A Friday Night Return

AP Photo / Bloomsburg Press Enterprise, Jimmy May

Years ago, there were Friday night football games, the marching band, cheerleaders, the smoke from hamburgers grilling out back of the snack bar, and that was the end to another busy week in the fall of the year.  Now, I hear echoes through the trees of the marching band and the roar of the crowd at my old high school just a few blocks away from my apartment.  High school football and smoke in the air:  nothing changes but everything.

“Notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind,” reads my blog tagline.  Well, I’ve been overwhelmed by all the life lessons lately, frantically scribbling away in journals and notebooks but not for publication.  What is this life?  What will happen next?  I could only ask my notebooks.  I wanted answers, and until I found them, I did not feel I had the courage to speak.  I had forgotten the prime directive of my own teaching philosophy:  the questions are more important than the answers.  The answers will always exist, but if one does not ask the right questions, the answers will never be found.

The last few years have been a crisis of faith for everyone.  Most of us were left to ponder:  where are we going?  Is the spirit of America dead?  What if we discover that the spirit has always been dead, that “all men are created equal” are just pretty words?  Maybe there is no equality and no justice, no liberty and no allowance for freedom.  Or, that we are slaves to our fears, our prejudices, our narcissism.  To the immigrant yearning for a better life we offer only the whip or the gun.  We sow the seeds of violence and celebrate the bloody harvest.  We are unwilling to reach out a hand to those in despair.  That is what we have become, a nation armed to the teeth against the Other.  A people too selfish and narcissistic to see we are all dreamers; we are all here in search of a better life.

We should be striving for a more perfect union.  Perfection may be unattainable, but like most sentences, in that one, the verb is the heart of the matter:  striving.  To paraphrase King, we may not get there in our lifetimes.  We may never get there, but we continue striving.  Always.

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” goes the lament.  Depression is the black dog that follows us home and threatens never to leave.  Anxiety wakes us in the middle of the night and disturbs our vague and restless dreams.  “I grow old…I grow old.”  We do and we are.  We are old before our time.  “Would it have been worth it after all, would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels; after the tea cups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—and this, and so much more?”

America is a colder place:  700,000 of us are gone from this autumnal world.  Where do we go from here?  The only answer, the best answer I have, is onward, while the ghosts flow in and around each of us and fall behind.  We try to carry some essence of them with us but it is like trying to transport the ocean to the desert with only our cupped hands.  It is too much to carry.  It is a futile enterprise on the way down to our own dusty deaths.

Yet, there is hope.  There is life and there is what remains.  We are more resilient than we know.

At the dawn of the new year, my grand-niece was born.  Charlotte Ileana, named for that patron saint of English literature, Charlotte Bronte.  I have watched Charlie discover her world.  In her face, I see my niece, her husband, his family, and my lost father-in-law.  She has not dared to eat a peach, as Eliot writes in his poem, but she did try mango the other night with hilarious results.  Mango and the world are her frontiers in these early days of her life.

So it is time to pick up that thread that connects us.  The thread always seems ready to snap.  Our humanity is always in danger of fading away.  But this is life and this is us, and we are striving to bring about that most American of dreams:  a more perfect union.  That is the only struggle that matters now.

This is a time for wonder:  “Do I dare disturb the universe?”  We have no choice because we are alive and among the living.

As for the blog, look for more notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind.  If I find a few answers in the smoke and fire of daily life, I’ll post those too.  “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…”  Onward!

 

Trust Wisdom and Experience

I have been watching a lot of NBA basketball lately, mainly to try to relax at the end of a hectic day.  I’m following my two hometown teams:  the Lakers for the drama; and the Clippers for their high flying, high energy entertainment.  The Lakers, according to those in the know (and anyone else with eyes and half a brain), will not go far in the playoffs with an aging team and an injured force of nature that was Kobe Bryant before tearing up his Achilles tendon.  The Clippers are a younger, more athletic team, and I root for them because they get no respect and are considered the underdog to win the conference, much less the championship after so many years of irrelevancy.

American culture has an age bias, and the Lakers are an example of what happens in the real world.  Sports writers and fans bemoan the team’s creaky old-timers and their lack of athleticism.  Never mind that combined, the team’s veterans bring thousands of games played to the table.  These are crafty athletes who must rely on experience to try to keep up with the young guns in the league.  Will this be enough to carry them to a championship?  As I write this, they are about to lose their second playoff game in a row to the San Antonio Spurs. If only they could find the right combination of experience and youth the way Kareem Abdul Jabbar, a wily veteran, was invigorated by the young rookie Earvin “Magic” Johnson all those years ago.  Still, I’d hate to see the Lakers’ failure this season attributed to the players being too old; age does not breed irrelevancy, and it would help if the team had some decent coaching, but that is another essay altogether.

The more important question is, why does society favor the young and energetic over the older, wiser veteran?

In teaching, the veteran used to be valued.  Wisdom and experience counted for something in the administrative office and in the classroom.  Students responded differently to an experienced teacher as opposed to a fresh college graduate who was closer to the students’ age.

The paradigm has shifted.  Principals are looking for the young, energetic teacher.  They can pay these newly minted teachers less, and they can utilize their abundant energy and lack of political knowledge to spread them oh-so-thin across the school.  Teach five classes, moderate a club, plan activities, coach a team, and stand on the playground for thirty minutes in all kinds of weather playing traffic cop when the school day ends, all for a salary half of what the school must pay a veteran.  No problem.  More experienced teachers know their place is in the classroom teaching, grading papers, planning lessons, providing extra tutoring, and working to educate students to the best of their ability.  Is it really the best use of teachers to have them stand on the playground directing traffic in a bright orange vest?  Veterans know it’s not.

Often, the extra tasks shoveled on teachers involve hours of unpaid labor.  My wife, a middle school teacher, has been up to the wee hours of the morning over the last two weeks completing the school’s yearbook by the publication deadline.  The yearbook at one point was cancelled due to lack of funds, but was revived twenty days before the final deadline.  She put in 18-20 hour days trying to complete the project and keep her sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students learning and moving forward in their language arts and religion curricula.  How did she make her deadline and keep all the plates spinning?  She is a veteran teacher with 27 years of experience in first grade to college classrooms.  Could a newbie pull this off?  Possibly, but is a less experienced teacher able to combine wisdom and quick thinking to create an action plan where tasks are completed without her teaching being diminished?  I know when I was a rookie, I pulled all-nighters to get things done and before I learned the ropes through trial and error and an excellent mentor, my teaching suffered.  Eventually, I learned techniques to conserve energy for what’s important—teaching—while maintaining the integrity of my preparation and classroom instruction.  And that mentor teacher who taught me so well?  Forty years in the classroom!

So when I hear that this 39 year old point guard can no longer do the miraculous things he used to do, when I hear people doubt that a 35 year old former phenom may not come back from a season-ending injury, or that a veteran shooter may not have anything left in the tank, I get defensive.  Don’t discount wisdom and experience.  And don’t forget determination.  Tennyson said it best:  “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

I love the Clippers because they are young and athletic and fun to watch.  They soar high and dunk with authority.  But it is interesting to note that the team’s second unit often opens a wider scoring margin and plays better at times than the starters.  Matt Barnes, Lamar Odom, Grant Hill, Jamal Crawford, Ronnie Turiaf:  all veteran players with years of experience.  And they’re damn good.  Because of them, this might be the Clippers’ year.

When I was a younger man, I once saw a senior citizen park his car in a mall parking lot on a slight incline.  He forgot to set the parking brake, so as he walked to the store the car began to roll.  I rushed over and stopped the car with my body, saving a row of parked cars from damage.  As a bystander fetched the man from the store, I congratulated my 25 year old self on my heroism.  The man returned and quickly backed the car into his former space and this time, he set the brake.

“That was really stupid,” I said in a tone of grating self-righteousness.  “You could have caused a lot of damage.”

The man stared at me.  “Youngster, I’ve lived longer than you, and I’ve already forgotten things you have yet to learn.  I do know this.  Only an idiot jumps in front of a moving car to stop it with his body. Sure, I would have hit a few cars, but that’s what insurance is for.  No policy can restore your life.  Keep that in mind.”

The wisdom of the years, indeed.