Remember

I teach this senior elective on the autobiography and memoir.  Right now we are reading a group of writers who always make me think: Lucy Grealy, David Sedaris, Anne Lamott, and Harvey Pekar.  A wonderful assignment from last week was to write (after reading Sedaris’s “Twelve Moments in the Life of and Artist” from Me Talk Pretty One Day) Five “Moments in the Life of a …”  Wonderful pieces came out of that assignment as well as the Proustian petite madeleine homage (after Paul C at quoteflections got me thinking about tangerines).

But last week I was struck by a moment so strong as to require me to write and remember.  As we waited for the final performance of my daughter’s high school play, my sister handed me an envelope.  It was an early birthday gift from my nonagenarian friend Mary.  Mary has been returning gifts from decades of receiving, gifts that my grandmother or my mother or I gave to her that she wanted to be sure that we got back or things of significance from our experience together.  Mary was my cello teacher from grade 4-12, and she was married to Jim.  He died last February and his passing has left a hole in the universe that is hard to fill.

Another Gift Economy moment

What Mary sent me was in two envelopes.  One held photographs from my wedding, a peak party for Mary as she has talked about it frequently over the last 16 years.  The photos were of Jim and Mary clearly having fun, laughing with friends; they didn’t have daughters, and I have always felt that Jim saw my sister and me as the daughters he chose.   The second envelope held a silver necklace.  If I misted over looking at the photos, the necklace caused full blown tears.  It was a Jim original, a pendant he made, solid silver, using a lost wax method.  Heavy and intricate, it is either a star-burst of feathers or ferns, or it is a poinsettia.  It doesn’t matter.

The gift

The weight of the pendant is significant.  The love in it palpable.

My sister’s birthday gift was also a Jim Pendant, though hers looks a bit like Yertle the Turtle with one red eye – I know the eye is a ruby, but the incongruity of the red eye and the cartoon shape makes her turtle pendant charming, idiosyncratic, oddly hilarious.  But still, the love of his craft and of the eventual wearer of the piece (he never sold his works, only gave them to the people he loved) is evident.  How can we not find a way to wear them?

Stories

Jim was a storyteller, and as he aged his stories became familiar through frequent repetition.  And as much as we sighed inwardly when a familiar story began, I know now that they were just another way Jim had of telling us how much we were loved and how important those stories were to him.  Like the photos and the silver pendant, the stories open up memories.

At the wake the night before his funeral (-47ºF real temperature), Mary cut her leg and had to be taken to the emergency room.  We were concerned because Mary is a diabetic and wounds are slow to heal in the best of circumstances.  My sister grabbed a washcloth and strapped it to Mary’s ankle with an Ace bandage and bustled her out to the car.  While sitting in the ER, Mary admired Liz’s handiwork and began a story, “Speaking of compression bandages…”

Stories too scary to repeat

This was a Jim story we had never heard.  It was a story of Jim and Mary, along with my brother Matt (who must have been an 8th grader at the time) coming upon a terrible car accident along a remote stretch of South Dakota Highway (circa 1974).   One passenger dead, two seriously injured.  Jim was a medic in WWII and an oral surgeon, so without wasted time, Mary was tearing up sheets and Jim and Matt were making compression bandages to help the survivors.  “Jim always admired Matt’s compression bandages,” Mary told Liz.

What?

Matt verified all details.  Yes this had happened in exactly this way.  Why had we never heard this story?  Why did we only ever hear the “it snowed so hard deer hunting I tied myself to a tree to avoid sliding down the mountain” story?  I think now that stories like this have to be unlocked.  Once unlocked, we can claim them as our own.  Matt now owns this story, just like Liz and I own the peppermint schnapps story (but that’s a Jim post for another day).

And all of this because of a stack of photos and a pendant. (I’ll post a photo of the pendant at the top of this post later today.)

Photo of Minnesota, February 2008 by Flickr contributor ScaleOvenStove.  This was taken about 150 miles northwest of where I grew up – looks just like this in winter.

Photo of US41 in South Dakota by Flickr contributor slavenpatrick.

Life Long Kindergarten

Yesterday I had a wonderful conversation with my American Literature class about playing with books.  I told them that I had spent a day at the MIT media lab two summers ago, and I was impressed by Mitch Resnick and the folks there at the Media Lab because they had this great problem solving model:

Imagine=>Create =>Play=>Share=>Reflect=>Imagine

The Lifelong Kindergarten Group (which is what the folks at MIT call themselves) believes that we are at our most creative in Kindergarten when we are allowed to construct meaning for ourselves.  Imagine a city at the beach, build a sand castle with moat and village, play for a while, invite friends to play and build, think about how it could be better, imagine a new city on the beach…Or stomp through it and start over.   I asked my students how we could bring this model to the study of American Literature.   Their ideas were both complimentary and challenging.

• They liked the fact that we don’t do the same thing every day.
• They like the fact that there is not always an analytic essay at the end of the reading of a book.
• They liked working on sentences yesterday – real sentences that they wrote, not to correct them but to improve their focus and sophistication, to look clearly at verb choices and parallel structure, to look at audience and intent.
• They like different modes of response.
• They like that everything doesn’t need to have a grade assigned to it, that they can PLAY with ideas and not set them in stone.
• They like building on each others’ ideas.
• They told me that I am one of a few teachers that recognizes how hard it is to focus on Friday at 2:00 and that the application of chocolate is an excellent addition to the class at that moment.

These are all exciting things that seem easy in the abstract but complex in the execution.  How is it that playing with books, words, and ideas can be so complicated?

Back to “The Gift” and “fair use”

So, I am not the only one thinking about on-line offerings as gifts.   In this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine there is a feature about Lewis Hyde, MacArthur genius grant recipient, poet, and essayist.  He asks the question: What is art for if not to share?   In a gift economy, gifts only increase in value when they are given again and again.  The enrich the giver and the receiver.  Hyde is also is a critic of the extended copyright act (the Mickey Mouse Protection Act as it is sometimes called) but is only a partial fan of the creative commons licence.

Copyright and Teachers -

On that note I am remineded that a conversation last year that I took part in with folks from American University’s Center for Social Media has been published.  It is a clear, no nonsense look at how we as teachers can use the work of others as a part of our teaching and how that use is protected under “fair use.”

Creativity is not the enemy of intellectual property.

Powerful memories

Paul over at quoteflections posted today about Clementines.  He’s got me thinking and remembering.

In South Dakota in the 1960s foods were good and the measure of a cook was how well she (usually) could capture summer in the freezer bag, the canning jar, the jam pot, and the pickle pail.  Fresh fruits in the winter were apples, oranges, pucker inducing grapefruit, and grapes.

Except at Christmas.

At Christmas there were myriad delights, but chief among them was the tangerine in the heel of my hand-knit Christmas stocking.  Having little extra money, our family stockings were filled mostly with fruit, some pieces as big as your head, but the best was the little, deep orange package – the tangerine.  It was the smell of the tangerine peel that I remember most strongly.  It takes me  back to a living room with golden oak floors, and stockings tacked to the archway to the dining room.  It takes me to my grandmother’s house in Madison, where the smell of tangerine peel mixed with the smell of eucalyptus.

Never mind the seeds

It was a tangerine with seeds, but we didn’t mind.  They cracked open easily, and the oil from the peel flew into the air and clung to our fingers.  Their sweet flavor always had a tart bite.  When I eat clementines today they are both seedless and sweet, like the mandarin oranges that came in a small can.  But the smell of the peel is the same.

Proust

This is my Proust moment, stronger than almost every other scent, and as elusive for a while in my life as the eucalyptus that only came out at the holidays as a part of a non-specific ornament.  I was never able to pinpoint which piece of holiday decor carried the eucalyptus scent, and it was high school before I knew its origins, but although that is evocative, the tangerine is stronger.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way. (You can find the entire text at Project Gutenberg)

There is so much to memory, but also so much captured in a Clementine. I must go get a box and eat my fill and remember.

Thank you notes

My mother and grandmother always had us write those thank yous before the excitement was off the receipt of the gift.  The gift came with an obligation, even if it was that pair of slippers from my Great Aunt Alice (who had no idea what Mom had spent the money that she sent on.)  As I gained in maturity and experience, I found that I agreed more with the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and his ideas of gifts having a reciprocal energy.

The Exchange

In The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never free but are a reciprocal exchange. The question he asked was: “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?”   He believed that the gift engages the honor of both the person giving and the person receiving the gift, and the gift and its exchange transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that to Mauss is almost “magical.” The giver gives a part of him/herself along with the gift, for the object is forever tied to the giver.  “The objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them.”

This connection between giver and gift, the act of giving, creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate. To not give back would be to lose one’s honor. Mauss saw three types of obligations: giving – the necessary first step for the creation and maintenance of social relationships; receiving, for to refuse the gift is to reject not just the gift but the social relationship; and reciprocating to show one’s own status and ability to share in return.

When everything is a commodity, then objects are sold, meaning that the ownership is completely given over to the new owner. The object becomes “alienated” from its original owner. In a gift economy the objects given are “inalienated” from the givers; they are “loaned rather than sold and ceded.” The identity of the giver is tied up with the gift, and that causes the gift to have the power to make the receiver give it or something back. They must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid.

To whom do I owe my gift-debt?

I see blogs as the ultimate gift economy.  People write; I read; I respond.  In a perfect gift economy of the blog, I write; someone reads my blog; they comment.

To my sister who reads my stuff no matter which blog it’s on and who has begun her own blog.  Thank you for being the person I imagine reading my blog

To Clay Burell, master storyteller and avenger against all things schooly.  Thanks for reading my posts and encouraging me to really write and reflect.  Your honesty in your own work is a gift that demands reciprocation.

To Paul C, at quoteflections.  Thank you for all your thoughtfulness and the time that you take to read and comment on my posts.  Your own blog asks me to reflect on living as well as the way I make a living.

To Antonio Viva, the first and only person to link to my blog.  Your class inspired my class, and the ripples from that project continue still.  It’s been very powerful.  Thank you.

I hope that in some way I can return your gifts to me.  Thank you.

Monday Morning Journalism

This week at school there was one consistent conversation in the halls and classrooms on the 4th floor: underage drinking, facebook, and getting called out on it by a peer. Who was the “snitch” who printed out photographs from facebook and gave them to the dean? Why did they do it? What would happen? Could the school do anything? Why this week when so much was riding on the early college application process? How would parents react?
Wake up!
It was a wake up call that my journalism class reported on, working in groups on the many parts of the story, interviewing parents, students, and administrators. This was the perfect teachable moment: how do you write objectively when you are scared and angry? The school reacted wisely, the kids discovered, and we are publishing a broadside on Monday (maybe Tuesday morning) with all of their stories because, even though they asked for them, the school newspaper editors did not use the j-class stories but chose to let a senior buddy write a piece that was full of inaccuracies and connotative language.

Polls Show…

In that broadside we also get to publish the results of the pre-election poll of 75% of the upper school students, fielded by the history elective in participatory democracy and compiled by the qualitative statistics class. This will be a tough story to write quickly, but I’ve got just the students to do the job. Collaborative writing on a deadline for publication – thank heavens for Google Docs!