Monday, August 19, 2019

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely FineEleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Starts out strange and wonderful as a comedy about a child abuse and rape victim, abruptly shifts in the second half to a less interesting recovery narrative. The first half of this first novel by Gail Honeyman presents the indelible character of the walking wounded Eleanor Oliphant: prickly, odd, critical, drunk all weekend, alone. She'll get a make-over, of course, because this is that kind of book. Gets her hair cut, make up done, replaces her bad shoes and her shopping cart for more chic options because retail therapy is therapeutic, right? The "twist" at the end is no twist if you've been paying attention. I'm happy that Eleanor is happier, but she was stunning as a misanthrope.



View all my reviews

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Post Summer School Addendum

Can I just tell you three, no, four more things about summer school? It was such a revitalizing experience -- I hope you get those days of work when you are so in the flow that when the last bell rings and the kids finally leave the room after all the last minute conferences/when you emerge from the controlled chaos/when you put down the seven balls you've been juggling/when you have a precious moment to reflect, it feels like you're breaking the surface into another world. Seriously, that was the feeling on the day they did their cumulative Socratic Seminar and I wasn't even leading the show, just observing and taking notes. Damn.

But a couple of other moments I don't want to forget: Nini calling out, "Is Shugs Avery a woman? I thought he was a MAN!" and the other kids yell "No!" and Nina yells, "So they're lesbians?" and the other kids yell, "Yes!" and we're like half way through the book. And later when Nini says, "This is the most evil book I've ever read" and I have to point out the line "when you can't git started without asking the bottle, you in trouble" but he still says he won't tell him mom about what's in the book.

It all feels very far away, on the other side of Ruth's funeral service and the good first week of school where I'm back in the support role I love but the first day back with kids I ran into Basmine in the hall with another kids and it was so good to see her and I asked if I could give her a hug and she said, "I was just telling my friend that he should read The Color Purple" and my entire year was made. My job here is done.

Monday, August 12, 2019

Eulogy

I am Cindy Fey. Ruth Dupree was the older sister of my father Ron Fey, and she and her husband Phil 
and their daughters Jeanne and Jan opened their hearts and their home and took in me and my brothers
Ron Jr. and Christopher and my sister Nancy when our parents died in 1969. It was a monumental act
of love and commitment for which I forever owe a debt of gratitude. So Ruth became both my mother and 
my aunt, but also my dear friend, my travel companion, my mentor, the proud mother-in-law to my 
husband Randy and the loving grandmother to my daughters Mia and Nora.  



My memories are sometimes crystal clear and sometimes shaky, so please forgive me if I don't get 
everything right and if my interpretation of this wonderful woman is a little different than yours. When 
I told my Uncle Sid this morning, "she had 95 years and I have 95 minutes worth of stories," he said 
that was "That's Ok, everything is ok," but I'm going to focus today just on beginnings. 

She was the granddaughter of German and Polish immigrants, the oldest of seven children. 

Clockwise from upper left: My father Ron, Ruth, Joan, Ed Jr., Susan, Grandma Helen, Grandpa Ed and Sid. Jon was born after Ruth married.
She played with her brother Eddie on Marshfield Street on the southside of Chicago, her father fixed 
watches, then opened his own store in the suburbs and moved the family to the leafy streets of 
LaGrange, Illinois. Beginnings are reasons for hope. The Fey family move was a new beginning and 
a reason for hope.

In high school, Ruth was elected to class officer, secretary or treasurer, I can't remember, but Jeanne 
might, and Ruth had a crush on the Student Council president.



In the summer between her junior and senior year, and after graduation, she had a job as a tour 
guide and personal shopper at the Marshall Field's department store on State Street in downtown 
Chicago. She loved giving tours of the candy making department, the three kitchens for the elegant 
Walnut Room restaurant, the resilvering department where they would dip trays and tea and coffee 
services into vats of liquid silver.

One day she saw Ronald Reagan walking with his first wife Jane Wyman down the street. He was tall 
and handsome Ruth said. She adored screen idols Rudy Vallee and Ralph Bellamy and even though 
I love old Hollywood, but I didn't know those two, I had to look them up. But these fleeting crushes 
were when Ruth was young and carefree and before she really fell for Somebody, Capital S. But that 
love story was still to come.  



After high school graduation, she started her nurses training at Michael Reese Hospital. She learned 
the skills that served her well as a gentle caretaker, but her oversized heart was breaking at the plight 
of the patients so her nursing work would remain in the family. 

She was a comforting presence when we were sick. In the 90's I had knee surgery after a ski accident 
and she flew up to Chicago to take care of me after the operation. I have a precious memory of a long 
talk in the quiet middle of the night. When she had to fly back home, I cried. It may have been the 
painkillers, but really, I remember our parting and missing her as the hardest part of my recovery.

And her nursing legacy continues. The culture of caregiving for the sick and vulnerable that she 
fostered in our family goes on with her daughters Jan and Jeanne, her granddaughters Andrea and 
Maggie, her great-granddaughter Kelley.

Ruth's granddaughter Maggie, great-granddaughter Caroline, Maggie's husband Brad, me wearing the pants Ruth made, granddaughter Mia
When she was twenty-one year old Ruth Fey met handsome Phil Dupree at a dance in Chicago. 
It was 1942, Phil was in the Navy, stationed at Great Lakes near Waukegan, Illinois. They dated, 
they went bowling, she took him to meet her family and when he had to report to Oxnard, California, 
they exchanged letters. When he eventually asked her to marry him, she laughed with surprise, 
delight and happiness. They took the train to Milwaukee for their honeymoon. It was a new beginning 
and a reason for hope. 

The line that is the thematic heart of the Old Testament's Book of Ruth is "Whither thou goest, I will 
go" and these words are a perfect expression of her fidelity to her beloved husband Phil Dupree. 
She left her large dear family in Chicago. Left dear Eddie and elegant Joan, adventurous Susan and 
the comedian of the family Sid, and baby Jon, who brought so much joy to Ruth when he lived with 
her and Phil for his first grade year. She left her family and moved out to the cornfields, literally, there 
were cornfields a couple of blocks behind the house when I was a little, but that was her loyalty and 
she made Kansas City her home.  A new beginning.

So the siblings made the trip back and forth from Chicago and Colorado to Kansas City, Jon 
sometimes making the trip by flying his own plane.


Ed, Sid, Helen, Susan, Joan, Ed Sr., Jon, Ruth


 
Top to bottom, Baby Jon, Susan, Sid

She was a talented seamstress. The blue street dress she wore to their wedding she later altered into 
a maternity outfit when she became pregnant the first time. She became pregnant twice but lost both 
the babies, a boy and a girl, because of an RH blood incompatibility.

She grieved, but she had not yet become close to the Friend, Capital F. who could help her through 
the hardest of times. She struggled to express and share her grief with Phil, so instead, one day she 
wrote him a letter that she wanted to adopt children. 

In the stories she told me two of her three happiest days were the June day they brought home Jan 
wrapped up in a new baby dress and sweater and blanket and the cold February when they brought 
home baby Jeanne and she felt like a little doll. But before they could bring the babies home, they 
needed to be approved by the adoption agency and part of that process included the question of 
church membership.



She told me, "We lived over at 91st and Central and there was this small building where a 
group of Presbyterian people were meeting.  They were building a church further down on 
Wornall at 95th, but they were meeting in a temporary place, and we went to that service 
because we decided that I would join."

The beginning of Colonial Presbyterian Church, where we are today.

So Ruth went and spoke to a minister but she said he saw right through her, saw that she just wanted 
a letter of recommendation and he wanted her to accept Christ as her savior. Can you believe she 
thought she was not the kind of person who could get into heaven! 

He said, “Christ died for you and your sins are forgiven” and she said, “I can’t believe that.”  
But she said they ended very friendly and he was very kind and very gentle. And he wrote the 
letter and Ruth started going to church. And she told me, "One Sunday while he was 
preaching, directly to me, I just realized that that was true.  That I was forgiven, and that it 
was just a matter of accepting the gift that God had given me, and just to say yes to it. So I 
ran home from church crying and telling Phil how wonderful I felt." 

The third happiest day. A new beginning. A reason for hope. And the relationship that she started on 
that happy day was one that sustained and strengthened her through the rest of her long life. 





She passed on a Friday morning in July and the next day I had a long and healing talk with Becky, 
her first grandchild. We talked about how close to Grandma Ruth we both felt, we still felt, like she 
wasn't gone. Then she came to me in a dream Saturday night. She showed me the quilt she had been 
working on. Oh, it was gorgeous. Brilliant jewel colors, rhythmic patterns of flowers and geometric 
shapes, soft velvety patches of flannel and smooth cotton textures. Not too large a project, it was 
sized for a child's bed so you could see the entire shape and pattern at once. But unfinished. It still 
needed stitching on the sides to bring the edges together. 

In my dream I thought to myself with that weird dream illogic, "Wait, Ruth doesn't sew anymore. Her 
eyes won't allow it."

And I woke up. It was so so good to have spent time with her. 

And I understand immediately what she was trying to show me. 

You see, quilts weren't typical for her. She sewed fancy occasion dresses for weddings and prom and 
the first day of school and picture day outfits and cunning Halloween costumes, a bean bag chair in 
the shape of a giant turtle for my bedroom and a little denim hat and purse for my Girl Scout troop 
friend Claudia's birthday that was on point 70's. And these awesome pants I'm wearing today that 
she sent to me at college in 1987. It was a Vogue pattern and there was a paisley asymmetrical 
blouse with padded shoulders and then a classic 80's jacket with inverted collar in a contrasting 
blue/black pattern with even more shoulder pads. Shoulder pads for days.

But I don't remember any quilts.

Think about how a quilt is different than a piece of clothing -- it's a folk art, taking all the disparate 
pieces, little bit that have been set aside, and putting them together to make something beautiful.

But do you see what she left us, another part of her legacy of love, besides the memories, the support, 
the good long talks, the unconditional love, the constant fidelity and comfort… is this. 

She left us work to do -- to continue her work, to keep putting those crazy diverse quilt pieces 
together, to keep trying and talking and loving and maybe fighting but making up and trying again and 
keeping this crazy quilt family, a family. And continuing her work, today is a new beginning. A reason 
for hope.



Sunday, August 4, 2019

Post Summer School


Student Photo Analysis Essays plus Color Purple Character Chart. Larry Fishburne as Swain was a class fav in the movie.

"Irony" was our word of the day most days and the strange or funny reversal of expectation for me was that almost everything I had been told in advance about the class was flipped on its head. I was expecting a class full of low level behavior problems; instead, there were twenty-so warm and wonderful and wise kids. With the dean's help, the two or three compulsively disrupting children reined themselves in by the second week and by the end of the third THEY ALL PASSED! Miracle of miracles.  

Stagecoach and The Color Purple book and movie took up the full three weeks with some song lyrics and photo study thrown in.

"Wait, is this movie like that movie Quentin Tarantino The Hateful Eight where everyone turns out to the opposite of what they were at first?" says Nini, one of my favorite students, despite his "I hate to read" or maybe because of it, despite his Reagan Bush '84 hat, no, honestly I loved him because of it. "Reagan signed an amnesty bill in 1986 that allowed my mother to become a citizen and she will never forget him for it" and voila, a young conservative teen father whose grade average hovered around 55% for most of the class gives me life.

"Thank you, Cindy from June," "Thank you, Yesterday Cindy," I said over and over when planning for the next day or coming week and my prep work pays off because up pops that Bruce Springsteen lyric "My Father's House" with the word "atone" defined at the top and the instructions to circle all the specific sensory detail that creates Imagery but even June Cindy could not have predicted it would become such a perfect perfect moment when we've been reading about Mr. ____'s efforts to redeem himself after his abusive marriage to Celie AND the sensory detail pattern of describing-adjective plus specific-noun that Springsteen uses effortlessly were just the examples of what they needed to add to their Gary Winogrand photo analysis papers.

Super simple lesson: Listen and read the lyrics. What's happening? Draw lines around the beginning and end of the dream. What happens next? Is there a line that could be the thematic statement? Yes, the last line.

My father's house shines hard and bright
It stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned

"What does 'unatoned' mean?" asks sweet DJ, the Christian kid whose smiles and nods at me during the first week kept me on fire and who turned up the last day of class with cuts and bruises all over his face and when he asks the question, the other kids chime in for me and Banyan, the thoughtful and gentle intellectual of the class calls out "He's run out of time" and BAM! What else could a teacher ask for?

The steady mix of rushes of gratitude for their earnestness and forgiveness of each other and heady moments of inspiration and discovery combined with getting the news of Ruth's death the morning of the second Friday tendered an intensely emotional but blessedly healing experience.

I tried to keep the focus off me, wary of the dreaded "Ms. Fey Show" and told them my personal challenges should not get in the way of their success but I bet some of them were old and experienced enough to know that compartmentalizing is a nifty if imperfect and temporary way to handle grief. As we listened to Bruce sing it again, I wept as quiet as I could in the back of the class but Kev got up and brought me the Kleenex box with a smile. I might have brought up dear Aunt Ruth a couple of times too many.

No, I wanted them to know I understood their blended families, that I felt their incomprehensible losses. The athlete with perceptive comments who had been described by a counselor as "very low" told me on one of the last days that he had a busy night with all his aunts and uncles coming together for the first time "since the thing" for his dad. And when I ask a question about it, he says he can't talk about it and I know what he's saying. He passed the class. He was so behind but I gave him a work day with the student advocates downstairs, "Is there a printer in the room?" he asked and what a delight to say "Yes!" and he may not have earned the A that he said his mother required before he could play next season, but he did pass the class.

So did the three who kept me up at night, but they are barely past children and our class themes included Forgiveness so I'll just move on to one more of my favorite moments when quiet, bearded Yacob and Bonathan got into a fascinating back and forth during the Socratic Seminar about whether arguments are good for a relationship.

"But why do you need to be emotional?" asked Yacob. "Why not discuss without anger or yelling?" And Bonathan countered, "That's how you get out your pent up emotion" and the question was not even on my suggestion list but their thoughtful, respectful discussion was the whole point. Even one of the three who kept me up at night jumped in with relevant comments, kept his eyes on the speakers (since I had confiscated his phone) and transformed in the discussion with his peers from the repeated "I don't know" when I asked him to name a plot point of the novel the day before into an engaged participant.

Watching the seminar, his buddy, who was supposed to be silently observing, said, "Ms. Fey is crying!" and I stage-whispered back at him, "I'm crying with happiness!"

Too many high points to even remember, but I want to remember them all -- the kids who stayed after class to talk; the athlete-leader who shut down, vehemently and incontrovertibly, some fellow student ambivalence about consent; Nini shaking the hand of the kid with social anxiety, saying, "I've known this guy since kindergarten!"; the private conversations with the same kid about the opening shot of Baby Driver; and then there was the time I was running out of time and my plan to divvy-up-vocabulary-definitions-then-have-them-teach-each-other-then-read-a-four-page-story had to be compressed to my giving a two minute recap of the plot of Ursula K. LeGuin's "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" and then showing them an NYU student's short film version as fodder for a practice Socratic Seminar.

"That was RAW!" called out Bonathan after I finished my plot summary. "I could see the whole thing in my head!"

Okay, we can't always avoid the Ms. Fey Show, but really, I'm more satisfied that all the cooperative and collaborative work I planned (Thank you, Smokey Daniels! Thank you, Jamie Almanzan!) kept their focus on talking to each other. We had some rough spots when they confused copying with conversation, but the best lessons were two variations on moving in groups to stations at the perimeter of the room. The first time I had thematic topics listed on large poster sized sheets and had the students brainstorm American Truths about the all-important Forgiveness, Journey, Hypocrisy (could not escape this theme over and over again in Stagecoach and Purple), Community and Identity. But you need to keep the groups small and I had 29 visual learners to wrangle so every other station was a repeat of the Theme Topics but asked the students to express them in images. Worked great.



The next variation was the day before the Stagecoach test. I put the essay questions in stations around the room, then had them sit in groups of three at each station and brainstorm "Who is the most ethical or moral character? Support your answer with specific details from the film" and "Who is the least ethical character?" and "What is ironic about the line 'They're saved from the blessings of civilization'? Include the context of the line from the film" and six other questions. They could take notes or not. After a minute or two of conversation, two students moved clockwise and the third student ("I need a code word!" "Butter!" "Okay, you're Butter. Butter moves to the left.") went the other way so each group was different each time. Worked great.

And there was Daily Oral Language with examples from their own work so we could improve their run-ons and fragments and punctuation. I cut out long strips of Post-It posters and wrote independent and dependent clauses on them so we could shift them around and learn how to place commas.

After the rainstorm, there was a full-on double rainbow! (DC plus comma plus IC)

There was a full-on double rainbow after the rainstorm! (IC no comma CD)

And of course on the last day we had to watch the Youtube video and connect it to Shug Avery's version of God wanting us to notice everything and enjoy everything and be grateful for everything. Which Kamani did with our last movie, the French version of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," when she noticed how the man who escapes death is transfixed by each twig on each tree, the way the sunlight shines through a leaf. Brava, Kamani!

 Another ironic bait and switch was the initial promise that the final exam would be multiple choice, ahh, easy, whoops! No, I needed to give and grade an essay exam based on the Common Final devised by the two high school's English departments, an analysis of a speech writer's persuasive tactics.

Okay. We can do this. The good news was that I had tracked down the spring essays that a few of the students had written and none of them had failed. Yay! So I prepared a quick review of prompt analysis and essay techniques using the Gettysburg Address, then cut down the script of David Foster Wallace's commencement address "This is Water" to two pages. The last Monday they read the speech, got the familiar prompt and wrote their essays. They did fine, everyone passed, some were exceptional.

What would I do differently? So so much. The day after they wrote their essays, I put the absent kids in the hall to write, then showed the rest of the class a film version of Wallace's speech.

"Okay, reactions?" I asked and found myself turning to my dependables, Banyan and Slad, and caught myself. I need to hear from each child every day. Sometimes you can give the kid the question ahead of time, let him have a heads up to prepare. The times that I had surprised Cadam, the target archer who wrote that he did not want to participate in class, and Naraz, the wry silent kid who wrote the same, they had risen to the occasion. Now I had let myself slip into a pattern that did not serve the class. Fall down seven times, get up eight.















Saturday, August 3, 2019

Things I Tried

These are the things I try: Things I tried before Sertraline:

Square my shoulders. Lift them up, them press them back, arch my back.

Deep breath. Try blowing out longer than the inhale.

Pull up the corners of my mouth. Enjoy the accompanying wry feeling.

Think about going to a yoga class.

Swallow the gray tablets of St. John's Wort, the multivitamin for over 50s, the soft progesterone capsule
at night.

Put in earbuds, put on gym shoes, go out to the sidewalk to do my steps. Push the pace, increase the
heartrate. Keep increasing, but shoot for Roger Ebert's 10K a day.

Keep putting new things on the calendar. 

Dress up for work. Earrings. Eyeliner and red, red lipstick.

Caffeine. Sweet, sweet, caffeine. Ah, hot English Breakfast with whole milk. Dunkin Donuts small coffee
with god knows what is in their "cream and sugar." Cold and bitter iced tea with a fat slice of lemon. Icy
diet Pepsi with something fried and salty.

Pillow between my knees, pillow under one ear, pillow pressing down on top of the other. 

Nap. Think that a nap is good, healthy thing.

Acknowledge the thought and the feeling. Allow yourself to be negative and then take a breath, clear the
mind and move on.

Recognize I am menopausal. Miss and honor the euphoric epiphanies that came every month; think that
this is change and change can be good too.

Realize that this is facing the monster. This is a kind of strength.