Little Groundhog down below…
February the Second is my favorite day of the year! It’s Groundhog’s Day!
Can you think of a sillier holiday than one celebrating the shadow-spotting talents of a rodent? “If the Groundhog sees his shadow, it means that there are still six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t see his shadow, it means that spring is only six weeks away.”
Can you think of a holiday that is more pointless than this one?
I can’t.
That means it is the perfect excuse just to do something fun.
And even better if you can do something ridiculous with someone else. Share the hilarity!
My Mom and I used to celebrate Ground Hog’s day together—we made a great team. What made the day special was the fact that we celebrated it together, even if everyone else thought we were just a little bit crazy for doing so. Everyone. But oh how we would laugh it up!
Not being one of the traditional Hallmark holidays, finding a card or some other recognition of the holiday was always difficult. In January, the stores swapped out their holiday ornaments for big red boxes of candy and greeting cards for kids to share with their kindergarten classmates. Roses could be found anywhere, even if looking a bit tired and faded, but not a single store carried a line of appropriate Groundhog’s Day product. Not one. They still don’t. If you want something for Groundhog’s Day, you have to make it yourself. But that is ok. Everyone knows that if you make it by hand, it is an instant heirloom.
Yes, Mom and I would anxiously await the prognostication of Punxsutawney Phil, of Philadelphia, because he was the nation’s Prognosticator-in-chief. No other Groundhog would do. And getting the prediction correct was difficult business, the sort of feat about which the minstrels would sing. Or at least the amateur prose poets. Like me.
I was determined to be among those who roamed the land singing laudatory praises of our friend Phil. I learned a real gem in Mike Thibodeau’s third-grade class at the Morison Memorial Elementary. (Mr. Thibodeau, who is gone now, was a great teacher. He used to have us copy in to our notebooks the poetry of Shel Silverstein as a way to practice our cursive handwriting. Sometimes, he would bring in other valuable quotations or life’s lessons for us to copy and recopy as we struggled in our penmanship lessons to make our letters slant toward the right, or to the left depending on one’s dominant hand.) Yes, on Groundhog’s Day 1982, we learned this little ditty.
Little Groundhog
Little Groundhog down below
Underneath the wintry snow,
Come out and tell us true,
Is Spring Coming?
Is Winter through?
We were given a paper sandwich bag, some manila paper, a popsicle stick, scissors and crayons and shown how to create a Groundhog pop-up puppet. To the front of our creation, we attached a neatly tri-folded copy of the poem we had just learned, expertly written on the good white penmanship paper (not that ugly yellow kind that was rough to the touch, but far cheaper). I still have mine. (Keep in mind that at the time, the u’s and the w’s weren’t all that evident to string together with the other letters!)
For Mom and me, Groundhog’s Day was a great day for story-telling. It was usually too cold to really go outside and enjoy the usual games anyway. Mom told me once about a surprise that had once befallen her grandmother, Marion Rowe, as she went out to chop a bit of firewood for the old black stove in the kitchen and for a small fire she intended to build in the yard.
Grammy Rowe, as she was always known to Mom and us kids, once owned the land upon which my Dad built our home in 1984. The picturesque old homeplace sits not so high up on the ridge that it leaves one with the aftertaste of judgment in one’s mouth—though as a good Baptist, Grammy Rowe sometimes had that effect on people. Having passed away in 1975, my personal memories of her are few, but her nephew Robert Parsons recalls her outspoken disdain for the hippies of her latter days. In reality, Grammy Rowe’s house was romantically placed just out of reach of us, owned by another family by then, a few hundred yards away from our home. Its front door and driveway opened on to the Marsh Road, a left hand turn from our place as you head in to town, off the Hudson Road where I grew up. It was a grand old white house, a Victorian with an imposing stature. Looking out from its back lawn, one sees the panorama of the whole valley spread out like a picture, with all its varied terrain (garden, pasture, woodland, etc.) stitched together like split-oak fences resembling nothing so much as a green-hued quilt in summer. For Groundhog’s Day though, the view was of a cold and chilly expanse of white.
On this one particular Groundhog’s day, the temperatures had climbed just enough that Grammy Rowe had decided that it would be a good idea to go out in to the back yard, chop a bit of wood, and fire up the lye pot to make some new soap, fearing of course that she wouldn’t have enough to make the winter without it. Out by the old tree, she used a fallen stick to get under the upturned old pot, getting ready to add her supplies when all of the sudden, a brown furry creature dashes out from beneath it.
Little Groundhog down below,
Underneath the blackened kettle,
How dare you, sir,
Frighten and unsettle
Our little Grammy Rowe?
Startled and caught off guard, Grammy Rowe, then in her seventies, stumbled backward and landed in a bed of white snow. Harumph! “Oh you silly beast,” she shouted, amid the raucous laughter of her granddaughter, Marion, who had stopped by for a visit that day.
Tell a story. Write a poem. Do something you wouldn’t normally do. But above all, have a little fun and think of Mom and me—fans till the end of a silly little holiday of no consequence. And if you should feel inclined, feel free to send me a hand-made card celebrating the best of all of our holidays. I will cherish it as the heirloom that it undoubtedly was intended to be.
Happy Groundhog’s Day!
Our Friend, Dr. Albert Trull, Jr.
Madison, WI and Tallahassee, FL—Dr. Albert Trull, Jr. passed away peacefully on October 29, 2012. He was born June 10, 1928 in Birmingham, Alabama to Alberto and Pura (Carrilles) Trull, originally of Cien Fuegos and Havana, Cuba. To his friends in Madison he is known as Albert, but those in Florida called him simply “Al”.
While in High School, Albert worked as an ‘engraving boy’ at the Birmingham News. He recollected vividly the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died; he was working with the chemicals to create the plates from which images for a Special Edition would be printed. With the money Albert earned at the paper, he set sail to discover the eastern seaboard and Cuba.
Albert graduated with honors from Alabama’s Auburn University and earned a degree in architecture. He later earned from Florida State University his master’s degree in urban planning and a PhD in Education and Urban and Regional planning. Albert served honorably at the Army’s Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he taught architectural drawing for two years during the Korean War. As a young man Albert lived in New York City and worked in the Daniel Schwartzman architectural firm, specializing in department store design. One of his projects was the famed Macy’s Store of 34th Street where he designed a staff lounge and cafeteria. Afterwards, he and a friend spent one year traveling across Europe, Middle East, and Africa. They had boarded the S.S. Ryndam II of the Holland American Line where they spent the Christmas season waiting to arrive in Rotterdam, Holland, the first leg of their journey.
Albert moved in 1966 to Tallahassee, Florida where he opened his own architectural practice. Among Albert’s major accomplishments are his work on the First Presbyterian Church, the Union Bank, and the Mental Health Building on Tennessee Street. He also designed the city’s Parks and Recreation Administrative offices on Myers Park Drive. Albert was not only President of his local Kiwanis, but also chairman of the Blue Print 2000 Committee, a commission set up by the city to guide the city remodel. He served on Tallahassee’s first ever Code-Enforcement Board, helping draft the city’s Environmental Management Ordinance, and was deeply involved in the Gaines Street Revitalization Committee and the South Monroe Sector Plan. The Mayor and Governing Body of Tallahassee proclaimed Albert Trull Jr. Day on June 25, 2003.
Albert wrote in 2006, “My passion is learning and improving my knowledge base. I am now learning Spanish, ecology, history, spirituality and other related subjects. I also attend concerts with my daughter who also lives in Madison. My passion is learning from any source possible.” Albert informed his Spanish instructor in Madison that he was learning the language so that he could talk to his mother in her own tongue when he got to ‘the other side’.
Albert leaves behind his beloved daughter, Anna Trull, Madison, WI; a sister, Mary Elizabeth Stewart, Blountstown, FL, and three nieces. He will be fondly remembered by his friends Robert, Helena, Monica, Jim and Alistair; and former professor, James R. Wilson, and partner, Gregory Humphrey, who managed his affairs and care over the past few years. Memorial donations may be made to the park where Albert gardened at Capital Neighborhood—Period Garden Park, P.O. Box 2613, Madison, WI 53701 (www.periodgardenpark.org). Thank you, Albert, for being such a kind and loyal friend to so many. Your compassion and care for others made this world a better place for all of us.
Love and Generosity
Conversations with a Hexenmeister
Wedding season is upon us, and people are all a buzz about the gifts they need to buy, the new dresses and neckties acquired for the special occasion, and in some cases, even the possibility of children. While it may now officially be autumn, what we’re witnessing is a conversation about the ancient ideals of spring and renewal and freshness. We’re hearing talk of what it takes to build a life together.
Indeed, constructing a family is not an easy task. It takes a certain number of materials and a special sort of carpenter to pull it off successfully. A few weeks ago, my Dad was remarried. Talk with my Dad, who spent much of his life building things for other people, and you will see clearly that while he is not as interested in building construction as he was before he retired two years ago, he still has a lot of love to give, and desires to willingly. His new bride, Dianne, is a lucky gal.
Dianne, who grew up only a few miles from where I did, is a retired school teacher. She spent her career working towards earning her sainthood by teaching the little ones, K-2, in Florida, mostly. She brings to the new union between her and my Dad, two dogs, Baxter and Teddy, who have plenty of energy (though perhaps a little less discipline than I would enjoy) to keep Dad’s cat, Minnie, entertained. Together, this “blended family” will reside in the home where I grew up. (Admittedly, however, Minnie intends fully to make the inaccessible-to-dogs-upstairs of the house her refuge and get-away.)
Thoughts of what makes a truly happy home have filled my mind as I have spoken to friends and family about the unions being formed this year, especially this one. I was lucky enough to have been raised in a home which was solidly unified right up until the end. My parents were excellent role models for what good and healthy relationships should look like. Relationships take work, and my Mom knew that. In fact, she sometimes went looking for “signs” as to where to take their relationship next.
When I was a kid, Mom was fully in her “arts and crafts” mode, painting with acrylic paints she bought in stores in the Downtown Bangor shops before the Mall opened in 1978 and forced them all out of business. She worked in other mediums as well—from string, nails and black velvet to water colors and heavy yarns. She was pretty talented and quite creative. She even enrolled on occasion in a continuing education class at the high school so that she could learn a new technique, or perhaps just to get out of the house and away from us kids for a few hours every week (though I like to think it was for the sake of learning).
At one point, Mom decided to make her own hex sign to hang on the front of our garage/barn. Hex Signs are a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition where by symbols are painted on the front of the family barn in order to encourage the universe to share, among others, elements of prosperity, health and peace. In this case, my father had cut out a hole for a bathroom sink in a sideboard at one of his jobs. It was nice piece of nice round Formica and added a certain level of weather resistance to the project since it would be sealed on the now back side. Not the kind of gal to let things go to waste, my Mom took the circle, flipped it over, primed it, and painted her hex.
Mom spent quite a lot of time preparing her hex sign which was full of the symbols that she felt best represented her relatively young family. While yellow is often associated with cowardice, in literature it is often used in an archetypal way to symbolize joy, happiness, hope and friendship. Topped with a heart filled with love and centered in the yellow background are two doves (my parents), birds known to mate for life. The excitement, energy, passion and love of the red doves, is tempered only somewhat by the blue wings of peace, tranquility, stability and harmony. Joined to them are two blue flowers with the same color orange dots on the top (my sister and I–twins) and one flower with a red (my older brother). There is balance in the orange and in the very symmetry of the design. My brother appears to be separate from the rest of the group, but upon closer inspection, you’ll see the green leaves near his flower. My parents were wed in 1967, shortly after high school. My mother always considered Todd to be the first flower in the garden, green with health, youth and generosity. The dot above his flower is red, symbolizing all that is intense and passionate.
Curious to know if my Mother’s version of a Hex Sign came close to the ones traditionally made, I consulted with a friend from home, Jj Starwalker. Jj is a Hexenmeister (hex master), a painter of traditional Pennsylvania Dutch (actually Deutsch or German) hex signs. She states, “These circular hex signs have much mystery, myth and confusion surrounding them. I was taught that they were “painted prayers,” invocations and petitions made visible, asking God for the blessing of protection for home and farm, good fortune, abundance and prosperity or inviting guests to be welcome. Other folks may admit that “once upon a time” the designs were attributed with “magical” properties of protection, or as a talisman of fertility for livestock and crops, or invocation for a balance of rain and sunshine.”
When asked about the quality of work my Mother had done, Jj was very complimentary: Your Mom’s hex is VERY NICE! I love your symbolism and the way you expressed it. Those flowers resemble tulips, which are interpreted as a type of lily representing faith…which is very appropriate for children, as they reflect the parents’ faith in the future. The only element in a truly traditional hex sign that I see missing is the circle in which they are inscribed. When I draw them I was taught that the centering moment was a focus on God, the radius representative of His reach — we know it is boundless but that is hard to depict — with the circle inscribed around it all to put all of the working of the sign within His will/domain. Even when we paint ON a circle, as is most commonly done now, we still use that bounding circle. Your Mom did a wonderful job, without access to my Grandmother or anyone with deep roots in the tradition, though!”
Jj concluded, “My grandmother’s practice of empowering the design “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen” was shared by other practitioners. I was too young to remember what if any sort of dedication my Mother gave her hex sign, but it hung for many years on the front of our then Hamilton blue barn (and now my ‘electric blue’ bedroom).
Before concluding, I should mention that hexenmeister Jj Starwalker was chosen by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 2011 to represent that state on the White House Christmas Tree. The tree was decorated with ornaments representing each of the 50 states and stood in the Blue Room during the holiday season. She works hard on her little Corinth farm, spinning her own wool, weaving her own cloth, canning and preserving the year’s bounty, and painting these hexen prayers for those in need. If you are looking for a unique gift this season, consider contacting her at www.dutchhexsign.com She has a toll free number as well: 866.574.4889.
To me, the most meaningful parts of my Mother’s hex design reside in the love contained within the red heart, and the generosity of the garden directly below. I was reminded of some scripture at my Dad’s wedding recently. As my Uncle Randy, who officiated the service in his capacity as a Minister of God, I couldn’t help but think of some history, some etymology. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle writes of faith, hope and love. In the Greek text for chapter thirteen, the word we translate commonly as “love” is the Greek one: agape. In the King James Version, agape had been translated instead as “generosity”. If the Greek word agape truly means both generosity and love, then I for one am glad to have been raised in a family which was brimming with both. As we get to know Dad’s new wife, Dianne, better, I certainly hope she will feel the same way too.
Join me in shouting, “Three Cheers!” to my Dad and his wife, the newly-minted, Mrs. Dianne Wilson!
Little Wrench–Sneaky Trick
It’s not easy when you discover that your own Father is a rat bastard.
So there I was recently, helping my Father declutter the house so as to make a little/quite a lot of room for the new person in his life. In my “sorting, fluffing and folding” of the things piled waist high in my brother’s old room, I stumbled across an old wrench. There isn’t anything terribly special about the wrench at first glance, so I will need to explain why I am writing about it at all.
Let me begin by saying that my Father, who can fix and repair just about anything, is notorious for getting a project in the house started and then getting distracted and not finishing it for some time. He always leaves the materials to do the job right where he was working, so that he wouldn’t have to go and hunt for them a second time when he finally did get back to the task. The idea, of course, is that he would indeed get back to the task sooner rather than later. Sometimes this worked out as planned, and in the case of Todd’s old room… well, let’s just say that the project was started sometime before I left for college and I just got around to picking up the materials and putting them where they belong, abandoning hope. The reality is that there are sets of tools all over the place. If ever I get the chance to sort the garage and house, putting all like things together, I am going to find that Dad’s owns a gross of screw drivers and a bevy of wrenches.
Over the years, as my Mom’s mobility issues grew more numerous and she became less and less inclined to take things she was no longer interested in using out to the attic over the barn, she had my father lug the stuff up to Todd’s room. That top third of the upstairs became the area where “crap went to die”. No kidding. There was so much stuff in there that it took me three days to stack it all out in the garage to be donated to the various charities that my Mom thought would benefit from her things.
I have tried for years to get those two children of the Depression to thin the herd when it comes to their stuff, fearing just what I went through over the last week. I was never very successful in encouraging those two beautiful people to get rid of their junk. Whenever I was home on vacation or otherwise, Mom and I would sometimes tackle this area or that and clean out, but it seemed a short lived catharsis.
Before she passed away last December, Mom caught my Father “cleaning” out her junk drawer—and she was pissed! “What the hell is your Father doing?” she shouted at me. “He has enough of his own crap to clean up.” I assured her that Dad’s turn was coming and she couldn’t have been happier. “Good. Serves him right, the rat bastard” she stated as she laughed sardonically from the other room.
When I told Mom that Dad’s turn was coming, she knew what I meant. Over the years, whenever I insisted that Dad come and finish a project with me, we called it “quality time”. Oddly, Dad was never as fond of the “quality time” that we spent together as I was.
In this last visit to Maine, Dad and I spent quite a lot of time together, sorting through my Mother’s discarded belongings and finding all of them a good home. We talked and laughed and reminisced about any number of things, saying good bye silently to Mom and the things that she had accumulated over the years. It wasn’t until the final push to get that last room upstairs cleaned that I found the little 4. Wrench sitting on the floor.
I told Dad about the little wrench when we got to his cousin Suzanne’s house for a visit up in Aroostook County. Dad always carried a jack knife and a little wrench in his pocket, so I was rather expecting that he would just say something about how nice it was to be retired and not have to have those things handy any longer. My prediction proved false. At the mention of the little wrench, he began to giggle and his cousin asked him to explain:
“When the kids were little and their Mother sent them out to ‘help’ me with this project or that, I would sometimes send them to fetch some tool I needed. When they got back, I would tell them that the one they brought wasn’t quite right and send them to get a different one. In the meantime, I would haul my little wrench out and fix the problem. When the kids got back the job was done and I had had a few minutes of peace and quiet.”
You see what I mean. The man is a rat bastard. Here we were—willing carpenter’s assistants and he sends us out on fool’s errands just to avoid spending “quality time” with us. I used to think that perhaps I was unfair to expect Dad to help me finish projects around the house, even if Mom encouraged me to get him to do them; I used to think he worked too hard and that perhaps he needed the break. Well not any more!
I am going to be hanging that little pocket-sized wrench on my Christmas tree this year, right next to the set of cooking spoons that my Mother used when I was learning to cook. I am hanging that little wrench to remind me of all the truly quality time that Dad and I spent together over the years. While I am not a carpenter and would certainly never hold myself up as one, I do have a lot of the basic skills that it takes to run a house and keep it well maintained. I tell people that I have a lot of the theory and none of the practice to accomplish the kinds of tasks that Dad did so effortlessly.
If the next time I am home for a visit, Dad leaves me alone in the house to sort and clean all day like he did one day this last time, he and I are going to spend quite a lot of extra “quality time” together. I’ll fix his goose. He’ll wish he had that little wrench back then, I betcha! The little rat bastard found a way to keep us quiet when we were kids, but it won’t work again. The jig is up! I am just glad that the next time that I go to Maine, the quality time that we will spend together can be just to socialize and get to know each other better as adults. I am hoping of course that Dad will be as fond of the “quality time” that we spend together as I know I will be.
Mr. Trusz Proves that 0 = 1
When I was a youngster in the MSAD #64 school system, I dreamt of the day when I would at long last be challenged in my classes. I was the kind of kid who listened to his classmates and their struggles with the material being presented and wondered what it would be like to need actually to do the homework assigned to learn the material—I usually did mine just because it gave me something to occupy my time. I admit readily that I was one of those smart kids who ruined the curve for the others, the kid for whom most everything came very easily. I was not “the norm” in that regard. There was no “gifted and talented” program at that level (and the one that had existed at the middle school level was not very well developed), only a tiny number of AP classes, and the “college prep” classes weren’t all that taxing either.
I can tell you though, from experience as both a student and a teacher, that when you raise the bar in educational settings, the students rise to meet it; if you lower it, they do the same.
It would be wrong of me to brush with a broad and negative brush stroke the entire school system. There were a few bright spots in my formative education. Charlene Farnham and Lucille Koncinsky, about whom I have previously written, remain in my mind two very positive role models for my own teaching. They exemplified caring, and love of their craft; and, that translated directly into excellent opportunities for learning for the students in their care.
Another of my teachers who merits my eternal gratitude is Mr. Trusz, a masterful mathematician and general unrelenting techie of the first order. When I first met his son, Daniel, as a classmate, I was on occasion invited to his house to play from time to time. Daniel’s dad, Richard “Dick” Trusz had “everything”. He had a computer that accepted not only floppy disks of varying sizes, but could also read an actual cassette tape and store information on it. The computer functioned in “basic language” and you could write code for it so that it would draw a three-dimensional box on the screen, or even make a string of text fly up and across the amber-colored screen, repeating itself endlessly. It had a printer that took paper that was really one long sheet with perforations every eleven inches. It was magical—or would have seemed so if one considers that those early Tandy machines weren’t even as sophisticated as the little Apple Macintosh that I would buy myself when I got to college a half dozen years later.
Mr. Trusz had joined the CHS teaching faculty in 1969, only a couple of years after fire had ravaged and destroyed the East Corinth Academy. (Richard Grant was the school superintendent then, and the new school replacing the old Academy had been officially named “Central High School” two years earlier in March.) Whoever accepted his application and gave him the job did the school and all those who attended it a tremendous favor.
Mr. Trusz was in charge of a small group of us for an algebra class. We met each morning in a tiny room off the library with no windows. He was the kind of teacher who would not accept work completed on a calculator—you had to show the steps that you took to get from the problem to the solution. He felt strongly that we needed to learn to reason mathematically as much as we needed to arrive at a correct answer. He also expressed a desire to see textbooks where we weren’t always given all of the information needed to solve the problem, to see if we could find the solution on our own using reasoning and logic. (I am not sure such a book exists even today. Books that encourage synthetic reason, such as Mr. Trusz desired, are certainly not available in the foreign languages that I teach.)
Mr. Trusz had a very dry sense of humor. The first Gulf War was raging in Kuwait. One day, when a loud noise came from outside the classroom, he turned to us and asked, “What was that? A SCUD Missile?” Mr. Trusz was also fond of proving to us that he had in fact discovered the way to become very wealthy. He could get something from nothing, he told us, and went on to prove that in fact zero was the equivalent of one. His mathematical proof was unassailable, but all these years later, I was unable to recall it. I knew I had to contact my old friend Daniel. “Okay…”, says son Daniel, “My dad gave me the proof. Here it is:”
Given: ‘a’ and ‘b’ are integers such that ‘a = b+1′
Prove: ’0 = 1′
————————————————–
a = b+1 | (given)
(if a= b+1 then a-b =1) | (implication)
a(a-b) = (b+1)(a-b) | (multiplication prop)
{multiply both sides of equation by (a-b) }
a^2 – ab = (b+1)a + (b+1)(-b) | (distributive prop)
a^2 – ab = ab + a – b^2 – b | (distributive prop)
-a = -a | (reflexive prop)
a^2 – ab – a = ab – b^2 – b | (subtraction prop)
a( a-b-1) = b(a-b-1) | (reverse distributive prop)
a = b | (division prop)
{divide both sides of equation by (a-b-1)
a = b+1 | ( given)
a = a +1 | (substitution prop)
a = a | (reflexive prop)
0 = 1 | (subtraction prop)
Thus 0=1.
————————————————–
Now, I didn’t share this proof with you so that you could take it with you the next time you were at the bank disputing an overdraft fee… “But how could I have nothing in the account? I have at least one dollar left!” I shared this proof with you to help you see what I saw as a student in Mr. Trusz’s class—there is joy to be found in all things. Even algebra problems!
All said, Mr. Trusz (whose wife was our school nurse) was also a pretty wonderful guy. He served as the faculty mentor for our school math team. He taught us leadership—encouraging some of the older boys to take charge of the club’s meetings and practices, imploring more of the female students in his classes to join the group. He was convinced that math wasn’t just for boys, which was pretty radical thinking at the time.
Most importantly for me, though, was the willingness Dick Trusz displayed to go the extra mile to help those of us in need. While I was not in need of “remedial” lessons of any kind, I was at one point enrolled in a math class with Mr. Johnson. I was doing marvelously well, but was so bored with the work and was likely contemplating mischief, as I am sure Mr. Johnson could tell. Mr. Trusz offered to step in and create a “class for one”, just for me. He saved me, he truly did. Finally a challenge.
While Mr. Johnson’s class met across the hall, Mr. Trusz and I met in what I am sure was but a broom closet only hours before our first meeting. As others sat there, coming to terms with the fact that no matter what you do, a-squared plus b-squared will always equal c-squared, Mr. Trusz and I hammered out curves and lines, the areas beneath them, and also the likelihood that statistically-speaking we were right in our estimations to between 3 and five points. I alone consumed an entire year’s worth of free periods for Mr. Trusz and I am not certain that I ever said thank you properly. (I do know that he knows of my admiration for him since I have shared that with Daniel several times over the years.)
What I am not advocating here is that “good teachers” always sacrifice their planning periods so that they can take on additional unpaid duties on behalf of the school. I teach, and I loathe the “good dooby-syndrome” in some of my colleagues. No, I believe in fair pay and fantastic administrative support as a way to encourage excellence in teaching. If Mr. Trusz wasn’t compensated for his time with me and I learn of it, I have a list of names of those people in the school’s administration who should be very ashamed of themselves!
What was extraordinary in this case, in my eyes, is that Mr. Trusz saw a student who was languishing in a system that was not set up to handle more than the average student, and he took the steps necessary to find a solution. He was a problem-solver. He could have very easily have left me in that other class. No one would have blamed him. He could have also have set me up in that other room to work at my own pace, on the home-schooled model, checking in on me only on occasion. I would have been fine with that solution too. Rather, Mr. Trusz took me under his wing and guided me through an entirely different curriculum.
Mr. Johnson was no dummy. He had also taught my Mom and later my brother, and knew a bit about me before I got there. I think he sensed that since I was not only smart, but also creative—which is not always a nice combination, mind you, if you should be on the receiving end—that I might in the end be a morale killer in the room more than an aide. Moreover, he had likely already spoken to Mrs. Campbell, the study hall monitor, who had gained a certain level of notoriety for telling students, “If you can’t behave, I am going to send you to the office so FAST!” One day, as she shouted her mantra for the umpteenth time, I asked her right out right, in a smart-assed tone, “Just how long would it take to get to that office exactly?” Damned if she didn’t give me the chance to find out! Of course when I arrived at the office and told Mrs. Wiggins the reason for my visit, she thought I was clearly joking. When Mrs. Campbell confirmed over the inter-com that indeed she had sent me there, I was quickly ushered in to the guidance office where Mrs. K. found me another class to fill my free time. Yes, bless Mr. Johnson for having spoken with Mr. Trusz about my discontentment in his class. Being challenged in that one 50-minute period of the day was just what I needed.
What made Mr. Trusz an excellent teacher was the fact that he knew his craft very well, and also cared about the pedagogy and didactics behind it. He told me once that it did him no good to have all this knowledge about mathematics if he couldn’t share it with others, just like me. He also believed as I do that you can bring all the tools to the workshop, give all the instruction on the method of performance, but you can’t do the learning for the student. They have to be willing to do that themselves, and if you find one who is willing to do more, for heaven’s sake DON’T DISCOURAGE THEM! In my own teaching, when I see a student who is even remotely bored or who seems ahead of his/her classmates, I always take that student aside and offer to provide materials which go above and beyond what the others are working on—I never let students languish in boredom. If I had a small room the size of a broom closet and free periods to sacrifice for a gifted learner, I too would find a small chalk board and set up a curriculum for one. Honoring those who love to learn, that is what I learned most from Mr. Trusz. There is joy to be found in all things, and great teachers help us to see that.
Salads for my friend, Debra
I spent a leisurely afternoon in the Adirondak chair on my front lawn, reading a new recipe book that my friend Kristin had recommended to me this spring. I was contemplating getting in to the kitchen to whip something yummy up, but the lure of the sunshine was too great and I remained seated.
As I pondered some new dishes, I turned to thinking about a couple of friends of mine, now living in Guatemala. Debra and I had previously worked together on her study of Spanish and became good friends over the years. She is the one who inspired my version of “Hilachas Guatemaltecas”, her favorite dish of her adopted land.
Debra is a self-admitted novice in the kitchen, and after a pleasant gathering among friends last summer, her husband Earl asked if I would share a couple of my recipes with him. Without hesitation, I wrote out the recipe to a pasta salad he had enjoyed as well as a recipe for a salad dressing which is just delicious and not at all over powering—both of these recipes would be great this time of year now that the summer heats are on the way, and farmer’s markets are back in town.
Gregory and I had been to a restaurant a few months prior to this party that I mention and they were serving a chicken salad sandwich “for adults”. I thought to myself, “This would be great as a pasta salad too!” So here is how I created the salad for the party.
Waldorf Pasta Salad
Chicken, chopped, about 1 cup
cherry or grape tomatoes cut in half (about 1 cup)
red grapes cut in half (about 1 cup)
apple chunks (1 large apple or two medium apples, peeled and chopped)
1 stick of celery, chopped
Pasta (about 1 cup)–any small pasta will do. We like Bowtie pasta, so I use that. Just cook up the pasta, run it under cold water to cool it off, drain, and stir in to the rest of the mix.
Add Ranch dressing to taste (I like mine a bit more moist)
For the sandwich version, eliminate the pasta and use a little less dressing or substitute the Ranch for mayo. Serve on good sour dough or other bread of your liking.
I also love a good salad dressing for greens, and our friend Lyn had asked me to make a dressing for the party. Sometimes, I think that vinegar is too over powering for a salad, so I make a vinaigrette (which is at its base an acid and an oil) which uses lemon juice instead
Lemon Vinaigrette Dressing
1 teaspoon of honey (I often make mine without the honey but I had some I was trying to use up)
1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard (don’t use a traditional American yellow mustard like French’s. I tried that once to disastrous results)
juice from one lemon (I often use a bottled lemon juice instead of being bothered with a fresh one)
roughly the same amount of olive oil
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of dried lavender (you could substitute the same amount of an Italian seasoning mix, or if you go to a spice store, pick up some Herbes de Provence which has lavender in it)
Shake well and serve
Shadow Race
Shadow Race
Every time I’ve raced my shadow
When the sun was at my back,
It always ran ahead of me,
Always got the best of me.
But every time I’ve raced my shadow
When my face was toward the sun,
I won.
–Shel Silverstein
A Light in the Attic
A few years ago, I decided to digitize my family’s old photos. Photos are precious links to the past and to a host of memories, almost always good since people rarely wasted film (or the money to develop it) on the family’s hard times. My hope for the project was that I would be able to share these instants in time more easily with my siblings if anything ever happened to my parents, and also create a record of them lest something terrible ever happen to my parent’s home. My mother was fortunate enough, when her two beloved aunts passed away each in their own time, to have inherited their family albums, as well as play the role of safe-keeper of our own family’s memory books. Our recent past, otherwise said, is well documented, or at least better than some.
Scanning photos takes a fair amount of time, but is an activity which bears its own reward. For one, it is a history lesson. My brother was born in the black and white era of the brownie camera, the nifty little brown box which captured snipets of time for so many American families just like mine. My sister and I came along in the next generation of photography, growing up with the 126 cameras upon which four-sided “flash bulbs” could be attached, greatly enhancing indoor shots. As we neared the end of our primary school days, we as a family transitioned to the polaroid where the photos came out of the front of the apparatus and developed themselves right before your eyes, and later graduated to the 33-mm camera that had taken control of the photography market, becoming the standard for most digital cameras too.
Among all of these images, I stumbled across snapshots of our family trip to the Niagara Falls, ones when we visited an aunt in Connecticut and others in Florida. There were pictures of the birthday cakes that Grammy used to decorate for us each year. (My mother insisted that just because my sister and I were twins didn’t mean that we had to “share” a cake—Grammy made one for each of us, in separate themes). As my father added on to the garage, or we bought a new truck, Mom was there to snap a picture of it, her own chronological paper keepsake.
After my mother’s passing, I dug a bit deeper in to the older albums she had tucked away at the bottom of the pile. In the older black and white albums I discovered, ones which I don’t recall ever having seen, my mother’s later childhood is reborn. In some of the neatly arrayed images, displayed on black paper with little paper holders at each corner, my then teenaged mother sits astride her white horse Snowball. She rode snowball in the Olde Home Day parade that year before she graduated high school. Amid crowds of cheering people, she and friend Wendy, also a lover of horses, proudly displayed their equine friends to the rest of the town. Since there is photographic evidence of the event, it can be assumed that Grammy and Grampy were there on the sidelines cheering the girls on in their saddles.
I have long held a special place in my heart for black and white photography. There are a range of emotions which display themselves richly when you take away some of the “color” noise of today’s clichés. Moreover, when I was in the seventh grade, I learned about photography and the art of darkroom printing and more from my science teacher, Derwin Emerson. He was a wonderful teacher who allowed me for the first time to see that my personal gifts and talents were not only valuable and exploitable, but worthy of dreams—dreams which I should be following. Mr. Emerson repeated often that in reality, the images caught on film were just shadows etched in to silver in that instant when the light hit it. Just fancy little shadows.
I, along with one of the girls in the class ahead of mine, worked many afternoons after classes had let out to take pictures of the school’s events for the yearbooks we eventually produced. When it was a sporting event, I would focus the camera and set the aperture settings on a spot ahead of the athletes in anticipation of their arrival in the frame. If the shot I was setting up were a portrait, I would try to get the light to conform to my needs, backlighting the staged area so that the person’s face and features were clear and bright. I was, in essence, always trying to get under a shadow if the sun were too bright, or run ahead of one if the room were already too dark. In most cases, in this shadow race, I was victorious. On those occasions when I would lose, I could always get a rematch when I made my way in to the dark room, lightening or darkening an image as necessary with the chemical processes Mr. Emerson had taught me.
I celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday this spring. Among the comments from friends and family, pointing out that there is a lot of white in my beard now, I was reminded that quite a lot of time had passed since Mr. Emerson introduced me to the darkroom laboratory at the newly constructed Central Middle School; that even more time had elapsed since Mom was caught on film carrying her large round Christmas box, containing the new jacket her Father had so proudly bought for her.
I was informed that I am almost officially a part of what is known as “Middle Age”—that period in your life when your memories seem to become more precious to you than the dreams you once chased. On my birthday, I looked at a few more of these old snapshots sitting on my desk waiting to be scanned, and I saw family gatherings and other happy occasions when those people I cherished the most were still with us. I closed my eyes to recollect those moments before and after the photographer intervened. As I pondered, one by one the people started dimming. They grew pale and then transparent, and finally they disappeared. My Mom’s father disappeared first and then his sisters, next to their luxurious new cars, clad in long cloaks still wearing gloves and kerchiefs over their hair. Slowly, the images themselves seem to have become less and less populated, until the only one left was that little boy I used to be, standing there all alone. Not really knowing what has become of my cousins with whom we gathered on Christmas each year, or their children now on the cusp of adulthood, I realized that as I have gotten older, I have said goodbye to more of those closest to me than I have perhaps said hello to new faces and personalities. That link, my connection, with a past was receding beyond memory as I contemplated the first half of my life. I am grateful for those photos which help me remain in touch with those people who were there for me in my formative years.
I resolved at that moment to finish my photo project, and encourage you to do the same. But don’t just scan those pictures to your computer’s hard drive where they will sit precariously, fearing some snafu which might wipe them out entirely. Make a cd-rom of the images and share them with your local historical society so that a record of them can be kept there as well—help to cement further your own town’s past by preserving your personal and family story for the future. Be the kind of person who runs toward the sun and wins the shadow race that is the family album.
*If you are from Corinth, Maine, as I once was, then contact the Corinth Historical Society, P.O. Box 541, Corinth, Maine 04427, or write to me and I will help facilitate your gift to them.
