Summer School 12: Marvin's Book

Before Mr. D* could finish packing his stuff up that last day, a student walked up, introduced himself and gave Mr. D* a huge bag of goodies (toiletries, food, things that people living in a pinch appreciated) and wished him well.

That student was Marvin, a perfect student who never missed a class, never missed a point, and always kept a phone out next to him because he was waiting for a call for a kidney transplant.

 I tell him about Marvin's Book and ask if I can write about what he is going through.

 He says of course, and promise to get him a digital copy of Marvin's Book  which I promptly forgot to do.  

The universe worked a perfectly timed miracle and brought Marvin his kidney RIGHT after he finished his summer school classes.  He is currently recovering in Gainesville, and you can support him through this link https://www.gofundme.com/ydb92-marvins-kidney-transplant 

Now, for the story I owe him.


Marvin's Book, The Story of a Professor and a Promise (2011)

Prologue: Potty Soldiers with Tails

When I imagine the house of a history professor, I see amber walls, brown sofas and lots of bookcases. There would probably be a cat lounging on a pillow next to a stained glass window.

On the dining room table, there would be stacks of papers to grade, thesis chapters and book reviews.

I don’t imagine a history professor’s life to look like mine, exiled in an early 2000s housing bubble development, surrounded by children, grading essay exams with a very, very sharp crayon.

My children and husband have grown used to tiptoeing around me while I grade, avoiding my martyrly speech I give when interrupted, which goes something like “LOOK at ALL this grading I HAVE to DO. And I HAVE to read these CAREFULLY and COMMENT on them. But I KNOW we need to go to the grocery….”

If I give the speech just right, they’ll do anything to shut me up.

On one particular night—the night by which I told students I would have their papers graded—I was behind schedule because of a Project Runway marathon. I begged my husband to go to the grocery store for three items, one of which I needed immediately. As a bonus, he took our son. Peace.

When the boys came back I was flipping through the near-empty tests that always land on the bottom of the pile, the tests that come from the students who were the first to give up.

My son Zack tried to hand me a box from the Publix bag, but I didn’t want to get up or look up.

“Honey, do you know where those go?” I said, not looking up because I was reading and rereading an exam in which the student rewrote the exact same essay answer for all four questions.

“Yes. They go in the potty.” He marched away.

I turned to the next exam, written in that textbook-perfect handwriting nuns forced upon my father in his New Orleans parochial school, revealing an author who probably was my age—or older.

The first two essays were complete, and perfect. She didn’t answer the second two essays.

 I wrote “10/20—the part you completed was beautiful.”

Then I picked up the last essay on the stack.

Instead of sentences, the student has listed terms. Brown v. Board of Education. De Facto Segregation. Montgomery Bus Boycott. I decided to give her 1 point (out of a possible 5) and wrote in the margin—“Please connect and tell me the story.”

I flipped through the rest of the exams, making sure they were all empty, that I was really done.

Zack interrupted, “Mommy, the soldiers’ jackets come off!”

I didn’t look up and instead started alphabetizing the exams.

Our house is full of naked Barbies, naked dolls, naked Builda-Bears.

A naked soldier would be a welcome addition to the mix.

Maybe save Santa a few bucks.

“Mommy? Why do the soldiers have tails?”

“Tails?”

“Yes. The Potty Soldiers have tails.”

“The potty soldiers?”

“From the box. From Publix.”

That got my attention, and I looked up, because the box from Publix didn’t have soldiers.

And on the coffee table, neatly lined up in straight lines were a bunch of tampon soldiers who had originally been intended to fight a different war. On a different front.

I put the exams down and went to the store by myself, mentally preparing for the next day’s lecture.

Summer School 3: She sees him too.

Originally published June 2017

The next day Mr. D* is in class early as usual, looking quite good, almost like he's relieved to have been unburdened.  He tells me about where he used to cook, and I know I definitely ate there.  Then the conversation goes this way and that way and we are discussing the hospital.  

They treat you different when they know you're homeless, he tells me.  

They do?

Yes.  They don't trust you, like being homeless makes you a criminal. 

They don't see you.

No, they don't. Like if they ignore you you'll go away and not be their problem.

I see you, I tell him. I'm thankful you're here. 

Then I get the idea to ask him if he will write some recipes for me to use to cook for the veterans and his face lit up like nothing I had seen from him in three long weeks of summer school.  

He starts talking about making pastry and different cuts of meat and I get this idea that we could maybe put together some sort of cookbook and he says YES.  

 I ask him to write about himself too and he says YES. 

At the end of lecture that day, I help Mr. D* put his notebook into his backpack and I can't help but notice a brown bag.  She brought me breakfast, he says, and smiles at the nice girl in the front row. She sees him too.   She waves at him as he leaves and goes back to writing her essay.  

(continued)

WW3: A Memoir. Part 1: The Before

World War 3: A Memoir

The Before

I used to know where information lived.

By the age of 8 I knew for certain that information lived in the stiff heavy leather bound Encyclopedias lined up in shelves around a large rectangular table at Cypress Elementary.

Want information about cotton? There it is, easily found in the “C” volume, one paragraph, a picture, a map of where cotton is grown.

I knew, without being told, that the other Encyclopedias would have pretty much the same information – maybe more, maybe less, hopefully a table or a map too – and that if I wanted more information I should look in the card catalog to see if there were any books on the topic

 I didn’t expect each book to describe cotton differently (example: Cotton – the worst disease to hit the country of Genovia; Cotton -  the forgotten food group; Cotton; something invented by George Washington Carver after he won the Battle of Epcot) because I trusted everything in print had been curated and edited by persons whose great pleasure and responsibility in life is to present good information to others.

This remained the same through my time college in the 1980s and the better part of my graduate work in the 1990s: the library was the primary place where information lived, where Census records, United Nations reports and decades of newspaper microfiche waited patiently to be discovered by information hunters.

Then came the big boom of internet search engines. Information – facts, pictures, stories, maps, livestreaming lives – explodes like confetti, separated from context, free floating, uncurated.
  

So much information everywhere, so easy to get.

Ask anything.

Be anyone.

Find anything.

Question everything.