Jim Burke: The English Teacher's Companion

Senior Moments: Celebrating Arrivals

Seventeen years ago our son Whitman, our senior son, arrived. He came early. Perhaps he knew he had to: a month before, his grandfather Melvin (Susan's father) had lost his year-long fight to cancer; a week later, his grandfather Jerry (my father) would lose his own year-long battle to a different cancer. 

We named him Aidan at first, for the one who helps others; then we named him Whitman; then we thought of our great fathers, wonderful men who represented the best of their generations, and named him: Whitman Robert Aidan Dykman Burke. 

It's a lot of name, but we felt called to honor so many at that time. 

They would be so proud, those two fathers, those two grandfathers who never saw or got to meet him. But the news of him, the knowledge that he was coming kept them company during that long year before their departure, when we would drive to our hometown of Sacramento, return to the childhood homes, to parents, to the end of one era and the arrival of the next.

So it seems that since the day of his arrival he has been a blessing to those who know him. As for all those names: He doesn't think they are strange, they are all he's ever known. When, however, we went to fetch him from camp a few years ago, we asked all over for Whitman, and no one knew anyone by that name. Finally, I saw him and said to the counselor, "There...that's him over there!" a little peeved no doubt that they hadn't come to know and appreciate our son.

To which the counselor said, "That kid? Oh that's Bob! Everyone knows Bob!" When we asked him about telling everyone his name was Bob, he grinned and said it seemed like such a strange and fun name, so he decided to just tell everyone that was his name that week.

Well, that's our Whitman...

Senior Moments: In the Garden

Today, I would see, at different times, Ann out in the garden, sitting under the apple tree, or on the deck of the playhouse, later on over on the swing seat under the rose arbor. 

It was as beautiful a day as San Francisco gets here in September, that point of the year that really marks the beginning of our summer. 

The playhouse is where she played as a young girl in the Eden of her childhood here in the same garden eighty years ago. The roses on the arbor were planted by her father, who was famous throughout the neighborhood for his roses. Sitting in the garden, on such a day, who could not feel grateful for all your life has given you the chance to see and do.

Looking up at the house, she might have glanced her granddaughter Nora playing dolls with her friend Audrey, both girls the same age Ann was when she did the same so long ago in the playhouse.

Senior students, our Whitman included, rarely understand that they live in the garden of their youth, wherein so much is provided, things they take so for granted that they can not even fathom life without them. 

Outside the garden, there lies a world all these students and my own son must learn to make their way through, to arrive at the other side, where they can, as Ann did today, sit in the garden, at peace, looking at the children of their children at play under a sky the same color as those of their own childhood so many years ago yet which the memory calls up with an ease and clarity that never ceases to amaze me.

Senior Moments: The Application Process

High school seniors across the nation (and in all my classes...and at home) are beginning the process of applying to college. 

Many of our friends whose parents are aging, especially those in declining health, are beginning the process of applying to assisted living facilities.

Some of our friends are doing both: helping their sons or daughters apply to college and applying to places like Aegis Living on behalf their parents (or, in the case of all our friends, their mothers).

One of these processes marks a beginning, a taking off; the other indicates the beginning of an ending that for many is not in sight but is nonetheless glimpsed as if "through a glass, darkly." For some, they have achieved a Zen-like absence owing to their condition that keeps them in an immediate present we all sometimes wish we could feel in the midst of our busy lives.

Of course, one is not just applying to get in but to get help paying for it or otherwise providing against certain problems. Thus there are additional applications---to banks, lawyers, the government, employers---to cover all the expenses until our seniors graduate from their school or this life.

What follows is yet another application process, one our beloved seniors must handle on their own, an application they must complete themselves prior to that next phase.

And after that? For some of us, yet more applications: for jobs, programs, or help of some sort. For others, a deeper, more demanding application of the self to their own life which they must return and devote themselves to with the same commitment they gave for so long to their high school seniors or parents.

Senior Moments: Obstacles

Sunday I went for a long bike ride out along the California coast. While taking a break, I saw these stones, one kept apart by a police barracade, and on the other side of that, waves, and past that, dense fog through which the sun did not shine.

As my seniors at school (and at home) prepare to launch out on the quest for college or whatever is next for them, I am reminded of all they must go through, climb over, sneak around, or simply endure to get where they want to be. 

Standing there on those cliffs, looking out at the ocean and its waves, I saw the surfers riding them with obvious joy. What are obstacles to some are opportunities to them. They seemed to be saying, as they cut along the wave, Come on in! Ride the wave that would otherwise ruin you.

Whitman wanted to start surfing lessons last week but found he was the only one who signed up so they canceled the class for now. I was disappointed, of course, but watching those surfers on Sunday, I thought about Whit and those waves that keep coming at him, and how he just rides them one after another with a calm, quiet courage that comes from overcoming what would take another into its wet embrace.

What are these obstacles made of but water and air, fog and sand? 

 

Senior Moments: Know Thyself

In the summer of 1985 I sat here at Delphi, where people like Alexader the Great would come to consult the oracle. What is to come? they would ask. Will we be victorious? he would ask.

Or, in Oedipus the King, which we have been discussing in my senior class lately, you find Creon asking why their country is plagued with troubles and how they can overcome these problems.

For all the standards in all the states, there is no such standard for "knowing thyself." In a few months, when we read Hamlet, Polonius will tell his son that he must "above all: to thine own self be true." 

One must, of course, know thyself before one can be true to it. Yet can we reasonbably expect 18-year-olds to know themselves? To have the courage it takes to be true to those selves? Hardly. And how do we know or come to create that self? By testing it against the world through which we move and finding someone who can guide us on that journey.

The other day my senior son Whit was working with a coach who was trying to find his limits, then talking to him about how to push those limits further and further out from where they are now, in the process creating the strength and stamina he will need for his next self.

A couple years ago, I had a young man in one of my senior classes, one without any compass other than his evident intelligence and obvious goodness. To say he lost himself during that year would imply he knew himself, and he did not. And he understood that. Realized he needed to first find, then forge, that next self.

So he set out to hike the Pacific Coast Trail by himself. That was 2200 miles ago. This week he is slated, after overcoming all manner of obstacles along the way, to complete his journey, becoming the youngest person ever to hike the entire trail solo. He realized he needed to become his own teacher, his own guide.

Back in July of 1985, as I sat all day atop the mountain there at Delphi, I wondered what the oracles would tell me about the years to come. I was not yet a teacher. I was not yet a husband or a father. I was not yet an author. I was a Peace Corps volunteer traveling on my summer break.

When I came down from that mountain, and returned to Tunisia, where a telegram was waiting for me, telling me to go to Paris to meet Susan, who would travel from Japan the following week. We had known each other since high school. But in 1979 I was just a kid, not unlike my former student, who did not know himself.

And so I would go to Paris where I would meet up with Susan who, more than anyone, would help me come to know myself. Ah, but that is another story for another time....

Senior Moments: Fleeing the Parents

My seniors are just beginning to read Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antigone, which are about many things but very much about the moment when we see our parents (or, coming from the other side I now know too well, our own children) as strangers, as antagonists, as obstacles to overcome on our way to our own lives.

Everything Oedipus did (or that others did to help him) to escape his parents, or that Creon's son does to hurt and reject his own father calls to mind what I see happen with so many seniors each year. Some parents last year often seemed to wonder who this person was that woke up in their son's or daughter's bed. 

Sons who had been generally good kids suddenly were in trouble or just gone. I loaned an audiobook of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses to a boy last year who, as he approched the freeway exit for our school, just kept going. He came back a week later. His parents had no idea where he had been. 

Ryan told me he was listening to the book, to the part where the son rejects his parents who are splitting up, and just thought, "I am done with these people!" And like the boy in the novel who saddles up and rides south into Mexico, Ryan hit the gas and drove to Los Angeles where he slept on the couches of friends until he ran out of money and realized he needed to return home and graduate before he could move into the world on his own terms.

This violence of th e heart, the fire of emotions banked there in the darkness of our young hearts---it so often blinds us in our youth. Last year a senior girl who spent the year not talking to her parents---literally, nothing, not a word---chose to study the relationships between parents and kids for her final project to understand what had happened between them. She went around and asked people to jot down their own feelings about parents on index cards like Postsecret.

By the time she presented to the class, graduation only a week away, Clara confessed she had long ago forgotten why she did not talk to her parents, what wrongs she had imagined they committed. They had reconciled by then. All were at graduation, smiling, together, grateful. 

Months later, her parents brought Clara to the airport, where she fled with their blessings and pride---to Ireland where she went to study, to become the fine young woman her parents raised her to be and which she was now ready to become thanks to their love, their example, their patience.

Senior Moments: Changes

When you are a senior, things change---or are about to---and often in big ways, though we do not always know this at the time. 

Senior year in high school two things happened that would change me in ways I am still realizing.

First, I was moved without being asked into a drama class. This was not comfortable. I now see such discomfort as a sign of greatest potential for growth. When we are comfortable we settle in; when we are uncomfortable we sit up, pay attention, are alert, on guard. From this class came confidence, a voice, a self I had never known before. 

Second, I agreed to go to Europe on a trip with dozens of others at the end of senior year. Throughout the year, we had to meet with Chuck Gebhardt, our guide, whose job was to prepare us for the trip and provide some educational foundation to the experience. In that group was a girl named Susan (to my immediate right in the photograph taken in Spain) who would first become my friend, then later my dear friend, and eventually my passionate correspondent and, finally, my wife.

Ann is taking a class now, one for seniors which she attends several days a week, which it seems she would perhaps rather not go to but from which she so clearly benefits. It challenges her. Gets her into the world. 

Isn't that really the essence of these senior moments: they are what the author Joseph Conrad called "shadowlines," spaces into which we go as we are and come out as we need to be to meet the demands of the world or at least the next moment.

So it is with Whitman and college, the coach he's working with, and the others in his life gathered to help him prepare for the changes ahead...and within.

Senior Moments: Leaving Home

This weekend we were up at the Russian River, the whole family, including Ann. We had two cars. Whitman, our high school senior, asked to drive the 90 minutes home by himself, as we were not leaving till later. 

I said yes because I know he needs more rope, needs to feel we believe he can handle it, needs to know that this is his future: going where he wants, when he wants, the way he wants. 

Of course, he is far from that moment. But he needs to try it on and prepare for it.

Seventeen years ago I spent Labor Day weekend in Sacramento at my parents' house, bringing our oldest son Evan up for a visit. The day after Labor Day, having just come home from work, my mother called to tell me they had been waiting all weekend for the results of tests on my father who, she then told me, had cancer.

A year later, Susan's father would die from cancer in August, Whitman would be born in September, and my father would die a week later from his cancer which had eventually matasticized into his brain. Seventeen years later, this boy who was such a gift during that time of such loss, hugged and kissed his grandmother, and drove away, leaving one home where we had spent the weekend (Russian River) to drive himself to another (in San Francisco) where, over dinner, we spoke of colleges and began the process of him leaving home next year to continue his education.

As we drove home earlier that afternoon, Whitman having called to assure us he had arrived safely, Ann spoke about her senior year in high school, how 200 of the 300 boys in her senior class had already left to fight in World War Two, that you could volunteer at 17-and-a-half for whichever branch you wanted or wait until you were 18 and you were drafted. 

Her brother left home to fight in Europe, at Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge. He's 92-years-old and still hanging on. He is not ready to leave his home where his three daughters care for him on this last stretch of his journey.

We spend our youth dreaming of leaving home so we may create a home of our own, one where we are kept company by those children who left the home we created for them, and now gather with us in that same home we do not want to leave but know, eventually, we must.

Senior Moments: Vulnerability

A new book out, This Beautiful Life, by Helen Schulman, has been getting a lot of attention lately for the story it tells. In the book, a high school boy and his family lose all they had worked so hard to achieve and enjoy when their son forwards a sex video a much younger classmate, whom the boy had ignored, sent to him as revenge for the way he treated her. The lives of both kids and families were ruined in the time it took to his the Send button.

And the other day the news  talked about the millions of seniors who are constantly preyed upon by people out there who trick them into giving money away. 

Yesterday I talked about that continuum of care along which we live as the parents of the 18 year old seniors or children of the 80 year old seniors. Both these stories above give us that much more to worry about, making us all--we and those we care for--feel so vulnerable. 

The only response to such vulnerability is to do what, for example, my wife is doing today: keeping her mother close by taking her out for a drive on this beautiful day then going to the Gertrude Stein exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where they can stand in the light of large rooms full of beautiful images together. 

And continuing to talk with our children, to help them through these vulnerable years of their lives.

And continuing to talk with each other, for as anyone raising or caring for a senior knows, it is sometimes more than one can carry alone. In this way, my wife and I try to protect each other, the heal the vulnerability we both feel on any given day.