Greetings from New York City! I’m speaking at some elementary schools in Lindenhurst on Long Island tomorrow and Friday, but Whitney, Mike and I flew in yesterday to spend a couple days in Manhattan first.

We booked a hotel room two doors down from our dear friends Benita and Henry on the Upper West Side, and after enjoying cocktails at their place last night, we all walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner (with live piano music, oo la la.) We made it back to the hotel before the weather turned, but when we woke up this morning, it was snowing.

The view from our hotel entrance on 81st Street. On the other side of the street, a dog park is beckoning Whitney.

It still is. Snowing, I mean.

We’d had ideas about taking a long leisurely walk through Central Park today and meeting up with my nephew Michael Hornburg (he lives in Brooklyn) for a book sale in a nearby library. But, alas. The snow is wet (feels like you’re walking through snow soup), Central Park sidewalks are sloppy, and the library book sale is cancelled.

Eyebrows up! There’s a dog park across the street….

Beth posted here a couple weeks ago about what her memoir-writing students wrote in response to the prompt “If you could have a guarantee that one specific person would read your memoir”. Kathy Zartman, one of her students—and our good friend—named Tim Kreider as that one person. Here’s Kathy writing about why:

“His take on his mother’s move into a retirement community, his analysis of the only hope for curbing gun violence, and his feelings when he kills, or does not kill, household ants — on all these topics he expressed, far better than I ever could, exactly how I feel.”

The cover of Tim Kreider’s recently released book.

Well, as much as I like to think I’m up on things, Kreider’s name was new to me. So I looked him up. Kreider made his name initially as a cartoonist—his “The Pain, When Will It End” series earned a large and loyal following. And he’s published a couple collections of his essays, the most recent being “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.” And, he’s a regular contributor to the NY Times Opinionator section.

Kathy has recommended his first collection, “We Learn Nothing,” and it’s on my list. In the meantime, I’ve been working through his NY Times pieces.

Kathy is absolutely right: Kreider  expresses things I feel and think, sometimes better than I could. Which, as a writer, kind of pisses me off. (Filmmaker Judd Apatow, in a blurb for Kreider’s first book, kind of sums it up: “He can do in a few pages what I need several hours of screen time and tens of millions to accomplish. And he does it better. Come to think of it, I’d rather not do a blurb. I am beginning to feel bad about myself.”)

My envy aside, Kreider is a completely satisfying read. A good example: an Opinionator essay called “Cycle of Fear” that opens with this reflection that I’m guessing a lot of you can identify with. I know I can:

Like many people, I like to set aside a few hours every day, generally between 3 and 6 a.m., to lie quietly thinking about everything that could go horribly wrong with my life and all the ways in which I am negligent and reprehensible. I have spasms of panic over things I shouldn’t have written, or, worse, things I should have; I regret having spent all the money and wonder where more money might ever conceivably come from; I wish I’d kissed girls I didn’t, as long ago as 1985. I’m suddenly convulsed with remorse over mean things I did in middle school (I am sorry, Matthew Reeve); I force myself to choose my least favorite death (drowning).

It’s worth noting that the order in which these items preoccupy me is more or less the inverse of the order in which I ought to be worrying about them.

All of this is to set up a discussion about his bicycling in New York City. His overall point is that, although it would seem that someone who lies awake mornings in angst wouldn’t enjoy something as nerve-wracking as riding a bike in a busy city, in fact, cycling in New York is an antidote to that angst. From the piece:

Natural selection has made us hypervigilant, obsessively replaying our mistakes and imagining worst-case scenarios. And the fact that we’ve eliminated almost all of the immediate threats from our environment, like leopards and Hittites, has only made us even more jittery, because we’re now constantly anticipating disasters that are never going to happen: the prowler/rapist/serial killer lurking in the closet, a pandemic of Ebola/Bird Flu/Hantavirus, the imminent fascist/socialist/zombie takeover.

Kreider goes on to describe how riding a bike in the city puts to use  his genetically programmed hypervigilance, and that’s why he loves riding—it gives him a kind of Zen state.

And I can totally relate to that state. For all of my life I’ve been an angst-ridden worrier. Sometimes it’s served me, Beth, and Gus very well. Other times it’s taken its toll, mostly on me. For most of my life, I’ve ridden motorcycles. Riding has been my escape from my angsty self on one hand, and the only time that I’m completely present in the moment. It does for me what bicycling does for Kreider. I’d go on, but Kreider has done it better:

When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in. I’ve heard people say the same thing about rock-climbing: how it shrinks your universe to the half-inch of rock surface immediately in front of you, this crevice, that toehold. Biking is split-second fast and rock-climbing painstakingly slow, but both practices silence the noise of the mind and render self-consciousness blissfully impossible. You become the anonymous hero of that old story, Man versus the Universe. Your brain’s glad to finally have a real job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint.

I could not describe it better. Thanks Tim Kreider, for virtually writing my blog post for me today.

And thank you, Kathy Zartman, for the introduction.

PS Here are a couple other posts to whet your appetite.

You Are Going to Die

On Smushing Bugs

During Oscars week this year I asked the writers in my memoir classes to choose a title of one of the films nominated for best picture. “Use that title as the writing prompt for your next 500-word essay.”

No one chose Dunkirk. And just like at the Oscars, “The Shape of Water” won the most votes. Most writers came back the next week with essays about vacationing at lake houses, renovating old bathrooms, learning to swim, that sort of thing. Second-most-popular prompt? “Get Out.” Writers used the prompt to pen essays about escaping scary situations, leaving home, undesireable roommates, blind dates gone wrong.

Wanda, the 95-year-old matriarch of my memoir-writing classes, chose “Call Me By Your Name” and generously offered to let me share her delightful essay with you about how she and her husband came up with a name for their daughter.

Here’s a screen capture of the live feed screen from when Wanda and I were on WGN radio last summer. There’s Wanda in the upper left screen.

by Wanda Bridgeforth I

I was the oldest female of a dozen cousins. For almost seven years, I was the only girl. This age difference resulted in being the first to date, to marry, and to become a mother.

The family referred to my father and his brothers as “We Boys.” They had no sisters, so We Boys name their daughters after themselves. This resulted in Albertine, Claudette, Claudine, Earline, Fredricka, Haroldine, etc. That should give you some idea of our naming process.

We grew up in the age of fairy tales, True Romance magazine and and movies that ended with the hero winning the girl and riding off to live happily ever after. Curtis was in the army, and on New Year’s Eve he called me from a train station in downtown Chicago. He could not say which train station he was at, and he couldn’t leave the station because his outfit was on alert. They were being shipped out, destination unknown. He told me not to worry if I didn’t receive mail because all contact with family would cease until they reached their destination. I told him my pregnancy had been confirmed and we would be proud parents in early summer.

In the meantime, the girl cousins back home got busy compiling a list of names for the baby. My husband’s name was “Marvin Curtis,” mine, “Wanda Geneva,” so you can just imagine the suggestions. True to tradition, we had some doozies. For example: Wantis Curanda. Marvinia. Marvetta. The names go on from there. I guess because of their gender, boy’s names were limited to Marvin Curtis, Jr.

At last in mid-April I received a bag of V-mail from my soldier husband. Much of it was blotted out, but it did say the ship had been at sea for 56 days. In case all the mail didn’t reach me, he wrote his name suggestions in several letters. Only two names were on the letters, one mail, and one female. The boys name was his, and the girl’s name was mine.

I always signed my letters with Roman numeral I after my name, so when this baby girl arrived I gave her my name and added “Junior.” Although she changed her last name when she got married, and she’s been married over 40 years, our family and friends still call us “Senior” and “Junior.”

I’m piggybacking on the Mondays with Mike post about civics this week with an essay written by Mel Washburn. Mel is a writer in one of the memoir-writing classes I lead for The Village Chicago, and the essay he came up with for the prompt, “A Song from Your Teenage Years That Sticks With You” talks about music and protest movements 50 years ago.

by Mel Washburn

When I became a teenager in December 1957, I was already weary of the music made for teenagers by singers like Pat Boone, Debby Reynolds and Elvis Presley. Rock and Roll, which had seemed so fresh a few years before, was drowning in sticky-sweet syrup.

The March on Washington, 1965.

I was attracted to a new kind of music, sung by “Peter Paul and Mary” or Pete Seeger or Harry Belafonte. Acoustic music. Truthful music. So-called folk music.

In 1960, Joan Baez released her first album of old English and Scottish ballads. To me and my friends, her music seemed beautiful, almost holy.

In 1962, Bob Dylan released his first album. Soon he was creating sardonic and satirical music that reflected the way my friends and I felt about our times and our society.

In 1964 – my last year as a teenager – Dylan released an album that was the Handel’s Messiah of youth protest: The Times They Are A-Changin’. My favorite song on that album was “When the Ship Comes In,” which describes metaphorically the morning when we, the young, vanquish forever the forces of repression and reaction.

On April 17, 1965 (four months after my 20th birthday) I was standing on the National Mall near the Washington Monument with 20,000 people. Most of us were under the age of 30, and we were there to demand an end to the War in Vietnam. The sky was blue. The day was warm. The crowd was peaceful. We heard speeches from student leaders who had organized the gathering and from Senator Ernest Gruening, who was one of only two senators who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that had started the war. Then Joan Baez stepped to the microphone.

I was standing with two old friends, Norman Vance and Rick Clinebell, and a group of high school girls from Manhattan. We were all thrilled to be there and were doubly thrilled when Ms. Baez began singing our anthem: “When the Ship Comes In.” We listened in rapture as she reached the last stanzas:

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.

Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharaoh’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.

How could it not happen? We were young, we were numerous, we were the future. Eventually the evil, the hateful people would be drowned in the tide of our indignation.

In that moment, I believed it. The girls from Manhattan believed it. The kids who had come to Washington from a hundred different high schools and colleges believed it. We could all see clearly what was wrong with our society and our government.

What we didn’t see was that most people in America liked things just the way they were.

A couple updates on last week’s post:

First, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate students (members of the Graduate Employees Organization) stayed on strike long enough to end up getting what looks to be a fair deal for themselves. Hats off to them and their supporters, which included their undergraduate students and their counterparts up here at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Last week’s post also referenced those Parkland, Florida kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School. They’re punching way beyond their age in pressuring lawmakers to do something about access to guns. Here’s just one impressive example:

Parkland high schoolers like Delaney Tarr, the speaker in the video, have been so polished that people have suggested that they are “crisis actors” hired by political operatives.

But this article at The Washington Monthly suggests another factor: Why are Parkland Students So Articulate? Because They Were Taught Civics in Middle School.

For those of us of a certain age, taking civics class was a staple of public education. Somehow, civics classes and requirements faded over the years. I don’t know if it was the product of the countless flavor-of-the-day education movements, or that the idea was that civics would be blended into other classes.

Whatever, tests have proven that people’s basic civic knowledge has waned, and in Florida, about a decade ago, a couple of legislators from both sides of the aisle took note. From the article:

The roots of this effort go back to 2007, when former Senator Bob Graham (D) and former Congressman Lou Frey (R) realized that adults in the state of Florida scored at or near the bottom of surveys that measure civic health and engagement. The two joined forces and formed the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship to get civics education legislation passed. After a few failed attempts, in 2010 the Florida legislature finally approved, and then-Governor Charlie Christ signed, the Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Education Act, named for the former Supreme Court justice who has had made civic learning and engagement her post-SCOTUS life’s work.

The law became practice starting in 2011. By all accounts, it resembles what I remember from civics:

It mandates a civics course in 7th grade and the incorporation of civic education content into the K-12 reading language arts curriculum. Second, while most states require that students be tested only in reading and math, the O’Connor Act mandates a comprehensive civics test at the end of 7th grade. That sends a message to teachers, administrators, and parents that civics is a core subject that needs to be taken seriously.

One thing that sounds better about the modern day civics class—it’s less lecture, more discussion of issues in context, and more participation in school governance. On that note, please do read the Washington Monthly piece—it includes a nifty online civics quiz (I dare you to take it) and some nifty little online exercises.

Efforts to bring back or augment civics programs have been implemented or are being considered in other states, including here in Illinois.

It’s not a quaint idea—it’s a pretty big deal. The founders of the United States envisioned a vast public education system with, in large part, the mission of equipping citizens to participate in our democracy. And it can only make discourse more constructive and civil.

So, I’ll say something I never thought I’d say: Here’s to Florida.