Open Letter
I boo-hoo at graduations — even the ones that Black billionaire Robert F. Smith hasn’t relieved of loan debt. Can’t help it. Inside, I’m like that new Lizzo song where she comes right out with an acappello sung shout-cry “I’m crying’ cuz I love you!” And then the band bangs in hard, three chords and percussion up the steps, three down— Dahm dahm daaaaahhm; Dahm dahm daaaaahhm!
That’s totally how I feel at graduations or when I’m in the classroom with great teachers, people who bring their entire selves, fearlessly, to a circle of young lives and feed and water them, and listen to them, and hear them. When teachers do that, you can hear the kids grow.
That’s how it felt to be in class with John Lavin, when my UPenn students and I collaborated with his kids at Kensington Biz High for SafeKidsStories projects. They came to UPenn and we talked about Baldwin; we went to his classroom, different groups of college students, including once when a student couldn’t get her token into the turnstile fast enough, and I held the door to the subway while the engineer shouted into the loudspeaker to “the lady in the blue coat: do not hold open the doors! Do not hold the doors!” Good times.
I’ve felt similarly moved by his writing about teaching and learning. Lavin’s first blog for SafeKidsStories.com spawned a recurring SafeKids prompt, illustrated with spot-on whimsy by Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Signe Wilkinson in “When a Book Chooses You.”
Lavin described how a book choose him in high school:
My father discouraged books. Choosing books was a luxury. Reading took time. He taught me that the point of a man’s existence was to make as much money as possible. He schooled me in choices that put money first. To teach me, he beat me. What I learned on the surface was, no surprise, to fight. But what I learned on a deeper level was desperation. The beatings were effective. By the age of sixteen, although books tempted me, I feared my dad and poverty enough to choose fighting, no matter how painful. I was on the wrestling team, and I knew how to box. Boxers like Joe Fraser and Jack Dempsey were rich. That was the ultimate goal, to be like them. I worked washing dishes at restaurants after school from the age of thirteen and by the time I was 16 on weekends unless I was playing trumpet at a paying gig. My dad got me into the musician’s union. I asked once only about hanging out with friends on weekends. That was out.
Then, one fall Monday morning in 1971, a book chose me. Pushed into a Spanish class, I arbitrarily took the front seat and faced our new teacher. His features were dark and delicate. His voice was light and buoyant and melodic. He wore a white cotton shirt, not the black clericals that the rest wore.
There were three books on each of our desks. They were slender with intense printing. Their sweet, fresh ink, more pungent even than dollar bills, was inebriating. One was a golden yellow and pamphlet-like. Juan Ramon Jimenez’s Platero y Yo. It was so thin. The other two were a deep blue with rectangular spines. They all felt mysterious. They felt alive.
Lavin wrote other moving and insightful SafeKidsStories.com blogs that I hope he will import into his new Tumblr Blogsite, “The Colloquy.”
For now, though, I’m just grateful that he’s chosen to write about Ladysitting in the form of an open letter to me, starting a perfect quote from Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal. John says that he hopes ladysitting will become a term of caregiving. He writes: “We remember how temporal we are. Thank you for your dedication to our shared mortality.”
Yup, yup, yup, that’s it: dedication to our shared mortality, which feels like the part that gives urgency to finding humanity. Now, while we can. Lavin has done it: in classrooms, union advocacy, universities, his own mansitting with his father, and in writing, at conferences, a new play, “Opium Confessions on a Swing,” and this new blogsite. I’m still waiting for him to publish a piece I heard him deliver at West Chester University about his students and Baldwin. Maybe that’s coming, too!
