4cargarage

Thursday, July 9, 2026

Saturday, March 29, 2025

How soon forgotten we shall be. One last breath before a sea. One wave roars and we are gone Another forms a bar of sand A monument to once was man. Most make no noise; strike no chord. All their works forgotten, motionless. A name engraved on marble stone. Like a still-life waits to be to explored Behind a door that's been ignored. Tallis washed upon the shore. Prints he left in bars and clefs. You follow then you resurrect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3nxOF8wnMk

Friday, November 22, 2024

On the Coatesville Area School District

Open Letter of Appeal to Important Contacts

If your love for Coatesville goes beyond velodromes, girls flag football, and using censorship as a marketing strategy, you should read this DEI Report by Dr. Jarvis ) of Penn (https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:06118bc7-9f03-475b-8498-ba60575b6192 and listen to the first hour of April 9th's board meeting. Even if you have no connection with Coatesville at all but share the same American humor of fairness, you should give this report a small portion of your time. It's worth thinking about merely from an intellectual point of view.

How can a school district, not to mention a city, sitting on the fulcrum of the most affluent and wealthy county in Pennsylvania (median family income $119K) be ignored by so many? It’s no accident or oversight. It’s intentional. Jarvis’ Report doesn’t answer that question, but it does describe the effects of the answer. Because of that, Jarvis’ Report is a milestone in the history of Coatesville. It may reveal in the long run the underlying causes of Coatesville’s problems. Our pursuit of a remedy may flush out the corrupt.

First, I am no fan of DEI. Jarvis’ report is no DEI report. It is a frank description of an ailing institution. It is objective for the most part but at times too kind to the people of Coatesville who have allowed their school district to sink so far. It is also kind to the PDE educational bureaucrats who have ignored it for at least nine years since their last examination and recommendations.

Second, we need to keep this report out front in all our discussions about the CASD so that we don't forget what we must urgently do and so that others like the school board and Coatesville administrators don't forget what must be done. We have wasted nine years. We must not be afraid of pushback and resistance. According to Superintendent, Dr. Catherine Van Vooren, there have been many changes on the school board since February 2023 when she was hired. Besides transparency, contiguity is an infrastructural concern.

Third, we must ferret out those who resist change and those who pushback so that we may condemn them. Make their names public. Dr. Jarvis’ report is a great opportunity to move the people who would maintain the status quo in Coatesville out of the way for good. They have had their way too long. Some of those names may be Coatesville icons, contributors to the false Coatesville pride that compares us to Compton and not to Cambridge.

You can listen to last Tuesday's Coatesville school board meeting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpSv1RnY9kQ.

Dr. Jarvis presented his DEI Plan. The board was overwhelmed but willing. It is similar to a plan that was recommended in 2015 after the Como debacle (see page 46 of DEI Report) that was never implemented.

Here's my criticism of Jarvis' Plan. In order to have equity you have to have something to make equitable. The CASD is so far off the scale that there is no measurable point to begin to make things equitable. The Coatesville Problem, be that problem with revitalization or the school district, goes beyond racism, the number one cause of inequity. If we are going to focus on racism we are going to get racialized solutions. The teachers will have two or three years of in-service where they will hear bad things about America and white people that they already know, and the district will hire a dozen or so Black teachers and social workers who will be just as ill-equipped to teach in Coatesville as white teachers. These are racialized solutions, but they are not pedagogical solutions. Jarvis to his credit does recommend that the district leadership form a committee "to look at culturally relevant pedagogy." I would make it districtwide requirement that all employees read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. These two books will provide an appropriate lens through which teacher can present their instruction.

As Dr. Jarvis stated in his oral presentation, “We want to challenge the status quo. I think one of the things that we found is again Coatesville is a pretty traditional system and again, I think what this is going to demand is some pretty non-traditional kinds of new, innovative thinking, and approaches to both teaching and learning…”

Coatesville comes as close as any American population to Freire’s oppressed and Fanon’s wretched. They have, in Richard Farina’s words, been down so long it looks like up. The people of Coatesville are a colonized people occupied by the powerful and affluent of the county. Coatesville is Chester County’s potter’s field home to the county’s walking dead. The county needs Coatesville as the place they send their disabled, traumatized, psychologically crippled, homeless, petty criminals, abusers, and old. It is Kafka’s Penal Colony whose healthy and whole inhabitants seek escape and once gone take pride in having survived there but never return.

One school board member at the April 9th meeting asked where should we begin. Jarvis said with human resources. In other words, they need to hire more teachers, more teachers of color, and more social workers. That 90+% of teachers are white in the CASD is unfathomable. It brings back memories of when I was President of the Coatesville Library. The library board was looking to hire a Library Director. I recommended that we seek a qualified Black for the job. I recommended that we contact HBCUs. I explained to the board that I was sure that colleges like Hampton had Library Science programs. Within three months I was no longer the president forced out after months of being left out of the loop.

At the April 9th meeting, the school board was asked to approve the hiring of two more administrators to oversee curriculum changes. (Isn't that what principals are for?) CASD already has more administrators than any other district in the county. Thankfully the hiring was tabled to be discussed in executive session.

As Dr. Jarvis said the situation is "urgent" and to expect "resistance and pushback" (48:53-50:00). From whom? In our pursuit of a remedy for the CASD, let’s make sure we find out who. Revelation and transparency are justice. As I have said over and over, “There can be no revitalization in Coatesville until the school district is revitalized. With this milestone report, Coatesville’s Revitalization begins.

March 2024

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Revisiting Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech

Here's my essay on Carter's Malaise Speech that was published on Smerconish in December 2020:

Revisiting Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech

President Jimmy Carter's televised speech on July 15, 1979, has been one of the most maligned Presidential speeches in American history. However, over time, the speech will gain momentum in American history for its subtle relevance to contemporary issues, like President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. I do not mean to demean Carter, but he was no Lincoln. Still, Carter has been one of the most providential American presidents in history. While most ex-presidents sharpen their teeth on world events, Carter has sought to influence world events through mediation.

Carter's speech was his honest assessment of the direction America was heading and provided remedies to forestall and reverse what he saw as impending American decline. Just as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, his primary treatment was working to reverse animosities and set the nation on a course of reconciliation and healing. Like Lincoln's, Carter's speech was an appeal to each of us to take the moral high ground. It was almost Christian in its attitude on materialism. "[F]or one's life does not consist in the abundance of things he possesses" (Luke 12:15).

Carter asked us to exercise old-fashioned stewardship over our financial and natural resources just as Lincoln appealed to the propositions by which our nation was founded. Like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Carter's speech called on us to have a new birth of freedom, a right from materialism and self-indulgence. According to Carter:

[W]e are also beginning to close the door on our past... In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives that have no confidence or purpose.

Initially, the American people liked the message and were ready to rally around Carter. Well, at least for a couple of days. Television had shortened our attention spans but not quite as much as today's cell phones and iPods. Once the special interest groups circled their wagons and Carter's political adversaries put their spin on the speech, the speech was tarred as a defamation of the American spirit.

At the time, our nation was vulnerable to political diatribes. We needed someone to uplift our spirits and tell us it was okay to take that extra cookie from the cookie jar because we deserved it. Vietnam, Watergate, and assassinations had taken their toll on our collective consciousness, and we were in no mood to downsize our appetites. We needed the cavalry to come to our rescue. Instead, we got Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan Revolutionaries ran against Carter's message of austerity and sacrifice. They told us that everything was fine as long as we waved the flag, chanted patriotic slogans, and bought on credit. With the help of the Ayatollah, the era of profligacy began. Carter was no competition for the great communicator Ronald Reagan who tapped into the yet unexploited aspect of the Boomer Generation's culture of narcissism and greed. After all, Nixon had freed the children of the Boomers from the draft. There was no need to worry about their kid's grades anymore so they could get a draft deferment for college. There would be no interruption of service to the self.

Tired of their introspective soul searching, Boomers rediscovered what their parents – who were children of the Great Depression – had always been skeptical of: the wide-open, objective horizon of laissez-faire capitalism. The same capitalism that had forced them to eat bread and lard during the 30s. From kindergarten to the workforce, there was a beeline to prosperity. The same teachers who were viewed as nation builders in Asia were considered obstacles to children if they awarded low grades, gave too much homework, or challenged students with rigorous lessons.

As test scores dropped along with student competence, Reagan proclaimed we could have it all, and we could have it now. Education became even more suspect than before as Americans looked to college dropouts and basketball players like Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Donald Trump, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Sam Walton, and Steve Jobs as icons of achievement.

Reagan's message was that we could extol ourselves into greatness if we only believed. It was our perceptions that were holding us back, not the truth. We could spend ourselves to the American Dream. Our rugged individualism – along with Friedrich Hayek's deregulated marketplace – was enough to fulfill our manifest destiny to be a beacon to the world by exporting our culture and democratic values.

We would dominate the world with our technological innovation, financial services, and voluntary professional armed forces that would police the world to guarantee our national security and oil at an affordable price. If workers overseas complained about earning a buck a day, we could always have our workers do our dirty work. What was needed was a good war – one at home and one abroad. Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and invaded Granada to save the medical students whose grades weren't good enough to cut it in American medical schools. America was back in the saddle again.

The "fundamental threat to American democracy" that Carter spoke of in 1979 is our tendency "to worship self-indulgence and consumption." Our "identity" is no longer defined by what [we do], but by what [we own]. We can hear today's social critics and free-market economists proclaim the business model as the key to all our woes. Hospitals, schools, museums, public libraries, and government agencies should heed the tremendous entrepreneurial spirit, privatize when possible, and restate their missions to be more pragmatic and tacitly useful to the masses. If institutions do not contribute to the economy, the bottom line is that their purpose is suspect and not worth our attention if they can't pay for themselves.

The Reaganites and their predecessors, including Clintonian Democrats, did not mention that part of their contract with America was the mass exporting of jobs and our manufacturing base overseas. Those of us not fortunate enough by birth, pedigree, or disposition were left behind or placed on the margins of society. There would be no trickle-down of wealth to them.

Well, they could always assemble TV sets. However, the problem today is that not one single TV is manufactured in the United States. This increased the bifurcation between the great American middle class and the rich and increased the divide between the poor and the middle class. Today, we can see how both the middle class and the poor are pinned against each other – one side wants a more significant share of the pie, and the other side struggling to keep what pie they have left.

Today, in my opinion, we have muted our voices by so much political correctness that we can't even speak the language of solutions. I doubt we will ever be able to return to the time when we could honestly appraise our situation and act to remedy it. The rugged individualist has been replaced by the pulp individualist fossilized in adolescence, viewing themselves as the hub from which the whole world revolves. Senior citizens no longer want to invest in the future of their grandchildren. Minorities hold white people in a perpetual state of guilt that impedes constructive discussion on the real problems in minority communities. And on the other side, white people form radical political parties and dubious militias to protect what they thought belonged to them but never did. They blame everybody but themselves for their inertia.

We are not yet fractured geographically, but we have long passed the point of cultured fracture.

Many of us who are isolated in a geopolitical box believe that our political system is too strong to collapse. Our nation is young and filled with great promise. That may be true, but we have to make it to adulthood.

That is what Carter's speech forty years ago asked us to do. Carter asked us as a people to become adults again. He reminded us to look to the past to inform our future. We need to remember the courage of those involved in the early Civil Rights Movement, who understood that freedom had to be earned and not bought. We need to remember those sacrifices of the GI Generation that helped save the world from fascism. We also need to remember the resiliency of those who lived through the Great Depression.

Carter's speech is a prescient warning of our decline. Our decline is inevitable and seems closer than ever. No amount of staged patriotism is going to change the direction we have set for ourselves. They will write about how the most powerful and prosperous nation in the history of the world destroyed itself in such a short period.

Our history from 1945 until today is filled with mistakes and misjudgments. Historians will blame the American people for our lack of vigilance, our naiveté, and our arrogance. I hope they will note that we were brainwashed – set against one another by a profit-driven media and political apparatus not designed in our best interests. There will be more battles to fight, but a tide has turned. The moral fabric of America has torn asunder.

Perhaps the second American Civil War has been occurring ever since 1980. This time around, there are no battlefields to gauge wins and losses. We do not tally the dead, the wounded, or those missing in action in military terms, but we can tally them in cultural, spiritual, and economic terms. It has been a civil war between those who had faith in our country and those who sought to milk it for their own self-interest. It was treason by misinformation, subversion, sedition, and sabotage. Their guiding motivation was profit.

Historians will write the epitaph of our nation in such terms; how a noble and generous people lined up row by row to be nothing more than cannon fodder for the rich, powerful, and maniacal. In his Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln asked us: "When will we have a new birth of freedom?"

Sunday, July 21, 2024

Great Valley Students

Students in Great Valley Middle School created twenty-two fictitious TikTok accounts of their teachers and received barely a slap on the wrist. By Beth Ann Rosica

Richard T. Beck’s Response on July 15, 2024, at 10:57 am

The behaviors of these Great Valley middle school students doesn’t surprise me. Long before AI, I listened to my high school sophomore students brag about getting one of their middle school teachers fired by harassing him. These were nice kids from nice families who had no clue as to the consequences of their actions. I taught middle school for four or five years before I was paroled to the high school.

The only place on earth where insane behavior is normalized is middle school. If you doubt what I’m saying, make an appointment to observe a middle school cafeteria during 7th or 8th grade lunch period. It reminds you of the movie Snake Pit when Olivia de Haviland finds herself lost in the asylum amongst the crazies. But do not interfere with the kids after all like a guidance counselor once told me, “This is their social time.”

There are three reasons that I can think of at the moment, why this insanity goes unchecked:

First, the middle school model is more of a social club where students cultivate peer relationships at the expense of family relationships. Rather than seeing adults like their teachers, parents, and other authority figures as role models, friends become the utmost and the highest. This model is compatible with those you don’t feel that parents have a right to know anything about what goes on once the schoolhouse doors close.

The old junior high school model is better, in my opinion, because academics is a priority and bad behavior is called out as bad rather than excused as developmental. All kids go through a stage where they revolt but kids who aren’t punished never develop a moral compass.

The sign that was required to be posted in our classrooms was “Self-Esteem The Right of Every Child.” That sign meant that if you ever made a kid feel bad, you were hurting their self-esteem. You couldn’t reprimand a disruptive kid in class. You’d have to wait until after class. Our pedagogical goal was to make a kid feel good. A kid who felt good meant his/her parents felt good and parents who feel good mean the building principal feels good. All the way to the bank, baby!

Second, parents still believe their kids in 7th and 8th grade. They still view them through an elementary school lens. The kids know this and are keen to take advantage of it. Parents stop believing their kids around the second semester junior year in high school when they realize that they’ve been lied to since 7th grade. They’re ashamed about all those times they slapped around their kid’s teachers at parent teacher conferences or 504 conferences, but they never apologize and neither do their kids. All those bodies strewn along their path were just taxpayer cannon fodder. 11th grade is about the time that they know their kid is not Princeton bound but would be best served at DCCC.

Third, the teachers’ union embraces the middle school model and condones this kind of student behavior because it means that more non-instructional personnel will be hired like counselors, psychologists, caseworkers, and aides adding to the retirement coffers.

Many teachers wouldn’t teach anywhere other than the middle school. They love it. As long as you have a knack for making emerging pubescent people happy and for getting 13 and 14 year olds to like you, middle school is the place to be.

Rosica, B.A. (2024, July 10). Students fake teachers' profiles on TikTok and face no real \consequences Broad and Liberty. https://tinuurl.com/542ztf4s

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Lau and Brown

Lau vs Nichols (the San Francisco School Board) is as important to public education as Brown vs Topeka. Today it may be more important since immigrants who are mostly Spanish speakers have replaced Black people as the largest non-White group in the United States. By numbers today, Hispanics have the greatest need although there remains an academic achievement gap between both Black people and Hispanics and Asians, Jews, and whites.

Black leaders accuse whites of racism when whites discuss the Replacement Theory. Only the far Alt-Right entertains the notion. There is no white replacement in the United States although the Woke Left wishes there was. Hispanics are replacing Black people not white people. Seventy-five percent of all Hispanics, mostly Mexican Hispanics, identify as white. Puerto Rican Latinos do not identify as white in such large numbers. That is due to Puerto Rico's lack of sovereignty and the ressentiment (fr.) produced by colonialism. Puerto Ricans reject Whiteness because they identify Whiteness with America. Franz Fanon wrote about this identity crisis for colonized people in his book, The Wretched of the Earth. Paolo Freire also encountered this ressentiment while teaching post-colonial students (See Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in the public schools was unequal, a violation of the 14th Amendment. In 1974 the Supreme Court ruled that based on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1974, which bars discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs, non-English speaking and limited English-speaking students must be provided a remedy for their lack of language competency either through instruction in their native language or remedial instruction in English.

Nixon supported the decision maybe because of his sympathies for California’s migrant workers and the fear of another documentary like the “Harvest of Shame.” Or maybe the Republicans saw it as another chance to dilute LBJ’s Great Society Programs, the first dilution was Women’s Rights, by putting Black and Hispanics in competition for federal funding and set asides. There was a great rift between Anglos and Hispanics over Bilingual education and English as a Second Language instruction. This rift spilled over into politics with the English Only Movement which did more to set back foreign language instruction in public schools than it did the education of non-English speakers.

Why was it so difficult to secure the educational rights of students whose first language was not English? It is complicated. I experienced as a teacher in the Migrant Education Program in Southern Chester County white racism toward Hispanic students while as an ESL Coordinator in West Chester, I experienced Black resentment toward Hispanic students.

First, as Rachel F. Moran says, “[Lau] was just never as visible as Brown" (Walsh, 2024). Moran is a professor at Texas A&M University’s law school in Fort Worth. She is a scholar of the case. It was not as visible because those who have no voice literally and as marginalized people find it difficult to get people's attention. White educators ignored Hispanic students and appeals from desperate ESL and bilingual teachers. The educational establishment also discouraged Hispanic kids from enrolling into the public schools. I encountered this in Kennett Square in the late seventies and eighties. Appeals to Black educators achieved mixed results. For whites it was, "No one asked you to come here." For Black people it was, "Why should you get special help when Black kids don't? I fought for what I got. You should too."

Second, educators were ignorant of how language acquisition works. Most educators felt, "Just put them in the classroom. They'll learn." Those students were receiving failing grades, the teachers would say, "If they can't do the work, they should fail. It’s not fair to make accommodations for them if I can’t make accommodations for others." Once a student could speak English, educators, especially Black educators, felt that they no longer needed support. They failed to consider that the acquisition of basic interpersonal communication skills is different from the acquisition of academic language. I considered myself bilingual until I took a course in Puerto Rican Drama at Temple where the instruction was in Spanish. I struggled. I was always a day late and a dollar short listening to the professor in class. I had to translate in my mind before I could move on to what she was saying next.

Third, the American public particularly Black Civil Rights leaders saw the struggle of Hispanics through the lens of the Black Civil Rights Movement. That was a miscalculation that often-caused tension between Black people and Hispanics. Where Black people sought assimilation, that is, they sought integration into the mainstream, Hispanics sought acculturation, that is, Hispanics wanted to maintain their culture outside of the mainstream. Identity Culture began with Hispanics not Black people. Blacks apply identity to the Race Trade.

Fourth, Black people who were the allies of Hispanics began to feel that Puerto Rican and Mexican students were receiving special treatment. As Black educators tried to close the academic achievement gap, they began to question politicians and school administrators as to why Hispanics were receiving educational support services and not Black students. There were even efforts on the part of Blacks to declare Ebonics, Black English, a first language and standard English their second language hence making Black students eligible for English as a Second Language services.

Fifth, white politicians, school boards, school administrators were content to see Black and Hispanic community leaders and professionals go at each other. It meant that while there was conflict between these two constituencies, they could direct funds to programs that served white students and garnered prestige for the district. A glowing example of this was the West Chester Area School District's implementation of a Japanese language and culture studies program at Henderson High School as a partnership with West Chester University. This was at the time that the district's language minority population was increasing, and I was begging for additional staffing for the ESL Program.

I complained to Dr. Tom Kent, the Superintendent, and Bob Fithian, the Assistant to the Superintendent, my boss, that it was unwise for them to establish the Japanese language program when the district had Hispanic students in need of help. I also noted that if there was a second language the English-speaking kids in West Chester should be learning, it is Spanish. I said that I could understand if our district was on the west coast where there was more contact with Japanese people and Japanese culture but not on the east coast. Fithian told me that Tom felt that Japan was the future and that I should look at how the Japanese economy was booming and show the Puerto Ricans how it’s done. Fithian said that soon we might be speaking Japanese. The enthusiasm for Japan and the Japanese Language and Cultural Program lasted until the mid-nineties when the Japanese economy went bust.

Walsh, M. (2024, January 19). In 1974, the Supreme Court Recognized English Learners' Rights. The Story Behind That Case. Education Week. http://tinyurl.com/4zknb45w

Saturday, January 20, 2024

You have no enemies by Charles MacKay

You have no enemies, you say?

Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;

He who has mingled in the fray

Of duty, that the brave endure,

Must have made foes! If you have none,

Small is the work that you have done.

You've hit no traitor on the hip,

You've dashed no cup from perjured lip,

You've never turned the wrong to right,

You've been a coward in the fight.

Monday, December 18, 2023

Professional Development
(Originally published in Vignettes, 2014)

            I missed the first day of in-service class. Well, I played hooky. Our supervisor assigned us one of those made-to-order Act 48 classes that we could have finished at home on-line had we had a snow day in August. I was too tired to attend after spending a night bar hopping with a friend who is a weightlifter. I spent most of my afternoon emailing my most ambitious parents about their Princeton bound students, introducing myself, placating their expectations using my best trailer park diction.

            The next day, when the instructor, Mrs. Pythia Paramedir, concluded her lecture on how to accelerate the reading competency of 11th graders from the fourth-grade level to Princeton level in one marking period, she gave us a quiz. She said that the quiz should take us five minutes to complete (essay form).

            I was clueless. I kept looking around trying to find something to refer to, something to read, or someone’s paper to copy. If I let myself drift, I know I would use my laptop to look at sports scores, bag the quiz, and give her an excellent evaluation. That would get me off the hook. The quiz: describe the differences in educational themes in Klondike and Berry, two journal articles we were supposed to have read but were almost unreadable because the copy machine she used was running out of ink.

            My colleagues got busy writing so that they did not have to stick around and do overtime or kiss some central office administrator’s ass if they happened to show to see if we were as bored and miserable as our students would be in September. I sat there looking stupid, which is not a hard thing to do for me. Learning to be stupid has more benefits in education than learning to be smart. Stupidity can earn you merit pay; intelligence only earns letters in your personnel file.

            Out the window, I saw a large group of teachers playing softball. Most of them were standing around in left field. They reminded me of gourds in a field because of their body shapes. They had chosen the other professional development class --- team building. District guidance counselors were in charge. I began to scribble something down on my paper using the educational jargon of the time making sure to throw in statistical varia-tion analysis words like mean rather than common man terms like average. I asked Gail to see her paper to get an idea if I was on the right track.

            Gail knew little about literature or how to critique it. She was a nice enough young woman who would much rather have been home having babies or shopping with her mother-in-law. I was surprised when she was willing to hand her paper over to me, but she did it willingly without any eye contact.

            Women who avoid eye contact seem demure at first almost pitiful. If you get to know them, which for most men takes decades, you realize that they have a sixth sense that only their eyes can expose. It might be their natural inclination toward exhibitionism that they decline their eyes preferring like exotic dancers to expose their bodies rather than reveal their souls. They have an uncanny way of recognizing weaknesses in others. This is due to their primeval mothering instinct. This power makes them reprehensible and the most threatening of the human species. They have panther eyes and like panthers, when the time is right, they take advantage of that weakness. They thrive on disequilibrium making sure they are in the audience for the next feeding frenzy when the weakest pup needs to be culled from the litter. The Human Resources Department needs their service to keep fresh blood in the human pipeline and the jungle inhabitants fit, vigorous, and off balance. When put in charge, they are most indelicate when weaning the weakest of their brood withdrawing their milk slowly until the weakest starved and dizzy for her support falls from the nest voluntarily.

            Men on the other hand (I mean “normal” men, who have not yet morphed into unisexual androids.), once they know a weak-ness in themselves willingly admit it to colleagues. Give a man the opportunity to talk about his ass and he will map a story from itch to colonoscopy. Men have cultivated this trait from being naked with one another in locker rooms. Men prefer certainty even to the point of degradation as T.E. Lawrence pointed out. Men must know where they stand, must know their place on the totem. Like dogs they sniff each other out then roll on the ground to make sure they have placed themselves in the pecking order correctly. Men prefer calm water with little ripples. This could be why research shows that women (I mean “normal” women, not Hofferesque true believer, man-hating feminists.) prefer working with men.

            Gail used her classroom like I imagine she used her kitchen. Whenever I used Gail’s classroom, she would always hide her stapler, so I brought my own only to find out that she hid her staples too. She felt I was like a bossy mother-in-law rear-ranging her cupboards.

            Gail was a big anti-plagiarist, an all-American girl who bought her clothes at Nordstrom’s. It was her call in life to destroy any vestige of mimesis. People who go over the top in fighting plagiarism really lack knowledge of history. They fear allusion or reference having never read Hirsch on cultural knowledge. They lack depth. I blame higher education for this. They do not teach teachers content these days just how to teach which is impossible to do. Thanks to technology, teachers nowadays do not have to teach at all. We now believe that knowledge emerges miraculously from the cyber world, as medievalists believed life emerged from the mud and ooze after a rain. Technology is a tool like a pencil. Do we ask a pencil to stand up by itself and write Macbeth?

            Gail’s one paragraph was right on point. Not having any idea of the details behind her concise writing, I could not use any of her ideas. She wrote in a way that made her writing impossible to plagiarize unless you copied it verbatim. She learned this writing style early like in elementary school to catch copycats or she read too much Hemingway. There was no bullshit in her answer, no name-dropping, and that rendered it unreadable, uninteresting, and 100% correct. There was nothing else to add to her answer. She was one who followed directions. I doubt if she had any friends when she was in school. She would have been a student who kept her mouth shut and just listened or pretended to listen just like a good student should. That would have been good enough to get an A in my book.

            It was 5:30. The teachers had paid their dues to the parents, school board, and that guy who publishes teacher salaries. It was so late that there were not any parents in the parking lot to time our departure. On the mark, the teachers began handing in their quizzes. I asked the instructor, Mrs. Paramedir, if I could have a syllabus and retake the quiz once I had read the material. I would finally learn what the formula was for grading papers on a curve. I was hoping to get something I could use in my classroom or decrease the time I spent correcting compositions.

            Mrs. Paramedir said, "Oh, you weren't here for the first class." (The "oh" sounded like the "oh" of an elementary school teacher when she discovers that one of her students has soiled his pants.) She had made her point and had once again earned her reputation of pinning pairs of balls on her trophy wall. There was nothing I could say. I had to accept the certainty of degradation. That was fine provided I got what I wanted. If that was what they were paying me for, so be it.

            I followed her up the ramp into the freshly painted annex. The maintenance crew had painted everything white. I was amazed at how slowly she walked. Ghostly. I felt like she was exhibiting me as her trophy to the crowd of teachers below trying to exit the building through one door. I thought there might be too much touching going on down there. On the hand, she was exhibiting what was under her stiff flannel skirt to garner the attention of the folks below. All the other doors nearby were locked for security. The glare from the new, tinted blue windows hurt my eyes. It had begun to rain outside that added to the intensity of the refraction of light and the humidity enhanced the smell of perspiration and perfume rising from the crowd at the bottom of the staircase. Someone had powdered themselves with too much lilac.

            Mrs. Paramedir went into a science room and printed me out a coded syllabus. There were horizontal lines of lettering and digits and vertical lines as well with lettering that looked Hindi or Malayalam. I did not want to appear any more stupid than I was. I still had a slight headache from drinking the night before with my weightlifter friend. I did not tell her I could not understand the code.

            "Oh,” she said, “This is written in Singapore Math. It is new. We expect everybody to understand the code." She turned to go, and I grabbed her arm.

            “Now, just hold on a minute,” I said. I was having an allergic reaction to lilac perfume. I could feel my neck turning red and itchy. I needed a cigarette. There was a frog in a jar of formaldehyde on the science table. I wanted to take the frog and place it on my forehead to cool off my headache.

            "Now you are in big trouble," she said. "And it will be up to me to file charges against you for sexual harassment."

            "I’m sorry for grabbing your arm," I said, "but I just wanted to know if I could retake the quiz."

            "Are you threatening me?" she asked. “I don’t like your tone.” I could not tell whether she was playing with me or being serious. She reminded me of Camille Paglia.

            "No," I said. I wished that I had brought along a witness.

            “Listen,” she said. “If you want to grab something on a woman, you’d better grab something more important than her arm.” I knew I was safe.

            “You mean grabbing is like stealing. You better steal enough to make it worth your while,” I said.

            “Exactly,” she said. “Grab a little and we think you’re afraid; grab a lot and we have something to look forward to.” She hesitated. “You know, I am not used to handing out free advice. I bet you have lost many friends by not paying enough attention to women. Didn’t you have a mother?” She moved uncomfortably closer to me.

            “You’ve been a great help, and I am sorry I underestimated you,” I said. She backed up.

            “I am Pythia, the Priestess of Delphi,” she said. “Here in America, I am known as the Measurer for I am well known for my skill of measuring men. I will let you know by next class if I intend to file charges." It was then that I realized that she was a shot and beer and a Nike just do it girl. She found me attractive, but it was late and was hungry.

            “You mean there’s more?” I asked.

            “Yes. Next in-service day,” she said. I knew I could not wait that long, and I suspected that she was waiting for something more.

I was not too worried about the sexual harassment charges, but I wondered if this chick had been sniffing formaldehyde fumes. Those kinds of charges had become so common in the educational workplace that they had become a right-of-passage. It had become as common as accusations of racism; neither accusation had anything to do with sex or race, but it seemed that they were the most important issues in school.

            I left Mrs. Paramedir in the room after dispensing a dosage of smiles and relishing my emasculation. I thought she was sad to see me go. By now, it was raining hard. Black clouds were accumulating from the west. I went down the same way I came making sure I would find the unchained door. I got in my car, drove over to the softball field, and looked for some teachers who might know something. The group of teachers that had been in left field was huddling together in the dugout. I went over to them. I asked one man if he understood the syllabus.

            He said, “No. why do you think I chose team building instead of that course? I understand how to play softball but Singapore Math...I’m not one to hop on the bandwagon."

            "Aren't you a math teacher?" I asked.

            "Sure, I am," he said. “And aren't you an English teacher? You are the one who should know about languages; math teachers only need to know how to teach kids to keep score. That's why we are playing softball." Everybody laughed except the guidance counselors who were too busy trying to be less humanistic.
"Who won the game?" I asked.

            "Nothin'. Nothin'," he said. "Chapter One, Introduction to Zero.”

            I got up to walk to my car and noticed Mrs. Paramedir walking across the parking lot pushing a bright yellow plastic wheelbarrow to her car. She looked ridiculous. It was raining everywhere except where she walked. Over top of her were two squawking red-tailed hawks. I thought they would fall from the sky like some kind of mythic omen. I ran across the field shouting, “Pythia! Pythia!” and whistling my best red-tail hawk call.

            She stopped just before she got to her car. I ran up to her and grabbed her ass between the two parked cars. The red-tails flew away.

            “I will tell you exactly what is going to happen,” she said to me. Her eyes drifted from side to side as if she were under some kind of spell. She was ovulating, and my touch increased the flow of lava.

            “Do you know where the Granite Run Mall is?”

            “If it’s in Delaware County, I’m not allowed there anymore,” I said.

            “My husband is on a business trip and won’t be home until late,” she said.

            I had mastered the new Singapore Math and wondered if the new math had any effect on telling time because I sure did not want to be there when her husband got home.

            “Don’t worry,” she said. “Just follow me to Sun Valley.”

“Boy, that’s a reversal,” I said.

            I followed her home doing everything I could not to get lost. There was much traffic that time of day. When we arrived at her house, she asked me to help her plant a balled and burlapped hemlock. She said her husband could not do it because of his heart. She even confided that she and her husband were not very active and then asked me if I wanted a drink. Before I could answer, she was pouring Canadian Club into a tall Yogi Bear glass.

            By now, the rain had subsided to a drizzle. She helped me take off my shirt and brought me a pair of her husband’s galoshes. Size twelve. I thought I hope I do not disappoint her. I pretended to fit in the galoshes. I wear a size eight and a half.

            I knew how far I would have to dig to plant her tree. Deep. Very deep. I planted the tree while she watched from the breezeway. Afterward, she asked how she could return the favor. She had changed into her pajamas.

            “How about if you just pretend, I’m at the next in-service,” I said.
I finished my drink and felt much better. I had not noticed before, but Mrs. Paramedir looked a little bit like Candice Bergen. I told her that and she said that people said that all the time. I kissed her several times and left. I was not man enough to wear her husband’s galoshes.

            I went to the Flat Iron bar, drank some more, got sick, and pissed on a wall at Sharples Works before driving home.

Saturday, December 16, 2023

Don Pito (2014)

Ramonita traveled with her parents who worked on the farms of South Jersey. As she got older, her affinity for the area grew especially toward the Napoli farm. There, the soft, porous soil reminded her of the narrow flat lands between the mountains and the beaches of Puerto Rico where she watched her parents cut cane and load the little train with cane that went from Salinas to the Bacardi factory in Ponce in the fifties.

Before her fifteenth birthday, she married Don Lilo, a good man full of promises who was a dozen or so years older than she was and whose blood had already been thickened by the harsh New York winters. Don Lilo promised Ramonita’s father, mother, and aunts and uncles a better life for her and promised Ramonita’s family the mountainside that faced Naranjito from the south where they could grow food and build cement houses.

Don Lilo had a good reputation. He was gentle and courteous and read magazines. He was tall and thin and light skinned with thinning red curly hair and some suspected that his real father had been a gringo overseer for a large coffee estate. He had only fostered one child out of wedlock, but he didn’t have much contact with the child’s mother. His family had been prosperous in the past but no one except the old storytellers could remember exactly when or why but they knew he liked horses. Knowledge of horses was the last vestige of Don Lilo's family's prosperity that had been passed on to him. Don Lilo de Naranjito had taught Ramonita to ride but it was Don Pito de South New Jersey who had bought Ramonita her first pony.

When they first married, Ramonita and Lilo followed in her parents’ ways by following the harvest with the eastern stream of migrant workers from Florida to Georgia, to New Jersey. Don Lilo promised Ramonita a quinceañera, but she never would have one. When she was twenty-one, after her third child and after Don Lilo fell asleep on a Manhattan street after a night of drinking and froze to death, Ramonita found herself alone in a one-room tenement house with three children. She sent Don Lilo’s body back to Naranjito but couldn’t afford to go herself with her three children. Someone wrote to Ramonita to tell her that they had placed a wooden cross on Don Lilo’s grave and that he was buried about thirty meters below the large flamboyant tree on cemetery hill.

She took the bus to Philadelphia and walked with her children in the dead of winter across the Commodore Barry Bridge to Old Man Napoli’s tomato farm. Napoli's wife, Yolanda, was surprised and overwhelmed to see her. The Napoli’s had known Ramonita ever since she was a little girl. They took her on as a cook and housekeeper. Don Pito turned on the heat in the little cabaña off the main property down the old cart road. The cabaña had one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. Ramonita turned it into a palace.

She was proud that Don Pito attended to her and had taken her from the fields and that the other Puerto Rican women were jealous.

The following spring, Don Pito and Ramonita painted the cabaña yellow and peach with the leftover paint that Don Pito had used in his bathroom. That summer, they replaced the roof and gave Ramonita a key to the big house where she could use the washing machine and dryer.

The farmworkers called Old Man Napoli, Don Pito, because he never stopped whistling. Don Pito was a first-generation Italian immigrant who settled in South Jersey. He was a brawny, big chested man with dark, leathery skin who never lost his accent. His strength and vigor betrayed his sixty-something age.

Don Pito had known Ramonita ever since she was a little girl. To Don Pito, Little Ramona was like a prodigal daughter whom he waited for to return every season. Don Pito and Yolanda could have only one child, a boy, Vincent. It was God's will, they would say. Vincent left the farm for Penn, became a lawyer, quit, got his PhD in Hebrew studies at Dropsie, moved to Bleeker Street, and got a job as a librarian in New York City. He was a disappointment. Don Pito never spoke much about him but Yolanda was still proud and bragged to everybody about how many languages Vinnie could speak and always sent his lover, Nick, anisette laced pizzelles on holidays.

One Saturday, Don Pito’s migrant workers were coming in from the fields. The young men were talking about their Saturday night American girls in curlers. Girls who had grown fat and wide in their hips after their husbands or boyfriends had left them for the Cowtown Rodeo or the shipyards of Chester. Ramonita was taking homemade zucchini bread, tangerines, and water in plastic milk cartons to the workers in the tomato fields.

It was a ritual toward the end of the day for Don Pito to sit down with his workers and talk. He had pride in their labor and was not offended by the calloused hand. It reminded him of his peasant upbringing in Italy.

Ramonita was late today because Don Pito’s wife, Yolanda, was having troubles. Yolanda’s doctor had changed her medicine for the pinched nerve in her neck and she was suffering. Ramonita did what she could for the old lady between gathering her bundles for the workers and cooking supper. Ramonita told the old lady she would be back right away. She turned down the stove burners to low and took the bundle outside and laid it across her pony tied to the rod iron porch gait.

Ramonita mounted the pony. It was a hot, cloudless day. Ramonita intercepted the workers returning to the compound. They made fun of her being late but didn’t seem to mind. Don Pito grabbed the leather tether and led the pony while Ramonita rode. Don Pito had never led the Pony before while Ramonita rode. She hoped he wasn’t angry with her for being late because he knew Yolanda was suffering and Ramonita did not want Don Pito to ignore Yolanda’s pain.

Ramonita let Don Pito lead the animal and thought it a bit silly for him to do so, especially because she still had work to do back at the big house where Don Pito’s wife was waiting for her. She thought of the greasy pan in the sink and her fried zucchini and pork in the oven. She knew Don Pito liked the skin of the pig a little burnt, but she didn’t want it to cook too long because the meat would lose its juice.

They lagged behind the group, picking up dropped or forgotten tools, aprons and random baskets that Ramonita stacked behind the pony's mane. They laughed and joked, and Ramonita feigned agitation with the old man as the stack of baskets got higher and higher hiding Ramonita behind them. He was not angry with her, and Ramonita felt that the old man was happy to see her. Ramonita pulled the stack of baskets closer to her body, pulling her dress up to a bundle below her hips into a mound in her crotch; the hard wooden binding of the basket's bottom rim pressing and pinching against the inside of her thighs made her adjust her seating to the gait of the unhobbled pony.

Back and forth, back and forth, up and back, the animal paced occasionally kicking a stone or moving its legs sideways to avoid a low spot in the cart road. Ramonita balanced herself and the baskets and held on to the pony with the strength of her legs pressing them to the pony’s sides. When they got to the woodshed before the main road to the house, Don Pito stopped whistling and lifted the baskets off the pony. His face was redder than it had been, and his eyes were watery and squinty. The workers went ahead. Ramonita swung her brown leg across the pony’s mane and slid off to help him. She followed him behind the woodshed that set between his tomato field and a windbreak row of thick arborvitae. They were alone.

As Don Pito stacked the empty baskets in the woodshed, Ramonita sat down on the grassy rise next to the arborvitae. "Be careful of the bees, Popi," Ramonita said. She had been stung by some yellow jackets that had built a nest under the old woodshed. She pulled her knees up to her chest but made no attempt to hide her white fluffy drawers and thighs. Don Pito came out of the woodshed, beads of sweat drifting down his face. "We should keep that door open for a breeze," he said. "Then the bees go away."

“OK, Popi, come sit an’ rest,” Ramonita said worried about the old man’s deep red face and the heat. She didn’t want him to have a stroke. She needed Don Pito to help Yolanda tonight. He stopped and looked at Ramonita. Ramonita had seen the look before some twenty years before when Don Lilo had first taken her between the two mountains one afternoon walking home from the river to her parents' home in Naranjito. She was only fifteen then and had not had her quinceañera because her mother could not afford a white dress. She did not move to hide herself because to do so would betray a confidence.

She had made a decision and told herself that she would live with it. It was God's will. That was enough to atone for her pleasure in being wanted. No one deserved her more than Don Pito. If there were a betrayal, it would remain unspoken.

Don Pito lifted her and pulled her toward him. The sweat on their arms slid together and she felt his rough skin mingle on her smooth olive skin. The pony had lathered. The inside of Ra-monita’s legs was wet from the white foamy lather. It was a sign she thought. Go slow Popi, Ramonita thought. Enjoy it for now because you will not sleep well tonight. Your sin will keep you awake. Yolanda suffers at home for you.

Ramonita could not speak. Don Pito undid the first button on her dress. She took his hand and removed it because she knew the knuckles of his old fingers pained him. Don Pito turned, and she grabbed his arm and gently pushed him back. She began to unbutton her dress. When she got to the last button just above her waist, she noticed one of Don Pito’s workers come around the arborvitae hedge. Don Pito did not notice. The worker did not look their way but veered left taking the long way back to workers’ houses.

Don Pito put his hand behind her knees and back and lifted her. Ramonita felt for the side of her dress to pull it closed. The old man’s movements were not gentle like a young man’s. She heard the bones of knees crack as he bent. He set her on the ground. He stared down on her and opened her dress exposing her brown breasts. She nudged upward and forward with her shoulder blades so that he could more easily kiss her breasts. Never taking his eyes from her eyes, he lifted her thin cotton dress upward from her knees and pulled her loose underwear to the side. He took care not to put his aged weight too heavily on her legs. He pushed her leg to the side with his left leg kicking up dust with his boot. He undid his thick leathery belt and loose-fitting Dickies. She turned her head to the side not to see his eyes for she did not want to see his embarrassment if he could not find his strength. Ramonita gently lifted her hips to brace herself and search for footing with her heals in the sandy soil. A tear streamed down Ramonita’s face, and she said a silent prayer to ask God to give Don Pito the strength to finish and manliness to forgive himself. She wondered how she would forgive herself if Don Pito failed or if she could not atone for all he had done for her and her children. She quickly tried to wipe the tear away before he saw it. Don Pito stopped and tried to pull away from her.

“Stay,” Ramonita said and nodded to Don Pito, “Stay,” as her hand snapped down to grab him before he had left her completely.

“Stay, Popi,” she said and caressed his old leathery face.

She managed to slide her fluffy panties down without moving his bulky frame. She paced him to the gait of the unhobbled pony. Don Pito closed his eyes and for a moment was young and strong. She lifted up to kiss his graying chest and then looked beneath him, under his aging belly and dirty shirt, to make sure she had not distracted him. Don Pito buried his face in her neck and took a deep breath through his nose. She gently gave a little budge. He was with her now, with her in all of his fullness, and he felt the blazing sun on his back through his shirt. When Don Pito had finished, she pushed her hips into him. She did not want to lose him even though he was losing her.

“Bueno, Popi. Suave,” Ramonita said caressing the old man’s hair and kissing him fully on his dry lips.

Afterward, Don Pito brushed the sand off Ramonita’s back and told her he was sorry that he had made her pretty dress dirty. She gently touched his bristly face. It wasn’t as red as it was before. Ramonita was careful mounting the pony that had been waiting patiently for her. Sensing the moment, it had extended its phallus. Ramonita lifted up and reached back with both bare feet and clutched the pony’s phallus.

“No. No. Don’ do that,” Don Pito said smiling. “You make him angry.”

“He angry, Popi. Celloso. You almos’ as big as him.”

Don Pito handed Ramonita her sandals that she had left on the ground. Without taking them, with an act of strength and pride, she pulled the reins hard to the right, she kicked the little pony hard in its side with her bare heel and galloped passed Don Pito, the pony’s phallus swinging like a thick, knotted cord. She rode back to the big house to unload the untouched fruit and to message Vicks Vapor Rub on Yolanda’s back and neck.

Don Pito returned to the house, hosed off Ramonita's sandals and set them by the screen door next to his work boots by the rod iron railing. He thought he might rub the pony down because he was lathered but it was Ramonita’s pony. She had always cared for it.

The following year, just after the last frost, Don Pito, with a little persuasion from his wife, paid Ramonita’s airfare back to Puerto Rico. Ramonita embraced Don Pito's wife and was forgiven. Marisol was born two weeks later and never would know her father who died of a heart attack just before the harvest. And even though she would know not her father, Marisol would know many others who would try to be.

Ramonita called Don Pito twice after she returned to Puerto Rico. The first time, when she arrived to let him know she was OK. The second time, months later, she had left a message on his answering machine asking him if he wanted her to return. A dream had prompted her to make the call. She had had a dark premonition of five full moons crossing a cloudy night sky. It was just a dream but when she awoke, the light of the moon had invaded her bedroom. She did not like the moon. She felt that it drew away her strength and claimed it gave her a headache.

Two days later, her neighbor who had a telephone, came to her door to tell her she had a phone call. It was Don Pito’s wife. Don Pito’s wife spoke to Ramonita respectfully and with dignity. She delicately told her that she had heard her message and that she was not the cause of her sorrow. She spoke more like a mother. She told Ramonita that Don Pito had had a heart attack but that it was not Ramonita’s fault. Don Pito had got into an argument with one of his tenants.

He went quickly, she said. He did not suffer. She asked Ramonita not to come to the funeral because it would cause problems with the family but that later, she could come and to bring the baby to see her but not to wait too long because she was going to sell the farm and move to New York to live with her son Vincent. Yolanda warned her not to wait too long because she was going to die soon.

4cargarage

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