5
Reading, Writing, and
the Wrath of My Father
I want to suggest that anthropologists, and other vulnerable observers, can and should write about loss. But we must do so with a different awareness, an awareness of how excruciating are the paradoxes of attachment and displacement. Above all, I think we need to be absolutely pitiless with ourselves.
ru t h b e h a r , The Vulnerable Observer My personal and professional lives have a serendipitous way of running along parallel tracks. Ever since my father was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, I have had to think about the possibility that he would lose the ability to speak. How would he communicate?
What would happen to his love of language? At the same time, as codirector of research for a large urban school-reform project, I am confronted with the overwhelming focus on reading and writing in contemporary classrooms. Observing teachers and students in a hard-pressed, low-performing district, I am painfully aware that a pernicious insistence on measurable standards, high-stakes tests, and accountability has filtered down to even the youngest children and 67
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their teachers. In these early childhood classrooms, every activity must contribute directly and visibly to teaching academic skills. The morning message, once written by teacher to students at the start of the day as a vehicle for encouraging discussion of past experiences or upcoming events, is now a formulaic exercise designed to teach letter and word recognition. When children are invited to bring in a favorite stuffed animal, the activity is rationalized with a measuring assignment during work time. The kindergartners must determine the tallest and shortest creatures brought from home. While reading sto-rybooks, teachers emphasize the names of authors and illustrators, ask children to draw inferences from pictures, and direct attention to techniques of character and plot development. Seldom is a text left unanalyzed and rarely are the author’s words allowed to wash over the children, the meaning and structure seeping into their pores without articulation. There is little time for cooking and block building, for trips into the neighborhood and visits from people who do interesting work. In these, as in so many classrooms around the country, literacy takes precedence over life.
Although phonics, spelling, and punctuation are drilled daily, in some classrooms the legacy of the whole language movement is evident in the labels affixed to cabinets, shelves, educational materials, even chairs and tables. I can’t help but wonder what the five- and six-year-olds make of the signs mandated by the district to appear over classroom work areas, such as “This is the dramatic play area. We are doctors and nurses. We have fun.” Or of the mobiles filled with poems that float too far above the children’s heads for them to read, or the
“word walls” crammed with too many words for a nonreader to sort through. Although children are required to write in journals and to share their efforts with the class, group discussions that reflect the world outside the classroom are few and far between. As long as they write it really doesn’t matter what they say. And for all the talk about multiple drafts, editing, and the writing process, there is an underlying emphasis on the product that will be read to the class, placed on the wall, and ultimately brought home to family.
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When in 1999 my father’s cancer returned and he lost the remaining part of his larynx that had been salvaged in the initial surgery, I was prompted to reflect on the power and limitations of language in an even more immediate way. Too debilitated or simply too stubborn to master the electrolarynx, an appliance that allows many to communicate despite the lack of vocal cords, my father remains wedded to the written word. Steadfastly refusing a simple instruction such as “milk” or “sweater,” he turns every request into a paragraph-long treatise on his current health status or the climate conditions in his room. He takes obvious satisfaction in his carefully crafted sentences, which range in mood from playful and humorous to angry and demanding. When he finally hands me the yellow legal pad on which he scrawls his communications, his expression is one of pride and watchfulness. Will I laugh at the right place, grasp his double enten-dre, or appreciate his concerns? Although I often wish for the more rapid, more “natural” dialogue possible with the electrolarynx, I can’t help but be awed by his command of pen and paper. Despite his numerous disabilities, he is still able to generate ideas, exercise control, and make his desires known in his own unique voice. My father teaches me about the compensatory pleasures of the text.
I only have to look back to my parents’ inaugural use of the telephone answering machine to find a precursor to the precise, carefully calculated style that my father would adopt in his written communications. It took my then eighty-something parents several years to master the art of leaving a message. Unlike my friends who have honed their telephonic skills on outgoing messages—adding and deleting musical serenades as well as chipper and Zen-like encourage-ments for the day ahead—my parents focused their attention on the messages they left on others’ answering machines. Over time they turned it into a distinct and nuanced vehicle of communication.
At first, there was only the clicking sound of their hanging up that announced the call. Our recorded message always seemed to catch them off guard. Was it simply that they couldn’t organize themselves quickly enough to say anything, or that they felt the machine to be a 70 n jonathan g. silin
personal affront, a mechanical barrier designed to prevent privileged parent-child communications? Eventually there were brief, cryptic fragments that ultimately gave way to more fully realized, if formulaic, communications.
My mother’s are the briefer. First, she calls out my name as if entering a house and trying to determine if anyone is home: “Johnny, are you there?” Hearing no reply, she identifies herself, “It’s your mother.”
Of course this is totally unnecessary, for who else but a mother would use a long-discarded childhood diminutive, Johnny. Finally, she asks that I call “when you have a chance.” While outwardly signaling respect for my full schedule, this last phrase implicitly underlines the need to make my return call a top priority.
For his part, my father is more playful and has developed the phone message into a literary genre. There are still moments when he stumbles, pregnant pauses from which I worry he won’t recover quickly enough to avoid a broken connection. But then the hesitant, sandpapery voice, the result of the first surgery and subsequent radiation therapy, returns with new assurance. Unlike the uniformity of my mother’s messages, my father’s vary wildly in length. His style is eclectic, dare I say postmodern. The structure is that of a business letter with opening address and closing salutation. The overall impact, however, is that of the carefully crafted camp letter, the kind I used to receive as a child in the 1950s. No faxes, e-mails, or telephone calls in those days. Growing up in New York City, I was packed off to the Adirondack Mountains for two months each summer—no wimpy, one-week specialty camps. Luckily, my parents were conscientious correspondents. My mother’s letters were chatty and upbeat while my father’s were more tightly controlled missives. Given his busy life, it was the fact of the letter that had to be appreciated.
Now, forty-five years later, with more time on his hands, he has clearly come to appreciate the communicative potential of the well-left phone message. The address is always direct, an emphatic call to attention, “Jonathan. This is your father speaking.” His commanding opening is then followed by a disclaimer made in a gentler, more re-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 71
laxed tone, “This is not a medical emergency. We are both fine. Well, actually, there is no change in our physical condition.” Here my father adjusts his initial assessment of “fine,” which implies an acceptance of their many new disabilities, to a “no change” status. He skillfully edits his words to achieve greater literal accuracy and emotional authenticity. He describes but prefers not to pass judgment on their condition.
My father’s request, the reason for the call,
is couched in formal language appropriate to the world of business in which he spent most of his life. “Please call me at your earliest possible convenience.” Now there is one of those long, unnerving pauses followed by a second disclaimer. “Nor is it about fiscal matters,” the topic of many tense phone calls during the last years. “There is something that I want to talk with you about,” a shorter pause, “and it’s not a problem with the help, either,” another arena of ongoing difficulties for us. Finally, the closing salutation echoes those long-ago summers, “Love, Pop.”
My father signs his missive with the term he uses to refer to his own father, not the way that I refer to him. I have adopted the more formal “dad.” With its increased distance, this form of address allows me to talk with greater ease about routine matters related to sustaining the body as well as to managing life-threatening illnesses. My father identifies with his father, Nathan Silin, for whom I was named, who died before I was born. I am more comfortable removing myself from such a generational link in order to fulfill my caregiving responsibilities.
My father’s message is teasing and seductive, a side of his personality that only becomes visible to me late in his life. He tells me what the call is not about while refusing to reveal the actual reason of the call. At the same time, he heightens the drama by reminding me of all the potential sources of apprehension. He provokes my curiosity and tries to lure me into a speedy response. He is a master strategist, determined to get my attention.
There will be no record of my parents’ success at coming to terms with modern telecommunications. My phone machine has a promi-72 n jonathan g. silin
nent blue delete button but no hard drive on which to transfer their messages. No mere recordings, however, could capture the way their brief dispatches resonate with the past, when pen and paper provided a simpler and more fluid, if less rapid, mode of connection. Nor could they capture the feelings of potential loss and vulnerability that this last stage in my parents’ life has elicited in me. At the time, I savored their mastery of a new technology, glad that it hadn’t obliterated the familiar style that permeated our interactions. I even wondered if I wouldn’t turn on my computer one morning and find an e-mail from [email protected].
Now that my father has no voice at all, the juxtaposition of my days in classrooms with young children and evenings at my parents’ apartment makes me all the more attuned to the power of written language.
My father would be all but helpless without his yellow pad and pen, which allow him both practical communications as well as moments of playfulness and pleasure. Because of the pressures on measurable performance in schools I see too little fostering of authentic appreciation for the written word. Both experiences send me back to childhood, to wonder about my own early struggles with reading and writing.
I was what euphemistically has been called a “late bloomer,” although not as late as my older brother, who did not begin to read until seventh grade. My own emergence as an independent reader occurred somewhere around fourth grade. Prior to that that time, I have memories of hushed, concerned conferences between my mother and my elementary school teachers.
One moment stands out. I am seated at a table pretending to read a new book that my second-grade teacher had enthusiastically given me a few days earlier. It is illustrated with gaudy pastel colors and has the toxic smell of fresh ink. The story involves some popular cartoon characters of the day that I have absolutely no interest in. Not even the active commerce in comics among my brother’s friends—and I do eye their collections with envy—has seduced me into reading about m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 73
imaginary animals or people. My own overactive fantasy life, crowded with figures from the real world, has no space for these intruders created by the pens of Walt Disney and the like. I turn the pages every few minutes hoping to appear gainfully employed.
Lucy Pringle, a tall, thin woman in her twenties, circulates through the room that contains just a handful of students. She is a new, well-meaning teacher, as my mother explains to me on several occasions, trying to secure my fuller cooperation in Lucy’s attempts to teach me to read. But good intentions aren’t enough to win my confidence or that of the small band of defiant second graders who I hang out with. We never miss an opportunity to take advantage of her in-experience.
Now Lucy leans over me with her prominent nose, receding chin, and black-framed eyeglasses, and asks me to read aloud. I stumble over every word with more than three letters and cannot answer the questions that she poses about the story. This encounter, in which the novice teacher who cannot control the class meets the novice reader unable to decipher the words on the page, is indelibly etched in my mind. It is a painful moment of truth in which my ignorance, as well as an abiding sense of shame, is unmasked. I am far too young to understand that it is also the failure of the school—to meet my needs as a learner—that is revealed.
As an adult I carry this moment with me as I visit classrooms today and imagine myself a “classified” child. Here I see many children who have been tested prior to entering kindergarten and found to have learning difficulties. Early in the year teachers must design an IEP (individual education plan) for them, which is then filed with the vice principal. A list of the classified children is posted at the entrance to the classroom for anyone to read. There are three to seven such children in each of the kindergartens that I regularly visit, and it is expected that the teachers will implement the plans without additional help.
Fortunately, my confrontation with Lucy Pringle took place long ago, in a small school where teachers had the time to bolster the 74 n jonathan g. silin
strengths of their students as well as to attend to their weaknesses. Despite my reading deficiencies, there were many other arenas in which I could experience success. I recall the pride we took in the rabbit cage we constructed from an old table and some chicken wire in first grade, the feel of the saw dust compound from which we modeled the con-tours of our second-grade map of New Amsterdam, and the smell of the paint that I carefully applied to the upper reaches of the cinder block wall just outside our fourth-grade classroom. That mural of the westward expansion remained long after I became a teacher in the very same school.
Miraculously, I acquire a few more reading skills by fifth grade, even though I seldom have the desire to open a book. My continuing lack of interest is now revealed during our Thursday morning trips to the school library. I am always anxious and at loose ends during these sessions. A short, gray-haired woman with a quick temper, bad teeth, and smoker’s breath, the librarian is a ten-year-old’s idea of the perfect witch. Each week she impatiently questions me about my interests to hasten the selection of a book. But I have no ability to name my interests and therefore assume that I have none. “How can you not have any interests?” she demands incredulously. A person of no interests, an uninteresting person, I am mortified by this inquisition.
Never doing well under pressure, I settle on a Hardy Boys mystery, consciously attracted by the cover drawing of the two friends and unconsciously drawn by the promise of scenes depicting illicit intimacy between them. Will they have a sleepover and be forced to share the same bed? Will they unexpectedly end up at the town swimming hole without their bathing suits? When a quick scouting foray into the text yields none of the desired moments, I disappointedly check it out anyway. During the week, I read so slowly and unenthusiastically that I cannot remember the plot, let alone finish the book.
Until I enter high school and begin to receive letter grades, I think I am very stupid, at least when it comes to academic matters. Then writing rather than reading becomes the terrain of interpersonal m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 75
struggle and the one on which I feel most inadequate. My grammar and syntax are awkward, my paragraphs filled with non sequiturs and my spelling unrecognizable. Nightly responsibility for editing my papers alternates between my mother and my father, the former far more patient and the latter always insistent that I understand the
principles underlying his corrections. I am impatient, easily frustrated, and unwilling to internalize the lessons they struggle to teach me. In the end, I am never quite sure who is the real author of these anguished collaborations. They reflect my deep ambivalence about being held accountable for my own words, my own life.
This reluctance to claim my ideas on paper, I now believe, was connected in some complicated and still incomprehensible way to my recalcitrant and unacceptable sexuality. The written word was both the medium that tied me to my parents in endless battles over periods, commas, and paragraphs, and the medium that eventually allowed me to see myself as an independent agent with a unique story to tell.
Initially seeking confirmation of my burgeoning homosexuality in the words of others, I consider the pseudoscientific tomes of Edmund Bergler and Alfred Kinsey, but the former’s case studies of tortured, unhappy lives and the latter’s statistics have nothing to do with the desires that course through my body. I am forced to look for more arresting representations to guide my future. Abandoning the public library and inconvenient bookstore for the corner newsstand, I discover the modest physique magazines of the 1950s. Filled with well-oiled, fig-leaf-clad torsos—no match for today’s perfected, unveiled gym bodies—the Grecian Guild models are all the more human because of their imperfections. Mostly they are posed alone, however, which is both a disappointment for a teenager desperately seeking images of men together in any format and an incitement to imagining their lives as lived both on the page and off. What does the jauntily worn sailor cap or beach towel casually placed on the ground suggest about what has occurred before or will follow after the photograph is snapped? I carry on silent dialogues with all my favorites and try to enter the photographed scenario so as to have my way with these 76 n jonathan g. silin
mysterious icons even as I create new stories for after the shoot has ended.
Despite these efforts, I am still dissatisfied. Unable to see myself reflected in the protoclones of that era, I draw on immediate experience as the source of my first literary efforts. Electrified by the touch of Marc’s hand on my shoulder as we walked home from the museum, unnerved by Roger’s invitation for a sleepover date that New Year’s Eve, mesmerized by the folds in Donald’s electric-blue bathing suit—
My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents Page 9