365 Memories

Welcome to September—to the U.S. Open, to crisper air and lengthening shadows, to a return to routines, and above all . . . back to school. Although my own son is still enjoying the liberty of summer vacation (why is Labor Day so late this year?!), we've already done a bit of shopping to get ready for the upcoming term: some tan corduroys, two pairs of shoes, new pens and pencils and composition books and flash cards. It's a ritual I love, always have: unsharpened pencils and unsullied erasers equal a seductive, if fleeting, perfection. The new academic year holds so much potential, be it for high marks or team tryouts, or else a respite from whatever social tyranny dogged the previous year (because when the newness of the year wears off, the drama tends to set in—and I'm not talking about the school play!). Here is what I remember most about back-to-school shopping from my own childhood: First, new markers and glue; three-ring binders (that ubiquitous scratchy blue kind t...

The best thing any writer can have is a great teacher and mentor. This person could be a more experienced writer, a teacher in a writing program, or an editor—maybe someone who is a combination of all those things. Someone, anyway, who reads your work and does not praise it ceaselessly because you are related by blood or marriage, though there's a place for that in life as well; sometimes we all need an ego boost, however biased it is. But you need someone who will be both encouraging and brutally honest. I have been fortunate to have many such people touch my writing life, but today I remember one startling example in particular: one teacher, one moment. This was in my MFA program, perhaps midway through. I had worked hard all semester, and during a residency in July, there was a student reading. I participated, and I remember that in the audience sat a faculty member I had not worked with directly, but who was a person I respected greatly. After the reading, dinner in the cafete...

My first memory of reading out of pure obligation and not deriving any form of pleasure from it is linked to the start of middle school. I was in California, where it's typical for middle school to consist of seventh and eighth grades only. I'd graduated from my public elementary school and had gained admittance to a private prep school. Heading into the summer before that seventh-grade year, incoming students were given a reading list. Apparently all the books were mandatory. I only remember a single one—though probably there were books on that list that formed a much more lasting impression, I just don't associate their titles with the marching orders I received in the summer of 1981. Until this time, I read voraciously, and I read everything I wanted (including Judy Blume books banned by my elementary school teacher) and nothing I didn't want. I mean, yes, certainly there were other school assignments, probably other summer reading lists, but if any of them were les...

  Seventeen years ago, the mortarboard cap and gown put away and the parties over, I closed the door on my undergraduate years, boxed up my affairs in the Hudson Valley (things and relationships), and prepared to move on. On this day in 1992 (a Sunday then, as now), the New York Times reported on weekend commencement ceremonies that had taken place the day before. My college was cited among them. " Bard College held its 132d commencement yesterday on the main campus lawn in Annandale -on-Hudson, N.Y. William Julius Wilson delivered the commencement address to the school's largest graduating class [. . . ]. Dr. Wilson, a sociologist and a professor of race relations and public policy at the University of Chicago, received an honorary doctorate of humane letters." It was not an uplifting ceremony; I was wilting throughout. First, it was hot—or anyway I was hot, sitting under the white tent, shoulder to shoulder with the two hundred plus seniors, doing my best to stay hydra...

Along with sunshine and the reggae beat of UB 40 coming from a friend's boom box by the lake at my Michigan boarding school, late spring in 1985 brings another memory: the first "real" kiss. I was fifteen years old, school would dismiss for the summer in a few short weeks, and when I came back in September, I'd be another couple weeks shy of turning sixteen. Sweet sixteen and . . . never been kissed? I remember feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, I didn't much care. On the other, I knew that I was supposed to care, so it began to bother me. And springtime conspires to create young love. And there was this one guy who seemed kind of interesting, a little different—though it's hard to remember now exactly what it was that struck me as unusual. Maybe it was the way he dressed. He was tall and slim, and clothes draped nicely on him. He had very blond hair, and the brightness of it was emphasized by his choice of wearing mostly white. He wore linen, I think; he w...

It's mid-May and gray today. Unseasonably cool temperatures. Hard to recall days of sunshine and nothing doing, but that's really all I'm fit for in my wishful-thinking mode. So what I remember is this: Warm sand between my toes, finally. Fifteen years old, the thaw of my first real Michigan winter; snow and icicles gone, rain and mud gone, and the sun working its late-spring magic on my sour, pale-skin self. My school at the time was situated between two lakes, adjacent to State Park property. In the spring, shanties for ice fishing gave way to calm blue water, gentle waves carrying sparks of light. Between or after classes, I would head with friends to a two-story, yellow-painted structure by a small patch of beach—the boat launch location for summer camp students. Throughout the year, we'd head there to talk or not talk, to smoke or not smoke, to sulk or to smile as our mercurial moods demanded, and very often to listen to music. We listened to a lot of classic rock ...

This is not about food. It's about homework. It's about parents helping kids, about adding a dose of levity to assignments that seem dreary or overwhelming. And it's about instilling confidence and boosting a student's trust in his or her own capacity to remember vast amounts of information, or else minute details—which may in and of themselves be helpful or not, but they are anyway necessary for the process of learning how to learn, learning how to think. The mind is a powerful machine, but sometimes it needs a little jump. Like the one I gave my son yesterday, as he worked on a weekly spelling assignment. (As an aside, let me point out that my son is a kindergartener . Spelling tests? I have mixed feelings about this. The copy editor in me knows that good spelling goes hand in hand with literacy. I lament the general downward spiral of spelling skills in our electronic age, so I'm glad his school cares about it. Still . . . in kindergarten? I don't think I had...

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...

I have to say: my son has a wonderful P.E. teacher, and he (my son) is only in kindergarten. Unless there's a big hole in my memory, I did not have a coach or a P.E. class until I was in middle school. Kindergarten was kind of like a one-room schoolhouse, without much of a curriculum other than learning how to "get along." The two elementary schools I attended—one a private school in Chicago, the other a public school in L.A.—did not have physical education classes, or really any organized sports activities at all. We had recess, though in Chicago I remember watching the older kids practice field hockey. The school in Chicago was K-12, so there were junior varsity and varsity teams, but as I was only there from first through fourth grades, I knew nothing about these. The kids our age just ran around outside playing tag. In the fifth and sixth grades (still considered elementary school in L.A.), same thing. There was recess. There was lunch. There were games of four-square...

Although I am an only child, I paraded through childhood with a group of kids who felt very much like family—they even lived in my house. They were fictional characters, but no less real to me. Actually, while I was growing up, they often seemed more real to me than real people did. That is, they were much more honest. They didn't try to stuff you with platitudes or false optimism when things weren't going well, but they gave it to you straight . . . including giving you the knowledge that you'd make it through whatever it was, intact. These characters most often were the brainchildren of one or the other of two classic children's book authors: Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume . (In fact, they're so classic that I almost worry it's cliché to remember them here.) While living in Chicago, I started out with Beverly Cleary and her neighborhood of kids on Klikitat Street. Ramona may have been a "pest" to her sister Beezus —and as a parent, I tend to agre...

When I started seventh grade, beginning in a new school (a private college-prep academy in Los Angeles, where I had spent the previous two years in a disastrous public "magnet" school), I experienced the joy of having Latin thrust upon me, non-negotiable. We were all required to take it for at least two years—maybe longer, but since I eventually left the academy for a performing arts high school, I am not sure whether the suffering of unwilling students persisted beyond that point. I don't think, at that age, that any of us really took to the subject. Those who got good grades were academic strivers , and the rest of us, well . . . I had other things on my mind then. I held myself somewhat apart, caring only about "extracurricular" activities, which for me meant dance on a pre -professional level. I had no room for a dead language, and although my mother had been told repeatedly of my "good ear" and aptitude for language (when I was ten or eleven, she ...

Valentine's Day, 1980. Red and white striped rectangular candy box. In my memory, before finding the picture posted here, the stripes covered the entire background, but otherwise, the box is as I remembered it. Old-fashioned Turtles: roasted pecans, chewy caramel, and milk chocolate--before the brand was bought by Nestle. For 29 years, every Valentine's Day, I have remembered with bittersweet sentiment a gifted box of Turtles. That almost counts as a lifetime; it counts as longer than some lives. The candies on this day in 1980 were the most extravagant Valentine's gift I had ever received, with the possible exception of tokens from my parents in previous years. I was in the fifth grade ( Brentwood Science Magnet School, in Los Angeles), and the candies were given to me by a classmate--a girl who was a friend, but a girl whose friendship brought with it certain tests for my developing moral compass. K. M. was a quiet girl, withdrawn and challenged socially in the face of c...

Sitting on a stool in the school infirmary, shoes off, I'd roll the right leg of my sweatpants up to the knee; I'd take up the tights on that leg, too, courtesy of a slit I always cut in the sole. I'd look down into the metal vat of hot liquid wax and plunge my foot in past the ankle, soak for 20 minutes or so. I'd do this several times a week, hoping that this "one size fits most" treatment would do the trick. (Soaking in paraffin wax was recommended frequently, for a variety of complaints that we just shrugged and called overuse, maybe tendinitis, not caring much what it really was, only needing to keep it at bay.) If the treatments did what I hoped, then maybe I'd have less discomfort to dance through, because that was what we all did with our aches, pains, and injuries: we danced through them, Ace-bandaged and ignored them—at least long enough to perfect the choreography in that day's class or rehearsal. The wax was clear-looking in the vat, and al...

When I was five, we were living in Chicago. I went to a kindergarten called Camelot, though I do not particularly remember this as a fairy tale place. Truthfully, I don't remember much about it at all. Only three things: One was that my teacher's name was Miss Kathy. The second thing was that I was not allowed to bring a lunch from home (which pretty much wrecked me, since I was a very picky eater at that age, and "sloppy joe" was definitely not in my culinary repertoire) and the exit from the cafeteria was barred by "lunch monitors," whose job it was to inspect the trays you were returning when the mealtime was over. I don't recall anyone ever forcing me to turn around, sit back down, and eat whatever had displeased me—I don't recall what they actually did about the kids who hadn't eaten whatever the food of the day happened to be—but I do remember dreading that moment of egress, when I could see up the steps leading to freedom outside, but had ...

I didn't drink coffee in high school, nor did I drink soda—morning joe straight through until noon, Diet Coke the rest of the day were the fuel of my mid-twenties. But I do remember a caffeine buzz in teen years nonetheless, which took the form of a product called Vivarin, which I'm pretty sure came in a yellow box (the packaging was subsequently given a face-lift) and was sold in drug stores along with a competing brand, NoDoz. Marketing for this OTC stimulant was the key to its true pronunciation: "Revive with Vivarin" . . . but for some reason, I insisted on pronouncing "Viv-" as though it rhymed with "give," a short i sound. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure if the box was yellow, or if it was just the tablets themselves; maybe both. Anyway, the pills tasted horrible, chalky and bitter. I swilled them down with orange juice and cereal for dinner once the scheduled day was done, at least once in a quantity that was close to overdose stren...

Today I remember Mr. McCatty, my middle school English teacher. His first name, I believe, was Ed. On a daily basis, he made himself memorable to us kids with his tweedy, uptight, grammarian ways; with his perfect enunciation; with his personal crusade against the interjection "like," which in Southern California in the 1980s was a quixotic endeavor (this was, after all, the time and place of the song "Valley Girl," by Moon Unit Zappa . . . like, gag me with a spoon, fer shure). Mr. McCatty had many other bêtes noirs. When someone raised a hand and asked, "Can I go to the bathroom?" his response was always, "I don't know. Can you?" If you didn't rephrase your question with "May I . . . ?" you may as well have peed in your seat. Mr. McCatty further disapproved of using the pronoun "I" in any kind of an essay. One could not write "I think that . . . ," under any circumstances. It was an egregious redundancy, as...

For any dancer of a certain generation (or two), there was only ever one "Mr. B," and that was Balanchine. He was ballet master extraordinaire, and before I was double digits in age, I knew enough to know that he was the surrogate father to please; the signposts of my nascent life read "NYCB or bust." Not that I needed another father—mine was wonderful—but Mr. B was the man whose vision shaped the ballet world, and that was the world I wanted to claim. I read biographies of Balanchine and autobiographies of dancers who were lucky enough (they must have been lucky, mustn't they?) to have inspired him to make ballets. I wanted, as did all my peers in the ballet world, to be the next Suzanne Farrell, the next muse, if only time and luck would be on my side. But it was not to be. Turning fifteen, attending NCSA (North Carolina School of the Arts), I already sensed that something about my dreams and my reality were not matching up. I saw the New York City Ballet, and...

Between seventh and eighth grades (or between eighth and ninth?) the deal was this: if I wanted to take an art class in summer school, I had to take typing. So said Mom. Although I didn't mind being in an art studio soldering bits of stained glass together, the thought of staying inside, seated in front of a typewriter when I could see the sun in its beautiful blue sky out the window, was torture. Still, I sat there. Such is the suffering one will endure for art! I typed the home keys in order, hundreds of times: a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l-;. I stretched my fingers up for T and Y and down for B. I did pages of the prototype sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." Yes, it has every letter of the alphabet in it at least once. I learned to automatically put two spaces after each period. (I have had a hard time undoing this habit, but a copy editor's job these days is often to make sure there is only one space following a complete sentence!) It's fair to say...

I had just turned sixteen, and the world was a dark, melodramatic place of unrequited love and friendships betrayed. I'll tell you something about boarding school: you don't have anywhere to go to escape a bad social situation; the offenders are always there, not just in classes, but at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It wasn't just some deceitful teenage lothario who plagued me, however; everything was impossibly wretched. Classic teen anger and angst, hormones pounding the shores of my self-esteem. No one was any help, so I thought. It's all quite cliché On one particularly Gothic night—that is, dark and stormy, doom and gloom—I was feeling empty, without much hope. Not suicidal (never had a serious thought about that), but just this side of it. Then, a note from a friend arrived at exactly the right moment. Three words, written in tiny block print with a lot of white space surrounding them. The single imperative was neatly written in pencil on a quarter sheet of white ...