what to do on your birthday

I never know what to do with these marquee birthdays. I spent my twenty-first birthday in the bedroom I grew up in, drinking tequila and looking at a book of Bonnard paintings. I spent my thirtieth riding around the Olympic peninsula with Cathy Dowd, watching it rain and listening to the scrape of a busted windshield wiper and Bruce Springsteen on the 8-track. I can't remember what I was doing for my fortieth, but I was in Ithaca. My fiftieth, sixtieth, and now sixty-fifth have been made much more celebratory, because of Laine, who has a sense of occasion. Still, I don't know what to do with the idea of these supposed milestones.

So on the 14th, I decided to stay off social media. I finished a terrible book that morning, then did what I told myself I was going to do. I read my first two journals. These books are a combination of workbooks (I was writing a lot, a lot of poetry) and diary. They cover from early in 1973, probably February to maybe December 1976. It's hard to tell. I was not very consistent about dating the entries. Partly that was deliberate. The younger me thought dating entires was pretentious. I have no idea why I thought that, but I wrote it down. But I suspect that I didn't date things because I often wasn't exactly sure what day it was. And because I wasn't very systematic.

I was high a lot through 1973 and 1974. I made some of the most important friendships of my life in these years. At the same time there are names that I barely remember and some I don't remember at all. The phone numbers are usually only seven digits long,

I had horrible handwriting. It gets better and I begin to print occasionally starting in 1974, but at the start? Nearly completely illegible. For all the idea of a journal being a private place to record thoughts, these early diaries are exercises in misdirection and obfuscation, as though I wasn't able to say things clearly even to myself.

Now I have very good handwriting. I am a bit more systematic than that young woman. Maybe I'm marginally better at writing, at least to myself, what actually going on rather than some allusive opacities. But I am still not good about talking about my feelings. I am still likely not to be all that direct where emotions are concerned, though so much better than then.

It amazes me how busy I was, reading, writing, trying out a million different things, a dozen different selves.

I wrote a friend from that time about the journals, telling her that I still had the journals, my first good cooking knife, my copy of Borge's Labyrinths, and a Melitta filter holder. I should have added that I still have that woman just past girlhood too.

coaching in El Cerrito

For about a month I was a slightly shell-shocked unemployed person. Then I started being an unemployed person who wanted to have something to do. So I volunteered with the WriterCoach program. I've worked with them before, 2011- 2013 or thereabouts. The program is in schools in Albany, in El Cerrito, and in Berkeley. It all started in Berkeley, with a bunch of parents. The idea is to support students by coaching them, not by being assistant teachers, but by helping them get their ideas on the page, by listening to them about their challenges in school and out. It is the opposite of copyediting or correcting student work. The whole goal is to build a relationship with the student that allows them to open up and write more easily (or write at all).

I like doing it a lot. I liked doing it back a few years ago and was happy to be able to volunteer again.

Of course there was a two day training, which was sort of fun and sort of boring, but had a remarkably weird guy there who is going to coaching in some poor Berkeley school. He took off his shoes. He wiped his neck with the weak tea in his water bottle. He interrupted a lot. I was sitting next to him and he managed to take of 2/3 of the table, an unhappy marriage of manspreading and girl training. Somehow it's always easier to shrink back than push back.

At any rate, I coached for the first time today. I'm a sort of substitute because I joined late. I had two students today M and S. I'll probably keep working with M, but S's regular coach will probably be back next week. They are both great young men, but very different. I coached S second, but I'm going to talk about him first.

But before that, let me talk about the context. El Cerrito High School is a lot like this part of California. From their website: "[Our] student body is diverse, including 28% African Americans, 27% Latino, 21% Caucasians, and 24% Asian. Approximately 20% of our students are Limited English Proficient and 13% are designated as Gifted and Talented. Approximately 11% of our students qualify for Special Education services and 50% of our students qualify for the free/reduced lunch program."

So a lot of minority students and a lot of poor students. It's a big school, about 1,200 students. The class we're working with is a ninth grade class, so this is these students' first year in high school. The classroom is packed with desks, packed with students. And most of the students are POC.

Most of the WriterCoach folks are white. In our group of about fifteen coaches, there are two people of color, me and another woman, who is also African American.  This has been true for every group of coaches that I've worked with, majority white, maybe a couple of Asians, maybe a couple of African Americans, rarely any Latin@ or Pacific Islanders. Most of the coaches are of retirement age, though there is a sprinkling of younger people.

All the coaches come to the room where we're going to work about the time that classes are about to change. We get our students' folders and wait to walk up to the classroom together to collect our students. We walked up to a chaotic classroom (each of them has been) full of students. Some are chatting, some are sort of paying attention to the teacher, a young African American woman, some are just hanging out. We stand along the walls until all the coaches are in the room. The each coach introduces her/himself and calls out their students' names. We tell them which one we're working with first, which second. The students stand up and then we all walk back to the place where we're coaching.

S, my second student, is one of the easy ones. He came in with a ton of ideas about the assignment. He grabs his pencil and starts writing, but the lead is down to a nubbin, so I give him my pen, and he's off to the races writing about healthy eating being a right and what that means. (The class had just watched Food Inc.) Every so often he stops and we talk about what he's written. He asks me about the differences between they're, their, and there. Then he goes back to writing and I make notes on the coaching sheet that he'll take off with him. S is a big, confident boy. On the way to the coaching room, he made a deprecating comment about not being a writing person like his mom.  I asked him what that meant and he laughed and said someone who writes a lot, so maybe his mom is a blogger or something.

He may not feel like a writer, but he has the sureness and easy fluency of someone who knows that he can put his ideas down on paper, even if he gets a cramp in one hand from writing a couple of paragraphs.

M is not like that. He's a little guy, maybe a couple of inches taller than I am. He slouches and doesn't always look directly at me.

Before we headed up to to classroom, the site coordinator came up to me to tell me about M. She had coached him last week. He didn't have his assignment. He didn't do anything. She says something about him, "not having any light in his eyes."

When we're walking back to the classroom I ask him whether he likes this school. He says he's new here, hasn't been there very long.  I ask where he's coming from and he says he's been in a lot of schools.  He says he likes the fact that his friends are at El Cerrito High. He doesn't like the police there, who apparently stop and harass the students. When we get to the coaching room, he doesn't have anything ready for the assignment, so I ask him to read the prompt. He reads ok, but when asked what the prompts means, it's clear that he doesn't quite understand what he's read, so we talk about it. We break the sentences down in smaller pieces. I wait for him. I don't push. By the end of the 30 minutes, he's got about five sentences. There are two completely different essays here. One is a reasonable response to the prompt (food is a right), but the other is a response to the movie Food Inc, itself. It really bothered him to see the cows and chickens slaughtered. That was the thing that stuck with him, not healthy eating, not the way that big corporations control what we eat, but the suffering of the animals. He talked about how they would do that to humans if the tables were turned and this clearly bothered him. (He's not a vegetarian.)

I tell him that he's got two different essays and that if he has the time, he should develop them both because his reactions were what the teacher wanted to read about and that including the emotional reaction as well as the thing asked for is fine. I gave him the notes I had been taking and told him that they were his to work with.

So here's this emotionally sensitive boy that the site coordinator, who is a nice woman who cares about these students, said had no light. Afterwards she said she was happy that I had gotten him to write something. She meant it.

I was angry about this earlier today, but now I'm sad because I don't know what it takes for people to see the students they work with clearly if they're not the easy ones, if they're not Ss. How do we keep out that hairline of pity or lowered expectations? I wish there were more POC in the coaching group.  I wish we all weren't so old and sure that our understanding of the world is what we should be sharing with our students. (I overheard a number of coaches telling the students about the evil of commercial food production.) I wish that M wasn't so drawn up against the world, but I'm glad I get to work with him.