A New Old Thing

A pencil.

I learned to draw with Jon Gnagy. I’d wake up Sunday mornings, turn on the television, and draw along with Jon Gnagy. He’d pull out his chalks and charcoal sticks and pencils, and I’d pull out my pencil. He had a kneaded eraser, but I just had the eraser on the tip of the pencil.

But I drew.

Jon Gnagy taught me perspective. He taught me shading. He taught me shapes. All in blacks and grays (but I only had black because I only had a pencil).

I was maybe six or seven, and I CRAVED a Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw set. Just before Hanukkah one year, my parents took me out to the local art store to buy one. They were all out. I was devastated.

But when the first night of Hanukkah came, I opened up my very own Jon Gnagy Learn to Draw set! Finally, I had the gray chalks, the special pencils, the blending stick, the sandpaper sharpener, and the kneaded eraser. I was delirious! The moment is frozen in my mind as the best Hanukkah ever.

Eventually, I discovered color and moved on to pastels, to watercolor, to oil paints. I moved on to clay and wood and fabric. I had other teachers. And for the last few weeks, I’ve had another class with Amanda Saxton (who taught me watercolor a few years ago). She called this class “Drawing with a Twist,” and the twist was: it was only with pencil.

Mostly, I use pencil to outline whatever I’m going to color in. Pencil is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But what an eye-opener this was! Our pencils became the way to show light and dark and texture. And not just our pencils, but the graphite they’re made of. (If you can believe this, I actually used my original Jon Gnagy sandpaper sharpener to get graphite shavings. A de-cluttering failure turned success!)

I’m a follower of the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain school: the real talent in drawing is learning to see. And when you’re working in just pencil and black and white, and if you’re really looking, you really see a lot more. Like the white rim of reflection on the dark side of the globe.

There are things you can do with the edge of your pencil.

And then Amanda gave us white chalk and told us to draw a leaf on gray paper. So this time, we were drawing the light, not the dark.

There’s a reason why my art in this blog is more like doodling. I made a promise to myself early on that I wouldn’t sweat and fuss and re-do, so I don’t achieve mastery. But occasionally, I see on the paper what I saw in my mind, and that satisfies. And when I learn something new, see something new, light bulbs go off.

I wonder if Jon Gnagy worked with only blacks and grays because that’s all television could show? I think of him fondly; he put art in my life. Now, almost sixty years later, that endures, but I had to relearn that there’s so much color in black and gray and so much magic in a pencil.

The Humor Self-Test

I really love teaching my Alaska Literacy Program class, but I had a special treat this last semester: the unit on Humor. First, we had to work on our vocabulary. Imagine being new to English and encountering these expressions. It makes you realize how many land mines a new language presents:

• It went over like a lead balloon
• I don’t get it.
• That’s too much.
• That went over my head.

Our book took us through a Humor Self-Test of funny pictures. Or not-funny, if you didn’t get it. Or not-funny if it was just stupid. We had to rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being very funny.

Quiet Insook rated everything a 5. As we went through each picture, and as Insook rated it a 5 yet again, we all found that hilarious. We’d wait for Insook’s vote and then laugh all over again.

Which was not as raucous as our laughter club. We’re supposed to improve our health and wellbeing by laughing for no reason. So we chuckled, looked at each other, and laughed some more. Soon we were helpless with laughter, sweating from laughter, tears streaming down our faces. Lori, the Literacy Program’s program director, came in because, as she said, her walls were shaking. We laughed harder. (Supposedly, all that laughter lost us between 10 and 40 calories.)

Everyone had to tell a joke in English to the rest of the class. Just imagine trying to tell a joke in another language! How would I even tell a knock-knock joke??? (I stuck with bringing in the peanut brittle can that explodes with snakes when you open it.)

Anne from Germany told this one: ‘Two toothpicks fight their troublesome way through the forest, taking many hours. Suddenly, they are passed by a porcupine. So one toothpick tells the other, “If I had known there was a bus route on our way, I would have waited.”’

We had to take some time to process mentally. Anne said, “Originally, the joke was about a hedgehog, but I thought maybe everyone would know porcupine better.” But that was only the beginning of our cultural adjustments. Some of us were still working on toothpicks, on waiting for buses, on forest. There is a lot of cultural translation that has to happen when you hear a joke. Moments later, we got it!

Rosario from Mexico told hers: ‘I gave my mother-in-law a present for Christmas, a cemetery plot. The next Christmas, she said, “Why haven’t you given me a present for Christmas?” I said, “Well, you haven’t used the one I gave you last year!”’

Some of us laughed, but Insook of South Korea was horrified: if a joke like that were told of a Korean mother-in-law, it would be scandalous. It would be a terrible, terrible insult. Definitely not a 5.

Meanwhile, Insook’s co-worker told her a blonde joke. In a room full of Asians and Latinos, the blonde joke doesn’t even compute.

Our workbook and CD had a few examples of practical jokes. We had to learn vocabulary like:

• be the butt of a joke
• cross the line
• take a joke

“You’re invited to a friend’s costume party. When you arrive, everyone else is nicely dressed in business clothes, and you’re dressed in a chicken costume.” How do you rate that joke? It’s a 0 if it’s you, but if it’s someone else, we admitted, we’d go home and tell our families about this hilarious practical joke. It’s all a matter of perspective.

The toughest vocabulary to explain was “politically correct.” In a workbook scenario, someone told an offensive joke about an ethnic group. When the object of the joke was insulted, the joke teller accused him of being too politically correct.

So how do you explain to immigrants the recent cultural phenomenon of “politically correct”? How someone’s experience of hurt and insult is turned around to being their problem? That rudeness gets a free pass in the guise of opposing “political correctness”?

It’s all a matter of perspective, and every day, I appreciate the opportunity to see the world from many different directions.

The Quest for New-ness #4

The quest for New Things is always a win – for variety, for newness – but the exact result of the quest sometimes yields a few duds. Recently, I’ve scored two clear wins, but the jury is still out on the dud.

They all came from classes at Anchorage Community House, my new go-to place of learning and doing New Things. The other things I’ve made there have been wood projects, but the class description for Indigo Dyeing said, “Create beautiful indigo creations using the shibori dyeing technique.”

In class, we took our fabric and folded it, tied it, clothes-pinned it. Basically, we made a tight little wad so that when it sat in the indigo dye bath, we’d leave the marks of where dye absorbed and where it didn’t. Yes – shades of tie-dying! – that’s shibori.

This was a clear success. I think I’ll cut my bluish indigo-ish fabric into squares and make a quilt, but that’s a project for another day … or year.

While we were busy dyeing indigo, Meg told us of another Community House offering: Bundle Dyed Scarves. What I got out of this one was that we’d roll flowers and vegetables up in cloth and make patterns. This sounded sufficiently goofy and fun and useful – right up my alley.

Yup, we rolled rose petals and leaves and eucalyptus and flowers and bugs in silk. (The bugs are from cochineal insects which produce the crimson color. I first met them when visiting weavers in Peru.) Then we wound the silk around tin cans or sticks and tied it on really, really tightly. Then we stuck the bundle in boiling cabbage water.

Finally, our dye bath was over, and this one, too, was a great success. An artistic, silk, loop scarf will challenge my usual schtunk attire, but it’s soft and pretty … and can always make a nice gift.

So now we get to my last New Thing class:

“Learn to make bags out of plastic grocery bags. These bags are EXTRA sturdy and hold lots of weight. It’s easy. Just bring a scissors, a crochet hook the size of your pinky, and patience.”

What really amazed me was that everyone in the class brought their own Bags of Bags. We all have Bags of Bags … along with Boxes of Boxes and Containers of Containers. Even using cloth shopping bags, plastic bags accumulate. We were supposed to slice our plastic bags into strips, loop them together, and make “plarn,” plastic yarn. This class was a decluttering/recycling opportunity!

My only experience with crocheting was a Brownie project when I was little. I would ride my bike to Mrs. Goodhartz’s house for help crocheting Pierre the Poodle. Every trip, Mrs. Goodhartz would say, “My, my, these stitches are so very tight.” They were SO TIGHT they were impenetrable. If Pierre had ever been finished, he would have been airtight.

But this time, I was armed with a crochet hook the size of my thumb!

A crochet hook the size of one’s thumb is no protection against tight stitches. My thumb nail hurts from trying to pull stitches off the crochet hook. When I come around a row, things are so tight and jam-packed that it’s hard to tell what exactly qualifies as a stitch. Peggy, who took the class with me, said I must be adding stitches: instead of going up, my shopping bag is going out. I am making a plastic rug.

Mimi, who also took the class, said this sort of project would drive her mother crazy. Her mother doesn’t get quilting (“Why cut fabric up only to sew it together?”) so the idea of slicing plastic bags in order to crochet them together to make another plastic bag would strike her as ludicrous. I’m starting to agree.

I had to take a break for my thumb nail, cuticle, and spirit to recover, but then I cut my thumb slicing an onion. After bleeding on my plastic bag, things have ground to a halt.

In my Third Third, I get to abandon projects that aggravate more than they please. Maybe I’ll recycle my crocheted plastic and call it a draw. Then I’ll sit and re-admire my indigo-dyed fabric and flower-dyed silk.

How do you say "panic" in Japanese?

I think most of the things I’ve learned in my life have been absorbed gradually. I noticed, became familiar, picked up new information: a nice, steady process of learning. But every now and then, I’ve received a sudden burst of knowledge, a direct infusion to the brain, a BLAST of realization.

I speak two languages (Spanish also) and have, in previous Thirds, spoken two others: German and Hebrew. (I have trouble keeping more than two in my head; the extras just get pushed out.) I’ve lived in a Spanish-speaking country, traveled in countries that spoke other languages. I teach English to refugees and immigrants. I thought I was pretty aware of what goes into language acquisition.

But a couple weeks ago, in a class at the Alaska Literacy Program, Polly demonstrated how she’d begin teaching English to someone who didn’t know a speck of English. She had to start with pointing to herself when she said “I,” pointing to us when she said “you.” We got it. She held objects up, said it was a “bird,” a “dish.” We got that, too. And we got it when she wrote on the board “bird.”

And then Polly pointed to herself and said something in Japanese! She pointed to us and said something else. We had to repeat.

Repeat? I wasn’t even sure what I’d heard. How could I pronounce what I couldn’t even hear right?

And she didn’t stop. She kept saying things in Japanese. My heart rate went up. I think the bird was a “tori,” but there were other sounds around it. Did those mean “This is”? Or is there some suffix that goes with nouns? How could I figure out the grammar when I couldn’t even be sure what I was hearing?

She just kept on. Everything was Japanese.

Then she pulled out some charts:

That was the bird. That sound in front was the T sound for that “tori” sound.

Polly pulled out cups and dishes and horns and her hand and said a lot more Japanese. They jumbled up terribly in my head. If I learned one, I forgot another. So Polly put them all in sentences:

By then, I think I’d describe what I was experiencing as “panic.” But deep down, I also knew it would end. Eventually, Polly would stop talking in Japanese and she’d return to English. My world would return to English and I could breathe easily again.

But Yousef in my class can’t return to Sudan. Muna can’t return to Iraq. They left war-torn countries and had to leave their languages behind. They had to land in a world of English and ADAPT. Street signs, TV, magazines – wherever they look, it’s English. And the remarkable thing is, they’ve learned it.

I am in awe.

Researchers say that immigrants have a greater forward focus than other people, that they’ve opted to make a future for themselves, to tackle the major changes that future requires. They’re motivated. They’re brave.

And what do they want to do? They want to volunteer, to contribute, to do something helpful while they improve their English. They want to make friends who’ll have the patience to let them speak English and get better at it.

It’s been two weeks since my Japanese trial by fire, and I can’t remember a bit of it. I haven’t tried because … because it was uncomfortable. It was a New Thing I was glad to ditch … and I could.

But it was a major blast of awareness, a staggering recognition of how very, very hard it is for our new immigrants. That’s the New Thing I’m glad to re-learn over and over again.

Citizen Amanda

A new year, a new beginning, a New Thing; and it’s not even mine. It’s Amanda’s. Amanda is a brand new American citizen.

Amanda came to the United States from El Salvador six years ago as a 20-year-old au pair. In El Salvador, she’d been a nurse’s assistant, but when she decided to come to the United States, she took another year and a half to learn English in preparation. Now, after a couple of years at the Alaska Literacy Program – where she was one of my students – Amanda is enrolled at UAA to get credentialed.

It’s hard.

Her whole venture has been hard. In six years, Amanda has not been back home, has only seen her mother on Skype. Her second year was the hardest, when most of her au pair peer group returned home, and she was lonely. Amanda is outgoing, creative, fun to be around; but 20-somethings don’t readily forge friendships with people whose English is developing. Think about it: how many of our friendships are with people who want to improve their English? The people Amanda meets in ESL (English as a Second Language) programs often return home after a year or so.

But Amanda persisted.

I read recently that immigrants have a future orientation; they’re looking to make a brighter day. That future orientation often leads them to giving the economy a push. Something in Amanda wanted the future, and she kept at it, making it happen.

Fortunately, her au pair employer appreciated her so much that she hired Amanda after her service ended. Eventually, Amanda met Ryan and they married. In 2013, Amanda applied for residency and now, years later, she could become a citizen.

My mother used to work for the Family Court, and she said the happiest days of her week were Thursdays: Adoption Day. I bet the happiest days in the Federal Building are Naturalization Ceremony days. Families come as parents and grandparents, wives and husbands, become citizens. Friends and colleagues, teachers and neighbors are there, and everyone is dressed up for the occasion.

The room was full with about forty new citizens from all over. There was some music, some singing, and a heartfelt address by a now-successful immigrant. All the speakers and the judge acknowledged that these new citizens may have to face a lot of negative comments and insults in the America we now experience – a sad message to people who swear an Oath of Allegiance pledging to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the U.S.

Many of these new citizens have left war or famine, persecution or other tragedies behind. They have lived here for the required three to five years of residency, may have learned a new language or a new vocation. None of it is easy. The only easy road is the one I traveled simply by virtue of the accident of having been born here … because my grandparents fled persecution and faced that tough road themselves.

When I was 20, I was a happy-go-lucky college kid. When Amanda was 20, she was moving alone to a new country.

Citizen Amanda, I’m glad you’re here!

A line connects two dots, right?

A couple in Anchorage – Meg and Zach – gave an incredible gift to the community. They bought the house across the street from theirs and turned it into Anchorage Community House. There are classes there, an art room, a tool check-out library – it’s a great idea.

My brain needed a rest from political ads, conversations, and coverage; so a couple of weeks ago, I took a class to make a plant stand. Not only would I learn how to make a plant stand, but I’d actually end up with one. It could lift the schefflera off the new carpet and be USEFUL.

Zach had the wood and tools, and my job was to cut the pieces and screw them together. We measured and marked the wood with pencil. Then I used the circular saw to cut along the lines. I learned the word kerf, which is the cut the saw makes.

The thing is, it’s hard to keep the saw exactly on target. Even harder when you have Third Third eyes and you’re not exactly sure – once you have the safety goggles on – where the line is anymore. The cut – the kerf – has its own dimension. So every now and then, Zach would say something like, “You’re missing it” when I guessed I was in the right spot. Zach compared all the post lengths and worried they weren’t exactly even. And I would tell him not to worry, that the plant stand was going to stand on carpet after all.

A couple days later, I read the book A Tenth of a Second about how measurement had to develop if science was going to develop. The author, Jimena Canales, starts with astronomy and how different astronomers got different measurements for when a star was in position in the sky. This caused lots of problems for mapmaking, even for determining the exact length of the meter (which is based on the earth’s circumference). It all comes down – among other things – to reaction time, how long it takes a person to see, process, and note a star’s transit across the sky. It was a huge international mess in the 1800s.

In 1835, an astronomer named Francis Baily showed that even normal, everyday measurements fell victim to the problem. Some people measured from the middle of a line, some from the top edge, some from the bottom. Even if you just have to connect two dots, it matters whether you’re starting from the inside edge of the dot or the outside edge, from the middle or the side.

The dictionary calls it the “personal equation,” and it affects just about everything humans try to measure.

Why am I telling you all this? Because there I was trying to escape all the election coverage: this opinion piece, that editorial; this article from one newspaper, that article from another; NPR vs Fox News; one pollster vs another … a million different viewpoints. And there’s no way Zach and I could have agreed on where a pencil line “began.”

It puts a lot of things in perspective when you realize there’s inherent bias in even using a ruler.

But even with all that, my plant stand still holds my plant up just fine.

A tale of two cities

Every day I’m in New York City, I’m astonished that class warfare hasn’t broken out. This city is filled with places, stores, restaurants, activities – you name it – that I can’t afford. There are plenty of free things – free night at a museum, pay what you can at an event – so I am having a great old time, but the expensive things are WAY OUT OF RANGE.

Sophie, whose New York is a world I’d never find or know existed except she tells me, happened upon a trendy gathering and they took her along to a club. The cost to sit at a table was $2,000, and that was before drinks! I walked into a store and won’t even tell you what the shoes cost.

The thing about New York is that you see EVIDENCE of rich people. Somehow in Alaska, it doesn’t feel so in-my-face as it does here. I move in my own circle back home (which, granted, doesn’t mean I encounter poverty on a daily basis). Sure, there are restaurants I don’t frequent, gear I don’t own, but we all shop at Fred Meyer. Here I’m wandering around, crossing economic boundary lines every day and popping my eyes at the prices. Popping my eyes!

The Village Voice had an article about the gardeners, plumbers, and service people in Long Island’s Hamptons. How they’ve been waiting 40 years for Reagan’s trickle down, how their lives have changed over the years. One income used to support a family; now two are required. They’re fed up and see the people who hire them – and treat them poorly – getting richer and richer.

So they’re supporting Donald Trump. That confuses me. I see the things they do, and Bernie Sanders speaks to me. Like a billionaire is going to revamp the economic system that has lead to this wider and wider divergence of incomes?

But this is what worries me: the Leo Frank exhibit tied his lynching and the resurgence of the KKK to how the South felt after Civil War reconstruction. Everyone ties Hitler to the deprivation of Germany after World War I penalties. When people feel excluded from prosperity – excluded, not just passed by – they get angry. And demagogues can channel that anger better than calm explainers.

The people who are angry are not stupid. The stupid, stupid people are the ones who thought they could get away with this indefinitely, that they could keep impoverishing people while they lived higher and higher on the hog. Did they think the waitress wouldn’t notice that they were throwing down $2,000 to sit at a table? I can see why the Occupy movement began in New York. I’d be camping in a tent on Wall Street, too.

Friday is the 105th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire where 146 mostly young women garment workers died. 62 of them jumped to their deaths and splattered on the pavement. The owners had locked certain doors to make sure the workers didn’t take unauthorized breaks, and they made more money from insurance than they were forced to pay in compensation. No one went to jail. Banker bonuses anyone?

On Friday, I will chalk Yetta Goldstein’s name in front of the building she lived in when she died in the fire at age 20. We have to remember the price regular people pay when they’re taken advantage of, treated poorly, and seen as the means to someone else’s prosperity. I’ve met wonderful people in New York who remember this, who organize those regular people to make productive change for health, safety, and wellbeing. Who draw the community together with those goals.

There are two New York Cities, one for the Haves and one for the Have Nots. I’m worried this isn’t going to end well.

What do you put on a burn? Whatever you have.

There we were in my Alaska Literacy Program class, going through the workbook, learning the English words for safety and accident prevention. We were also working on the difference between “should” (see a doctor) and “have to” (go to the hospital). We were describing what had happened in this illustration:

“She burned her hand.” “She should use a mitt.” And then, in those moments I love, the conversation took off.

Irma from Guatemala said she should put eggs on her burn. Rebecca from South Sudan agreed, but she would add sugar and milk to the mixture and make a paste to spread on the burn. I’m not exactly sure of the recipe; ingredients were coming fast and furiously, in a mixture of several languages, with energetic hand motions for emphasis. Irma was “stirring” her eggs for me while Rebecca was “applying” her paste.

But Fioly from the Dominican Republic was busy grating potatoes. Her mother had a terrible burn from a pot of boiling water, but applying grated potatoes meant no scar. So Irma showed me where she’d received a bad burn but the eggs had cured it.

Afele from Samoa got in on the action: “Butter,” he said. “No, no, no,” the women chorused, “Never butter.” I explained the little I knew, that butter continues to cook from the heat of the burn, making a burn worse.

Sandra is from Colombia and found the whole thing hilarious. She said she puts ham and cheese and bread on her arm and then mimed eating her arm. I didn’t think Sandra understood. I thought she wasn’t following the conversation, that she thought it was about eating. It took me a while, but then I got it: she was making a joke. It really seemed like we were putting meals on our burns.

So, of course, I had to get in on the action. I told them what everyone should do when they get a bad burn in Alaska: cover it with snow. I knew that the temperature had to be lowered quickly, and I’d heard stories of miraculous rescues by throwing fire victims in snow banks. But then the women all shouted, “No, not water. No water at all.” They were adamant.

So I came home and Googled “burn remedies.” Well, the first thing that pops up is “No ice.” Ice can damage tissue. Cool water is the top recommendation, but then there’s a whole batch of things: vanilla extract; cold, wet tea bags; milk; oats; raw potato; onion juice; vinegar; and honey (although there’s some debate as to whether it’s only special honey). Some say eggs, some say egg whites. And, after all this food, what else? Mint toothpaste.

Not to be outdone, the National Mustard Museum touts the yellow mustard burn remedy, and the People’s Pharmacy says, “Some people have wondered if brown mustard or fancy Dijon mustard will work as well. From what we hear from readers, cheap yellow mustard works best.”

I’d better tell Sandra her ham and cheese sandwich needs mustard, too.

If most burns in the home happen in the kitchen, I can guess why all these food remedies have emerged: everyone grabs whatever they can find. The mustard solution was only discovered after someone realized soy sauce didn’t work. Soy sauce?

And afterwards, wrap the burn in aluminum foil because the foil delivers “restorative minerals as foil contains aluminum and other regenerative minerals.”

I’d better tell Sandra to wrap her sandwich in aluminum foil.

Okay, after migrating through all these assorted food remedies and Google sites, I finally found something reputable (I think): cool water and aloe vera. So I keep an aloe vera plant in the kitchen. I might try a couple of tea bags because I’ve already been told to keep some of them in the freezer for mosquito bites.

But I still don’t know about snow. Was that just an urban legend I’d picked up? Burns happen all over the world and all over the world, people pick what’s handy in their attempts to treat it. My snow may just be Alaska’s answer to Irma’s eggs and Fioly’s potatoes.

1-2-3-4 left feet. Pause.

After returning from New Orleans, Tim and I found a Zydeco dance workshop as part of the Folk Festival. Saturday morning, that’s where we were.

I do love to dance …

… as long as no choreography is involved. Once there are specific instructions – steps – there’s a problem. In high school, when we did calisthenics, the gym teacher would say, “Will someone take Barbara aside and work with her?” At theater auditions, I’d make it past the acting and the singing, but when the dancing happened, they’d all be stepping left, right, swing, turn, jump, spin, right, left … and I’d be stuck at “what comes after ‘left’?”

During the Jazzercise/aerobics craze of the ’80s, I did learn to do it. I got pretty good at it … as long as I did the same routine over and over again for months.

Even when I took up curling and had to slide with one foot while the other went down as I advanced with the stone, I would have to ask over and over before each turn, “Which foot slides when I put it down?” I’m sure there are people there who still wonder how I walk, period.

So the dancing that I love doing consists of hanging onto Tim’s neck during a slow dance (a la high school cafeteria) or moving to the beat of some Rolling Stones so that the beat makes it all happen without any steps, routines, or motor coordination. (I know people laugh at Elaine’s dancing on Seinfeld, but I’m not really sure what they’re laughing at.) Here’s a hint: the first dance I learned was The Freddie to Freddie & The Dreamers. Do you remember? It was so happy!

I met Tim, and he could dance with twirls where he spun me out and back. He even owned cowboy boots. I was very impressed. So years ago – maybe even before we were married – Tim and I took a swing dance class together. Turns out Tim wasn’t as talented as he’d impressed me, so Marlis, our instructor, tried to straighten us out with “slow-slow-quick-quick.” Class was an hour-and-a-half long, and I think one of our first arguments happened when, after 15 minutes, Tim said, “Okay, one-sixth done.”

Twenty some odd years go by. Lots of dancing, no steps. I dance with abandon and have such a wild time maybe people think it’s some sort of demonic possession rather than dancing. Tim twirls me out and back and there isn’t a slow-slow-quick-quick anywhere. Or rather, we always recite “slow-slow-quick-quick” while we do whatever we want. It’s our little joke.

Fast forward to last Saturday and the Zydeco dance workshop. It looked like it should be incredibly easy: “1-2-3-pause, 1-2-3 pause.” It’s a little unclear whether the foot stays in the air during the pause or comes down, but it sort of looks like shuffling so we’re maintaining. But then it gets complicated: one foot goes back while one goes out to the side. All in turn. Which turn? Which foot? Mirror image of each other or doing the same foot? Still with 1-2-3-pause? Or is now when we switch to “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8”? And we have to switch hand-holding position, too?!?

As Tim put it, we’re the ones who have trouble clapping along with any musician. We seem to catch it a half-clap behind. Dozens of couples moving around, and we’re mumbling “1-2-3-pause,” bumping into people. We lose the beat and just can’t find the “1-2-3,” let alone the pause. We’re marching to our own drummers, “1-2-pause,” “1-pause-2,” “1-2-3-4.” We’re so coordinated we can say “1-2-3-pause” and do “1-2-pause-3-pause” at the same time. Isn’t that an achievement?

Unfortunately, there are many more women than men so the pairs have to split up. Now we take our ineptitude to the population, like a contagion, a spreading virus. Each time we link back up, we share stories of dancers we have confused, bumped into, or sweat upon. Finally, three-fourths done, we escape. Every now and then, we say “1-2-3-pause” to each other and laugh.

Some New Things are just destined to be fodder for a funny story.

Tonight we’re trying Zumba.

Go to school for an eye-opening jolt

I am in my Third Third and I had a major eye-opening jolt last week. Right here in Anchorage. Right in an elementary school. I’m still reeling.

I read the newspaper. I have been involved in fighting for school funding. I have lots of teacher friends. I have volunteered a lot in the schools. I know that Anchorage’s school kids speak 93 different languages, that our census tracts are the most diverse in the country.

And then I walked into my friend Dawn’s class to teach writing, and half the class is somewhat monolingual in a language other than English.

Just think about this. Not about how lovely the cultural celebrations might be, how rich the heritage of the kids are. Think about the reality of teaching a classroom of 27 children where half of them don’t speak the language. Think about being the dedicated teacher trying to reach each child where they are so they can grow from that point.

I went from kid to kid, saw that some put two words to the page, some whole paragraphs. Some were into the creativity, some were tortured by the task. They were all trying so hard, but they each needed individual attention. And Dawn is one person.

Dawn is a superlative teacher who used to teach gifted kids. She elected, in her Third Third, to teach in a Title I school. She loves those kids, and she has the personal presence to command their attention, the skills to guide them. She tutors till 5, takes professional development classes on Saturday, makes home visits. And yet, when we got together to talk about this, she still cried because it isn’t enough.

The kids in her classroom speak Lao, Tagalog, Farsi, Korean, Spanish, Yup’ik, Hmong, and Twi (the language of Ghana). Four of them are special ed students. The parents are hard-working immigrants; while there is little generational poverty here, there is hardship. But the parents are pulling for their kids, supporting the school. 25 of 27 came to parent conferences, several families come to parent education classes twice a week at the school.

There is a bilingual tutor and an English Language Learner teacher – for a half-hour a day. The special ed students get two hours a day. There’s a student teacher, a family coordinator for the school, and a staff that Dawn says gives 110% of themselves to the kids. If a kid was lucky enough to get into one of the Title I Preschool spaces, he’s way ahead.

But there are 27 kids in Dawn’s classroom. If she spent ten minutes with each one individually, more than half her school day would be over. The successful third grader is supposed to be able to read 120 words a minute. One in Dawn’s class can read 6.

I’ve gone to language immersion courses in Spanish and Hebrew. Teaching methods have improved where fluency can be picked up pretty quickly, even for adults. Could we do things differently? Could we put kids in some sort of intensive English-language school and then release them to their local school? Or do we just throw them to the Dawns of the district and mandate that “every child will make a year’s growth wherever they are”?

Dawn loves science and social studies. She says that’s where students really engage, but with the emphasis on reading and math, she can barely get to that. “Well,” I asked, “isn’t the new curriculum supposed to focus more on nonfiction so kids can get that?” Well, yes, but the textbooks are so old, they are falling apart. There’s no money for curriculum so the district distributes a “grade level story” every week. They’re supposed to spend a half-hour on it every day.

If you’re like me, by now you’re wracked, too. I wasn’t living in a vacuum. I consider myself well-informed; I teach at the Literacy Program, know the dedication of our immigrants, know how smart they are in their own language. But I never saw the reality of 27 kids with such tremendous educational needs in one classroom.

Dawn is an optimist. She’s one of the happiest people I know. She wants everyone to see the reality of her classroom – school board members, people who vote, potential volunteers. Not like I did at first, when I looked from the outside at this “mini United Nations” and marveled at how engaged the kids seemed.

Come in as a volunteer instead, and work with the kids. (I discovered my friend Barbara there, volunteering to help kids read twice a week.) Dawn wants her classroom flooded with volunteers. That’s the one-on-one chance these kids need. The English learner needs help across his language barrier, but don’t forget: other kids need relief from the slower pace of the classroom, the chance to open up on the highway.

Volunteering is not my usual exhortation for social impact. I’m more about mobilizing, voting, and pounding on legislators for funding, but I am about eye-opening jolts.

No matter where you are, there are kids needing help in a school. And no matter where you are in your Third Third, helping that kid adds Purpose to both your lives.

Painting with water

The Quest for New-ness continues and, for the past four weeks, it’s involved a class in watercolors. Friends were taking it, and it was going to be pure fun. Then I saw the supply list.

Here I was, all prepared with my flat little tin boxes with the little cakes of color in them. But the list named specific colors like quinacridone rose, cerulean blue, cobalt blue. Well, obviously, that went beyond little blue cakes. We were going to a whole new level: watercolor in tubes.

The first shock was how much tubes of watercolor cost. And in the stores, different brands had vastly different prices. I was looking at the cheap ones, and the sales guy came over and said, “That won’t mix well. It’s just a hue, not a pigment.” ??

So, of course, I should have known the brush purchase was going to be just as complicated. Is a synthetic brush worse than a natural one? What kind of bristles? I don’t need many excuses to spend time in art supply stores, but these decisions took hours.

Armed with all my new little toys, I went to class. This is the BIG THING I’ve learned: with watercolor, the water does the work. We actually painted our paper with plain water and then added the color to let it bleed into the wetness. We put wet paint on dry paper, wet paint on top of wet painted paper. We even flicked paint from a stiff toothbrush onto wet paper. Some of them came out like Rorschach test blobs, but we were encouraged to play, to let happy accidents happen.

You’re probably looking at my illustrations and thinking, “Doesn’t she already paint?” I paint with acrylics. When acrylics dry, they stay dry. I can paint next door to one color without worrying about the colors mixing and turning to mud. Between colors, I write. As soon as they’re dry, I paint some more. Then I write. But with watercolors, they can always get wet and wake up again. Get them too wet, and they flow into all their neighbors. I tend to err on the side of wet so I make a lot of rivers and they tend to overflow their banks.

Which doesn’t matter a bit if you’re playing and creating happy accidents!

When I was a little girl, I used to watch “Learn to Draw with Jon Gnagy” on Saturday morning television. Jon Gnagy would give us shapes to draw, lines to add, and shading to round it out. Then we would create the same picture Jon Gnagy did, give or take some talent. The best Hanukkah present I ever got was my own Jon Gnagy art set with all his special tools: the kneaded eraser, charcoal sticks, blending pencils. But Jon Gnagy never said, “Play around.”

Our instructor, Amanda Saxton, believes in enjoying art, in experimenting. So our first class, we made sky. With clouds. The next class we made mountains. My mountains seemed sort of extraterrestrial to me, like the mountains on another planet.

Then Amanda brought in irises for us to draw and paint. Amazingly, we started by drawing the shape of the petals with just water. Adding the purple let it bleed into the water, take its soft shape. I finally managed my overwatering problem so my colors could get more intense. And now, because I am such a big baby who laps up positive reinforcement, I feel compelled to tell you Amanda’s reaction: “Barbara, this iris could be in a show.” She is such a great teacher!

Tonight, we had lilies. Lilies are harder because they have white edges. How do you paint a snowman on white paper? Yes, I know here on the blog, I’d just outline it in black, but that’s because here they’re more like doodles. Fortunately, my lily was aging a bit, so its edges were kind of yellowing. Almost cheating, but not quite.

Just as I learned that my Third Third needed to have structure, I think I’m learning that in art, too. When I “just play,” I tend to get a lot of mud. Red, yellow, and blue make brown, after all. But when I have a thing to paint – and next week we move on to animals – I have to put my paint in specific places. I have to think about whether it’s darker underneath or on top, whether this color overlaps that one. I have to really look at what I’m painting.

Really looking at things – that’s only good, too.

Best thing since sliced bread

One of the pleasures of being on my own schedule is that I get to volunteer on my own schedule, too. I’d been involved with the Alaska Literacy Program for years, mainly because of the old “teach a person to fish” idea. Giving people the tools to forge their own self-sufficient futures seems to me to be the way to go, and literacy is a natural. But I’d never actually tutored or taught a class.

Until I unemployed myself.

I started as a substitute, teaching writing for a couple of weeks. Then I took on a whole class on Idioms. They gave me a book with lessons and a classroom with students. We did a whole bit on anger: hit the roof, blow my top, go off the deep end, see red.

And then every now and then, there was an idiom on the list that I didn’t get: “take out the garbage.” Why was that an idiom? And then you realize, as you’re working with people whose first language is not English, that “take” usually means you get something and keep it. We take seconds on dessert. But we don’t hold onto our garbage; we dispose of it. So in that case, “take” is different, an idiom.

Oh, I love words!

Sometimes, when I’d give an assignment, I’d tell the class they had to come to class no matter what, no chickening out. “Chickening out?”

This was proving to be a lot of fun. Literacy Program students are committed adults; they are there because they want to learn, to become citizens, to be active members of their families and society. I graduated to teaching a whole writing class, and they taught me things, too. When Vilairat had been out collecting devil’s club, she ended up with lots of spines in her legs. She came into class with banana peels wrapped around her legs. I was skeptical … until the remedy showed up in one of my magazines at home.

Now I’m teaching a great class. I have students from Korea, Laos, Mexico, South Sudan, and China, and our book covers things like renting an apartment or visiting a doctor, reading prescription labels, dealing with emergencies. Yesterday, Sophia (who knows Chinese medicine and is preparing to apply for the test to be qualified to practice) told us that tofu and flour, mashed into a paste, is good for burns.

We have spent a lot of time recently on using the present perfect tense: I have eaten, you have danced. While I might use it because it sounds right to my ear, I have to provide the rules to help my students develop the ear. It reminds me of when I lived in Costa Rica, taking Spanish. After a while, when I finally mastered the subjunctive (I wish I were…), someone told me that made a big difference, that before I’d only spoken Tarzan Spanish: “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” I couldn’t tell. Even now, I wouldn’t feel the jarring it would give to a native speaker’s ear.

This is hard work. Rosario, from Mexico, was reading about elevating a wound. But pronunciation is tricky: this is wound like “woooond,” not like “wound around.” Rosario’s daughter goes to preschool down the hall while Rosario is in class, and she’s adorable.

We look at complex pictures of things going on and try to explain them in English. In the department store, a shopper had fallen asleep in a chair in the furniture department while a man checked the price tag. “No,” said Sophia, “that isn’t a price tag. That’s the controls. It’s a massage chair; that’s why she fell asleep.”

That one really had us laughing. Maybe you had to be there. In fact, you can be there. The Literacy Program is always looking for more teachers, and the staff gives lots of help and support. I am valued as a volunteer, and walking in the door is like walking into an oasis of pleasant, positive, meaningful activity. If one of the Big Three for a Third Third is Purpose, I get that. The fun is just gravy (an idiom).

This post is R-rated

I teach a writing class for OLÉ (Opportunities for Lifelong Education). I titled it “Dangerous Writing,” but on the first day of class, I discovered the title had scared a bunch of folks. Brave souls, they still registered, and we’ve been having a lot of fun.

So one of the assignments was “There are two people in a room who hate each other. Demonstrate that fact in writing without using dialogue or any physical violence.”

Wow, everyone was so creative. We had siblings at their mother’s funeral, roommates (one messy, one neat), a husband accosted by an overbearing, talkative person. Rivals at a 51st reunion. In another, two women were delighted to find each other at a social event, but when their husbands joined them, it was obvious there was bad blood there.

We had tension, passive aggressive behaviors, averted eyes. We had reddened faces, tightened jaws, escapes to an exit. It was a real treat.

The class is mostly retired women and John. I’d guess the ages were 50+ into the 70s. After everyone reads, we all point out what made it real for us, what parts resonated and made the picture vivid. Then it was John’s turn.

His story was an affair gone bad. She’s pretending she doesn’t notice him in a crowded room. He’s shuddering and trying to find an exit; he’ll come back later to get his coat. “She turned and walked slowly toward the coat room, smiling and chatting with people along the way, but moving inexorably toward her destination, her escape. She felt moist, not in a good way. Clammy, nauseated.”

I like the scene. So does the class. “But John,” I say, “I don’t think ‘moist’ is the right word. People aren’t moist; sponges are moist. Clammy is the right word.”

The women – the older women, the class full of women – think ‘moist’ is just right. It has to be ‘moist.’ She’s moist. They stare at me. I stare at them. John attempts to clarify: “But not in a good way.” What does that have to do with it? Quite a few white heads bob at me. “No, ‘moist’ is the right word.”

“Ohhhhh,” I stammer, “moist down there moist???” Yes, that’s exactly what they mean. It’s the real point of the scene. John, whose misfortune it is to be the only man in the room with women who know exactly what he meant, is so beet-red he’s glowing.

“It’s from a Leonard Cohen song,” he says. “‘...and the ladies go moist, and the judge has no choice....’”

This class knows how to do their Third Thirds! The only one who flustered in the face of “danger” was me. So I felt compelled to tell a story; when would I ever get a lead-in like this?

Do you remember the movie The Big Easy? Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin have the steamiest, most incredibly sizzling scene together. Shortly after it came out, my sister and I were visiting my mother on Long Island, and the subject of the movie came up. My sister lives in Berlin and hadn’t seen it yet. I told her about that sexy scene. My mother added, “Oh, Allison, that scene just lubricated my vagina.”

The class roared and exclaimed, “Your mother said that?!” Hey, hadn’t they just taught me about ‘moist’? My mother was in her Third Third, too.

Role models all.

Of galaxies and glaciers

Not only is the earth not the center of our solar system, but our sun is not even in the center of our galaxy. Today I learned that our Milky Way galaxy is called a “barred spiral” galaxy: in the center is a bar-shape of stars. Our sun isn’t even in the two biggest arms that spiral outward; it’s in a lesser one called the Orion Spur.

We are a teeny-tiny bit amongst billions and billions of stars, and we are back in the wings, on the periphery, not center stage. I find this reassuring.

Right after I moved to Alaska, I went kayaking in Glacier Bay. It was an astounding trip: beautiful, blue glaciers; the stark black-and-white landscape that I love; utter quiet. I stayed out long enough to forget about coming all the way back.

At one point, I spotted a dirty glacier. It was blue, but it had lots of debris and dirt and was really splotched and marred. At first, I felt as if it were some horrible aberration in the universe, a defective glacier. And then I thought, This glacier is so huge, and its stain is so huge, and still it’s powerful. And this is me, and my defects are huge, but compared to that glacier, they are infinitesimal. My problems are insignificant!

I have to remind myself of this every now and then so I check out astronomy, where I am reduced to insignificance again. I am a major fan of the UAA Planetarium; as members, we get to attend the shows for free. What I like is that the shows come with real, live, local scientists who are actually doing research that the films introduce.

I once was a physics major. Eventually, I stopped understanding it but remained in awe of it, so I switched to philosophy of physics. The questions still enthrall me so I take Olé classes taught by Travis, a UAA astrophysics professor. Today, Betsey and I agreed that Travis is so clear and comprehensible, we actually understand general relativity until we get home.

So the current class is about finding life on other planets, and it reminded me of another class with Travis. He had said that life would not look like little green men, but we were looking for the elements and conditions that might support life. He spent a whole class talking about how we might go about categorizing, identifying, finding those elements. Finally, one woman raised her hand and said, “Well maybe that’s not the way to go about it. Maybe we should first figure out what the little green men require and then focus on finding those places that might support them.”

Blows your mind, too, doesn’t it?

It starts with a class

In my quest for my new life (one that would restore my absent creativity and use my hands) and recognizing that I needed structure, I decided to sign up for a fiber arts class. It was a great class: phenomenal teacher, warm and supportive women classmates, very demanding course work. I decided I would Do Art!

It had been a long time since I Did Art. It soon became clear to me that these women were Artists-with-a-capital-A. They’d been doing art for the last 20 years while I’d been doing other things. So the problem with trying new things in your Third Third is that other people have been doing it longer and better so you’d better be prepared for your own mediocrity.

While they’re making masterpieces, you’re making things to put on your refrigerator with a magnet.

Or else, while they’re making lovely felted hats (and you find wool too itchy for a hat), you make a lovely tea cozy. Except that your teapot is a large, 10-cup teapot, so your tea cozy becomes known as the “tea yurt.”

So if my Third Third is going to be about keeping curiosity alive, trying New Things, then I have to let go of needing to feel skillful and accomplished. I have to accept being an apprentice, a beginner. Actually, being a beginner is easy. It’s being an intermediate that’s harder, when mastery proves elusive because it takes those 10,000 Malcolm Gladwell hours. Do we really have 10,000 hours to devote to mastery? Well, we would if we’d decided on The Big Passion, but what if we’re still experimenting around? What if we’re exploring several Lukewarm Passions?

The thing is, it is really electrifying to be around master craftspeople. They have tried so many different materials and techniques. They introduce you to papers and yarns, things named matte medium, gesso, roving. They add illumination to their sculptures, layers to their papers. They drape fabric and plaster over metal frames. And they are so generous with their acquired experience.

Best of all, the studio is open. So you can drop in, work on art, and get to know each other. Taking a class automatically satisfies the “structure” requirement, but if it’s filled with friendly folks, it also moves into the “sense of community” category. And then, miracle of miracles, you might discover – if not The Big Passion – a little, entertaining, enjoyable, creative Little Passion. For me, it was embroidery, the means to make gifts for my friends. Wine glass cozies!

Afterwards, you might re-figure your work space at home to include an art space. You might start hanging out at Michaels and Jo-Ann’s and racing there every time a new batch of coupons shows up with the Sunday paper. After a while, you might end up with the critical mass of art supplies. Other friends may discover Art, too, so old friendships might take a new turn, and then – lo and behold – you try drawing and next thing you know, you start a blog with pictures.

Wow, that was some art class!