On the Bikes of Boyhood ...

You didn't want your bike to look new, not in the 1950s in Enid, Oklahoma.  Not in my hometown!  Kids with new bikes were, well, you know ...

A few other ground rules: Schwinn was in.  That's it.  No other brands were really bikes.  That's why I laughed so hard a few years ago when I saw the Coen Brothers' film Burn After Reading (2008).  Brad Pitt, who plays a doofus who works in a health club and rides a high-tech bike all around, tries to extort some $$ from former CIA biggie John Malkovich.  JM makes a crack about Pitt's Schwinn, who snorts derisively, "You think that's a Schwinn!"  At which point JM smacks him in the nose.

(I still have a Schwinn, damnit!  Enid habits die hard.)

Also, you didn't put a lot of flashy junk on your bike.  No lights, no colorful plastic streamers coming out of the handlebars, definitely no horns or bells or whistles.  Basic bike, that's it. Your bike was a tool, a weapon--not a toy!

And just to prove how "basic" we were, most of us removed our kickstands.  No (sane) Enid boy used a kickstand.  A bike had only two positions: up and rolling and under your butt; on the ground.  That's it.  Anyone who used the bike rack at school was, well, you know ...  Lots of us removed the chain guard, too--and the front fender.

I remember the look on my dad's face when he saw lying on the lawn my brand-new red Schwinn, sans kickstand, sans chain guard, sans fender ... sans everything.

We always got our new bikes (uh, Schwinns) at Ernie's--Ernie Williamson, whose ads on KCRC radio were wild: He called himself "The Mad Merchant of Market Street."  But I knew him as the father of Shirley Williamson, whom I loved fiercely until she beat me--easily--in a footrace down the church sidewalk one Sunday after services.  Then I wasn't so sure if it was really love, you know?  (We kept in touch, now and then, till she went to Colorado College, and I have no idea what happened to her.)  Shirley taught me something, very early, about the relative skills of men and women. I've had countless reminder lessons ever since.

And now ... look at that picture of my bike, my Schwinn!  Kickstand.  Chain guard.  Front fender.  Lights.  BELL!

I can see my Enid self sneering ... then, after school, kicking my ass.

Wheels of Fortune: Biking Through Biography

Mr. Schwinn, out on the porch, ready to ride!

The other day, I hauled my bike out of the basement, its winter home in the south.  I hate putting in down there in the late fall: there's always something a bit melancholy about it--something even valedictory, especially as I continue my march toward 70 and all that ensues.

In recent years, when the weather reports convince me (usually in November) that the biking season--for me--is over (I see some doughty folks riding all winter; it doesn't look fun), and when I finally carry the bike to the basement, I have to work hard to silence that annoying voice (my brain's? my bike's?)  that insists on saying: You know what?  When it's time to go back upstairs next spring, you may be DEAD!

You can't really slap a bike's face.  Or insult it right back (Oh, yeah?  I might leave you at the curb with the other TRASH!)  I mean, you could talk to your bike ... but what if the neighbors heard?  (Old Dan's out there talking to himself again, Marge.  Sad ...)  A friend told me that my favorite English teacher from high school, later, wandered around town talking to people who weren't there.  Maybe he had a bike.

But--hauling it back up the stairs each spring!  Now, that is Hope!

I always take it to Eddy's in Stow (where we bought it, oh, twenty-five years ago), where they charge me an ever-increasing sum to restore it.  I like Eddy's.  I remember when it was a much smaller operation, a place where you could buy cheese and fresh bait as well as bikes.

But this time, the service tech looked at me and said, Seen better days ...  I wasn't really sure if he was talking about the bike, or me, so I assumed the former.  I said, Well, I'm not riding any Tour de France.  Chortle, chortle.  (No reaction from focused? tech.)   I suppose we can replace ... he said, naming parts I'd never heard of.  Sure.  Whatever.

Eddy's kept the bike a few days.  On Tuesday I picked it up and, back home, hopped on right away, riding around the funeral home parking lot (next door--I call it my Stage 2 Retirement Home), checking out the gears, brakes.  Everything worked fine.  I'd been riding an exercise bike all winter, so I was working pretty fine, too.  Not bad for guy on Medicare.

And then yesterday morning--Wednesday, very early, 6-ish--I rode it for the first time this spring (I know--not yet, officially) down to the coffee shop, several blocks away, both bike and I illuminated like a turnpike plaza, smoothly cruised to the front door, expertly stopped, smoothly dismounted, turned off all the lights (it took a while), waited for the doors to open, thinking, for yet another year: I am immortal.

And I think of that gorgeous Richard Wilbur poem ... from 2010 (see link), a poem about a man hopefully feeding birds in the winter's snow--

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.


Richard Wilbur poem

How Busybody Biographers Biograph

Awhile ago, I posted on FB some images of a device called a "Busybody," a contraption that John O'Hara mentions in a few of his stories and novels.  Since O'Hara was not so kind as to tell me what it was, I spent some quality time with Google and found some pictures and descriptions of a Busybody--a set of mirrors affixed near an upper window permitting someone up there to see what's happening out on the street--who's at the front door--that sort of thing, all without having to rise from the couch (this is definitely an American invention--we of the Snuggie, the garage-door opener, the TV remote, the drive-thru window, etc.).  I knew they were more common in eastern Pennsylvania (Ben Franklin the inventor), but what I didn't know was this ...

John O'Hara's father was a doctor in Pottsville, Penn., and O'Hara later wrote much about small-town, country doctors.  And why not?  He knew a lot about them.  His father's office was just down the street from their residence.  Little-boy John adored his father (that changed with adolescence).  Well, not long ago, I was reading one of the O'Hara biographies (the one by Finis Farr) and came across this: "John O'Hara at the age of seven or eight would use the busybody in the middle window on the second floor of No. 606 so that he could see his father coming up the street and be at the door to meet him" (30).

And suddenly that odd detail--that Busybody that pops up in O'Hara's fiction--took on enormous emotional significance.  And metaphorical, too.  As boy John saw his father in the mirrors, so he would, later, mirror his father in his fiction.

I learned long ago that many novelists hate being asked about autobiographical aspects of their fiction.  And who can blame them?  Fiction's fire is imagination.  But often the fuel is autobiography.  It's ludicrous to deny it.  Novelists transform experience, no question.  but the volumes of experience they remove from the shelf are often stored in the libraries of their own lives.

Examples, of course, are so plentiful as to be obvious.  How about a couple of really obvious ones.  Mark Twain's Mississippi River novels?  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?  (A significant scene between Victor and his creation occurs on the very glacier above Geneva that she and Shelley had seen in 1816.)  Jack London's Klondike writing?  Joyce Carol Oates' Niagara writing?  And on and on and on.

Of course there are counter-examples.  Many and powerful ones.  (Shakespeare anyone?  But even he scattered throughout his plays references to flora, fauna, sites from the region where he grew up.)

It does nothing to diminish a novelist's achievements to notice autobiographical elements in fiction.  For me, in fact, those elements add a surge of electricity, a charge of verisimilitude that, for me, animates the fiction even more, in a very intimate way.  It would make as much sense to condemn an Impressionist's painting because, you know, it's of an actual wheat field!

As a biographer myself (YA biographies of London, Poe, Mary Shelley), I've been astonished to discover the connections between creative act and autobiographical fact.  I've found that knowing lots about a writer's life gives me another doorway into the text--it's obviously not the only doorway, and once I'm inside, all sorts of unexpected things always happen, especially when a talented writer is in charge of the tour.

I always taught my students a bit about the lives of the writers we studied, trying to humanize the poets, playwrights,novelists, and others we read.  Trying to show that these artists were also people who were born, grew up, thought and cried and suffered and loved.  I always believed that if my students could make a human connection with, say, Hawthorne and Irving and Melville, that they would find their reading assignments a bit ... different.  More personal.

Billy the Kid

And let me end with a story.  Thirty years ago I somehow fell under the sway of ... Billy the Kid.  Before it finally ended, I'd read everything about him, visited the "shrines" in New Mexico, seen all the movies, bought all the old comics--I even flew to NYC to see the Joffrey Ballet perform Copland's Billy ballet.  With my Aurora students I wrote a play about the Kid--a musical!--that we performed in two different years with two different casts.  I was insane.

And at Western Reserve Academy, thirty years ago, I delivered an hour-long illustrated talk about the Kid (in pre-PowerPoint days, this meant hundreds of 35mm slides in a Carousel projector).

The morning I was to deliver the talk I rose very early--about 4:30--to go through it one more time, cutting a bit (even I, a madman, knew it was too long).  As I sat alone in my study, with only a single small lamp, the pre-dawn dark pressing in on all sides, I felt, well, that I was not alone.  I don't believe in ghosts, in the supernatural.  And I didn't see anything.  But I felt something.  And--this defies explanation--I smelled something, too, something sour, unwashed--as if the Kid were there, not-so-fresh from the Southwestern desert. 

And I was afraid.

I turned on more lights, feeling like the little boy I'd once been, back in Oklahoma, afraid of the "man in the closet" who, my older brother had convinced me, would come out and slaughter me if I fell asleep.

The light scattered the feeling, the smell, the fear.  And I went back to editing.

Later, I convinced myself that my weariness, my obsessive immersion in the Kid's story, had, in ways, brought him to life in my study that dark morning.

A biographer's dream ... to know so much that you can coax back into this world some fleeting sensations of the people who were.

Turning Pages ...

Carnegie Public Library, Enid, Oklahoma

I'm currently formatting for publication on Kindle Direct Publishing a memoir I've been working on for well over a decade.  (I sent it to one publisher a few years ago; she was encouraging; she said "revise"; her press--an academic one--is now defunct!  Q.E.D.)  It's called Turning Pages: A Memoir of Books and Libraries and Loss.  I'm hoping to have it up on Amazon by this weekend--or early next week.

At the center of the book is the library you see pictured there--the Carnegie library in my hometown of Enid, Oklahoma, a building that opened on August 2, 1910, and fell to the wrecker's ball in July 1972.

I loved that old library.  My brothers and I would ride a bus (those days are gone!) the two miles from our home to the Carnegie, where I would check out biographies of cowboys, mountain men, and Indians; where older brother Richard would check out Dickens and Tolstoy and Austen (he was still in elementary school!); where younger brother Dave would check out Dr. Seuss and Munro Leaf.

It was cooler inside.  (Enid temps were often over 100 in the summer.)  And smelled wonderful and strange.  We'd pick out our books, present our library cards to the unsmiling censorious librarian (she made Richard go get a note from home to check out a Mickey Spillane); she would stamp the card, stamp the DATE DUE slip in the book, and off I would go for a week or so of adventure, reading about Jim Bowie, George Armstrong Custer, Crazy Horse, and my other mounted heroes.

We left Enid in the summer of 1956, and I did not learn about the library's razing for a quarter-century.  I was horrified when my mother told me,  They tore it down!  They tore my library DOWN!

How could they?  It was by far the most beautiful building in town--it seemed as if it didn't even belong there, as if it had been flown in from the Ancient World to elevate our flat prairie town.  It was the symbol of all.  But in July 1972, the very month our son was born, my library died.

I had originally planned to drive back there, to sit in that old building and to let the memories begin--to use that experience as the trigger for my memoir about my life with books.  Now, I had another story, a story that began on the site, now an overflow lot for a nearby car dealer.

I went back to Enid several times.  I researched the history of that library, acquiring microform copies of the original application Enid had made to Carnegie.  I interviewed folks in Enid who remembered the building--remembered the razing.  I visited local historical museums, where I saw on display a few remaining chunks of it--a bit like seeing pieces of a broken human heart.

In the meantime, I was writing about my development as a reader--from an eager elementary-schooler to a lackadaisical junior-high-schooler to a testosterone-soaked high-schooler to an erratic college student to a serious graduate-schooler to an obsessive adult bibliophagist (book-eater!).  I wrote, as well, about the reading habits of my brothers, my parents, my friends.

I wrote about reading books in school (and not reading the ones I was supposed to); I wrote about cheating on a couple of book reports (oh, my besmirched soul!); I re-read all the books I remembered reading in elementary school (one of my favorites: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel), in junior high (I loved sports novels then--Claire Bee, et al.), in high school (I actually read Martin Eden and Moby-Dick in study hall, for the helluvit).  I re-read some books that affected me in college--assigned and unassigned texts (among the latter, Another Country blew me away).

I wrote about my book-collecting (some successes, some major screw-ups), my reviewing, my experiences with libraries.

Intertwined with all--the death of my father in 1999--a devastating experience for all of us, a loss I revisit in various ways throughout the book.

I realized, as I was writing, that if youth is about acquisition, age is about loss.  And I saw the loss of my Carnegie library as a potent symbol for all.

Carnegie

Much in the book about Enid, Oklahoma, about Hiram, Ohio, and Hiram College, about my book-obsessed family, about Andrew Carnegie (who, by the way, is buried in the same cemetery--Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown NY--as Washington Irving, whose marker is somewhat more, uh, unobtrusive, that Carnegie's!), about the remarkable Carnegie library program that has affected millions of us.

So--anyhow--when the book is available on Kindle, I'll let y'all know (see, I am from Oklahoma!).

Irving

Another Tale from the Locker Room ...

The other day I was at my locker at the health club, changing to head for home (and a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels; not really--though there are times when I want a consumable reward for suffering on the Airdyne for 30 minutes).

My locker that day was at the end of a row, permitting me a view of the large open central area of the room.  And there, a young man--could he have been more than twenty? he looked even younger--had laid his infant son on a towel in the middle of the floor and was engaging in that most parental of tasks: changing a diaper.

The young man was fresh from the shower (I'd seen before the phenomenon of young fathers holding infant children in their arms while they exercised and then showered), only partially dressed himself, but he was bent to this task with a combination of gravity (got to get this done!) and humor (he was playful with the child, smiling and laughing).

I caught his eye.  He smiled.  I said, "You don't know what 'tired' is until you're a parent."

"You got that right," he laughed back.  "He was up half the night, and every time I had just fallen asleep ..."

Parents know the rest of the sentence, the rest of the story.

When our son, Steve, was born on 16 July 1972, our lives changed overnight--and permanently.  (Only parents really understand this.)  Suddenly, we no longer went wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted.  We no longer slept more than a few hours a night (we took turns with the feedings).  We no longer knew what a meal was like, what a house without a diaper pail smelled like.  (Oh, you in the Pampers generation have no idea!)  Every night, every day, every week, every month ... suddenly, the future seemed forever away.  When would he sleep through the night?  When would we have a moment to ourselves?  When could we reason with him (answer to that one: never!).

Gradually, of course, a sweet little boy emerged from that crying bundle of bad smells.  And we enjoyed his childhood immensely, taking him everywhere (plays, movies, trips)--babysitters were charging $1.50 an hour--outrageous!

His infancy is now nearly forty years in the distance--but in those ensuing decades I have never been so tired as I was those first few months with that imperious and mysterious infant stranger in the house.

And so I salute that young man in the locker room, kneeling over his child, smiling, weary with work, animated by wonder.

**

PS--Steve and his wife, Melissa, now have two of  their own: Logan (7), Carson (about to be 3.)  Great little boys = lots of lost sleep ...

Are These the Pubic Schools We Really Want?

In his column today in the New York Times (Friedman on Education) Thomas L. Friedman wrote about our greatest natural resource: people.  Specifically, educated people.  He wrote, "Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students."

I've thought about this issue a lot the past few years, wondering why we have in so many places--communities, states, regions--such inadequate schools.  It almost seems as if we want them.  Perhaps we do.  Consider ...

What would you do if you wanted to destroy our public school system--if you wanted to fracture the spine of its principal duty of educating kids?

- Wouldn't you trivialize the curriculum?  Test kids and teachers--year after year--on things that don't matter so much?  And label as "frills" such things as art and music and drama and even literature?  (Hey, the tests measure reading, not literature.  Why teach Moby-Dick if your kids can pass the test by reading Willy the Whale?)

- Wouldn't you focus on data, not on kids' faces?  (I know which gives me more valuable information.)

- Wouldn't you make the curriculum so rigid and repetitive and unappealing that creative young people will avoid going into the profession?  That imaginative youngsters will suffer?  (Think of a creative child--any child--as a beautiful winged creature that we confine to a tiny cage.)

- Wouldn't you pay teachers so poorly (yes, poorly) that there is no real financial incentive to enter the profession?

- Wouldn't you overload teacher certification programs with repetitive, trivial courses?

- Wouldn't you make it hard for talented people who have not had traditional teacher training to enter the profession?

- Wouldn't you overload teachers with too many students, too many classes, too many preparations, too many ancillary duties so that it becomes virtually impossible for them to perform at the high level they want, and we expect?

- Wouldn't you let communities choose, via the vote, whether or not they will have good schools?

- Wouldn't you vote NO on critical school issues because something in your local school annoys you?

- Wouldn't you see to it that nonacademic activities in school earn students far greater status than academic ones?  (Take a look at your school's trophy case.  What's in it?  Who gets the banquets?  The press coverage?  The celebrity?)

- Wouldn't you grant decision-making power to people whose only knowledge about education comes from their having once been students?  (Would a hospital permit ordinary citizens to make decisions about treatments? Patient care?  If their only qualification was that they were in a hospital once?)

- Wouldn't you make life outside school far more appealing to students than life in it?

- Wouldn't you create a political climate so perverse that well educated politicians have to conceal their academic achievements?  Apologize for them?

- Wouldn't you elevate anti-intellectual politicians who bray about "elitism," who sneer at higher education?

- Wouldn't you create a powerful "news" channel that routinely attacks educators, that blames them for the ills they've done little to cause?

- Wouldn't you spend far more money on making war than on educating children?

- Wouldn't you flood the media--movies, TV--with films that portray teachers (indeed, most adults) as venal, stupid, cruel, perverted?  (In most films aimed at the teen market, it's the youngsters who are wise; parents, teachers, other authority figures--most are clueless and/or corrupt.)

- Wouldn't you do everything you could to get kids to care about--care about--activities in and out of school that are nonintellectual?

- Wouldn't you flood the print and electronic media with ads that teach that pleasure and entertainment are more important than anything else?  That owning things confers status and happiness?  That being physically attractive is far more important than being intellectually attractive?

- Wouldn't you make ads and movies that show how much fun it is to be under the influence of a deadly, mind-altering and -destroying drug (alcohol)?

- Wouldn't you make sure that our economically poorest areas have the worst schools?  (Making it extraordinarily difficult for teachers and youngsters there to succeed?)

- Wouldn't you ...?

I could go on.  So could you.

And it makes me wonder ... do we have so many bad schools because we want them?  Who benefits?  Who stays in power as a result?  Who does life's dirty and dangerous work?  Who stands by and watches?  And profits?  And sends their kids to private schools?

And what can we do about it?

If you really cared about the health of public education, wouldn't you ...?

Memorial for Dr. Vars, 10 March 2012

There is nothing so old as death; nor so new.

It's  a bright sunny day here in northeastern Ohio, though not warm.  Sunny but cold--appropriate weather for this day of remembering a life and a recent death.  We've just returned from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent for the memorial service for Dr. Gordon F. Vars, who was one of my professors at Kent State while I was working on my master's and doctoral degrees there in the early 1970s.  I was his grad assistant for one year (I think it was 1971-72); I took several courses from him; he became my dissertation adviser.

The service was moving in so many ways.  Former students, friends, colleagues, and family members spoke about his effects on their lives.  Much lovely music (a string quartet played throughout), a touching eulogy by the minister, the Rev. Melissa Carvill-Ziemer.  So many stories, memories.  Laughter and tears.

I've written at length about him elsewhere, but there were a couple of things I wanted to add here.  And a story ...

The former KSU School

When I first became his grad assistant, he told me he wanted to give me a taste of what life as a professor was like.  I sort of knew that already: My dad was a professor.  But I smiled, eager, perhaps even a little condescendingly phony.  He had a dual assignment during those years: He taught in the College of Education (graduates and undergraduates), and he also taught in the mornings at the Kent State University School (1913-1982), the "lab school" then still in operation.  He taught the 8th graders.  His subject--"Core," once in fashion, a curriculum model that combined English-social studies-guidance.  Dr. Vars believed profoundly in the "core concept," long after it had fallen out of fashion.  Through his determination he kept alive the National Association for Core Curriculum, whose official name I'd forgotten until I saw it again today in the church.

When Dr. Vars was out of town, I sometimes took over his classes that year I was his grad assistant..  I taught his section of Educ 342, a course for students who were beginning their teacher training.  I enjoyed that class.  Most of the students were serious about becoming teachers--and afraid at the same time.  They appreciated being with someone like me, I think, someone who was fresh from the classroom.  I'd taught five years at the Aurora Middle School and thought--no, knew--that I knew every damn thing there was to know about teaching.  And probably more, too.  (I was soon--see below--to get a much-needed lesson in humility.)

Beside the Kent undergrads, I also had to teach Dr. Vars' eighth graders over at the KSU School.

Those kids had known each other since early elementary days; they had been in the same classroom since then; they knew one another.  They knew what to do with a young puppy like me: They chewed me up and spit me out.  The longest days of my life were the three days I spent in their company.  (Each morning at home, I begged to awaken with smallpox--anything to prevent my having go get devoured alive by a roomful of voracious 13-year-olds.)   I was the "mark"; they were the con men.  I was the instrument; they were the musicians.  I was the baseball; they were the Louisville Slugger.  I was the .. you get the idea.   I very quickly found out that there was no correlation whatsoever between what I told them to do and what they actually did.  They did what they wanted to.  My words were merely foul air they were forced to inhale, that's all.  And as we all know, inhaling does not require any ears.

One day they suggested we play "telephone," a game, they said, that Dr. Vars often used to teach them about the unreliability of communication.  So--I whispered something innocuous to an innocent-looking lad nearby (something like, "Susan recently fed her cat some food from a tin can").  The innocent-looking lad then whispered it to the next person and so on around the room.  When the last person had heard the message (and he was not an innocent-looking lad), he spoke aloud something so, well, dirty that I will not even write it here (a decision that will greatly please my mother).

I'd never heard such words uttered in a classroom.  Rarely in a locker room.  I had no idea what to do.  So I did nothing--except declare my outrage (and, silently, consider a career change).  And on we went to a worksheet on commas.

I think I would have succumbed completely if I had not invited to class one day two of my former Aurora Middle School students, John Mlinek and Dave Prittie, who had been making 8mm and Super-8 films together for some years.  Their films were funny and imaginative and they saved my ass one awful spring day in the early 70s.  The Kent 8th graders loved the films, loved John and Dave, and my stock ticked up a half-point or so--until the next day.  At which time they once again made a Cuisinart of our (their!) classroom.

They were the Cuisinart; I was the squash.

And when Dr. Vars got back from his absence, he asked me how it had gone.

"Just great.  Love those kids," I lied.

I'm sure he heard a different story at school.  But he never said anything.  And I was grateful.  And remain so, for so many, many reasons.