The Lives of Others - Issue No. 15
THE BACKWARDS WALKING WOMAN, DUMBLEDORE AND GIFTED COCKTAIL SAUCE
When I studied abroad in a small Etruscan town in Italy for a semester of college, there was a woman who lived on my street. She and I, though we always remained strangers, both lived at the bottom of too many steps and half way down a very steep hill. She didn’t seem well. Her unkempt hair was unnaturally black and scraggly long. Her makeup looked like a child who had gained unauthorized access to some lipstick and eye shadow before getting stuck in inclement weather. She was somewhere between 35 and 70, weathered by a story I would never know. Every day, despite the sloped cobblestone streets, she would wear outrageously high platform heels which rendered it impossible for her to walk downhill, so she was left with no other choice than to walk backwards. Most days, we’d pass each other, she walking like a VHS tape being rewound, and I trying desperately to maintain a straight face at the strangeness of it all. Sometimes, I’d say “Ciao” as we passed, and other times I’d feign distraction by my far-from-smart Vodafone. It was a really weird semester. Perugia, where we were, was beleaguered with the fallout of Amanda Knox being imprisoned for allegedly murdering her roommate just a few months before I arrived, and Americans were seen as having brought a lot of bad press to the region. The writing material I gained from that semester continues to be quite fruitful. And, while much of those months have blurred with time, the backwards-walking-woman-in-heels remains crisp in my memory; she was the embodiment of how frighteningly, and sometimes humorously, untethered the world felt during those months.
Two years later, while touring graduate schools, I met the director of my dream MFA (Creative Writing) program. Picture Dumbledore driving a pickup truck around a small college town; he was charmingly and endearingly eccentric. His gas tank was very near empty, and his truck was filthy, a brown coat of dust across the windshield, papers scattered about like makeshift floor mats. So, our first stop was the gas station, at which point, he grabbed two scratch-off lottery tickets from the dash and said “that should cover it.” I waited in the car as he paid inside with his winnings and filled up the truck with the couple gallons of gas that his cashed-in lottery tickets covered. He got back in his truck, rolled down his manual window and combed his working-man fingers through his long beard. I remember thinking, this is exactly where I should go to school. Years later, after having gone to a second choice school because of a better scholarship, I found out this man had died. I felt pangs of sadness, as if I knew him so well, but also for not getting to know him at all. He will always represent a path untaken for me.
One year later, my roommate from college and I moved into our first apartment in Philadelphia. It was the attic of a row home with a bathroom that had green floor-to-ceiling vinyl and a kitchen that made you lose all sense of time because of the stackable washer-dryer that blocked the only window. Our landlord’s name was Bill Clinton, and the middle-aged man living below us was a hoarder. Soon after moving in, we began receiving gifts from our neighbor. It started with cocktail sauce. He had allegedly had a party, though we never heard or saw anyone, and as his note explained, “he had far too much cocktail sauce left over,” so he bought extra frozen shrimp and left the hors d'oeuvres on our stairs. Next it was boxes of Girl Scout cookies because, “how can you say ‘no’ to those cute Girl Scouts?” Then it was a $100 gift card to the sushi restaurant that opened at the end of our block because “we have to support local business.” And finally, since he was an employee of Comcast he “saw that we used them as a provider and decided to take care of our bill for the rest of the year.” This was one of two times that I actually remember speaking to him, confused and questioning his decision to pay for our Basic Cable and Internet Bundle. The only other time we spoke was when my roommate and I needed to recover our air conditioning box unit that we had accidentally dropped out of our window and onto his patio (thankfully, no one was harmed by our stupidity). We had very little money that year, my roommate had experienced a catastrophic loss in her family, and despite the strangeness of it all, our neighbor’s random acts of generosity always brought smiles to our faces. A year later, we moved out, and that was it. His public Facebook profile picture is now of pole dancing Peeps-bunnies on stage while Peeps-chicks watch in the audience. That’s all I know about his current life. Pretty weird, as was he, as was a lot of that year when this person we never knew, but invented a whole life for, became strangely incorporated into my navigating my early 20s in a new city.
F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in one of my favorite quotes from “The Great Gatsby,” “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Paying attention to the people on my periphery has helped me connect to time or place or even myself. To me, strangers can be a playground, letting me explore without ever leaving my own head.
Just as when I was a kid, I am still kind of floored by the fact that life continues on for people even when I am not there. There is something akin to kismet that my life and the lives of others have moments of intersection, and that sometimes, and often unpredictably, those moments matter.
MORTALITY AND MOTHERHOOD
A woman who I worked with back in 2011 was shot and killed in a doctor’s office a few weeks ago by someone she had never met. She was two years older than me, and her kids are two years older than mine. When it happened, they locked down Midtown, and before anyone knew any details, I just felt sheer relief that my husband was working from home that day, that my kids go to a mainly outdoor school in the woods, and that if an incident transpired, there would be so many directions for them to run in. That we live in a time where this crazy thought has crossed my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about this woman who was killed: how in the very brief time I knew her, she always seemed so kind and gracious, how she always had a moment to strike up a conversation in the lunch room or make you feel noticed, what a wonderful mother I have no doubt she had become, how unfair it is that she will not get to see her children grow. This is innately a story about the lives of others, how someone else’s news impacts our own, how tragedy can remind us to treasure this precious life. Though I had not seen her in so long, as our city began to mourn the loss of her, concentric circles of our lives began to intersect. This world can feel so big and unwieldy and so strangely small at the same time.
The day after her death, as I chugged my lukewarm coffee, something I never could have imagined doing before becoming a mom, I thought of how just one morning before she could have been doing the exact same thing. I hadn’t washed the right tutu for dance camp, my daughter had lost a quarter in her underpants and my son asked me to watch him tie his penis into a knot. “How old are you?” my daughter asked me a million times as my son zipped around on his bike calling me “Bad Mama” every time he passed. I blended a smoothie, checked for dinosaurs in the bathroom, asked my humping dog to leave my arm alone, wrestled socks and shoes on wiggly feet and tried to hold onto that feeling that this life is just such a gift. Here is what I know: children shouldn’t have to know an unjust world without their parents, we cannot become apathetic to gun reform, the shortcomings in mental health resources in our country are a travesty, and this fragile life is just utterly beautiful and bewildering.
THE POWER OF READING AND LEARNING TO READ
One of my daughter’s Barbies just came down with Cholera last week. A couple of weeks before, Ken had a terrible case of Scarlet Fever. The other day, when someone said “wow, a war of big feelings,” my daughter interjected, “at least we’re not in a real war!” This is my fault. Recently, my four-year-old and I have been reading historical fiction together. It started with this abbreviated 65-page version of Little Women, which we read three times. Then, the librarian, who we see weekly during our Books and Bubbles outing (library + bubble tea), recommended we try the classic American Girl books, which I had not read since I was eight or nine years old. So, we have dived in, and with this undertaking, I have had to improvise insufficient explanations to my four year old on such topics as immigration, the Westward Expansion, Native American Reservations, World War Two, and the Suffragettes. And, I’ve had to offer context to parents and teachers as the references to the 1700s prairie or 19th century industrial revolution have begun to pop up during playdates and at school. Despite my flawed attempts at making sense of such a crazy world to my sweet kid, it has been such a pleasure to read together, and has conjured up quite a bit of nostalgia to revisit these stories as an adult. I love seeing her find the same joy as I have always found in historical fiction, watching her dive into these worlds as the words I’m reading swirl around her. I’ve wondered if it’s too much, if she’s not old enough yet to be exposed to such things. Then, I remember how grateful I was that my mom did this with me. Watching My So Called Life circa 1994 (a show that in its brief 19 episode scope was ahead of its time and exceptional) is still something I so fondly remember doing with my mom. This is just one among the many opportunities she gave me that led to such dynamic and fruitful conversations afterward. The trick was that she just kept showing up and leaving space for me to better understand the world with her help, and now I get the pleasure to do that through reading with my daughter. There is evidence that reading fiction can make you a better person. According to dozens of experiments, reading has been linked to increased empathy, better social skills, and increased tendencies towards kindness and compassion.
I was thinking about my daughter learning to read this morning while soaking up my final moments in bed. On the monitor, I saw her surrounded by American Girl books flipping through each of them and looking at the pictures. She loves doing this and I can tell that she’s reliving everything she’s heard as she does. This approach to learning to read is called “Balanced Reading” and it has been one of the main methodologies schools in the United States have used to teach reading in recent decades. According to The Daily’s episode on The Fight Over Phonics, “balanced reading” allows children to pick books that interest them, have quiet reading time, and infer the words on the page. So, this method of reading leans heavily on interests, pictures and context. The other main method has been deemed the “science of reading” which is grounded in phonics, the practice of learning sounds and letter combinations. My gut reaction is to gravitate towards balanced reading. Really anything with the word “balanced” is pretty appealing to me. If we teach our kids to love the act of reading, their investment in learning the words will come eventually and perhaps naturally from curiosity. No one cares that Mat sat on a cat. Except, maybe, the cat. To me, the phonics approach is tedious and certainly doesn’t seem like it would be the impetus for building a lifelong love of the written word. However, cognitive science and MRI research on reading have revealed that I am wrong and that phonics is the most important component of learning to read. So, those painful Bob Books that I remember from childhood unfortunately matter, and my gravitation towards balanced reading, it appears, is rather short sighted. And, pairing phonics with a well-rounded education in such areas as social studies and science seems to be the ticket to much higher rates of literacy.
So, despite over a half-century of research that shows the importance of teaching phonics, why is it that at least one-quarter of our country’s schools, including some of the biggest school systems, are teaching the “balanced reading” approach? The impact of how we’ve been teaching literacy in our country has led to a national crisis on dropping literacy rates. According to The New York Times, In New York City, only 49 percent of third grade students were proficient in reading in 2022. In Chicago, 80 percent of kids are not reading on grade level, and in Detroit that number jumps to 91 percent. This educational crisis in reading instruction is disproportionately impacting black and brown children: “On national tests last year, only 18 percent of black 4th-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4th-graders was 45 percent. For 8th graders, the percentages were 15 and 42.” New York City recently announced that they will trade in their “balanced reading” approach for a more phonics-based approach to teaching reading. This announcement is “the latest and biggest acknowledgment to date that a generation of American students has been given the wrong tools to achieve literacy.” But, there’s a long way to go. Many teachers still need to be trained in more phonics-based methodologies, and many schools are still using balanced reading curriculums. Maybe it shouldn’t be a shock that our education system is so flawed, that a popular methodology of reading that isn’t scientifically successful has caused an entire generation of kids to fall behind in their ability to read, that children with learning disabilities and people of color have been disproportionately impacted by this failed methodology, that perhaps it has taken so long to shift our approach because of who was being disproportionately impacted. So, all of this to say, reading matters. How we teach reading also matters. It feels exhausting and riddled with privilege that not having an excess of time or resources or education ourselves can cause our kids to fall through the cracks. As Frederick Douglass once said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” Literacy is a fundamental right and our kids deserve the key to the worlds that books open.
SOMETHING THAT
DID WORK
My favorite dinner table question currently is “what is a recent internet rabbit hole that you went down?” To me, understanding the topics that consume our energy when we could be spending those resources on so many other things is truly fascinating. Here is an example:
While perusing Instagram back in December, I stumbled upon a picture of Joe and Jill Biden dressed up for the State Dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte. My first observation was that Emmanuel Macron looked like he could be the son of the other three people in the picture. From there, the rabbit hole began: Joe Biden, whose age has been a point of contention for our country, is a well-documented 80 years old. His wife Jill is 71, similarly, Brigitte is 70. Macron is a sprite 45 years old. So, in fact, my Instagram observation was quite accurate. Naturally, I then wanted to know how Macron and Brigitte met? Macron met Brigitte when he was 15 years old and she was his drama teacher and a married mother of three. Their age difference, and that of Melania Trump and Donald Trump, is almost exactly the same, the only difference is our country’s sexist view of what is copasetic versus controversial. The Macrons married in 2007, one-year after Brigitte’s divorce, he was 29 and she was 54. I have nothing intelligent to say; this deep dive took an hour of my life that I will never get back and made me an expert on a topic that will very likely never be useful.
Here are some recent rabbit holes of my dear friends:
Who Taylor Swift is dating
Your eyes involvement in the immune system
TikTok chiropractic adjustments
All things eczema
Smith Island Cakes
Breast milk in mice
To me, the rabbit hole question is similar to the intrigue of seeing what’s inside your neighbors’ recycling bin on trash day or being able to hear what someone is listening to on the earbuds when they think no one hears. When I was in my early twenties and living in Boston, there was this dreary day when I had forgotten my coffee at home, and adulting just wasn’t coming easily. I got on the T (the subway) on my way to work, popped in my headphones and played a song on my iPod (to age this story) that I was into at the time. In order for you to get the whole experience, the song was a rendition of the 90s hit “Back for Good” covered by The Concretes. For the first twenty minutes of my ride, I had the song playing on repeat at full volume, as the T filled with people. Eventually, I pulled off my headphones, which it turns out were not fully plugged in, and thanks to the iPod’s internal speaker, I had blasted this angsty tune for everyone on the subway during the entirety of their commute. I was mortified by having exposed my inner world to strangers. To me, this is similar to revealing your deep dives, how are you filling your unoccupied time when you toss inhibition to the wind?
So, at the risk of being nosy or prying, if you need a conversation starter for your next dinner party, I would encourage you to ask what rabbit holes have you gone down recently?
SOMETHING THAT
DIDN’T WORK
Every Sunday evening, I curse the task of making our weekly dinner menu. I Google healthy-enough, fast and easy recipes that will fit my family’s very limiting dietary preferences, and then put together our grocery order to be delivered the following day. Then, as we refer to the whiteboard menu that hangs in our kitchen, I feel very grateful to have at least one clear roadmap for the week. This morning my son ate three string cheeses for breakfast, and yesterday my daughter ate a baguette like an apple. Left to their own devices, this would be their preference. But, instead, we have the menu, and then once a week, despite all logic and experience, I throw in a wild card, a meal that looks good to me but is a risky move for everyone else. It’s a chance for me to stretch my culinary prowess and invite my neglected spice cabinet into the mix. Last week, I decided to try lamb meatballs with saffron rice and an herby yogurt. My kids love balls of meat, I hadn’t tried lamb with them for a while, and as long as they didn’t connect what was on their plates to the cute lamb puppet that they use to describe their big feelings, I thought we’d be in good shape. Often, my wildcard meal earns disgusted faces and is reduced to the adjective “yucky.” But, I got to use saffron, and my kids picked dill, cilantro, and mint from our garden. It looked like a success; They ate the meatballs, the hummus and the veggies, and they capped their meal with the classic digestif: the after dinner banana. The evening activity of calculating how many twirls will make you too dizzy to stand had commenced when we asked my daughter to bring her finished plate to the counter. This is one of her “chores,” something that we’ve read increases the potential success of children. She explained that the kitchen was too smelly to bring us her plate. We are no stranger to this excuse: I’m too tired to clean up my toys, my nose hurts too much for me to put my own shoes on, I simply can’t clean up my spilled milk because my hair is too tight. So, despite us being perfectly aware of sensory challenges, I explained that if the smell is too much for her to touch her plate, at the very least she would need to throw out her banana peel. The meal had been cooked over an hour before, she had sat in the room and eaten her food with no problem, surely the smell of spices wasn’t still so thick in the air now that she would actually feel sick. So, without protest, she went to the table, grabbed her banana peel, threw it in the trash, and then proceeded to vomit all over our kitchen. Then our two-year-old son, who is no stranger to his sister’s light gag reflex and propensity for puking, as if having seen it for the first time, ran a lap around our house to escape the puke, and then, in an act of total disorientation, slipped in it and began puking himself. And just like that, my attempt to make a nice pre-kid, sophisticated meal was once again proven to be far from worth the effort. I thought of the Instagram mom I had watched that morning, feeding her son a plate full of sauerkraut, spinach and tilapia, and the caption explaining that it was our job as moms to banish the idea of “kid’s food.” Or the occupational therapist who had said dysregulated emotions are most certainly tied to gluten. I do my best to offer a balanced diet for my children, but as puke-gate proved once again, the challenges to expanding our meal plan repertoire are real.
SUSTENANCE SUGGESTIONS
ONE-PAN LAMB MEATBALLS AND SAFFRON RICE WITH HERBY-YOGURT SAUCE
I realize that the story told in connection with this meal might be enough to deter you from making it. But, it was a fantastic combination of flavors and everyone in our family ate the meatballs, so I'll call it a win. My sister-in-law introduced me to the Defined Dish cookbook as a holy grail of interesting, easy to make, healthy meals and it has not disappointed. Pull out some spices and may your meal be less eventful than ours ended up being.
