Sputterpub's Blog

     When I was 17 I experienced my first disappointment about activism. I was a senior at Redwood High in Marin County. Rumor then had it that our building was designed by the San Quentin architect (impossible). But the school was built around a courtyard (senior quad) just like the prison. And we could see San Quentin from our back parking lot. We felt a connection.

On April 11, my schoolmates and I awoke to the news that a convicted man was to be executed the next day. As far as I can recall I had been against capital punishment for awhile, so I don’t know why I remember it as sudden news, but the way I recollect those days all of us were last-minute mobilized against what would be the first execution since Caryl Chessman and the last in the gas chamber. I remember asking my parents for permission to attend the vigil outside the prison gates. They declined.

The demonstration was to be peaceful. It was candle-lit all night and the plan was to continue the next morning until the deed was done.

I stayed home that evening. I had no choice. But the next morning, after first-period physics, I agreed with friends to make a run for it. I even secured the permission of my second-period boss (I lab-assisted for Mr. Girton, so he wasn’t exactly my teacher then).

I headed for the front parking lot, where my future husband was waiting for me in his Corvair. I didn’t make that either. The school administration and most teachers had formed a cordon around the place, prohibiting students like me from leaving.

I shoved the Dean of Boys in my attempt to break through and he shoved back. That brought Nick racing to my defense, which not only didn’t get us to the vigil; it got him suspended. I followed Nick and Mr. Bosque to the deans’ offices, where I planted my butt in a chair and in solidarity with my friend, refused to leave when the Dean of Girls ordered me to, and lectured her about the true and only value of school: socialization.

After Nick was sent home I continued to refuse to go to class. Instead I made a circuit of the place, beseeching my mates to sign my petition, to get involved way ahead of the next execution. I didn’t know then that we’d get a quarter century break from cold-killing prisoners. I had no idea what court judgments were coming. I just knew we couldn’t wait till the night before or day of; we had to put in organized work.

And I didn’t get any takers. I soon saw that the passion of the preceding twelve hours was hormonal instead of philosophical. Everyone had gotten off on the excitement – the crowd, the night, the candles, the disobedience – and no one wanted to do any work.

The disappointment was crashing and crushing.

I didn’t get over it. I remain discouraged and pessimistic about most activism. And it’s not like I didn’t witness it. Six months later I started four very political years at Cal (stop the draft, make education relevant (black, women’s, and native American studies), get out of Vietnam, Kent State, Cambodia). We all sported blue denim so no one stood out, bandanas for gas-filtering, hormones. But seriously? Most of the demonstrators were no more committed to the cause than puppies, and no more rabid than any excited late adolescent. The sex was good after a riot, just like it used to be after a big game bonfire or heated sports event.

When I was 10 or 11, I was a coward.

It was a one-event wuss but I’ll never forget it.

I was in sixth grade at the time. One of my classmates was a trashy girl named Edie May. There were serious differences between us.

I was the best student in our class and she was one of the worst. I lived in a newish tract home with my parents and brothers and she lived in a ramshackle-y place with a loud undistinguished family. There may even have been a wrecked car on cinder blocks in her yard; I remember her house was within sight of the school playground.

I don’t know how the argument started, but we were on the asphalt play area near the classroom when she called me out.

“I don’t fight with babies,” I remember responding, in the futile hope that those words would make it all go away. But she kept glaring at me, with freckles inflamed and fist-ended straight arms. It looked like she wasn’t done.

We all walked to and from school then. I had two friends named Candy, both from the block adjacent to mine, from houses with similar floorplans. We had just crested the small hill and were on the downslope toward the entrance to our Cinderella home development when Edie May and her gang surrounded us.

Surrounded me, I mean. Because suddenly Candy and Candy were also in the circle of observers. They had apology instead of hostility in their faces, but they were as unwilling to help me as the rest of the girls.

Edie May put up her dukes and invited me to violence. I refused. I just stood there.

So she shamed me. She took up a pencil and approached me and then wrote whatever nasty words she could imagine (she didn’t have much vocab or spelling ability) on my white cotton blouse.

I just stood there. Candy F mouthed “I’m sorry,” and Candy C didn’t meet my eyes.

Eventually Edie May tired of her game, or ran out of room or words or pencil lead; she stopped. She and her pals retreated almost as quickly as they’d arrived, and I was able to finish my walk home.

My mother was outraged. She removed my blouse and tut-tutted over the torso scratches that had overcome the cloth. She tore into some folks in the school office for “letting it happen.” I don’t remember her receiving any satisfaction for that. I sure didn’t.

I learned a little something about “friends” that day. But I learned more about self-esteem. I don’t engage in physical violence, but since then I’ve never backed away from a fight.

When I was 7 years old I had my first good teacher, and when I was 9 I met Mr. Borup.

There were a few remarkable instructors in junior and senior high, too, but in elementary school the teacher has you all day, and you’re a kid so impressions cut deeper. That’s when how good or bad they are is important.

First up was Miss Seaman. For second grade we didn’t go to a regular school building. We attended class in an old mansion called the Thayer House. It housed kindergarten, first and second grades. The babies had a real playground, segregated from the rest of us. We older kids just romped on the big back lawn, ranged in the semi-circular row of trees that curved around it, or clambered on the benches that hid near the trees. I remember thinking that was strange but not minding it.

I was the smartest kid in the class. I was way ahead of the others in reading. I’m sure I was a bit disruptive about it. Miss Seaman pulled me out of the top reading group and put me in charge of the slowest. I took my job seriously, taught pretty well and became a better student myself.

She also had me stay after school and read The Red Balloon to her. I loved that exercise.

We moved to California the following year. I went from a mediocre third grade New York teacher to a worse one in Chula Vista, got pulled out of class and tested in the principal’s office, was skipped to fourth grade (where I don’t remember the teacher but do remember struggling to catch up in multiplication), and landed in the best fifth grade in the world.

Mr. Borup liked me. He talked to me and even took me with his family to the zoo, where he showed me how to do it right. We stopped on the way and bought day-old bread and stale lemon drops. He used the bread to get the bears to do the same tricks that the tour trolley operators did, flinging the slices sideways like frisbees to animals that always caught them after cutely showing us their feet. And he used the lemon drops for something even the zoo employees didn’t seem to do; he took them to the wolf cages and coaxed the animals to perform tricks.

He was a good teacher not only to me. The man had us listen to a few minutes of news every morning and then, at whatever random moment he selected, gave us a spot quiz about what we’d heard. He ran dictionary races. He read history to us while we made art (I’ll never forget his narration of the Miles Standish/John Alden/Priscilla vignette while we were building toothpick sculptures). He made us each recite or read a poem every Thursday. I remember doing a dramatic rendering of Robert Service’s “Ballad of Lenin’s Tomb” and having most of the other kids on the edge of their chairs. Better than that: the class developed its own private intellectual joke. I can’t remember how it happened but each of us soon memorized the first stanza of “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Now listen my children and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere/On the 18^th of April in ‘75/Hardly a man is now alive/Who remembers that famous day and year). Whenever anyone showed up unprepared on Thursday, those are the words she or he would speak. To the smiles of everyone else in the room, including Mr. Borup.