Tag: urban life

• The Urban Saints

This morning I received an apology, of sorts, from a machine. At the parking garage that runs between Center and Allston in downtown Berkeley, next to the YMCA, the ticket dispenser advises drivers, in an authoritative female voice, to press the button for a ticket. Then, as if she has told you a million times, in a mordant falling tone, she says, Take the ticket. Her ts are muffled, as if she is biting back on her temper.

Urban Saint 1

When we drive into the garage, my husband, Raymond, and I shake off the chill by imitating her voice. “Take the ticket,” I will intone, as we circle up toward the second floor, and on the next ramp Raymond will toss it back to me, sliding to an even lower pitch: “Take the ticket.” Today at the garage entrance, though, something different happened. After “Take the ticket,” in an ecstatic sigh, as if a flock of doves had fluttered skyward, the machine voice uttered, “Welcome!”

I envision a conversation where the garage manager tells the ticket dispenser to improve her attitude and work on her customer service skills. Then, more realistically, I imagine someone clicking a box on a computer screen to activate “Welcome” in the repertoire. It’s an improvement, but still poor recompense for the loss of the outdoor attendant, who disappeared earlier this year, after the owners automated the garage. Every day from 4 to 7, this man, with his compact build, trim beard and zippered jacket, mediated between the pedestrians passing by and the cars rolling out of the garage.

Expertly turning, waving, beckoning with his right hand while raising the left in another direction to signal a stop, he kept the flow of traffic moving, maximizing efficiency, minimizing uncertainty and danger. Raymond and I encountered him as drivers but more often as walkers. “Yes,” he lilted when we hesitated on the sidewalk before crossing the entrance. “Yes, you can come.” He seemed to recognized many of the drivers and greeted almost every pedestrian. No matter how many times I passed him on the same day, he always offered an acknowledging nod.

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photo by Abbey Hendrickson

I carry the memory of this man in my book of urban saints, which goes right back to the crossing guard who faithfully stood at the corner of Maple Avenue and Linden Street, throughout my early elementary school years. When I started kindergarten, her straight back and substantial build, sheathed in a navy blue uniform and topped with a police cap, made me think of the undulating, armless lathed wood body of the adult female figure from my toy family of Fisher-Price people. This was by no means a disrespectful comparison: like that cheerful blond mini-doll — or any good toy, for that matter — the crossing guard possessed a magical degree of consistency. She radiated a bully-free circle that stretched as far as she could see. Though she herself withheld her smile and shouted gruffly if a child set a toe off the sidewalk, she devoted unwavering attention to the well-being of everyone within her zone.

More recently, there’s a trainer at the Y, a tall, long-limbed man, also of substantial build. Despite–or because of–his size, he’s the staff member there who seems to best understand the mechanics of my solid but length-challenged body. With his help, I have reconfigured many of my settings on the weight machines there, relieving some untoward ankle and elbow stretching.

Beyond that, I don’t interact much with him, but I observe how he is with other people, advising them with gentleness and grace that I don’t find within myself. As is common among intermediate practitioners of any discipline, I find myself mentally scolding other users of the machines: Stop flapping your arms like that. You’re going to hurt yourself. Quit slamming the plates! Work with a weight you can actually handle.

I marvel at how the tall trainer can set people straight without evoking any shame. Try it slower, he’ll suggest, without a trace of superiority. I promise you you’ll get a lot more out of it that way. He calls people “my friend” — a phrase that could come across as condescending — in a tone that sounds perfectly genuine — because it is. He conveys a sense of acceptance toward others that must arise out of self acceptance. “This machine makes you feel like a gazelle,” I heard him tell someone he was showing an elliptical trainer. “It makes me feel like a gazelle, and I can tell you that doesn’t happen very often.”

My urban saints, for their mindfulness, humility, and generosity, win more admiration from me than achievements that are by typical measures more important. These individuals have connected with a capacity that we all have to heal and protect within a personal radius, recognizing tone of voice and choice of words as powerful forces for stability in a trouble-swept world.

• Morning in Alameda

8:27 AM

Ordinarily, I don’t do mornings. Certainly not before the crack of nine. I’ve always slept in whenever possible, but now that my tutoring schedule sometimes runs to 10 pm, I have an excuse. Unfortunately, one of my other idiosyncrasies is that I have trouble managing my possessions. In other words, I lose stuff. At the gym, I pay for the quarter lockers. It’s cost effective when considered against the price of continually replacing my own padlocks.

frogprince

So, yesterday I left my iPad in a classroom on the island of Alameda, where I was teaching an after school debate class. Doing debate with 4th- and 5th-graders is one of life’s great pleasures, something, I imagine, like riding a temperamental horse: exhilarating, perilous. As elementary school students, they still live in a world where principles can be relied on. Promises need to be kept, offenses require precise apologies: “It’s not that you bumped me and I fell. I’m mad because it really hurt and you laughed at me.” After elementary school, we continue to yearn for a morally coherent world, but middle school cures most of us of the hope for justice.

For debate workshops, my iPad is crucial. That’s because I have a timer app that goes toc-toc-toc as you spin the second-hand to set the dial. Classes in the late afternoon, when kids have been studying all day, can easily fall into rambunctious turmoil. In this case, though, as owner of the iPad, I hold the reins. The desire to touch the timer, I assure you, runs as deep as the longing for a just world, and I have the power to grant fulfillment or take it away. The kids know that mishandling my tech would bring consequences that defy imagination–in computer-savvy Alameda it would be like mishandling a statue of the Virgin at a Catholic School–so I can trust them to follow my rules with the device.

With that control in place, the event pretty much runs itself. Once we have a resolution to argue, I choose the judges. Almost everyone wants to be a judge–even the most impish child has a sober judicial side just waiting to come out–so I assign the role through a random drawing. Then, by consensus if possible, we organize the teams. It’s a common pedagogical practice to start debaters off with fairy tales, replete as they are with ethical conundrums. The story I had planned to do, “Rumplestiltskin,” turned out to be one they had already hashed over in their regular class.

And so we moved on the Frog Prince: Undervalued Dreamboat? Innocent Victim? Slimy Interloper? Passionate arguments emerged. The Princess tried to break her word after the Frog Prince risked his life to rescue the princess’s golden ball. What is a grown man doing, even in frog form, asking a young girl to take him home to her bed? (She’s obviously a child: she’s playing with a ball.) And what do we really know about this prince and the “castle” that he’s promising to his would-be bride? What if the castle is really a dump?

During in the breaks between the four rounds, one of the three judges also took on a coaching role, smoothly incorporating the technical terms we had just learned: “I want to see more pathos. Really show me your emotions. As far as logos, make sure your arguments connect.” A second judge, a wag who likes to raise his hand just to get called on so he can announce that he has nothing to say, transformed himself into a gracious host. If the timer ran out on a speaker, he stretched out his arm, asking, “Would you like to complete your statement?”

Since this was an intramural event, I was happy to allow the students make these small adjustments to the usual proceedings, adjustments that encouraged full and satisfying participation. At some point one of the debaters respectfully pushed back against Judge One’s torrent of advice. “We appreciate what you’re saying, but we’re up here doing the best we can.” On the other hand, the debaters also took the initiative to ask for a bit of feedback from the third, hitherto silent judge.

After arguments closed, the judges went to the whiteboard and drew up a chart with the scores for the two teams (0-4 points for each of 5 categories). Then the kids discussed the results among themselves, staying on topic for a full 15 minutes, without any prompting. In my education as a teacher, I was taught that my role is to facilitate “negotiation of meaning,” so I find it gratifying when such negotiations catch fire.

With the quarter hour we had left in the session, we tried a form of debate devised by the students. One student stood at the back of the room and one at the front, trying to lure other students to their side. We settled on a simple topic: red vs. blue. (In many schools, where Norcal and Socal loyalties run red and blue respectively, this could be a volatile, even taboo subject, but in a well-to-do area like Alameda, the preferences are arbitrary.)

bluevsred

The red side, I have to say, suffered from too much reliance on logical argument: People say that water is blue or the sky is blue, but that’s just a trick of the light. Blue rode to success on a wave of pathos: The sky may not really be blue, but blue is what we see.

I lent my support for the red side, but the blues rejected my appeal to authority–A billion Chinese can’t be wrong–and shot back with an irrelevant yet devastating counter-assertion: “Your shirt is blue.” Despite blue’s intimidating numbers, the controversy raged on until it was time to go. Then the students, helpfully cleaning up the class materials, came at me with wadded piles of paper, which I stuffed into my bag. We locked up the classroom, and I was 15 miles away before I realized I’d left my iPad behind.

Today, therefore, I have hauled myself back to Alameda, getting to the school before instruction starts to retrieve my mysterious object of desire, which I will need for a 1 pm debate class with another group. And now here I am, negotiating the meaning of morning, that beautiful time I seldom see, where the people who aren’t rushing to their jobs walk around with their minds in loose focus, taking in whatever comes.

I’m at a coffee shop, and the barista is telling a red-headed customer with a flowered purse, a diamond-patterned shirt and a camouflaged jacket that he is hoping to get back to nature.

“That’s so good,” she replies, chewing up a few leisurely bites of pastry before adding, “It’s the most important thing.”

“Actually,” he says, “I’m growing a few things in my drainpipe.”

While he pours in the milk for her latte, she rips open two sugar packets and shakes them in at the same time. “I just love everyone here,” she announces to the staff, before she grabs her cup and heads off for work. For this moment only–do not expect any more out of me–I love mornings, as I have always loved the application of well-intended words.

• On Not Telling People Not to Tell Me to Smile

[This article contains mature subjects, at around a PG-14 level]

I am going to make a confession, a personal one, not meant to speak for any other woman: I don’t mind when men tell me to smile. By saying so, I risk denting my feminist credentials. I mention this because of a street art project–recently covered in news sources such as NPR, The Daily Beast, and the New York Times, that operates under the name “Stop Telling Women to Smile.” 4da6914b38a9a8cd82cc8712a3dc6b2d_large

This campaign, organized by an artist and activist, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, uses posters to confront the “street harassment” that women deal with regularly as we go about our daily lives. Street harassment may include catcalls and whistles, but this project focuses more on men’s inappropriate personal comments to women.

The posters sport crisp black-and-white portraits of women with sober, steadfast gazes, along with concise written messages: My name isn’t Baby. Critiques on my body are not welcome. Women do not owe you for their time or conversation. My outfit is not an invitation. The slogan “Stop telling women to smile” appears under a self-portrait of the artist with her head turned, casting a skeptical eye.

I am 100% behind almost all the messages–the ones pointing out that women are neither “outside for your entertainment” nor in need of validation from strange men. It’s the one about smiling, though, that has me churning, questioning my loyalties, reviewing my own experiences, asking myself where I stand. I have conflicting impulses, wanting to celebrate and at the same time to raise objections to Fazlalizadeh’s work, or at least decry its title (which admittedly makes a nice palindromic acronym: STWTS).

My first thought about the saying is that I don’t want to be that surly. Most of the time, when someone tells me to smile, it feels less like an imposition and more like a reminder. I usually do need to step away from some grim rumination, and it feels easy to me to yield up the requested grin. Also, the flower-child side of me prefers empathy-building “I” statements to outright commands like STOP!

Sometimes, “stop,” though, is what you have to holler. The artist is responding to a whole range of behaviors that are indeed disruptive to female lives. She makes a carefully considered choice to hone in on one that is seemingly harmless, just as a pinch on the behind, an office come-on, or an embarrassingly intense flirtation — “If I weren’t married, I would…” — were once perceived as OK. She argues that when a man prevails on a woman he does not know with personal comments of any kind, he is assuming that he has an innate right to her attention. His actions reinforce the idea that women somehow owe something to men.

Anyone who has come across the notion of men’s dates “putting out” in exchange for dinner, knows that many men do have a sense of entitlement when it comes to women. I briefly dated the poster boy for this attitude, who congratulated himself out loud for not forcing his attentions on me.

And so, as it was designed to do, STWTS got me thinking about the kinds of harassment I myself have suffered. From the time I was a teenager, working in the 1980s as a downtown foot-messenger, I have spent plenty of time on public transportation and on urban streets. This week I pulled together my own collection of unpleasant and even frightening interactions I’ve had with men. Any one of these various stalkings, flashings, and gropings could be shaken off, but together they make such an impression–such a discouraging and R-rated one–that I decided not to include my collection directly in this essay.

Experimentally, I wrote a list of Don’ts, less concise than Fazlalizadeh’s, aimed at my own harassers. For those of you who are comfortable reading about immature acts related to mature subjects, you can find my slogans here. I deployed enough euphemism and innuendo for them to qualify for a PG-14 rating. Perhaps my act of burying mine on a back-page web post will highlight Fazlalizadeh’s courage in putting hers out on walls.

I recognize that I have lived a charmed life, virtually free from physical violence, and that my own experiences with masculine aggression are worlds away from the worst that they could be. (Compare Josie Pickens’ painful reminiscences in Ebony, also sparked by STWTS, about the degree to which men’s remarks normalize physical forms of sexual aggression.)

And some instances of men presuming on my attention are ones that I wouldn’t change, for instance with Florio, 4′ 11″, who followed me through an amusement park trying in various languages to strike up a conversation. When I gave up and answered him, I wound up learning all about his career as a weightlifter in Romania. Then he thanked me for the chat and politely said goodbye.

Then there was my encounter with a guy on the long transbay bus ride from Oakland to San Francisco. I could certainly have come up with some Don’ts for him. Don’t get drunk in the morning on an empty stomach and tell me the whole sad story of your life falling apart. Do not, under any circumstance, start calling me your ‘little support system.’ Do not follow me onto a second, desperately crowded bus, holding forth so loudly and repetitively than no one will sit in the empty seat on the other side of you, then promise you will get off the bus only if I kiss you on the cheek.

Not that I would want to to go through an experience like that again, but still it was worth it for the memory and for the story, and maybe for making my post-college life of house-sitting and unemployment seem relatively respectable and orderly. When I tell the tale, I sometimes leave out the fact that I did kiss the man. He was good as his word, disappearing from my life at the very next stop. I certainly don’t mention that he wasn’t even the only stranger ever I kissed to make go away. It weirds people out, and, in light of Fazlalizadeh’s activism, now feels a bit like a betrayal of feminist ideals.

But there it is. In those days, I was a sucker for strangers. Not once did it occur to me to scowl or tell someone to shove off.

Such incidents tapered off sometime after my 20s. The dew in my eyes evaporated. My appearance changed, and so did my stance. When I made my mid-career shift from writing and editing to teaching, I developed “the look,” a glare that can part crowds, knock a rider from a skateboard, or pacify a late-night shouter on Telegraph Avenue. (“Are you a schoolteacher?” one of them once straightened up and asked me.)

Even now, though, I depend on the intervention of strangers, such as the woman sitting next to me on a plane, who patted my back for fifteen minutes during the landing while I threw up into the airsick bag. Once, over-confident of my teacherly superpowers, I got into a shouting match on the UC Berkeley campus with a man who objected to my walking behind him–20 or 30 feet behind. In retrospect, it’s obvious that he was speaking from the throes of mental illness, but at the time it just didn’t sink in for me.

I was yelling at him that I would walk where I wanted to, when another woman (I have no recall of what she looked like) linked arms with me and led me in the opposite direction, out of this pointless altercation, saying, “Let’s just have a little stroll over this way.”

Like Farzalizadeh, I dream of a world where women can move freely, without fear, even without hassle. Beyond that, I dream of a world men and women can generally count on one another for some spirit of street solidarity. Conceivably, suggesting a smile could be a part of that. But for now, in the world we live in, I have to get behind a woman’s right to just say let me be.

• What’s under your bridge?

“Too much social interaction!” a young friend of mine is roaring, sitting on his heels in his swiveling desk chair. A proficient internet pilot, like many of his generation, he has been showing me a computer game based on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of several books we’ve read together. He also mentions an online version of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. I start telling him about the old days, when D&D players sat around a kitchen table rolling dice. I’m just getting to the part about my generation staying up late over cold pizza and flat soda. That’s when he breaks in, cutting off the reminiscence: “Too much interaction face to face!”

He’s kidding, I think. As a teacher, I can attest that most 6th-grade humor has the consistency of roasted chestnuts. This particular 11-year-old, though, constitutes an exception. He’s got a wit that’s hard and sparkly as diamonds. The first time I met with him, I asked him whether he knew what it meant to “infer.” He told me he’d encountered the word “inferences” before. “So I can infer what it means.”

Now he confirms for me the ironic tone of his protest, as he goes on playfully to describe a future world where young people will hunch over devices texting each other even when they’re together in the same room.

Much has been made, and for a good long time now, out of the isolating effects of time spent online. Sociological studies, widely publicized on the internet, blame that same internet for the decay of social networks in the phenomenon we so tellingly capitalize as Real Life. I pooh-pooh the fretting, because I love the new opportunities: keeping up with former students, tracking the growth of my niece and nephew. It pleases me to be able to determine where I’ve seen that actor on that show before, with just a few key taps, or to fact check (and verify) the assertion that Lupita Nyong’o looks gorgeous in every color she wears. I like having my reach extended, beaming messages to old friends who belong, in my personal cosmos, to the distant galaxy known as elementary school.

Much has been made of the way the internet brings out the worst in us, for instance through flame wars, cyber-bullying, and derogatory “bashtags.” Here, I share the concerns. So often, I see posts and articles whose gist is “I have no sympathy for so-and-so.” Much of the time I see reason for withholding fellow feeling, whether from well-heeled individuals raising tantrums over the fraying of their privileges or from vicious killer on death row. Still I find myself reflecting on the suspension of sympathy and its role in the actions of the wrongdoers just mentioned.

troll

Flinging put-downs on the internet is a seductive business. We get the excitement of confronting others’ behavior without all the consequences and risks. Particularly aggravating for me is the anti-immigrant screed. Such messages often appear in the second person, accusing some unidentified “you” of parasitical laziness.

These postings, I admit, spark the urge for reciprocal bad behavior on my part. Are you saying that our immigrant elders (mine and others’)–whose language learning suffered because they washed for, cooked for, cleaned up after, scolded, and cared for entire extended families, serving as one-man or one-woman safety nets–who worked multiple jobs to bankroll the education of a highly skilled and often seamlessly bilingual new generation–now need to “Press 2 to hang up and learn English”?

Come over and say that to me here.

If anything, though, my internet anger raises my awareness of my own fundamental trolldom. Like many others, I suspect, I tend toward an ingrained defensiveness that I’ve nurtured for a long time–probably since my first-hand experiences of how young people do also say terrible things to each other on a face-to-face level. Some days, no provocation is too small to stir the troll in me.

Yesterday I was standing at a corner where a tiny side street meets bustling San Pablo. The walk sign there takes forever to come on. As I was waiting, a woman strode up and forcefully jabbed three or four times at the button, when I had ALREADY PRESSED IT! Look at her folding her arms smugly, as if in expectation of instant success. Does she think she knows some better way than I do of pressing a walk button? Another 45 seconds of DON’T WALK will wipe that self-satisfied smile from her face.

Forty-five seconds did go by, with her aplomb undiminished. Then we crossed the street and started walking up the same steep hill. “That’s a cute dog,” she said to me, pointing to a fluffy white pooch walking by on a leash. Then she said the same thing to the tall woman walking the dog and gave the animal a friendly pat. Geez, what’s wrong with you, I asked my troll, getting so worked up about a perfectly pleasant stranger? My inner troll just shrugged at me and headed back under my inner bridge.

Hostility, says the troll. It’s what I do.

That’s just one example of an unseen flare-up in me of old feelings. On the other hand, here’s something new. Once every few days, usually peering at budding trees outside a window, over the shoulder of a student writer, during silent moments when the student needs to skirmish with the structure of a hard-to-structure sentence, I experience a shiver of unaccountable joy. I feel that I’m where I am supposed to be, that everything is right. And it’s true. I am doing what I dreamed of doing when I was in my 20s, a mix of teaching, writing, and art making–and actually the art making is more than I had even dared to dream. So the feeling’s not surprising, but its piercing sweetness is.

The euphoria has to do simply with being present, in a way that cannot be synthesized, even as our electronic devices deliver streams of positive and negative reinforcement that are, I do believe, rewiring our brains. Spelling, for instance, is in genuine peril, mark my words. Many students right-click two or three times a sentence to turn anylisis into analysis or–if they’re not careful–into analities. They’re not memorizing the words, but they’re going to have to cut down on the clicking, or they won’t be able to make deadlines. It’ll be like getting stuck at the endless DON’T WALK sign every day of their lives.

Still, I’m holding out hope for books and for swivel chairs, as well as for late nights and cold pizza, with the electronic universe as a powerful complement to–but not a substitute for–our breathing lives.