A ROOM OF MY OWN

When my sister moved into the family house, which she and I
own and our mother lives in, we borrowed money for some repairs
and improvements. My share of the payment on the equity loan
came to a bit more than I was then paying UHaul to store my
books, so I commandeered a room for them in the house.

Redecorating that room was one of the improvements. By the
time I took possession, it had white, painted walls instead of
the ancient blue-flowered wallpaper with brown water stains from
the 1938 hurricane, and a reddish-brown neutral carpet instead of
deteriorating linoleum. It even had heat. My sister made me
some green and burgundy drapes. I adopted a white table lamp
that wasn't being used and bought it a burgundy shade.

Other than that, my approach to interior decoration was to
line the place with books. I covered all the available walls
with cinderblock and particleboard shelves and a few real
bookcases that I happened to own, and the bulk of my husband's
and my combined libraries moved in. A couple of years ago, I
replaced the 16-inch blocks in two of the units with 12-inch
blocks, significantly increasing the available shelf space.
There's one unit left with 16-inch blocks, but those may have to
stay: the holes in the blocks are perfect for pens and pencils,
Chap-Stick, dental floss, a nail clipper, and one or two other
small objects that I would have to find other homes for.

After the shelving upgrade, I achieved a long-cherished goal
of equipping my room with a recliner, by the clever expedient of
putting it on the charge card and promising myself that I would
figure out how to pay for it when the bill came. As Stark Munro
(one of Conan Doyle's other fictional doctors), trying to estab-
lish himself in practice, said of the gas bill due in a month or
so, "Any number of things may have happened by then."

The recliner rests in a corner within arm's reach of the
cinderblock pigeonholes. Also close by are a plant stand that
supports a mug of tea, a few books of poetry, and a box of
tissues; a small table comfortably littered with papers; a pile
of books on the floor that I plan to get back to soon; and a
wastebasket. What more could any rational creature want? Well,
yes, there's a bathroom at the end of the hall and a kitchen
downstairs. There's also a cordless phone when I remember to
bring it in from the front hall, half a mile away.

The back window looks over the field and the woods behind
the house. The window beside the recliner faces the house next
door, across the lawns and some trees. The view from the
recliner is mostly the second story of the barn, with sky and
treetops; but in the spring, I set morning glories in a large
planter directly under that window and provide them with strings
that lead to the top of the window. By the end of June I have
vines to look at, and flowers from July through September. Like
Charles Darwin, I admire climbing plants.

I wonder at odd moments what seven cinderblock-and-particle-
board shelves and the books on them weigh, what kind of shape the
hundred-year-old floor is in under the carpeting, and what might
be the first symptoms of an imminent, so to speak, breakthrough.
I especially think of this when reading in Little Dorrit or Bleak
House about the collapse of elderly houses in nineteenth-century
London. But as long as the ceiling under my library shows no
sign of cracking, I will continue to climb into my recliner and
tranquilly read myself crosseyed every weekend.

THE WELSH LULLABY

Choir rehearsal: we're taping the Welsh lullaby that most of
us know as All Through the Night, the arrangement that I got from
the Welsh choir that performed at the church earlier in the year.
The soprano part is just the melody, and I'm singing from memory.
I love this lullaby but have come to associate it with a particularly
dreadful moment in a custody war that ended about four years
before. If I'd lost I couldn't have listened to that song ever again;
but I won, if anyone can be said to win such a thing, so the
dreadful incident is almost a bittersweet memory, as I follow the
director, sing the tune, and get the words in the right places.

And there's the very child himself, walking around the periphery
of the room: I don't want to pay a sitter for a nine-year-old, or quite
want to leave him at home by himself. He's so cute, and a joy
generally. I watch him affectionately against the background of the
incident and the custody war, while continuing to follow the director,
sing the tune, and get the words in the right places.

Then the child's meanderings turn toward the front of the
room, where the long table with the tape recorder is. Some dippy
soprano has already spoiled one take by coming in late and
ruckling through the folders on the table. From the back of the
soprano section -- on risers, I think -- I watch with the helpless
horror known only to parents and pet owners as the boy,
whose approach to life has been characterized as "head first at a
hundred miles an hour," works his way toward the table -- watch,
and continue to follow the director, sing the tune, and get the
words in the right places.

The child is quick and observant, and knows about tape
recording. He notices the machine turning -- why do I picture
open reels? circa 1989, that's unlikely -- and pulls himself up
short in Michael Jackson's Moonwalk position, "Oops" in every
line of his expressive body (he has since become a dancer). To my
vast relief, he moonwalks himself backwards down the side of the
room and out the door. The side door leads to the sanctuary and
the parish hall downstairs. God knows what he'll find to do
there, but I can't help it. Probably nothing worse than
frightening someone by climbing pillars. I gratefully clear my
mind of everything but following the director, singing the tune,
and putting the words in the right places.

LEARNING TO DRIVE

At the astronomy club on a back road in Groton,
members set up their telescopes on the lawn at the side of the
building, in full view of any headlights coming up or down the road.
Accordingly, use of headlights is forbidden between the building
and the main road. Anyone who comes by with headlights blazing
into the astronomers' carefully cultivated night vision is persona
very non grata indeed.

Due to a flaw in the design of the universe, the most
exciting viewing of the heavens is to be had in January and
surrounding months. The astronomers come into the clubhouse and
thaw a bit now and then. For the benefit of non-astronomers and
of club members who have other things to do, the clubhouse has
light as well as heat, kept inside by heavy shades on the
windows.

My son and I usually arrived early enough in the day that
driving to the clubhouse wasn't an issue. He was the club
member. My interest in looking through lenses has always been
minimal. I relate to James Thurber's piece about trying to make
sense of what he was seeing in the microscope in biology class:
He diligently copies what he sees, only to be told by the
instructor that he had copied the reflection of his own eyeball.
The main difference is that I usually couldn't see even that
clearly. So I stayed inside in the light and warmth while Justin
looked through the telescopes.

Optimal viewing requires minimal or no moonlight. It could
be very dark when we left the clubhouse. Justin would literally
have to lead me from the edge of the porch to the car and hope I
didn't fall into any holes on the way. When it came to backing
the car out of its place in a couple of lines of vehicles, most
of which had come in after we did, it was obvious that at twelve
or so Justin was far more qualified to get us out of there than I
was.

He would back out of the area where people parked (I
wouldn't quite dignify it with the term "parking lot") and drive
us out to the main road. As time went on, he would turn onto the
main road, and just keep going. Routes 119 and 2A through Groton
and points east, at the unheard-of hours when an astronomy club
is in full swing, are pretty deserted. By the time we got back
to our urban base it almost no cars were in sight.

No one drives more carefully and inconspicuously than an
otherwise conscientious under-age kid with a deep desire not to
get himself and his mother in trouble. The only time we got
stopped on that route, I was at the wheel. By the time Justin
was fourteen, he was a better driver than I am.

UP AND DOING

I fall out of bed and into contact with the exercise machine
on the back porch as soon as, in my muddled way, I can get there
with all the accountrements my routine seems to require -- tape
deck, timer, appropriate extra clothing, and the ChapStick that I
require at all times. It's important to start before I wake up
enough to realize how thoroughly I hate exercise. My idea of
physical activity is chewing and turning pages; but at my age if
I don't do something a little more vigorous than that, my joints
will set like plaster of Paris. So out I go.

My exercise companion is one professor or another as
recorded by The Teaching Company (you probably get their
catalogs; www.TEACH12.COM, if you don't and are curious). For
some weeks now I have been hearing about the history of science.
The first set of lectures covered science from antiquity to 1700.
We are now working on the years from 1700 to 1900; the next
series is twentieth century science. I will never understand
relativity, quantum mechanics and the rest of it, but I persist
in a vague faith that making the attempt will build character, or
at least keep the old brain cells from dying off quite so
quickly.

While peddling and listening, I monitor the activities of
small birds and squirrels in the box maple and the number of
pigeons on the neighbors' roof. I watch clouds move across the
sky and sunlight along the table. I consider whether the shrub
that makes bay leaves will need a bigger pot next year. I note
that those big termite bees are back and making little piles of
sawdust, and wonder when we'll have to do something about them.
I remind myself that the row of glass bottles that hold water in
summer are empty and thus won't freeze and break. I wonder if
it's going to rain. I enjoy the rare treat of watching it snow.
I like snow, and it isn't often that it happens to be falling at
the moment that I'm out there.

Last fall I noticed that the plastic covering an attic
window in one of the houses behind ours had developed a rip that
flapped in the breeze. I dropped a note into the mailbox of that
house and was gratified the next time I looked to see that the
plastic had been replaced.

Even without snow, even in hot or otherwise loathsome
weather, I have come, if not quite to enjoy my morning pedal on
the back porch, to feel guardedly good while doing it and to miss
it when I skip a day. Between the lectures and the exercise I
start the day feeling so improved I can hardly stand myself.

THE SCIENCE BLUES

I was thirteen; my sister would have been ten and a half or
eleven. I had read somewhere that the appearance of food is
important to palatability -- most people won't drink a glass of
blue milk even though they know it's all right. I didn't quite
understand this. For no particular reason except a fascination
with food coloring, I sometimes dyed a glass of milk blue. I
never had a problem with drinking blue milk, but having a
scientific and inquiring mind, I devised an experiment to test
the proposition.

It's hard to come up with an experimental protocol that
includes a control group when you only have one subject (at the
time, that was all my parents had provided me with). I planned to
dye the milk blue, blindfold the subject and offer her the milk;
then remove the blindfold and offer it to her again. For some
reason, I ran this by our mother.

"Can I have a glass of milk to color blue and give to
Paula?"

"No. I don't want you wasting milk."

"But . . ." (some attempt at explanation).

"NO!" or words to that effect.

"All right, can I have a cracker?"

"Yes, you can have a cracker."

So I spread blue liquid food coloring on a Ritz cracker,
summoned Paula, and gave her some sort of account of what I meant
to do (this was long before laws about informed consent). She had
been victimized by schemes of mine before. I'm not sure why she
agreed, but she did. I blindfolded her and fed her the blue
cracker.

I had used a lot of food coloring. Perhaps the cracker felt
cold and damp, or tasted funny. Maybe it was just the quality of
the silence as I watched her chew it. Suspecting that all was not
well, she ripped off the blindfold, leapt into the bathroom with
a single bound, and spit the cracker into the sink. The resulting
mess was very blue, and the mirror above the sink confirmed the
worst: her lips were blue, her teeth were blue, her tongue was
blue; presumably her tonsils were blue, and her gullet all the
way to the duodenum and beyond. With a roar, she seized and
moistened a washcloth and fell to scrubbing her tongue, howling
and lamenting.

Collapsed as I was against the dining room table, helpless
and almost speechless with laughter, I reassured her.

"Don't worry, Paula, every cell in your body replaces itself
every five years."

"Five years???!!!" -- loudly scrubbing her tongue.

At this point Mother appeared in the doorway from the living
room wanting to know what I was doing to my sister. Without
waiting for an answer, she withered me with a look and proceeded
to soothe and succor Paula.

The blue color must have subsided after a day or so at the
outside. Paula gets over things readily. I doubt that she
remembers the incident now. Forty-odd years after the blue
cracker incident, she redecorated that same dining room in blue;
so she clearly developed no permanent aversion to the color.

"I'M STUPID AND EVERYBODY HATES ME"

I got into the motherhood business at thirty-seven, knowing
nothing about babies or kids. When they handed me this little
thing in the hospital, I was inclined to think, "What am I
supposed to do with this?"

What I did was talk to it a lot, and later read to it. Something
we were reading or doing prompted my sister, a school speech
pathologist, to say, "You know, if you keep that up you're going
to wind up with a kid who can't function in public school." So
much the worse, it seemed to me, for public school. I'd read
John Holt and Summerhill in college and was comfortable
with the position that school as we know it isn't given in
the nature of the universe. But by the time Justin appeared in
the world, I hadn't thought about that issue for years. I took
it for granted that he would go to school like everybody else.

Justin's approach to life has been characterized as "head first
at a hundred miles an hour," although in fact he has always been
more controlled than he seemed to be to slow, old grownups. He
was Dennis the Menace, Calvin, Eloise, Tom Sawyer -- a kid who
may grow up to be Mark Twain or Liza Minelli but whose childhood
is hard on everyone concerned. A book I once read about the
Dakota Indians described the big boys' "dangerous games," things
like galloping their horses across the prairie, bareback of
course, and trying to push each other off. Justin would have
loved it. He'd have been tribe champion. He would have made a
great Dakota Indian. He'd have done well as a Shao-Lin warrior,
or a Spartan, or a Zulu. He did not make a good middle-American
school child.

His problem in school wasn't really his tearing energy and
nonstop activity, although that didn't help. It wasn't even that
he knew it all already, or thought he did, and was bored to
death, although there was some of that. He reminded me of Pigpen
in Peanuts, with the cloud of dust and dirt that follows him around.
Justin's cloud wasn't dust and dirt so much as a black hole of
disorder and a gleeful disinterest in adapting to the system. He left
trails of lost objects behind him. He played with his lunch like
Play-Doh instead of eating it.

Two high points of his career were losing his spelling book for
good and all -- apparently into a space warp in his desk since no
one could figure how it could have gotten out of the classroom --
and trailing grape juice across the floor from one of those
supposedly unspillable boxes that they make for kids' lunches.
He so mastered the art of losing papers that he could get to
school without his homework even when I picked him up from his
classroom after school and delivered him back there the next
morning.

By the end of third grade, he was saying things like, "I'm stupid
and everybody hates me." I understand that a lot of kids say
things like that, and parents and teachers take it with a grain
of salt, assuming they'll outgrow it. I did not so assume. I
don't think people do outgrow that kind of thinking, once it gets
built into their assumptions about themselves. I think they stop
talking about it and figure out how to make their way in the
world in spite of it, but working around something isn't the same
as getting over it. Nobody should know how to think "I'm stupid
and everybody hates me."

Three incidents sum up why I came to think that our struggle to
shoehorn Justin into public school wasn't working. First was a
conference with the principal. We agreed that in some sense
Justin was doing the best he could, and that continuing to rag
him about his ways wasn't likely to help. She also looked at his
life as I described it and commented that he had a lot of outside
activities, which he did. She suggested that he might be doing
too much, that it was confusing to him. I thought this over and
realized that I knew what he was getting out of the activities,
but I wasn't sure what he was getting out of school. Maybe
school was the thing we could do without.

Then there was a phone call from the school nurse: "Do you know
that Justin came to school this morning with his hair not
combed?" Give me a break. In January, a kid pulls off his
knitted cap and his whole head explodes into static electricity
-- particularly Justin's. He was prone to explosions, most of
them figurative. Likely enough he did go to school without
combing his hair. Since when is this a medical emergency? (My
mother was a public school teacher. Mother and I have had our
issues over the years, and still have a few. Being scolded by
school personnel doesn't bring out the best in me.)

The third incident was the last conference of many with the third
grade teacher: "What are we going to do about Justin?" She said
they thought he might have a neurological crossup of some kind,
and they'd like to do a workup on him. The occupational
therapist happened to be there that day and could take a quick,
informal look at him and check out his coordination.

Check out his what? This is Justin the Dakota Indian. He loved
to do three-point headstands on the back seat of a moving car, or
in a tub full of water. I'd once told his day care lady she
could put him in the gym and swim program if she'd promise
not to improve his coordination. The occupational
therapist had him scoot across the room on a skateboard, sitting
down, and that was that.

But on the way out of the building Justin asked me, "When she
said that, why did I feel like a retard?" That did it. Click,
as the feminists say. In his private universe in the back of the
room, he did his third-grade schoolwork creditably enough when he
bothered to do it. His other activities included melting crayons
on the radiator and reading Stephen Hawking's book about time.
I'm not sure a kid like that can be incorporated into an orderly
school system -- but that wasn't my problem. My job was to get
him out of there before they convinced him beyond repair that he
was stupid and obnoxious. I took him out of school, telling him,
"Someday you'll have your own reasons for keeping track of your
life, and then you'll figure out how to do it."

We did a year of home school. We had fun; but a ten-year-old boy
with no siblings needs to do more than hang around with old Mom
all day. The following year I sent him to Sudbury Valley School
in Framingham, Massachusetts (www.sudval.org), which has its
own kind of order and focuses on requiring students to be
responsible for themselves. To this end, the school tries to keep
its tuition to what a teenager can earn in a year. Some of them do
just that; I remember watching ne kid proudly writing the check
on his own checking account. The real hurdle was getting Justin
to Framingham every school day for five years, including at least
three summers; but that's another story.

At fourteen, he decided that it would be easier to get into
college from a conventional high school. We agreed on Cambridge
School of Weston, and after that Brandeis University. Today at
twenty-seven, he works as a programmer (largely on the basis of
what he and his best friend from Sudbury Valley taught themselves
and each other about computers while everyone else was struggling
with middle school). He is a responsible, tax-paying, self-
supporting citizen. I'm not sure what more a conventional
education would have done for him.

On the first day of his sophomore year in high school, I came
across a list in his handwriting of items to bring to school with
him. Across the top was written: "Do not put this paper down
until everything is in the car." He'll go through life devising
systems to protect himself from his own absent-mindedness,
counting on intelligence and resourcefulness to get himself out
of predicaments he wouldn't have gotten into if he'd been paying
attention in the first place. This is all right with me, having
gone through life that way myself.

Our friends and relations wondered what would become of Justin as
a result of missing all those years of formal schooling. My
answer was that if you believe in yourself you can do anything.
If you don't, whatever else you have going for you almost doesn't
matter. Academic deficits can be made up; but it's frighteningly
easy to build negative images into a child's self system, and
once that really takes hold it can be impossible to eradicate it.

When, after a year of home school and half a year of Sudbury
Valley, Justin stopped saying, "I'm stupid and everybody hates
me," and got on with making a life for himself, I figured I'd
done my job.

UPON A SUMMER'S DAY

If, as I remember it, I was twelve on the verge of turning
thirteen on that summer day, Cousin George would have been ten
and a half. I was sitting on the ground with pots and soil and
plants spread over a few square feet of the side lawn, re-potting
cacti. Cacti of the kind I had as a kid reproduce like alley
cats, and I couldn't bear to part with any of them. My mother and
I had some lively discussions when it came time to move them into
the house at the end of the summer.

George was mowing the lawn. George liked to mow lawns, as
did my mother, a taste I have never been able to fathom. George
also liked to tell other people what to do. As the mowing
advanced, my cacti and I came to be in the way. He threatened,
loudly and pugnaciously -- George was somewhere in the upper
percentiles of pugnaciousness, even for a ten-year-old boy -- to
run over my planting operation. I stepped over my stuff and
positioned myself between it and the lawnmower. George and I
faced off and shouted over the noise of the motor, neither of us
about to back down. He repeatedly gestured with the lawnmower as
if to run over my bare feet. I knew he wouldn't do that and stood
my ground, shouting and being shouted at.

My family is, in some literal sense, famous for shouting: as
reported in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, a nineteenth-century
ancestor drilling the militia on the town common was heard distinctly
in the next town, three or four miles away. Eventually the uproar
George and I were making attracted my mother's attention. She
gave me permission to finish my project and told George to go mow
somewhere else. Presumably he did and I did. My only memory of
the rest of that day is of retiring to bed with a monumental sick
headache, precipitated by stress, fumes, and allergens kicked up
by the lawnmower. I think I hated lawnmowers even before that
occasion. I have certainly hated them ever since.