by Alice Ozma
What he was saying must have entered through a different ear this time because now it stuck. It was obvious, in fact. I still disagreed in this particular case, but it made sense—in order to be a better parent, you had to be a better person, and that could mean facing some pretty intimidating demons. I realized, feeling suddenly put on the spot, that my father was actually giving my sister and me parenting advice.
“I’m only twenty,” I mumbled, turning away from Dan to make it clear I was not trying to make any child-rearing plans with him. Then I felt guilty for excluding him from the conversation, so I poked his arm a few times until he held my hand. Our relationship was highly evolved at this point.
“If your suggestion is to abandon my future children,” my sister said, still focusing on the example of the mountain climber, “I don’t understand how Egg and I turned out so well.”
“No,” I said, “that’s not it at all. His suggestion is to be your own person before you try to be anything else, because Dad couldn’t have been a father if he wasn’t at least Jim. Is that it?”
We were sharing a moment, an adult-to-adult conversation about his experiences raising children and his insights for raising mine. It was a conversation we couldn’t have had even a year or two ago, while I was still living full-time at the house and fully dependent on his care. He was preparing me for a world that would be, in the not too distant future, mine even more than it was his. My body’s strange reaction to coming to a realization, a shiver went down my spine.
“No, Lovie, you’ve got it all goofed up. I don’t know where you get these cracked ideas.”
“Really?” I deflated. So much for the moment.
“No, I was just teasing you. Of course that’s it. You have to be comfortable with the person you are before you try to raise a bunch of little people. Obviously, the man in the movie wasn’t comfortable. His decision wasn’t selfish at all. If anything, he was trying to be a better parent. He had to figure himself out. I can’t say that I blame the guy.”
“Have you ever had to figure yourself out?”
“No,” he said, puffing out his chest with pride and pounding it like Tarzan. “I raised two nearly perfect girls, and I always knew who I was.”
He raised his arms over his head, miming holding his Styrofoam barbell during his walks through town wearing his various strange hats. The walks, and the stange props, were traditions he’d taken up in the past few years, as much to bewilder fellow Millvillians as to amuse himself. This was to remind us how comfortable he was with himself.
“But,” he said, lowering his arms, “if you encounter some bumps on the way, that is probably common. You can’t expect everyone to raise children like I can. Just make sure you are reading to them. That certainly won’t hurt.”
My father has spent the past five or six years collecting books for his grandchildren, to ensure that I will do just that.
As we were about to leave the Franklin Institute that day, we passed through the great rotunda where we had once seen the trapeze artists perform. I nudged Dan and pointed at the ceiling. I’d told him many times the story of how my father had encouraged and even planned for me to join the trapeze man in his act, dangling high in the air with no training and little more than a basic educational background in spelling and addition. To my surprise, my father was thinking about the same thing.
“You know, Dan,” he said, “I once brought Lovie here to see a trapeze artist. And she got it in her head to go up, so I went and pretended to talk to the guy, just stood close enough to him that from a distance it might look like we were talking, to make her think I was trying to convince him. Like he would take a child up without even a second thought!”
He laughed a long, hard laugh breathing through his nostrils. I stopped in my tracks.
“You pretended to ask him? Does that mean you didn’t actually?”
“Are you nuts, Lovie? Can you imagine what that man would have said if I had really come up to him and asked him to let a second grader go flip around in the sky with him? He would have thought I was cracked!”
Again, he started laughing that deep laugh.
“That story makes a lot more sense now,” Dan said, eying the domed ceiling and showing a smile.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that? What was the point of that? Why would you convince me that he was practically ready for me to go up if you never actually talked to him?”
Now everyone was laughing except me.
“How does this fit in to your philosophical ideals on raising children?” I persisted, grinding the back of my heel into the ground with embarrassment.
“It doesn’t,” he said through his laughter. “Sometimes being a parent is just fun.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I have gone over and over my choices—try to temper what I see as the misbegotten policy of putting road miles on children instead of nurturing their minds, or resign in protest.
—Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season
My college years rushed along at a surprising pace, and I was glad to be at a school near home. When I was too busy to get away, I called often. Although my father was the only person who ever picked up, his number was saved in my phone not as “Dad” but “Home,” like I expected the building itself to answer and tell me how the cats were doing and whether the honeysuckles were blossoming yet. Instead, my father would answer, always happy to hear my voice. I’d tell him about my classes and he’d tell me about his latest and greatest projects in the library. But as my senior year progressed, I noticed that something was wrong. I recalled our conversations just a year or so ago, about the mountain climber in the movie we’d seen. I understood now why my father had defended him. James Brozina was about to climb a mountain of his own.
Changes had been happening at his work for some time before the trouble really began. Computers were moved into the library, and I taught my father how to use them in his lesson plans. He was asked to work in more analyses of stories, so he did. He didn’t even complain too much when he was given a second school and his workload was doubled. It meant that he would have over five hundred students, making it difficult to learn their names and personalities, but he took it well. His work was a challenge, but he couldn’t help loving it anyway.
Then he came up to have lunch with me one Saturday afternoon during my last semester of college. I could tell something was wrong from the moment I saw him, and it wasn’t even because I knew him so well. His shirt was a little wrinkled, which for my father was extremely wrinkled, and his face looked like it was drooping. His hair was noticeably thinner, and his skin had a strange, gray tint, as though the blood pulsing under it had suddenly gotten older, or sadder. He’d lost weight. His eyebrows weren’t as thick.
“He doesn’t want me to read anymore,” he said to his pancakes, as we talked over brunch at a diner we’d discovered in Glassboro, down the street from my college. We both always got the same things—pancakes, scrapple, and milk for my father; a BLT, coleslaw, and iced tea for me. We’d gone dozens of times without changing our orders. Today, he forgot to ask for scrapple. I reminded him, but he said he wasn’t in the mood for it. His plate looked empty without it.
“Who doesn’t?”
“My principal. Well, one of them. He said that I could only read one picture book per class. Five to ten minutes, then on to something else.”
“Five to ten minutes?! Even a Clifford book takes longer than that, if done well!”
He nodded his head to that emphatically and gulped some milk.
“And the other principal told me, here’s the killer—he told me I couldn’t read at all.”
“You’re kidding me!”
He shook his head, but he relaxed a little. It occurred to me that he might have come up expecting me to say he was being unreasonable. Maybe others had been saying this.
“What does he want you to do instead?”
He deepened his naturally high voice to do an impression of his principal.
; “THE COMPUTERS!”
The word made us both wince at the same time. Even though he’d gotten better with them over time, my father did not think computers belonged in the library. Computers belonged in a computer room and books, sacred and worn, belonged in the library. It was a place for reading.
“What’s going on? How could this happen at two different schools?”
He stopped eating altogether and passed the rest of his pancakes to me. This was an especially shocking move, as he usually came after my food if I wasn’t done by the time he took his last bite.
“Neither of them understand what I’m trying to do. Mr. Davis ordered hundreds of new books this summer without listening to my suggestions. He said we needed all new, current books because students like new things. He put everything but the picture books, fiction or nonfiction, in storage.”
I put up my hand to fight in defense of the collection my father had spent years building, but he raised his eyebrows and gestured his hands in agreement and continued.
“I know! It’s absurd! Here’s the worst, Lovie—the library already owned some of the books he ordered! We had them in hardcover, and he ordered them in paperback. I never order paperbacks because they fall apart in less than a year. He ordered flimsy, paperback versions of books we already had. After all the budget cuts, that is how he uses our precious library money. When there are things we really needed, books that the children would have cherished. And where is the collection I spent so many years putting together? In boxes, in the school basement.”
I couldn’t even imagine what the library must be like now. I tried to picture the happy room my father called his home just a year or two ago. The bookshelves were lined with books that he spent hours hand-selecting, dating from the most current market offerings to out-of-print masterpieces. Some nights during The Streak, I got to hear books that he was trying out for his repertoire and give my opinion. He spent his own money and countless hours at yard sales collecting books and decorations to make the library feel like a comforting, inviting place to read, and he’d succeeded. The walls were covered in hand-done paintings of relaxing scenes. Small fountains sat in the corners of the room, and he plugged them in while the students were reading to create a bit of white noise layered over the classical music he kept on in the background. Instead of overhead lights and classroom chairs, he brought in lamps and upholstered furniture to make students totally comfortable. He put up curtains to block out the sun on hot days and laid decorative rugs over the drab gray carpet. There was even a collection of dolls, available to both boys and girls, for his students to read to quietly. It was heaven for children and books alike, until he came in one morning and found it all in a pile. His request to keep up his decorations and his explanation (that children who enjoyed their time in the library were more likely to read on their own) fell on deaf ears. And now it was happening again. His well-researched methods, which revolved around reading to his students as much as necessary to ignite a love for reading within them, were doubted. The books he’d carefully chosen were replaced.
“The most frustrating part,” he summarized as he reached for the check, “is that reading has become irrelevant.”
Over the next few weeks, my mind kept wandering to an episode of The Twilight Zone. “The Obsolete Man” stars Burgess Meredith as a man put on trial and sentenced to death for the crime of being a librarian. At the time it was written, the world of the episode was sometime in the distant, nebulous future. Now, my father felt as though he were being put on trial, and saw his passion for inspiring children to read become antiquated, quaint—obsolete. He was not about to receive capital punishment, of course, but for a man who had devoted his life to books, watching these items become irrelevant was as close to a death sentence as he had ever come. A few weeks later, when he was told to remove reading from his lesson plans altogether, I couldn’t understand how he was even able to get out of bed in the morning.
My father was branded as rebellious and insubordinate because he did what any bibliophile would have done in this situation: he fought back. He began with calm conversations with his principals, asking them why these strange rules were going into effect, and why now. But they didn’t seem interested in talking it over. He explained that what he was doing fit the curriculum—buying age-appropriate books and reading to children were both expected on a state level. But as quickly as the words came out of his mouth, they floated away on the breeze, unheard and unheeded. At the school where reading to children in the library was banned, my father moved his classes to the back of the library, turned the lights out, huddled them around him, and read to them in secret.
I couldn’t figure out what it was about the reading, or maybe my father, that frustrated these men so much. The main idea, though, seemed to be a desire for change. His principals wanted to make a change, to have the school be different when they left than it was when they came in, and I could respect that. It’s hard to imagine leaving a place without making some sort of impact. But to just arbitrarily throw out my father’s traditions, like the books that had been thrown out because they were old, seemed wrong. The books, and his lesson plans, lasted as long as they did because they served their purpose. And now, for the sake of modernity, both were being tossed without a second thought. Worst of all, reading was disappearing from the library altogether.
“You have to fight it,” I told him one night over the phone.
“Well, I plan to, because it’s the right thing to do for the kids. They need to be read to, and they need good books in the library.”
“And you should fight for you, too. It’s your job and you do it well. People need to respect that you know what you are doing. You were Educator of the Year for the whole city just nine months ago! Doesn’t that count for anything? Do you want me to come in and talk to them?”
I knew that wasn’t a real solution. Still, I could understand why frustrated parents sometimes told off referees or sent angry letters to coaches. No matter how uninvolved you think you should be, it’s hard to see someone you love mistreated and do nothing about it.
“I’ll call the paper, if you’ll let me,” I added, hopefully. “I think people will really respond to your story.”
“Lovie, I understand that you want to help, and you’d be darn good at it. If you were a lawyer and we could make this a court case, you’d tie everyone up in knots. But I’m sixty-one. Lots of teachers retire at sixty-two. It’s not worth the stress to fight it for my own sake. I don’t need to defend my job just so that I can stay seven more months. Someone needs to stick up for the kids, and I will, but this can’t be about me. It isn’t worth it.”
To hear my father describe himself, or his position, as “not worth it” made my heart sink, even if he was being logical. Many people would have described all of the money and time he put into his work as “not worth it,” but it wasn’t a job to him, or even a career. It was his calling.
“You don’t want to retire at sixty-two! That’s not you!” I was fighting back tears and glad that we were talking on the phone, instead of in person, so that he couldn’t see my eyes getting red.
“If reading was still the priority, I would work until I couldn’t get up the stairs to the library anymore. But if my job is to spend the entire period teaching children about the Internet while perfectly good books sit in storage getting dusty, I can’t bring myself to keep going in there.”
“But for now, you’ll take it to a higher level, for the sake of the kids?”
“For now. For the sake of the kids.”
My father scheduled a meeting with some higher-ups in the district. Once a date was set, he devoted all of his free time to researching the benefits of reading aloud. He spent hours collecting articles and studies, printing them out in thick stacks and then searching through them for especially convincing arguments. He reached out to America’s most prominent authority on reading aloud, Jim Trelease, a best-selling author on the topic. Trelease responded with suggestions and helpful
research ideas. In fact, my father’s story moved him to write an essay about the situation (leaving out the name and city, at my father’s request) and post it on the homepage of his website. Between my classes I did searches on the benefits of reading aloud to children and sent my father links and suggestions. When the big meeting came, I was feeling confident.
He came up to take me to our favorite diner the next day and looked much better than I had seen him in months. The meeting had gone well—extremely well, in fact. The supervisors in attendance confirmed that reading was indeed a part of the curriculum and that the computers, though important in their own way, were not the point of library time. My father was reluctant to believe that anything would actually come of this meeting, but that made no sense to me. These were district officials! They were on his side! I could barely finish my BLT, but this time it was out of pure excitement. Finally, someone understood.
A week later, my father got a letter about the meeting. He called to read it to me.
“ ‘As we discussed in our meeting,’ ” he had trouble saying, as though the words were stuck in his mouth, “ ‘you are to read no more than one book to each class, lasting no more than five to ten minutes.’ ”
“It can’t possibly say that! We’re back where we started! That is not what happened! Is that what happened?”
“No, not at all. I’ve got my notes from the meeting in front of me. I may have gotten goofed up at some point. I know my hearing is bad, but I couldn’t be that far off.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“What can I do at this point? I’ve taken it as high up as I can.”
“I honestly don’t understand what happened. Why did this change?”
“Someone even higher up than the people I spoke to must have disagreed. That’s all I can figure. Reading doesn’t seem to be too popular right now. Or maybe I’m not too popular.”
I knew the latter was impossible—my father is one of the most well-liked men I have ever met, especially on a professional level. Teachers have always been so impressed by his work, they would sometimes give up their free periods to come and sit in the back of his classroom, listening to picture books but enjoying every minute of it.