Se Hace Camino Al Andar

If you been enjoying the Slice of Life series on this blog, considering joining the Two Writing Teachers for a weekly Slice of Life challenge and participating on your own blog. Check out the details here!

I’ve felt a bit like a chicken without a head this past week. It seems that I was hardly home during the day, and when I was, I didn’t get much done. I’ve been keeping up with things on the Internet but lurking for the most part, not leaving comments, just taking it all in.

This week won’t be much different! It’s 7:55 am and I’m armed with my one and only cup of coffee for the day, gearing up for day of errands and chores. I ordered my kitchen cabinets last Friday. The work will begin in about a month, after Passover. So, there are other myriad little things that need to be done. My goal is to cut my two bookcases down to one this week. It’s a good first step. A good second step is figuring out what to do with all the contents of my “office.” I foresee a trip to the Container Store in my future, for temporary storage solutions.

This past weekend was nice and relaxing. Despite not working a full-time job, I’m still living for the weekend. On Saturday, I co-presented at the NYCWP Teacher to Teacher conference at Lehman College. My friend Ken and I did a workshop on Trailfire, or we tried to, anyway! There were technical glitches and we spent the whole 75 minutes troubleshooting and trying to get things up and running. Bummer. On the bright side, though, participants were sufficiently interested to say that they would go home and try it on their own. Hopefully, some of them will sign up for the Tech Retreat in May and give it another go with us.

On Sunday, we took an impromptu road trip to Pleasant Valley, a farming community off the Taconic, above Poughkeepsie to check out the Remsberger Maple Festival. Yum! There were tree-tapping demonstrations and a tour of the sugar shack, where the maple sap is processed into syrup. We stocked up on apple cider maple donuts, creamed honey, maple syrup and pancake mixes. We were back by 2:30 and spent the afternoon hanging out with my mother at An Beal Bocht.

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I have a love/hate relationship with my car.

I suspect I’m not alone in this feeling, especially among those of us who do not have the luxury of off-street parking. I reached the apex of my hatred a few months ago, when I managed to get not one, but two, 115 dollar tickets in the span of three hours. But alas, the junker stays with us.

In the section of the Bronx where we live, a car comes in handy. Westchester is more convenient than Manhattan, and it’s much easier to be able to get on the Saw Mill for points North than it is to hop on a bus in the same direction, of course.

Back in the days when we were in the habit of renting a car every time we needed to go upstate to Albany or to other destinations, we dreamed of owning a car. When we realized we were spending more on car rentals than we would on a car of our own, we began the hunt but didn’t have to look far. Our neighbors had upgraded to a minivan and were eager to sell their smaller car, since they had only one parking space (ah, the luxury!), which they had to use for the old car, whose plates had been removed. We borrowed some cash from Henry’s father and bought the junker. A car of our own! Never mind that it had a GOP sticker on the back that seemed to be stuck for all eternity, and plenty of scratches and gouges. It was a car of our own, right up there with having a room of our own.

In the honeymoon stage, all was well. Me and the junker took short trips to Target and the gym. Eventually, we got brave enough for the Saw Mill and the Cross-County Expressway (I remember that Sunday well!). Then, reality sunk in. 34 dollars for a tank of gas!? The parking spot is good for the next three days?! These little facts began to dictate my driving habits. Tuesday mornings became Target days. The car needed to be moved by 9am. If I timed my return from the store correctly, I could snag a spot right out front, where the car could sit until Friday morning without having to be moved. Gas became a consideration. Did I need to go here or there badly enough? Was it worth the gas?

Our junker is not that old (2001) but he was poorly maintained by previous owners. We weren’t surprised to discover that the car needs a new battery, new brakes, and whatever else would be fix the rattling noise it makes. We made a decision– 100,000 miles or a very expensive fix, whichever came first, we’d get a new car.

But in the meantime, the freedom afforded us by the little junker far outweighs the headaches. For now.

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Teachers Unite and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative are surveying NYC public Middle and High School teachers on their opinions on safety in their schools. The survey will support advocates in their efforts to learn about the impact of current school safety and discipline policies on education, and explore alternative approaches to discipline that teachers believe are effective. Next fall we will release a report of findings from our focus groups and anonymous surveys that we’ve been conducting since October.

If you’re a NYC Middle or High School level teacher, please click the following link to take the survey (which takes just about 5 minutes to complete): SurveyMonkey

We want to hear from you no matter what your school security situation is! You can also find the link to the survey at teachersunite

Whether you have completed the survey or not, if you are in a middle school or high school–whether it is heavily policed or not please send a short email to
Sally@TeachersUnite.net to set up a 15- minute meeting with at least five teachers in your school where surveys will be completed and collected. This
would be invaluable to the Student Safety Act Coalition’s work (http://www.nyclu.org/node/1325).

About Teachers Unite:
Teachers Unite is a growing membership organization of New York City public school teachers dedicated to building the social justice movement. Teachers Unite?s members work in solidarity with organizations of parents, youth and activists fighting for an overhaul of the criminal justice system, an end to school privatization, immigrant rights, and the many fights that are challenging the status quo in these dire times. Web: www.teachersunite.net

About NESRI:
The National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) promotes a human rights vision for the United States that ensures dignity and access to the basic resources needed for human development and civic participation. Towards this end, NESRI works with organizers, policy advocates and legal organizations to incorporate a human rights perspective into their work and build human rights advocacy models tailored for the United States. Web: www.nesri.org
–
Craig Hughes
National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
Human Right to Education Program Intern
Hunter College School of Social Work
Phone: (212) 253-1785

I’ll be out of town this weekend but if I were around, I would definitely be going to this teacher-blogger meetup, organized by Ms. Frizzle! Let her know if you can make it…

Saturday, March 22nd
National Underground http://www.myspace.com/thenationalunderground
159 E. Houston St. (at Allen St.)
Time: 7:30 pm for chit-chat
9 pm – free live music upstairs & downstairs – I’m not 100% sure what the music will be, but the last time it was blues upstairs and funk downstairs, both pretty good… and FREE

Recently, I saw the documentary Sound and Fury, upon the recommendation of my friend and colleague. The documentary has been around for awhile but I’m always slow to get on things. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the film is about two brothers, one deaf and and one hearing. The two sides of the family are in conflict over cochlear implants. It goes much deeper than the cochlear implant issue into issues of identity and what it means to be deaf or hearing. I need to see the film again. Certain parts of the documentary are stuck in my head, not even very significant parts but meaningful to me all the same.

I have a bilateral, congenital hearing loss classified as a severe-to-profound loss, meaning the quietest sound I can hear is between 70 and 95 decibels ( like an airplane, motorcycle, garbage disposal). I wasn’t diagnosed until the age of 2.5. The most significant thing about that fact is this: children learn 75 percent of all the vocabulary they will ever use in their life, by the age of 3. At the time I was diagnosed (by the wonderful people at Adelphi University on Long Island), I had ten words, and half of them were intelligible. Those of you who have young children, or have worked with them will realize the significance of that. Back in 1979, babies weren’t tested for hearing loss at birth or infancy the way they are now. When my parents caught on that something might be wrong, doctor after doctor gave them excuses like “she’s slow,” “she’s hyperactive,” “she has two older sisters to speak for her.”

In my ten years in New York City public schools, I’ve come across more than one child with a disability, and substitute taught a deaf middle school class for a few weeks in the South Bronx. I came away from that experience ever grateful that I was born to the parents I was born to. The single biggest factor in the success of children with disabilities, I believe, is the educational attainment level, as well as economic class, of the parents. My parents are college-educated and middle class. They knew, when doctors threw this litany of excuses at them, it didn’t make sense. They had the resources to herd me around from clinic to clinic, hospital to hospital. They questioned everything and everyone. When my younger sister was born, she was better off. Her deafness was discovered almost right away, and my parents knew the drill.

My parents knew I was going to be no different from my sisters–my education was intense and my rehabilitation even more so. My mother had the good sense to become an audiologist, so I’ve always had access to the latest technology. 28 years later, I hold a BS in English Education, an MA in Urban Policy Analysis, and have ten years of classroom experience under my belt. I’ve traveled all over the world and lived in another, non-English speaking, country. I’ve been offered, and turned down, a Peace Corps assignment. I’ve held steady, well-paying jobs. All this while relying on lip-reading and my hearing aids, and my awesome powers of deduction. I don’t sign, because I’ve never needed to but I’m not opposed to learning. I don’t foresee myself getting a cochlear implant anytime soon (or ever.)

I’m very much in limbo, as I’ve been all my life. Not quite part of the deaf and not quite part of the hearing world, and equally comfortable and uncomfortable in each. This is why Sound and Fury resonated with me. It was like the struggle of belonging was articulated and visualized in this documentary, in a way I had never seen before.

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I like to watch cooking shows. My husband makes fun of me, especially since that SNL skit that derided the Food Network as Porn for Fat People. Offensive, but still funny… that’s why we love SNL! I’m not offended because I learn so much from watching the shows. Instead of spending a small fortune on cooking classes, I pay a cable bill and get to learn from all the experts.

I grew up in a cooking household. My mother was not a gourmet cook, or even an experimental one but she made good, home-cooked meals and baked goods. I looked forward to coming from Hebrew school on Wednesdays and smelling my mother’s spaghetti and meatballs in the air, or waking up on a Saturday morning to collude with my sisters in swiping the brownies off the top of the oven hood, which involved one of us clambering up onto the counter to reach the homemade brownies. I’ve been spoiled. I feel sorry for my friends who grew up on take-out and processed, packaged food because their mothers “didn’t cook.” And now that I’m about to have my own child, I am thinking more about what kind of “food lifestyle” I want for our family.

Last year, Henry and I joined a CSA, a community-supported agriculture group, in which we bought shares of a farm that entitled us to a twice-monthly harvest of fruits and vegetables, from June to November. In the winter months, we received hardy root vegetables that were placed in storage at the end of the growing season, so we’ve been enjoying sweet potatoes, onions, celery root and other vegetables, along with farm-fresh eggs, a new experience for me. Yesterday, Henry and I went out to Williamsburg to pick up our last winter share from the farmers. (Usually, we pick it up on Wednesdays at a shul on the Upper West Side but we couldn’t make it this week.) While we were at the McCarren Park Farmer’s Market, we picked up two loaves of bread, three bottles of Ronnybrook Farms milk (yum!), apples from Red Jacket Orchards and raw-milk cheese from Consider Bardwell Farm in Vermont, along with bluefish, scallops and cod from a Long Island fisherman.

There’s been a craze lately for local eating, and organic eating, and we haven’t escaped that. One of the hot topics is whether is more important to eat locally, or to eat organically. In terms of environment and economics, it’s definitely better, I’ve decided, to eat locally, which also means eating seasonally, in many cases. I like the idea of supporting small farms, and of reducing my “food miles.” When we left the Farmer’s Market yesterday, Henry and I took stock of how much money we’d spent, for what we got. All told, we spent just under 100 dollars for the milk, cheese, fish, bread and apples. The farm share, we’d paid 140 dollars back in November for four shares. The farm share was a great bargain, and though the other items we’d bought were pricey, we felt good about where our money went. We wondered if it would be enough, and I pointed out that back in the days before there were supermarkets, people ate was locally available and that meant not having summer fruits and veggies in the winter. We could do the same! We’ve been spoiled by the modern age and paid dearly for it.

Our dinner last night was made up of ingredients from the farm share. We started out with fresh greens, topped with the Consider Bardwell farms cheese and an apple from Red Jacket Orchard. I sauteed the scallops (using a Mark Bittman recipe) and added those to the salad, with a dose of balsamic vinegar (which I made myself, by the way…not from the bottle!). The salad was followed by broiled bluefish and roasted root vegetables, all from yesterday’s excursion. This morning, the farm eggs went into a fritatta with onions and potatoes, all from the farm share, along with a hunk of the pumpernickel bread we’d bought at the park.

Using farm fresh ingredients really does lend a whole different taste experience. The flavors are deeper, and just taste fresher. It’s really amazing. Recently, I acquired two wonderful cookbooks at Stone Barns, up in Pocantico Hills and I highly recommend them to anyone who is interested in cooking more with vegetables and cooking at home more often. The first is The Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without, by Mollie Katzen, of Moosewood fame. The second is How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. I have other cookbooks gathering dust, but these two cookbooks have been perused more times in the past month, than any other cookbook I’ve owned for years.

And let me leave you with a picture taken by my husband.

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We are a relatively young family. My oldest living relative is probably my grandfather, who just turned 88. He keeps himself young with a lady friend, a sprightly woman in her ’70s. Because of this, my sisters and I haven’t had much experience with family deaths. When our grandmother died three years ago, I was not prepared for the onslaught of emotions I felt. Her death was not unexpected but all the same, the permanency of her death shook me.

My grandmother was a woman who believed in having a positive attitude. It was this positive attitude that carried her through her first bout with cancer, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. She recovered, a little bit weaker but still strong. Over the years, she contracted one cancer, then another. Each battle left her weaker and weaker, but she still carried on. She walked straight and proudly, a tall woman, a physical trait that was passed onto my cousins but not to my sisters and I (we cap out at 5’3). In the end, the radiation burned her lungs, making it hard for her to breathe and that proved to be her final downfall.

My grandmother was a harbinger of hope, literally. In 1920, her family left Roumania, my grandmother safely ensconced inside her mother’s womb as they set sail for New York City. En route, my great-grandmother went into labor. They disembarked at Liverpool, and had to catch another boat, or so the family lore goes. I like to think of my grandmother being born atop the high seas, a human bridge between old world and new, desperation and hope, a symbol of optimism.

I carry my grandmother’s spirit with me as I move through the world, and try to model her positivity, her optimism, her gentility and her love.

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The summer I turned 16, I went to Israel, which sparked a lifelong love affair with travel. It was a memorable trip, in and of itself, since it was my first international trip (Does Canada count as international? I don’t think so…). I do not come from an overly religious family. I guess we were “holiday Jews,” though my father has gotten more religious over the years, and now observes the Sabbath and keeps kosher in his home. As a deaf child, though, there were not many opportunities for being part of a Jewish deaf community. There was no USY (United Synagogue Youth, for conservative Jews) offshoot for deaf youth, but there was one at NCSY, the National Council (Conference?) of Synagogue Youth. NCSY, though, was an orthodox youth group. Nonetheless, I was enrolled in the belief that it would be good for me to socialize with other deaf Jewish kids and to be in an environment that was supportive of my needs. I was involved for many years, and when my chapter, called NCSY-Our Way, was offering a trip to Israel for its youth members, it wasn’t hard to make the decision to go. I got a small scholarship from my shul and my parents put the rest of the money together for the trip.

I travelled with two madrichim (chaperones), and two other girls. It was a very small group. In retrospect, definitely too small! The madrichim were two orthodox women, one young and one not-so-young. Their religious beliefs constricted our freedom somewhat, and their lack of physical fitness robbed me of one of the quintessential Israel experiences but more on that later. They were lovely women and I’m forever thankful to them for creating such wonderful memories.

For five weeks, we lived on a kibbutz in the South of Israel, called Migdal Oz. Every kibbutz has a livelihood and here, it was fruit orchards–more specifically, nectarines. We settled into a small house on the kibbutz and spent some time amusing ourselves with “European” oddities, like a toilet that was in a room separate from the shower. I don’t remember much about the house, except that it was small and cozy, simply appointed with a little garden in the front. We worked in the kibbutz’s processing plant, where we sorted nectarines, folded packing boxes and flirted with the Russians (ah, Roman and his marriage proposal!) It was years before I could eat a nectarine again, having gotten more than my fill that summer. I would sit up high on the conveyor belt, keeping an eagle eye on the nectarines coming down the line, making sure each fruit sat in a cup, ready to be sorted by size. I honed my basketball skills by snatching the rotten ones off the line and tossing them into a bin down on the floor below me.

We were fully introduced to the Mediterranean food lifestyle– small breakfast of toast and juice (was I drinking coffee yet, then? I don’t remember.), a 10 am snack break of fruit, a huge lunch at noon, another snack at 2, then a small dinner. I began a lifelong love affair with Nutella and discovered the joy of fresh tomatoes, salted and eaten like an apple. I recently discovered a small market in the East Village, called Holy Land, which brought back memories of the commissary on the kibbutz, the exotic juices in curvy, plastic bottles, the snacks and treats you can only get in  Israel.

We travelled a bit, too. The kibbutz was 45 minutes from Jerusalem. We would take a van that identified itself as a press vehicle, a safety precaution as we drove through bombed Arab neighborhoods, which made my heart break a little, even at that young age. (With a Lebanese great-grandfather, I felt and still feel a kind of kinship with my Arab brothers and sisters.) Jerusalem was my first taste of an old-world city; it’s sheer age and history thrilled me, the same thrill I would feel later in Paris or Prague or Guayaquil. We travelled north to the Galilee, to spend the night on a moshav. We stood on a bunker leftover from the 6 Day War, where we could see the red sands of Syria in the distance. We visited The Good Fence, a “friendly” border between Israel and Lebanon, where I wondered how far we were from Beirut.

I was looking forward to the highlight of the trip–Masada. The traditional experience is that you wake up at 2am and hike up the face of Masada to watch the sunrise. It was supposed to be awe-inspiring and beautiful. But I was robbed. My madrichim, those lovely women, were not in any shape to climb a mountain. So, our Masada trip was in the middle of the hot, sunny day and we rode a cable car to the top. To this day, I feel pangs of disappointment and I’ve never let go of the idea that I must go back and reclaim that adventure. I don’t have many regrets but that’s definitely on the list…

And today? I remember the big details but the small ones, they are a blur. It was an overwhelming experience that was hard to process and reflect on, in my flighty, 16 year old state. And what of the pictures I took that summer? I know I took some but they’re lost to the ages, I suppose, though I do have some buried treasure in my father’s basement. I smell a sleuthing expedition in the near future–somehow, I feel those pictures would be the missing link between my memory and my experience.

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My wedding day went by in a daze. I woke up super early in my hotel room overlooking the Hayden Planetarium on a crisp Sunday October morning. My best friend and maid of honor was sound asleep on the foldout couch, having been a bridesmaid in a different wedding the night before. My little sister was snoring away in bed next to me. As usual, I was the first one awake and forced to lie there for as long as I could bear it, thoughts racing through my head. I tip-toed out of bed and puttered around as quietly as I could but not too quietly. After all, I wanted the girls to get up! Yelena, my best friend, got up first. We laughed at my sister snoring for awhile and talked about… what? I don’t remember. My other sisters and my mother were due to come by later that morning, to get dressed and do hair and make-up. We ordered up breakfast from a local deli and eagerly awaited my mother’s coffee run, in the meantime, satiating ourselves with mimosas, having ordered orange juice and purchased a bottle of champagne for that purpose.

Before long, the hotel room was bustling with noise and activity. My nieces, 3 and 6, amused themselves in the bathroom mirror. My 4-month-old nephew gurgled away, smiling as usual as he was passed around from aunts to grandmother to mother to Yelena and back again. Two of my sisters and my mother sat on the couch, now folded up, working on the Sunday puzzle. We did our hair, our make-up. Ken, my friend and photographer, arrived to document the chaos. My make-up went on, my face offered to my sister for approval and denied. The make-up came off and we started over. Then, came the hair. I drank from the bottle of champagne, leftover from the mimosas, as my sister stabbed my scalp with bobby pins and yanked my hair this way and that, too clean and straight to stay in place. My mother left at some point, to head to the restaurant in Riverdale and greet guests.

Finally, it was dress time. It came out of the garment bag and was lowered to the floor. My shoes already on, I stepped into it gingerly, taking care not to snag the lining or crinoline. Up the dress went, gliding smoothly over my undergarments. My sister and Yelena tackled the bridal buttons, those infernal buttons! There, the dress was on. We ooh’d and ahh’d. Then, it was time to hustle out the door. The car service was waiting. Shaking on the elevator. Shaking in the lobby. Lots of lip-biting as I struggled to contain my excitement and nervousness. Trying so very hard not to get teary, lest I ruin all my make-up. Yelena next to me, helping me keep my wits about me, Ken in the front seat, turned around, documenting our ride up the West Side Highway to Riverdale.

We arrived at the restaurant, after what seemed like an eternity. My parents greeted me at the car door, my mother instantly weepy. Lots of people out front, Henry in the backyard of the restaurant waiting for me and would have to wait a little longer while we did family pictures. Endless posing and shuffling around to accomodate the light. Finally, I made it inside the restaurant, where I waited near the back door, gratefully stuffing my face with the little hors’ d’oerves a waiter thoughtfully offered me. I peered out the door, looking at my friends and family gathered around the chuppah and lining the brick walkway. I was cued to step onto the deck when the band began to play “At Last.” As I walked down the stairs, I willed myself not to trip and met my parents at the bottom, honoring the Jewish tradition of having both parents walk the bride down the aisle. Each step closer to Henry and wedded bliss sent thrilling shivers down my spine. A year of planning came down to this one moment. We kept the ceremony short and sweet, and walked back down the aisle to “O-bla-di, O-bla-da,” ready to eat, drink and breathe at long last.

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