Interlude

Carmen had not been in San Francisco in nearly three months, and Neil had not been there for several years. It was early Friday evening; they had no school tomorrow and no deadlines tonight, and apparently Carmen had finally decided that she liked Neil. So they headed in.

It was rush hour and the commuters coming back from San Francisco were choking the lower level of the Bay Bridge, but the upper level was reasonably clear. Carmen slid skillfully through traffic, found the right lane and made the wide southward loop that would put them on Van Ness. The city lights were just beginning to come on, as the lowering sun turned the skyscrapers to brass.

They parked in the lot beside the Maritime Museum and walked out to look at the boat basin. Since Neil had been there last, the three master Balclutha had been acquired and moved in. She was silhouetted against the lights of Richmond. The Thayer was gone, but when he inquired of a passer-by, Neil found out that it was just in dry-dock for repairs.

Neil said, “I was worried there for a minute.”

“Why? What is the Thayer?”

“Haven’t you see her? She’s been tied up here for years.”

Carmen laughed. “If it has been here for years, then I have seen it, but one ship looks just like another to me.”

“How can you say that? That’s like saying when you’ve seen one woman, you’ve seen them all. Balclutha is all right; she’s pretty enough, but she has no real historical significance. The Thayer was a west coast lumber schooner. She was built on Humbolt Bay and sailed the coast of California bringing down the lumber that built this city. I think she is the only one of her kind left.”

“I think you may be the only one of your kind left,” Carmen laughed. “How did you get to be such an expert on ships?”

“My grandfather was in the herring fisheries out of Aberdeen in the twenties. When they went bust, he came to America with my grandmother, and my father in nappies. That’s diapers in American.”

“I know what nappies are. I watch PBS.”

“Anyway, my grandfather settled in Astoria, at the mouth of the Colombia, and took up salmon fishing. He was still working at it when he was seventy-five. My father grew up with the sea and hated it. He got a job as a carpenter, worked his way up to being a contractor, put me through college, and dropped dead of a heart attack at age fifty. My grandfather went to his funeral. He’s still alive, and tough as leather.”

Neil stopped talking and stared at the ships. He had said too much, too fast, and his voice had lost its lightness. He had not intended to talk about his father. It was too soon after his death to speak lightly of it and the flippancy he had tried to assume had turned to bile in his mouth.

Carmen put her hand on his and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up. It just slipped out. I meant to just tell you about my grandfather.”

“When did your father die?”

“Two years ago.”

“It has been ten years since my father died,” Carmen said. “I can talk about him now, but I still have the pain. I suppose I always will.”

” ‘If it is cured by anything less than death, the chances are that it was not true sorrow.’ “

“Is that a quote?”

“Hemingway.”

“I’d rather hear McCrae.”

“I didn’t mean to be pretentious.”

“I never thought you were.”

They went up the sidewalk and around the museum to look at the shops in Ghirardelli Square. They did not hold hands because they were not lovers; but they were becoming friends. The old black guitarist with the raspy voice and the pictures of himself with the stars was playing his ragged blues as they passed by. They admired the paintings in the galleries on Beach Street. Neil like the semi-nude self portraits by Ruby Lee. Carmen thought they were self-indulgent. Neil agreed, and liked them anyway. Carmen wanted to know if he liked the art or the subject. Neil said, “Both.”

They took a cable car from the Hyde Street station and played tourist, riding the hills as the city turned on her multi-colored night face. Downtown they counted the couples, categorizing them him-her, him-him, and her-her, and found out that San Francisco was still basically a heterosexual city.

They went to Chinatown, side by side, hands in pockets; but where Neil walked, Carmen strode, heels clicking, soles twisting under the back thrust of her lean legs, with a motion that turned heads wherever they went. Neil had never seen her this way, free, relaxed, laughing, full of tasteless jokes and outrageous puns. She had shed her teacher persona. It was her night to howl.

They ended the night at the Plow and Stars, listening to Golden Bough, and caught the last cable car back to Fishermen’s Wharf. They made the long drive home in a companionable silence, broken by the sound of soft music on the radio and only occasionally by talk. Neil watched her profile in the light from the instrument panel and thought her beautiful. more tomorrow

Over in A Writing Life today, there is a post that gives the background for this part of Symphony.

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That uncorked the bottle. Neil leaned back with a bland look of false interest as Anne Marie Chang proceeded to pounce on his words and destroy his arguments to her own satisfaction. And, to judge from the sycophantic mutterings around the table, to the satisfaction of her friends. Her discomfort and anger paid him back a little for the morning he had had to endure, and he learned a great deal about Anne Marie and the shock troops for change that she represented. 

She had, as she herself said, unfinished business with the school system. She had been leveled when she was in elementary school and she had never quite forgiven her teachers for doing that to her. She felt that they had been saying to her that she was unworthy, and she was determined that no child would ever have to go through that again.

“But you did learn to read under that system,” Neil pointed out, baiting her further.

Yes, she had, but it had been boring and repetitious, and while she had been rote learning vocabulary, the children in the advanced classes had been reading stories that were meaningful and enjoyable.

Neil pointed out, “But if you had not done the hard, rote work, you would never have made it to and through college, would never have become a teacher, and would not be in a position to push your theories now.”

That was not the point. She could have learned just as well — better — some other way.

Maybe.

They were late returning from lunch, and Anne Marie had to hurry her afternoon presentation. Carmen remained very quiet through it, and Neil knew that she was angry with him. That could not be helped. He had come here to learn, and the argument at noon had taught him a lot about the hard reality behind the slick presentation.

# # #

After the meeting was over, Neil and Carmen walked quietly out to the car together. Before she started the motor, Carmen turned to him and said, “Why did you take on Anne Marie at lunch?”

“That’s a hard question, Carmen,” he said. “There were several reasons I was aware of and maybe some subconscious reasons as well. The simplest answer is that I couldn’t take it any more.”

“Couldn’t take what? Her?”

“Sort of. Her pretentiousness was irritating, but what I really couldn’t stand was the way her followers ate up every word without thinking about any of it. I can’t stand stupidity — particularly among the well educated.”

Carmen digested this for a moment, then said, “What did you think of Anne Marie herself?”

“Before lunch, I thought she was a monstrous, walking ego without a sense of perspective. Afterwards — I still didn’t have much respect for her, but at least it was clear that she really believed in what she said. And that she really cares for kids and wants what’s best for them. Knowing that, I couldn’t quite dislike her. But if she is going to set out to be a reformer, she have an obligation to be intelligent about it.”

“You didn’t find her intelligent?”

“No. A good politician, yes; within the limited scope of selling a product, she was very skillful. But her arguments were full of holes. Why did everyone buy them?”

Neil fell to musing and missed the laughter on Carmen’s face. She said, “Maybe the smart teachers don’t go to conferences?”

“We were here, weren’t we?” he said. Then he saw the grin on her face and suddenly the world was a better place to live in. more tomorrow

Anne Marie reached over to shake his hand and said, “If you have been teaching literature in high school, then you should be right at home with what we will be doing in the elementary schools from now on. We are learning from you.”

Neil smiled and thought, “If I bag some of this, I can fertilize my garden with it.”

Anne Marie shifted her attention elsewhere, for which Neil was grateful. All of the others at the table were either her old friends or, like Carmen, were old acquaintances pretending to be friends. Since he had heard all he wanted to hear from Anne Marie already, Neil soon lost himself in his food, offering only an occasional “Oh” for politeness sake. Gradually, his attention was dragged back. The air of sycophantic attention to Anne Marie was ruining his appetite.

A heavy-set teacher named Dana was saying, “What was that poem, Anne Marie, and why was it so strange?” Anne Marie explained, and Dana went on, “That was brilliant! Now I know how my kids must feel sometimes!”

Neil winced inwardly.

The pale, skinny woman at Dana’s side said, “Can you give me some copies of that poem? I want to try that same exercise on the teachers at my school.”

Neil stopped chewing. This was just too much to take in silence.  He said, “I wasn’t impressed.”

Eight heads swiveled toward him, and Anne Marie said in a silky, poisonous voice, “Oh? Why not?”

“It was too fake. It might have impressed laymen, but not teachers who have had any experience.”

Dana gave him a look that made him wonder if he had suddenly sprouted horns and a forked tail. She said, “That is exactly what our children face. Maybe you don’t realize it because you have spent your time teaching high school, but it isn’t easy for younger kids.”

“I have noticed that,” he replied dryly. “I didn’t mean that the exercise of putting yourself in the students place was false, just unnecessary. Anyone with any imagination could do that without setting up such an artificial situation. My complaint is that your conclusions do not follow from your set-up. In fact, that exercise would make a better argument for leveling than for heterogeneous grouping.”

He felt Carmen kicking him under the table, but he didn’t care.

“Would you care to explain what you mean by that?” Anne Marie said. Her voice was level, but there was fire in her eyes. She did not like being disagreed with.

“Certainly,” Neil answered, unabashed, and pulled a folded copy of Address to the Deil out of his pocket. “Here, take a look at the first verse. There are ten words that the average English speaker of today might not know and six of them sound like modern English. The structure, allowing for the fact that it is poetry rather than prose, is the same as modern English. What a reader has to overcome here is simply vocabulary. For that all he had to do is read at a level where he does not become frustrated by guessing the meanings of too many words in one passage. That does not represent what a non-English speaker faces. That represents what an English speaking child faces as he learns new vocabulary. The answer to that particular problem is simply to give him new vocabulary at a rate he can absorb, by letting him read things that are a little hard, but not too hard. That is easily accomplished by leveling.”

That uncorked the bottle. Neil leaned back with a bland look of false interest as Anne Marie Chang proceeded to pounce on his words and destroy his arguments to her own satisfaction. But not his. more Monday

They parked at an underground garage at the hotel where the conference was being held.

Since Carmen had shown him only coldness from the first, Neil had tried to avoid thinking about her. He hadn’t had much success. She figured prominently in his erotic fantasies, and in spite of himself he always noticed what she was wearing and how she was wearing her hair. Now he studied her covertly while she took time to fluff up her shoulder length curls. Her eyes were deep brown in a cafe-au-lait face. Her nose was thin, her features were finely modeled, and her skin was smooth.

In the elevator, her perfume surrounded him. He felt sixteen years old. He felt foolish and elated at the same time.

The elevator door opened and Carmen stepped out. Neil came a bit behind, enjoying her trim figure. She wore a short, close fitting black skirt and a patterned silk blouse of many blues, with her hair loose on her shoulders and a yellow scarf at her throat. The high heels she wore exaggerated the motion of her hips. She had the look of a hot, chic, young Chicana on the prowl; and the fact that she seemed unaware of the effect she was having on Neil — and all of the other men she passed — only made her more desirable.

It was going to be hard to keep his mind on business.

# # #

The conference was titled Literature Based Learning: a New Approach to the Teaching of Reading. The hotel had set aside a long conference room with a speaker’s table at one end and rows of tables facing the front of the room. They had shoehorned nearly a hundred teachers into a space that would have comfortably held half that number. Neil and Carmen appropriated a spot near the front, then Carmen left to run some errands of her own. Neil stayed behind to listen in on the conversations around the room.

Neil liked to circulate before things started and get a feel for the crowd. That way he could pick out the dull and the pompous, and zero in on the interesting ones who remained in case he had to get into a group.

The conference was advertised for grades K through eight. All the conferences Neil had attended before had been only for high school teachers. The difference between this conference and those was striking. Those conferences had been seventy-five percent male; this one was ninety percent female. As Neil circulated, he found that most of the conversations were about other people. He heard, “He said . . .”, and “She did . . .”,  and “They went . . .”.  At the high school conferences he had mostly heard, “I said . . .”, and “I did . . .”, and “I went . . .”.

Carmen returned and they took their seats. The superintendent of a local district spoke briefly and then introduced the main speaker, Anne Marie Chang. Carmen whispered, “That is the woman who gave us a bad rating last year. Whatever you do, don’t tell her you’ve grouped your kids!”

The speaker did not look that formidable, but when she began talking it was clear that she had an axe to grind, and that she had had a lot of practice in grinding it. After a brief introduction to the new language arts framework, and a hint that she had had more than a small role in shaping it, Ms. Chang passed out xeroxed copies of something she wanted the participants to read. Once they were distributed, face down, she told everyone that they had two minutes to read the passage and then they should be prepared to discuss it. Neil and Carmen turned theirs over, and Neil chuckled. Carmen said, “What is this?” She sounded irritated. “Can you read this?” more tomorrow

They rolled past Tracy and onto highway 580. For as far as the eye could see in every direction were windmills. Most of them were tall, slender, high-tech monstrosities. Seen in isolation, they might have a functional beauty, but here on these hills they were starkly out of place. Neil said, “I had read about these windmills, but I never guessed they could be so ugly.  How could they do this to the landscape?”

“I know,” Carmen replied bitterly, “and notice how few are turning.”

“Almost none of them.”

“Right. I’ve been watching this take place for a couple of years now. Every time I come through here there are more windmills, but I never see them turning. If we need wind energy so badly, why aren’t they making electricity instead of just standing there? If they don’t work, why are they building more of them? It makes you wonder if someone lining his pockets on government money?” see below

For a few minutes, the conversation lagged; then she said, “How do you like teaching sixth graders?” It was almost the same question she had asked thirty miles before, but this time it sounded real. Neil answered, telling her some of the feelings he had for his students, and explaining how different they were from high school students. Carmen warmed to him as he spoke. He could feel her relaxing.

Then he told her of his conversation with Pearl, and how he had grouped his readers. Carmen laughed and said, “Don’t let Bill Campbell hear about that.”

“Why?”

“Last year he caught hell during our Program Quality Review. They said we were tracking. We weren’t really, but one of the inspectors had an attitude problem. She was one of the new guard, and gung ho for literature based reading. Her report was so unfavorable that Bill had to do away with leveling even before we had anything to take its place.”

“I had wondered about that. You seemed to be out of synch with yourselves. You’re all set up for literature based reading, but the books aren’t literature — they’re horrible.”

“Yes, they are. We have some new materials ordered, but they haven’t come in yet.”

“Good.”

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get your hopes up. Bill only had so much money, so he only ordered for Pearl and me. He said he would order literature for sixth grade next year when Gina was ready to come back.”

After a long silence, Neil asked, “Did he come to that decision before or after he knew who was going to replace her for the year?”

“Before,” Carmen said, but he was not sure he believed her.

Paranoid! Don’t let them make you paranoid, he told himself sternly. Then he had to laugh. Don’t let them make you paranoid? Them?

“What are you laughing at,” Carmen asked, but he couldn’t answer and she looked miffed. He thought, “Serves you right.”

The rest of the trip was friendly. Neil traded stories with Carmen, telling of his boyhood and youth in Oregon, and finding out more about what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a field worker. They dealt with surfaces and first insights, speaking as if their lives had been without pain. It was not intimacy, but it was a beginning.

It had been several years since Neil had been to the Bay Area, and he was shocked at its growth. It had spilled over the first range of the foothills to fill up the Livermore Valley. All the lovely hills and pasture lands were giving way to stucco and concrete. “People are even moving as far as Modesto to find affordable homes, and commuting to the Bay Area,” Carmen said. Neil could not imagine a seventy mile commute.

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Out of fairness, I have to add that the windmills did look like a big government hoax in 1988 when this was written, but today they provide much of the state’s energy. more tomorrow