Indiana Oh Indiana

When I was a Kid in the 1950’s and 1960’s, there were TV drug ads only for aspirin, Rolaids Anti-Acid, and Alka-Seltzer. It was a more innocent time, when my parents were embarrassed even by the innocuous intimacy of bathroom tissue commercials. Today my parents would be shocked by the frequency of drug commercials that appear, one or another of them, every five to ten minutes.

The veneers for these ads are generally pleasant settings in woodland areas or beside pastoral lakes or affluent seaside cottages. There is always familial bonding and laughter with friends, including beautiful, romping dogs, activities like fishing with grandkids, or simply sitting blissfully on benches of lovely gardens in public parks or backyards. All of this manufactured joy often beguiles me into forgetting the intent of the messages until the final moments of revelation about the terrifying possible side effects that can accompany use of the meds.

There are times when two to three such commercials will be aired in a row, often making me feel uneasy about our culture’s apparently cavalier way of accepting medication as our only path to happiness and good health. This prevalent attitude reminds me of the novel Brave New World (1931) by Aldous Huxley, and the seeming dependence by that fictional society upon “Soma tablets” to take care of everything, with no one, except one man, to question their validity or possible danger. All of this compelled me to create a little parody inspired by the immense power and presence of the drug industry in our world today:

Use Pylorexene with caution. Side effects may include nausea, internal bleeding, blindness, stroke, desire to commit suicide or murder, uncontrollable urges to stick your finger into an electric light socket, to pee on a neighbor’s new car, or to shoplift tubes of expensive toothpastes. See your doctor if side effects persist, and eat plenty of peanut butter.

OK, that felt good. Now I have to deal with an actual problem. Yesterday my next-door neighbor’s house began the installation of a new roof by a team of four workmen, who have been making  sounds constantly that I might otherwise have guessed was a group of fifty toddlers with drum sets, pie pans, and spoons. The work, said my neighbor, won’t be completed for at least two more days. I’m now ashamed to confess that I then went directly to the medicine chest for a Bayer aspirin.   JB

I grew up going to church every Sunday morning, to church camp every summer, and Bible study every Wednesday evening. It was a protestant sect that had during the 1930’s broken away from The Disciples of Christ (founded by Thomas Campbell), which I didn’t join until my late thirties, having, in my late teens, left the other, more rigid, independent church of my childhood and youth after some huge, ideological battles with my parents and our rather fundamentalist minister, who also happened to be my uncle (husband of my mother’s younger sister). Going back to the Disciples church was a wonderful thing for my life, considering especially what I had endured as a teen in the church of which my uncle was pastor.

As a child I didn’t have the verbal acuity to express my growing suspicions about sermons and other teaching that seemed centered mostly upon the “evils” of this world and the gift of “salvation” from a man who suffered and died for our sins. Such rhetoric is very difficult for a child (and I dare say, most adults), when the word “sin” becomes the center of every admonition, every lesson, and every conclusion. Anything outside the pleasant safety of our church services and pot luck suppers was, it seemed, “evil” in one way or another. “Those people” became a phrase referring to folks in the outside world who weren’t members of our congregation. By the time I reached age ten, my fears became more vivid that heaven would be a small realm, with no room for my Catholic, Jewish, and unaffiliated friends. The absurdity of this notion increased as I began to reason that people would not go to hell (if there was even such a place) just because they had not been baptized by immersion, or because they didn’t observe the Eucharist (Holy Communion) every Sunday. As religion became more and more about following the rules of ritual but less and less about Christ’s message of mercy, compassion, charity, forgiveness, and inclusion, I knew it served no purpose, except to give people the comforting illusion of being God’s chosen, despite their condemnation of a world I knew contained non-church people, who practiced far better the message that Jesus taught. It showed me that the frameworks of belief we have that make us feel safe or superior are not always true, good or necessary. This is so in society and government as well.

Reading or memorizing Bible verses doesn’t make us good Christians any more than reading and memorizing the Dow stock report makes us wealthy investors. The backlash of my religious training is that, though I still believe in God, I have a much broader, more forgiving view of people than I did as a child. Perhaps that’s true of everyone. I don’t know, but this point brings me to some recent social and political backlashes in our nation.

Last winter in Indiana, for example, there was the legalization of gay marriage. It seemed that  just minutes later the Religious Freedom Act was passed, giving carte blanche to anyone claiming to be “religious” to deny service from his or her business to any gay person. This was like an angry reprimand or retaliation against uppity people who demanded basic human rights that should always have been theirs anyway. In fact, I don’t believe that The Religious Freedom Act had anything to do with religious conviction or faith. Religion can be, as it often is, a mask to cover the personal fears, misgivings, and actual hatred of anything or anyone that is not understood or that some people don’t want to understand. It’s an old country club value of “We’re better than you.” It’s the same reluctance to enlightenment that existed before and even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Treatment of Negroes as slaves was, according to the establishment of the time, “God’s will” and it was condoned from pulpits all over our country. Most of us now look back in horror at the assumption that some human beings could be considered inferior enough to be owned as property. That was only 150 years ago. Perhaps in another 150 years people will look back at our own time with abhorrence at the snide, detestable way gays and lesbians were treated circa 2015 by zealots hiding behind religion, even though gays have come a long way in the past fifty years. Really, it’s the same old saga involving one group of people claiming to be, in one way or another, intellectually, morally, or anthropologically superior to another group or race, subjugating them, usually in the name of God. The British, the French, and Americans have all used God as an excuse to treat others badly, only on a somewhat grander scale.

The twist for me comes from the use of martyrdom by many fundamentalist Christian groups recently, as though they, not gays, are the ones being oppressed. Is this based upon the vain assumption that there aren’t or can’t be any gay Christians? This makes me wonder what the bottom line is in defining what a Christian really is. I’m weary of the tired message, however it may be disguised or reworded, “We don’t hate them. We just don’t want to have anything to do with them, or allow them to participate in American life as we think it should be lived.” The backward hypocrisy of that thinking takes us back to the 19^th Century, or even before. It’s that “us against them” mentality that continues to grate against good will.

“Onward Christian Soldiers” was, when I was a child, a favorite hymn of mine. However, its meaning for me has become embarrassingly exclusive and unloving, even a battle against other Christians as we become a nation of gated factions, one against the other. For many, the terror that America may no longer be a Norman Rockwell painting is too much to bear. In that way, maybe gays and lesbians are seen as invaders, unless we can have the courage, the imagination, and the loving spirit, not just to honor the past but also to create new, inclusive, loving “paintings,” done sometimes in Rockwell’s style, and in a spirit of which Jesus himself would approve. Let the next backlash be one of acceptance, tolerance, forgiveness, and hope for a better future, not just for some but for everyone.

JB

I can’t remember another time in my life when Democrats and Republicans were so distant, one from the other. In the political arena, both have become stereotypes of their former selves so that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have become catchwords for a series of associations that have come to define us, not just for political choices, but as human beings. Republicans use the word “liberal” in derisive tones, and Democrats say the word “conservative” in similarly mocking ways, making up their minds before even getting all the information to make sound judgments. Our responses have become more emotional than rational.

The results of this deadlock of philosophical differences are a comatose Congress and political battles in the media bordering on civil war, stirring up the basic prejudices and preconceptions by the media, and a few resonant voices on both sides. There seems to be no middle ground for sensible discussion, only an atmosphere of suspicion and accusation, as in Ann Coulter’s sweeping generalization this week that “Liberals hate Christianity,” which made me want to know her definition of that religion.

It’s interesting to me, for example, to observe the often self-righteous extremes of social and political vitriol between Fox News and MSNBC. There are certainly other forms of media, but these two television networks distill down to their purest forms the convictions of Republicans and Democrats. Tweaking issues and facts by leaving out important details has become an art form on both sides. It reminds me of the British cartoon posters displayed during World War I of German soldiers wearing spiked helmets and stabbing infants with swords before holding them up in triumph. Both our political parties are guilty of such unapologetic hyperbole to the point at which it becomes almost comic. There’s no better way to get an ally than to make someone angry in a shared cause against a monstrous enemy, real or imagined. Martyrdom on both sides is basic in gaining sympathy (and votes). Persecution has become a political device.

What bothers me most is the blind hatred of one side for the other, often funneling itself down to mere name calling and pure meanness of spirit through altered photographs and other caricatures. There is nothing new about such deliberate exaggeration. That sort of furious rivalry goes back more than two centuries of our political landscape, but such rage can have a powerful effect on our figurative and collective vision of whatever and wherever the truth may be.

I’ve always been suspicious of people who have no doubts, second thoughts, or reservations about their apparently clear-cut answers to spiritual questions regarding God and our “only” ways of seeking and achieving salvation (whatever that may mean) and eternal bliss. If such a person has no questions or no gray areas of thought, I usually run in the opposite direction. By the same token, if someone is so satisfied that he is completely correct and omniscient about the political arena in this country (especially if he or she foams at the mouth), I know the person is emotionally or sentimentally reduced to a simple and puerile black and white view of whatever the truth may turn out to be.

No matter how staunch a Democrat may be, if he can’t examine calmly Republican values and try to see the sense of at least some of them, his grasp on reason is impaired by tunnel vision. This works the other way around as well for Republicans. Members of both political parties wear blinders, whether they are the most naïve and fantasy-prone Democrats or the most rigid, gun-toting Tea Party Republicans. On Facebook almost daily, I see deliberately isolated and trimmed issues posted, creating false impressions and faulty conclusions among readers, who often express indignation and white-hot anger before knowing all the details, which have been cleverly omitted. The result is unjustified anger, simply because people have not done their homework to see important details that help provide an entire picture. This type of vigilante publicity is only half-information, which can sometimes be worse than total ignorance.

I suppose we need both extremes to arrive at some sensible kind of middle ground, where we can look at enough sane details (dispassionately if need be) from both sides and understand them without having brain aneurisms.

Finally, I would love to see literal boxing matches with the political opponents paired off in this way:

Chris Hayes versus Ted Cruz

Chris Matthews versus Mike Huckabee

Ed Schultz versus Rush Limbaugh

Al Sharpton versus Bill O’Reilly

Rachel Maddow versus Sean Hannity

What a great TV special this would make! The sponsor would be Ovaltine. 

JB

At the risk of generalizing, I would say that America doesn’t appreciate speculation or theory as much as it lauds action. This is fundamental to the understanding of why education in liberal arts is shrinking in our culture.

A college education today is very expensive and growing more so yearly. A practical viewpoint is for many, not surprisingly, aimed at using their education to earn a living. Parents who foot the college bills for their children usually have a similar aim. Making one’s way in the world by being independent enough to pay his or her own bills for housing, food, transportation, medical costs, insurance, raising children, etc. can be a daunting prospect, as many or most among us may remember from our early years of trying to stretch each dollar to make ends meet. None of this should come as a thunderclap of astonishment for anyone who has “been there.”

High schools and colleges have, in recent years, begun using a different modus operandi to prepare students for what has popularly been called, “the outside world.”  Though there is nothing wrong with wanting to make the most money possible in the most efficient way, such a goal has become so laser sharp that it has burned away some other considerations and benefits that can come from being “educated.”

Most people can live secure, comfortable lives not knowing how to diagram a sentence (though I find it helpful in deciphering the “legal” language of a contract). Nor will one’s life be necessarily less successful if he’s never heard of Othello, Elizabeth Bennet, Willy Loman, J. Gatsby, Blanche Dubois, Captain Ahab, or Miss Havisham, but I believe also that life will not be as full emotionally or intellectually if one skips the otherwise shared icons of literature, art, and music, all bulwarks of civilization that no amount of computer surfing can replace. We still need English, art, music,  and philosophy majors.

We live in an age of technology, something that has become almost deified and which is daily modifying or even supplanting what we have known or thought we knew. The importance of technology through science, mathematics, and engineering goes almost unchallenged by most, as though we are all on some sort of fast-moving conveyor belt hurling us toward a time when instrumentality will hardly be necessary, as electronics creates a world in which even getting out of one’s chair may eventually not be required, because pushing buttons will do everything. Sounds like the old cartoon, the Jetsons, doesn’t it? Even now cellphones and texting, though reputed to keep us “connected,” have separated us more than brought us closer. I’ve been told by several people that they like texting, because its efficiency makes it possible not to have to talk to people. Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury have all written about civilizations like the one we are becoming. The difference is that their creations were fictional.

Funding for art, music, drama, and literature programs in our schools has been sadly reduced over the past several years and continues to decrease. For me in school they were sometimes the only programs that kept me from becoming a robot set on “automatic.” Though not a particularly religious person, I do believe that music, poetry, drama, visual art, and sports all help to enrich the spirit in a shared quest to understand ourselves and other people, all over the world. I believe also that the best CEO for any company or head of any organization will be someone whose education has had a generous helping of liberal arts. I think it is a grave mistake to believe that a liberal arts viewpoint does not hold an important place in schools. Literature, visual arts, music, and I’m adding sports here, are not frills. They open the mind and heart at least as much as science, mathematics, and engineering. We need all of these things to provide us with a fuller sense of the world around us. That broadened view can help us all understand not just how to get somewhere, but why we are going in the first place and with a much deeper comprehension of where we have been.  JB

Children generally don’t experience crises of identity. During that period of life there are few shades of gray for most of us. Our friendships then are simpler, little sense of political correctness exists, and our physical senses steer many of the choices we make, as in attempting to eat an entire Easter basket of candy, or riding a tricycle down a steep hill onto a busy street on a summer morning. We depend often upon the good judgment of our parents, however much we may disagree with their assessments.

During adolescence, our views become governed even more by ego and a terror of not fitting in with our peers. Though our true selves are still forming during those years, those selves often remain hidden, at least at school, by an obsession to blend in, as we desire above all to “fit in,” hoping mostly to avoid any hint that we are in any way “weird.” I believe that for most of us that awful fear and intolerance fade with age, though some people retain them all their lives.

The powerful realities of work and raising children provide other levels of self-awareness, but ones that stress success through responsibility and choosing with hard-earned wisdom what we can do best. Most of us become more practical in terms of what we can accomplish as we move toward retirement and the final stage of life.

The question, “Who am I?” is the one I asked myself often during my first year of retirement. So accustomed to judging my own worth and purpose by what I did in my work as a high school teacher, I began in retirement to feel like some hedonistic rebel, self-gratification becoming, for the first time since childhood, my primary concern. Such guilt, however, was certainly short-lived. Socializing with friends and family, giving and attending dinner parties, playing cards, dominoes, Scrabble, the piano, painting in oils, gardening, swimming, helping animal rescues, bowling, playing bocce ball, and enjoying the continuing relationship of eight years with Jim, my domestic partner, as well as caring for our cat and dog, I feel happy and fulfilled. Good health I attribute to that happiness. Jim and I care for our house in Colorado and for our winter home in Florida. He retired in 2014, and I retired in 2004. We are in good health, and money is not an issue for us after all our years of work and preparation for such freedom. My purpose has become a simple one, to enjoy and be thankful for each day and to help others do the same, in whatever stages of life they may find themselves. Jim has children and grandchildren who add yet another level of joy to being alive. Life is good.

Of course, life cannot be perfect. Over the past few years my mother, father, brother and sister, as well as several dear friends, have all died. The frequency of such terrible losses only increases with age. The inevitability of that fact is one of the toughest to accept as we grow older, and the world seems to shrink at the bereavement over each person we have loved and lost. I sometimes wonder why I’m still here and why so many I loved are gone. Such unanswerable queries can haunt us if we let them, but I do know that my siblings would want me to keep loving them by celebrating each day of life left to me.

Maybe one of the best things about aging and retirement is that we can more easily allow life to unfold in its own way, without trying to control it as much as we did when we were younger. The bottom line here is to honor the gift of being alive every day, regardless of our ages and perhaps to begin each morning by asking, “Who am I today?” or “Who do I want to be today?” without fear of being placed into a padded cell under maximum security.        JB

I am often fascinated and sometimes troubled by America’s obsession with celebrity. There is something irrational about the intense, engrossing concern that so many people have for others who are extremely well known. Those who have achieved fame in professional sports or in the entertainment industry through music, films, or television seem to be at the top of the list of those whom the public idolizes. Though the talents of a sports star or actor can sometimes astonish us, we tend to lionize them as being somewhere between super-human and god-like.

The source of this deification is what interests me, though I’m not sure of its source. Does the value of worshiping celebrities (assuming there is any value at all) come from our need to daydream sometimes about being  in the limelight ourselves? Is there perhaps in most or all of us a secret desire to be lauded on a grand scale, to be a Michael Jordan, Taylor Swift, Tiger Woods, or Mariah Carey? Though the lives of admirers rarely cross the lives of the mega-famous on even the remotest levels, the mystique survives, maybe the same mystique that perpetuates such keen public interest in royalty, especially that of Great Britain, the lives of royalty being so vastly unlike those of the rest of us, as though we are from two completely separate planets.

Of course publicity is often used to further enhance the stature of celebrities so that, at last, they can become media creations like the ones from the old movie studios, like MGM and Paramount. The same adulation is rarely, if ever, offered to Nobel laureates, those who make medical or social breakthroughs that actually change the world. The greatest school teachers have never received accolades even approaching those received by professional quarterbacks. I wonder sometimes about what we really value and if, finally, entertainment doesn’t generally trump everything else. Our children being unable to name the people in history who changed the world most but able to name long lists of rap singers, pop stars, and movie idols isn’t as much the fault of public education as it is of human nature itself.

When fame and entertainment are joined, they become a powerful force to engage our attention and interest. The popularity of scandal sheets (disguised as newspapers) is another testimony to our fascination with the famous, whether for good deeds or bad. There is a kind of Jerry Springer appeal to the worst in us, the part that takes perverse pleasure in seeing those we envy brought down. Facebook, Twitter, the internet, cellphones, texting, and other media have rendered fame an instant commodity in our time, usually fleeting but potent nonetheless, for the time its presence is known. Driving a car through a store window can bring more renown than a brilliantly written book, and a dirty tidbit splattered across a tabloid cover about a United States senator can summon more attention faster than a military victory.

However remote fame is for most of us, we continue to watch from behind the curtain as distinction and eminence shimmer like gold dust upon those few among us whose names we know from a distance, not as much because they are very different from us as that they are “famous,” however else they may be just like us.          JB

I heard once in an old movie, starring Monty Woolley, that even on your deathbed you shouldn’t make any confessions until you feel the rigor mortis setting in, because you might otherwise just recover and then live with miserable regret for years to come.  I’m going to take the chance though of making a confession that perhaps many other teachers wouldn’t. If school teachers are completely honest (and I’m not sure that anyone can be “completely” honest), they will admit that the challenge of inspiring and motivating their students can sometimes become more difficult due just to one or two in the class, whose neediness or orneriness become the prime source for disruption of whatever focus was planned for the day’s lesson. As a first-year teacher, you may on occasion find the placid surface of your yet persistent senior-year, college ideals churned up by the speedboat maneuvers of a student, who is hungry for attention, power, or just plain revenge for an educational system he has hated since kindergarten.  In what I hope are only the rarest cases, you may encounter a kid for whom all of the above is applicable.  In such an instance, if you can socialize the student by tapping his inner gifts, you should be eligible for a Nobel Prize;  if not, the whole community should pitch in to purchase for his parents a gift certificate to the nearest exorcist.

I find it interesting (a courteous word for strange) that nothing in college methods classes seems even to address the possibility that one day there may actually be a socially or mentally disturbed student enrolled in your class.  That bright, sun-shiny world of methods classes doesn’t really want to talk about such a contingency that might mess up any happy statistics on a teacher doing such and such a thing to produce such and such a result. Demonic behavior in a child is almost too disturbing to discuss in a society where shifting the blame to parents, teachers, or to society itself is so much more sanitary.  That’s why addressing social difficulties while one is still young is so very important, not just to render society safer, but also to rehabilitate those who may not be able to function in “civilized” ways.  Fortunately, it’s the rarest challenge we as educators have, but that doesn’t make it any less momentous a task and responsibility. I’m not sure the term “social misfit” is even used anymore, but if it is, it has to be only as a last resort.  Education is designed, I hope, to help people function better in a world, where they can be productive without endangering or impeding the progress of others. 

We sometimes forget that in a room with thirty students, twenty-nine are often, for practical purposes, brushed aside in favor of the teacher’s having to deal most of the time with the thirtieth child, who is disruptive, for whatever reason.  I suppose that most of the worst and most dangerous sociopaths were ones who simply slipped through the cracks in public schools. In fact, there were over the years only a very few students from my classes, who ended up in juvenile hall and then prison, none being there for life or wanted for murder.  Wonderful, isn’t it? In that respect, maybe I have nothing about which to complain.  I did, however, have in my classes from time to time students who were just annoying in what appeared occasionally to have become a sacred mission on their parts.  All public school teachers of middle or high school kids must deal with those.

Even from the beginning of my years as a teacher, I didn’t send students to the office or to sit in the hallway.  Dumping the responsibility of discipline on somebody else never made sense to me.  I figured if I couldn’t make a difference myself by re-channeling a kid’s anger or mischief, I wasn’t worth much as a teacher.  Besides, I didn’t want misbehavior to become a ticket out of class, even if it meant a trip down to the Hades of Mr. Powers’s office, that horrible underworld, where there was often loud yelling, followed by weeping into a ply from that famous box of Heather Breeze Tissues with the ballerina on the box.  No, handling problems myself made more sense. Classroom rules revolve always around mutual respect.  The golden rule is of prime importance, and almost every behavior precept comes from it.  I discovered over time that positive reinforcement and rewards, like writing a wonderful letter of praise home to surprised parents worked wonders, when a usually cantankerous kid did something positive in my class.  Taking a student into the hall for a brief one-to-one talk (talking and listening) is so much more valuable than scolding and embarrassing him in front of peers, which often only increases the level of attention he craves anyway. 

Education isn’t about control.  I found more and more that treating students more like adults yielded from them more grown-up behavior.  Listening to their concerns, when they were willing to share them, and tuning in to their angst and to why there were negative feelings almost always made a difference, even if not the first time.  Your pupils know when you care and when you care enough not to give up on them.  You will be tested sometimes over many weeks. It’s usually not even because of a teacher’s class, but rather because there are outside conflicts and circumstances that a student chooses to make the teacher his whipping post.  Listening to students and reading what they write can help them believe in your concern, your belief in their abilities, and your sincere desire that they succeed.  Most of classroom behavior goes back to those precepts. A good friend of mine, who was also in the English Department and a splendidly capable and dedicated teacher was distraught one day, because a mean -spirited boy had glued a Webster’s Dictionary to the floor in her classroom, necessitating a janitor’s removing the tiles in the area and replacing them.  To anyone not in charge of a classroom, that incident may actually sound comical, but it wasn’t funny to my friend, who pondered painfully why anyone would have done such a thing.

I’m afraid I have a strong vein of sarcasm winding through me, which I have to work hard to keep under control.  In attempting to cope with the rigors of teaching that tiny minority of ill-behaved students, I found it occasionally helpful to write what was really on my mind….after I sent the genuine letters to parents.  I think teachers will appreciate the following example, which I ran across recently and wrote in December of 1995, and which was particularly satisfying.  I recommend it as a way to release tension without having to kill any of the kids. I have, of course, changed the names.

December 8, 1995

Morton High School

6915 Grand  Ave. Hammond, Indiana  46323

Dear Mrs. Patrick,

Having made every effort to instruct your son Leland Patrick for the past two years in the subject of English and having tried to teach him the rudiments of civilized behavior in a world that will undoubtedly reduce him to the status of a street person, I have come to the unalterable conclusion that your son will have to be put to sleep.

This may come as something of a shock to you and perhaps seem rather politically incorrect, but given the history of Leland’s behavior and prospects for his improvement, you will probably agree that this solution is the most humane for everyone concerned. It makes much more sense financially, as Leland’s chances of any kind of employment are somewhat slimmer than those of Ralph Nader being elected President of The United States or Jay Leno receiving the Nobel Prize for physics. The needle on the school Irritation Meter has flown off the machine several times when Leland was in the same room, and blood pressure for any living creature reaches dangerous levels in proximity to Leland’s annoying banter.

Let me assure you that the Morton faculty will make this as convenient for you as possible. The procedure will not even have to be done in your home but can be done in the counselor’s office downstairs (lethal injection).  There is even a cremation facility in the school’s boiler room.  Leland’s ashes can be mailed to you in a tastefully appointed little box, cunningly decorated with all of Leland’s old conduct grades in gilded letters.  We want to be as accommodating as possible, which is why our original plans of tying your son to the railroad tracks between Kennedy Avenue and Indianapolis Boulevard have been abandoned due to the inevitable mess and bad publicity for your family.

In conclusion, let me encourage you to take advantage of this splendid offer while it lasts. Other unhappy parents are waiting in line to engage our services in this most discreet solution.  In your case it is surely the answer to a question that has plagued us for all the years that your son has been a sophomore at Morton High School.  My only other comment, though it comes too late, is that you should have danced all night.  God bless you.

Sincerely,

John Bolinger

Morton teacher since 1969

This private manner of using a written steam valve to release tension was one that worked quite well for me.  One drawer of my desk was for the letters I really sent to parents, and another drawer was for the letters I would never actually send. The result was that in my classroom the milk of human kindness flowed much more abundantly than it could have, had there been no safe way for me to get rid of my frustration.  Thank God I never mailed letters from the wrong drawer!

It has been said that each of us has a ghostly double somewhere in the world, especially one that haunts its own fleshly counterpart. The Germans coined the term “doppelganger” for that supposed duplicate, but the word has provided me with a springboard for thought in terms of a different look at my own double.

I’m not sure about the truth of my having a doppelganger, but this morning I imagined what it might be like to travel back to the year I turned twenty, not to BE twenty again but rather to observe and then to communicate with that other self by being his social, intellectual, and spiritual mentor, even if just for part of an afternoon. Nor am I certain if such a meeting would be for him more than for myself. Without attempting to explain the efficacy or even possibility of time travel, I’m going back to a February day on campus at Ball State University in 1966, when I was about to turn twenty.

I watch my younger self going to classes, doodling during some of the interminable lectures, ditching tennis, because our coach made us wear summer gear, even when it snowed. I see that younger self walking across campus to meet Eric, Larry, Debbie, and Grace for lunch at The Pancake House on University Avenue, where music by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Peter, Paul, and Mary seems always to be playing over the chatter of college kids and the occasional professors. After lunch the others leave to attend afternoon classes, as the young John remains in the booth reading a paperback copy of L’Etranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus. After a waitress clears the table of everything but the mug of coffee over which John has been lingering, I slip into the seat across from him, excusing my arrival by saying that I know his parents and grandparents well.

I doubt that he would be overly startled by my appearance, my silver hair and facial lines helping to mask the identity of his other self, fifty years from the future. I might refer to the book he had and discuss it briefly with him, but more importantly I would ask how he was doing and what mattered most to him. I would want him somehow to know that despite what often seemed like insurmountable odds, not achieving every goal, losing loved ones, feeling at times terribly alone as the years went spinning by….that everything would be all right, that life’s loving gifts would be there when he needed them most, and that being crushed by discouragement served no purpose. I might name some of the books that he would love during the coming years and remind him that people were the most essential parts of one’s happiness and that they should be cherished above all else.

No, he wouldn’t “freak out.” I know him too well for that. This young, innocent fellow is, after all, my other self. His curiosity and desire to understand have always been intact, and as I get up and shake hands, wishing him all the best, he asks whom he should tell his parents he met today. I answer, “Just tell them another John Bolinger sends his love and best wishes.” Though obviously puzzled, he smiles back and continues reading the Camus novel as I go to the exit, looking back once more at my younger self as he sits in the red booth, his portal for the journey through the next half century.

If you, the reader, could meet and speak with your younger self from decades ago, what would you say to him or her? Would you preach, rhapsodize, instruct, warn, or simply gaze, awe-stuck by the knowledge, wonder, terror and unspeakable beauty that lie ahead for that very special younger version of yourself?   JB

A Do-It-Yourself Job for Inept Household Taskers, Like Me

cherry dining chair

There is not really a long list of do-it-yourself tasks at which I show any skill.  Plumbing and electrical jobs, however small, I leave to those who know what they’re doing, but there are some little jobs around the house that I enjoy doing, however slowly, with the result that I save a little bit of money and can tell my friends, “Yes, I did that myself.”  One of those tasks is simple upholstery of chairs.  I’m not talking about complicated wing chairs, car seats, or sofas, but simple desk chair, or dining chair jobs for which a staple gun and scissors are all that is required.

The book that I believe is the best for instruction of beginners, like me, is SIMPLY UPHOLSTERY written by the editors of SUNSET BOOKS.  If you go to Amazon.com, you’ll see the book at under $10 and can read eleven reviews by other readers.  I like the book, because it gives easy steps to easy upholstery jobs and then some information on more complex challenges of more advanced upholstery tasks. 

19th century French chair

It’s surprising how a new piece of fabric on an old chair can change the character of a room through color and pattern.  It’s very easy to go on line to purchase fabric at good prices, and with a staple gun, you can finish a chair in no time.  I’ll include here some photos of chairs that I have done, but I’ll start with the most complicated challenge I tackled, which was a 19th Century French arm chair given to me by an old friend.  I chose a grey silk striped damask material and measured the surfaces I would be covering, bought the roll of material, and the nails and trim.  I cut the material for each surface, folded it under just an inch as I went along and used many dozens of small upholstery nails to attach the fabric to the wood.  I did this for the back, the arms and the seat, and then took the trim, which covers the nails, and sewed it on.  That’s the part that took the longest, but the result was a chair that looked very respectable, so that when friends found out I had done the job, they were wowed.  By the way, stripes are one of the most difficult patterns to use in upholstering, because they can shift easily if not placed properly from the beginning and tightened well.

silk upholstery

The other chairs I have done are simple, because only the seat had to be covered, and the material was folded under so that no nails or trim were necessary.  The seat part of the chair can easily be removed with a screw driver in most cases and covered by the fabric, folded under, tightened, and stapled as you go along (checking the position of the fabric design along the way too), and finally putting the seat back and tightening the screws.  I have used stabalized silk for all the upholstering I have done, mainly due to its strength and sheen.  Its being “stabalized” just means that for upholstery purposes, the silk has been adhered to a cotton backing, which makes it easier to work with and adds strength for long wear.  The 19th Century French chair I upholstered in 1987, and it has worn quite well.  The other chair photos here are from very simple jobs that required no complicated folding around corners.  Anyone can do that kind of upholstery, as long as you have a staple gun, because you fold, tighten and staple until you’ve gone all the way around the seat bottom.  Paying someone to do even that simple job can be rather expensive, but aside from the savings, It’s just fun to tell people that you did the work yourself.   JB