It was a day when the Puerto Rican Goddess chose her theme with typical exuberance.
“Our great grandfather came to Puerto Rico from the Canary Islands as a very young man without a penny. He collected wood in the fields, and then went and stood by the side of the road. Took anything anybody would give him for the wood. He saved and saved, never spending any money on anything, but buying land. He ended up a very rich man, and bought one of the first cars in a town west of here. Then he realized: he could travel for less on the públicos—the public cars. So he sold the car back to the dealer.”
A story a friend, Carlos, told me at the café. We were talking families, and how for the generation of the Great Depression it’s agony to shell out a dime they don’t need to spend.
Now, of course, they can afford all the help they need. But Carlos’s parents are still living frugally, still wanting to pass something on to their children, still worried that they’ll run through their money and be a burden.
“Your mother always wanted to go to Europe,” said Carlos’s father, when Carlos, having reviewed his father’s finances, told him just how well he had done.
They hadn’t, of course. They had stayed home and worked and gotten places their parents hadn’t—both Carlos’s parents went to the States and got Master’s Degrees, both worked, both believed passionately in getting ahead.
No time for Europe.
Oh, and no money, either.
There were similar stories in my family. Franny’s family were eccentrics, Jack came from salt-of-the-earth Norwegian immigrants. No money there, although there is a hospital ward that my grandmother had donated somewhere in Chicago. And she hadn’t had a car until she was shamed into it by hearing a rumor that the Newhouses were too poor to buy one. So she bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, drove it back, had the tires taken off, and kept it on cinder blocks in the front yard.
And like Carlos’s parents, Jack had been a big believer of getting ahead, making progress, going somewhere and making a life that was better than the person’s who had given you that life.
And then giving a hand to somebody less fortunate—but as hardworking—as you.
Which is why Jack had called up his old friend at the Urban League, sometime in the late 80’s.
He’d gotten it into his head that parents needed to read to their kids.
Well, he certainly did.
There’s a photo of me, somewhere, with Jack lying down on the couch, and me sitting on a pillow above his head. He’s holding the book that we both are reading.
So Jack had teamed up with his old buddy, and they were busy on a project involving filming parents reading a book, visible to the viewer, to their kids. At least that’s how I remember it. And since that had been Jack’s project-of-the-moment when he died, we had asked for donations to the program in lieu of flowers.
As a writer, Jack respected conciseness. He tended, however, to use the telephone as an instrument to explore what he thought. He would call his friend at the Urban League, get the voice mail, and then leave one, two or even three lengthy, pontificating messages. The Urban League guy wrote a warm tribute to Jack after he died, and finally confessed that most of the time, he had only listened to the concluding message.
Right—so it seemed to be a day organized around some simple themes: poverty, getting ahead, hard work and giving back. Which had been as the well the theme of the remarkable documentary I had seen the night before.
On the flimsiest of excuses, I had written an old high school classmate, Emily Auerbach, now a distinguished professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We hadn’t been close, but we knew each other. I was a cellist, she an oboist—we shared a lot of Shostakovich Fifth together.
Franny had mentioned her, once or twice, over the years and had attended some of her lectures. And she’s no lightweight. Margaret Drabble writes about Searching for Jane Austen, “Emily Auerbach's approach to Jane Austen is lively, engaging, and thoroughly modern. Like Austen, Auerbach wears her wide learning lightly and imparts a great deal of information in a most enjoyable manner.”
Right, Margaret Drabble—the heaviest of guns….
But I have, as you know, until the end of February 2013 to get my message out. You can have a good, comfortable death at the time and place of your choice. You don’t need to rot away in a nursing home. You can die at home with the cat on your bed on a spring afternoon—just as Franny did.
So it was time to call in whatever artillery seemed at hand. I tracked down Emily—not hard to do—and sent her an email.
Some time elapsed. She replied, apologizing for the delay. My email talking about the book I had written about the death of my mother had arrived…
…on the day Emily had buried her mother.
So it was one of those times that an email couldn’t do it. Time to phone. I did, stammered out an apology, and then began to watch the documentary for which Emily had sent me a link.
I’m happy to say that while I’ve been occupying myself with the daily trot and writing blog posts, some of my high school classmates are actually doing some real work. And no, not on Austen—which I’ve not read, but will—but on the south side of Madison. In a library—The Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman Library. Didn’t know the library, but did recognize the building behind it.
Emily, it seems, never knew poverty, as I—knock on wood—have not. But her parents did, and were only able to escape it through the help of a remarkable institution, Berea College, which was free. So her parents, like Carlos’s and mine, had gone onward and upward, and now Emily was reaching out and giving a hand.
Or a handout. Or homework she had assigned and graded.
It’s called the Odyssey Project, and it’s a free, yearlong, fully accredited university course with the intention of getting people who never would have dreamed of going to the university…
…into the university.
And out, with a degree.
More than a degree. A changed life, or rather, lives. Because nothing happens in a vacuum. You’re a kid, and you watch your mother go from homelessness to university graduate. You think that doesn’t have an effect? Especially when she calls you on your skipping classes in high school.
She’s not big on subtlety, the Puerto Rican Goddess. She paints with a pretty big brush. Sometimes that’s best, I think. Sometimes the message really is simple. You can change lives. You can get ahead. If you’re sitting pretty now, stand up, look below you, reach down and give a hand.
Raf swears that there’s something unique about Wisconsin—its efficiency, its earnestness, its almost naïve belief that institutions and systems can work, and can get better. I scoff at the idea.
Until I see an old classmate in a room with thirty poor people on whom, as a colleague says, “she just won’t give up. She won’t let anyone slip away.”
And Raf passes the Kleenex to dry my tears.
