It’s Monday, and sometimes I have something to say on a Monday, and other times I have nothing to say, and that is when I turn to my children and ask them what I should write about in my weekly column. My son is home from school today with what might be strep throat; if the three rapid tests I’ve administered since Saturday are correct, he doesn’t have Covid-19. I’m risking a sore throat myself right now as I sit opposite him at the table on our sun porch and watch him chew a smoked-turkey sandwich, breathing through his mouth because he’s so congested. He’s hunched over a novel assigned to his seventh-grade class, titled “The Well of Sacrifice,” about the Mayans, and is grudgingly and with a pained expression leaving small pencil annotations in the margins.
“Teddy,” I say, interrupting his unhappy reading. “Teddy, what should I write about this week?”
He glances up from “The Well of Sacrifice.”
“How dumb school is,” says he, turning back to his book and his sandwich.
“Okay,” I say, “I can run with that.”
Teddy’s book is about a noble Mayan boy named Eveningstar Macaw who runs afoul of an evil high priest named Great Skull Zero in the ninth century, in Guatemala. “Is there human sacrifice in there?” I ask. “There’s a lot of human sacrifice in it,” Teddy replies.
“How boring can a book be, when there’s a lot of human sacrifice in it?”
“It’s boring because I have to annotate it,” he says. “Annotating is garbage. Annotating is how you ruin a book.”
I can’t disagree. Annotating is garbage.
I’m not sure if I should confess to my son my own issues with reading assignments when I was his age. Probably I should keep this to myself: I was never able to read a book at all — and I mean at all, not a page — when I was required to read it for homework (or for any other obligation). I did not read anything assigned to me, whatsoever, between eighth grade and midway through my sophomore year of college. The assignment, the expectation, made the reading impossible. The pleasure was destroyed. I skimmed, at the last minute, and faked my way through book reports on Dickens and essays on Joyce, pulling out quotes and passages plucked from the skimming.
This psychological quirk persisted, despite the fact that I was already, at 12 and 13 and 14, a formidable reader. I graduated early from “Anne of Green Gables” and soon was reading my way through the literature of the First World War (Erich Maria Remarque, “A Farewell to Arms,” Ford Madox Ford), before gravely pondering as only adolescents can gravely ponder every single word in all of the works of all the Beats, from Burroughs to, by tangent, Bukowski (and perhaps it would have been better if some adult had stepped in and prevented me from reading Bukowski at that tender age, but the adults in those years were all off somewhere, out of sight, working and drinking and, on occasion, acting like the summer stock cast of a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”).
I don’t tell Teddy how delinquent I was, when I was his age, but I do tell him I sympathize.
It is a blustery day, and outside the surrounding window panes of the sun porch I can see the raindrops plinking on the glass patio table and on the wet green cushions on the patio chairs, and on the barbecue grill in its black nylon cover, and the green-and-white-striped patio umbrella that is still open even though the sun hasn’t shone in a week. It’s time to put away the patio furniture.
I’m carried away to an October morning in Mrs. Webb’s sixth-grade classroom at East Hampton Middle School. The classroom was at the back of the building, facing the Long Island Rail Road tracks, and we would Scotch-tape messages to the train conductors on the windows, and they would blast their whistle for us as they passed in a whoosh of wind and noise. The still-green branches moved wildly beyond the glass and wet leaves flew and stuck.
Mrs. Webb’s nickname was Pinkie, though no child would have dared call her that. I remember the classroom as a succession of seasons and holidays as we rolled along on the waves of the weather outside the windows: In hurricane season, a man who had been shipwrecked in the Pacific came to speak to us about survival on a life raft; there were construction-paper Santa cards at Christmas, and a single pink long-stemmed rose chosen as a gift for our teacher that lasted a remarkable number of days, never wilting, in a vase on the windowsill at Valentine’s Day. Each week, Mrs. Webb required her pupils to choose and memorize a poem from out of a thick poetry anthology — hardbound and illustrated with gloomy 1970s drawings washed in murky mustard and split-pea tones — and then take turns standing at the front of the class and reciting the poem from memory. If you were lazy, you resorted to a five-line rhyme called “I Eat My Peas With Honey,” and Mrs. Webb would sigh and roll her eyes but still check you off in the ledger in her lap.
In my school days I was something of a leader among children, just through pure boldness, but I never harnessed this power to any good end. On this rainy October day, when I was 11, I wrote a note on a scrap of paper, gave it to my neighbor, and whispered that she should pass it around, desk to desk. The note suggested that everyone should fall out of their chairs at exactly 10 minutes past 10 a.m., as a prank. I was standing before my classmates, reciting, as the seconds hand ticked closer and closer to position, and as the hand grazed 12, I crumpled to the linoleum tiles in the middle of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Afternoon on a Hill,” and my classmates followed, sliding and falling to the floor.
Mrs. Webb was angrier about this than I had anticipated.
Teddy has not inherited anything from me — no inclinations, gestures, or tastes, because neither he nor his sister is related to me by DNA, both having been adopted — but I am secretly pleased that he has an independent streak. He has always demonstrated an inclination to wander off and do his own thing. He is something of a leader among children. A couple of his bosom buddies, at nearly 13, still aren’t allowed to walk to town or cross the street alone, even at a crosswalk, but I have been letting Teddy go on wanders around the village on foot since he was 9. This autumn he’s begun riding a hand-me-down bicycle for miles (which is fine by me as long as he sticks to sidewalks and verges), and he also is turning out to be not just a nomad, but a long-distance runner.
Teddy does not want to annotate a young-adult novel about Mayan sacrifice and he does not want to draw a Mayan-inspired story in Maya glyphs that represent the sounds of the words in both symbol and syllable sounds. He wants to open the front door and run down to Main Beach and follow the shore down to Egypt Beach or Atlantic Beach, and return home by road, across Hook Pond and up Dunemere. Run, Teddy. Run, run, run, run, run.