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Galen Green
msmith2210@aol.com
&
mythoklast@mailstation.com
(voicemail box: 816-807-4957)

Wednesday
October 17, 2007
(the late Arthur Miller's
92nd birthday)

Dear Shannon (& Co.),

I forgot to congratulate you in my opening installment on getting your doctorate. How typically thoughtless of me! Anyway: CONGRATULATIONS!!! I e-mailed the first installment of my 1st grade reminiscences to you this morning. I hope you found them helpful; I did. And then, to my utter delight, when I arrived home from work this evening, I found your highly illuminating response. I so very much appreciate your using up your last "handful of brain cells" (Love the imagery!) to catch me up on at least a preliminary outline of what you've been doing for the past 40 years. Again: congratulations! I'm so proud just to know you! (Seriously!)

I feel terrible about leaving the wonderful, radiant Christine Roth off my list of those of us who went to the same schools all the way from K thru 12. I guess it was because I seldom if ever ran into her in high school, probably because I spent far too much of my high school career down at the far end of the music & journalism annex, either rehearsing with the madrigal or the choir or for one of our stage musicals or goofing off with the "real" journalist such as Bill Daniels or Cindy Anderson. It's particularly ironic because Christine was always so gracious toward me in grade school -- so friendly and accepting. If you get a chance to share my 1st installment with her, Shannon, I hope you'll include this lame excuse.

I agree that it could be a hoot to reconnect with Steve & Chris sometime in the next few months -- on line at least. Do you have an e-mail address for either of them? I had Steve's but lost it when my system crashed a couple of years ago. It would probably be better if you were the one to make initial contact, but I'll be more than happy to contribute with fair balance to any conversation that gets going. I have fond memories of both of them during our early classroom and playground days together.

Jumping to the end of your very welcome letter: it sounds as though you and I are philosophically on the same page with regard to the intense significance of getting written down (and/or otherwise recorded) for coming generations as much as possible of who we were, of what life has taught us that might come in handy for those wise enough to mark our words, and what this world was really like during the brief time that were passing through it. When Bill Clinton was on Letterman to plug his autobiography a few years back, he emphasized his belief that everybody should at least try to budget some portion of their time and energy to telling the story of their own life and times as they experienced it. Sadly, as you suggest, only a small percentage of those with the literacy and intellect to do so are ever going to make it a priority. I wish that my parents had.

Even though I was merely adopted at birth by these Green-McCall people, every credible concrete detail I've been able to sleuth out concerning the reality of their time on earth has proven helpful to me in understanding me. (If you scroll all the way to the earliest page of my Toolmaker's Other Son blog, you can see a picture I took with my cell phone camera in the Richmond, KS cemetery of my great-grandfather's gravestone (1830-1900). He served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature as a young man, before emigrating to Kansas, evidently in that 1854-1864 Bleeding Kansas era covered in your dissertation. Last summer, before briefly revisiting the formerly bleeding counties of Franklin & Miami, I reread the Jane Smiley Lidie Newton novel I've recommended in my blog's random reading list. It's available as an audio book through ILL, if (like me) you spend more time driving or working in the kitchen than actually sitting down with eyes & hands free to read. (Audio books have saved my life!)

Before I forget to mention it: I recently ran across a copy of Monitor On Psychology (Sept. '07 edition) which someone had left in what I call the "recycled tract rack" at the Leawood Pioneer Branch library. At the risk of telling you something you probably already know: the cover story, on pp. 38-55, is entitled "Serving Those Who Serve." I mention this only because of what you've told me thus far about what you do as a psychotherapist with soldiers returning home. It sounds as though you've had a fascinating career -- and are continuing to do so. I'd love to hear as much about it sometime as you'd care to share. Whatever you're comfortable with.

Before I drift off into a few more reminiscences from the mid-1950, I wanted to express my curiosity about the title of your doctoral dissertation. It's an absolutely captivating title: Resilience Revisited, A Portrait of Resilience as Expressed Through the Experiences of Kansas Territorial Settlers, 1854 -- 1864. Did I say it right? Is it available on line? How many copies of a KU dissertation are published the first time around nowadays? I'm honestly totally in the dark on such matters.

I've already mentioned my mother's father's parents (1830-1900). On the Green side of things, Harry's parents Ira (1857-1946) & Etta (1861-1958) appear to have both been born somewhere in Pennsylvania and tried farming with some other family members north of Fairfield, Iowa, before deciding to try farming in Kansas, beginning in the 1890's. It's extremely difficult to sort out many reliable historical details with either the Greens or the McCalls. Anyway, what little my father was able to tell me (his being their youngest, born when Etta was nearly 50!) would indicate that Etta & Ira Green were about as hard working and luckless as any of the characters in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. As socially embarrassing as their story is/was to both Harry and me, it was/is philosophically inspiring to us both (if I may presume to speak for the dead). If rule #1 in life is, as Paul McCartney has stated in several published interviews, to NEVER GIVE UP, NO MATTER WHAT, then my parents' parents stand as shining embodiments of that principle. So, you can see why I might have more than a passing interest in your dissertation.

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If The Toolmaker's Other Son were to include an entire chapter on my years as a pupil at Fairmount Elementary School in Wichita in the middle of the 20th century, it might need to open with some visual imagery, some sort of physical description of the place itself:

Fairmount Elementary School, as I recall, before it was demolished to make way for a small fashionably modern Methodist Church, sometime during the many years I was away at the Culture Wars, sat 20 or 30 feet off the street on the northwest corner of the intersection of 14th Street & Lorraine. It was, if I recall correctly (and I'd love to have a photograph, if you know where I could lay my hands on one), a two-story red brick building, probably constructed in the 1920's, judging from the architecture, the plumbing and the age of the Fairmount College neighborhood. For those familiar with the Kansas City Missouri School District, it might be helpful to know that the handsome old edifice which housed my earliest public educational experiences was built in the style of Swinney Elementary just west of the Plaza or Ladd Elementary at 36th & Benton Blvd. As of this writing, urban America is still strewn with hundreds of such relics.

When I was a child, it gave me a headache to hear some crusty old geezer such as I myself am today say that the school he himself attended as a child held "nothing but pleasant memories" for him (or her, as the case may be). Any such tendencies toward "nostalgia" on the part of the oldsters around me back then always struck me as being symptomatic of some disgusting character flaw. And perhaps it is; but here I am, going all dreamy-eyed over an otherwise ordinary two-story red brick building.

Truth to tell: I felt a sense of awe toward that sturdy old fortress of learning and socialization even before my first day in kindergarten inside its nurturing walls; although, admittedly, my sense of awe was itself largely the product of socialization I'd fed upon at our family's supper table ever since I'd been old enough to sit up in my highchair. I can remember riding in the back seat our family car past the school I would one day attend and feeling the stirrings of a hundred fantasies of what "school" would be like.

As is inevitably the case with the gulf between all human fantasies of anticipation and the realities of what follows, there were, in the case of experiences at Fairmount Elementary School, a few stark contrasts. Probably the most significant of these involved my false expectation that school was going to be difficult, which was a direct result of my having a foster sister named Lois Aiken who'd come to live with us when she was 15 and I was 4. The year you and I, Shannon, began kindergarten, Lois began her sophomore year at East High School. In retrospect, I'm guessing that school was "hard" for Lois only because she was an unusually bright young lady, bent on a career in nursing, which meant taking a lot of challenging courses and making excellent grades. (She not only became an RN, but eventually earned masters degrees in both Nursing and Education.)

Lois and her East High friends warned me that even though kindergarten wasn't really school, but only a place where we'd spend our half days (Remember half days?) learning to sit quietly and listen to the teacher, to line up for restroom breaks or to go out for and return from recess, to listen up when we heard any teacher blow her police whistle, to take turns, to share, to play nice, to unroll our little woven rugs purchased at Orr's Bookstore when it was nap time (obviously invented for the kindergarten teacher's mental health), and to stretch out on our nap rugs quietly and pretend to be taking a nap even if we weren't at all sleepy, etc., etc. . . . that even though kindergarten was all fun and games, 1st grade was going to be another kettle of fish entirely, one which would require every ounce of blood, sweat and smarts that an unworthy little puke like myself could summon.

As a consequence of this obnoxious distortion of the facts, I provided my one and only incorrect answer on the little "intake" exam Miss Robertson administered to us orally sometime during the first week of our 9 months together in her 1st grade class. Do you remember that little "test," Shannon? The questions she was asking us to answer as she strolled amongst us where we were sitting up straight and attentive at our tiny 4-child wooden tables, were so incredibly easy that I kept wondering to myself: "What's the catch? When does this get hard? Am I missing something here?"

Remember? There'd be a picture of 3 balls of different colors, and Miss Robertson would tell us to "circle the red ball." No problem. I kept thinking: "If school is this easy, maybe they'll just let me move on to high school with Lois."

Then came the question that tripped me up. On the paper in front of us were the caricatured drawings of two ladies. One was very young and pretty like, let's say, Dale Evans. The other was older and noticeably homely like, let's say, Eleanor Roosevelt . . . or like my adoptive mother Margaret . . . or like Miss Robertson herself. Miss Robertson then asked us to "circle the picture of the pretty lady."

Well, as you, of all people, know, Shannon, I did know the meaning of "pretty" back then. But I'd also been raised to spare people's feelings, as I'm sure you yourself had been. Fat people, homely people, poor people, crippled people -- all those for whom we now have generally agreed-upon euphemistic adjectival phrases -- you and I had been trained to show a special kindness to. "So," I thought to myself, "this must be the trick question I'd been warned about." So I circled the caricature of Eleanor Roosevelt. Which is why I ended up with a 98 instead of a 100 on the very first written exam of my academic career.

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Do you remember the day we sat in a circle and played that little learning game commonly known as "Telephone?" Miss Robertson whispered to the child sitting to her immediate left: "I have a new dress." As I recall, there were only perhaps twenty or so boys & girls present in our classroom that day, seated there in our circle of tiny wooden chairs. I was, therefore, perhaps the eleventh child to have something like "my pet turtle got away" whispered in my ear, which I dutifully whispered into the ear of the child to my left. When something like "my dad's car is orange" was finally whispered into an amused Miss Robertson's right ear, she smiled and explained to us what her original message had been -- and what we should all learn from this little game, concerning the unreliability of whispered gossip. Or words to that effect. Perhaps I remember this little life lesson so stubbornly vividly because of the number of times I've had my life wrecked (and I'm actually understating the case here) by the reckless gossip of folks who were old enough to know better -- some of them in (obviously undeserved) positions of high authority.

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Before I break here again for a few more days, Shannon, I thought I'd very quickly mention a handful of moments from when you & I & Christine & Steve & Ellis were 5 & 6 & 7 together, there in that (relative) Garden of Eden.

Do you remember when we all tied on our regulation arts & crafts aprons (purchased at Orr's Bookstore?), spread out old newspapers on our little 4-pupil wooden tables and gleefully painted empty (clean) peanut butter jars with flowers to be presented as gifts to our mothers? My flowers were red with yellow centers. That's easy for to remember since Margaret kept buttons in that jar right up to the day she died. Nowadays, what sticks in my mind is the fact that we were 1st graders using enamel paint which must have contained toxic levels of lead. Right?

And do you happen to remember that day our class came back from lunch or recess or whatever and the cloakroom along the west wall of our classroom betrayed the unmistakable odor of poop? While someone went to fetch Mr. Gibbs, the custodian (right out of central casting), Miss Robertson passed amongst us ever so discreetly, in essence sniffing in the direction of each of our bottoms. The tragic culprit turned out to be an unusually diminutive little fellow whose name I forget. More than a half century later, I'm finally figuring out that his slight size probably meant that his family had, for whatever reason, decided to lie about his age so that he could begin his schooling in the 1st grade instead of in kindergarten. If I'm not mistaken, the next time I saw him, he was doing recess out on the playground with the kindergarteners. I've often wondered about how such a dramatic early humiliation may have impacted his later development.

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And finally for now -- but not finally finally -- I'm curious about your own reminiscences from that Age of (relative) Innocence. What do you remember about what they called "Fun Night" at Fairmount Elementary? I can recall my family's attending Fun Night only 2 or 3 years. Will try to find time to say more about it later.

And what about Miss Robertson's classroom itself? Didn't it have rather high windows along the south wall, with the sills low enough to the floor that we little folk could lean against them and look out? Look, Shannon, look! There's Miss Robertson's ancient (but gently driven) Band-Aid-colored Hudson, parked on the other side of 14th Street, along Lorraine, elegantly conspicuous, there in line with the other teachers' cars of more recent manufacture. And look! There we are with our classmates, leaning on the windowsill, looking out at it all.


Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen