Fourth Street Positively -

By the summer of 1968, smoking marijuana with my friends had become a tired ritual. Each hot and empty night followed the previous one in an endless cycle of semi-suburban tedium. First, my fifteen year old girlfriends and I would gather on the corner of Darlington and Flagstaff in our Pine Valley neighborhood. Then we’d  wait for one of the older boys to drive up in his father’s Dodge Valiant or Chevy Malibu after scoring a couple of nickel bags from the local dealer in the parking lot of the Thriftway Super Market. We’d pile into his car and he’d chauffeur us to the house of whomever’s parents either weren’t home or were so clueless that they would barely shift their gaze from the hypnotic light flickering from the television set in the center of the living room as the five or more of us dull eyed teenagers made our way past them to their child’s bedroom or their finished basement.

That sweltering July night we ended up at Steve’s family’s apartment. That at least was a little break from the tired routine. Steve’s family lived in an apartment building, unlike the rest of us whose families inhabited small split level boxes with red roofs, white aluminum siding and black shutters. Evergreen Towers was the only luxury apartment in Northeast Philadelphia in the 1960’s and just entering the elegant building and smiling innocently at the security guard at the night desk added a tinge of daring to our otherwise predictable escapade.

At sixteen, Steve was the youngest of three. His siblings were both grown men in their late twenties and his parents were considerably older than most of ours. They were also richer, or at least appeared to be by their lavish life style and expensive furniture. Steve was a bit indulged too – he had two cars at his disposal – a brand new Chevy Impala and a vintage green MG convertible.  He had his own room at the end of a long hallway and that was where we gathered to smoke pot and listen to music on Steve’s brand new and top of the line stereo player.

I was fifteen at the time and crazy in love with Steve’s best friend Dock. I had been in love with him for almost two years and during that time my love had become somewhat of an obsession. I thought about him day in and day out. How he felt about me was always a mystery to me. He came in and out of my life at will and would go from confiding his deepest secrets and desires in me to ignoring me for weeks on end.  And while I was more than a little happy to see him sitting on Steve’s bed, propped up against the wall and rolling a joint, I was also wary.

I never really enjoyed being high. I was the kind of person who was always worried about getting caught. So I was totally paranoid all of the time. Being high also exaggerated all of my feelings of self consciousness and I spent a good part of the time that I was high worried about how I looked, how I was sitting, how my voice sounded whether I was sitting too close to someone, whether I was making a stupid face. All of this worrying took an awful lot of work. I tried mightily not to be noticed --- not to look stupid – not to laugh at the wrong time, not the say the wrong thing. Looking back,  it was more like torture than pleasure.  Just what a totally insecure adolescent self conscious girl  needed – a drug to increase her self consciousness. 

I was just getting to the part of my high where I was almost comfortable with myself  -- the part where I could feel safe enough to go sit alone in a corner on the floor and indulge in my favorite marijuana induced activity – imagining that I was on a very slow moving and erotic ferris wheel. Just when I was settling in a pleasing rhythm, Steve’s voice jolted me to attention.

He was standing above his stereo with a record in his hand. “You’ve got to hear this,” he said. “It will blow your mind.”

         

          By the time the first song had finished playing, the night had changed – it was no longer just another night in a string of meaningless nights – This was the night when I heard Bob Dylan for the first time. And what a great person to listen to when you are high.  “No body feeeeeeeeeeeels any pain” was the first line I heard sung by a plaintive voice which drew out the syllables and teased and tantalized the listener, bringing me to the brink of release.

“Marsha,”  I thought I heard Dock say through the haze.

“Yo Marsh,” he said again , because I guess I was too paranoid to acknowledge him the first time just in case he hadn’t been talking to me.

“I want you to listen closely to this next song. It reminds me of you,” he said in the prolonged silence between songs.

His words had put all of my senses on alert. I leaned forward and felt my blood begin to pulsate through my veins as a cascade of electric sound poured out of Steve’s stereo.  

The first words of the song grabbed me by the throat.

Yoooooooou’ve got a lot of neeeeeeerve to say you are my frieeeeeeeeeeeend.

When I was doooooooown you just stood there griiiiiiiining.

Yooooo’ve got a lot of neeeeerve to say you’ve got a  helping haaaandto lend

You just waaaaant to be on the side that’s wiiiiiiiiiiiiniing.

The rest of the song slammed me into the wall repeatedly until by the final verse all I could do was sit numbly and dumbly accepting the final blow.

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

And just for that one moment I could be you

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

Yooooou’d know what a draaaaaaaaag it is to seeeeeeee yooooooooooou

By the time the electric tidal wave of sound retreated I was devastated. To this day, I can hardly hear this song without feeling the acute meanness of the words and the sadistic glee with which they were sung. Someone else may have been the target of Dylan’s wrath and disdain, but Dock had harnessed it for himself and redirected it at me  -- barrels blazing. 

Maybe even at that time, there was a part of me that knew I didn’t deserve this attack. Maybe, a tiny voice inside my head was trying to tell me that this had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him and how he felt about himself. All I had been guilty of after all was loving him far more that I ever should have and believing in him when he hadn’t believed in himself. Once during one of our telephone conversations that would sometimes last all night long, he told me that he wanted to be a lawyer one day. The next day,  I searched the Yellow Pages for a trophy store that I could get to by bus and with forty of the seventy-five dollars I had earned for a whole summer as a camp counselor, I bought him a custom made name plate for his future legal desk. It read “Alan Dockler, Esquire.”  

            I can’t remember what he said after I gave it to him or even if he said anything. I can’t even guess what he thought about my incredibly naive gift or if he was thinking about all that when he told me to listen to that song.. What I do remember is that when I finally got up the nerve to look at him after the song had ended, he wasn’t looking at me at all. Instead, he was sitting in the same position, staring straight ahead with an empty look in his eyes.

That night, I had no way of knowing that the boredom would soon give way to increasingly dangerous behavior and by next summer – the summer of 69 --- the summer of Woodstock and peace and love, these middle class white boys would already be addicted to heroin. Nor could I know that I would soon stop getting high altogether but I wouldn’t stop accompanying Steve and Dock and their friends as they scored and shot scag in the same bedrooms and basements where we had once smoked pot.

In the psycho jargon of today, I became an enabler. By the time they picked up the needle, I had forsaken the joint. Someone had to remain alert as they drifted into their ecstatic oblivion. Someone had to hide the burnt spoons and throw away the bloody balls of cotton. And someone had to be there when Dock outstretched his arms to me. 

Despite his disdain for me, or perhaps because of it, my love for Dock was a constant that he could rely on for years. Things would change: national leaders would be assassinated, men would walk on the moon, his father would get fired from his job, his grandmother would die, he would get thrown out of high school, he would discover heroin and his best friend Steve would die of an overdose and we’d go to his funeral instead of Woodstock.  I’d go to college, discover the women’s movement, have my consciousness raised and one day in a righteous rage, send him a letter with the lyrics to Positively Fourth Street addressed directly to him.

            I wish this is where the story ends. I wish I could tell you that I sent this essay to the New York Times and it was published in the “Modern Love” section and that Dock read the essay, emailed me, arranged to meet, and we shared our life stories, embraced and forgave ourselves for hurting ourselves and each other in the past.

            I wish that is what happened. But it’s not. After I finished writing this, I decided to “google” Alan Dockler. I hadn’t done that in a really long time. The last time I had looked him up, I learned that he was married and living in Florida.  This time I typed his name into the search engine and found the MySpace page of a young man who called himself DJ Dockler. And in a tiny line in the space marked “heroes” was written R.I.P.  Alan Docker 12-28-51 - 10/7/02.

            He had died four years before and I hadn’t known. His surviving son’s name was Steven.

            Sometimes life just ends that way like this story – with no closure, only questions and regrets for missed opportunities.  And a burning need to know more. 

Coming Apart - Coming Together

Recently, my therapist, the Jungian analyst Angelo Spoto, told me a story he had heard about James Hillman. At age sixty-five, Hillman had set off to visit his  85 year old father.  At this time in Hillman’s life, he was very successful, having studied with Carl Jung in Zurich, penned dozens of highly acclaimed books and founded a school of psychology.  In the story, Hillman recounts how when he begins the journey to his father’s house, he is 65 years old. As he gets closer, he becomes 55, then 45. As the miles accumulate, he regresses further to 35 and 25. When he pulls into the driveway, he is 15 and by the time his aged father answers the door, he is five years old.

     I know what this feels like – how one can be fifty-nine and nine at the same time in the presence of your family – especially a family filled with people who have never really understood you at all.  

 * * * * * * * * * *

I spent the entire last week of January inside – inside my house and inside myself, creating four mixed media collages for a collaborative exhibit by local artists at the Muse Gallery in Olde City, Philadelphia.

I am not an artist. At least I wasn’t trained as one. And I know that some artists try their entire lives to have their work exhibited in a public gallery. So I know how lucky I am. This opportunity found me. Knocked on my door like the travelling Kabbalah salesman from over a decade ago, who when I told him I had recently become curious about Jewish mysticism said with a gleam in his eye and a lilt in his voice, “When you’re ready to learn a teacher will appear.”

I bought the entire Zohar for over five hundred dollars.  

There are no coincidences.

I signed up for a four week collage course last summer at the Main Line Art Center at a time when my sense of outward identity was falling apart, causing acute disruptions on the inside. Without a plan, I brought in images of myself to use for my collages – pictures of my face from all different stages of my life.  I also brought in my photography - pictures I’d taken of trees and shadows, altered to reveal hidden images and surprising connections.  In class, I cut and pasted my photographs onto each other in varied ways – an eye here, an upside down mouth there, my shadow hanging from branches of anthropomorphic trees, two right halves of my face, glued together.

I got lost in the process. There were times when I felt myself begin to giggle in sheer delight. My teacher, Francine Shore encouraged me on this introspective and mythopoeic journey. She never made me feel as if I were strange, even though the other women in the class were making pretty things with butterflies and flowers.

That was last summer. In December, Francine emailed me and asked me if I could make four collages for a show she was curating at the Muse. Each artist was to create four images a piece, on the same 12 x 12 x 1 ½ inch canvases, leaving the edges white.  These similarities would unify the exhibit and Francine would then arrange these diverse images in an artistic way that would in itself be a collaborative work of art.

Of course, I said yes, but as the weeks wore on towards the February 1st deadline, and the canvases remained blank, I began to lose my nerve. About to back out, I went to visit Francine with some of the collages I had made in the past, hoping for direction. She looked through the different things I had brought - mosaics of pretty ladies, mixed media homages to Frida Kahlo, and the surreal images of my personal journey.

“I know you’re not an experienced artist, Marsha,” Francine began. “But you tell a provocative story with these images,” she continued, pointing to my idiosyncratic self portraits.  “These other ones are nice, but they are decorative. They aren’t art. Art invites the viewers to come closer, to get into the image, to wonder what is going on and to bring their own meaning to it.”

I listened intently, trying to see my images through others’ eyes.

“Go home and do you,” she concluded.

Of course I waited until the last possible minute, but I DID create four new pieces that were deeply personal.

I went home and I did myself.

I cut out tiny images of my life - family scenes and picture of scared rituals, like bat mitzvahs and weddings and important moments like births and family functions from my childhood and pasted them onto a mask which I placed on top of a photography of my face with nothing but the eyes peering out intently thought the cut outs.  For another, I took those same images I had used for the mask, glued them on the canvas in rows like strips of film then used cut up pictures of my face to create the masks of tragedy and comedy affixed atop the smaller pictures of my life.

It was a deep, deep internal process. The placement of each tiny picture brought up old and painful memories. What drove me to place the picture of me pregnant with my daughter ( who is herself now pregnant) next to one of my father  ( who never saw me pregnant, we were already estranged) or one of my wedding pictures next to the one of me as mother of the bride?

I relived my entire life while making these images --- all of the joy, complexities and pain during this one agonizing week.

And then I was done.

I completed the final image, a tree in the shape of a woman’s body, with my solemn face growing from the trunk, eyes masked before dark on the last day of January. The entire piece was in black and white except for an upside down image of my face, cut in the shape of a womb and affixed to the body of the trunk of the tree.

I called this piece "Insight."

                                           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I probably should not have agreed to meet my mother, her husband, my sister and brother for dinner that night. I was too churned up and too vulnerable to see them.  But I said yes because I was struck by the reality that at eighty-two my mother was cherishing every possible opportunity to have all three of her children together and my brother was making a rare appearance in Philadelphia.

So I went.

My sister was the first to start the familiar ritual. Once everyone was seated, before we ordered dinner, she took out the advance copy of her soon to be released book – a very thorough and informative guide for parents about talking with their children about sexuality and protecting them from sexual abuse.  She was able to write this book drawing on her experiences as Director of Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey and her work in government in Child Welfare. She also announced her recent appointment to a special research and teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania.

My brother then whipped out his iPad and proceeded to show videos of himself at work as the Executive Director of Communications for the Baltimore Ravens in features the Wall Street Journal and Baltimore Sun had done about him. He was in town to be the announcer for the Big Five Basketball game between Temple and St. Joes.

Then there was me, with my retired self, my idiosyncratic images and all of the insecurities I have always felt in the company of my highly successful (and younger) siblings.

I shouldn’t have done it.

I knew better than to try to enter this arena. I knew I should never try to compete. But I was nine years old again, vying for my mother’s attention, trying so desperately to be seen, affirmed and understood.

So I took out my puny Blackberry and opened to the small images of my kooky collages and tried to pass it around the table to share with my family. My brother didn’t look, passing my phone off to my sister who said, “I"ve seen these before” ( she hadn’t – I’d just completed them that afternoon). She in turn passed it to my mother who just peered at the screen perplexed and said, “What’s this? I can’t make it out.”

On the verge of tears, I left before dessert and cried the entire ride home.

When I walked into my house, still a wreck from my week of manic creativity, it was filled with paper and glue and scissors and paint strewn everywhere. There were scraps of my face lying on the floor in every room.  I walked slowly into my office cum studio and I looked up on the shelf below the window. There I saw four completed mixed media collages each telling a piece of my story, of my inner journey towards integration and wholeness.

              I looked at up them and they looked back at me and we smiled.

             I was fifty-nine again.

             And I was okay.

            At least for the moment.

Ephemera - For You

VII

Come daughter. Let me tell you the story of Ephemera.

This is a story of a woman who gave birth to herself. No one has ever really seen her, except they say, for one tiny little girl they call Ephemera, who some think may even be the daughter of this woman.

The story goes:
Once three was a girl named Ephemera. Ephemera used to live in a small house on the edge of the forest – in between a place of in-between – a land neither forest nor town, field nor hill top – in a home that was always there for as long as anyone could remember but no one has actually seen . This house in the in-between stands alone but it’s not foreboding. It may even be welcoming, if visitors would ever find it.

None do.

There is a special glow about this place and the sun always shines on it, even in the darkest weather and at night it’s as if there’s a cut out space in any clouds that might be overhead that lets the stars flicker on through. On most nights, you can even see the Milky Way.

One day the mother and daughter who may be the same person and who do not live too far from here not too far from there, set out upon their daily walk together. Holding hands, they sing their favorite little rhyme.



Un, deux, trios. Nous aurons au bois.
Quatre, cinq, six, caiez des cerises
Sept, huit, neuf, dans my panier neuve
Dix, once douce, ils serant toute rouge.


They laugh and sing their song and they are having such a giggling good time that they do not notice that they have strayed from their usual path.

Yes, they pass the tree that looks like a scarecrow and the rock where they sometimes stop to play castles together. They pass the place where they once saw a dozen hummingbirds hover in the air then swoop skyward as they they’d been teleported through space. And they pass the soft spot where the cat had brought them the gift of a furry and oh so dead little mouse.



In their joy, singing their rhyme, they do not notice that the landscape has changed and that there are new sounds replacing the squeaks and yacks of the birds and razzling of the insects.
Here in this new place, they hear tones, sounds, notes they’ve never heard before. WHOOOO. WAHH LLOOO SOOO SIIII SAAAAA LOOOOOR…

It is the song of the girl who lives in the magical house, the girl who is also named Ephemera her mother tells her.

And as she listens to the story, the girl who may be the daughter of herself begins to make theses sounds: WHOOOO. WAHH LLOOO SOOO SIIII SAAAAA LOOOOOR and the sounds rise from their throats coming from deep inside and then lilting over their heads as it they are reaching for the sky with every breath.

Together, mother and daughter sing Ephemera’s song – a lullaby -- until the daughter falls fast asleep.





Again on another night, turn it sideways and the pieces fall in a different pattern.

This is a story of a girl named Ephemera who lives in a place in the in between.
A mother.
A daughter.

No one knows this girl except for the mother and the daughter who live together in a place in the town who take a walk everyday through the small forest on the edge of town. They hold hands and sing about gathering cherries.


Un deux trios.

This day, unlike the others, they wander too far. They have been lost in their giggly song, lost in each other’s hearts and do not notice that they have long passed all of the familiar places along the way - the scarecrow tree, the castle rock.

They look up and see that they are lost. The familiar squawks and hoots of the birds have grown silent. The crickets’ crescendo rattles to a halt.

They begin to hear sounds--- Whoo Ca To La Go ---- beautiful sounds. This time holding each other’s hand, they edge closer to the source of the sounds and there it is, like magic -- a glowing house hidden behind enchanted trees, and inside, still as could be, a girl.

She’s lovely in her stillness. She sings these sounds of the world to come and they are flowing through her. Her daughter begins to sing. And the mother joins her, a note or two behind until her voice trails off.

Sing my daughter, she coos in her ear. Sing yourself to sleep.

Fine.

Fin


All photographs copyright Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus 2011

A Camera of Her Own

"You do know, Marsha, that camera means room in Italian." ( I didn’t)

“Photoshop is a 21st century form of active imagination.”

I found this idea on JungQuotes posted beneath a picture of Carl Jung’s face affixed atop the body of a yogi. And I sat back in my chair, in front of my computer and I said. “Yes.” “Yes” “Yes.”



It all began ( as so many of these things like this do) with a shadow. It was spring, 2010 and I was in Greece, standing in the entrance to the remains of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, and before me were the words, “Know thyself.” I was pointing my camera at the Greek letters carved in stone when I felt it move downward. I clicked and when I looked at the image on the camera’s screen, there it was. The very first photograph of my shadow.

This trip to Greece was the first time I would be travelling abroad by myself, about to attend a writing and hiking retreat for women in Athens and on the island of Naxos. Because I was anxious about travelling alone, my husband joined me the week before the retreat and the two of us spent time together exploring Athens, Delphi and taking a cruise of the Greek Islands. And because he was going to leave and I would eventually be by myself, I bought something I hadn’t possessed since 1962 when I was given a Brownie Hawkeye for my tenth birthday – A camera of my own.

Throughout our married life, my husband was always the one to take the pictures on all of our trips and vacations ( along with making the travel plans, paying the bills and making the decisions etc.) So when I finally had my own camera, a simple-to-use point and shoot, Nikon Coolpix, I took the same kinds of pictures that my husband would – landscapes, buildings, historical sites, portraits of him posed in front of the landscapes, buildings and historical sites - until that moment when standing at the site of the oracle of Delphi, the camera pointed down.

On this same journey, I’d packed a book, bought at the last minute and stuffed into my suitcase as an afterthought. I had been attracted by the title, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey and France and the little I had read about the book on its jacket. I knew that Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees had traveled to Europe with her daughter and they had co-written a book in alternating chapters about their experiences there. I was also attracted to the title; an allusion to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, a favorite of mine.

I began reading the book once I arrived in Athens, which is where Kidd and her daughter’s journey began. As I continued reading, I saw that I was following the same exact path of their journey—Athens to Delphi to Mykanos to Santorini to Kusadasi. And even more wondrously, I was encountering the same kinds of existential questions, spiritual crises and mystical experiences as Kidd, a woman struggling to redefine herself post mid-life. Kidd had come to Greece in the midst of spiritual upheaval, feeling a deep urge to write a novel yet not able to give up her past work as a non-fiction writer and suffering from self doubt about her ability to write fiction. Everywhere she went in Greece, she found images of bees and the Black Madonna, mysterious manifestations of her inner vision that would later appear in her novel.

She had come to the land where Western myth began and found connections to her own.

I, too, had come to Greece to write, and I, too, was a woman of a certain age, whose inner life was in turmoil.

Virginia Woolf meeting Carl Jung, at the entrance to my unconscious.


Which brings me to Jung and synchronicity. And the appearance of the darkness through the lens of a camera of my own. And my journey which was not unlike Persephone’s, travelling to the underworld of the unconscious, entering through the cave of my own shadow.


After Delphi, I began taking pictures of my shadow everywhere. On buildings and grass and ancient cobble stones. The shadow pictures gave way to other images in nature – anthropomorphic trees, angels in gardens, stones that spoke in secret tongues.

One day, last spring after uploading some of my images onto my computer, I began playing around with one of them on photoshop, when I accidently hit a filter that refracted the image in two, then reconstructed a new one by reflecting half of the old image back upon itself.

When the reconstructed tree appeared, I lost my breath.

The tree had been split open. Its hard trunk had cracked and a soft inner body, much like that of a woman appeared. Down the center of that body, images of gods, gnomes and other living creatures had become visible.

It was as if the tree were showing me its soul.

Its soul and our own. This deep deep place of inner and outer connection – this kind of revelatory oneness that animates us all.

And I, a woman nearing sixty, set free by a camera of her own, have entered that dark place through the shadow. I'm going to stay here for a while-- imagining the real and playing, yes, playing with the possible.

Yes.

Patchwork

Maybe tomorrow, I will try
to read the language of stones;
to find the meaning
in the placement
of slabs of granite
cut and stitched
beneath my feet.

I will learn to translate
cracks and spaces
and gather clues
from sprigs of maroon clover
pushing through the mortar
which has failed to
hold these stories
together.

all images by Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus 2011

How to Retire With Joy: For Carolyn and all of my friends who have walked away from the classrooms they loved.

First, have no plan.

I know how hard that will be for you, given that for almost forty years of your life, you not only had a plan but were the one who created and implemented the plan for everyone else- wrote the daily, weekly and monthly lesson plans complete with the behavioral objectives and specific learning outcomes ( this during the decades that Bloom’s taxonomy and behaviorism held sway) or posed essential questions and developed student-centered collaborative projects ( back in those hopeful years when constructivism provided the epistemological framework for thinking about how humans learn and policy makers actually believed that urban children should be treated as human beings.)

There is one caveat to the "have no plan" plan. You must plan to be elsewhere the week immediately following Labor Day- some place where this particular week means nothing to the people where you are, preferably a place with no children. It will ease the emptiness you will surely feel as school begins anew – the way a school smells on a crisp clear autumn day, or how the floors gleam with varnish before scraped and scuffed by children’s sneakers and teachers’ high heels. ( Did I ever tell you about the time there was this huge roach varnished into the floor of my classroom at Harding Junior High School? Ah- the memories.)

Instead, think about the crushing heat and the sickening humidity, the odor of unwashed socks and sweaty adolescent bodies, redolent and dripping after a lunch period of running ball on the rooftop yard. Or remember the broken elevators and the lack of supplies, the irritable secretary who will scold you for misplacing a memo, or the misogynistic roster chair who will take out all of the frustration and anger he has felt for every woman who has disrespected him from his mother to his daughter not to mention his three ex-wives – on you - who for some reason reminds him of all of them. So, because he could, he scheduled you into ten different classrooms on five different floors. None with air-conditioning.

If you are still feeling even a twinge of regret, picture the same said roster guy,( did you notice they are almost always men even when the faculties are primarily comprised of women?) standing outside of his classroom ( note he NEVER floats) snickering as you drop your book bag because your shoulder gave ( the one with the unrepaired torn rotator cuff) because it hurt so much opening the door to the stairwell ( remember, the elevator wasn’t working!) that you practically collapsed and dropped everything while no one came to help you re-gather your belongings, your books, your self.

It will feel a like a death, but know this. So will staying. Remember our colleague who once joked with a false bravado, “I’m going to die with a piece of chalk in my hand.” It was after hearing that that I knew. I was not going to die that way. And neither are you.

That’s not dedication or commitment.

That’s lack of imagination – a failure to believe in the power of re-invention – a cynical disrespect for possibilities – those same possibilities that you have always believed in so fervently for your students.

Let life surprise you. Lower your defenses. Wear clothes you’ve walked past for decades in stores because a teacher would never wear THAT!

Get the keratin treatment for your hair.

Go to the Omega Institute and take that course in Yoga and Writing as Spiritual Practice that you’ve circled in the catalogue every year for the past five years but could never take because it was only offered in October and we all know that you were never the kind of teacher who would miss a day of school. Even when you were deathly ill, wheezing and sneezing you dragged yourself through 8 successive classes with one prep and a fifteen minute lunch.

When you retire, you will be paid back for those days with a small percentage of your highest per diem rate. Here’s how crazy I am. At my retirement, that amounted to nearly fifty thousand dollars!

You will get a pension for the rest of your life and in time your social security will kick in. What a delicious twist that you’ll get your dead ex-husband’s because you were married to him longer than the floozie he left you for.

Enjoy that too.

It’s a passage, this thing you’re about to do.

We all stop what we have been doing, one day and one way or another. We all leave behind the work we once did in the world, our hearts filled with memories. You will leave holding onto the stories of the lives you touched, the children you believed in supported and nurtured and the ones who frightened you, when they held up that mirror and showed you the best and the worst parts of yourself.

There’s never a “right time” to go. There will always be that one homeroom class that you want to stay to see graduate or that one boy who needs you and only you to guide him or he will never go to college.

He will.
Or, he won’t.
With or without you.

So, here’s what to do. Give your old books away ( you only think you’re going to read them again – there are so many new books to read!!!! ) Pack up your memories the good and the bad, and leave the chalk that has been in your hand this whole time on the ledge at the bottom of the chalkboard.

Say good bye to the kids, farewell to the school and hello to yourself.

With love,
Your colleague and friend,
Marsha

( me, saying good-bye, June 23, 2008)

Teaching on 9-11-2001: Remember

Septmeber 11, 2001 began in Philadelphia as a beautiful late summer day. I remember thinking how beautiful the Center City skyline looked against the clear blue sky as I was driving to school along the river drive. I was feeling particularly blessed, loving my job as an English and Drama teacher at Masterman High School, and looking forward to an intellectually challenging year with my 11th and 12th grade students.

First period began and we had a stimulating discussion about the purpose of education and Salinger's critique of school and "phonies" and what it meant to fall and who was the metaphorical catcher in the rye. When the bell rang, I stepped out into the hallway to greet my second period class when a colleague, Bill Synder told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

When my class entered, I was faced with a choice. Do I teach the same lesson about phonies, unreliable narrators and metaphors, or do I turn on the television and find out what had happened in New York. I chose the latter. Later, the students told me that they were grateful that I had done that. They spoke with disdain about the teachers who had continued teaching through the morning as if nothing were going on. Together we sat there, gazing up in shock at the old tv mounted to the wall and watched in real time as the second plane slammed into the other tower.

Of course I was terrified, confused, and uncertain of what to do or say. I knew even as I was standing there that these young people would remember how I reacted, what I did, what I said to them in these moments, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

I don't know where it came from but I found the words. Perhaps it came from Mr. Rose, my 6th grade teacher who on November 22, 1963, another crystal clear beautiful day, told his class of disbelieving 11 year olds that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed. The word assassinated had yet to enter our vocabulary. He also told us that when we got home, we might see our parents crying. He told us that they would be upset but that we shouldn't be frightened -- that our lives were still intact and that our parents were still there to protect us. Those words helped me that afternoon when just as Mr. Rose had said, I got off of the school bus and saw my mother and all of the other mothers, waiting for us on the corner, their eyes still wet with tears.

As the announcement came over the loud speaker, telling the students that they would be dismissed early and to go right home, I felt all of their eyes on me. I took a deep breath and I said, "When you go home this afternoon, I want you to watch television. And you're going to see something you've never seen before. You're going to see people reaching out and helping each other. You're going to see acts of bravery and kindness that will inspire you. These terrible disasters bring out the best in people. You'll see."

I'm not sure if I even believed these words myself as I uttered them. But they seemed to help my students as they gathered their books, ready to leave school at noon to return home in a world that was totally different from the way it was when they entered school that morning.

In the days and weeks that followed, I worked with my Drama and Inquiry Class to create the theater piece that is excerpted here. Each of the students interviewed a person about their experiences on September 11th. Some interviewed their parents. Others interviewed neighbors, friends, teachers. From the interviews, they created monologues then performed the monologues as the person they had interviewed. The most moving stories came from the students who had interviewed their siblings who were eyewitnesses to the attacks in New York and Washington. And as they performed their words in class, I could see the bonding that had taken place between them as sister listened to brother, brother became witness for sister then took their words deep inside themselves and made their siblings words breathe with life and witness.

For years, while I was still teaching, if September 11th happened to fall on a school day, I would begin each class by playing Bruce Springsteen's Into the Fire.
And as the song was playing and the words were resonating in the silence, I would hand the class copies of "Dust to Dust," the script of the theater piece their predecessors had created. They would read the words while the song played and as the music stopped, they would spontaneously take turns reading the words.

I imagine that during that time, each student was recalling where he or she was the moment they learned of the plane crash, the images of the buildings crumpling to the ground, and the people of New York City, lining the streets to offer water, food and shoes to the hundreds of thousands making the long and frightening trip back home.

So it's ten years later. I am not teaching today, but I am remembering...

Dust to Dust – Living Through September 11, 2001
By the Masterman Drama and Inquiry Class

Part I – Mundane

Eyewitness AISLING September 11th - I wake up and go to my 8 o’clock class.

Eyewitness BEN - Well, I remember, I was sleeping on, in my bed, on the futon uh in the living room and uuuhh, I felt the building shake…

Young Man MARQUES - I’ll be honest though. I was sorta excited. Like it’s something out of the ordinary. I mean that’s not to disrespect anyone you know, the situation in any way, but you know, sometimes daily life gets kinda mundane.

Eyewitness BEN - .. and I kinda thought at first it was a sonic boom, but then I kinda figured what would they be testing jets over Lower Manhattan at ya know, 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. Uuuhm and I wasn’t quite awake yet either to really give it too much thought so I sorta fell back to sleep and whatever the e3xact time interval, I don’t remember from the news, but the second plane hit and the impact actually threw me off of my bed.

Little Boy NIRVANA -- Cause, when I first heard about it, I didn’t really know much about it. Soooo, I really wasn’t that scared..

Woman JULIA - A workman stopped me and said, “Did you hear about it? A plane crashed into the World Trade towers.” I sort of blocked it out of my mind and went about my business.

Eyewitness AISLING - Twenty minutes after seeing the broadcasts, I had to leave for my next class. The entire time I was wondering if terrorists would hit something next. Living in Washington, three blacks away from the White House I was nervous. I have never been more scared than I was right after Washington was attacked. Seeing people running in every direction from federal buildings was crazy. If the government is telling all federal workers to leave Washington and I’m stuck in the middle of Washington in my dorm room, of course I am going to be scared. I felt as though I was sitting in the bull’s eye of a giant dartboard.

Little Boy NIRVANA - First we heard when I was in the bathroom, people from the other class saying “Yeah, we have a half day cause of a plane cra… a plane crashing. I was actually in Science. We had been hearing fibs like “a plane crashed into the Statue of Liberty, it’s about to fall.” That kind of stuff. My teacher finally stopped us talking about it and she started talking about it and I just thought it was awful. Cause who would do something like that? It’s just… unthinkable.



Part II – Chaos

Eyewitness JILL - Everything was totally chaos on Tuesday. Everyone was running around not knowing what to do. When the second building fell down, cries came out, that like, it would break your heart if you had to hear. Everyone was screaming and running, It sounded like New York herself was crying. I don’t think anyone knew where they were running. They just were. Seemed like they were trying to race back into time, you know, before this ever happened.

Eyewitness BEN - But I kinda got a sense from them that they didn’t even have a clear idea of what was going on and they were more concerned with ushering the ..the fire department and rescue squads that were already being deployed into the zone. Umm and at that point, ya know, no body was figuring that they were gonna collapse uhhh,,, so it was quite ya know ( beat) upsetting ( beat) afterwards to realize that ( beat) during those few moments, we were literally watching guys, ya know, sort of run towards their graves.

Young Woman - (JULIA) And they kept showing the same scene over and over and over and over. It got really annoying. It’s okay for them to have it on regular tv, because it’s free, but if I’m paying for cable then I should be able to get what I’m paying for.

Woman ( CATHLEEN.) - I would love to deport all of the Arab nationals who are over here on illegal visas or have illegal immigration papers and even those who have legal papers. I would put a waiver on a lot of civil rights that people carrying green cards have in this country. I don’t know what else to do.

Man ANTHONY - Thank God I’m not in a position to have to come up with the solution. We have to stand by our government. We have to make sure we are all in line with what the President says and does.

Young Man MARQUES - WHAT??? So like we don’t have to follow along the rules of decency and like it just doesn’t I dunno, we just do what we please with no regard to any other nation? I don’t mean to say we have it coming. I think it’s a tragedy a grand tragedy for all the people that died. But I think that’s where the tragedy stops. I mean we have the right to attack people, but they don’t have the right to attack us?

Part III – Too Philosophical

Eyewitness JILL - That night, everything got so weird. It was like silent. It was like New York was asleep, for the first time ever. I was walking around taking pictures today. You know you’re used to seeing missing dog posters on every corner or so, but now it’s missing people signs every couple of feet. Pictures of these smiling faces - faces that are lost.

Man DAVE. - At Rosh Hashanah services the tragedy was on everyone’s mind. I think it set the background for all of the prayers that we were saying that day. It’s like all the prayers had a tinge to them now that they never had before.. and when I was ummmm leading the part of the service and when I came to the prayer for peace, I just felt very very emotional and at the end of the uhhhh section of prayers the last prayer is a prayer for peace. Every word just seemed so vitally important to me.

Young Man LAMAR – What they don’t realize is that this is a holy war. In my opinion, God is on the side of the believers, the Muslims. These cats think they just gonna wipe out the Afghans. Nah, man, nah. Not if it’s the will of God. We gonna be the ones wiped out. People gonna see how corrupt they are, ya know. I hope they uhhh turn to God, ya know. If they don’t, they gotta pay.

Young Man ANTHONY - You know, I think what we are facing here is a war against a belief system. That means we are facing an intellectual enemy, not one of brick or mortar. The “enemy” theoretically could be your neighbor, best friend or the person standing behind you in the store. We are “fighting” something that is not tangible. Thought has no body. No headquarters to bomb. Thought is liquid. ( 2 beats) Was that too philosophical?

Part IV – Dust to Dust

Eyewitness JILL - On Wednesday, the air changed and the wind blew towards us. It was like a really dense fog, the dust and asbestos were everywhere. I just walked around a lot, but I had to wear a wet paper towel on my face. Everything I wore was covered with dust.

Young Woman JULIA - I think that all those people are dead now, so they need to stop looking for people. What they need to do is just dump all the debris in the ocean and have one big mass funeral and memorial service. That would be a lot easier. Because they’re not going to find any more people alive so it’s a waste of time to keep looking for people. And they want you to send clothes and money and stuff up there, but for what? What they need to do is just dump all the debris in the ocean.

Eyewitness BRONWEN - There were people lined up cheering for the workers as we passed by. People were crowded along the street to thank the rescue workers. They had water and food and all this stuff to give to the rescue workers on the bus. There were people of all ages and all races out cheering.

Man ANTHONY - The main thing right now, people have to get on with their lives which is hard to say and hard to do considering what happened. But I guess that’s why we’re the United States of America. Heal we will.

Eyewitness JILL - It’s weird. I am a passive person who doesn’t believe in war and never did I think I would be for murder, but sometimes I catch myself wanting those sons of bitches to die. You know what I keep wishin? I mean I keep thinking about when my friend first told me, I mean man, I wish, I just wish, wish I could go back to that one second when I just, I just didn’t believe him.