Again, What We Aren't Taught Continues To Hurt Us

I teased this a little in my last post and said that just because we don't know something doesn't mean we, particularly here in The United States, as able to ignore it.  We, I am speaking white American here, have so many excuses for why we don't know things.  

Some of them are objectively, sadly true.  As a child, I desperately wanted to learn history--I grew up in a family that put a great emphasis on history, although my mom (now 90) and I have been talking about all the things she did not know as well.  I was disappointed that we did very little "history."  We learned a watered down version of "social studies."  I believe that our text book had about four pages about slavery and post-slavery times, concentrating on George Washington Carver and Eli Whitney. High school was not a lot better.  I am blessed in having realized early on that I was going to have to educate myself because school was not providing me with an appropriate education.  I am largely self-educated, up to starting college.  Much of the self-education was encouraged and reinforced by a strong Quaker community that stressed free thinking, diversity, and non-violence.  

I don't think I am in the minority for having had a deficient education, even in an affluent consolidated school district.  But, does that give any of us the choice to remain blissfully ignorant?  Muslims say that the crowning glory God has given us is the human intellect, and I thnk we have often been sloppy with this, to our shame.  This is compounded in my current teaching because I work with African immigrants, who have only recently come to the United States, in addition to learning very little history, African or American.  On many days we spend much more time on history and current events in my English class than on anything else,and I consider that time well spent.  Sometimes it is excruciatingly difficult and painful, but it is some of the most important work I have ever done.  

So this brings us to Stamped From the Beginning.  It is beautifully written, lovingly researched, and unflinchingly de-mythologizing.  There is not much that I can say about this book that hasn't been said in a much more eloquent way in recent weeks, but reading it has been another corrective to the "Don't Know Much About History" that we suffer.  Read it and stop and let it wash over you and then make new choices, and don't choose to be quiet anymore.

If anyone is scared by reading a dense 583 page book of "scholarship," much of it reads very smoothly.  We need to use our wonderful human intellect.  If you want to ease into this work, there is a wonderful podcast called Scene on Radio (Season Three) that is about Seeing White.  It covers a lot of the same history and background in a compelling and fast-moving way.  

I have also been reading Imani Perry's Breathe:  A Letter To My Sons.  In many ways that has been a tougher read for me because it is achingly personal.  It brings history down to the cellular level.  Both Stamped and Breathe  discuss George Washington's false teeth.  This morning I was brought to a complete halt by this quote from Breathe:

"George Washington's false teeth were not wood, as you may have heard.  They were actually made from .a variety of materials,including Black humans' teeth.  The father of our country stole our teeth.  Our bite.  Think about that.  What did Washington feel and think when the dentist inexpertly shoved Africans' teeth into his mouth.  Was it the anxious trepidation one feels with a sloppy technology, or just one in many rituals of taking every bit of use value from the Africans?  Did they pull them off cadavers, like entitled grave robbers, or was it a form of torture?  One of the many rituals of slavery?

 ...The fear of body snatchers is warranted." (pp. 112-113 of my kindle version)

We recoil from the Nazis, but this is a lot closer to home.

I guess I am sorry that this is a tough post, but, again, we need to wake up.  I wanted to touch on one more thing this morning.  We often hear that protesting is fine, but why do "they" have to be violent?  I have two answers this morning, one from right now, and one from history.  The historical one is taken from a discussion of the successful rebellion of Haiti in Stamped: "As historian C. L. R. James explained in the 1930's, "they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.'"  We need to think about that.  Today's answer comes from the Chicago Tribune, in an column called "Today's social justice movement was born out of anger, not hope.  There's nothing peaceful about it."  I recommend it.   

Oh, The Places We Have Never Gone....

I read Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian  over ten years ago, and it has stayed with me as a wonderful reading experience.  I read her second book, The Swan Thieves, when it came out, and I had very mixed feelings..  My recollection of it is that it is an ambitious book in its construction and philosophy, but not necessarily a satisfying read.  I have been thinking that this may have been because I read it on a rather emotionally taxing trip to Alaska, which may not be the right backdrop for it, so I may try it again.

On a past episode of the Currently Reading Podcast one of the hosts recommended The Historian and they went on to talk about how Elizabeth Kostova has written very little since.  Lo and behold, here is The Shadow Land,  which was published in 2017.  I have just finished it--it is one of those books that lures you in to "Just One More Chapter...."

One of the most lovely things about Elizabeth Kostova's writing is her slightly melancholy tone and her extremely strong sense of place.  I generally feel the need to go back and check the dates that things are supposed to be happening because both The Historian and The Shadow Land  are set in worlds that are drenched in history.  The history is a character in the books, overshadowing current events.  In SL, Alexandra, our young main character, has been drowning in her personal history since she was sixteen, so her history-logged life and the history-drenched world around her are very congruent.

The majority of us in the United States know very little about eastern Europe.  Elizabeth Kostova is married to a Bulgarian man and runs a foundation for creative writing in Bulgaria.  The world that she describes is just as puzzling to us as it is to Alexandra.  What does all this mean?  Who can you trust? What is the hisotry that we don't know that has an impact on us right now?  We all experience these questions when we travel to new countries, but here this is a profound sense of cuttural unease. For most of the world, the past is never past.  Americans have been allowed to have a naive and inappropriate belief that we are exempt from history because we are such a "Young" country, built on a metaphorical hill.  As I write this, it occurs to me that my question about the history that we don't know impacting today is very topical and immediate.  I will be witing about Stamped From the Beginning this week,, and Kendi's work certainly brings that question home for all of us.

For those who are concerned that this is going to be a WWII book, it is not--the memoir pieces are set in post-Communist Bulgaria, which, again, we know very little about.  All of the characters are dealing with painful, frieghtening events that continue to have current echoes and serve as warnings for us.  The memoirs are difficult to read but not unmanageable. 

I almost just wrote that this is a story of hope and survival.  It is, but with survival and pain often comes guilt.  How do we learn to let guilt go and lead lives that are productive and genuine without letting ourselves be stunted?  One of Kostova's answers is that we create.  Her characters are writers, painters, musicians, and consumately humane individuals.  We each make decisions about how to live every day.

Wine and Bread

                    Thoughts on Euphoria, by Lily King

I have about five blog posts that I have been wanting to write--most of them ultimately important but rather depressing, as I feel like it has been a depressing few weeks.  This one is a bit more positive, I hope.  

I had never read anything by Lily King before, and I am not particularly interested in her newest book, Writers and Lovers, but this is from her backlist, and I really liked it.  It is the story of anthropologists in New Guinea in the 1930s--heavily influenced by the life of Margaret Mead, although it is a slim, bittersweet story of love and loss. 

                                                Margaret Mead, 1939

                                                       

There are several aspects of the story that really struck me.  First, this is a study of the early days of anthropology.  Seeing a new social science evolve was interesting.  The three main characters have significantly different ideas about how to conduct field work and learn about cultures.  How Nell and Fen and Banskston handle interactions with their communities was fascinating.  Do you go native and just live and not take any notes (Fen), do you concentrate on kinship mapping and ways that anthropology mirrors the hard sciences (Bankston), or do you develop deep relationships within the community and document everything (Nell)?   Ultimately, one of these choices leads to disaster for the community and the anthropologists.

Nell and Fen establish a true home in the community--with books, the New Yorker, house help and a clear echo of western civilization.  Banskston, while loving Nell, comments repeatedly and sometwhat negatively on the creature comforts of their living space, while also being desperate for this feeling of home.  Wht impact does it have to bring western culture into the field like this?  Does it skew observations?

However, the most moving part of the story for me was the characters' energy and excitement of intellectual discovery.  This is a love story between a woman and two men, but, even more importantly, a love story about finding a relationship that feeds one's intellect and creativity.  The title describes the euphoria Nell feels when she finds the "key" to a new culture, the euphoria of new love, and the euphoria of intellectual passion.  

Nell brings up a poem by Amy Lowell, called "Decade" and says that there are loves that are like wine and loves that are like bread.  /She ends up saying that she finds both in Bankston.  I was lucky enough in my life to find somewone who gave me the euphoria of intellectual passion, a person who gave me coplete nourishment.  It is a rare gift.  I hope that for each of us.  

Decade, by Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,

And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.

Now you are like morning bread,

Smooth and pleasant.

I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,

But I am completely nourished.

Everyone Leaves a Mark

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half  was one of this spring's most anticipated books.  Quite often that makes me decide that I should wait for awhile, but I am so glad I did not wait longer!  This is going to be on my list of favorite books, along with Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. Each has an incredibly strong sense of place and each has characters that are immensely human--in their strengths and in their all too human struggles.  I strongly recommend both of these.

The Vanishing Half  is about twins, Stella and Desiree Vignes, who grow up in Mallard, a town that doesn't appear on the map and prides itself for being home to very lighted skinned people.  At  sixteen, Desiree and Stella run away from home, and shortly after, Stella chooses to move again and to live as a white woman, marrying her boss and ultimately living a life of physical luxury in California with her husband and blonde daughter, Kennedy.  

Desiree marries in Washington, DC, and then escapes form her abusive husband and returns to Mallard with her daughter Jude, who astonishes and scandalizes Mallard for her very dark skin.   Desiree, considered the more impetuous twin, lives with her mother and has an atypical but satisfying relationship with Early, who tracks people who are on the run.  After high school, Jude goes to college in California, where she begins a relationship with Reese, a transexual man.  The book traces how time treats decisions mold each of the chracters and how they do a dance of longing for and running from each other, against the backdrop of Stella's choice to "pass" as white.

I do not think I have given anything away in this description.  The beauty of the book is the relationships between the characters and how they navigate the choices they have made.

The important thing is that every chacracter in this book is "passing," except perhaps Desiree, who probably ends up most content with her life, afer initially struggling as an adolescent.  Early's work as a tracker means he is always looking for people who don't want to be found.  He says the key to it is always looking like you are someone else looking for something else.  He breaks his rule of not living when he meets Desiree again.

 

I have read reviews that say that Bennett tries to tackle too much in this book--and why does she have to have Reese be transexual?  I think this is inspired plotting.  Transexuals, more than perhaps any other current group, "pass" as those they physically are not and living with bodies that betray them.  Reese spends years not letting Jude see his chest, which physically marks him as female.  It is only after surgery that she says that he spends most of his time with his shirt off, physically living in his wuthentic body.  Jude struggles in Mallard and with her "white" family as "the dark girl."  Even in her loving relationship with Reese, they are "passing" as a hetero-normative couple.

But the deepest pain in this book is Stella's, who pays terribly for the choices she makes and the damage that she passes on to her daughter Kennedy.  There were many points in this book where I cringed at Stella's bahavior, which is cruel and racist, but Stella is a sad woman who has enough of her own self-loathing and fear.  Any accomplishment or relationship that she has is poisoned by the choices she has made.  

I can't say enough about how much I loved this book.  We each are marked by the choices that we make.  

How True Crime Defines Us

Some thoughts about Savage Appetities:  Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, by Rachel Monroe

First of all, it couldn't have a better title.  I love "savage appetities"--it has a certain Grimm's fairytale feeling to it.  The female appetite in fairytales is so problematic, which makes it even better.  In case you haven't seen this book, Rachel Monroe explores the predoninantly female fascination with true crime through four stories that exemplify four archetypes--detective, victim, defender, and killer.

The four stories are introduced somewhat chronologically.  The first is the story of Frances Glessner Lee, the proclaimed mother of forensic science, who built the astonishingly detailed nutshell dioramas to be used for training detectives to look critically and analytically at crime scene evidence.  Frances Glessmer Lee's miniatures have a creepy parallel to the circumscribed world women lived in, but juxtaposed with chilling violence and mystery.  I suspect that her story may be the hardest for contemporary women to grasp because FGL's obsession may  seem so far removed from out world.  We pride ourselves on being far away from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper," but I imagine FGL feeling constrained and isolated and breaking ou wiht her miniatures.  

Our second story is about Alisa Statman, who ends up inserting herself into the lives of Sharon Tate's family after the Manson family killings.  This story also highlighted the history of the victim's rights movement and its link to the Tate family, which I was unaware of.  Following this comes the story of Lorri Davis, who spent over ten years working to exonerate Damien Echols, on death row for the West Memphis killings, and, finally, the macabre but ultimately rather banal story of Lindsey Souvannarath who plotted with a young man she met online to accomplish a mass shooting in a mall in Canada.  They are unsuccessful and the young male kills himself and Souvannarath is serving life in prison in Canada.  The focus in this chapter is on the cult following of the Columbine killers.  

I read this because it was the reading group book for The Stacks podcast, which I have mentioned before.  I would have said that I am not particularly interested in true crime, despite that my husband has an evening fascination with Dateline--which I usually have to watchin the background of my life because he goes to sleep holding the remote.  In recent years I have not read or listened to many of the bockbuster true crime stories that have come out, although I think it is almost impossible to escape from these--they seep into our lives like celebrity gossip or internet memes.  In all of these cases women seem to be very susceptible.

However, I have realized that there are two true crime stories that have been extremely important in my life.  The first was the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, in 1974, when I was fifteen.  I was absolutely fascinated--glued to the New York Times everyday, and attempting to convince my mother that she should give in and let me purchase whatever lurid tabloids were available in Nassau, NY.  My father's secretary gave me a copy of Steven Weed's My Life With Patty Hearst, which I found when I was home last summer.  It is in pieces.  It came home to Wisconsin with me because it still draws me in with the same glamour.  As I write this I also have Patty Hearst's Every Secret Thing on the table with me.  Over time, some of the truly bizarre parts of the story had faded, but there was a series of podcasts on CNN that brought me back to this last year.  I did listen to those, and, my goodness, what a story.  Every violent eccentricity and naivete of the early 1970's all rolled up in one story. 

I can 't explain the initial fascination I felt for Patty Hearst, other than that she was not that much older than I was and seemed to have a very glamorous desirable life pre-kidnapping and and an even more astonishing life after.  The odd political overtones probably added to this.  Psychologically, I am even more shocked at her apparent peaceful return to pre-kidnapping life.  People from the outsksirts of the story continued to show up in the outer edges of my world for quite some time.  Jack Scott, who was apprehended in Pennsylvania with his wife Emily, later became a pioneering person in the sociology of sport, and I heard him speak at a conference while I was getting my Masters.  

So, for whatever reason, this story has psychological importance in my life story.  I think we all have something like this.

The other time when I have suddently felt like true crime has had personal relevance is with the Lorri Davis and Damien Echols story that is profiled in Savage Appetites.  When I was interviewing for jobs in Arkansas, my first trip was to West Memphis.  Some of my horror receded the more experience I had with Arkansas, but on that first visit it was very clear to me that West Memphis had had something happened that he community had never been able to get past.  At the time I had no frame of reference, but the West Memphis child murders, with their connection to Satanic cults (unfounded) and the wrongful arrests of the West Memphis Three do seem to have left a bruise on the little town by the highway.  (There is a lovely college there.)  I have done a lot of reading about Lorri Davis since then, and was interested in her reappearance in Savage Appetites.  In this case, odd as they are, I am glad Damien Echols and Lorri Davis have been able to build a life for themselves and to heal, individually and as a couple.  

I don't understand the famale draw to true crime.  I think it tugs at some of what we most desire and are most repelled and frightened by.  Rachel Monroe ends up deciding that she does not have to be part of the narrative of true crime and feels an immense sense of relief.  I wish for a world where we all could step away from that linked fascination and fear.  

                 Until the lions tell their tale....

                   Some Reflections on White Fragility

“Until the lions tell their tale, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” – African Proverb

There are currently a plethora of lists for those of us who want to learn the history we missed, think differently, try to be supportive, etc., since George Floyd was killed and many of us decided to wake up. If you are looking for lists and want to do some of this work, I recommend Traci Thomas's non-fiction anti-rasicm book list at https://bookshop.org/lists/antiracist-reading-list.  She also has a fiction list.  I am well aware that white people are being criticized for starting book clubs and thinking that us liberal progressives can change the world by reading, but it is a start.  

I read both fiction and non-fiction, although I spend more time with fiction, and I know that my recent life has politicized me and broadened what I read.  I have spent this spring with two or three books going--usually one non-fiction that requires slow reading and thinking, and two fiction.  In the past month, I decided to read White Fragility:  Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngelo (spoiler alert--she's white) and I also read a companion piece in Slate called What's Missing From "White Fragility" by Lauren Michele Jackson, who is an outstanding cultural critic.  

DiAngelo is a good place to start, if you are new to this kind of reading.  She has gotten a lot of negative press for being white and doing the work she does, but I'd rather have people read and think than not at all.  Jackson, when asked what she thinks of the book, hesitates but then she responds that it feels very intuitive to her.  I would echo that response.

The large point in this book and in so much of the writing about white responses to racism is that virtually any comment about race to white people makes us blanche and curl up like rollypollys.  Everyone's attention then gets focused back on making us OK, which maintains the status quo and quickly shuts down any further discussion or learning.  

I personally agree with this, but we all need to visit/re-visit/dig around in this concept. As I read, I know there are so many times I have done things wrong, as a truly well-meaning person working in programs intended to support diversity.   Robin DiAngelo says that all of the work we do on race is on a continuum--the best we can hope for is to push the needle ahead, many times one step forward and two steps back.  The important thing is not to stop.  Be gracious in our failings and find people who will support us but know that it is not their job to do our work.  

I do want to touch on two specific points.  First, one of the toughest chapters in DiAngelo's book is called White Women's Tears.  White women's responses to distress carry so much historical freight.  I know that I have cried with black firends and colleagues afer having been told about something that I did or said that was unintentionally racist.  My tears, again, put the emphasis on how I feel and on taking care of MY emotions, not having me understand and learn what I have done and how I can fix future interactions.  This is work that I have to do, and I was so appreciative of that chapter.  

Early in June I went to a Black Lives Matter protest and peaceful walk in Oconomowoc.  There has been criticism of white people marching in white suburbs, but I think that again, we start where we are, even as I might roll my eyes at how safe all this is for us.  While I was standing with my sign and my mask, good citizen that I am, the white woman next to me said "I am so glad I came.  I've needed this."  I have to practice an answer for this.  The hunters are still telling the story.  

Start With One, Ready Or Not

    

            

Yesterday I finished my installment by telling everyone to enjoy the ride.  Since sometimes we attract fate when we say things like that, I managed to have a small accident with the bike in Port Washington yesterday afternoon, and I have road burn all of my elbow and the left side of my body is very sore.  I will be fine, but this is certainly another sign of the vulnerability of the aging body.  This is the cleaned off picture.

This afternoon I limped myself into the car and went to Pick N Save.  I have a rather rocky relationship with my Pick and my community, which  I won't go into today, other than to say that I don't think either the store or the community does a good job with the mandate that we should love one another and God loves us.

When I came out, slightly unable to see because of my mask andThere was a little bit more,  my glasses, a woman and three children were ight by the exit door, with a sign.  The sign said "Fallen On Hard Times, Every Bit Helps."  There was a little bit more, but this will give you the idea.  This small family was neatly dressed and clean, but the woman has quite a bit of wear on her.  And, perhaps I should add that they are LatinX.  

I walked to the car and put my stuff in, and then, perhaps because it is supposed to be a day of some sort of celebration, even if we don't live up to it, I got out my wallet and got five dollars--I don's usually have cash at all--and went back.  Children and mother were very appreciative and blessed me, which I did to them in return.

For so many of us, one way that white fragility rears its head is that we absolutely don't want to have substantive contact with those Not Like Us.  That includes race, developmental disability, physical disability, and mental illness--and more, but you get my point.  Some of you will say, Why are they allowed to be there by the door?  Some will say, But they don't LOOK like they are in readlly bad shape!  and some will say, I think they took advantage of you!  Today I don't relaly care.  We have to practice authentic interaction, and all I can worry about is my part in this.

I got in the car and started home, and I was thinking about the life of our kids, in this season of the virus, sitting on the hot pavement next to their mom.  There isn't a lot that I can do, other than be as authentic as possible in a very unequal world, but I came in the house and got some of our good peaches from the fruit truck and put them in a bag with napkins and went back.  

This time I said, "It's hot.  You need something good to eat."  The kids immediately opend the bag.  I asked mom if they have a safe place that they are living.  She told me a street name that I don't recognize and said that it is really expensive.  I don't have a solution to that today, but we had a conversation and right now they have somewhere safe.  

I wasn't planning on all this today, but I think that is one of the keys to living.  We are never going to be ready.  Mother Teresa says that we start with one.  I would add that we need to do that whether we are ready or not.  

Worshipping As We Roam

Worshipping as We Roam

My parents, good pre-hippies that they are, were intense organic gardeners.  I grew up surrounded by vegetables, fruit crops and orchard, and flower gardens.  As is perhaps the case for many farm children, I am not sure I properly appreciated all of this.  The farm and the gardens were  just the backdrop of my life.  Simultaneously, books and words anchored and transported me.  I may not have been overly excited when the hayfields got replanted, but the names of the seeds in the mix continue to be magic to me--red clover, alfalfa, and bridsfoot trefoil.  Fifty years later those words are the key to my farm memories.  

What the farm did do is to give me a profound sense of how God created and sustained our natural world.  I think this is one of the reasons why it bothers me so much when farmers and others close to the land tell me that "this world will fade away and just think how heaven will be."  I love this tired but beautiful world so much.

When my kids were young and we lived in New York, we attended Quaker meeting at the Upperville Friends meeting house in Smyrna, New York--a long way from anywhere is the land the time forgot. In the eys of my kids, there were two advantages to Sunday morning.  First, after we struggled through First Day School, we went out and walked up the road behind the meeting house.  My goal, every week, was to gather one wildflower of each species that we came across that week.  This way we watched the wheel of the seasons.  I can't imagine a better way to worship God's glory.

The second joy was Upperville Falls, right around he corner from the meeting house, on the Chenango River.  All of our kids climbed down ont the rocks under the falls, although, unlike the other children of the land that time forgot, we didn't swim under the falls.  Waterfalls are also enchanted places, but the additional gift was that the stones were covered with fossils.  I could fall of fossils and not see them, but Emily can walk along and just reach down and find a fossil anywhere.  We took rocks home every week.  Some shoeboxes of rocks came to Wisconsin.....Again, I can't think of a better way to be aware of the mystery of God and this world.  

Upperville Falls

Under the Falls 

Upperville Meeting House

I am pleased to say that some of this has embedded in my now-adult kids.  Christopher, who says he doesn't remember anything from his childhood (a mother's worst fear is the reprecussions offifteen years of hockey goalie-ing,) but we were talking about churches and religion a couple months ago and he said he and Ashley had been talking about how important it was to let your kids learn about different religions--and then he said "But I said isn't the best thing you could do with your kids to take a walk and look at what you see?"

I spent a lot of years of my life in campus buildings, working year-round and not being outside.  I consider that one of the sadnesses of my life.  This was one of the reasons why I started riding my bike about five years ago.  It gets me outside and I am physically, psychologically, and spiritually healthier.  I now watch the change in the wildflowers each week as I ride--and I think about God and about how Bullthistles came to Wisconsin on the railroads and how even they are beyond lovely.

In case you haven't been wildflowering--the colors get brighter as the summer progresses.

              Enjoy the ride, friends.

Boomer Fragility

Boomer Fragility

Lots of people have been talking about how hard it is to have a child graduating from high school or college in this time of viral discontent.  I understand this, although I hasten to assure all of you that you have raised resilient kids.  Not so many people have expressed what it is like to prepare for semi-retirement in the Year of the Virus.  So, here I am to take care of this, after giving some general comments about the horrors of my current condition.  

I will actually write about White Fragility, the book and the phenomenon, at a later point because they shouldn't be in a semi-humerous post.  However, I have decided that boomer fragility is a pretty good description of my current state.  

First, the viral state has led me to New Hair Issues.  Boomers already have hair difficulty, as exemplified in the following picture:

Now,  after struggling during my 50's because I wasn't ready to look or feel like I was in my 50's, I  have decided to No Longer Dye My Hair.  I am old and fragile.

Next, I have changed my life with my ebike.  I am sure I will write more about this, but after three years of stubbornly saying that I want to do it on my own--a boomer philosophy if there every was one--I captitualited after watching a couple go wafting up the embankment on the trail in Merton while I struggled to walk my bike up.  My bike and I now have 710 miles together since Memorieal Day, and I couldn't be happier, but I was looking up some information about bike betteries last night and someone told a woman to "suck it up boomer" and ride on her own.  Apparently this is something like telling me I shouldn't have an SUV when we lived way out in the world of nowhere in New Yorl because I was creating too much of a carbon footprint.

And, finally, semi-retirement.  What a year to choose to do this--we all say "well, we have never seen this before!" but this time I would say appears to be true.  The year began with getting our kids into our new-old high school building and having DPI say they wouldn't give us our occupancy permit because there wasn't a crash bar on the one side of the front door.  All in favor of safety, but I will say the previous school was there happily for five years without said bar.  So, we crammed ourselves back into the old building/outsode/in the Harambee Center for three weeks.  At one point, while we carried my English class is a bag between buildings I mentioned to my kids that we were refugees again.  One of them said "We sure have been in these camps for a long time!"  

So we got back into our home in late September and proceeded to have multiple students fights (flying tables) a four alarm fire down the street, a boiler that malfunctioned and filled the building with acrid smoke, and then The Virus.  This boomer is less resilient than she used to be.  I would never have imagined that I would teach myself how to teach online in my last year of teaching and have very limited contact with physical students.  Students are, of course, why we do this.  It has ultimately been no less exhausting than traditional teaching.  Poor boomer teacher....

I am going to work mornings in the fall, doing tutoring, advising, and some mental health work  I am very excited about it, and so far it sounds like the good parts of school with grading and lesson plans.  We will see.  I am looking forward to being able to think about what comes next.  

The Reading Round-up

July 1 Reading Round-Up:                              

Many people have said  they have not been able to concentrate on reading during this season of private discontent.  I appear to have been bucking this trend.  I statrted keeping a reading log at Christmas , and I am up to forty-five books.  It is interesting to look at how my reading has shifted a bit--I have read a lot of non-fiction non-fiction, even before the current spasm of social justice/anti-racism reading has gripped all of us; and I have read a lot more YA semi-comfort reading than I usually do.

Here are some of the spring highlights:

Non-Fiction:  I read five books about The Prophet (PBUH) and/or Islam.  If you want an overview of Mohammad's life, you can't go wrong with  anything by Karen Armstrong.  Her Mohammad:  A Prophet For Our Time  is a great general biography, although I think it comes to a rather sudden end without a lot of analysis.  She is better describing the society of pre-Islam and the early life of Mohammad.  

The best book about Islam I have found, from a philosophical and practical perspective, is Islamic Concepts:  Evidence Form the Quaran, by Dr. Bahar Faad.  This was leant to me by my friend Saleem, and I would put it in the category of the clearest, best books I have read.  It is hard to find/out of print, but I ordered myself a copy to keep.  Another indication of how good it is is that Saleem said he had never leant it to anyone before because his copy was a gift to him and was so important.  

I  read They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Roper, which is another scholarly book that will bring the horror of our myths about slavery vividly alive.  And, quite recently, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I truly loved.  What an extraordinary man and an extraordinary life--someone who exemplified the power of reading and life learning and the humility and strength to grow and change, many times over.  I think it was also important for me to read because I work at a school that came into being in the Elijah Muhammad days, and the perspective is really valuable for how we as an institution and community have grown.  

                    

                                                                        

For fiction, which always restores my soul, I read several books that I should have read ages ago--I don't know why I am so behind:  Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Aditchie, The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, and Olive Kittridge and Olive Again, by Elizabeth Strout. All were thought-provoking and wildly delightful.

In case you think that I have been being way too English-majorish, the real pleasure of the spring has been fairy tale re-tellings.  First, Bridget Kammerer's A Curse So Dark and Lonely and A Heart So Fierce and Broken, and then a true revelry of Sarah Maas books--I have really loved the Court of Thorns and Roses series, especially since they deal with much deeper issues than is immediately apparent.