The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

  In the mid-eighties I came to America for an academic exchange program. That wasn’t my first visit to a Western country. In previous years, I’d spent some time in England and Germany and a semester in Florida at the invitation of a Fulbright professor who taught at my university. I saw stores overflowing with goods I didn’t know existed. But in 1984, three years after brutal martial law that obliterated any hope for change, Poland experienced unprecedented shortages, as if the communist government was doing everything in its power to punish the recalcitrant populace. To buy meat we needed coupons, and the same was true of sugar. Chocolate was rationed, too, but you had to have children to get it. Grocery stores had shelves stacked only with vinegar and low-quality tea, called Popularna—Popular, the irony of whose name wasn’t lost on us. Other necessities were so hard to get that serpentine lines formed in front of the stores before daylight.

  A few days after I arrived in the United States, a friend took me to a supermarket on Long Island where she lived. I knew what to expect, but as I kept watching people piling item after item into their shopping carts until they looked like elaborate pyramids, I felt sick. Who needs so much food, I thought. This was almost obscene. Soon my own shopping habits changed and began to resemble the American ones—if not in quantity, then in the way I went about buying. But for many years I didn’t quite shed my old ways. For one thing, I attempted to have all broken items repaired. I remember insisting that my husband take me to a repair shop to have a strap reattached to a sandal that I’d bought a month before. The sandals were cheap; I couldn’t have paid more than twenty dollars for them. To my dismay I discovered that fixing the shoe would have cost me more than half that price. I gradually learned the same was true of electronics and many other items of daily use.

  My reluctance to part with something that could possibly be repaired, which, against my better judgment, I still exhibit, comes from my grandmother. I can also attribute to her my preference for well-made objects with a long life span ahead of them. I remember how she had often said that she couldn’t afford poor quality. By today’s standards she had few clothes, and she wore her coats, hats, and jackets for many long years. All her clothes were made to last, carefully sewn of good-quality fabrics by a seamstress or a tailor. The same can be said about her shoes. She had only four pairs of them, a pair for each season, spring and fall counting as one, and one pair of “going out” shoes that she’d wear to name-day parties or family celebrations. She dutifully carried them to a shoe repair shop if any of them needed new soles, straps, or buckles. Her apartment was furnished in what I came to call utilitarian style: only the necessary items, simple, and functional, no bric-a-brac, no trinkets of any kind. The only older object in her place was an antique napkin holder, with a marble bottom and brass top, whose origin I know nothing about. She must have developed this unsentimental attitude after everything she owned perished in the burning of her apartment building during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

  After many days of hiding in the building’s basement and the subsequent defeat of the uprising, my grandmother was taken to a camp in Pruszków with my aunt, who was barely a year old, and my mother, eleven at the time. My grandfather had disappeared at the beginning of the turmoil and found his wife and daughters much later. Grandmother had a baby carriage, a suitcase with a change of clothes, a handful of photos, and a silver sugar bowl that at the last minute she snatched off the table. I never thought to ask her about the sugar bowl, although I wondered why she took it. Besides the photos, that was the only item that had nothing to do with survival. I can see her hurriedly packing clothes, a mug, a spoon, maybe some Cream of Wheat for the baby. For a moment her eyes rest on the silver sugar bowl on the kitchen table, a wedding gift from her husband’s aunt. She hesitates, then quickly wraps it in her daughter’s blouse and puts it in the suitcase. Did she want to keep at least one thing from her apartment, as a reminder of the life she knew was about to end? Or did she just grab it thinking she might swap it for food or use it to bribe a German soldier?

  Eventually, she ended up living for several months with a peasant family near Łowicz. They treated the survivors from Warsaw like their own kin, and Grandmother gave them the sugar bowl, the only thing she could give to repay their kindness. When Warsaw was freed by the Red Army, she went back, hoping that maybe her building was still there. She saw only its skeleton and her beloved city in ruins. Convinced that Warsaw would never be rebuilt, she decided then and there to move to the former East Prussia, now labeled the Recovered Territories. The family settled in a small town that was barely scathed by the war, with only a few ruins here and there. The majority of the apartment buildings and one-family houses were intact. Their former German owners fled in panic from the advancing Red Army. To save their lives they had to lose everything, abandon all the possessions they had accumulated over the years, just like Grandmother, who had to leave her apartment and all it contained. The difference, however, was that none of her possessions survived, while here the newly arrived, shipwrecked people moved into apartments that were furnished, had pots and pans, rugs, bedclothes, pictures, and all sorts of knickknacks.

  I often wondered how my grandmother felt in a strange apartment where the smells of the previous owners still wafted in the air and the sheets were still warm from their bodies. Among strange furniture, saltshakers with the inscription Salz, faucets with Gothic script, she must have felt like an intruder. She missed her Warsaw apartment that she had patiently and lovingly decorated. Now she had nothing of her own, no objects imbued with memories, nothing to fill out the space and make it hers. She never felt comfortable surrounded by all these strange things, this post-German stuff as we came to call everything that had remained after the German exodus. She also sensed the wrongness of her situation, its moral illegality, even though it was done with official encouragement and approval. Contrary to the official propaganda, there was nothing she could recover in those “Recovered Territories.”

  When I was about ten, Grandmother, who, in the meantime, had divorced my grandfather, moved into her own small house on the outskirts of town. She took with her all the furniture that was in the apartment because that’s what she had. She couldn’t have just sold it and bought new items. To begin with, she didn’t have the money, but even if she did, the rampant shortages of everything would have made buying new items difficult. She lived in that house for less than two years and hated the distance she had to walk to get to town. When she sold the house, this time she sold it with everything in it, and got a studio in a newly built apartment building that had the telltale look of communist-style residential architecture. She was relieved to get rid of all the post-German objects she’d never considered hers. Because her new place was tiny, she needed only a few items to furnish it. Those post-German items were more attractive and better made than what she had bought, but at last she had things that belonged to her. And once she furnished her place, she never replaced anything in it, and she lived to be ninety-three. Her furniture and all her other possessions were functional and practical, and that was all she cared about.

  My grandmother passed away in the fall of 2001. My mother was no longer alive, so the task of dismantling Grandmother’s apartment fell to my aunt. I told her I’d like to get something that belonged to my grandmother, a keepsake. My aunt was at a loss because Grandmother had none of the items that family members usually keep after a person’s death. I ended up with a round glass paperweight and some photos. My aunt took the napkin holder and my sister a metal basket where Grandmother kept needles, receipts, and small change. Was the paperweight an object that was full of memories for me? Not really. I knew that it was hers and that it was in her apartment, but it wasn’t like those things that overwhelm us with nostalgia when we hold them or look at them. I have a lot of memories attached to Grandmother’s apartment, the many times I visited her, the meals she cooked for me in her cramped kitchen, and I know that these memories are more important than a trinket I could have inherited. Bu
t sometimes I do wish she had left behind some things she valued and loved, which I could keep now and later pass on to my daughters. My grandmother is still alive in my memories. My daughters’ memories are limited, as we could visit her only in the summer. When I’m gone, she will die a second death. An object that belonged to her could then serve as a reminder of her life, a souvenir connecting the different generations.

  When I came to America, I left behind everything I owned in Poland. I arrived with a large backpack and a suitcase the size of a carry-on, which contained my clothes and a few books. In this sense my situation was like my grandmother’s, but there the resemblance ends. My circumstances weren’t the result of a war or a historical upheaval. Yes, I did lose things I was attached to, but they didn’t just disappear. They simply changed owners, and most of them remained in the family. And unlike my grandmother, I felt I needed things for my emotional well-being. My future husband had a lot of books and records, all of which I happily adopted as mine. Gradually, we filled our house with more books and records, more photos and photo albums, china, pictures, artwork, Christmas decorations. Some years later our daughters’ dolls, teddy bears, drawings, seashells, rocks, homework, and school projects were added to the trove of important objects. I’m not a hoarder, but I’m sentimental about things.

  My attachment to objects was put to a test the year of our cross-country move, from California to Massachusetts, where we live now. We knew we had to get rid of a lot of stuff. I decided to pack most of our belongings myself, separating the items of value from the ones relegated to the giveaway pile. The process was lengthy, and it exasperated my husband, who has a very down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude toward possessions. He urged me to throw things away, since most of what I wanted to save I would never use or even look at. But with many objects I felt as if I had opened a sluice gate: I was flooded by memories. And once that happened, I knew I had to keep those items, no matter how trifling they would seem to someone else. I kept my daughters’ newborn caps, their christening gowns, their first diaries with lockets, the cards they wrote to me on Mother’s Day. I kept some folk art pictures, vases, plates, table runners I got from different relatives in Poland, even though I knew they would stay in the attic until the next inventory. And against my husband’s advice to toss them, I even salvaged some items that he had as a child, like two model tractors he received at five from the Delta Implement Company in Indianola, Mississippi, and that now adorn the top of the bookshelf in his study. Will our daughters hang on to these things when the time comes to dismantle our house? I have no way of knowing. I do suspect, though, that they will want to keep our collection of books with its many first editions, the artwork, the photo albums, my mother’s and my jewelry, a few antiques we have, and the Polish stoneware that I’ve been collecting for years. Maybe they will even keep some of the things that my husband wanted condemned to the junk pile. Maybe they’ll be grateful to things for the delight they give us and the lessons they teach about the triumph and defeat of mortal matter.

  Some years ago, in a world literature class, I was teaching Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. One story in the collection, “The Man with the Package,” a mere four pages long, provoked a very lively exchange. The story’s main character is a Jew who has the position of a Schreiber in Birkenau’s hospital—a position that for a long time offers him protection other prisoners don’t have. Besides clerical work, his duties involve accompanying Jews selected for the gas chamber to the washroom, from which they are taken to the crematoria. One day the Schreiber himself comes down with the flu and is selected for the gas. On his way there he carries a cardboard box tied with a string; the box contains a pair of boots, a spoon, a knife, and a few other items. Seeing this, the story’s narrator says: “He could show a little more good sense . . . He knows perfectly well . . . that within an hour or two he will go to the gas chamber, naked without his shirt, and without his package. What an extraordinary attachment to the last bit of property!” Just like the narrator, my students found the Schreiber’s behavior bizarre. They couldn’t understand why, when faced with imminent death, he would hang on to what were to them worthless things. They hadn’t yet learned that objects help us exorcise some of our fears, that they are stronger than we are, perfect and independent, that they give us a semblance of permanence and grant a stay against chaos, darkness, oblivion.

  GARRET KEIZER

  Getting Schooled

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  IN THE FALL OF 2010, after a fourteen-year hiatus from the classroom and at the unpropitious age of fifty-seven, I began a one-year job filling in for a teacher on leave from the same rural high school, in Orleans, Vermont, that I’d entered as a rookie thirty years before. I signed on mainly because my wife and I needed health insurance. The reason I had trained to be an English teacher in the first place was my parents’ insistence that I graduate from college with a trade, “poet” falling short of the mark in their eyes. It’s fair to say that I have never worked in a school with what might be called purity of heart, though much of what I know about purity of heart I learned there.

  That I can say so without irony probably owes at least something to the fortunate working conditions of this past year. To describe those conditions in any detail will make many a teacher green with envy, if not downright incredulous. Most of the roughly four hundred students enrolled at the school were obliging and even friendly—I mean hold-open-the-door-and-ask-how-your-day’s-going friendly. At no time did I feel threatened or in danger of violence. At no time did I feel inclined to regard any of my colleagues as lazy or inept—or feel they were insinuating similar judgments about me. My principal, recently and deservedly named Vermont’s high school principal of the year, had been a student of mine at the same school. As he announced both to me at our first meeting and to the entire staff at its first meeting, he could not bring himself to address me by my first name. The vice principal, married to another of my former students, followed suit. My department head, though not a former student or at all disinclined to call me Garret, treated me like a peer and looked after me like a best friend. Of my five classes, none exceeded twenty students and three were sections of the same course, meaning they could usually be served with the same preparation. Not to rub it in, but I had all but one of these classes in the same room, both semesters, and a full forty minutes in which to eat my lunch. I could also eat my lunch alone in my classroom.

  That said, I was nearly faint with hunger by the time lunch rolled around, for I ate my breakfast most days at 4:00 A.M. Not infrequently I would put in a twelve-hour day before heading home to work several additional hours after dinner, only to wake up the next morning feeling unprepared.

  My immune system proved even rustier than my pedagogy. During the course of the school year I caught several colds plus one case each of flu, pneumonia, and conjunctivitis. After only two months on the job, I was compelled to put in a tedious session on a treadmill because of unspecified chest pains, though the technician assured me that my heart, however impure, belonged to a man twenty years my junior. This was a good thing to know given that I was frequently awakened by my heart pounding from a nightmare, invariably set in school. The bad dreams continue, but as I know from past experience, they will have subsided in ten years.

  Except for a few precious hours on Friday nights, I had little of what is generally called a life. My wife and I seldom went out. My normally robust correspondence dwindled to nothing. I was unable to file our income taxes until July. Though I took pains not to appear so to my students, I was often despondent. One morning, when my wife remonstrated with me for picking up a drunk hitchhiker by myself on a lonely road late the night before—“What if he’d pulled a gun?”—I responded, half joking, that if I could just get myself shot, I might not have to correct any more papers.

  My point here is that even under ideal circumstances, public school teaching is one of the hardest jobs a person can do. Most sensible people
know that. Anyone who claims not to know that is either a scoundrel or a nincompoop; or, to put it another way, a typical expert on everything that’s wrong with American public education and the often damaged children that it serves.

  Like a war-wounded veteran unable to give his full trust to anyone who has never experienced the traumas of combat, I can find it hard to respect the opinions of anyone who has never taught school—not only in matters of education, which is reasonable enough, but also in matters of philosophy and politics. John Adams, Samuel Johnson, and Henry David Thoreau, to name but three who make the cut, tried their hand at “school mastering.” All three proved more or less dismal at it; all had greater things to do in their lives than I, whose best accomplishments have arguably taken place in a classroom. Still, I attribute the lack of illusion in their thought, their disinclination to dogma on the one hand and despair on the other, to the fact that they were tested as teachers. They had encountered humanity in all its rawness and variety, and with the dubious aim of “forming” it in some way. In the process, they had beheld their own selves as naked as a human being can get, and may in fact have achieved greatness partly out of fear of being that naked again.