Windows

I look out the window of our boutique hotel in Berkeley, across the commons to the windows of a U.C. Berkeley dormitory. Forty years ago, I walked past the front door of this same dormitory on my way to classes. I didn’t think about windows, I thought about doors. Behind the doors of that dorm I envisioned students plugged into dorm rooms like bees in a hive -- tightly packed, indistinguishable from each other, throbbing with activity. My dorm was WWII-era temporary housing on top of a hill -- smaller, cheaper, but rooms with a view of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco.

Tonight I see the students’ world through windows. A girl paces on a terrace, talking on her cell phone. Below, a boy skateboards alone at dusk, as students stroll in twos and threes toward the back entrance of the building carrying cartons of food, but no books. I see lights in the windows above them. It’s early in the academic year, and unseasonably hot. But I’m not here to wonder at a new crop of students. I’m here to wonder at the world I used to live in and how it’s changed.

Even though renovation excuses the absence of coziness in the Bear’s Lair, my personal landmarks are relatively unchanged – Wheeler Hall, still has no air conditioning and the hard stone staircases that took your breath away when you climbed to reach your classroom and counted it a privilege.

Privilege is the window I looked through this evening from our perch at Chez Panisse in North Berkeley. “Have you been here before?” the waiter asks? Not even in my dreams 40 years ago. Then, I didn’t attend to the larger community that surrounds the University. Now, the classroom experience only makes sense within the context of the larger community.

Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a particular benefit, advantage or favor. I was given the right to an education. Over the years, I have taken time to gaze through many windows: from my ESL classroom in Germany, across the square to a gargoyle’s gothic posture on a cathedral spire high above the streets of Ulm; from a Left Bank pensione in Paris across the boulevard to an apartment window where young Parisians entertained friends in an elegant dining room – taking time to look out your window and appreciate other worlds, past, present or yet to come, with some measure of understanding is a benefit of education.

“Do the students look different to you,” a Venezuelan woman at our hotel asks me? Yes and no. Behind the doors, I imagine they are different in their study habits, less interested in changing the world than making their way in it. Through the windows, they look not much different, reaching for connection, for recreation, for respite from dorm food.

Those were good years. I would not go back.

Learning to Learn

This essay has been published on the AARP website.

Home ownership has always been the traditional American dream, dating back to the early settlers whose first actions were to form community and build shelter. Creating space where they were free to pursue their own endeavors fueled westward and immigration movements. Although I cherish the home that I own, my American dream is different. My dream was lit in my heart by my Kansas-born grandmother.

Opal Nellie Wolff left home at 16 to become a dancer in New York. A widow in her twenties with a young child to support she established a dance studio in Oregon, weathered depression and war, and fought poverty much of her life.

In her tiny cottage in Northern California she entertained me with stories of her life in New York, but always ended them with a caution. “The one thing I regret,” she said, “is that I did not get my education. There is so much to know in life. Promise me that no matter what you do, you will get your education.”

I grew up in the shadow of Stanford University and attended school with children whose parents were professors and founders of tech companies. It was assumed that they would go to college, but no one had that expectation of me, except Nana. When I told my father I planned to go to college, he told said, “That will ruin you for being a wife and a mother.” Then he got me a summer job in his office and helped me open a savings account. If I were going to college, I would need to pay for it on my own.

Two things made my days at U.C. Berkeley valuable. I realized that I was buying a degree, so I had to make the most of my time, but the thrill was getting an education. I didn’t know what I would do with my education, but that didn’t matter.

In college or university, you learn how to learn. Life-long learning helps you build on experience, figure things out for yourself and appreciate every stage of life. I have used everything I learned in my career in communications and my multiple roles as wife, mother, volunteer and grandmother.

The American part of this dream is that, despite dire headlines, education is available to all. A house can be repossessed but no one can take away your education. Nana told me that.

Brainy Groveland

Early in the school year I sat side by side with a third-grade boy in an empty grade school classroom in our town. He stumbled over simple words in a chapter book and could not make sense of the narrative.
I saw him again last week. It was a different story. He handed me his chapter book, Nate the Great Stalks Stupidweed.
“What does “stalk” mean?” I asked him.
He smiled broadly, got a stealthy look on his face and mimed crawling through brush on his belly.
“It’s when you sneak around and spy on someone,” he said gleefully. I stalked my sister. I snuck up and watched her send a text message on her phone.
Then he began to read with confidence and comprehension. When he finished he looked up at me with wide eyes and said,
“I’m getting better at this!”
“Well yes you are,” I said. I pulled out the paper that listed all the books he’d read during the school year. He counted them -- twenty-three.
“My sister doesn’t believe me when I tell her I’ve read a lot of books,” he said. “But I have!”
“Would you like me to write her a note and tell her how many books you’ve read?” I asked? He thought that was a great idea.
“Dear sis,” I wrote, “your brother has read 23 books this year.” And I signed the note. He went back to class, his note stuffed in his pocket and the title of the next book he wanted to read in his head.
Steve and Kathy Ryan are the sponsors of Brainy Groveland, a reading incentive program in our town modeled after many other reading programs across the nation. The children get 1:1 time with mentors (over 30 volunteers), a dollar now for each book read (two dollars, if it’s over 120 pages) and a matching amount of money in a lump sum at the end of the school year. Programs like these are reported to be successful.
If you have a story about reading with a child, please share it.