Gentle, Plain, Just and Resolute

We have finally reached the sixteenth president. When, at the beginning of the week, I take the Mike Venezia biography on Lincoln off the bookshelf, Simon says: “I read that already, Mom--don't you know?”

“On your own?”

“On my own.”

“Wonderful!” And then, because sometimes I have little control over my mouth, I say: “Why?” Simon reading a whole book on his own, cover to cover—that's new.

“Because it's Lincoln, Mom!” Simon says, impatiently.

“Can you read it to me again?”

“Sure.”

It's December in Miami. The windows are wide open. The air is crisp and cool. We lie on the day-bed in the Learning Room. Simon reads. I smell the grass, the trees; I hear birds. The mail-man comes up the walkway and we take a break to check if we got another holiday card. We make hot chocolate and take our mugs back to the Learning Room.

“I have to finish Lincoln all today, Mom. We cannot do Latin or German. After Lincoln, I have to read about Andrew Johnson right away. I have to find out what happened after Lincoln was shot.”

“OK. Why is Lincoln so super interesting to you, Simon?”

“Because he ended slavery. Even though he was very ugly, he was great. The presidents before him all sucked.”

“Sucked” is the new word d'jour. George and I choose our battles when it comes to colorful language. Simon can say “sucked,” but he cannot write it. We've defined formal and informal speech.

Simon finishes Lincoln, and then this child who does not read with pleasure immediately takes Johnson off the shelf and starts reading.

The Venezia biographies all begin with a general assessment. Venezia writes about Johnson that he “wasn't as skilled a leader as Lincoln had been...he was stubborn and racially prejudiced ...very little was accomplished.”

“I don't want to read anymore. Johnson sucked, too, Mom. I'll just look at the pictures. I'll read more tomorrow.”

It's a beautiful day in Miami, I think, looking out onto a Hong Kong Orchid and a Meyer's Lemon drooping with fruit. Simon lies next to me, flipping through the book.

“Look at this,” Simon says. He points to a picture of Richmond, Virginia, all rubble, all bombed out. “Why do people do that?” he asks.

Instead of saying “Why do you think?” and letting him figure it out, I proceed to do an information dump. I've been tired this week, somewhat self-absorbed. I talk of military strategy, of controlling territory, of destroying not only the enemy's cities and forts, but also his spirit.

“Did kids die in Richmond?” Simon asks.

“Some kids died, I'm sure.”

“Moms?”

“Moms, too.”

Simon is quiet. Then he says: “People are mean.” He continues looking through the Johnson biography.

I can hear the neighborhood kids congregating down the street. They are on vacation. They have a basketball. I hear it bouncing off the pavement. Soon they will come and ring the doorbell, asking for Simon.

“Mom, look at this picture,” Simon says. “Look how many people were in the room when Lincoln died.”

He's gazing at the Alonzo Chappel painting--see above. I tell Simon that I know from my readings on Lincoln that the scene is fictional. Lincoln died at a roadside inn with only a few people in attendance, not a mob of all the important political figures of the time.

“Maybe the painter wanted to show how many people would miss him,” Simon says.

“Maybe,” I say, nodding.

The doorbell rings and Simon bolts off the bed and runs out of the room. He ducks his head back in. “Can I go play?”

“Go play.”

Many people would miss him, Simon had said. I miss him.

It's been a week of too much feeling. Layered on top of the exhausting, excessive, and inescapable joyousness of the season, have been my readings about Lincoln. He never went to school; he taught himself everything, even the law. He lost two of his four sons during his life-time, all much loved. He had so many friends, they made up towns, cities, states. He cared little about all the stuff that doesn't matter: clothes, manners, appearances. Acutely aware of weight of his responsibilities, the full impact of his actions, and the full measure of his--and everyone else's losses--he struggled with melancholia.

I've poured over his key speeches. I'd never read them closely. There is something intimate, exposed, unabashedly personal about his voice, as if he's speaking to you with no reservations from the center of his heart's obsessions.

You probably remember Gettysburg and the 2nd Inaugural, but here is his Farewell Address, delivered as he was leaving Springfield, Illinois, to begin his first term. War was looming.

My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

Lincoln has been on my mind this week. I lack his faith that “all will yet be well.” This week the Copenhagen meeting came to an end, and the Health Reform Bill went up for a vote in the Senate. How will we bring about all the radical changes we have to make for the sake of our planet, our economy, our children and grandchildren? Following the wranglings about health reform these last months, I've felt stuck in a Dickens novel—with few exceptions, each character more vain, foppish, thoughtless, reckless, and undignified than the next. I realize that the gains made by the Health Reform Bill are huge, but they seem so much less than what is necessary, a bill brokered in an age of relentless compromise, indomitable special interests, and men, mostly men, who are not Lincoln. And there are so many bills to go.

Dark thoughts in sunny Miami this holiday season.

Some last words by Walt Whitman:

This Dust Was Once the Man

This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.

On the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Instruments of Torture

(Below find Part II and Part III. For Part I go to the blog posted on Sunday 12/13/2009)

II

Simon

This year, in fifth grade, Simon is supposed to write an essay every week. First he reads a biography about an American president; then he writes an essay. I came up with this plan last spring, when full of hope and hubris I began shaping a curriculum for the coming academic year. I felt so proud of myself. Instead of doing what every other fifth grader does, namely writing a dozen book reports and a research paper or two in the course of the year, Simon would write 44 brief essays. And if he did a portrait of each president, he would have a book by year's end. Fabulous!

By July, as the beginning of the new school year loomed, I began to have doubts this grand plan was going to work. For starters, Simon has hated writing since I first handed him a pencil, and that hadn't changed. But I quickly came up with a fix: he would only have to write one paragraph a day. That seemed doable. Within five days, he would have an essay.

Then there was the problem of the topic sentence. Every one of the paragraphs Simon writes is supposed to have a topic sentence, preferably at the top, or so various writing manuals for this age group suggest.

Here, the problem was all mine. I can't stand paragraphs with a topic sentence at the top, paragraphs that begin with something like: “Abraham Lincoln was an excellent president during the years of the Civil War,” and then go on to elaborate.

This kind of writing is torturous to read, smacking of the worst of textbook prose. A topic sentence at the top of the paragraph robs the reader of the fun of making sense of what he's reading—why bother getting through the rest of the paragraph?

In lieu of the topic sentence at the top, I prefer, a snappy and opinionated sentence at the end of a paragraph, summing up and evaluating the information given in the sentences above. “Although burdened by family tragedies, doubt, and debilitating bouts of depression, Lincoln invariably rose to the demands of defending the Union.” Here is another example: “He was too skinny and quite ugly, but he was big-hearted and brilliant.”

The reader of the paragraph can then compare his conclusions, reached while reading the paragraph, to the views of the author. This makes for a dynamic and interactive reading experience. Maybe the reader agrees. Maybe not. Either way, he keeps reading.

The more I thought about teaching the essay, the more I remembered those topic sentence driven five-paragraph essays I'd had to read years ago, the ones I hadn't enjoyed—at all. The more I thought about teaching Simon, the clearer it became that I was dealing with a ten-year-old who loved narrating stories but hated writing. I wasn't going to be doing him a favor if I insisted that before he put any word on paper he first had to figure out the topic of each paragraph, and then shape a sentence about that topic. Only afterwards could he proceed with the rest of the paragraph. This was going to lead to tears and little else.

As a matter of fact, a few more sleepless nights and I decided: forget the essay. I was going to ask Simon to write reports. I would use language he comprehends. Each week he would have to report on, or tell the story of, one president. Forget five paragraphs--begin with three. Furthermore, drop the topic or thesis or analytical or opinionated sentence for now. I would get him to identify excellent topic sentences in the writing of others by asking: “What's the most important sentence in this paragraph?” But when it came to Simon's writing, I wouldn't mention it. For now.

Instead, we would focus heavily on getting the right information into each paragraph. In science Simon has spent much time learning to separate items by their characteristics, studying categories, taxonomies, animal kingdoms. For starters, Simon would focus on categorizing all the information, thinking of paragraphs merely as organizational categories.

So July ended and the school year began. The first presidential biography he read was George Washington by Mike Venezia.

“Simon, now that you have read about George Washington, you need to write a report about him. You're in fifth grade.”

“But, Mom, you're killing me--I hate writing!”

“Let's begin by writing down all the things you know about Washington. You talk. I'll write.”

He came up with eighteen bits of information.

“How could you organize all this information? How would you organize the story of this president? You can't begin your report with his death; then mention he had wooden teeth; then say he was the first president. That would be so confusing. How could you organize the information to tell Washington's story?”

“From the beginning, Mom. Don't you know? He was born in 1732.”

It took just minutes to get Simon to come up with categories. One category was going to be Washington's life before he became president. A second category was what happened once he was president. These two categories would make up his first and second paragraphs. I then urged Simon to think of a third category, something he'd learned in his reading about Washington that most people might not know. This third category would lead to a third and final paragraph.

“Think of your readers, Simon. Always think of your readers. You want to give them a reward, something extra and unexpected--a surprise--at the end of your report. It's like a treat, a yummy dessert you're offering them for patiently reading through all your words. Mom loves reading good essays because they always have something in them I did not know, or had not thought about. And that makes my mind go: Wow! What's your wow bit of information about Washington. ”

Simon was quiet for a minute.

“Well, Washington was huge, super tall, very funny. He was a good dancer, and people liked him a lot.”

I pulled out a $1.00 bill. “Does this guy look like he's funny?”

“He looks boring and mean,” and after another few seconds Simon added, “and P.S., maybe also short.”

“So, do you think your readers would be glad they read your report because they learned something new?”

“I think so.”

“I think so, too.”

That was five months ago. Last week Simon wrote an essay on Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth president. Simon wrote about how Franklin Pierce had many family tragedies: all his children died—in case you didn't know.

III

Suggestions

Ask your children to write every day. Do copy-work if writing does not come easy at first. But make sure they write. The only way to master writing is by writing.

Read. Read daily. Read good stuff. Every day, if possible, take a paragraph of something that has been read that day and take it apart. Ask questions. What is this paragraph about? How do you know? What is the most important sentence in this paragraph? Why? Is the author expressing an opinion in this paragraph, and if so, where?

Have your child tell you (narrate) what he has read. Have him tell you the story of his reading. This is an invaluable pre-writing skill. You cannot write a report on a book you read if you cannot report on it verbally.

Forget the five paragraph essay and all that comes with it—thesis statements and topic sentences. Don't introduce them until 9th grade. They will take all the pleasure out of writing.

Once your child can make it through a handful of paragraphs, have her write reports. To order the information, have her come up with categories and then write a paragraph for each category. For example, if your child is writing a book report, she would organize her report around categories such as theme, plot, character, etc. If she's writing about a historical figure or event, the categories would be dictated by chronology. If she's writing about manatees, she would categorize the information by topics: type of animal, habitat, food source, etc. If your child has thought through the categories and has a history of narrating information, she will have little trouble shaping paragraphs that will naturally have a topic sentence buried in them. Children want to tame and master the information they have learned. They demonstrate that mastery with a topic sentence. “Manatees are herbivores.” “Because of Winn-Dixie is a novel set in Florida.”

As for the essay: By 9th grade, once your child has written hundreds of reports, begin writing essays. The main difference between a report and an essay is that a report reports on a particular topic, while an essay asks a question about that topic—it is an instrument of inquiry.

Forget the thesis statement in the opening paragraph—if you give a thesis statement, there is not enough incentive to continue reading. Instead, formulate a question in your head that you want to answer. Once you have the question, begin your essay by explaining the background to your question. “Over half a million people died during the American Civil War, etc., etc.” Then ask your question: “In these pages, I would like to attempt to answer the question: Was the Civil War avoidable?” You can follow up with related questions: “Specifically, was there anything Lincoln could have done differently?” And then you proceed to answer the question. You give the historical context. You report on your research. You evaluate the information. You try to come up with an answer.

Remember that essays are attempts. You do not have to answer all the questions you raise. You can end by stating that many issues in your essay will remain unanswered. Trust me, most good essays do not completely answer the questions they raise. However, they do give their reader at least one interesting insight. This is the type of essay your child will have to write in college.

Read essays written by great essayists. There are various collections. Read essays in The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly—that is where the great essayists of today publish their work.

Last words: Take it slow. If possible, write daily. Remind your kids to have fun and to create writing that is fun to read. Writing should not be torture.

On the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Instruments of Torture

I.

(This is the first part of what will be at least a two-part essay. Part II will be posted next week.)

I should put my academic background and prejudices on the table from the get-go. Although I now refer to myself in official documents as a “homemaker,” and otherwise I'm homeschooling my eleven-year old son at the end of a cul-de-sac in Miami, I have, in decades past, done my share of hard labor, teaching freshmen composition at colleges in the Boston area. I say “hard labor” for a reason: for the most part, I hated it.

I hated it because every two weeks I went home with a stack of essays I was supposed to read, correct, and grade, praising what had been done well, suggesting ways to make the writing better. Reading them, I would be overwhelmed by a flood of feelings: endless boredom, frustration, rage, utter indifference, utter helplessness. How was I going got get these students to write essays that I, or anyone else, might want to read?

The papers were plagued by grammar, spelling, punctuation, logic, and attribution problems, as well as a predilection for passive verbs (boring) and abstract nouns (even more boring), but those were minor issues compared to the fact that at least half of what came my way--no matter what the instructions were--were five paragraph essays.

Sometimes each paragraph had been bloated to the length of a page; sometimes the structure had been expanded to absorb ten paragraphs; but the rhetorical tool at the core of so many of these essays, whether discussing a story, a poem, or presenting a research topic was almost invariably the same—that dreadful thing taught in American schools: the five-paragraph essay.

This is what the five-paragraph essay written by too many hard-working, well indoctrinated, eager to please college freshmen reads like:

Paragraph I: Abraham Lincoln was a great president for three reasons.
Paragraph II: Reason 1 expanded
Paragraph III: Reason 2 expanded
Paragraph IV: Reason 3 expanded
Paragraph V: In conclusion, Abraham Lincoln was a great president.

The five-paragraph essay is first presented in the fourth grade. After eight years of steady practice and brainwashing, the above is what most freshmen produce: a padded, puffed-up, and self-satisfied tautology. In case you haven't reviewed your terms of logic this week, a tautology is the repetition of meaning, using dissimilar words to say the same thing twice. In brief: A equals A. Lincoln was a great president. Here are three reasons why. Therefore, Lincoln was a great president. The essay unsurprisingly ends exactly where it began.

The best of these essays would get a B-. Invariably, the recipient would make his way to my office and either livid or in tears let me know that he had been at the top of his high school class in Cleveland or Atlanta or Buffalo. He had never gotten a B-. Ever. And, Professor Franklin, Abraham Lincoln was a great president, wasn't he?

Where to begin?

When Galileo was about to be tried for heresy in Rome in 1633, he was first taken down to a dungeon and shown the instruments of torture that he would get to know better if he did not recant. So what did he do? Being a smart fellow, he gave the powers that be what they wanted.

I think of Galileo when I think of kids learning to write in an American school. By fourth grade, every one of them has been shown the instruments of torture; all of them know the price of not doing what they are told—they will be held back. Teachers “teach the test” and the five-paragraph essay, and kids learn the test and master the art of writing tautologies.

Galileo comes to mind not only because, like him, students clearly come to know the price of disobedience, but also because the five-paragraph essay has more in common with a confession induced by torture, than with the essay as it was envisioned by Cicero, Plutarch, Bacon, and Montaigne. In the five-paragraph essay, the student demonstrates (under duress) that she has been a good girl, that she has learned her lessons, that she has done her research and knows three reasons why Lincoln was a good president.

But the essay is not an instrument that is meant to perform and perpetuate indoctrination. It is, first and foremost, an instrument of inquiry. (The word “essay” actually means “attempt.”) Its present day format is very much the product of the Renaissance, a rhetorical tool that attempts to move knowledge forward in ways radical and disobedient, celebrating the individual and all that he or she is capable of. The essay might rely on what is known already, as the Renaissance painters and scholars relied enthusiastically on classical antiquity, but the thrust of the essay is into the unexplored, into new knowledge, into radical new ways of thinking and perceiving.

So what does that mean when it comes to writing and teaching the essay? For starters, forget a five-paragraph format. Forget the cookie-cutter formulations bequeathed by No Child Left Behind. If you're a homeschooling parent reading this, if you're homeschooling because you do not want your child to only “learn the test,” have the courage to also let go of the five-paragraph essay. It's not a writing instrument used by an educated and inquiring mind.

If you think that a liberal arts college might be in your child's future, realize that the first thing that will happen when he takes Comp. 101 is that some younger version of me will beat the five-paragraph essay out of him with a two-by-four, if he's lucky.

Not only will he be hurt and confused, but he will have wasted time. Instead of spending his school-years proving that he was a good boy who had done the reading, his mind could have been in training, questioning, inquiring, writing.

(To be continued.)

What We Talk About When We Walk Around In Venice

These are the things we talk about about while walking around Venice with Simon:

~Is Venice going to drown? How can we stop global warming? Are they going to rescue the treasures? Is Miami going to dissappear into the sea? Maybe we should buy a boat.

"Our" canal--Rio dei Carmini

~Is Italy a dictatorship? Why are things so expensive? Is Berlusconi a tyrant? Why do the dinosaurs that we can buy in America in a dollar shop for $1.oo cost Euro 8.00? Are we sure Berlusconi is not a tyrant? Italy might have a revolution if toys are so expensive--in America they had a revolutionary war because of taxes.

~Why do people not like Jews? Why did they have to live in a ghetto?

George and Simon talking in the ghetto.

~Why did people come to Venice long ago? Why do Mom and Dad like coming to Venice? Why do we have to look at so many crucifixions and churches? Aren't we Jewish? Why do we have to hunt down every painting by the Bellini brothers--Gentile and Giovanni? Why does Dad like all these Madonnas painted by Giovanni Bellini? Are they really that beautiful?

~How many days until we can go home? Is our dog OK?

~How was Guiseppe Garibaldi like George Washington? In what way were Garibaldi, Washington, and Simon Bolivar similar? If you can answer that question, you get an ice-cream.

~Can I have another ice-cream?

Simon checking a picture he took of Garibaldi's statue.

~Did they ever let people out of the dungeon in the Doge's Palace? What happened to them? Why did they write on the walls? Did anyone give them a blanket?

~Why did they resettle all the glass and metal workers to Murano? It was a smart way to avoid having a great fire, like the London and Chicago fires--don't you think? Look at those cityscapes of Venice done by Carpaccio--do you see all the chimneys? In everyone of those buidings, someone was making a fire--isn't it amazing that Venice didn't go up in flames?

~Venice didn't burn, but I think it's going to drown. Don't you, Mom? Really?

~Why do we have to go to Joseph Brodsky's grave, if he was just a poet? Why is he buried in Venice, if he was Russian and lived in New York after the Russians kicked him out? Why did he love Venice so much?

~Can we have pizza for dinner?

Something we don't talk about:

How hard it is to leave.

"Our" Campo Santa Margherita, a few steps from our rented apartment.

Thanksgiving in Venice

Thanksgiving is always hard for us. The holiday does not mean that much to me--I wasn't raised with Thanksgiving, and the menu is too full of things sweet and mashed for my taste. Moreover, we have no extended family to speak of that we could share it with. Most of my family is abroad, George's parents are dead, and his older kids have tended to spend it with their mom. Now that they are all grown-up, they often visit the families of their significant others, American families that have strong Thanksgiving traditions.

So years ago we figured out that the end of November was a perfect time to go abroad. The flights are at their rock-bottom cheapest, and you can bargain if you are renting an apartment. Again and again we plan to go to some new place in the world, and invariably we end up, again, in Venice, taking a place far away from the hoopla of tourists. For a week, or more, we come and on a very tight budget pretend we live here, belong here, are Venezians. We play the game so well that by now, although we speak almost no Italian, tourists stop to ask as for directions.

Above: This is building in which we rent a small two bedroom.

Left: This is the courtyard you enter once you have opened the main portico with a huge key. It's very quiet.

Below: After using another big key on a door off the courtyard, you get to "our" little house. We have a small wintry courtyard of our own. "Our" little place occupies a couple of rooms on the first two floors. Did I mention it's very quiet?

Why Venice? It's the most beautiful place on earth--for me. It's so very old. It has survived fires, plagues, endless wars, rising winter tides. There is so much to see, to think about, to feel. The city is--improbably--built on water. Improbably, it resists destruction. Wandering for days around its alleys and passages, through its churches and museums, I tend to perceive marble seeping into my spine. I feel stong, invincible. If Venice can hang in there, so can I. One's own silly troubles seem just that--silly. It helps that there is fresh and bountiful food of beckoning colors to be bought at open-air markets where the vendors are friendly, and that the wine is cheap, and that the air smells of salt and frozen seaweed and is full of the warm sound of churchbells. Here, I'm always, first and foremost, happy.

For Simon the trip is not all joy thus far. He says he is homesick for all things American: his friends, his home, his toys, the Florida sunshine, Burger King. He's a bit like the American tourist from hell. Back in Florida the supermarkets are bigger, he says, as are the refrigerators, washing-machines, bathrooms, restaurants, roads, etc. And, of course, the TV sucks. If he hears English spoken by anyone, he hits upon them all smiles: "Where do you come from? I'm from Miami. My name is Simon." At a restuarant in Murano, he said to the waiter, "You look just like Millard Fillmore, do you know that?" Simon was right--he did. I found myself struggling to explain in a mix of English and Spanish to the confused and apprehensive waiter, who didn't know if he had been praised or offended, who Fillmore was. "Un presidente Americano. Un buono uomo," I kept repeating, hoping he understood. But by nightfall, Simon will acknowledge he had a good day. It helps that you can get a small gelato for less than 2 Euro.

And it helps that in this town, where so little is recognizable to him, where there is so little he desires--there are no American bookstores, or a Gamestop, or a cinema, or a Video Arcade type place--he found sailboats. Simon has been learning to sail and was delighted to look down from the bellfry of San Giorgio Maggiore--and there they were.

I, in turn, who desire so little in Miami, am full of wishes and appetites: for Pistachio cake, and marzipan, and that apartment at the top of so many buildings. If you look closely, you can see they have a small roof-top garden.

I daydream how in that apartment I would be endlessly happy, eating little peaches shaped of marzipan. One feels so alive when one is full of wants. I, who hardly ever have my feet out of Birkenstocks, today saw a pair of boots, and a flashy purple handbag, and red mittens. I wanted them all. None of these items, except for the pistachio cake, will be bought. But it is lovely to covet them for a day.

Photographs

A Photograph of Zachary Taylor.

Steadily, Simon continues to read a presidential biography every week: Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce. Simon notices, about each one, that he, too, could not fix the problem of slavery.

“They're not as smart as Abraham Lincoln. They're not as courageous,” Simon declares. This week, reading about Franklin Pierce, he exclaims with genuine excitement: “Oh goody, Pierce is the fourteenth president. Only two to go until Lincoln. Lincoln will fix everything.”

Oh, goody. I'm delighted by Simon's excitement. I didn't know he had been keeping such careful count, or that he had fully comprehended how all pervasive the problem of slavery was, how it was the growling grizzly bear in the Oval Office and in Congress for every administration, somehow kept appeased by a diet of compromises.

But Simon does understand--the south insisted on slavery, the north wanted it abolished, yet year in, year out, decade in, decade out, the Union survived due to the imperfect but devoted work of this group of presidents.

Or, to be honest, that's what I understand. Simon gets that there was a BIG problem, that the BIG problem needed to be fixed, and that “forever” went by without it getting fixed.

Grown-ups value compromises. Eleven-year-old boys who have worked their way through stacks of superhero comics, as well as all things Greek, want someone to walk in with an army of 300 and fight to the death of all, if necessary, and change the course of history

* * *

The series of biographies Simon has been reading, Getting to Know the U.S. Presidents by Mike Venezia, is full of illustrations: painted portraits, etchings, maps, period prints and posters; however, beginning with these presidents, with only the exception of William Henry Harrison, the biographies invariably include a photographic portrait. How does my thoughtful, deep-feeling son respond to these black and white pictures, pictures that are not heroic portraits, pictures that show lined and wise faces in the flesh, in need of a haircut, and in rumpled clothes?

"Mom, he is so very ugly. He is so old. I don't like him. I don't like him at all. Actually, I think I hate him.”

Hate him? Really? When I pursue the question--“Why?”--I get an answer that reiterates what he has already said.

Somewhat irritated, and a little loud he says: “I told you already, Mom--are you deaf, or something?--because he's very old and ugly.”

I point out Zachary Taylor's military accomplishments, or Millard Fillmore's success in getting Japan to open up to trade.

"Yes, Mom, that's true. But they're old and ugly.”

So this is what I've been thinking about this week, working in my yard when I've had a minute--it's planting season in Miami. Why would Simon say that?

Yes, TV is to blame. From the cartoons he watches, he learns that surfaces seem to matter a lot.

And it is his age. Having recently become aware of just how young he is, he wants to have some power over the world, and naming its imperfections gives him a fleeting illusion of control. Again and again, he impulsively takes aggressive language out for a spin, sees what it feels like to flex your mots injuste muscles. So-and-so is old, or dumb, or mean, or fat, or ugly, or has bad judgment. Or worse. A moron. A turd.

And it is the kids his age he hangs with. They're all nice, yet every third word out of their mouths is an adjective describing something or someone with utter contempt: ugly, lame, boring, stupid.

It's a full-time job just to fight this verbal self-assertion, to talk about respect, generosity, kindness; to point out that no adult in our lives talks this way; to speak of the character of heroes—none of them called someone a moron; to remind him what it feels like to be on the receiving end of nastiness; to ask him what kind of world he wants to live in.

But I don't think that all the above adds up to an answer that explains why Simon responds so negatively to these presidents. I think the answer lies in the fact that of these presidents there are photographs.

Zachary Taylor, like William Henry Harrison, was a war hero with an astounding track record. He fought wars against the Indians, the British, and the Mexicans. Often Zachary Taylor was outnumbered. Usually, rifle in hand, he fought right alongside his men.

Of Harrison there are no photographs that Simon has seen. But he has seen one of Taylor--see above. In that picture, he looks like the guy at your local supermarket who sweeps up the broken jar of tomato sauce, should it slip out of your hand. Taylor doesn't resemble a hero. He looks like a man who has had a rough life, and he wears that life on his face.

I find myself pouring over the photographic portraits--can't keep my eyes off them. These men were human beings: tired, spent, dignified, disheveled, strong, full of feeling and breath.

It is their very humanity Simon finds troubling, I think. He hasn't figured out yet that there are no super-heroes with super-human powers, only human beings--like Simon, like the aging presidents in the photographs, like the guy at the supermarket.

Moral Passion

“I'm a bit sad that you dwell so much on the sad and depressing stuff of history,” my mother wrote me this week. Mother is smart as a whip, and she cares deeply about Simon.

She's right--the readings last week were high on the sadness and horror scale: all consuming fires on two continents, the Plague, doom and destruction. That combination of misery wasn't on purpose—that's where we were in the textbooks that week: the Great Chicago Fire for American history, and the Great London Fire followed by the Plague for world history.

“You probably just don't mention the positive, the creative, the artistic and technical breakthroughs,” Mother went on to write, adding, ”But they are so important. Don't forget them. How about journeys of discovery?"

Good questions--how about all the good stuff in history? The discoveries, the great feats of technology and construction, the grand achievements in the arts?

Many are covered, wonderfully so, in this year's primary textbook for American history, The American Story—100 True Tales from American History by Jennifer Armstrong. We've read stories about the building of canals and railroads; the discovery of a dinosaur in New Jersey; the finding of gold in California; the development of the clipper ship; the reconnaissance balloon corps used during the Civil War; the introduction of the steam-engine into mining; and Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, among others.

But none of these stories interests Simon as much as the ones that involve a tragedy, a searing injustice, or a unforgivable lapse in judgment. The violent and the shameful moments in history lead to longer conversations, to conversations that get continued over lunch and dinner, to big questions that rise unbidden from the back of the car on the way to the supermarket to buy lettuce and detergent.

“Mom--I have a question."

“What's your question?”

“Why do some people kill good presidents?"

And as we wander through the aisles of our local Publix, he turns and says: “What do you think was worse? World War I or World War II?"

Sometimes his questions leave me breathless because I'm so unprepared. He will have worked his way through an audiobook on his own, and I'll have no idea what historical moment he's been cogitating about.

Why do the dark moments in history take such hold of Simon's imagination? He's only eleven. He still sleeps with a nightlight and his arm around two stuffed polar bears called Erik and Dora, much loved presents from my mother.

A couple of years ago, when we studied Christopher Columbus for the first time, Simon kept going to the globe and tracing the daunting westward route to India that led instead to America. This year, everything has changed—not only has Simon grown almost four inches in the last twelve months, he has grown in ways I'm slow to perceive. This year, when the Columbus story was covered again in world history, all Simon wanted to talk about is smallpox and other diseases the Europeans exported wholesale to the Americas.

The last few days we read about Alexander Graham Bell and about Custer at Little Big Horn, but the technological wonder of the telephone could not compete with Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's failure to listen to his Indian scouts. They told him not to attack the Cheyenne and Lakota. They told him he was vastly outnumbered. But Custer attacked anyway. He was going to teach the Indians a lesson. Custer--and every single one of his soldiers--was killed.

“What a stupid moron!” says Simon with utter indignation--moron is a favorite word these days thanks to The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. “Why didn't he listen to his scouts? And couldn't Custer count? Didn't he go to school? I can count. I wouldn't have attacked.” Simon is outraged.

The truth is of late is he is outraged a lot. Three days ago, for world history, we read about Louis XIV. Louis XIV was decreed another moron. “Why did he buy so much golden stuff when the peasants were hungry?"

In Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw suggests that the first great passion that we feel as children is not love--but the moral sense. Suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, children are inflamed with moral passion, and from that passion the adult is born. As one of his characters says:

All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless...grotesque and ridiculous to the mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion.

Late last week, I came upon Simon in bed looking at a book, a hardcover, not a comic book—those were strewn on the floor. His head was lying on his stuffed polar bears. In his hand he was holding a book I had just bought about the Civil War and had left on the coffee table, unsure as to when to introduce it, Photo by Brady—A Picture of the Civil War, also by Jennifer Armstrong. The book, pitched to teenagers, tells the story of the civil war through the pictures taken by Matthew Brady and the photographers he hired to make a record of the Civil War.

“Come here, Mom. Look at this. Look--the rebels stole the soldiers' shoes."

I sit down on the side of his bed and together we look at a picture of the dead at Gettysburg.

“They stole their shoes, Mom. Do you see? That's not fair."

Rust Stains

This week we read about disasters, and more, and more—disasters. First, there was the Great Chicago Fire, and then the swarms of locusts that swept through the mid-west in the 1870s. That pesky omnivorous scourge didn't just devour everything green, everything planted with such care by pioneering settlers--crops , orchards, gardens--but also sheared the wool right off the backs of sheep.

Our readings this week for world history were also replete with calamity: Oliver Cromwell and his bloody Protectorate, followed by the Restoration of Charles II, a time filled with the silence of the plague, the silence of the dead and dying--all you could hear were the funeral bells tolling, followed by the deafening roar of the 1666 Great Fire of London, which destroyed four-fifths of the city.

I thought Simon would have trouble handling all this suffering, but that aspect of the calamities did not interest him very much. Instead, he focused single-mindedly on rewriting history, on fixing the problem, on making sure such catastrophes do not happen again.

He said: “Well, Mom, if Chicago had been built out of bricks, the fire wouldn't have happened. Mom, what is our house built out of?”

He said: “I think if I had a farm in Kansas, I would put a net over it. That would work against locusts, wouldn't it, Mom?”

He said: “Mom, if the plague came to Miami, I would bring all the cats from all over America to Florida. I think all the pythons in the Everglades could also help. They would kill the rats that are covered in plague fleas, and that way people would not die."

The next time I toss and turn at 3 AM questioning why I'm spending so much time on history, sometimes at the expense of math and science, which are not studied with exactly the same enthusiasm, I hope I remember the net spread over acres and acres of Kansas farmland, or the rat-eating pythons of the Everglades. Simon is, if nothing else, learning from the past.

As I've told him hundreds of times, I'm so grateful he ended up in our family—just think of it, by some act of magic or fate, he could have been born into another nice family, maybe one in Italy, or Korea, or Wyoming. We would have never met. Instead, Simon ended up born to us. And that's the best thing that's ever happened to me. Should shit happen, I've got the kid who thinks of rat-eating pythons on my team.

* * *

Simon's response to these catastrophes led me not only to muse about the delight and privilege of having him in our lives, it made me aware again of the fact that Simon is an American--a 100% American boy.

At the risk of of generalizing too much, let me try to explain. I think of Americans as viewing disasters as opportunities: opportunities for action, and if action is not possible--learning. There is a relentless optimism, a go-get'em, go-do-it certainty that the impossible can be achieved, even against hopeless odds. And if all else fails, if all you're stuck with is lemons, as they say in this country: make lemonade; make the best of it; make sure it doesn't happen again.

I, on the other hand, when faced with disasters--think of other disasters. I think of wars, genocide, fires, military coups. I think of lives lost. I find myself so consumed by the lugubrious meanderings of my mind that I'm incapable of wrapping my head around the disaster, and am, initially, clueless as to how to begin to fix or improve the problem. (If there is a crisis, you should think twice about having me on your team.) I lack that American positivism. I tend to go to some dark place first. But then my parents were Simon's age in 1945. Their fathers had died. They lived in urban centers that had been, for the most part, bombed into utter ruins.

That year, when the Russians marched into Berlin, they pillaged what was left and raped more than 100,000 women in that city alone, many repeatedly, as punishment for what the Germans had done in Stalingrad. When they came to my grandmother's apartment, which they entered by rifle-butting a panel of the front door, she hid inside a pull-out couch, or so she said. Afterwords, she discovered that they had ransacked the place and had shat in the bathtub and the sink.

She told me this story in the 1980s. I was offering to remove the rust stains in her tub. In America, they had a product that could do the job; I was sure I could find something similar in Berlin. She insisted the stains would never come out. Not rust. Excrement. Die Russen. They had ruined the tub forever. There was no way to change her mind.

We have stains in our tub here in Miami. Five years ago, we had to redo the plumbing in the kitchen and for a couple of months we did dishes in the tub. Something metal scraped against the enamel and the stains will not come out without an enamel repair kit from Home Depot. Day in, day out, I shower in that tub. When I notice the stains, I think of my grandmother, who died a few months before Simon was born. She was a nice lady. Marie was her name. She read me all of Grimm's and Andersen's fairy tales during her visits to Peru long ago. Year in, year out, I fail to make the repairs.

Cowboys

This week we learned that cattle drives began right after the Civil War. During Reconstruction, people were very hungry, and longhorns were brisket and pot pies on legs. With some help, they could get themselves to a railroad, which might be a few states away, and then via rail to the nearest meat-packing plant, where Armour & Co. put them into cans.

I must confess that for decades I thought that cattle drives were about exercising the cows, or getting them to greener pastures, or maybe to another owner. I didn't realize cattle drives were the beginning of the cattle's demise--in a drive today, a can tomorrow, in someone's tummy after that. I didn't know that the history of the drives was intricately linked to the devastation wrought by that war.

* * *

It was Halloween this weekend. In the spirit of our studies, I try to convince Simon to go as a cowboy. No way.

"Mom, that's for little kids. I'm going to go as a criminal with my gun-machine.”

“It's machine-gun, Simon, and you're not going to take it out for Halloween.”

“It just shoots soft pellets, Mom, and I'm not going to aim the gun at anyone. Just up into the air.”

We have a long talk. I speak of our neighborhood being our community, I remind him of the spirit of Halloween, I mention the many younger kids up the street. I tell him that due to terrorist attacks—some of which he knows about—people are scared. I suggest that he dress up as a criminal from history—maybe Henry VIII.

"Nobody knows who that is, Mom,” he says impatiently. Sadly, he is probably right. “Remember, Mom, they don't know who the Vikings were.” Six month ago Simon made a Viking ship and showed it to the neighborhood boys who were out on their scooters and bikes—all public-school fourth and fifth graders. They had never heard of the Vikings.

So we agree he can go trick-or-treating as a criminal but without the gun. He dresses all in black: black gloves, black sunglasses, black tights, and slips a plastic dagger into the pocket of his black jacket—a man in black. He looks more adorable than dangerous, but George and I let him know he definitely has become a terrifying crook, a thief maybe: “Do us a favor, Mr. Thief--stay away from our house.”

It is not easy to raise a boy in this seductive, consumerist, violent culture. When it comes to eleven-year-old boys, that culture takes the form--primarily--of aim-and-shoot video-games, weaponry and paramilitary equipment, and a steady barrage of cartoons and movies where the heroes have mastered the art of treating others with utter contempt. Stay out of my way, moron.

Earlier in the week, Simon had attended a homeschooling Halloween event. He had dressed up as a detective, in George's fedora and my raincoat, a costume he'd come up with in a jiffy, after I reminded him that kids would be dressing up. Looking at himself in the mirror, he said: "This is great." And yet, once we got to the party, a kid called him a dork. Simon was not about to get put down again. He, too, has learned what the culture's expectations are. So on the actual eve of Halloween, he went around the neighborhood armed, ready for combat. Make my day, worm-face.

George and I work hard trying to teach Simon that you can have a great life without being like everyone else, without buying the latest whatever--gaming-console, I-pod, I-phone, cellphone, video-game, weapon, Transformer, sneaker, designer cap, skateboard, t-shirt, or back-pack. Sometimes I feel like I'm pushing back a flood with my bare hands.

We're not nut-case radicals—Simon has a small arsenal of play-weapons, a DS, and access to a TV, but his screen time is limited, and, until recently, play-dates could not involve screens of any kind. So far so good, although I should confess he has a roomful of Lego, and if I can't immediately locate an audiobook at the library, I buy it. It's not like Simon is deprived.

For now, Simon and his friends are happy to play with Lego, or draw, or run around in the back-yard with swords, or play Battleship, or cards. For now. For now, Simon comes back from the homes of other kids and notices they have few toys, only video-games. For now, we have managed to keep his desires at bay and shape days and weeks that are fulfilling. For now, Lego and books and paper and colored pencils—and his screen-time at the end of the day—are enough. From time to time he calls me an “evil mother” because he cannot watch more TV. But then he laughs: “Just kidding.”

But this won't last. He will be called a dork again—and again. And he will try to fix it by being like everybody else. And being like everybody else will involve buying something—a gaming-console, an aim-and-shoot video game, angry music, something that oozes contempt.

I'm not exactly ready for what is coming, but I recognize it for what it is. Small consolation. I just hope I have a light touch, and some humor, when it shows up.

* * *

Cowboys. My father loved--and loves--cowboys, Westerns, John Wayne. When I was a child and an old John Ford flick was on, I could always bamboozle him into letting us watch TV.

What my father loves about Hollywood cowboys is what I find so appealing about Buddhism. The cowboys from all those movies owned nothing: a horse, a canteen, a bed-roll, a rifle--the miles of this great country stretched out in front of them. There were no fences. The blue sky was all theirs. Having nothing and wanting nothing, they were free. And as Buddhists (and all Hollywood cowboys) know--if you need nothing, own nothing, desire nothing, you will not suffer. (Or, at least, you won't suffer as much.) How do you teach that to a child at the beginning of the 21st century?

________________________________________

My father's favorite cowboy song is Don't Fence Me In. I always thought this was a song that went back to the 19th century. Researching it this week, I discovered it was written by Cole Porter for a movie. There are various wonderful versions of the song on youtube. The one by David Byrne is a favorite.

Horses and Drums and Stuffed Carnivores

There are two versions of the Saint-Gaudens Shaw Memorial. One is in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. . The other is in the Boston Commons--after all, Captain Shaw's black regiment was organized in Massachusetts, before going south to fight in the Civil War. Although I lived in Boston for sixteen years and visited the Commons dozens of times, I have no memory of ever actually looking at it. The Civil War is a very distant, long-forgotten rumble, if you live up north. But when we moved to Washington, D.C. in 2002, that war was with us.

On many weekends we took Simon to the National Gallery: it was free, you could bring a stroller, the cafeteria served sushi for us and fries for the stinkernoodle--a perfect outing. The Saint-Gaudens is off to the left near one of the main entrances. Often, we didn't get to see much of anything else. Simon was four. He loved that sculpture. “Horses and Drums,” he named it. Again and again, George and I would point out the soldier's caps, their bed-rolls, weapons, how young they are, how serious their sad faces—even the horse seems worried. They are going off to war. Overhead, a sleepy and not particularly reassuring angel keeps vigil.

“Don't touch!” the guard would invariably yell, not knowing what to do with this little white boy who showed up every couple of weeks and always got too close, wanting to get into the sculpture, maybe even march away with Shaw's Mighty 54th regiment .

“M'am, I cannot tell you this again--you need to get your boy to step back!”

If it was my job to guard the Saint-Gaudens, I, too, would feel protective. Sometimes, I would sit on the bench and just look at it—the scale of it alone knocks your breath out—while Simon scampered around in front of it counting bed-rolls, caps, weapons. Within two months of leaving Boston, more than half of the soldiers, including Shaw, would be dead. We didn't mention this to Simon, but George and I thought about it. Simon, in turn, thought of bed-rolls and canteens. He wanted to try sleeping on one and drinking from the other. He wished for a drum, a gun, and maybe a real horse—a pony would do. At four, war is full of thrilling danger and exciting possibilities.

Now Simon is eleven. The threatening thunder of war has been a part of our readings from the beginning of this school-year. Many of the Founding Fathers were against slavery, even Jefferson who owned many. The South, and all its representatives were for it, and for states that were strong and independent—they feared a central government that would tell them what to do, like forcing them to end slavery. In the meantime, tobacco and cotton made the South rich and reshaped the economy of the world. The pastry shops in England were full of sweet cakes made with Caribbean sugar. And all over England, rooms were so thick with tobacco smoke that many of us in the twenty-first century would have had to step outside to vomit. But back then, with a piece of cake in hand and a pipe between their lips, who was going to promote abolitionism?

Studying slavery and the Civil War is the first time Simon has had to deal with complexity in a sustained manner. No longer can he group historical figures into just “bad” and “good.” Jefferson was a slave-owner, but he wrote a great Declaration of Independence, and he was a terrific president. Andrew Jackson was a war hero, even though he owned over 400 slaves by the end of his life.

* * *

One day last week, a buddy of Simon's came to spend the afternoon with us. His mother and I had made a deal—the buddy could come over if he was willing to do some work with us.

“No biggie,” said the friend, as he stepped into my car at noon when I picked him up.

“Great,” I said. “We'll talk about the Civil War.”

“I know everything about the Civil War,” he said, buckling himself in. He just turned eleven. “You know, Ulysses S. Grant became president after the war.”

“No,” said Simon, my little historical know-it-all. “Johnson became president when Lincoln was shot. After that came that guy—Ulysses S. Grant.” Simon has been looking ahead in the president biographies we have on the shelf, and memorizing a chart of all the presidents that hangs on the wall.

“You're right,” said the friend, “but you know what? I know how Lincoln was shot.”

“How?” I ask. In the back-seat, both boys have taken our their Nintendo's and have buried their faces in the screens.

Simon's friend, not one to lift his face once a screen is in front of him, looks up and our eyes meet in the rear-view mirror: “Well, he was shot right in the ear—right inside it.” He lifts his index to his ear to show me. “First, he lost his hearing, so he couldn't hear anymore. Then the bullet moved into his brain, so he couldn't move his body. Then he couldn't talk or remember anything—not even the Civil War. It took many hours to die. He suffered, but I think he was lucky because he couldn't even feel it--that's how the brain works. That's how he died.”

“I didn't know Lincoln was shot right in the ear,” I say. (I was pretty sure he wasn't—I thought it was a shot to the back of the head—but I keep mum.) “Thank's man, for telling me.”

The blow-by-blow is so imaginative and empathic, I find myself weaving the car through the streets of another beautiful day in Miami thinking of how deeply that dark and deadly war affects children this age. Simon's buddy had moved right into Lincoln's brain, trying to fathom what his last hours were like.

At the house, I attempt to establish how much the kids already know before I decide what I might teach them. Simon's friend has recently done a unit on the Civil War as part of his homeschooling curriculum. Simon, in turn, has spent hours looking at educational videos and listening to historical audiobooks.

To my amazement, these two pip-squeaks know everything that matters: why the war started, who the major players were, the biggest battles, complicated words and concepts like emancipation, abolitionist, the triangle trade. And they know so much more.

The friend explains to us that the war had to happen because the South needed slavery for its “economy to be profitable. They couldn't make a profit without free labor, you know.”

Simon, in turn, explains that when the war began, Abraham Lincoln asked Garibaldi to lead the Union forces. Garibaldi refused because early in the war Lincoln only “wanted to keep the states together; he was sort of a big coward in the beginning and wouldn't make the war a war to end slavery and all that stuff. Lincoln changed his mind later, but by then Garibaldi was busy.” (Simon learned about Garibaldi from George.)

“Well, you guys, ” I say, “I'm having trouble finding something you don't already know. How about the Union's balloon corps? If you were in a war and you had hot air balloons, a new technology back then, how would you use them?” So we sit on the couch and we read a story about Thaddeus Lowe and the Union Balloon Corps.

I could write a few paragraphs about how the boys know so much because they are home-educated. But the truth is both kids have an interest in history and have history geeks for parents—they would be exposed to this material whether they sat in a regular classroom or not.

They know so much about this topic because--on their own-- they've made an effort to master the material, to make sense of it, letting the facts, stories, and details marinate in their minds. They wonder how Lincoln died. They perseverate about poor decisions, and about concepts like coward and war hero. Unlike the many religious and territorial wars in Europe they've read about for world history, something real and comprehensible is at stake here. Slavery had to end.

I suggest they watch the short videos on brainpop about the Civil War. Simon knows how to access the site on his own, so I leave the guys alone for a few minutes with my lap-top. When I return to the living room, they've piled the couch full of stuffed animals. The friend is sprawled on top of them and has a stuffed shark in his arms. Sitting at the far end of the sofa is Simon, hugging his favorite polar bear in one arm and cradling the laptop in the other, turning it so his friend can see. I'm reminded that when Simon was younger, he once explained to me that when he gets sad or scared, he likes to "cuddle" with his "stuffed carnivores."

"They protect me.”

I'd been considering telling them of the 620,000 dead soldiers and the indeterminate number of civilian casulaties, more dead than in all the other wars America has fought put together. I want to tell them about the fields at Antietam, how they were covered ankle-deep in blood. I want to tell them about the Gatling gun and how it mowed down men and horses--I've been spending my evenings reading about the bloodshed. But seeing the boys on the couch, they seem so very young. And they know too much already. Time for a break. I remember I have some cones in the cabinet and ice-cream in the freezer.

I'm not much of a believer, but please, dear God, let these boys live their lives all the way through.

Over ice-cream cones, I make some decisions. We'll see the Shaw Memorial again--soon, either in Boston or D.C. We'll try to get to Gettysburg this year. Maybe next summer, when Simon is a little older, we'll open up a folding table and work our way through all the Civil War battles. We'll buy some tin or plastic soldiers, lots of them. We'll talk of military strategy. We'll talk of the dead.

Click on the link to go to the National Gallery website and learn more about the Shaw Memorial .

Potato Chips

I've never understood the appeal of those little things, a mouthful of crusty salt and oil. In the midst of the tales we read this week, stories about the gold-rush in California and some of what it wrought—the discovery of the redwood tree (tall and majestic), and the development of the Clipper sailing ship (speedy and crowned by countless cloud-white sails), allowing folks from all over the world to get to California ASAP to pan for gold—there was the story of the potato chip.

It was invented in Saratoga Springs—who knew? I thought it was bequeathed to the world by the English, one more example of their lousy cuisine, on a par with fish'n chips served up in a cone of day-old newspaper, or their mystery-meat pies. But it turns out potato chips are truly American. A cranky customer at a Saratoga eatery in the mid 1800s kept sending back his steak fries, claiming they were still raw inside. The chef, one George Crum, a somewhat touchy fellow, cooked up a dish of very thinly cut potatoes fried to a crisp, as if to say: “You wann'em cooked, you got'em.”

To everyone's amazement, they were a hit. Every joint in Saratoga started serving Saratoga chips—that's what they called them at first.

Simon's good for three or four, if there's absolutely nothing else to eat. I've tried to like them all my life. I've wanted to fit in and embrace various--if not all--things American. I love food, and all things that have to do with food. But Simon echoed how I felt about potato chips when I suggested we make some from scratch: “Why?”

* * *

My mother is a wonderful cook. As a child, I wondered if the girls who wanted to come over after school, came to hang out with me, or to eat my mother's goulash and her chocolate pudding.

In my parents' home, we ate at a set table, all together, for every meal. In Peru, and later in Brazil, the local German school started early and was over by one-fifteen. However bored I was while diagramming German sentences, there was always lunch to look forward to; however endless my homework, dinner was only a few hours away. And once at the table, we sat there for maybe an hour, or more, eating and chatting, nibbling on more dessert, while my parents drank coffee.

I started cooking early--I was eleven--making pancakes for girlfriends as an afternoon snack, served with butter and jam. By the time I went to college, I could roast a chicken and a leg of lamb. In my twenties and thirties, I had a weakness for men whose life centered around a kitchen and shared meals. Unemployed, decades older, burdened by a history of suicide attempts, married, or residing two continents way—if he cooked, I was interested. On the other hand, if he had nothing in his fridge, ate off paper plates, and had no dining room, that affair went nowhere, no matter that he was a doctor, drove a Benz, and was a hit with my parents. On our first date, George, all professorial shabby tweed and scuffed loafers, made a three course Chinese meal from scratch and served it with cold Tsingtao.

What I find hardest about living in America is that food so often occupies a trivial place in people's lives. Little effort is put into procuring, preparing, presenting, sharing, enjoying every meal of every day. The press has been full about all the reasons why—no need to repeat.

Still, I don't get it. I think of the dining room table as the center of my marriage and our family life. All special events turn around food. So-and-so is coming—what shall we make? Birthdays, holidays, weekends, anniversaries—salmon? asparagus? Prosecco? Most of my dearest friends have lives that turn around meals. Our affection for each other is expressed with food, the sharing of a few hours over bread and wine. Other ways of living seem sad to me. Something crucial--for me--is lacking. And I find myself pushing that sadness away, not letting people very close who do not share my gastronomic obsessions. Friendships without good food are like love affairs without sex—they end quicker than most, and if they last, they lack the same intensity, generosity, delight, loyalty, joy. All this to say, I feel like a very odd duck in this country, and my life in America has meant I have only a few friends.

But I began with the potato chip. Early in my first marriage, we went to spend Christmas with his parents. They were interesting and talented people, living in Maine in a home that had once been a tavern in the 1800s. From a drafty hallway, I called my parents in sunny Brazil to wish them a happy holiday. I had intended to keep it together and very brief—international calls were pricey back then. But hearing their voices, I began to cry. I complained about the food. No one had baked anything special; we had meat-loaf made with onion soup mix, I think, and English muffins. And in between sobs: “And, and, Mother, guess what they served as an appetizer on Christmas Eve?” I was so upset, I could barely get the words out: “Potato chips!”

To be fair, my first husband was deeply disturbed by my own parents upon first meeting them. “All they talk about is food!” he sputtered. “At the end of breakfast, they talk about lunch—who will buy it, cook it, serve it. At the end of lunch, they go on about dinner. For God's sake, we're people of the 20th century—not cannibals!”

I have so little control over most aspects of my life—jobs, friends, husbands, countries, children, youth, parents, health, wealth, even happiness—everything comes and goes. But meals—those I can control. I can set a table and around it gather the people I love. I can make something ever so simple--a casserole, a salad, a berry crisp. I can invite everyone to sit and eat. Whatever losses I've suffered, I forget. All that truly matters is right in front of me.

Servitude

(Picture: Claudia's first communion--with her brother Peter, some friends, and Dionisia. Lima, Peru, 1969.)

In our learning about America, we have now reached the mid-1800s. From the emotional workout that were the Indian Wars, we've marched straight into the searing whip-lash of slavery. No happy slaves singing contentedly on the grand plantation—the textbook we use did not include such a story. Instead, this week we read about Henry Brown, a slave whose wife and children had been sold and taken away from him. In 1849, bereft and hopeless, he mailed himself to freedom in a box. Tightly confined in a large package, he went from Richmond, Virginia to Philadelphia, to an address manned by the Anti-Slavery Society.

There are many details to this story: what kind of box was used; how Henry survived inside the box; the length of the trip; the mismanagement of the postal service which ignored signs on the box that read: “Handle With Care. This Side Up.” Henry Brown wasn't “handled” with anything that resembled “care,” but he did make it.

The happy ending is irrelevant to Simon. He cannot be bamboozled by an upbeat twist in the plot. He doesn't care about Henry Brown, the grown-up, celebrating his freedom in Philadelphia.

“What about his children? How many did Henry Brown have? What were their names? How old were they? Who purchased them? Who took care of them? Did the kids miss their mother and father? They must have been so sad. What about the mom? Her heart was broken. Why don't they tell us how many children Henry Brown had? Just saying he had “children” is not fair. How many? Two? Eight? The author is not so smart. We need to know. Who bought the kids? What happened to them?”

In case I didn't hear him in his first barrage of questions, Simon asks again: “Mom, what happened to the kids?”

“Sweetie, I don't know. Let's hope their new owners were kind to them. Let's hope they got food and shelter. Let's hope they did not have to work too hard.”

“Yeah,” says Simon.

We lie there, on the day-bed, for a few minutes completely silent. I wrap my arm around him.

Although he's eleven, Simon has recently taken to bringing a stuffed rabbit to the day-bed, especially to our readings in American history. The word regression has crossed my mind.

Simon lifts the rabbit to my neck and makes kissing sounds. “Do you like my rabbit?” he asks.

“He's a very cute rabbit,” I say.

“You wouldn't really cook him with mustard--would you? Or give him away?”

I have been threatening to cook the pesky bunny rabbit aux moutarde and serve him up for dinner, or give him to my younger sister's small children.

“Of course not.” I say, “We'll take good care of him.”

* * *

After his schooling in America, my father moved back to Germany. Unable to get an immigration visa to America, my parents, who'd met while working in Cologne, decided to emigrate to Lima, Peru. In the early fifties, jobs and housing were still scarce in Germany; if you were lucky enough to have a job, the pay was very low. At twenty-two, Father landed a job working for a tin baron operating out of Peru and Bolivia; father was supposed to oversee the tin ore shipments going out of the port of Callao. In time, my father became a metal trader in Peru, and later in Canada and Brazil, working for an American company.

In Peru, I grew up with maids. The houses and apartments came with at least one maid's room, or a little beehive of tiny rooms the size of closets, sometimes with no windows, only ventilation slits going out to a hallway. The maid's bathroom was often the size of a small shower stall. To shower, you had to sit or kneel on the toilet. There was a drain at the bottom of the bathroom floor. My parents, unused to colonial ways, would give a maid two of the tiny rooms, or later, when they were flush, move walls to make the maid's room livable.

Various women worked for us over the years in South America. Usually just one at a time. They were a constant of my childhood, always in the background. They cleaned, served, cooked, washed, ironed. They tended to my brother Peter and me, and later my little sister Andrea, when my parents went out, or when they traveled abroad.

However, with the exception of one, I cannot remember the names, or the faces, of any of the women who worked for us in Lima. I know Dionisia's name (in the picture above) because she's the only one that appears in the dozens and dozens of annotated photo-albums my father made of our years in Peru.

But there was one maid I think of often. She worked for us in the early seventies, in the years before we left Peru. In 1968 there had been a nationalist revolution. I was eight. After that, foreigners were no longer welcome. It took my parents until 1974 to give up and leave Peru, a country they'd come to call home.

What I remember about this one maid is that her room smelled of starched and ironed laundry, and hair that had not been washed in a few days; she listened to soap-operas on the radio while she ironed; she would knit herself a sweater and then, after a few weeks or months, unravel it onto an empty toilet paper roll, to then begin a new and different sweater; she made great fried egg sandwiches—two pieces of white toast, one egg fried in oil with salt and pepper.

I began going to her room because of my assignments for my home-economics class—ten centimeters worth of knitting. Could she help me? If she could knit for me, I would iron. So I ironed items I couldn't mess up, like underpants, while she did my knitting.

She didn't say much. Neither did I. I never asked her about herself. We never looked at one another. She ironed or knitted. The radio played soap-operas. When I wasn't ironing, I sat cross-legged on her bed. She made me take off my shoes.

And then I started coming to her room all the time, to do my homework, to read, just to hang out. And she let me in every time. Her room was bare. A calendar, I think, hung on the wall. My parents were stressed, fighting. You couldn't buy chicken, or gas, certain days of the week. There were tanks in the streets. Father had a job offer in Teheran; then he had one in Manila. Who wanted to go there? The maid's room was far away from all of that.

I don't know if we got her address when we left for Canada. Maybe. I never wrote. We didn't take a picture of her. I don't remember her name, and her face is a blur.

She was kind to me. I missed her and her room when we first arrived in Montreal.

Decades later, I found myself at a Buddhist retreat in Elmhust, New York, trying to learn how to meditate. I wasn't any good at it. I couldn't count to three without a tsunami of worries rushing in.

When I met with the abbot, an old bony Taiwanese man, he said: “Think of smell, smell that help you settle your very silly worry mind.”

In that cold room—it was a snowy January-- I remembered the maid's room: clean starched laundry and unwashed hair. And how the sunlight hit her bare walls. And the low whisper of the radio.

I've thought of her often since. I know life can't have been good to her. I know that. I do. She was in my life—and then she was not. She was an Indian who had come down from the hills for a life of servitude in the city. My family hired her to do the work we did not want to do. And then we left for a new life in Canada, where we hired an imperious, fat woman called Madame Genarde to clean our house once a week. For a half-day's work, we paid Madame Genarde, whose name I do remember, as much as we paid in a month to our maids in Peru.

The Wounds of the Past

(The illustration: Andrew Jackson by Simon)
We've been learning about the Indian Wars and the presidents who won them--to Simon's great delight. But all week my mind drifts away from bloody battles and the Trail of Tears; instead, I find myself thinking about the afternoon I saw my first John James Audubon—about whom we also read recently. It was over twenty-five years ago. My college sweetheart and I had a friend who was renting a room near Harvard Square in someone's private home, and one day we went to pick him up to go for kebabs, or a beer. The Audubon hung in the entrance of that home, over the stairwell, luminous and playful and exact.

Peter was the friend's name. Peter had been our pal in college. He had moved to Boston to study law. Peter, a child of missionaries, was, unlike some of us, not only thoughtful but also single-minded and ambitious. At that time, I was working at an arts bookstore and my sweetheart, Mark, was trying to figure out how to paint in his own style, as opposed to all the painters he admired. Mark and I dallied in the arts and the book business. But Peter had bigger plans. Last I checked, he has spent his life prosecuting white collar criminals in Texas.

We were let into the entrance and asked to wait. It was one of those well-appointed homes to which I, at that time, had no access: fleur de lis wallpaper, wainscoting, Queen Anne couches and Persian rugs, portraits and paintings illuminated by their own individual light. Through a double-doorway, I could see a wall of books and a group of older women in dresses drinking tea.

Waiting for Peter to come down the stairs, I found myself drawn to the Audubon. Which Audubon? No idea--birds of some sort. What I do remember is feeling deeply content to be living in Boston, even though the rent-controlled apartment we called home looked nothing like this one, and within a year Mark and I would split, and the gay men I worked with at the bookstore had AIDS, or their lovers and friends had AIDS, and before long most of them would be dead.

There were many moments of my life in Boston that were perfect and uncomplicated, like gazing at that Audubon: Saturday mornings at the Museum of Fine Arts when you could get in for free; listening to the Messiah at the Emmanuel Church; playing hooky just to spend the day perched over books in the vast and stately Reading Rooms of the Boston Public Library on Copley Square; wandering through the haunted hallways of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and coming upon a John Singer Sargent; or better still--a poorly illuminated Vermeer. It was so easy back then--I was twenty-three or four--to love this country.

“That's an original Audubon,” Peter said, when he finally skipped down the stairs. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

* * *

I read Simon about John James Audubon and show him images on my laptop. I point out the elegant compositions, the clean lines.

“They're just birds, Mom. What's the big deal? Birds are soooo lame.”

Audubons don't grab his interest, but Andrew Jackson surely does. Simon carries the biography around the house. To my amazement, he offers to read it to me all over again. Jackson used expletives and fought in the Revolutionary War as a thirteen-year old; he had a scar down his cheek, a gift from a British officer whose boots he refused to polish; he conquered Florida; he won the Battle of New Orleans; he was born in a one-room cabin but he ended up with a big plantation and hundreds of slaves; he was tough, rough and very popular.

“But what about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears?” I ask. “After Jackson conquered Florida, he relocated the Seminoles to Oklahoma. He made them walk--thousands died.”

“That wasn't so good,” he says after a moment of silence. “I'm glad I'm not a Seminole.”

Simon is eleven. He wants to like what everyone else likes. He wants to fit in. The biography Simon read told him that, unlike John Quincy Adams, Jackson was immensely popular, that he was a war hero. Moreover, Jackson conquered Florida from the Spanish for the United States. In Simon's mind, if Jackson hadn't done that, Florida might never have become part of the United States. If that were the case, how would he access Cartoon Network from our living room in Miami?

“And Simon, remember he also had a huge plantation with hundreds of slaves.”

“Well, I'm glad I'm not a slave.”

This is how a kid's mind works. It takes information that is hard to process, that it cannot accommodate comfortably, and it finds a way to live with that knowledge. It was terrible, but at least it wouldn't have happened to him.

My mind, in turn, wants to wander away from that knowledge altogether and think only about Audubon, walking around in gorgeous Kentucky, drawing birds. For me, the stories of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and William Henry Harrison are fascinating—and repulsive. Land was needed for all the new immigrants coming to America; canals were built to connect rivers and lakes to ease transportation, settlement, and trade; peace was necessary to ensure the well-being and prosperity of immigrants, commerce and transportation. So the land was cleared—cleared of Creek, Choctaw, Blackhawk, Sauk, Seminole, Cherokee, Shawnee, etc. The Indian Removal Act was enacted, and battle after bloody battle after bloody battle was fought and won. From these deadly encounters the likes of Jackson and Harrison emerged as heroes--while whole nations vanished.

Unscrupulous despotism, tyrannical chauvinism—these are words I want to teach Simon. I want to tell him how much I hate this ugly side of the American character. I want to let him know it frightens me that there are Americans to this day, millions of them, who are certain they are better than others--a chosen people. These same folks are full of a zealous and aggressive patriotism, and a blind enthusiasm for military glory. I want to tell him that part of this country's complex heritage is made of stark inequalities and a ground soaked in innocent blood.

But I don't. I've rocked the boat enough as is. I need to let Simon make sense of these stories on his own. There are many ways to view Jackson. He won the Battle of New Orleans, killing two thousand British, suffering only a couple of dozen casualties. They called him “Old Hickory,” because hickory wood is tough.

From Jackson we move onto Van Buren and then William Henry Harrison. Harrison won various battles against Tecumseh and the Shawnee. Eventually, Tecumseh was killed by Harrison's men at the Battle of the Thames River.

Simon gazes at all the battle paintings in the Harrison biography and says: “War is horrible.”

Learning about Tecumseh, how he'd organized a large Indian confederacy that opposed the United States army, I remember that long ago I read a poem by Mary Oliver called “Tecumseh.” I pull my ragged copy off the shelf. I bought that little collection, American Primitive, back in Boston all those years ago. I wonder what Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison would make of a lesbian poet. Would they find a place for her in their America? And I think again of Peter-- has he ever read Oliver? Does he remember the lovely Audubon? We lost touch decades ago. Maybe I should drop him a line.

“Tecumseh”

by Mary Oliver

I went down not long ago
to the Mad River, under the willows
I knelt and drank from the crumpled flow, call it
what madness you will, there's a sickness
worse than the risk of death and that's
forgetting what we should never forget.
Tecumseh lived here.
The wounds of the past
are ignored, but hang on
like the litter that snags among the yellow branches,
newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.

Where are the Shawnee now?
Do you know? Or would you have to
write to Washington, and even then,
whatever they said,
would you believe it? Sometimes

I would like to paint my body red and go out into
the glittering snow
to die.

His name meant Shooting Star.
From Mad River country north to the border
he gathered the tribes
and armed them one more time. He vowed
to keep Ohio and it took him
over twenty years to fail.

After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,
it was over, except
his body could not be found,
and you can do whatever you want with that, say

his people came in the black leaves of the night
and hauled him to a secret grave, or that
he turned into a little boy again, and leaped
into a birch canoe and went
rowing home down the rivers. Anyway,
this much I'm sure of: if we ever meet him, we'll know it,
he will still be
so angry.

from American Primitive