Funny People
Recently, my 85 year-old father broke his neck, which is, of course, terrible. But he survived and I was trying to say something daughterly and encouraging so I remarked that his hair was getting so long he “looked like a poet.” “Yes,” my mother added, drily, “a poet coming out of a drain.” This was in reference to the neck brace he was wearing and remarkably accurate while insensitive which is the really killer combination, cruelty combined with an eye for detail. My mother is a master at that. Upon meeting my newborn baby, my gorgeous, amazing, perfect boy who had subjected me to 72 hours of labor without any family present as he was born in London where my then husband was a reporter for an American Newspaper, she remarked, “With that much head you expect more body.”
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Stop Modeling Murder Instead of Literacy and Peace
In 2012 I published a blog post titled “Stop Modeling Murder Instead of Literacy and Peace.” Why has so little changed in over a decade?
Yesterday I spent the day in Southwest Chicago holding writing workshops with 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students who had come to another school on a Saturday to help them get a jump on applying to selective high schools in the city. The room where I was teaching was identified as the library but the shelves were empty of books. Overall, the students were wonderful. We worked on a simple poetry exercise "I was" and "I am" to help them see themselves in the present and find strong words to describe themselves. Some of the "I was" sections were heartbreaking. "I was…" hurt, alone, afraid, angry.." They were good about getting up and reading and their poems were wonderful, full of hope and self-esteem.
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How to Be a Patriot
When Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June fifth and died on June sixth, I was eleven and we were living in London for the year on my father’s sabbatical from Rutgers. It was my mother’s birthday and she put her arms around myself and my two older sisters and said we would never go back to America. My parents had loved John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. who had been assassinated that April. The Vietnam War was raging, and the United States looked like a place you would willingly leave. But my father turned to my weeping mother and said, “Of course we’re going back. We have to go back. We’re Americans.” I was surprised by this. I thought of my parents as rebels, they protested the war, they supported all liberal causes, they were vocal and active in their beliefs. But they were also staunchly patriotic.
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