Wildflower Lessons

          My older son, Andrew, and I spent last Wednesday together. He and his wife, Emily, were in California for his spring break from medical school in New York, where winter, as usual, is acquiescing to spring unwillingly. We have had the finest spring in the Central Valley that I can remember in my thirty-one years here: day after day has been perfect, sunny, clear, warm, unlike our usual quick spring that soon launches into the hot days of summer, with an occasional brief, chilly respite in April and May before summer sets in to stay, until sometime in October. It helps that daylight savings is now set two weeks earlier than in the past, the longer days prolonging the peaceful joy of spring. Andrew and I spent several hours driving through the foothills, taking in the lush green, the clouds of wildflowers, the cows and sheep and goats and their numerous offspring savoring the plentiful grasses. 

          I had not intended the drive to be so long, but I do not know the jagged Southern Sierra foothill roads well yet. Nor did we mind. As the car climbed, and the road narrowed and twisted, and the color of the hills changed from yellow to gold to white, with blue lupine in the ditches along the road, we talked intermittently, normal for us. With my younger son, Stephen, conversation usually flows easily and satisfyingly, but with Andrew, it is more halting. 

          I find myself studying my children now that, for the first time, I cannot see them on a whim. Until now, at least one was always within a couple of hours drive, and if the other was further afield, it was never for more than a couple of months. Last summer, with Stephen’s college graduation and employment and Andrew’s marriage and beginning medical school in New York, my sons were simultaneously removed from my daily life. 

          I, too, chose then to move, to live with my partner. In retrospect, I sometimes think this was an unwise decision, but then I imagine the frustration I might feel alone in my house, knowing I could not just pick up on the weekend and drive southwest for a day with Stephen or northwest for a day with Andrew. Our roles have all changed, theirs more easily, I imagine, full of adventure and newness, though I am sure it has not been one hundred percent peaches and cream. I find myself at times at a loss in my new role. There is nothing specific to do: no diapers to change, no activities to drive to, no school work to oversee, no tuition checks to write, no group of their friends to take to dinner. 

          I know they need me as much as ever, to know I am here and love and support them, no matter what. They still call, still show their love and trust, with questions about insurance, landlords, and recipes, and reports on their week. But the challenge seems somehow so much bigger. Did I set a good example in life for them to follow? I talked with them about the importance of loving the only brother you will ever have, who will love you as no one else can. I talked to them about the importance of communication. I talked to them about not being afraid to change paths, to take risks. But did I demonstrate any of this adequately?

          I think I have only begun to learn about myself again in the last two years, after a hiatus of perhaps thirty years, that included only intermittent times of lucidity. I attribute this to hormones, depression, lack of self confidence, a failed marriage, no community roots, minimal communication within my family, and the usual demands of parenting and careers. Awaking today with restless legs (which thankfully usually only occur at night when I calm them with Requip), a clenched jaw, and a sense of frustration, I took a long, hot bath, on Doug’s recommendation. I am so guilty of exactly what I protest in others: bottling up thought and emotion. As I read Bill Hayes’ fascinating The Anatomist, a biography of Henry Gray, body and mind relaxed. After a shower to wash my hair, I told Doug I was going to excuse myself from coffee with him and his daughter, Katie, and stay home to write this, instead. 

          I am only beginning, still, to learn to identify what I want to do and to do it without guilt or anger. I seem to have spent much of my life protesting that I am ignored, but unable to state a priori what it is I want, until I dissolve in frustration, like a two-year-old, as my siblings and then-spouse so often told me. Doug and I each wish deeply that our marriages had succeeded. We each carry a desire for our children to be strong, healthy, independent, despite the wounds their parents have inflicted. We each believe the wounds may have been deeper had we stayed married, and that we married for the wrong reasons. And yet, here are our four incredible children, who but for our previous partners, would not be here, and they are, all in all, healthy, strong, and independent. They are who they are, and, I think, have learned from their parents' mistakes. 

          When I tell my sons I am so impressed and so pleased by their communication with their partners, they respond it was obvious that their dad and I did not communicate. In college, between them, they changed majors, traveled abroad, spent vacations with friends rather than family, all of which pleased me. For each, their partner is one of the centers of their life now, and when I think of Andrew and Emily, Stephen and Jessie, I feel the comfort and peace of the seamless universe. 

          That is what I felt driving with Andrew through the foothills. It is the first day I have spent alone with him since he was married last summer. During my February visit to New York, I spent more time alone with Emily than I ever have, and we came to know each other better. It was a pleasure, not a challenge, as they so clearly adore and care for each other, and she is open, sincere, and tender. 

          What I think I know about my son is that his life experience to now, with its successes and disappointments, simplicities and complexities, has fertilized the miraculous combination of genes that is him to grow a young man who can enjoy with his mother, for an afternoon, the sensual pleasure of nature’s rebirth in spring. His mother, still thankfully growing, can know, without regret or wistfulness, that Emily is the woman to whom he turns with his deepest self and desires.

Story Cloth

          Yeng Wednesday after school, I participated in a student study team, a gathering of teachers, counselors, the school nurse, and the school psychologist with a student and parents or guardians to discuss the students' strengths and weaknesses academically and socially and to try to determine a course of action to assist the student. In this case, the student is Hmong, a junior named Yeng. His mother and older brother were there. We have a Hmong counselor, who translates as needed, which is often, in addition to her regular duties. Connie—her name is indicative of a tendency among the Hmong when giving their children American names to use names that are straight out of the 1950s—was born here, but speaks Hmong fluently. 

          Yeng is among our most recent influx of Hmong immigrants from the refugee camps in Thailand. The supposed last 10,000 or so arrived about two years ago, thirty-plus years after the Hmong, who had been recruited by the CIA to fight the North Vietnamese, fled their mountain homes in Laos when the United States conceded its inability to "win" the Vietnam War. I am not well-versed in the details, but I do know that some Hmong still hide in the hills of Laos, while others face atrocities and death at the hands of the Thai. The "lucky" ones have finally been able to immigrate to the United States, mostly to California's Central Valley, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, where they become part of an immigrant community that has struggled to preserve its history and traditions, while becoming American. I suspect that within that community, there is now a certain snobbery toward the new arrivals, just as there is by Mexican Americans born here toward immigrants, legal or not, born in Mexico.

          True to a stereotype that has developed, I have erroneously expected all Asian students, whether Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, or Hmong, to excel academically. I honestly think it is the rare parent who does not wish for their child to excel, but often the wherewithal to motivate the child toward that result lacks. Discipline, consistency, valuing knowledge, realism, meeting basic needs, delusion: they can all play a role. As a teacher, I want to challenge each child to reach and possibly exceed their intellectual potential and to provide them the tools to do so—I honestly think these are the two main ingredients of teaching. The child and the parents or guardians have to take it from there, and if they do not, there is not much any teacher can do, except keep hoping that the parents will come around or, more likely, though still on the order of a miracle, that the child can divorce his goals and potentials from all negative, or absent, influence from home. 

          But how does the teacher know the child's potential when she can barely communicate with him? These students must both acquire English on a steep learning curve and study the other academic disciplines. In the beginning, they have two English classes daily, with our English language development (ELD) teacher, and often, as in Yeng's case, a third class, because they have not yet been able to pass the English portion of the high school exit exam. Their ELD classes are taught entirely in English, just as we teach French entirely in French from day one, as immersion is the best technique, the one that mimics how we acquire our first language. 

          Yeng does well in science and math, which is not unusual for second language students, especially if they also happen to like the subject matter. There is also a bilingual aide in those classes. Despite having numerous Hispanic and Hmong students with minimal English skills, I have had no such aides all year, and given the nature of the class, I cannot teach at a level below the skills required to pass the exam. The best I can do is try to dole out ample individual encouragement and feedback. Some students do well, because of internal motivation and, in some cases I think, a natural capacity for language-learning. I smile broadly when a student who has not uttered a word all year says, "Hi, Ms. Harper," or, "May I go to the restroom?" or when a student who could barely write two sentences completes an essay. These are huge first steps. 

          Yeng, however, shows no intiative, not unlike too many students. They do not like to read, and they do not like to think. I tell them they have not foud the right thing to read yet. I tell them their brain is a muscle that must be exercised to become stronger. I tell them to learn English, they must speak, hear, read, and write English. Occasionally one discovers I am right. 

          Does Yeng have a learning disability? We do not think so. He is getting reading glasses, which hopefully will help—if he wears them. I comment to the school nurse and psychologist, "If only we could superglue kids' glasses to their noses." 

          Shong I am enthralled by Yeng's mother, Shong Lee, her face, her comportment and demeanor. I do not know the Hmong forms of address—often father, mother, and children have different last names—so I shall refer to her as Shong. I listen earnestly to Connie's translations and Shong's responses, thinking surely I should be able to understand a word here and there; I am, after all, a language teacher. But I have to rely on Connie's translations: Shong is grateful that all of Yeng's teachers have come to the meeting: it is living proof that we care about her son. 

          Yeng's older brother listens intently and occasionally comments, but he seems more a witness. Shong agrees her son needs to take more initiative. She is worried, too, that he is beginning to hang out with the wrong sort of kids—we tell her he has cut class a couple of times, though for the most part he is never a discipline problem. Although 17, he seems immature, as if he could be easily swayed. 

           Still, it is the mother who fascinates me. Her face does not appear lined or worn, but it displays wisdom and experience. Her hands, the short fingernails with dirt stains under them, are lovelier than the hands of women who spend time and money on fake nails with intricately colored designs. Her dark hair, with a few strands of gray, is pulled back imperfectly, wisps allowed to float. It is not the glistening black hair of some Asians. Rather, it is an earthy black, healthy and thick and experienced. She does not look like some Hmong women, who seem like dolls, costumed by a child and placed in a child's fantasy that mixes time and place. She wears a dark blazer, perhaps put on over a simple cotton shirt and skirt in which she stooped in the field I assume she works in. The Hmong grow the best strawberries. Lately I have seen the Hmong farmers, men, women, families, stooped low over their expanding plants as the ground warms. 

          Shong knows that her son must acquire the skills to succeed here. She must feel at times a quiet desperation that she is not familiar with the system, that she cannot communicate directly with Yeng's teachers. As I look at her, I think she must have learned long ago to master her fears, when she crossed the Mekong River with her parents and siblings, seeking refuge in Thailand. She must have been born hopeful, or learned it. Perhaps marriage in the refugee camp and giving birth to her children there was no more than fulfilling cultural expectations, regardless of the surroundings. But she brought her children, with her husband, to this agrarian area, where there can be a sense of community among other Hmong and fields. 

          Still, America is a world apart from the lives she has known. Shong's eyes do not have the hollow look of one who is overwhelmed. They are the eyes of a woman who lives life, who accepts her deck of cards and plays it for all she is worth. This is what she wants for Yeng, to play his deck well. She is not with us, seated around this conference table, to ask for the moon or a bye. She wants only our honest assessment of her son and our honest suggestions, to help her comprehend what is expected of Yeng in order for him to succeed academically. 

          I imagine Shong as the daughter, new to America, unfrightened by the feast of options arrayed before her, not longing for the familiarity of the refugee camp, with its squalor, limitations, and threats, but ready to accelerate the metamorphosis of her life. If only the mother's hunger could be transferred to her son. Even a portion would do. 

          The next day we have a journal entry in class. Yeng appears to be writing.

The Survivor Staircase

          It is Mach 10, 2008. Today, the 9/11 Survivor Staircase was removed, to make way for redevelopment of the World Trade Center. I sometimes wonder if rather than a show of force and might the United States should not acknowledge and respect more the past. Memories should not always be erased, or displayed, as the staircase will be, in a museum, detached from life and history and remembrance.

           In France—at least as of ten years ago, when I was last there—gratitude is still shown, sixty years later, to Americans of any age for having freed France from the Nazi grip. War monuments preside over the countryside. It is at once an eerie and peaceful sensation to walk around and through a half-destroyed bunker on the Normandy cliffs and read the plaque on a monument to American engineers, as voices of children playing in the sand in the sun's warmth drift up from below, and the wind whispers through the grasses, of past struggle and horror, of calm and hope.
          Traditionally, the graduation announcements for the school where I teach carry a background picture of the original school, a lovely, ivy-clad, two-story brick building, which was torn down decades ago for the sin of not meeting new earthquake standards. Similarly, the City of Fresno tore down its original, dignified courthouse, toppling the cupola first, and built a gray, concrete, prison-like rectangle in its stead.
          Man keeps trying to conquer nature. We defy gravity, the ocean, earthquakes. The human mind is, indeed a wonderful thing, in its curiosity and intellectual capacity. Yet weeds emerge in sidewalks every spring, and the abandoned blacktop soon yields to grasses and wildflowers. Perhaps man needs to spend more time trying to conquer human nature, to explore more the capacity of the heart.

          At our local junior college, the proud, elegant, brick Old Administration Building, after some twenty-five years of court battles between preservationists and destructionists, was saved from the wrecking ball. Now students, faculty, and administration can again be part of a history, of a work of art, of the breezes and shadows that design the two interior courtyards.

           What do we learn in building on the discoveries and accomplishments of our predecessors, rather than replacing them in their entirety with our own? Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth is enjoying a resurgence of interest with the release of its sequel, World Without End, nearly two decades later. At the center of Pillars is the construction, over a period ofo four centuries, of a Gothic cathedral, a major player also in the sequel. Europeans have had the wisdom, even sometimes during war, to allow these architectural masterpieces to stand. What if all the cathedrals had been torn down? Our children would have had the cathedral-free day they begged for when we traveled in Europe, but our fourteen-year-old would not have had Pillars of the Earth to keep him (and his mother's mind) relatively happily engaged as he waited alone in Amsterdam, where he'd traveled by himself from Parirs, for the rest of his group. We do not know the impact our decisions now, to tear down or to preserve, will have on future generations.

        Before dignitaries, survivors, and anonymous onlookers, the Survivor Staircase was lifted and put on a truck to be moved to the 9/11 museum at Ground Zero. In the photos, one sees behind the stairs the surviving World Trade Center Towers. Are they not equally informative, the stairs that are detached from their raison d'etre and the still-standing skyscrapers?
          I've often thought 9/11 was an emotional upheaval for my dad, that it contributed to the winding down of his life over the next ten months. He believed so deeply in man's capacities in all realms, his capacity to think, to achieve, to feel, to overcome, to be human. I believe the Saint Louis Gateway Arch represented all of this for him. The company with which he spent his career, PDM, realized Eero Saarinen's design. Pre-computer, they fabricated the materials and engineered the arch's erection, using equipment they designed and built. Man's ability to create and to problem-solve thrilled my dad, and he thought it limitless. He held patents himself, that in our computer age I can search and print from the United States Patent Office website. If only I could, as I myself live through my sixth decade, search his mind.
          In City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, James Glanz and Eric Lipton write that after the bids of Bethlehem Steel and US Steel, which were termed extortionist, were rejected, parts of the WTC were fabricated by a dozen steel companies around the country, in 1968. PDM constructed "the tridentlike forks, some of them fifty-five tons apiece, that would sit on the base columns and run to where the regular pinstripes began on the ninth floor.... It seemed that an entire nation had been mobilized to build the World Trade Center" (Glanz and Lipton 186-87). I have a hazy remembrance of looking at pictures of the remains of the WTC, of the "trident forks" still standing, of my father explaining that was the part PDM had built, of seeing in his eyes and on his face, hearing in his voice, what seemed a great, inexpressible anguish.
          Poseidon, the half-man, half-fish Greek god of the sea, and his son by the sea nymph Amphitrite, Triton, each carried a trident, a three-pronged ("toothed," in Greek), long-handled spear. Poseidon caused violent, earthquake-spawning storms by striking his trident on the ocean floor. He calmed the same storms by riding his gold chariot. He was the brother of Zeus, the king of the gods, the god of thunder and lightning. What gods watched on, incapable of controlling man, as the Twin Towers were struck and collapsed?
          In a rare stroke of fate, shortly after 9/11, my brother, sister, and I arrived simultaneously at our parents' home, our own family members all coincidentally otherwise occupied. We took our childhood places at the dining table, as though transported back decades, as though needing the reassurance of our childhood nuclear family.
          World War II must have shortened the lives of those it did not kill, of the American soldiers who, like my father, slogged through the sand and mud, heat and cold of Northern Africa and Italy, for years. Many, like my dad, made the best of it, camouflaged the drudgery and horror with plane rides over Africa, ice cream made in helmets, favors done for friends, whether with or against Army regulations. Military or civilian, whatever nationality or social status, the humans who struggled through World War II shaped our world. 

         It was as though a beginning. Peace has been tenuous since, and too often in too many places nonexistent. But by and large, humans are managing to muddle through, and there is always grace among us, the grace of an old person's wisdom; the grace of a child's innocence, whether rich or impoverished; the grace of nature and man's quest to understand and cherish it; the grace of human invention and man's quest to harness ideas to imbue, not destroy, life; the grace of creativity.
          To have left the Survivors' Staircase where it stood would have been the most powerful reminder of humanity in all its facets. When we are knocked about, knocked down, it is in the grace of this human spirit with which we are endowed that we climb from the suffering and tragedy and move forward. In doing so, we need to remember the past and build on it.