday party this week....

Her: (warmly) Hi!

Him: (somewhat hesitantly) Er, how do I know you?

Her: (a trifle irritated) You're my gynecologist.

Me: (complete silence - too many punchlines for words!)

What I Needed to Know I Learned In My Child’s Kindergarten

You know those quintessential kindergarten teachers you meet in picture books? They are always ready with a hug and a song, an endless supply of delightfully messy projects and deliciously nutritious snacks. They have a block area, a dress-up area, a big bucket of junk, and a welcoming lap. They have a reading corner crammed with colorful overstuffed pillows. They understand the importance of play. Mary Jo is one of those teachers, and then some. Her reading corner is a refinished antique claw foot bathtub which overflows with the comfiest pillows anyone’s ever snuggled into. That tub is where my daughters learned to love reading.

Because my girls attend a school with multi-age classrooms, their kindergarten teacher stayed with them for first and second grade as well. My daughters were born just over three years apart. Three years, three weeks, and two days to be exact. There isn’t any correct period of time between having children. Every age has its advantages and disadvantages, but the particular gap separating my daughters came with one unforeseen bonus. It allowed each of them to have the incomparable Mary Jo for three years straight. It presented me with six consecutive years to count my children’s blessings.

The result was six years of essential development in which my daughters built dynamic structures out of blocks, painted sensational pictures, created mysterious potions involving borax (mysterious because I am still not clear what borax is ever used for outside of potion-making), learned how to cooperate with others, and went on nature walks to discover the greatest joys in the simplest things. The ultimate result is that my girls love learning and, even in their relative advanced ages of twelve and nine, can’t wait to get to school every day.

Shortly after my youngest said her tearful goodbyes to Mary Jo at the end of second grade, she received a sweet letter from her teacher conveying beautiful wishes written personally for my daughter’s future, wishes which expressed knowledge of who my child is as no one else could have articulated. Truly touching sentiments which brought tears to my eyes that I will treasure forever.

Accompanying the letter was a newspaper article Mary Jo had found. It was about kids and summer time, how middle-class children today are formally scheduled for such a giant portion of their summer vacations – swim team, camps, classes on every subject under the sun. When they are home, they spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet and with video games instead of playing baseball in the sandlot. The author mourned the carefree days of her youth, playing in the street until nightfall and being allowed to get bored. This is a tricky issue.

I live in a large city but it is not just urban dwelling parents who worry about our children if we let them out of our sight. We know instinctively that they need to have the freedom to run and make their own mistakes and figure out the pecking order in the neighborhood. We also know that very real dangers may be lurking around the corner. I have a hard time allowing my children to walk the dog for more than a couple of blocks without taking a cellphone with them. That is not the world I grew up in, nor the one I want to live in.

I have rarely seen my children more happy than on a family vacation to Siesta Key, on Florida’s west coast. The beach was wide and mostly empty, of people and obstacles. We all loved time on the sands before sunset. My wife and I strolled and enjoyed the time to connect that only vacations can bring. Our girls ran wild for what seemed like miles. Naturally, or perhaps environmentally cautious, they would turn to check in once in a while, but essentially they had the freedom of the whole beach. It was a magical time and one we find hard to duplicate at home. The story serves as a good reminder to take more vacations, but also brings up an important question. How can we find a balance between protecting our kids and giving them space to grow up to become independent thinkers and adventurers?

A wise friend once told me that she thought it was important that children learn an essential lesson in life: how to be bored. The last time we moved house, while my wife and I were packing and organizing in the weeks leading up to the move, the kids got into the habit of watching more television than they were used to. From our point of view, it kept them quiet and out of the way. For them, it gave them some respite from the chaos.

After we moved to the new house, we didn’t get around to plugging in the TV for a few weeks. We were all busy creating our new spaces. Something else unexpected happened. My daughters re-discovered the joys of finding their way out of boredom without a television. They made a city out of moving boxes, they played cards together, they painted, they got to know the new kids in the neighborhood, they read books, they spent their time doing all the wholesome things we imagine kids did before the dawn of TV. When we eventually did connect the television, they were already in the habit of finding other things to do. They still don’t watch too often. They have discovered some child-friendly websites which keep their attention on the computer screen more than I would like, however they continue to create, to play, to read, and to run in the sprinklers.

In the summertime, my family tries to find a balance for the girls between camps, classes, and pure unadulterated downtime. Even I wouldn’t expect my children to entertain themselves for three whole months, time that was once set aside for them to help me bring in the harvest. However I do think they need to learn how to pull themselves up out of the well of boredom.

In the article that Mary Jo sent me, the author made a great point about how unstructured downtime allows the creative spirit to flow. Neale Donald Walsch makes the same point in his popular book Conversations with God. If we’re always busy, or spending our free time in front of a screen, how can we let the underlying seeds of our creativity begin to poke their heads into the light? Are we raising a generation devoid of poets, writers, actors and songwriters if we deny our children the space to find their way out of boredom?

As a part-time writer who has a full-time teaching job and a family, both of which require great chunks of my time, I struggle with these very questions. It’s not that I cannot make the time to write, but I find myself with very little downtime in which to simply cogitate, to let the ideas flow. If I structure my life so that I am continually busy, constantly keeping occupied by the list of things I have to do, I will never learn to find my way out of boredom. I will minimize the development of my creative abilities. The artist in me yearns for that kind of time. The responsible adult hates to give it up.

There is infinite wisdom in Robert Fulghum’s famous essay All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. One of his recommendations goes like this: “Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.” I know Mary Jo agrees with this sentiment.

As teachers, she and I have talked about the difference between the work we are paid to do and the work done by our friends and relatives in the so-called ‘rat race’. My work was once dismissed by someone close to me who claimed that “those who can do, and those who can’t teach.” Baloney. Not only have I worked alongside incredibly talented teachers who could be outstanding artists, managers, engineers, and stockbrokers, I have personally trained former architects, lawyers, soldiers, and salespeople to become teachers. They wanted to contribute to the common good. The way Mary Jo describes it, those of us who teach may not be turning a profit, but we are affecting the future by molding young minds.

I know that Mary Jo has been instrumental in teaching my girls to live what Fulghum calls a balanced life. Under her guidance and tutelage, they learned some and thought some and drew some and painted some and sang some and danced some and played some and worked some every single day. They continue to do so. With the tragic cultural shift towards standardized testing and away from arts programs in our public schools, much of what Mary Jo teaches every day has been tossed by the wayside. It shouldn’t be. It is through the kind of learning that goes on in Mary Jo’s kindergarten, first, and second grade class that our collective future lies.

I want my children to know facts. I want them to know how to balance a checkbook, read the smallprint, speak a foreign language, and learn the lessons of history. I also want them to exist in the world as artists. I want them to create their way out of boredom, out of a problem, and out of the box. I want them to be independent thinkers and adventurers. I want them to work well with others, to find the joy in learning, and to love life.

I know that they have received an outstanding start at the hands of an unbelievably talented educator and friend. I am filled with awe and gratitude.

Science Fair

My sixth grader is beginning her first science fair project. It’s a vast undertaking, a mammoth enterprise incorporating multiple pieces and parts. There are forms to fill out and permissions to procure. Her teacher has given her a substantial heap of instructions. Rubrics abound. She feels excited and ready for the job. Not me. It brings up all my insecurities.

Science teachers scare me. At our school, we have wonderful science teachers. All women. Delightful people. They are talented and engaging teachers; they behave in public; you could even invite them out to dinner and they wouldn’t embarrass you. But there is something that sets me on edge.

It may be that they are just way smarter than I. They know the periodic table by heart, they can discuss the intricate details of oxidation and photosynthesis, they are immune to disgusting smells, they know the difference between Newton’s law of universal gravitation and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and they are comfortable handling creepy animals.

One of the science teachers at my school keeps two tree pythons in a large glass tank in her classroom. She actually lets her students touch these insidious creatures. The kids encourage the snakes to crawl around their waists and necks and they even bring them outside at recess. There is nothing worse than minding my own business, supervising kids at play, nursing my steaming cup of coffee, and thinking about how much more fun it would be to be lying on a beach in Mexico, when some irksome middle schooler ambushes me with a deadly reptile, forked tongue inquisitively probing my outer ear. I think the science teacher puts them up to it.

I was never very successful at science at school. I think it was an early sign of my unwillingness to follow rules. I was taught that science required me to stay within the lines. It bade me adhere to strict principles, abide by specific guidelines. It forced me to acknowledge that certain laws were not negotiable. The liberal artist in me couldn’t deal. I wanted to create, to experiment without a hypothesis, to throw a whole bunch of hydrochloric acid into the beaker and see what would happen. My English and history teachers loved me. I always failed science tests.

My science teacher’s name in elementary boarding school was Mr. Parsons. He had one of those bushy mustaches which were so fetching back in the seventies. Mr. Parsons was a former policeman, a fact which clearly made him uniquely qualified to teach fourth grade chemistry. He used to hurl blackboard erasers at my head if I talked in class. The wooden kind. He was a sadistic son of a gun. Maybe this is why I didn’t learn very much science. I think Mr. Parsons was hired because the headmaster had a thing for his wife’s alabaster skin and winsome smile.

In high school, my chemistry teacher was Mr. Packard, he of the throbbingly large nose and the insipidly monotonous voice. Chemistry under his guidance only existed in formulas, never in action. I copied down pages upon pages of molecular formulas, but don’t recall touching any equipment with my hands.

Mr. Hinge taught physics. After one year, he gave it all up to become a priest. I never got the chance to ask him where he stood on evolution.

My biology teacher was Dr. Upshaw. While not a medical professional, he took it upon himself to perform exploratory examinations on all incoming freshmen. Why I am not quite sure, but one was trained not to ask such questions in English boarding schools. Dr. Upshaw was a prober and pronounced the letter “s” as “sh”. “Looshen your troushersh” is a phrase I will not readily forget.

But that is all in the past. Thirty years later, I am learning to become open-minded about science. My daughter and her lab partner are encouraged to think outside the box, to design their own experiments based on what they find interesting. They are conducting a study of whether exercise affects short-term memory. This is cool stuff. I’m hoping it will shed light on the fact that the longer I go between visits to the gym, the harder it is to find my car keys. I have been assuming that it was just age, but there may be method behind my madness.

The budding scientists are developing an excellent understanding of the scientific process which will set them in good stead as they discover the wider world. They are holding themselves accountable and having to keep excellent records, traits from which I could learn as tax day rolls around each year. They have to discuss their results and be open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Dr. Upshaw needed a strong dose of that. They also get to design a really eye-catching poster – with colorful accents, intriguing vocabulary, appealing pictures, and attractive graphs.

My daughter’s science teachers are doing amazing work. Science is teaching her to think for herself, to use her resources wisely, and to be inquisitive about her world. Where was that when I was in school?

Over The Moon - part 2

On Tuesday November 25, the Denver Post published my essay 'Painting Pottery' under several headlines - all of which are more fun than my own! - "A dad fires up his inner artist", "Inner artist wins out over party pooper", and "Dad's feet of clay lead to pottery bliss". I have learned that there are people whose job it is just to write headlines. Thanks, guys! In addition, the folks at Ceramics in the City, the pottery studio where I had my breakthrough moment, were happy to be mentioned in the paper. They have linked both the Post essay and this blog on their website. I am pleased to be able to return the favor here.

It feels good to be getting out there. I am very grateful for my two families, Laura, Emma and Leah, and my Stanley BPS family, for being so excited for the publication and for all the amazing support.

The links to my Denver Post essay and Ceramics in the City appear at the bottom of this blog. Scroll down...

Enjoy!

What Would The Dog Think?

My friend Craig and I are different in many ways. I’m a dog owner. He doesn’t even have a hamster. He’s Jewish. I’m an intermittent agnostic. I’ve got a vehicle that can carry large items. He has a Volkswagen sedan. He’s got an unfortunate sense of timing. I’m more cautious. Random and fairly extraneous pieces of information, I am aware, but they all coalesced quite memorably this week.

Craig called me one day to ask if I could help him with an event he was hosting at his synagogue. His neighbor was lending him some long tables. Could he borrow my van and my time to help him haul the tables? “Absolutely,” I said, “I’ll be over after dinner tonight.” Even though I was feeling a little under the weather and my nose was congested, I was happy to help and glad for the opportunity to meet. I had some news about my writing career that I wanted to share with him.

After work, I drove home. While my daughters wrestled with homework and my wife concocted something delicious in the kitchen, I took the dog for our daily constitutional around the block. My dog’s name is Polo. He’s small, white, fluffy and very friendly. When you meet my dog, you understand that I have girls. My boss told me that I must be extremely comfortable in my manhood to be seen with a dog like this. Indubitably.

I live in an urban area. Both the city ordinance and the morality of being a responsible dog owner dictate that my jacket pocket is loaded with orange bags, the ones in which my newspaper is tossed upon my porch each morning. Polo and I walk. He pauses to deliver the unmentionables. I scoop, tie a knot in the bag. We walk on. There is an unwritten code of silence between us. I don’t question his choice of locale. He doesn’t ask why I am so eager to collect his contributions. Once or twice I have been caught unarmed, bagless. Fearful that I would be seen and reported by the neighborhood watchdogs, Polo and I scurry home, seize a bag, and return to the scene of the crime to remove the evidence, to eliminate his eliminations, so to speak.

I share this because, as Craig and I drove away from his neighbor’s garage with the tables, he started telling me how amused he was by an incident that he had witnessed a few minutes before. A dog was doing his business, smack dab in the middle of Craig’s front lawn when he pulled up to park. It was after nightfall. His headlights were on. Both dog and owner were caught in the glare. The owner quickly performed the scoop-and-tie maneuver and the pair went on their slightly shamefaced way.

Craig naturally got to wondering if the owner would have disposed of the goods if she hadn’t been surprised in the spotlight. Fancying himself somewhat of a post-enlightenment philosopher, Craig reflected on the further ramifications of the situation. If the owner was an inconsistent scooper, if she sometimes picked up and sometimes didn’t, what would the dog think? Would he feel rejection? Would he worry that some of his offerings might not pass muster? Might some of them not meet his owner’s exacting standards? Would it be possible for him to somehow fail or succeed, based on the scooping actions of his owner? As his listener and friend, I worried, truly agonized, about the kinds of things that Craig thought about in his spare time.

As one might expect, this line of conversation soon exhausted itself and I began to share my news with my friend. Craig is an excellent listener and a wonderful fan of my work. As I was relaying my good fortune, he seemed uncharacteristically distracted and inattentive. Something in the darkness was bothering him. “Excuse me just a minute, Steve,” he interrupted. He’s also very polite. “Do you mind if I turn on the light?”

“Of course,” I replied. Craig flipped the switch to reveal the biggest wad of dog excrement that could possibly cling to the underside of a shoe.

“Oh, shit!” he yelled out. And I couldn’t help but wonder, what would the dog think?

A Black Man in the White House

Whether you voted for him or not, the election of Barack Obama is without question a watershed moment in the country’s history. Throughout the long months of the campaign, the so-called race factor was consistently downplayed. While African Americans registered and turned out to vote in record numbers, both the Obama campaign and prominent leaders in the black community were quick to stress that the candidate’s race was not and should not be a major issue.

Fast forward to the hours immediately following Obama’s victory. The mood among all his supporters was euphoric. The celebration in the black community in particular was ecstatic. African Americans danced in rapture in the streets. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Jesse Jackson and Congressman John Lewis, wept openly. Oprah became, in her words, unleashed. Whoopi whooped and Maya Angelou expressed graceful thanks. There was an outpouring of emotion and grand proclamations of the immense significance of the election. A black man was coming to the White House.

On the weekend following the election, my local newspaper carried a story by Wil Haygood of the Washington Post. It touched on the history of blacks in the White House. In 1901, “President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute, to meet with him at the White House. Roosevelt was careful not to announce the invitation, fearing a backlash, especially from Southerners.” Certain southerners found out and the response was swift and filled with hate.

According to Haygood, the first African American to work in the executive branch was E Frederick Morrow who was an administrative officer for special projects in the Eisenhower White House, appointed in 1955.

But someone had beaten him to it. Many blacks worked in non-political jobs in the White House. One of them was Eugene Allen who was hired as a butler in 1952. For $2,400 a year, Gene Allen polished silver and washed dishes. In the bowels of the President’s official residence, he plugged away at his menial job for thirty-four years. He felt proud to serve his country’s leaders.

Rewards came. Not only did Gene and his wife Helene shake the hand of every President he served, there was the special occasion in the mid-eighties when they were invited as guests to a state dinner. Nancy Reagan called Gene about the dinner, asked him how preparations were going, and then surprised him by inviting him and his wife, not to work, but to sit as their guests alongside world leaders. It was an honor they would never forget. Helene fondly remembered drinking champagne that night, champagne no doubt that her husband had stored.

Gene’s birthday was on the same day as Gerald Ford’s. When the Fords celebrated the President’s birthday, Betty always made sure Gene’s was mentioned as well. The Allens have fond memories of the Carters and the Kennedys. Through some of the darkest times in US history and through some of the best, Gene Allen was at work for his President. From the early fifties until the mid-eighties, there were some tough times being a black man carrying trays down the halls of power. Segregation, violence, protest marches and assassinations. Gene and Helene Allen saw it all.

Slowly, over the decades, they saw a few more African Americans creep into the influential inner circles, culminating in Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice’s consecutive appointments as Secretary of State. In Haygood’s words, “the butler remembers seeing both Powell and Rice in the Oval Office. He was serving refreshments. He couldn't help notice that blacks were moving closer to the center of power, closer than he could ever have dreamed. He'd tell Helene how proud it made him feel.”

And now this man. Obama. More than twenty years after Gene Allen stacked away his last wine glass, he and Helene were on the verge of seeing an African American man ascend to the highest office in the land. Some said he’d be the most powerful man on earth. Interviewed for the Washington Post, their excitement was palpable. Now in their late eighties, Gene and Helene prepared to get dressed up on Election Day and cast their vote for one of their own. How proud that would make them feel.

The day before that momentous day, Helene had a morning doctor’s appointment. Gene rolled over in bed to wake up his wife. She did not respond. He walked over to her side, but still she would not wake. After sixty-five years, the marriage had come to an end. On Election Day, Gene voted alone.

Helene never made it. But I know that, somewhere up there, this woman, who had shaken the hand of eight Presidents, knows who won. She knows that the baton has been passed to a new man, an African American man. There is a black man in the White House. For Gene and Helene Allen and for me, how proud it makes us feel.

Thanks to Wil Haygood. His article A Butler Well Served by This Election appeared in the Washington Post on 11/07/08 and is the inspiration for this story. Post photographer Kevin Clark’s photo of Gene and Helene appears here.

Handshake

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Family members, celebrities, teachers, historical figures, community leaders.

For me, growing up in southern England in the 1970s, my heroes were the stars of the Arsenal football team as they made their historic title runs – Brady, Macdonald, and others. Action shot posters covered my bedroom walls. In my early twenties, as college opened my eyes politically, I read voraciously the works of those fighting apartheid: Gordimer, Woods, Coetzee, Malan, Mphahlele, Paton. I met a couple of them – Donald Woods when he came to speak at my university and Es’kia Mphahlele when I taught his grandsons in Denver. I remember celebrating the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 as I had celebrated a few months before the last-minute goal for Arsenal which brought home the English championship. As we grow and change, so do our heroes.

I recently had the great honor of meeting my latest hero. A gentle and wise man in his seventies, he looks a lot like the Father Christmas of my childhood. He is blessed with a full head of white hair, a downy beard, a portly profile, a warm smile, and a bountiful heart. A storyteller, a gifted writer who describes the world as I wish to see it. For him it is a place of goodness and laughter, and generosity of spirit. He is quite possibly the single most influential voice in my own writing.

Robert Fulghum may still be best known for the essay that propelled him into the public eye - All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. It remains a wonderful philosophy by which to live. He has since written eight best-selling books. A former cowboy, minister, and teacher, Fulghum now divides his time between Moab, Utah, Seattle, Washington, and the Greek island of Crete. Lucky fellow.

He also travels for speaking engagements where, last month in Lakewood, Colorado, I was fortunate to hear him reflect on his latest musings, share some wonderful new stories, and re-tell some old favorites. I especially enjoyed the one about Norman, the little boy who single-mindedly decided he was going to be the pig in the play of Cinderella. His wise and experienced teacher allowed him free reign and Norman stole the show. During the course of the evening, Fulghum had his listeners laughing and crying; he snapped a photograph of the audience – to inspire him during the lonely moments of the writing life; he even had us singing the words to Itsy Bitsy Spider to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth. A delightful couple of hours.

Most memorable and inspiring was the opportunity to meet the author following his talk. The usual line of book buyers and autograph seekers formed in the back of the hall. I too joined the line. I had no clue what to say to the man who was expecting to sign a copy of his latest book. What could I say to someone I knew so well, through his reflective writing, yet not at all?

As the line in front of me got progressively shorter, I had a brief moment of star-struck panic. I am a sensible, even-keeled schoolteacher in my early forties. Fulghum is a self-described old geezer, a moderately well-known author who writes about the everyday. This was not the latest pop sensation confronted by hordes of adoring fans. I wondered about buying one of his books to give myself a prop, something to talk with him about, but I owned all the titles for sale that night. Now second in line, I worried that I would be speechless, or worse, mumble something inane.

My turn came. The author reached out to sign the book I hadn’t bought. He looked up at me. “I’m Steve,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Nice to meet you, Mr Fulghum.”

“Nice to meet you too, Steve,” the baritone voice of wisdom responded. Well, that didn’t buy me a lot of thinking time. A pause, enough time to tell my hero the only thing that really mattered. “Thank you.” I briefly told him that I was a teacher and a director of children’s theater, that I too had encouraged my own Normans to find their place in the limelight. And I thanked him for his incredible body of work and for being the writer with the most influence over my recent commitment to write and my decision to publish my work online.

Fulghum’s response? He reached his hand over the desk to shake my hand, to thank me for doing what I do, for inspiring children, and for pursuing my art. I was honored and touched by his gesture and his words. The renowned author, who had just spoken to hundreds, whose books have sold in the millions, wanted to shake my hand? It was the response of a humble and gracious man.

Mr Fulghum, I hope you have an opportunity to read this one day. You made my day and gave me further encouragement to follow my passion. For that, you are my hero.

Painting of Robert Fulghum by Dimitris Katsigiannis from www.robertfulghum.com