Comrade Keller

"I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate-- that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased....I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment....Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone." --Helen Keller

For the past two days at speech camp, Sal has assigned my students to a coach who is headed to grad school next year. To my delight, while teaching them the basic components of limited preparation speaking events, he has been indoctrinating my kids with equal parts Marxism and Chicano pride. I was a little unnerved when, as he was explaining how educated and well-spoken his black civil rights law professor was, he stopped, looked at me, and said, "Dude was as white as you," but I restrained the urge to claim the Brown pride of being the (albeit disowned) daughter of an Indian father in order to avoid interrupting him from preaching the truth.

At first part of me worried that his radicalism might prove to be a bit jarring for my well-behaved ninth graders and another part worried that they were wandering too far from the training they needed in the event. But then I looked over at Kim, who had asked to write an original advocacy piece about Latino rights and had been denied the request by Sal with the claim that it was "too controversial" (only because we live, and will be judged by parents living, under the Orange Curtain), who was hanging on to Daniel's every word and sharing her frustrations that her own dad seemed to be ashamed of his own race in what she views as his obvious favoring of his "light-skinned" kids over his browner ones. And then I watched as Sebastian, my statistics nut, took the initiative to cross-check Daniel's argument that segregation still exists and can be documented most obviously in school demographics by searching online to find the percentage of "Hispanics" attending his last school (his findings: 94%). At that point, Aaron explained how he had seen the same thing proving true in his observation of the changing demographics of the passengers on the Fullerton-Santa Ana bus when they crossed the border into Santa Ana for the first time yesterday (I finally decided it's too much of a liability for me to be driving them home in an uninsured car, especially since my "check engine" light went off last Friday as I was fighting the traffic back to my aunt's and I won't have any money in the bank to check it out until the end of September when our first paychecks kick in). Mextli talked about how much her friend regretted being enrolled in the local private school, Mater Dei, feeling like one of the only non-white kids there. Rocio stayed quiet during the short time I observed, but I couldn't help recalling the story she told me last week about how her parents had managed to cross the border illegally or how difficult it had been for her to ask me for lunch money during the first week of camp and how hard it was for me to realize she still doesn't have access to the money she said she would now that I don't have anything left to give when I asked her why she wasn't eating with the other kids yesterday.

To make a long story short, in those brief two minutes, I decided Daniel was giving them the very education James Loewen advocates in the book I picked up to read over the weekend, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. I figured I was pretty edgy and progressive as a literature teacher who is always trying to open up the canon of selected works for reading, but I realized that I missed the boat just last year when I complained my way through teaching the play about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker. Turns out that after the sister struggled to learn her table manners and show her gratitude to her teacher by spelling "T-E-A-C-H-E-R" into Anne Sullivan's hand, she later reclaimed her necessary wildness to advocate as a radical socialist when she gained a "vision" (har har-- ouch!) of the role that class was playing in the incidences of blindness in the country ("Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness" (21)).

I realize I'm still unwillingly a contributing member to the system of oppression that keeps all of this madness in motion, especially now that I'm a federal employee, but I'm just feeling grateful today that I've broken free of the private school bubble, at least when it comes to the kids that I finally have the credentials to learn with.

Timely Words

"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others... When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered...We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land." --Robert F. Kennedy

Books not Bombs

I have had a fabulous two weeks of reading alongside working in Utah and helping Sal run the speech camp back here in California. Two books: Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father and a book co-written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time. Both books reinforced my most core belief system: secular humanism, or the belief that it may just be fine--actually possibly more miraculous and life-affirming-- if the closest thing to divinity we ever experience in this life or the next is the power of human compassion, here on Earth.

Obama's book was written long before he launched his political career, fresh out of law school, and documents his early life. He splits the book into three phases and labels them according to the four geographic centers where he grappled with his racial identity as the son of a black father and white mother: Origins (Hawaii and Indonesia), Chicago, and Kenya. In reading about his years spent between his undergraduate work at Occidental in California and law school helping with a community development social program in Chicago, I was a little nervous that his main goal was to paint a picture of his achievement of bringing religion and liberal social efforts into one by documenting his path to religious conversion. He did manage to achieve the former by taking advantage of the organization and humanitarian elements of the churches in this struggling Chicago neighborhood to help improve the lives of its struggling working-class inhabitants, but he demonstrates marvelous restraint from wearing his religion on his sleeve, managing to avoid alienating readers with ideological rhetoric while still affirming the power of faith in a general, non-specific sense. I was struck primarily by how his own background almost fated him to be the perfect messenger for this kind of balance, as I read about the influences of his Muslim biological father from Kenya, his Buddhist step-dad from Indonesia, his first Jewish supervisor urging him to work with the Christian churches to transform their focus Chicago neighborhood, and his humanist mother from Kansas.

I think the last seems to have had the most influence on him, though. Early in the book, he writes, "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess, a faith that she would refuse to describe as religious, that, in fact, her experience told her was sacrilegious: a faith that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny. In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship, where ultimate truths were kept separate from day-to-day realities, she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal Corps, position-paper liberalism." It is this influence that I hear most prominently in a passage near the end of the book, speaking to his dead father: "You, the son, might have taught your father that this new world that was beckoning all of you involved more than just railroads and indoor toilets and irrigation ditches and gramophones, lifeless instruments that could be absorbed into the old ways. You might have told him that these instruments carried with them a dangerous power, that they demanded a different way of seeing the world. That this power could be absorbed only alongside a faith born out of hardship, a faith that wasn't new, that wasn't black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead-- a faith in other people." In the name of...HUMANS, amen.

Obama would definitely find a cause for affirming his faith in humanity in the account of Mortenson's work building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan that I read immediately after reading the last lines of Dreams. Greg Mortenson began the project on a very small scale after stumbling into a small village at the foot of K2 when he got lost after finding himself forced to turn back before reaching the top of its peak many years before 9/11.

After he was nursed back to health, he asked the village elder to show him the school and was amazed to find unsupervised students sitting quietly on the ground, diligently studying work given to them by a teacher in a neighboring village who was only able to come and check in with them a few times a week because the pre-Musharraff government had failed to extend its promised funds to build a school and pay the dollar-a-day salary of a permanent teacher. From fulfilling his promise that day to build one school, he has continued building and funding more than twenty schools and women's vocational centers through the years that took us to war with Afghanistan, up until today's current reported resurgence of El Qaeda activity in Pakistan.

Finally, a story of an American HUMANITARIAN effort to gently show communities who are at-risk for breeding terrorists another way, giving students thirsting for an education an option other than the extremist Islamic maddrassas that were otherwise the only choice. Mortenson's story inspired a Taliban contingent in Afghanistan that had at first imprisoned him when rumors began circulating about his efforts to educate girls alongside boys in non-maddrassa schools to not only release him, but to throw him a party in the process, and quietly undercut-- through the power of the story of his work alone-- two fatwas initially issued to expel him from the regions where he was working. As he wisely advises, "If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs."

I still find myself yearning to be doing something large like these men, but this week with Sal has been fantastic. Favorite snapshot of an experience diametrically opposite the one I found at Fairmont:

Me: So, Aaron, when I started calling you to remind you about speech camp, your mom said you were working. What were you working at?
Aaron: Nothing much. My mom just doesn't want me inside watching TV all day.
Sebastian: You have a TV? You're so lucky!
(No response from the car, as if this is the norm.)
Aaron (comforting): Well, we only get a few channels and the cartoon channel comes in fuzzy anyway.

Hurray for kids who don't take life for granted...

Desert Healing

Well, here I am again in Utah, where I swore I'd never return. As I told Becky, the ONLY thing that brings me back to this place is my deep love for the Englands. I started working on Gene's papers after graduating from graduate school six years ago and I'm back for a week to try to get it moving with the sisters again. Then I have to fly back to help Sal run speech and debate camp, but now I'm thinking I'll come back with my last flight credit for ten days between the end of camp and the beginning of Godinez teacher inservices so I can catch the end of Sunstone and work some more on the papers.

As part of many sweet gestures of gratitude that I've been given every day that I've been out here, Becky paid for me to have a full body massage yesterday after she found out that I'd never had a massage. The idea of stripping down for a stranger to put their hands all over my body used to creep me out, but somehow I've overcome some of my body shame and I was ready when she asked me if I would be interested. It was fascinating to see the areas of my body where I have the most tightness. I seem to carry all of my tension in my neck and shoulders, which is why I get a lot of stress headaches. I figured my weight would build tension in my legs and/or back, but she didn't find anything to smooth out there. She had a hard time getting me to relax my arms when she lifted them up, saying they were in a holding pattern, which Becky had just used as a description of my LIFE when I told her I didn't know how to deal with my dad's latest drama.

Well, I have to run now. Time to start helping Becky write an introduction to what is perhaps the greatest piece of controversy among Gene's papers: the letters between himself and Bruce R. McConkie where McConkie raised the threat of a curse on Gene's family if he continued to talk about the concept of eternal progression-- that God's judgment and our progress will never be final. I've felt torn between sadness to see Gene fighting to create dialogue against so much pressure to conform, frustration that he didn't strike out so he could say more without feeling impeded, and relief that I have chosen not to put myself in that position. And then there's a small aching voice of the past that wonders if I'm just a weak coward for not trying to fight from within...

Only in Los Angeles...

So, inspired by a friend to try to find the unique beauties of Los Angeles, I came across this in the blog of an illustrious los angelino: the Simpsons' Kwik-E-Mart has come to the west coast, complete with Buzz Cola products, Frosted Krusty O's, and a Squishee machine. I think I'm going to have to put this down as a summer must-see...

So maybe I'm not meant for the stage, but...

every stage needs a good audience. Enjoying a pleasant summer afternoon reading in the garden to kill some time before tonight's concert, I came across this passage in Ann Patchett's Bel Canto: "Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see" (219).

What's on the summer slate for this privileged appreciator?

May 29: Arcade Fire @ the Greek Theater with Amy
June 3: Indigo Girls and Thao Nguyen @ Pechanga with Mum (kidding her that, given the audience, we looked like we were there as a couple)
June 16: Lavender Diamond @ the Troubadour with Amy
July 7: The LA Philharmonic accompanies Band of Horses, Andrew Bird, and the Decemberists @ the Hollywood Bowl with Amy
August 23: Daniel Johnston @ the Henry Fonda Theater with me, myself, and I
August 29: Wilco @ the Greek with Amy, Justin, Brandon, Robert, & company

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dick Tracy, and my OTHER Grandma

Although the finale of my week in San Francisco was greeted with a formal "denunciation" and disownership by her son, my father, the favorite part of my vacation in the city I feel I was destined to, but never will, live was taking a day trip first through the redwood forests of Muir Woods National Park and then down a winding road through northern California vineyards to my paternal grandmother's hometown of Santa Rosa. I hadn't seen Grandma Margaret since I was in high school, probably when I was thirteen or fourteen, but we wrote pretty constantly after my mom's dad died and through the first few years of my college education. Sadly, the last communication I remember having with her was when she sent me a beautiful painting of a seaside town on the edge of an ocean filled with sailboats, on the side of one of which she had painted my name.

I have always felt a special bond to Margaret, even though she has been virtually nonexistent in my life and despite the fact--maybe, perhaps shockingly, because-- she woke up one day in the family mansion she was sharing with her husband and his family in Bombay and decided she was living a life she could no longer tolerate and decided to leave my father to the mercies of a local orphanage at the young age of two so she could return home to northern California. She is a woman who loves art and travel as much as I do. Like me, she has relatives to be proud of like her grandmother, who was among the first graduating class where women were permitted to enroll at Stanford because her father had donated the land that later became the foundations of the school's campus, but she also has less impressive members, like her father who beat her and her sisters until he finally abandoned the family and her ancestors going further back, who were the Hatfields of the famed Hatfield/ McCoy feud. My memories of her one visit to our home as an adolescent were of a woman who spoke intelligently and with strength about things that seemed more interesting than the petty concerns my mother's side of the family seems to focus on.

My latest visit was full of great stories. She had moved into a new home and we first talked about the paintings on her walls-- some hers, some her daughter's (my dad's half-sister from Margaret's second marriage), some her son-in-law's, and some her step-granddaughter's. She then went where I didn't expect her to go-- after telling me her daughter's stepdaughter had just gotten married to an Englishman she met as an art teacher in Portland, she asked me if I was dating. I was a little disappointed-- here was a woman I thought would understand my current disinterest in romance of any kind. I made a comment about how it was my current feeling that a woman needs a man about as much as a fish needs a bicycle without going into the specifics as to why I felt that way and her response was an unheeding, "Well, I suspect we'll receive another wedding invitation soon."

Then the stories started: I told her that I felt torn about whether or not I was interested in tracking down the history of the Beat generation in San Francisco as an English major and asked her if she owned the art gallery next to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookshop, City Lights, during any of the years when he and his crowd were there. She said, "Well, I wouldn't say we were friends so much as I was a constant pain in his side. I was constantly telling Larry he needed to keep the door into the alley [the alley which San Francisco has in subsequent times designated as Jack Kerouac Alley] between my shop and his shut, because he always had people hanging out about the shop, and without fail, a few of them would run down that alley headlong and smash their faces right into that open door. Between bleeding faces and the smell of the chickens being brought in by the Chinese restaurants around the corner in Chinatown for cleaning, I was constantly fighting to keep my entrance inviting to my own clientele."

I asked her why my granddad had decided to go back to India around the time when they had my dad and she reminded me that World War II was going on and that Indians were being targeted as potential spies for the Japanese. She told me how the FBI would go through her trashcans looking for evidence in her mail of where Dinshaw might be and she laughed at the thought of my granddad being romantic or smart enough to be a spy. She even moved to Los Angeles at one point, trying to get away from them, and then got so angry one day when she opened up the door to find another agent asking the same old questions on her doorstep. She covered her face with her hand as she chuckled, "It was really awful. He had this get-up on that looked like he was trying to be Dick Tracy and I kept trying to keep myself from laughing until he finally asked me out to dinner and I realized he had developed a bit of a crush on me after watching me and tracking me for so long."

And who would blame her? I only wish I really looked as much like her as my mother says I do...