“Mr. and Mrs. Maltese,” the letter began, “This is to inform
you that you have seven unused days at the Freemont Park Hotel in New York
City. You must use these days before
August 1st of this year.”
Polley and I sat down at her Ipad and carved out a four-day
getaway in New York. On the New Jersey
transit to the Big Apple, we discussed what museums to visit, and, as we exited
a station, a woman in Islamic garb entered our car and sat down across from
us. I noticed that what looked like a
brown turnover wrapped in white parchment protruded from her beige tote
bag. The smell of whatever that brown
turnover was drifted to my nostrils, and the salivation began. I turned to Polley.
“So where are we going to eat?”
As we exited the womb of Penn Station, we were born into the enormity of choices of eateries and shops and things to do in the bustling, hustling city. I hailed a cab.
“You are visiting New York?”
We were stuck in a massive, typical, traffic jam on Seventh Avenue. Balaaj, our cab driver, softened our impatience
with conversation.
“I was born in New York, well, the Bronx, actually.”
Balaaj nodded.
Polley is the brave one.
She always is. “I noticed your
accent. Where are you from originally?”
“Iraq.”
My stomach began to growl as the traffic began to move. I watched the conveyor belt of restaurants glide past my window: Indian Palace, Ethiopian Oasis, Wild Ginger Thai, Pho Pleasure, Joey’s Pizzeria.
By the time reengaged in the cab conversation, Balaaj and
Polley were deep into sharing family histories.
Balaaj had learned all our grandchildren’s names, and Polley knew his
wife’s names and the names of his two sisters and two brothers still in Iraq.
“Yes, I had to leave.
I did not want to leave my brothers and sisters but I must.”
“May I ask why?”
“Of course. I was
interpreter for American army forces. Once
the troops leave, it was too dangerous for me.
I must leave.”
Our movement stopped.
Two unloading trucks double parked side by side forced four lanes of
traffic into one. I stared again through
the sparkingly clean cab window at Rosa’s Mexicano. Images of flautas de pollo and queso fundido
and ceviche de camarones stimulated my hunger, and I coughed loudly so Balaaj
would not hear the growling of my stomach.
I wondered if I could slip out of the cab and buy a carnitas just to
tide me over till dinner. Once a craving
paralyzes my brain, it is hard to eradicate.
Aside from my daughter-in-law’s home cooked carnitas, the best carnitas
I ever devoured were not from a restaurant.
We were in Colorado, staying in a flyfishing lodge near the Black Canyon
of the Gunnison River, and the owner of the establishment took us on a tour of
his property. I wish he hadn’t because
we had driven a long way that morning and afternoon, and it was exceptionally
hot for a Colorado July day. I wanted to
collapse in our room and check out my fishing gear in preparation for the next
day. But I acceded to my host’s wishes,
and drove, then walked, to a corner of his land. The sweat poured off my head
and dripped onto my loafers.
“I’m gonna offer quail hunting next season, but I gotta
change the grasses.”
“The grasses?”
“Yeah. The
grasses. I’m buying two hundred quail
from England and stocking my fields here, but for the quail to survive they
have to have the right habitat…the right grasses.”
“Oh.” A drop of sweat
fell off an eyebrow and found its way into my eye. Through my partial blindness I noticed four
men in the field below me hoisting heavy pipes and laying them on the
ground. Their shirts clung to their
bodies.
“What are those guys doing?”
“The Mexicans?”
I didn’t know they were Mexican. I nodded.
“They are laying pipe for irrigation. To have the right grasses you need water. And if you want people to irrigate your land,
you pick Mexicans. They are the best at
irrigation.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yeah. Definitely. Even if they didn’t come cheap, I would hire
them because they really know their stuff.”
“Come cheap?”
My host slipped into a sotto voce pattern. “I can’t get regular guys to work for the same
price. Last year I hired four American kids
from nearby Montrose and they were worthless….and they wanted three dollars
more per hour.”
I watched the men work on the pipes, and I just wanted to go
back to my room. I lost my appetite.
I got it back when I entered the dining room of the lodge and the rich, earthy, complex smells of Adalia’s magic teased my nostrils. Adalia, our cook, prepared the best carnitas I had ever tasted. The meat was tender and moist and the spice had just the right amount of kick, and the ceviche de camarones lingered on the tongue just long enough to make one delight in being alive. Adalia offered us coffee. We nodded appreciatively and asked her to join us. She politely refused at first but then we waved her to a chair.
“You like the meal?”
Adalia took off her head covering and silky black hair cascaded down her
shoulders.
“Very much. How did you
learn to cook like that?” Stupid
question what I really wanted to gain some information, some secret into the
delicious dishes we had just enjoyed.
Adalia gave a little laugh.
“From my mother, Engracia. She
taught me. I didn’t want to learn at
first, but then I had to.”
Polley inhaled the aroma of the dark brown coffee before
sipping. “Really? You certainly can’t
tell. That was exceptionally delicious….and
I love Mexican food.”
“Thank you. I am
pleased.”
“Why didn’t you want to learn at first?”
Adalia leaned back in her chair. “Hmmmm.
I was in school, in Universidad del Valle de Mexico. Yes. I
studied there to be a…” Adalia looked at
the ceiling….”a what you say, lawyer but not lawyer…..not yet lawyer.”
“Paralegal?”
“Yes. That the
name. Paralegal. I almost graduate.”
“Do you have family here in Colorado?”
“No, I wish. I work here, save money, go
back to school, finish studying.”
We smiled.
Adalia smiled back and stood up. “You have now dessert?”
We smiled and nodded, and Adalia soon returned with two
plates of Pastel de Tres Leches.
The light turned
green, the traffic inched forward.
I heard laughing. Balaaj
turned and said to Polley, “See? It
works that way.”
I was still in Colorado wolfing down Adalia’s carnitas when
my mind slowly worked its way back to the present.
“So, Balaaj, what did you do before you were an interpreter
for the Americans?” Polley leaned
forward.
“I was an engineer.
Built bridges.”
Polley smiled widely.
“My dad and two brothers are engineers.”
Balaaj shrugged slightly and a shadow of lost dreams spread
across his face.
We registered at the Freemont Park Hotel, unpacked, and
focused on our first major decision on this getaway—-where to go for
dinner. The Freemont Park Hotel strongly
recommended the Greek restaurant Milos. “Very good and just across the street.”
So when twilight arrived and we could hold our hunger no
longer, we crossed Seventh Avenue and entered Milos. We were escorted to
our table and introduced to our waiter.
“Good evening. My name
is Aindrea, and I am honored to be your waiter this evening. May I get you something to drink?”
We sipped our Sauvignon Blanc.
“As a kid I worked one summer in a sweatshop cleaning ink
bottles and fixing copy machines.”
“Hmmm. The wine is
really good. What made you think of
that?” Polley put down her glass.
“Four of the five older guys I worked with were all Greek…and each one was
named ‘Nick.’”
“No!”
“Yes. When I met the
fourth guy, I said, ‘Oh. You from Greece
as well?’ He stood up straight, struck
his insulted pose and said, ‘No!!!!! I
am Macedonian. From Macedonia!’”
“I thought Macedonia is part of Greece…you know, Alexander
the Great and all?”
“So did I! I guess it
is the regional thing. Like when someone
asks, ‘Are you from New York?’ and I reply ‘the Bronx,’ just so they know I’m
not from Staten Island….or Brooklyn.”
Then the food came. Grilled Octopus in olive oil with grilled Holland peppers and oyster mushrooms, Tzatziki, Taramosalata and Htipiti, warm pita and marinated raw vegetables, followed by Grilled Mediterranean sea bream with steamed vegetables and Grilled Madagascar Shrimp with endive salad.
In between those courses Aindrea stopped by to check on us and chat. Aindrea was really into basketball, especially college basketball. Polley graduated from Duke, I from Villanova, (which, just to remind people, won the 2018 national championship), so the chatting went on quite a while. Aindrea knew the names of all the players on our college teams, their strengths and their weaknesses.
“How do you keep track of all these stats?” I was on my second glass of Sauvignon Blanc.
“Oh. It is easy. I keep track on spreadsheet. Back in Larissa I was computer technician.”
“How beautiful is Greece?
Never been there.”
“Greece is beautiful.
I go back to Larissa once a year.
See family. But no work there….and
no college basketball like here. I come
back with your dessert.”
Aindrea soon returned to our table with two plates of
Karydopita, traditional walnut cake with honey lavender ice cream.
Back at the Freemont Park Hotel we discussed our next decision. What to do on the morrow. All the way up on the New Jersey Transit Train I considered taking the 8th Avenue line up to the Bronx, my boyhood home, and visiting Arthur Avenue with its shops of fresh made pasta, marinated artichokes, Tuscan salami, coppocola, and provolone. I wanted to inhale the rich aroma of parmesan Reggiano, and fresh baked Italian bread with sesame seeds and buy a paper cup of real lemon ice.
But back at the Freemont Park Hotel I was too full of grilled fish and walnut cake and Sauvignon Blanc to seriously vote for the Arthur Avenue option. Instead we decided on another nostalgic experience—visiting the Museum of Natural History, a wealth of lore and science that consumed hours….days….of my youth.
The next morning we had difficulty hailing a cab, so I
dialed in my Lyft service.
Sunatillo was our driver, a young man, thin with thick black
hair. We judged him to be in his twenties,
but at our age people in their thirties we mistakenly judge to be teenagers.
As always, Polley initiated the conversation. She has a way of letting people feel
comfortable enough to share freely.
“I am from Uzbekestan.”
I don’t think I ever knew anyone from Uzbekestan.
“What did you do in Uzbekestan?”
“I go to school, play soccer. Lots of soccer.”
“We like soccer, too.”
Sunatillo beamed. “Ubekestan
not good in soccer but getting better.”
“You like it here…in the States.”
Sunatillo turned so far around in his seat that I thought the
car was going to swerve off the street and onto the sidewalk.
“Here is great. Just
play soccer in the park and work. Work
all time and play soccer.”
“Work all the time?”
“Oh yes. Work seven days a week…finish
work play soccer.”
“All week?”
“All week. Must work to support family.”
“Are you married?”
Sunatillo turned around again a huge smile lighting up his
face again, and I was afraid he would go through the red light.
“Too young. Have
mother and two younger brothers, one younger sister. Too much work to marry.”
“Some day.”
“Oh yes. Some day.
Some day I finish school, become a lab technician like my father before he
die.”
We arrived at the museum.
“Good luck to you.”
“And to you sir and lady. I love it here. Thank you.”
The only disappointment in the Museum of Natural History was that the long canoe filled with statues of Native Americans had been moved to the Smithsonian. I taught Catcher in the Rye, and one of Holden Caulfield’s favorite pastimes was to admire that exhibit. To Holden the canoe and the poses were frozen in time, a metaphor for his desire to remain forever in the innocence of childhood. But that was the only disappointment. The best thing about the museum was the people. People from everywhere, accents from everywhere, garb from everywhere. It was not about observing humanity, it was about being in humanity.
That night in the Freemont Park Hotel, I surfed the five hundred stations and settled on a cooking show featuring barbequing. The show was half over, but I was able to determine that it was some contest somewhere in the south, and the three hundred pound finalists sporting massive aprons and cooking in front of pickup trucks showcasing the stars and bars, the confederate flags, were sweating over charcoal grills. I wondered, as I watched them carefully monitor their briskets and pork shoulders, if they knew that barbeque owes its origins to slaves who received the worst cuts of meat to eat. The slaves learned that the only way to make those meats palatable was to slow cook them, and since they were not allowed to cut trees down for smoking, they became experts on types of driftwood and downed trees to use for smoking—mesquite and hickory and pecan. I wondered if that knowledge would change anything. Maybe change the decals on their pickup trucks.
On the way back home on the New Jersey Transit train, I
wondered about many things. My neighbor
Charlie’s engineering company sent him and his family to Brussels, Belgium for
a year to work. When he returned, I
asked him about his experience living in Europe. He was unenthusiastic.
“It was all right, I guess.”
“Well, at least you got to eat great food…..I mean, Paris
alone is nearby.”
Charlie looked at me, surprised. “We ate every night at the
hotel restaurant. Steak and potatoes.
Every night. Layman and Curry
picked up the tab, of course.”
“You can’t be serious. Tell me you never, the whole year,
ate any of the local cuisine.”
“Those people eat things like snails.”
I just sighed. What
was poor Charlie missing?
What are we missing? What would our nation be like without the import of panzanella and pizza and ravioli and moo goo gai pan and Szechuan chicken and egg rolls and baklava and minted lamb and pulled pork and hickory smoked chicken and sushi and sashimi and ramen and that is just the food. What about the importations of genius and energy from peoples from distant lands and distant views? What about jazz and the blues and Mardi Gras and Italian opera? What if we had not imported Greek democracy?
To my knowledge I have never heard of a couple engage in the
following conversation:
“Let’s go out for dinner.”
“Good idea. What food
are you feeling? Chinese? Italian?
Mexican? I heard a new Ehtiopian
restaurant opened in the next block. And
there is always the Rib Cage—-pulled pork sandwich?”
“I was thinking, maybe Anglo-Saxon white.”
It the pilgrims had succeeded in keeping other immigrants out, then today fine dining would mean kidney pie and mixed grill.
And I continue to wonder. It is not about acceptance of difference. If I “accept” you, it implies that I am superior to you, allowing you to enter the bubbly environment around me. It is not about accepting difference, about accepting barbequed ribs. It is about appreciation of food, appreciation of diversity and all the rich potential they offer.
After ten minutes of sliding down the embankment, grabbing hold of weed stalks and thorny bushes along the way, I found myself on the edge of Gore Creek. I tied on a Parachute Adams and made a few casts behind some boulders and along a fallen log dipping from the opposite bank.
Owners of land in Colorado, unlike owners in many other states, can own streambeds. I was warned in the flyshop in Vail NOT to wade on the southern side of Gore Creek near the railroad because some rancher owned that half of the stream. I was careful until I came to a large boulder jutting out from the northern bank. The only way to negotiate the boulder was to go around it by stepping in the southern portion of Gore Creek. I looked around, but except for Polley reading her book on the railroad embankment, there was no one.
I stepped in the southern streambed of Gore Creek, and, in four large steps and less than one minute, I was back on the northern streambed of Gore Creek, when a few pebbles landed on my fishing hat. I looked up at the trestle, a railroad spur crossing over Gore Creek, and there was a tall man in cowboy boots which kicked more pebbles onto me. His hand was on the pistol in his holster.
Okay…..I forced a wide smile and tipped my hat. The tall man with the cowboy boots and the pistol stared at me for a while. He may have been deciding whether or not to shoot me. He opted to let me live, and just walked away. Where did he come from?
I stepped out of the water and walked back upstream, this time tying on a Griffith’s Gnat. Polley saw the man on the trestle too. “Where did he come from?” I shrugged my shoulders.
I lived to teach Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales once again. Andrew’s class had performed especially well on that project in which groups of students, assuming the characters of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s work, competed in a Whose Line Is It tournament. Andrew, as the Pardoner, was applauded for his participation as that pilgrim, winning several events for his team. Yet, he only received a 68 on his Canterbury Tales test. He obviously had read the assignment. What was going on here? I called him in to discover why.
“Mr. Maltese?”
“Andrew. Please sit down.”
He dumped his twenty pounds of books on the desk next to mine and straightened the glasses on his nose.
‘’Andrew, I truly enjoy having you as a student in my class.”
The look of worry evaporated on his face and was replaced by a smile.
“Your contributions to class discussions are poignant and reflect deep thought, your collaborative skills, working with your classmates are excellent, and your performances on class projects are exceptional, like the Pardoner you played in the Chaucer project.”
The smile grew wider.
“So, Andrew, I am troubled by your low test scores. I do not understand how such an intelligent, self-motivated, pleasant young man can get a 68 on the test. I know you read and took notes on the material.”
The smile quickly faded. Andrew looked down at his shoes.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Andrew, you don’t understand. I did not call you in to criticize you. I want to understand why your test scores don’t reflect the excellent student that you are.”
Andrew looked up into my eyes, searched for trust, and looked down again.
“I shouldn’t be in this honors class.”
I took off my glasses and tossed them on the desk. Now I truly did not understand.
“Andrew, why don’t you belong in this class? I certainly think you belong in this class. If you don’t, no one does. Are you an undercover CIA agent tracking expired milk dates in the cafeteria? Why? What?”
He replied as if he had a virulent strain of the bubonic plague which would kill him in two days.
“I have dyslexia.”
“Uh huh.”
Andrew looked up at me. “The letters in the words all look scrambled to me. I have to unscramble them first and then I look up the words in my pocket dictionary.”
I nodded my head.
“Mr. Maltese, I read all your assignments. I leave your homework to the last, and by the time I am through it is one or two in the morning.”
“Andrew, if anything, I am more impressed with your work ethic and skills.”
“I don’t do well on the tests because it takes me forever to read the questions.”
“Andrew, now I understand. We can work around that..”
“I was surprised when you gave me an “A” in English because my quiz and test scores were low.”
“Andrew, first, I did NOT give you an “A.” You earned that “A” by your work ethic, your intellectual curiosity, and your performance on projects.”
“Mr. M., are you going to transfer me out of honors now? My mother had to push and yell and stomp her feet to convince my counselor to put me in your honors class.”
“Andrew, you haven’t been listening to me. You belong in an Honors class, and I am so very honored you are in my honors class.”
We worked it out. I would create a separate quiz and test for Andrew and I would administer the quiz or test orally during his study hall. He consistently scored in the nineties.
I made a few casts to some riffles up stream with no takes. I looked up at Polley reading her Scandinavian mystery.
“You see any good water?”
Polley got out of her chair. “I was just about to go for a walk.”
“Okay. Let me know if you see any good holding lies.”
One of my favorite projects involved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. After we read and discussed the conventional themes—-mythologies associated with geographical biases, the dream concept, the “morally corrupt” 1920s, etc.—groups of students would select one of several projects to demonstrate their understanding of character and theme. Most groups chose the Yearbook Project. Assuming that Gatsby and Daisy and Tom and the other characters all went to the same high school, what would their yearbook look like. Students liked to exercise their linguistic and visual skills and jumped into the assignment enthusiastically. Andrew chose to work alone, which was unusual.
“Hey, I see a trout, a big one, right across from you.”
Polley was high on the embankment pointing straight down to a cluster of rocks next to the bank. “He’s a nice one….I think a rainbow.”
I maneuvered my way gingerly across the stream to a casting position just downstream of the cluster of rocks. I checked the Griffith’s Gnat and applied more floatant. My first cast was a little splashy, and I was afraid I spooked the trout. A few more casts, more delicate. Nothing. I yelled up to Polley. “Is my fly going over him?”
Polley nodded. I snipped off the Griffith’s Gnat and tied on a Gary LaFontaine pattern, an Aft Sparkle. I had tied up about fifty Aft Sparkles after catching a bunch of browns on the pattern on the Rio Janeros in Colorado last year.
Two casts brought nothing. The midday sun was up and the desert land around Gore Creek embraced the heat and reflected it back onto me. Time for a break. I stopped casting and looked around for the guy with the cowboy boots and pistol. He had been an unpleasant surprise.
Andrew’s choice of Great Gatsby projects was a pleasant surprise. He chose the option of writing music for each of the characters in the novel. When his turn came, he handed me a list of selections he had written for his clarinet, and across from the piece of music was the name of the character the music described. His classmates did NOT have the list I was holding in my hand.
Andrew sat in a small chair in front of a small podium which held his score. Andrew was first clarinet in the school orchestra, so his classmates grew silent as he placed his fingers on the instrument. He played the first selection and then looked up at the class.
“So which character does that piece represent?”
The class, in unison, responded, “That’s Tom Buchanan!!”
I looked down at the list in my hand. The piece Andrew played reflected Tom Buchanan!!!!
Andrew played his next piece.
He finished and looked up. “That’s Daisy!”
I looked at my list. It was Daisy.
And so it went for twelve characters.
What Andrew had done was to demonstrate his understanding of the novel’s characters by expressing their traits through music. Did he demonstrate an understanding of character? Yes he did. Would he have done well on a paper and pencil test on character? Maybe not. Did he get an “A” for his project? Yes he did.
One of the essential concepts that formed my teaching was Howard Gardner’s book on multiple intelligences. Schools only focus on two primary intelligences, verbal and mathematical, but students like Andrew are proof that, if given the chance, there are other ways to demonstrate understanding of content.
I snipped off the Aft Sparkle and rummaged through my dry fly box searching for that magic pattern that would fool that trout by the cluster of rocks. I decided on a Foxy Quill, size 16. I yelled up to Polley. “Is he still there?”
Polley was standing on the embankment, hands on hips, watching that trout. I made another cast upstream, just above the cluster of rocks, and watched intently the Foxy Quill float right over the trout’s position. I braced for the take. Nothing.
Another cast. Same result.
Then I noticed something I should have noticed earlier. I shouted up to Polley. “Which way is he facing?”
Trout face upstream, the current becoming a conveyor belt of food for them.
Polley yelled back. “He’s facing downstream.”
Of course! The cluster of rocks formed an eddy, and the food chain swirled around the rocks and that clever old trout was feeding in the back channel.
I made my next cast downstream and into the eddy and the rainbow took it immediately. He was huge, taking me upstream and downstream and tail walking at least four times. I held on, to the trout as well as to my heart which was thumping wildly and loudly against my chest.
I worked the nineteen inch rainbow into a current of slow moving water, picked him up to show Polley when his body suddenly contorted and he was out of my hand, out of my control, the 5X tippet snapping and he was gone. Just another style of catch and release.
Once my heartbeat sought its normal level, I thought about the problem. I broke with convention when I presented the dry fly downstream rather than upstream in order to get it into the trout’s window. There are a number of ways to demonstrate proficiency. That rainbow on Gore Creek helped teach me that. And Andrew was able to present his proficiency through his clarinet performance. Those experiences convinced me that I had to create other opportunities for my students to demonstrate their knowledge and their proficiencies.
I looked down the embankment from the railroad tracks. My weight was already shifting under the loose gravel and sandy earth, and I visualized myself slipping and sliding down this bank and plunging into Gore Creek below. That would be a shame on a nice morning like this. To my right, a little over a half mile away, Interstate 70 ran east-west out of Vail into Copper Mountain or, in the opposite direction, to Grand Junction. I stood on the track mustering the courage to work my way down to the stream and wondered what the Interstate looked like during the skiing months. Bumper to bumper, maybe, as opposed to this July day when traffic was heavy but steadily moving.
“Be careful going down. It looks pretty steep.” Polley was unfolding her streamside chair. She became an expert at reading water. “That eddy over there looks promising.” It did, but first I would have to survive getting down to the water.
That school year I was doing better than surviving teaching Andrew’s Honors class. Henry Bouquet High School prospered from a change in principals, and, after publishing an article about collaborative learning that received some note (and the school district some positive publicity), I found myself released from the dog house after twenty years. I was assigned an honors class. My former principal referred to my collaborative learning methodology as “that group work crap.” He liked lecturing…every day…..for one hundred and eighty six days a year.
I rarely lectured in my classes. I thought students should be engaged in high level thinking as opposed to low level listening, so I tried to create projects that would improve those neural pathways. Many of Andrew’s classmates were highly motivated, mostly by grades, but Andrew was one of those who exhibited genuine intellectual curiosity. He applied the adage, “Information is only useless if you do not use it.”
“So, we are going to study Geoffrey Chaucer and his work, The Canterbury Tales, but before we do, let’s develop a context for his poetry by sharing what we know about the Medieval Period.”
And so we shared what we knew or thought we knew about the Medieval Period.
Michael raised his hand. “Is this gonna be on a test?” Michael was solely motivated by grades, and he was disappointed in his last group grade. He had let his group down by not doing his share of work and research.
My answer to this question was always the same. “You ARE accountable for this material.”
Michael let out a colossal groan. “Why do we have to look at this crap?! Why can’t we study something relevant?”
Every year someone in class moaned about relevancy, and every year I waited for this teachable moment.
“All right, Michael. What would you like to study that is relevant?”
Michael sat up. “How about that thing about Milli Vanilli? They got caught lip synching their album.”
“How is that relevant to your life?”
Michael looked at the ceiling and thought.
Andrew raised his hand. “The Milli Vanilli thing is topical….not necessarily relevant.”
What a great kid!
“Great point, Andrew.” Andrew was tall and very thin with dark brown framed glasses. If he starred in a western he would be called “Slim.” Some Andrews would choose to be called by his friends “Andy,” but “Andy” did not, like a baggy and draping suit, sit well with this young man. Andrew was never absent, always participated in class, and did more than his fair share of work. However, his test and quiz scores were abysmal. I wondered why.
“So what is the difference between something that is relevant and something that is topical?”
They thought in silence.
“Okay. Have you heard your parents complain about taxes?”
Everyone nodded their heads.
“How about the possibility of war?”
More nodding.
“How about disease?” The Aids epidemic was filling the nightly news.
More nodding.
“So would you say that taxes, the threat of war and disease are topics that are relevant?” Again nodding.
We were all on the same page.
“Barbara Tuchman, an historian, wrote a book, A Distant Mirror, a book about life in the fourteenth century. She called it ‘a distant mirror,” because what people in Europe feared at that time were taxes, war and plague. So how relevant to our own time would that be?”
Majorie shouted out, “Very relevant.”
“When we watch the nightly news and hear that there was a fire in a store in Center City or that Milli Vanilli got caught lip synching their album, those facts might be interesting but how relevant are they to your lives?”
Benjamin raised his hand. “Relevant if it was your store!”
Laughter.
“True. Let me give you another example. I have in one hand a radio built in 1990, and one manufactured in 1932. Which one is the better radio?
Lots of shoutouts. “The one made in 1990!”
Okay. Now. Imagine I have two paintings here. One in the left hand, one in the right. All you can see is the back of both paintings. I tell you the one on the left was painted in 1990. The one on the right was painted in 1654. Which one is the better painting?
Benjamin raised his hand. “You can’t tell.”
“Why not? Why isn’t it the newer one?”
Andrew raised his hand. “Art isn’t like technology. Newer does not always mean better.”
“You all agree?”
Everyone, including Michael, nodded.
“So, do you also agree that something old can be relevant and something new, while topical, can be irrelevant?”
Again, general consensus. “So let’s give Chaucer a chance and see if The Canterbury Tales are relevant. Okay?”
Relevancy and topicalism are tricky things. I saw many young teachers go down in flames trying to be topical and thus “cool” with their students. By the time I learned what was new in student pop culture, it was old. I learned my first year of teaching in northern New Jersey not even to try to be hip. To earn my student teaching credits I had a Cooperating Teacher from a nearby university come out every two weeks to observe me. Mr. Farley, in his eighties, took ten minutes to work his way from the door of my classroom to his seat in the back of the room. He always observed the same class because, as he confided in me, it fit in with his lunch and nap schedule. The class that fit in with his lunch and nap schedule consisted of juniors, five of whom wore ankle bracelets for tracking by the local gendarmes, four of whom were in the middle stages of pregnancy, six of whom had failed this class before and none of whom were interested in British poetry, which I was required to teach. I started each class demanding they remove the headphones blaring Heavy Metal music from their heads.
Mr. Farley had a tendency to contribute his observations on the content under study.
One day, as I tried to explain to this class the nuances of Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse,” and the concept of fate as a determining factor, Mr. Farley chimed in.
“Yes….Robert Burns….yes yes yes.” A few students lifted their heads off their desks.
“Robert Burns……Scottish poet…..yes yes yes….Harry Lauter. You all have heard of Harry Lauter, haven’t you?”
Receiving no response, Mr. Farley looked at me. “Yes yes yes. Harry Lauter. You certainly have heard of Harry Lauter, haven’t you?”
I shook my head. The students were quietly attentive, but if this Harry Lauter thing went on, I was going to lose them.
Mr. Farley looked puzzled that I had not heard of Harry Lauter. “Harry Lauter, actor AND singer?”
I shook my head again.
“That’s strange. Harry Lauter, yes yes yes, was a singer noted for singing Scottish ballads. Yes yes yes. He sang many ballads that came from the poetry of Robert Burns.”
Mr. Farley stared into the unblinking eyes of twenty six students…and one teacher.
“Hmmmm. Yes yes yes. Harry Lauter was big in my time….” Mr. Farley sought a relevancy. “Yes yes yes. Harry Lauter was to my generation as as as …..as Harry Belafonte is to yours.”
Not a few students turned to each other and blinked. Harry Belafonte? Who he?
Since that experience I never again sought to be a hip teacher.
(After Jackie played her song with the inappropriate language, I tried to turn the debacle into a teachable moment by relating the difference between cuteness and cleverness using the tale of Uncle Harry, Joey, and Joey pummeling Uncle Harry’s toe with a hammer at Thanksgiving Dinner.)
“There is a huge difference between being cute and being clever. People who want to be cute want to draw attention to themselves. Their actions are saying, ‘Look at me!!!! Look at me!!!! Look at me!!!!’ They are craving attention.”
I saw a number of students shift uneasily in their seats. Jackie sat with her arms crossed in front of her.
“Being clever means making people think about something old in a new way…..like Caleb did yesterday when Caleb made the connection between Donne and rolling your eyes when you say something sarcastic.”
All of you are adults. You are NOT babies. You get points in the adult world for being clever. Leave cuteness to the babies.”
They were silent. Hey, it was the best teachable moment I could conjure up. When the bell rang, they marched out in silence, except for Jackie who bulled and elbowed her way to be the first to leave.
In the spring of that school year, I noticed that Jackie was absent two days in a row. The reason why became apparent on the third day of her absence. In my mailbox was a Progress Report for Jackie. When students were suspended or had a parents’ conference, each teacher was required to fill out a Progress Report noting grades and behavior. This was used at the readmission meetings. Teaching five level three classes meant I would fill out many many Progress Reports. Jackie was failing my class and her language was increasingly filled with profanity.
I completed the Progress Report and decided to hand it in personally to Rae Levin, Jackie’s guidance counselor.
“So why did Jackie get suspended?” I handed Rae the Progress Report.
Rae was from Atlanta and still retained a southern accent. She began to read the Progress Report. “She got in a fight with another girl on the bus loading platform.”
“What over?”
“Boyfriend I think. Jackie saw this other girl talking to a boy that Jackie liked.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“How is the other girl?”
“Okay. But Jackie shut out her lights. She was taken to the hospital and released the same day, bless her heart.”
“Who is the other girl?”
“Diane Jenkins.”
Diane was in my seventh period class.
“I didn’t get a progress report for Diane. Did she get suspended?”
“Nope. Witnesses say she didn’t throw a punch. She was more or less a victim.”
“Rae, another question?”
“Sure.”
“What’s with the yellow raincoat? Last week it was seventy five degrees in my room and she is wearing that heavy yellow raincoat on top of a sweatshirt.”
Rae pulled her chair closer to the desk implying something confidential was about to be shared. I moved my chair closer to the desk.
Rae folded her hands in front of her on the desk. “You’re a man. You might not understand. Jackie is very very very ashamed of her figure. She wears the yellow raincoat every day to cover it up.”
I felt my soul sink. “Damn.”
Rae nodded.
“Can I make some changes to that Progress Report?”
The next day, before Period 7 began, I pulled Diane aside. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, Mr. M. I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was face to face with Jackie waiting for the bus, and we’re going at it, ya know, me yelling at her, her yelling at me. Then I turned away and started to walk away when I thought of something else to yell at her.”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s all I remember. I turned to yell at her and all I saw was yellow and then nothing.”
“You’re okay now, though?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
The next day Jackie returned to school.
Period 3 went as usual. We struggled through Robert Burns. “To a Mouse.”
When the bell rang Jackie hung behind and waited for the room to empty out.
“Glad to have you back, Jackie.”
She put her hands in her yellow rain jacket. “Thanks for the good things you wrote in the report.” I could tell that this was a really hard thing for her to do.
“Just told the truth. By the way, here is the essay you wrote before you got suspended.”
She looked it over, flashed surprise at the B-, and read my comments. I made the usual criticisms of spelling and paragraph structure and errors in punctuation, but I purposely included phrases like “beautifully written” when a nice segment of prose appeared.
Jackie passed my class, honestly, as did Caleb.
Six years later I was still assigned five classes of level 3 students. I asked my department chairperson if I could be assigned a higher level group if only to develop some other teaching skills. Truth was, I feared burning out. Years of teaching students hostile to learning was taking its toll. But sometimes success is a death knell. I worked well with level 3 students and school is about placing people in pre-ordained niches, including teachers.
As my sixth year of teaching Henry Bouquet High School’s most inexperienced students drew to a close, the birth of our first child neared. One day in mid-June Polley experienced contractions; we made a phone call to our obstetrician who advised us to go to the hospital. We were in the hospital parking lot when Polley began to stamp her feet. “I’m not going in there. The contractions stopped.” We later learned that Braxton-Hicks contractions were common.
“We’re here. Let’s just go in and check it out.”
“No!!! I am so embarrassed.” Polley did not open her car door.
“Embarrassed?! Honey, what are the chances we see anyone we know in the hospital?”
My mind was rolling the film of Polley stomping her foot. “I will be so embarrassed!” when I heard a splash upstream and to our right. Mike heard it as well. “Well, at least there is one trout in this creek.”
Then another splash, this one closer to us, and then another practically in front of us. We leaned down closer to the water to see what insects were inspiring trout to rise to the surface. Mike was the first, as always, to identify the hatch. “Quill Gordons. I think they are Quill Gordons.”
That made sense. Quill Gordons were an early spring insect. I reached into my vest for my dry fly box, looked up and down the rows of hackled flies and found the Quill Gordons. When I looked up and began to tie on the fly, the stream we thought was devoid of trout was boiling with life, trout inhaling the insects, wings upright, that now were like a flotilla of tiny sailboats riding the current downstream. My blood pressure shot up a hundred points. With anxiety-inhibited fingers, I tied on the fly and made a cast upstream. Mike was doing the same a few yards downstream. I watched my fly float down toward me, one imitation Quill Gordon amongst thousands of naturals. My eyes searched for my fly. A trout rose, and I lifted my graphite rod to hook him. I felt no resistance. My fly came up into the air and bounced off my waders. My eyes were mistakenly following a natural!!! I made another cast, trout were splashing all around me, and my eyes sought my fly, a sailboat coasting along with a fleet. A trout rose to inhale a fly but I did not lift the rod because I thought the fly the trout took was a natural. Then I felt resistance! Again, I was following the wrong sailboat! This trout hooked himself. I landed and immediately released the fourteen inch brownie.
Hatches do not last long, perhaps twenty to thirty minutes, but Mike and I had a great time in that short period. We laughed afterwards at how many fish we missed for various reasons.
It was one of those pleasant surprises. A stream I swore earlier was troutless became a caldron of hungry, feasting creatures.
When Polley and I entered the emergency room of the hospital, an aide immediately pushed a wheelchair underneath my wife who was still shaking her head. “I am so embarrassed.”
“Why? Look, we’ll just check everything out. Okay? Look, nobody we know.” I made a sweeping gesture with my arm, and just as the arm stopped, we heard, “Mr. Maltese!!!!!!”
It was one of my students from that year. Then another student from that year appeared and approached. Then, as the aide wheeled Polley to an examination room, one of her former students spotted her. And then another. Polley shot me a look. I knew that look. “What!? Do half our students volunteer here?”
I simply shrugged.
In the examination room we waited for someone to tell us what we already suspected. Braxton-Hicks. False labor. I was reading an article posted on the bulletin board, “Dietary Habits That Will Make You Healthy” when the curtain suddenly parted and a mass of white filled the room. “Hey, Mr. Maltese!”
It was Jackie. She had on a white uniform with a pink ribbon in her lapel.
“I heard from Marie that you were here. How you doing?”
My shocked Ralph Kramden came out of my mouth….all babbling, but through the blather I was able to make introductions.
“So Jackie, how are you doing?”
“Just fine. I went to school and I’m a nurse’s assistant. I bet you’re surprised.”
“No, not at all.” I lied. “Do you like it?”
“Yes. Very much. I like helping people. I am going to enter another program so I can work in pediatrics. I like working with kids.” “That’s great.”
We had a nice chat. Years later Jackie’s son Jonathan showed up in my class. Nice kid. I heard from Jonathan’s counselor that Jackie had demanded he be placed in my class.
One of the many things I like about flyfishing is that, often, there are surprises. And most are pleasant. This coming from a flyfisherman who has inadvertently sat in several streams and endured not-so-pleasant surprises. It was late afternoon, and Mike and I had already made fifty or so casts apiece into the Church Pool on Resica Falls Creek. The rain had stopped, and the sun was dodging between puffy light gray clouds. Tired of fruitlessly flailing line, we took a break and sat down on a fallen oak along the bank.
“See a rise?” Mike shifted the weight on his vest as he settled into the log.
I shook my head. Despite the rain, the water was relatively clear. Neither of us saw any trout. “Are you sure they are in here?”
Mike nodded. “They should be. Every year I come here they are in this pool.”
The Church Pool on Resica was called the Church Pool because the boy scouts often camped here, and they erected a small wooden structure for Sunday worship. But there were no scouts this day. Just Mike and I and the lovely spring woods, light green saplings on the opposite bank and behind us, and a pool in front of us that apparently held no trout.
Mike and I sat there in silence, enjoying the woods and the stream and, as often happens when one is silent in the woods, surprises occur. Mike lightly touched my left arm. I looked where he was looking. A mink sporting a dark, glisteningly reddish-brown coat, worked its way along the opposite bank, occasionally dipping into the water and then back up on the bank. If the mink was here, fish would also be here.
We watched the mink until it realized we were there, and then it scampered up the bank and disappeared behind a pine tree.
Still the stream looked devoid of any life.
My third period that year was full of life. They burst into my classroom, jabbering and jostling as if to get the best seats at a rock concert. I was no rock concert and the seats were assigned. Period 3 was my favorite level three class of the five level threes I taught that year. A level 3 student was supposedly assigned to a level 3 class because they had level 3 reading ability, whatever the hell that meant. I asked repeatedly to see the written criteria for level 3 (and level 2 and level 1 for that matter), and was repeatedly told there were no written descriptions of levels, but former teachers and counselors decided on the grouping. Later in my career, when I had achieved some gravitas and attempted to eliminate tracking, I asked teachers and administrators if they would mind being paid on a pay scale labeled level 1, level 2, level 3, level 3 being the lowest salary. Invariably someone in the audience would ask, “What are the requirements for those levels?” My response would be a shrug. “It is kind of fuzzy. Wherever your superiors feel you belong.” Much consternation and huffing and puffing, but I made my point.
And the problem was compounded by the fact that Henry Bouquet High School wanted it both ways. The policy makers wanted tracking, arguing that level 3’s were the lowest on the totem pole because they had “reading difficulties,” which they did, but the curriculum for every student, including level 3’s was still classical and high brow. Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Chaucer, Hardy, Dreiser. Henry Bouquet School District wanted the community to believe that all students were reading and studying the dead old white men….and white women.
This included my Period 3 class of 11th graders, most of whom, I learned in the first week of school, were reading on the third grade level…..some were lower. So we struggled. We read Macbeth aloud with our fingers dragging across the page, the words dripping from the mouths slowly like a slowly leaking faucet.
“Mr. M., I don’t know what I just read.” Caleb was a very short, thin young man who was the worst reader, and thus needed the most practice. But listening to him read was an agonizing enterprise. Even his classmates, who were only slightly better readers, mentally dropped out when Caleb read. They studied the water splotches that marred the acoustical ceiling tile or read the bulletin board for the thousandth time.
Caleb was always seen in the company of Jackie. If Caleb was small in frame and skinny, Jackie was his feminine counterpart—exceptionally large in frame, and it could easily be imagined that she daily ate Caleb’s weight in food. Every day Jackie wore the same fading-yellow raincoat with several missing brown buttons. Every day, rain or shine. And Jackie’s entrance was always a sweeping motion. As she negotiated her way down a row of desks, her billowing yellow raincoat with missing brown buttons swept pencils, papers, books and the occasional eye as it cycloned the path to her desk……a Tasmanian devil in slow motion.
Caleb and Jackie were friends. Nothing more than that, no appearances of romantic involvement, no wooing eyes or fingertip touching. Probably because of her size, Jackie seemed to be his protectorate, beaconing the warning that if anyone touched her diminutive friend she would break the miscreant’s head.
I had to teach the Metaphysical Poets. John Donne’s poetry was a curriculum requirement. I sifted through the selections of Donne’s work that were included in the textbook. “Bait” is a short poem. None of my students would like it, and once the general theme was realized, there was not much else to explore.
“Meditation #17” had the famous line, “No man is an island, entire unto itself.” This had promise. We could explore our separateness and our connectedness, and if I used Simon and Garfunkel’s song, “I Am a Rock,” we could also explore the rhetorical device of irony.
The next day, as a class, we read and discussed Donne’s essay, and, in one of those delightful rarities in a level 3 class, engaged in a productive conversation. Then, again, this was period 3, my best class that year.
“So, Mr. M., he saying that we all together?”
“What do you think he is saying?”
Caleb raised his hand, and I nodded.
“I think he be saying that somehow we all in this together. I means, we all live and we all die.”
“That’s sick.” This was a positive comment back then.
“Yes, I think Caleb is onto something here.”
Caleb was about to elaborate, but Jackie, who sat in the row next to Caleb, looked down at him and interrupted. “What you know? That’s bogus.”
“Go ahead, Jackie, tell us why you think Donne is wrong.” She often yelled out things, using non sequitors, but she rarely participated.
Jackie used both her big hands to pull her fading-yellow raincoat closed around her.
“I knows plenty of people that don’t want to be together with me…..and I certainly don’t wants to be together with them.”
“I understand. That is valid.”
And so the period went. With ten minutes to go before the bell rang, I plugged in the record player that I had borrowed from the school library and played “I Am a Rock.’
I actually, upon request from Caleb, played it twice. Students went to the blackboard and wrote their arguments for and against Donne.
Caleb looked down, his chin in his hand. “So irony is say one thing but mean the opposite? It’s like when you roll your eyes and say you’re sorry but you’re really not?” I said they were my favorite class.
“Caleb, I think you got it.” He smiled and the bell rang. Jackie said in her booming voice. “Hey, Mr. M., can I bring in a song tomorrow that is like what you played?”
“Sure, Jackie. Bring it in.”
I had to call the library and see if I could hang on to the record player for another day. My other classes that day were not so cooperative.
The next day Period 3 jammed and jostled their way through the classroom door as usual. Jackie filled the door frame as she filed in and swept her way down to her desk while carrying a record album.
I took attendance and remembered Jackie’s request. “Okay, people, yesterday we discussed Donne, his famous phrase, ‘No man is an island,’ and the idea that we are all connected…..or, as Jackie postulated, we are NOT connected. Jackie, you said you have a song that illustrates that point of view….the opposite of that Simon and Garfunkel song we played yesterday?”
“Uh huh. Can I play it?”
“Sure. I already setup the phonograph for you.”
Jackie, and, for some reason, Caleb walked to the front of the room. Jackie put the record on the player as Caleb stood next to her—the difference in size was hard not to notice.
As the record started, Jackie started to smile slyly and Caleb’s eyes grew wide. The song began.
“I WANT TO GET YOU IN MY QUEENIE, FUCK YOU ALL DAY, FUCK YOU ALL NIGHT, FUCK YOU TO MY HEART’S DELIGHT.”
So that was it. They just wanted to play a song for shock effect. Jackie was swooning and gyrating to the music and Caleb was laughing into his cupped hands. I made my way from the back of the room and lifted the needle off the record. Jackie reached out to stop me. “No. Let me finish my song.”
I fended off her attempt to keep it going. “Not funny. Caleb. I am very disappointed in you.”
Caleb looked down at his work boots and actually seemed contrite, but Jackie was incessant.
“We listened to your whole song. I wanna hear mine.”
“Sit down. Your song is not relevant to our conversation yesterday.”
“I don’t see why. You can’t get any more connected than fucking.”
“Sit down.”
They both took their seats.
A teacher’s truth is that one often has to think and work hard to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear……on the fly.
The class was dead silent. They were wondering what I was going to do. I was wondering what I was going to do. I disconnected the record player and closed it up ready to return it to the library. I did all this in slow motion, buying time to think.
“I want you all to think about a big family dinner….maybe Thanksgiving. Uncle Harry is there. Uncle Harry is about eighty years old, and he is sitting at the Thanksgiving table, dinner napkin wrapped around his neck. All your family is there…including your two year old cousin Joey. Joey is crawling around the floor under the Thanksgiving table with his toy hammer in his hand. Got the picture?”
I searched the faces in the room. They got the picture.
“So suddenly Uncle Harry jumps out from the table, his napkin falls off, and he begins hopping around the dining room. Someone yells, ‘Joey just hit Uncle Harry’s toe with the hammer!!!!!’ Everyone starts laughing. Everyone starts saying, ‘Oh, how cute….little Joey hit Uncle Harry on the foot with his toy hammer. How cute!’
Now, fast forward thirteen years. Your cousin Joey is fifteen, Uncle Harry is ninety-three. Joey does the same thing. He slams Uncle Harry on the foot with a hammer. How many people at the table think that is cute? What is the difference?”
I did not want a reply. I wanted them to think. (to be continued)
Reginald Rochester II was about to explode. There were rapid puffs of gray smoke from Leadbeater’s pipe emulating Native American smoke signals messaging an imminent attack by the cavalry. Apparently my awarding of “A’s” to level three students was threatening to collapse the academic structure of Henry Bouquet High School.
Eric Part II
“Mr. Maltese…you fail to understand that you are undermining honors students’ attempts to be selected to the AAS [American Academic Society—Reginald Rochester II was chairman of the committee that selected students to place the glory of AAS memberships on their college applications.) because of your A’s to your undeserving students.”
I stood up. “If they were undeserving they would not have received A’s.”
“Mr. Maltese, please sit down.” Leadbeater pointed to the chair.
I sat down.
“So, what I hear both of you say is that level three students, no matter how hard they work, cannot receive A’s.”
“That is correct.”
Reginald Rochester II stood next to my chair in a feeble attempt at intimidation. Reginald Rochester I must have been a real tightass.
Reginald Rochester II raised both eyebrows. “If they are doing such good work, they should be moved up to a level two.”
“They can barely read what they have now.”
“Mr. Maltese, I taught Shakespeare to level threes.” Leadbeater puffed some more and settled smugly and snugly back into his leather chair.
Years later, at a social function, I learned from one of Leadbeater’s former students that his idea of “teaching” Shakespeare was to read all the parts of the play aloud to the class, ninety percent of whom were catching up on their sleep the whole period.
“If a student earns an “A” I will award him or her an ‘A.’”
“Your colleagues in the English department adhere to policy.”
“I can’t speak for them.”
I learned later he was lying. Other teachers of level threes gave out ‘A’s. Not many, but some. This, I learned, became an administrative tactic, telling teachers individually that they, alone, were not towing the line. Divide and conquer.
Leadbeater shuffled the printouts on his desk. “What about college admissions?”
“What about college admissions?”
Reginald Rochester II’s face was the color of cheap Chianti. “Do you think it is fair that an honors student who masters challenging material and gets an “A” is ranked the same as one of your students who also gets an “A” for less challenging subject matter? Suppose they apply to the same college?”
This was getting ridiculous. “First of all, the material I teach is challenging for my students. Otherwise all of them would receive A’s. Secondly, your argument involving college admissions is specious. Most of my students, if not all, would never apply to the same colleges as your precious ones.” I don’t think Reginald Rochester II’s comments had ever been described as specious before. His eyes opened wide, his muscles tensed, his lips quivered and I was ready to hear “Code Blue” come over the school’s loud speaker system any second.
Leadbeater tapped his pipe on an ash tray.
“I see, Mr. Maltese, that with more experience you will learn.”
With that I left. For the next fifteen years I was allowed to teach only level threes, and the administration tried to “teach” me the penalty for disrupting the grade distribution. Instead of assigning a classroom to me, I “floated” from one class to another—five classes—-five rooms scattered throughout Bouquet High. Six rooms including advisor room.
Somewhere in early June we were finishing the curriculum requirements for Eric’s class. It was an early summer, and the heat seemed to find its way up to the second floor of Bouquet High and grow there. We finished reading and discussing T.S. Eliot’s Lovesong of J. AlfredPrufrock. Well, I read and discussed the poem. I looked around the classroom and watched the drowsiness that comes with stifling heat and clothes sticking to skin and beads of sweat dripping from foreheads and onto desks and Eliot’s poetry envelop my students. We had already suffered a week of sultry summer.
“Hey. Up here.” Most heads looked up at me. They were down. Really down. The school was a marathon.
“Look, I will give everyone in class two points on the final exam if you all sing Jingle Bells.”
Smiles and even some laughter.
“Seriously, Mr. M?”
“Seriously. I’ll start.”
And so, slowly at first, we sang Jingle Bells. Within less than a minute they were into it, singing loudly. We heard the class next door pick it up and then the next class and then the next as Jingle Bells rolled down the second floor of Bouquet High. When it finally ended, I took in all the smiles. “Now, don’t you all feel cooler?”
“Hell no, Mr. M. But that was fun.”
“Okay. Last poem we have to cover. Poe’s Annabel Lee.” The singing brought us a little energy, even if it only lasted to the end of the class period.
The bell rang, and Eric seemed to hang around my desk. I gathered my roll book and papers and anthology. I had to run because my next class was at the other end of the building. Floating would get worse, but I did not know that then.
Eric rubbed his neck against his denim collar. “Mr. M, can I show you somethin’?”
I looked at the clock on the wall. We only had four minutes of passing time to get to the next class, and my next class was a rowdy bunch.
“Sure, Eric. What is it?”
He produced a neatly folded piece of paper from an inside denim pocket and handed it to me.
Eric looked down at shoes, sniffed hard to dry his nose, and waited.
I unfolded the paper and looked at the very official-looking document. The letterhead read “Harley Davidson.”
“Dear Mr. ______ We examined your design for a new carburetor valve for the Series XE-150 motorcycle with great interest. We would like to discuss this with you at your earliest convenience. Please call the number below to set up the appointment.”
It was signed by some poo-bah at the company headquarters.
My mouth dropped. “Eric. This is fantastic. Amazing. Did you call them?”
Eric smiled. “Yeah. I’m seeing them next Wednesday. They got an office in Philly.”
“Eric, you must be very talented and smart to design something like this. I couldn’t design a carburetor for a motorcycle….not in a million years.” I handed back the paper.
“Well, it’s just a valve for the carburetor. I just like to fool around with mechanical stuff…ya know…especially motorcyles.” His smile grew larger. “But the guy I talked to said they might hire me on when I graduate high school.”
The bell rang. I was late. “Eric, I have to get to class. That is terrific! I am so proud of you. Thanks for sharing with me.”
“Yeah. Well. Ya know. I can’t read well, but, ya know.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Look at me.” He raised his eyes.
“Eric. I know.”
Lesson I learned as a teacher: there are a number of intelligences as Howard Gardner suggests, and schools only reward two of them: language and math skills.
I got up from the log I was sitting on and once more gazed at the painted mountainside. I made a few more casts upstream with the Parachute Adams. I thought I saw a trout rise just alongside another log on the opposite bank, and I began to work myself into position for a cast. I crept slowly into the sandy bank and saw something that increased my heartbeat tenfold…a hundredfold: a bear track filling slowly with water. Suddenly I lost interest in the rising trout, my silent footsteps, the pastel mountainside. Suddenly everything looked different. Suddenly everything looked ominous. Suddenly I remembered that out here in the Montana wilderness I was not at the top of the food chain.
And, suddenly, I was back at the car, out of breath. Mike was surely downstream fishing wets, Jim could be upstream or downstream but I would wait for them by the car…..in the car, lock buttons down.
Another motorcycle hummed up route 191 to Bozeman, a youngish male sporting a yellow helmet with a black stripe being held onto by a youngish female also wearing a yellow helmet with a black stripe.
The cyclist raised a hand as he zoomed by. I wondered if Eric designed the valve for his Harley.
I would like you to bear with me. I taught high school English (and Cinema and Computer Assisted Instruction, and Humanities and a half dozen other electives) for nearly forty years. Reflection is an important component to learning, and now that I am retired, I am learning from plenty of reflection. Besides thinking about family, including the loss of some family members), my thoughts always seem to return to my students—-the ones from whom I learned and those whom I may have failed. All of them haunt me still. This blog will be a serialized retelling of my experiences with them. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, as well as to protect the guilty, but except for dialogue recreated from memory the stories are true. I hope you find them as interesting.
Eric
Every time I stand in the stream for a while, trying to fool trout with my homemade tied fly, my thoughts flow back to them. Oh, I think of other things as well: growing up in the Bronx and later the suburbs of New Jersey, hunting and fishing with Mahogany Jim, my father, making meatballs with my mother Lee, making out with Maria, my high school sweetheart after a movie and a malt in my dad’s Buick, chanting and yelling and screaming and dying and hoping my Villanova college basketball team will prevail at the Palestra, meeting and marrying and loving Polley, and enjoying and growing with my four children. Those memories all float along the current as I fish, but eventually and predictably, my thoughts always return to them.
Like the time I was fishing Grayling creek outside of Yellowstone National Park. There were no grayling fish (a species of the salmon family) in Grayling Creek but it was supposed to harbor some nice brown trout. I left Mike and Jim, my teaching colleagues and flyfishing mentors, and slipped down the bank and into the stream. The stream was narrow and not too deep. I made my first decision: I would fish a Parachute Adams dry fly upstream.
I made a few casts to likely lies and worked my way upstream, casting behind rocks, ahead of rocks, near downed trees, in eddies. A half hour passed with no luck, but as I rounded a bend in the stream, a mountainside suddenly lit up with a blaze of natural colors, of wild blue flax and orange daylily and sticky purple geranium and yellow salsify and crimson clover, all backdropped by deep green American mannagrass. I stopped my casting and let my eyes, in fact, my whole body, my whole being, take it in.
Lifetimes passed.
A distant rumble shook the air around me, lightly at first, but then louder and stronger and all the flowers on the mountainside seemed to shrink as the Harley Davidsons zoomed by on the road high above the bank I had been fishing.
Eric. It was my first year of teaching. Or maybe it was the second. Graduate school was still fresh in my brain. I received a Masters in English by engaging in literary discussions involving Shakespeare’s Great Chain of Being, Sapientia and Fortitudo as forces in Beowulf, the Modernist temperament in Hemingway’s work, literary naturalism and its connection to Darwinism, Buddhist influence on Emerson’s Oversoul. All these great questions, all these literary explorations of life and its meaning I was anxious to share with my eleventh grade students. I had to rethink my approach when we read aloud Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman in my first period class.
“Where……were……you…..all day?
Silence.
“Who’s playing Willy Loman?”
Silence. A hand goes up.
“Oh, Eric. Thanks, Eric. Go ahead.” Eric was short for his age, his denim jacket and denim pants a little too baggy, and he possessed those muppet eyes, his eyelids perpetually drooped halfway over his eyes.
Eric began his part. “Wil….ly. I sud…den….ly”
“Eric. You don’t have to read the name of the character who is saying the line. Just read after the colon.”
“What’s a colon?”
“It’s your intestines, dirtbrain!” Class laughter.
“Tom. Quiet! Eric. The colon is two dots, one above the other.””
Eric gave Tom the finger and returned to the page.
“Sud…den…ly….couldn’t…….drive….any……more.”
The other students in the class were only slightly better readers than Eric. This play was going to take a couple of millennia to read aloud, and even after they read the words, they could not process the ideas behind the words.
And Shakespeare and Hamlet were part of the curriculum we were required to study.
Hamlet’s soliloquy might take up the entire second semester.
And I had five classes of readers like Eric.
Henry Bouquet High School was named after a colonial military Pennsylvanian who apparently slept one night in Bouquet township. Like most other high schools in the area, Bouquet High School practiced tracking, students assigned to levels based on, supposedly, reading levels and counselor input. Honors students went to the Harvards of the collegiate world, level one’s a step below, level two’s college or technical school, and level three’s the factory. What tracking in reality accomplished was the continuing stratification of the peoples of the United States.
The unwritten policy declared that new teachers would be thrown into the pit, assigned five classes of level threes, non-readers all, students frustrated at their inability to win at the game of school, and often young people suffering from a lack of parental support. Some level three classes made the inhabitants of Blackboard Jungle look like the student body of Little House on the Prairie. Confronting five classes of level threes was the administration’s ordeal, its trial by fire, its sink or swim mentality with little support for new teachers as they tried to educate students many of whom did not want to be educated. The reasoning was, apparently, if the teacher survived the gauntlet of five level threes, they might just survive a teaching career.
I listened to Eric read and thus I learned early on that a class discussion of Chaucer’s satire on church abuses and Augustan satire in general was not in my immediate future.
Essay on Death of a Salesman. “In a well-organized essay supported with examples from the text, respond to the following: What comment does the author make about the American dream in the play? Give reasons for your answer.”
Eric’s response: “He says people shouldn’t dream because it’s stupid.”
I called Eric to my desk. He shuffled forward, wiped his nose on his denim jacket, looked down at my shoes like he always did and listened to my suggestions. My effort was to get them to talk about what they knew, even if they found it difficult to write it down.
Two months later, Eric’s essay on a short story was two paragraphs, two paragraphs of misspellings and absent punctuation, but I watched him write. He exhibited the classic signs of thinking, hunched over his paper, pencil held tightly as he scribbled, tongue protruding from a corner of his mouth. He tried, and he had a reasoned answer to the question.
I called him up to my desk.
“Eric, this is a major improvement. You developed your ideas and you supported them very well. This is intelligent writing. We have to work on mechanics, but this is such an improvement, I am giving you an ‘A.’”
A switch flipped. Eric’s eyes were almost totally wide open, a smile broadening his face. “Shit! I never got an ‘A’ before on my writing……Sorry, Mr. M. I mean ‘God damn!” I nodded and Eric returned to his seat. He worked even harder on his next essay.
I was beginning to learn. We were on a number grading system, but I couldn’t really tell the difference between a paper that received an 87 and a paper that was an 88. And what standard was out there? I was learning. The only realistic functions for grades were as motivating factors. If I could motivate Eric to work harder and think more and thus learn more by giving him an “A” then that was what I would do. And years later, if I needed to make an honors student who thought everything he wrote was Pulitzer Prize material, work harder by knocking down his ego a bit and giving him a “B” rather than an “A” then that is what I would do.
Late in the semester I was summoned to Mr. Leadbeater’s office. Lincoln Leadbeater became an assistant principal because, as he unwittingly confided to all present at a social gathering after one too many rock and ryes, he got tired of reading and grading papers as an English teacher.
In Leadbeater’s office was the social studies department chair, Reginald Rochester II….Dr. Reginald Rochester II.
What was he doing here?
“Mr. Maltese, please sit down.” Leadbeater pointed to the creaky wooden chair in front of his desk.
“Dr. Rochester and I have been looking at the grade distribution for all the English classes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well,” Leadbeater puffed out a cloud of dark gray smoke from his pipe. “we have a problem.”
“Problem?”
“Yes. You have five classes of level threes. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
Leadbeater looked at a printout. “That is one hundred and forty two students. Correct?”
“I guess so. Sounds right.”
“And you have given out seven A’s for this last marking period. Correct?”
“Correct.” That is what this is all about. Too many kids failed or had C’s and D’s. I had heard that principals in Philly would just change the failing grades to passing or higher to make the school look better. Would the administrative guardians of Bouquet High do the same?
“I can explain that. Most of my kids come from disadvantaged families. They work ten hours after school to pay their car insurance and don’t read their assignments or do their homework. Half the ones that got an “F” were absent three out of five days a week. Many of them are tired from working after school, and all they want to do in class is sleep, which I won’t let them do.”
“I see.” Another puff of gray smoke from Leadbeater’s pipe drifted to the ceiling. “I don’t think you understand. We are……concerned…. about the seven A’s.”
“The ‘A’s?”
“Yes.”
I was confused. Sort of. “The kids that got A’s earned them because they attended class and worked hard when they were in class.”
“I see. But the work they turned in was not as good as work from, say, an honors student?”
“Probably not.” I was becoming angry. “So what? These kids worked hard, did the assignments to the best of their ability. I don’t see a problem.”
Reginald Rochester II was standing by the desk and virtually hopping from one foot to the other. Finally he blurted out.
“You don’t seem to understand. If your level three students get A’s, it wreaks havoc with the grade distribution.”
“How so?” I was becoming snotty.
Reginald Rochester II turned beet red.
“Class rank is affected. A student in your level three class who receives an “A” might be higher in class rank than an honors student who gets a “B” in a more challenging course.”
“Class rank, competing for grades, is an abomination.’
Reginald Rochester II was about to explode. There were rapid puffs of gray smoke from Leadbeater’s pipe emulating Native American smoke signals messaging an imminent attack by the cavalry.
My maturity as an imbiber of the fruit of the vine was not a smooth transition. Collegiate bouts with vintages manufactured within the last month along with ales best suited as cleaning solvents had an adverse effect on my palate. As my professional environment expanded, so did my need to refine my taste buds. It was not an easy task.
One of the legends anchoring our family history involves Polley’s first visit to New Jersey and her future in-laws. My parents liked her immediately. I expressed my fears that she was much too good for me. But you know parents…..especially parents with an Italian heritage. “What’s a matter with you?!! You are wonderful!!”
Understandably nervous, my fiancé sat down at the dinner table. My mother presented her with a six square inch, five pound slab of homemade lasagna while my father lifted a jug of red over his shoulder and poured her a tumbler of vino.
Now Polley’s Midwestern roots had not prepared her to view the six inch square five pound slab of lasagna (which she repeatedly praised as the “best lasagna I ever had”) as an hors d’oeuvre.
But appetizer it was, followed by roasted potatoes, stuffed roast beef, sausage and peppers, peas and onions, sautéed spinach, rigatoni with bracciole, steamed broccoli rabe with lemon, and the odd roasted chicken. As the meal progressed, and my father replenished the tumbler several times, the conversation diminished. Polley pushed her chair back from the table, my mother (immediately embarrassed, surmising that the roast was overdone, the broccoli rabe undercooked), looked at Polley in panic.
Polley slowly surveyed the faces which, I am certain, were wine distorted from her perspective, and announced, “Excuse me. I am really sorry. Really sorry. I have to go lie down.”
My mother escorted her to the guest bedroom.
I turned to my father who was pouring himself a glass of red. “So, Dad, what do you think of her?”
My father took a healthy sip, looked at the door through which Polley had just exited, paused and said, “You are a lucky man……but the girl can’t hold her wine.”
As I matured, I began to realize that drinking wine was not simply drinking wine. The imbibing of liquid grape was, in elegant circles, an experience. And the experience of wine drinking needed to be preceded by wine tasting. This was a revelation. For years I thought I knew how to drink wine—–just tip up the Welch’s Grape Jelly jar and swallow. Boy, was I wrong. There are “stages” involved in wine tasting. To wit:
The results of the four recognized stages to wine tasting:
Appearance
“One of the things that you can tell by looking at the color of the wine, is the region and climate where the grape vine is located. Darker shades of wine, namely the darkest reds and yellow whites come from warm climates. Lighter colors come from cooler climates and taste lighter and less lush.” In my college days, the conclusion drawn from an examination of the $1.99 bottle of Thundercloud would be “Secaucus, New Jersey, lower swamp near the railroad tracks and pig pen, Saturday at 5 AM vintage.”
I have watched wine connoisseurs stick their noses deep into the wine glass almost to the point where their eyebrows are brushing the rim of the glass. Sometimes they are in so far I think they are snorting the liquid. This wine smelling is a problem for me. Parkinson’s stole my sense of smell. White wine tastes light, red tastes heavy, potato chips taste salty, broccoli tastes green; so when we are with relatives or friends dining out, and I order a bottle of Pinot Noir, and the sommelier pours a small amount in my wine glass and waits for my approval, I have to pretend I can smell. But I have perfected going through the ceremony sniffing the wine and fooling the somnolier; One cannot fake blindness or even deafness, but one can fake smellingness.
“in mouth” sensations
Wine tasters swish around the liquid in their mouths for a couple of hours and then forget to swallow. “When at a wine tasting event, it is not frowned upon for spitting wine out. Take a sip of wine and hold it in your mouth for a couple seconds, then either swallow it or spit out. This is an acceptable way to know if it’s a good wine. A good wine will have a lengthy aftertaste.” Spitting it out is acceptable? Had I spit out even a morsel of that “vile” vegetable weed broccoli at my mother’s table, I would not have lived to write this blog.
Okay, so my smellingness is responsible for my inability to develop a highly sensitive and refined palate. But I have to wonder if I really want to experience tastes that wine connoisseurs seem to enjoy.
This is a partial review of a gerwurztraminer:
“This example from Alsace makes the point, with exotic, perfumed lychee and turkish delight aromas. There is good texture and body, with floral and soft stone fruit flavours ending with a touch of honey and fresh acidity. Try pairing with an aromatic curry.” I am suspicious about both the Turkish delight and soft stone descriptors, because I have to tell you I am more of a hard stone fruit guy.
Here is another review for an expensive red:
” is a complex and layered wine. Pleasant green notes of savory herbs, peppercorn, blackcurrant leaf and brambly berry drive the bouquet, while the medium-weight palate offers flavors of black-fruit skin, char and cigar box all framed by a crushed-velvet texture.
It shows good grip, concentration and length, and should drink well through 2021.” Mmmmm hmmmm! The char and cigar box flavors make my mouth water, especially when framed with crushed velvet texture.
And another one, this for another red:
“Carrying a whiff of musty leather, it nonetheless impresses with mixed black berries, a hint of cigar and polished, firm, substantial tannins. It’s a fine steak wine to enjoy now through 2022.” Now if I were sitting at Mama Maltese’s table, and I pushed back my chair from that table so loaded with great dishes that one could not see the tablecloth and exclaimed, “Hey, Mom, that bracciole sure tasted like musty leather!”, you can imagine what her next move with the five foot wooden spoon would have been.
I wish I knew the etiquette and language of wine tasting in my collegiate days. A review then would have gone something like this:
“This Thundercloud Red (vintage last Saturday at nine AM) teases the senses with a bouquet of your roommate’s gym socks and cafeteria mystery meat, with just a hint of black bananas newly retrieved from under a pile of chemistry textbooks, and the after taste of stale smoke and semi-discarded pizza boxes lingers on the palate. Pair with day old hoagies or the odd Slim Jim.”
And one last review:
“There is some bretty spice and oxidised richness on the mid-palate, adding complex notes that will work well with soft cheeses…”
The word “bretty” was new to me. So I looked it up.
“The Aroma and Flavour of Brett Character
“But what is Brett character and how and why does it appear in some wines? The wine character described as “Bretty” comes in various forms. It is the combined result of the creation of a number of compounds by the yeast Brettanomyces bruxellensis, and its close relative, Dekkera bruxulensis. The three most important known aroma active compounds are 1) 4-ethyl phenol (4-ep), which has been variously described as having the aromas of Band-aids®, antiseptic and horse stable 2) 4-ethyl guaiacol (4-eg) which has a rather pleasant aroma of smoked bacon, spice or cloves and 3) isovaleric acid which has an unpleasant smell of sweaty animals, cheese and rancidity. Other characters associated with Brett include wet dog, creosote, burnt beans, rotting vegetation, plastic and (but not exclusively caused by Brett) mouse cage aroma and vinegar.”
Here are the words that stick in my mind from the description of “Brett” above:
Band-aids, antiseptic, horse stable, sweaty animals, rancidity, wet dog, burnt beans, rotting vegetation, plastic (see my blog on plastics), and, my favorite, mouse cage.
“Hey, Mom, I think I detect a little flavor of wet dog in the meatballs.”
Time for a quiz:
Match the descriptions with the varietal of wines. Please remember these are not my descriptions but those of wine connoisseurs.
tobacco, green bell pepper, raspberry, freshly mown grass [to my knowledge there has never been a gummy bear flavor “tobacco.”]
raspberry, cherry, violets, “farmyard” (with age), truffles [“Hey, Mom, this kitchen sure smells like a farmyard!”]
Petit Verdot
violets (later), pencil shavings [How does the connoisseur know what pencil shavings taste like? I would like to have been a fly on the wall in his/her elementary school classroom.]
Cabernet Franc
gooseberry, lime, asparagus, cut grass, bell pepper (capsicum), grapefruit, passionfruit, cat pee (tasters’ term for guava)[26] [Cat pee? Really? See comment above for pencil shavings.]
Nebbiolo
“Yeah, my owner is a wine taster.”
Answers at the end of this blog.
Taste aside, here are other reasons to drink the fruit of the vine:
” While beer makes that unaesthetic beer belly, wine does not affect your waistline at all. In fact recent studies showed that “women who routinely drank moderate amounts of alcohol, totaling about one drink per day, carried almost 10 pounds less body fat than women who did not drink at all”. “Experts believe that the calories in alcohol are not metabolized in the same way as calories from carbohydrates, fats or protein. So if you are about to start a diet to lose weight, then you should consider having a glass of wine instead of chocolate pudding for dessert.
Red wines are known to contain many beneficial antioxidants such as polyphenol and resveratrol that have cardio-protective effects and anti-cancer properties. Grape skin is especially rich in antioxidants. Since red wine is fermented together with its skin, it has more antioxidants than white wine which is processed without its skin. White wine may even slightly increase the risk of contracting cancer, especially of the digestive tract, as some studies show. So, don’t drink more than 1 or 2 glasses of wine per day!”
Still, people don’t drink wine in restaurants to improve their health. I mean, we don’t sit at La Maxime’s and order a celery tonic. We like the experience of wine, and perhaps the tasting is all in our heads. Consider these two biases:
“Color bias
In 2001, the University of Bordeaux asked 54 undergraduate students to test two glasses of wine: one red, one white. The participants described the red as “jammy” and commented on its crushed red fruit. The participants failed to recognize that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been colored red with a flavorless dye.[8][9]
Geographic origin bias
For 6 years, Texas A&M University invited people to taste wines labeled “France”, “California”, “Texas”, and while nearly all ranked the French as best, in fact, all three were the same Texan wine. The contest is built on the simple theory that if people don’t know what they are drinking, they award points differently than if they do know what they are drinking.[10]”
So that is the good and the bad of wine drinking. Personally I am thinking of this Parkinson’s affliction as a mixed blessing…..okay, it is NOT a mixed blessing, it is an #@!@!%$$ curse. But I have to concede, when it comes to drinking wine, while I am missing out on the citrus and cinnamon and bramble berries and chocolate and thyme and truffle flavors, my palate is not experiencing after tastes of tobacco, tar, pencil shavings, farmyards, musty leather and cat pee.
So if you see me in a refined restaurant sipping a red, faking smelling, come on over and enjoy the taste of red with me. Salute!
As promised, here are the connoisseur descriptions aligned with the varietals:
tobacco, green bell pepper, raspberry, freshly mown grass [to my knowledge there has never been a gummy bear flavor “tobacco.]
raspberry, cherry, violets, “farmyard” (with age), truffles [“Hey, Mom, this kitchen sure smells like a farmyard!”]
Pinot Noir
violets (later), pencil shavings [How does the connoisseur know what pencil shavings taste like? I would like to have been a fly on the wall in his/her elementary school classroom.]
Petit Verdot
gooseberry, lime, asparagus, cut grass, bell pepper (capsicum), grapefruit, passionfruit, cat pee (tasters’ term for guava)[26] [Cat pee? Really? See comment above for pencil shavings.]
I have a long history with wine. As young lads, my brother and I were allowed to have a small amount (half a Welch’s Grape Jelly jar) of red wine at holiday dinners.
Drinking was no big deal in college (though it seemed to be a big deal for some of my classmates whose parents preached total and unforgiving abstinence). Actually wine drinking in my family has a long tradition, and this tradition is anchored in family stories involving the fruit of the vine.
The first of these involved my grandfather and his friends from the old country who monthly played poker in his small New York City apartment in the 1920’s. He assigned his son of nine, my father, the responsibility of siphoning wine from the barrel in the communal basement into a bottle and bringing it up to the card table. Either my father got the idea from the popular Laurel and Hardy or the comedy team got the idea from my father, but, as the poker night went along, my father was siphoning more of the homemade brew into his mouth than into the bottle. Late that night he staggered up the stairs and, smiling broadly, delivered an empty bottle to my grandfather who quickly erased that smile.
Wine, of course, goes back father than my Italian ancestors.
“The earliest archaeological evidence of wine yet found has been at sites in China (c. 7000 BC), Georgia (c. 6000 BC), Iran (c. 5000 BC), Greece (c. 4500 BC), and Sicily (c. 4000 BC). The earliest evidence of the production of wine has been found in Armenia (c. 4100 BC)
The oldest-known winery was discovered in the “Areni-1” cave in Vayots Dzor, Armenia. Dated to c. 4100 BC, the site contained a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups.[24][25][26][27] Archaeologists also found V. vinifera seeds and vines. Commenting on the importance of the find, McGovern said, “The fact that winemaking was already so well developed in 4000 BC suggests that the technology probably goes back much earlier.”[27][28]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wine
Interesting. I would think that the “ancients” would be more preoccupied with the possibilities of being plagued, pillaged, and plundered than with the processing of stimulating beverages. Then, again, perhaps putting on a buzz helped them cope with plagues, pillagers, and plunderers.
We almost lost our ability to put our own buzz on.
” Monastic orders such as the Cistercians and Benedictines preserved and innovated the art of winemaking during the Middle Ages. It is thanks to their research and indefatigable efforts we have such an elaborate winemaking technology today. One of the world’s most famous Champagnes Dom Pérignon was named after a monk. Dom Pierre Pérignon (1638-1715), an early advocate of organic wine-making, experimented with new methods, successfully improving the winemaking process. His practices and techniques are still used today.” https://www.wiine.me/blog/10-amazing-facts-about-wine/
Thank you, Dom!!!
My growth with the grape continued into my collegiate years although it may be argued that my growth was stinted by financial setbacks. My first toast was at an off campus gathering. “Salute!” No one in that particular group of celebrators knew the meaning of my toast, but they recognized the raising of the glass, so I escaped. Time for a pop quiz. (occupational hazard—I was a teacher—I assigned lots of quizzes) Match the toast with the country:
France Kampai
Italy Cheers
Denmark Salute
Chinese (Mandarin) Prost
Malta Skol
Finland A Votre Sante
Great Britain Kippis
Japan Evviva
Germany Gan Bay
Answers at the end.
I always wondered why the raising of the glass was called a “toast.”
“The term toast comes from the Roman practice of dropping a piece of burnt bread into the wine. This was done to temper some of the bad wines the Romans sometimes had to drink.”
As a lad, asked by my uncles to taste the red stuff siphoned from their basement casks, I always replied by a nodding of my head in the affirmative, even though I was usually thinking that what I was drinking was better suited for dressing my ensalade than for imbibing. I have tasted wines, especially in my penurious college days, that could have used whole loaves of burnt pumpernickel bread.
I remember one special off campus gathering hosted by a rather well-off classmate. I was invited because of my mature demeanor, my savoir-faire, and the fact that I helped him study (and pass!!!) his engineering calculus midterm. I noticed right away that I was attending an upscale party by the way the guests were holding their wine glasses by the stems, by the fact that the wine glasses had stems(as opposed to the plastic cups we retained from fast food meals, and far removed from the Welch’s Grape Jelly jars), and by the means party goers sipped the wine rather than the more customary method of chugging it. Also I observed the price tag on the Pinot Noir—$22.99!! I had, indeed, come a long way. My suave classmate proposed a toast that was more involved than my “Salute!” although I hardly remember any of it.
“’Drinking to one’s health’ came from ancient Greece. The host of dinner would take the first sip to assure his guests the wine was not poisoned.” http://www.gooseneckvineyards.com/20-fun-facts-wine/ I actually knew this historical fact from a research paper I was writing on the Socratic dialogues (my philosophy prof always told me that my study of the ancients would pay off). I carefully watched my host drain his glass to see if he keeled over.
I am interrupting this blog for a confession: As a lifelong denizen of Nerddom, I know I share with others of my ilk the great pleasures to be unveiled in the stacks of an old college library. You know how it is. The stacks in the library are dark statues closing you in and smelling of dark, deep mahogany and leather-bound books and shelf dust and the wisdom of ages. You are dusting off a tome to find a piece of evidence that will support your thesis on how Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty affected modernist literature, and the next thing you know you are engrossed in a book detailing the beer making habits of the ancient Incas. One of my really stellar college professors told me that something is only “useless information” if we choose not to use it. With that in mind, make use of the following two tidbits of research:
1) Women are more inclined to the effects of wine than men. This is partly because they have less enzymes in the stomach lining that is needed to break down alcohol simply.
I am still trying to determine if early Roman husbands were upset at their wives dipping their beaks into the wine cellar or the men were afraid that their spouses would spill the beans at a social gathering.
A few weeks ago meandering along the research trail, I came across an article on “wine biases.”
“Another well-publicized double-blind taste test was conducted in 2011 by Prof. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire. In a wine tasting experiment using 400 participants, Wiseman found that general members of the public were unable to distinguish expensive wines from inexpensive ones.[6] ‘People just could not tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine’.”[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_tasting
Things seem to become more complicated as I grow older. In college it was easy to distinguish the difference between the $22.99 Pinot Noir and my more familiar $1.99 bottle of Thundercloud Blush vintage last Tuesday at 5:30. After the latter, I threw up.
I was growing along with the grape. My connoisseur days were ahead of me. Next blog.
How many times have I heard that mantra from opponents of any sort of gun control. These same guardians of our rights cite the second amendment:
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
I used to argue that the constitution was meant to grow with the times hence the ability to create amendments. We don’t have a standing militia. We now have a standing army, standing navy, and standing air force (which the founding fathers could not have imagined). I don’t think having me as part of a standing militia would be a good idea. First, they would have to change the term “Minute Men” to “Hour Men,” or even “Century Men.” Secondly, if we were invaded by a foreign power strong enough to have the audacity to land troops on American soil, I don’t think I would stand a chance against highly trained soldiers or against missiles, no matter what weapon I was brandishing.
Thirdly, the word “infringed” in the amendment does not mean we cannot have laws governing what kind of arms.
In my wrong thinking days I believed that the Constitution was meant to grow as opposed to the strict constructionists or strict interpreters of the Constitution who believed everything should stay the same as in 1791 when the second amendment was ratified. I mean, the Founding Fathers recognized the future need for change by providing for amendments in the first place. So, again in my wrong thinking days, I thought why couldn’t we amend the amendment? We could also satisfy the strict interpreters by amending the second amendment to “bear arms but only muskets.” This would appease those stuck in 1791. A crack British infantryman could load and shoot a musket 5 times in one minute, and fire at a range of fifty to seventy five yards. Not quite up to the firepower of an AK-47, but, hey, I thought, you can’t be anchored to the thinking of colonial America and expect modern weaponry.
“Guns don’t kill people
People Kill people”
I also used to argue that one reason why America seems to want to return to the lawless climate of Deadwood in the 1870’s was American exceptionalism. We seem to possess this narrow-minded view that we cannot learn from other nations. An example: In 1996 an Australian man entered a café in Port Arthur, Tasmania and killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. This spurned Australia’s citizens to initiate stronger gun control laws. “the Australian government ‘banned automatic and semiautomatic firearms, adopted new licensing requirements, established a national firearms registry, and instituted a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases. It also bought and destroyed more than 600,000 civilian-owned firearms, in a scheme that cost half a billion dollars and was funded by raising taxes.’ The entire overhaul, Friedman pointed out, took just months to implement.
The number of mass shootings in Australia—defined as incidents in which a gunman killed five or more people other than himself, which is notably a higher casualty count than is generally applied for tallying mass shootings in the U.S.—dropped from 13 in the 18-year period before 1996 to zero after the Port Arthur massacre. Between 1995 and 2006, gun-related homicides and suicides in the country dropped by 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively, though these declines appear to have since leveled off. Two academics who have studied the impact of the reform initiative estimate that the gun-buyback program saves at least 200 lives each year, according to The New York Times.”
There were originally Australians opposed to any gun control, but the results spoke for themselves. As one gun control supporter argued: ‘We register cars. We register boats.’ But this time we added ‘We even register dogs. So what’s the problem in registering guns?’” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/australia-gun-control/541710/
And we register ice cream trucks. A number of years ago ice cream trucks were virtually banned in an American city because a child was harmed.
Injury to Child Leaving Ice-Cream Truck Did Not Result from Dangerous Condition or Nuisance Created by California City
When she ran across the street after buying ice cream from an ice-cream truck, Kaila Pekarek was hit by a van and injured. Kaila and her sister sued the driver of the ice- cream truck, the driver of the vehicle that hit Kaila, and the City of San Diego (city). The plaintiffs claimed the city maintained its street in a “dangerous condition” and created a “nuisance” by allowing ice-cream trucks to operate on city streets. The Superior Court granted the city’s motion for summary judgment. Acting on the plaintiffs’ appeal, the Court of Appeal affirmed
And, in my blissful ignorance, I thought it rather silly that we can ban ice cream trucks but not assault rifles. Silly me. I used to support legislation on gun control based on facts like the following:
Costs of Gun Violence
Gun violence impacts society in many ways: medical costs, costs of the criminal justice system, security precautions such as metal detectors, and reductions in the quality of life because of fear of gun violence.
S. lifetime medical costs for gunshot injuries total an estimated $2.3 billion
S. taxpayers pay for almost half ($1.1 billion or 49%) of lifetime medical costs for gunshot injuries
More Americans have died from gunshots in the last 50 years than in all of the wars in American history.
Since 1968, more than 1.5 million Americans have died in gun-related incidents, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, approximately 1.2 million service members have been killed in every war in U.S. history, according to estimates from the Department of Veterans Affairs and iCasualties.org, a website that maintains an ongoing database of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A stat from 2015: According the nonprofit project the Gun Violence Archive, there were 12,562 gun deaths in 2014 and 9,959 in 2015 thus far. That’s a grand total of 301,797 firearm-related deaths in the past decade, compared to 71 deaths from domestic acts of terrorism.
Now, if 301.797 people in the U.S. had died from mosquito bites, I can guarantee that the federal government would legislate a program to nuke every swamp in the U.S. But the best our government does now is to bow our collected heads and keep the victims in our thoughts and prayers. If ten of our soldiers are killed on foreign soil, we have congressmen vowing to nuke the country in retaliation. But if one American kills ten Americans, we simply shrug our shoulders and say, “There’s the second amendment, ya know.” I used to believe there was something irrational in there. No longer. My mind is straight now….like Luke’s in Cool Hand Luke.
Another example of wrong thinking on my part involves my belief in democracy. I read the following:
So, in my wrong thinking, I reasoned that since most Americans were in favor of gun control legislation, why don’t we have gun control legislation? That was until right thinking taught me about the power of money and corrupt politicians and the realities of pseudo-democracies. Our Republic does not bow to the will of the people—it bows to the will of the economically powerful. So much for eighth grade civics. Which leads me to my modest proposal:
If you can’t beat them, join them. Opponents of any form of gun control must envision the inevitable future where everyone is packing weapons of mass destruction, a future where all arguments, even disputations over minor things like bumping into someone in a crowded hallway is settled in a blaze of gunfire and death. As an educator, we must prepare our children for this future. So my proposal is to throw out reading and writing and arithmetic from the elementary school curriculum. Instead, teach the kindergarteners how to brace an M-16 against the shoulder to absorb the recoil, how to load a clip into an Uzi, and how to breakdown, strip clean, and reassemble an AK 47 assault rifle—while blindfolded. Bulldoze the outdoor recess areas and set up a rifle range.
In social studies teach the little ones the Stand Your Ground laws, so that if any one of them is offended by a classmate, say for “looking at me funny,” then he or she can resolve the issue with a quick draw. Since every student will be packing heat, bullies will have to think twice, or they will have to augment their arsenal which should stimulate an arms race in all schools in the nation thus providing an economic boon to gun manufacturers. Which is really what our lack of gun control is all about anyway. How can that be bad? Some people might argue that quite a few students might be victims of the almost daily shootouts, but there is an upside to that as well: Class size will diminish.
As for the victims and their families, we’ll do what we do now—and that is all we seem to do—-keep them in our thoughts and prayers. Some might argue that putting assault rifles in the hands of children is irresponsible. I would counter thusly: 1) it is not any more irresponsible than allowing people with histories of violence or severe mental illness or anger mismanagement. 2) Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and, therefore, it would be irresponsible to not educate our little people on how to blow away other little people.
After the church shooting in Texas, President Trump said, “Don’t forget, if it wasn’t for the citizen who carried a gun and shot the mass shooter, more people would have been killed.” During my wrong thinking days I would have wondered how much damage either the citizen or the mass shooter(mentally disturbed/recently unemployed/terrorist…how come all the mass shooters seem to be men? Don’t women get angry?) could have been done if neither had guns….how much death can second graders accomplish with only a spitball?
So what do you say to my modest proposal? Come on, parents. Put away those silly, non-functional stuffed animals and take your second grader to the nearest gun show to buy his/her first weapon of mass destruction. Be a proud American. The second amendment is intended to guarantee the rights of every American to inflict pain, suffering, mayhem, grief and death on every other American. Many of our soldiers and sailors and air force warriors have died to defend that right. Many more citizens have died because of that right. So what do you say, America? My proposal is no worse than the reality you have fashioned. We are already killing our children by our drive to make a profit at all costs, by our smugness in not learning how other naitons deal with the problem, and by our stubborn adherence to a post-colonial 1791 concern. IF you support my modest proposal, contact your legislator…or just sit and think and pray.
And though I am right-thinking now, some tidbit of reason still nags at me. It is a syllogistic problem really.
Guns Don’t Kill People
People Kill People
But guns allow one person to kill easily many many people.
