#66Challenge
As a reading teacher, I'm often put directly in touch with something I teach to my students. Anytime I choose a book or come across a piece of writing that rings true for me, I think of my young readers and wonder how I can make those kinds of experiences real for them. Of course, it is a bit of an impossible task as it is totally experiential and up to the individual. Still, I look to at least introduce the idea of reading as a way to change and grow.
In recent years, the idea of books being a window, a mirror, or a sliding glass door has come into vogue. The simple explanation is that books can provide a window into another life unlike your own. A mirror is when the text reflects you back to yourself. And the sliding glass door is when you are able to practically walk inside the book and be there. This is a concept I haven't spent much time talking about with my readers, mostly because I haven't put enough thought into how to explain it and provide examples.
Saturday provided with all I need.
Window
Jim and I attended our jam session at Guitar Studio, 30 minutes we spend each week with a teacher playing a song together. This past weekend it was "Friend of the Devil," a slowed-down version in which I was learning how to do some improvisation on my mandolin.
While getting my scales and tremolo picking right, I was reminded of a memoir I recently read by Emma Johns called Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Journey in the American South. Emma finds herself in Boone, North Carolina, far from her London home, with the intent to learn how to play bluegrass music. She is a trained classical violinist, and the improvisation and speed and lack of solid structure in the genre befuddles her throughout most of the book.
But then she has an epiphany. She suddenly realizes that she was trying to make something up on the fly, thinking that was the meaning of improvisation. It finally gets through to her that musicians teach themselves all kinds of riffs and runs they practice over and over again so when it comes time to improvise, they have something to work with. Then they can scat off of that, as well as play of other musicians. This was a huge revelation to her, and changed everything about her experience. She went on to win a fiddle competition.
While at our session, I felt like Emma must have felt, as my teacher guided me in how to create these types of runs, to make them work for me, to help me find my voice with the instrument. I am not sure I would have gotten the joy I got out of the session if I hadn't been thinking of what I read in Emma's book. It seemed like it was a piece I needed to help me connect to what Tom was asking me to do.
A window into an English fiddler's life gave me something new to get excited about. It has changed how I see my relationship to my instrument. Most importantly, I actually see myself picking up my mandolin between sessions, something I haven't bothered to do much. I've been inspired!
Mirror
Before the music session, I read the first (and title poem) of Richard Blanco's poetry collection "Looking for the Gulf Motel." At first I was confused, as the opening line is:
There should be nothing here I don't remember.
I kept reading and learned that Richard was talking about family vacations taken at Marco Island, the poem full of details of the motel and the items they brought along and the activities they participated in. He was describing a Marco Island of the late 70s, early 80s.
Then the poem shifts as he explains that on a return to Marco Island years later, there is nothing there he remembers -- most significantly, the Gulf Motel. And suddenly the repeating line There should be nothing here I don't remember was about the consequence of change. His sadness about not being able to revisit his childhood was palatable.
And I knew what he was feeling, since this mirrored my own experience with Marco Island. Jim and I spent one night there in December 1989 when we attended conference for the direct mail marketing franchise I owned. We were already making a trip to Florida to see family and spend some time in the Everglades, and made a quick trip to Marco for the opening night of the conference. We stayed at the Radisson, and that evening a group of us went to the Olde Marco Island Inn, a historic Victorian-style inn which was the place to visit on Marco, according to people I knew at the conference. We had a wonderful dinner, lots of laughs, and made great memories.
The next day we left, and I remember a storm was brewing as we drove from the beach back to Tamiami Trail to make our way to the Everglades. I remember the wild lands of Marco, the views of the beach, and so much more. Sadly, I didn't take any pictures, but it was clear in my head.
In 2000, after I moved to Fort Myers, I decided it was time to revisit Marco Island. I was excited to return, and was not prepared for what I encountered.
Concrete. Lots of and lots of concrete. Homes. Shopping centers. High rises. No view of the beaches at all. No wild lands.
I stopped at the visitor's center and asked if there was a nature park or some kind of preserve to visit. The answer was no--just a fitness trail. I asked for a restaurant on the beach I could visit for lunch. I was directed to the only one they could advise: at a marina. They also told me I could go to the end of the island and perhaps spot some dolphins.
I drove around, sad and a bit disgusted at what I was seeing. The Radisson was still there, looking a bit shabby next to all the new places. It took a while, but I finally figured out I couldn't find the Olde Marco Inn because it was now totally surrounded by high rises, the lovely building sitting squat in the middle of concrete towers.
It was sickening.
Richard's poem provided a mirror to my own experience, my own disappointment. The best I could do after lunch and an unsuccessful dolphin watch, was to stop at a bookstore. I don't even think I bought anything.
The experience and poetry of a gay Cuban man gave my experience validity. And it made me sad for both of us -- that the island didn't hold its charm in some way, didn't know what it had, didn't know what we know: There should always be something left we can remember.
Sliding Glass Door
Saturday evening I opened up a newly published Jason Reynold's book called Ain't Burned Out All the Bright. This is a book written in a unique fashion. Jason Reynolds wrote the text in what he calls "3 Breaths," and Jason Griffin did the mostly abstract art.
So it begins, and we're taken into the narrator's home, a worry wart of a child (never gender defined or named) during the 2020 COVID shutdown and protests. We do know from the artwork this is a black family, each struggling in their own way with the way things are happening (and not happening) around them. My immediate feeling was that this probably gives me a window into what some of my own learners experienced during the lockdown: remote or sick parents and perhaps siblings who weren't handling the situation in healthy ways. Fair enough.
But sometime during the 2nd Breath, the text spoke to me so loudly, I couldn't turn the page. The words spoke so deeply to my own personal experience as a 19-year-old in a family who had just lost its youngest member, that it was like a bomb dropped inside me. I suddenly walked through that sliding glass door and was the narrator. I knew exactly what they were feeling. The events and the time frame was totally different, but the experience was identical. We were all, in a word, suffocating.
I cannot remember when something hit me this hard. I don't know how long I stared at that page while my solar plexus did a dance of remembrance, and little pieces of emotion exploded, tears dripped down my face. Even at this writing, I'm still reeling from the intensity.
It was another reminder of how layers of grief remain hidden, and unresolved issues are always seeking resolution. It took a black writer and a white male artist to collaborate in a way that spoke to this 66-year-old woman, and to the young person she used to be. And not only that, they gave healing advice, something I will find useful in my everyday life. Jason and Jason did not leave me without something to hold on to.
*
In one day alone, I found new perspective, new growth, and a healing force from people I have never met, but somehow seem to know me. This is the power of reading to change us. Because in some small but significant ways, this has added to my life by increasing my empathy, making me feel connected to others, and perhaps, in the final analysis, will help my reading students, too.
And for that, well, there isn't enough gratitude in the world.
