The Corona Diaries: Day Fourteen

Among the many elements of daily life that have been lost is my Writer’s Circle at the New York Public Library, Mulberry Street branch, which I have had the honor of leading since 2016. The following is a piece about how it all got started. This one’s for Sherri Machlin, the librarian and friend who’s responsible for it all:

At the Library

I started teaching in 1998. I have worked with young and adult students, as a volunteer and paid teacher.

One of my favorite positions has been working with adults at the New York Public Library; these are my thoughts on the past year at the Mulberry Street branch:

It was the perfect job. I was a volunteer instructor for a conversational ESL group at the New York Public Library.

That was in 1994. Then I became a mother. I couldn’t do the hours. The group met in the evenings, after work. I swore I would come back.

It took a while, but in 2016, I made a concerted effort to make my way back. Libraries are in my blood; my father worked for the Queens Borough Public Library for thirty years, and my aunt worked for the 42nd Street library, as well. I have spent the last thirty years patronizing the Brooklyn Public Library and my children, when they were visiting their grandmother, lived at the Massanutten Regional Library, in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Getting back in, though, turned out not to be so easy. It seems there are a lot of people who want to volunteer for the library (thank goodness) and what seemed like a simple phone call was going to require a lot more effort. Undeterred, I persisted. A humorous moment occurred when I got a call from the volunteer division of the 42nd Street library and the woman mistook me for another Anita Bushell.

Finally, I was set up with a woman who managed adult learning for the library. It would be a data-entry position and, although, I am no administrator, I committed to it for a three-month period; however, because of scheduling conflicts, that position didn’t work out. What a gift. While looking at the volunteer needs of the branches, I found the posting for a Writer’s Circle instructor at the Mulberry Street branch.

What a joy this year has been. The workshops, which were only supposed to run from September through January, were extended into July (and will begin again in September). And when I saw that the sessions were too short, the library happily extended the time to two hours.

And the participants? They are marvelous. As one would always expect at a library in New York City, they come from all over, around the corner, and as far as India. They come with every level of writing background, having written little since school to professional writers. All are welcome, to commit to a regular writing practice and the invitation to tell their stories.

We talked about New York a lot this year and one participant mentioned the idea that, even though the city changes all the time, “New York is still here.” This served as a writing prompt for pieces that were developed over months and shared with the library at the end of the year. It was a wonderful event that brought together a group of New Yorkers, who had recently been complete strangers to each other, telling their stories in a warm and nurturing environment.

The Corona Diaries: Day Thirteen

There is nothing more satisfying than getting lost in a black-and-white Bogie-and-Bacall masterpiece such as The Big Sleep. The following is a blog post I wrote several years ago in tribute to the late Joe Stockdale, my Dramatic Theory professor at SUNY Purchase.

What's Your Problem?

Faulkner contacted Chandler who said he had no idea.

The screenwriting team for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946), writers William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, as well as director Howard Hawks, had been busy parsing the plot of the novel and wired Chandler to find out who was responsible for chauffer Owen Taylor’s murder. “Dammit I didn’t know either!” Chandler responded.

One theory posits that it simply doesn’t matter because the resulting chemistry between the films’ stars, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, was so electrifying and their brilliant back-and-forth banter so satisfying that no one cared who murdered Owen Taylor. I disagree and so would Joe.

As an undergrad I had to take a class called Dramatic Structure, with Professor Joseph Stockdale. Joe, as he quickly became known to us, was not an easy man to study with. At the almost new SUNY Purchase (this was in the early 1980s) Joe was very old school. Tall and lean with close-cropped white hair, he often barked at us and peered (or perhaps leered) at us over his eagle eyeglasses. His was a large lecture class and in order to keep track of all his students that semester, Joe assigned a seating chart. In college. For one semester, we all sat in the same seats.

Joe was the king of dramatic structure theory, assigning us Aristotle’s Poetics so we could learn how plays were assembled, using exposition, rising action, conflict, climax and denouement, or the ancient and more sophisticated version of beginning, middle and end that every story essentially contains. Plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman were assigned weekly and our job was to practice breaking down the plot line of each play, using the aforementioned linear structure. Above all, Joe taught us that there is no piece of any story, no matter how large or small, that is unimportant. Every character has a motivation and every action or word of dialogue is there for a reason.

The problem, or conflict, was always the focus of each story, whether, it was the intrusion of Blanche into the home of her brother-in-law, Stanley (A Streetcar Named Desire), or the fact that Willie is old and unstable and cannot make a sale (Death of a Salesman). In the beginning I found Joe to be oddly refreshing at oh-so-groovy Purchase; there was something rather comforting about his firm, conservative ways. Joe provided a road map for our journeys through storytelling; each step like a guide giving us water and telling us which way to turn. As difficult as Joe was, after a month of class I knew exactly what this dedicated drill sergeant wanted.

In my own story line that semester I had an exposition (college student takes class with difficult professor) and rising action (said student learns how to accept unbending ways of professor). Before I knew it, though, I had a problem: I was diagnosed with Mononucleosis and assigned to bed rest for the remainder of the semester. By some stroke of 1980s permissive genius, I was allowed to stay on campus, my argument being that I would get sicker if I was sent home to become my mother’s patient. I sent word to all my professors; the fact that I did not hear back from Joe did not bode well.

While I recuperated in my room and barely had the energy to get up and make a cup of tea, I ruminated on my problem: with each passing day of the semester I was falling farther and farther behind and I had absolutely no idea how I was going to catch up. It should tell you a lot about my personality that I was much more concerned about passing Joe’s class than my own recovery. Finally, one day in later March, I managed to sit up and have enough energy to pick up a play and read it from cover to cover. Somehow, day after day, I got the rest of the reading done and finished the assignments for Joe.

One of Joe’s strategic tactics was to let his students decide what grade it was they deserved. You would go see him, review your semester and declare that you earned a grade of ___. On a chilly, late April afternoon, I crawled into Joe’s office, ready to face my maker (here was my climax). “Joe,” I said, “this was a really hard semester. I didn’t plan on getting sick but I also did not give up on your class and eventually managed to read all the plays and finish all the assignments. I know I would’ve done better if I had been healthy but, taking all of this into account, I think I’ve earned a B minus.”

“Anita,” Joe squawked at me, “I was very angry when I heard you were sick. I thought you should’ve dropped the class.” Here it comes, I thought. The D I’ve been waiting for (forget the luxury of a B minus). “However,” Joe continued “you did do all the work I asked you to. Therefore, I am giving you a B plus for the semester.” There it was: my denouement. As I turned, stunned, to walk out the door, Joe stopped me. “And another thing. When I was in graduate school, I, too, got sick but I handed in my thesis and THEN checked myself into the infirmary.”

Like Joe, I’ve always felt that everything, whether in drama or life (hell, lets just say both) happens for a reason and Joe definitely appeared in act two of my story for a specific purpose. Joe taught me how to be a professional; Joe taught me how to show up on time. And Joe taught me that every problem in storytelling, whether it be drama, comedy or mystery, happens for a reason. Perhaps, most of all, Joe taught me that there are no excuses, even medical ones, and that everyone is up to the task of doing their best. Even me.

To get back to The Big Sleep: No one can argue that the stunning pair, Bogey and Bacall, made you forget all your problems; Joe, however, would’ve railed at Chandler for sloppy storytelling and a plot that had become the runaway train from hell. In my movie version of this story, I would cast Joe in the part of Raymond Chandler. When the team of writers, Faulkner, Leigh and Furthman, contacted him about the murder of Owen Taylor, Joe would pick up the phone, listen to their absurd request and yell into the mouthpiece, in under one minute, that “obviously Taylor was killed by…”

On the other hand, this cinema story would never work out. No one would have called Joe Stockdale about a plot complication in one of his works; Joe knew exactly what his problem was.

The Corona Diaries: Day Twelve

There was a time, not so long ago, when I stared at the sky.

Today I heard Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and I wondered about that time, when life stopped for a few minutes for contemplation of the clouds, or the azure blue world above.

I’ve tried to stare at the sky this week. Little glimpses, preferably through a magnolia or a pear blossom. Somehow it doesn’t seem right that there is so much beauty around us at a time of such suffering. Or perhaps I have it all wrong. How much worse would this be in the dead of winter? In a cold hard rain…

There was a time when I dreamed of moving my life forward. Of, say, teaching a literature class called A Year in New York at the New York Public Library, where I had even had a meeting about it. This was in October. The ideas were welcomed but, not surprisingly, there was no funding available. If I could find my own funding…

Which is how I found myself on the way to the gym one late October morning, thinking to myself, “Wow, it’s actually happening. I am taking steps to make a dream come true.” 

And then I called my dad. And he didn’t answer the phone. This is itself was not unusual, as he often answered if I called ten minutes later. When this did not happen, I called the doorman.

And that is why I began to refer to life before October 24th and life after – I have seen “Pre- and Post-Covid references recently in the paper, as well. As I made my way from the subway station to his apartment, where he had fallen and was sitting in his armchair, thanks to the custodians in his apartment building, I got a call from my husband. His father had fallen on his driveway in Florida. 

Needless to say, in the swirl of doctors, hospitals and rehabs, dreams completely evaporated. We were all simply in survival mode once more. What is the saying? “You make your plans and God laughs?”

And yet…it somehow became clear to me that, when the dust settled and everyone was getting the care they needed, there was no better time to squeeze in a little creativity here and there. After all, if not now, when?

The news gets worse every day; friends report elders are lying alone in hospitals, with no families nearby to comfort them. I’m so grateful the fathers are home and safe. The New York Times publishes an article on all the big and little losses, and how mourning is different for everyone and valid, no matter what.

And so, I go on. Listening to the music of dreams and spending a few minutes each day writing. And, quite surprisingly, I discovered I can still make A Year in New York happen, just not in the way I originally intended. Do I actually need funding to talk about the books of my home town? 

Maybe…or maybe not.

The Corona Diaries: Day Eleven

“Say sugar, you got a match?” Humphrey Bogart asks the diner waitress in The Big Sleep, while Lauren Bacall waits for him on the other end of the coin telephone.

I could not have been happier to discover that The Grand Canyon, my former Park Slope home away from home, was open for a take-out cup of coffee this afternoon. And when I walked in, who should I see but Cesar, my waiter from Clarke’s, in Brooklyn Heights, where I ate weekly when I worked at Plymouth Church School. 

The following is from an essay I’ve been working on about the New York diner.

 “I had a pastrami and fries,” the woman wearing a heavy coat in Eisenberg’s told the girl at the register. Uptown, at Burger Heaven, which closed this week, after 77 years at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 62nd Street, perhaps the culprit was Sweetgreen’s Tingly Sweet Potato Kelp Bowl but downtown, at Eisenberg’s, which has been “raising New York’s cholesterol since 1929” a pastrami and fries wasn’t threatening anyone’s lunchtime routine.

As a child growing up in 1970s Yorkville, the corner diner was part of my DNA; I grew up in one -- Gracie’s Corner, on 86th Street and First Avenue. My mother worked in the Russian typing pool at the United Nations three weeks a month during the days, and one week a month at night. Wanting to make sure my dad and I had a hot meal in case she hadn’t cooked for one of those night shift evenings, she set up an “account” at Gracie’s, where we could eat now and pay later.

For years Spyros, the manager, in that “everybody-knows-your-name” manner served me cheeseburger deluxes and Cokes. My dad always ordered lamb chops with cheesecake and coffee for dessert. And my friends loved coming to my house after school because it meant they got a free meal at Gracie’s. Because it was on the corner, there was great “people watching.” Children and their parents, owners and their dogs, and the usual Yorkville characters, were all part of the local parade. The best table, and the largest, was the one right on the corner, which gave you a view of both 86th Street and First Avenue. I recently ate at Gracie’s, which has moved to the corner of Second and 86th, having taken over the old Viand coffee shop space. As I sat in the sunny corner window, and read my paper, I watched the customers come out of another venerable Yorkville institution, Schaller & Weber. My smiling waiter asked, “You want more decaf?” “Can I get you some mustard or mayonnaise for your burger?” “Here. Let me help you,” he said to an older man who tried to maneuver his walker through the front door.

Gracie’s was just one of so many diners that fed New Yorkers when I was growing up. Burger Heaven was another one. This was the fuel stop before a shopping trip to Bloomingdale’s, two blocks away, where my mother bought my clothing and purchased fabric for sewing. Burger Heaven was also located on a corner, which was brighter and sunnier than 86th and First because the surrounding buildings were no more than four floors in height. The majority of the tables were along the window that faced 62nd Street, with its beautiful brownstones. Here I did less people watching and more fantasizing about who lived in these historic buildings and what they looked like on the inside. Burger Heaven also had a fabulous literary allusion: it served as the “office” where lawyer Mr. O’Shaughnessy met it-girl Holly Golightly regarding her “arrangement” with Sally Tomato in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

 And if you wanted to see the swells, such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her son John-John play with the salt-and-pepper shakers, you could drop by Burger Heaven’s sister, on 53rd, off Fifth, which was nestled in the shadow of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A particular feature at the 53rd Street location was the high-school-like wooden flip-up tray that was attached to each individual seat, in keeping with the diner’s sleek modernity, speed and ease of use. 

The Viand’s other location, on Madison and 78th Street, was special because it was where my father always took me on his days off from his job at the Queensborough Public Library. He would pick me up at school, around the corner, and have his coffee and cheesecake while I munched on my French fries and sipped steaming hot chocolate.

In middle school I began doing research at the Mid-Manhattan Library and discovered the Chock Full O’ Nuts on Madison and 41st. Although it was a chain and not a mom-and-pop operation, it could not have been more fun to sit at the curvy counter and order a tuna fish sandwich and a Coke.

Many a high school coffee (and French fries, of course) were consumed at Three Star, on 86th and Columbus..  Diners, or coffee shops, as they are often called in New York City, were so ubiquitous in the ‘70s that there was another one right across 86th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam. Then there was Big Nicks, where my friends and I consumed one of the many burgers – there were over thirty varieties –they were known for. A side note is that this was the era of Barry Levinson’s absolutely pitch-perfect “you-gonna-finish-that-sandwich?” Diner, about a group of high school friends in 1950s Baltimore.

One summer in high school, a friend and I auditioned for an acting class at HB Studios on Bank Street. The venerable Herbert Berghoff, for whom the school was named, was alive and well and at the helm of a hard-to-get-into class that I was surprisingly accepted into. Around the corner from HB was the down-and-out Bus Stop café, so named because of the Marilyn Monroe film of the same name, and the fact that the M11 bus concluded its Ninth Avenue run at the café corner, Hudson and Bethune. And just up Eighth Avenue was the equally marvelous LaBonbonniere, a narrow little space now made famous as an occasional setting for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

When I graduated from college and worked at Random House there was a beautiful moment when there was still a lunch counter at a drug store on Lexington and 50th, as well as the glorious Automat, with its dolphin-spouting coffee urns, on 42nd Street and Third. Fancying myself a big girl with a real job in the city, I envisioned eating at either of these establishments on a weekly basis.

For the several years I worked at Pratt Institute as a writing tutor I found myself at Mike’s, the corner diner on DeKalb and Hall. I still stop there on my way to a teaching job I currently have in Bushwick.

Years later I worked in Brooklyn Heights and treated myself, once a week, to a turkey burger deluxe at Clark’s, again on a corner, this one Henry and Clark. I would sit at the counter, have my coffee, while I waited for my order, which by this point my extended family at Clark’s -- Cesar and Miguel -- already knew. I would chat with the son of Victor and his wife, the older couple who ran Clark’s. Up until fairly recently, Victor’s wife was still answering phones and taking orders.

I will always have a soft spot for the Lexington Candy Shop, where they still have accounts for the local school kids and there’s a photo of, among others, Robert Redford in his prime, around the time of The Sting. In fact, the Candy Shop was where he grabbed a sandwich only to report back to work in the neighborhood and find his whole office “taken out” in Three Days of the Condor.  

Then there was, and thank God still is, the Waverly, on Sixth Avenue in the Village, where my husband and I began one new year speaking with Nick, the manager. “Ekberg! I call you Anita Ekberg!” he proudly proclaimed before handing us our bill.

These experiences don’t take place in chain establishments where no one knows your name. It is exactly this fact, that you may be a regular and that your order is already etched in the mind of the server, that makes the New York diner such a special place. This is where your extended family is, indeed the “bedrock of your community” as the New York Diner Map attests. 

This dandy little map, which must by now list many more diner casualties, relates the history of these working-class eateries, which are descended from the food wagons that sold sandwiches to late-shift factory-, newspaper-, and dock-workers in the late 1800s. Workers began asking for hot meals and eventually the dining car, which resembled an old railroad car and had a full-service kitchen, was born. Just like the Star Diner, in White Plains, where my husband and I ate when we were in college. As the diners evolved through the twentieth century, they developed a clean modern style that promised modernity before the advent of McDonalds. One of the reasons I have always loved diners is that they cook real food served on real dishes. Dinerware is even what I eat off at home; I have been collecting it for decades.

I now see the trajectory from late-night food wagon to Gracie’s, where my mother, an immigrant from Ukraine, made sure there was a hot meal available for my dad and I. This is a very immigrant thing, the hot meal -- no cold sandwich will do --and as I recently met a friend for my usual, a turkey burger and coffee, on a very blistery February afternoon at the Lexington Candy Shop, I was in my happy place, warm, and cozy, with a hot meal on the way.

“Give him some ham and eggs,” says The Girl, played by Veronica Lake, to the waiter.

“That’s very kind of you, sister, but I’m not hungry. A cup of coffee and a sinker will fix me up just fine,” responds masquerading hobo Joel McCrea.

This scene, from the Preston Sturges masterpiece, Sullivan’s Travels, could only take place in a diner. After all, where else would a Hollywood wannabe and a Depression-obsessed director meet?

The Corona Diaries: Day Ten

The birds are having words on Douglass Street.

This is a common occurrence, but this morning it seems they are having a bird bitch fest.

My late mother in law, Maria Prytula, gave us a magnolia tree when we bought our house and it has grown beautifully over the past 24 years. In the spring it brings forth glorious magenta buds that bloom pale pink. People stop and stare and even photograph.

One of the added benefits of the magnolia is that it is home to a host of sweet birds that arrive each spring – I call them the birds of Douglass Street – that serenade us in the morning (our bedroom faces the magnolia) and remind us of Alexander Pope’s words, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” 

This morning, though, there must have been a fight – it certainly was no conversation – between the birds. They were louder than I’ve ever heard. Were they arguing about the human condition right now? Were they fighting over food? Did one insult another? I wish I knew because I have never heard them sound that loud.

In a previous lifetime, say last month, I used to marvel that Brooklyn can sometimes be so quiet that you can hear a bird sing. It was a matter of timing; between traffic lights and usually at a certain time of the day – say 1 PM on a Thursday – where there simply wasn’t much going on with the humans. This might be the point at which you could hear the birds and marvel at the fact that you were in the city.

But this morning I welcome their cacophony. Whatever it is they are loudly tweeting about, it drowns out everything else and gives me a moment of happy respite.

The Corona Diaries: Day Nine

Snoopy is upside down; the bed is a mess. Welcome to my office. On good days, I have a desk. On bad days, I have a chair. But…I have evolved.

Years ago, I could not possibly have worked in this chaos. I’d have spent the whole morning cleaning up the room in order to work in it. But parenting and life have whipped the type-A out of me. That’s a luxury for times of plenty, not chaos. And the job has to get done, so ultimately do you want to spend your time cleaning or working? I can always clean up later. You know, kind of like cleaning up after the storm has passed…

I don’t know why, but I move around the house a lot, in terms of work space. Sometimes, I’m at the dining room table, sometime I’m on the couch, and sometimes I’m in an armchair. One thing I’ve noticed is that I really like to work from the couch because there is a loveseat perpendicularly situated next to it, which forms a corner.

I like corners. They’re cozy. They also make me feel grounded. When I taught preschool, the way the room was set up was important because research has shown that young children learn well in cozy settings with lots of divisions. This makes them feel safe. Too much space is overwhelming.

Perhaps, in this period of enforced domesticity moving around the house gives me a sense of adventure, of trying new things in different settings. It seems I am traveling around the house, hopefully preparing for the travel that will take place one day, once more, in the not-too-distant future.

The Corona Diaries: Day Eight

What is that? I wondered as I stared at the large box in the basement. A high school friend and I were visiting her aunt in suburban New Jersey and we were sent down to retrieve something from what turned out to be their chest freezer. Filled with cuts of meat and who knows what else, I was simply stunned. In my one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville we never had more than an extra roll of toilet paper hanging around.

This was the way of my city-dweller parents. We always had enough food but there was no such thing as storage. And we certainly didn’t have a pantry. Just a couple of cabinets with some canned vegetables and a jar of instant coffee. 

Of course, at the time, there were three grocery stores located within two blocks of our apartment. There was the A&P across the street, the D’Agostino, on First Avenue, and Grand Union, across 86th Street. To say nothing of the German gourmet shops, such as Schaller & Weber, and Bremen House, where my mother regularly shopped, as well.

It wasn’t until I left for college that I started to understand that distance creates a new food issue: one of transportation. If you don’t have a car and you’re hauling food on a bus, you are limited by the amount you can carry. 

When I met my future mother-in-law, Maria Prytula, I began to understand pantries, grocery shopping and food transportation as a whole other animal. Maria took this practice to another level, turning it, like so many of her activities, into an art form. She had to, living 14 miles from town. She made daily trips but it was never because there was no food. It was simply to stock up. Bread was purchased at one store, but produce at another. Seafood came from a separate market and tea – well, that was just a whole other story. Oh, did I mention she was the queen of “day old”? And all this in one town in Virginia.  

Our pantry – open shelving – is part of our kitchen and we have small jam jars and large Masons filled with sugar, flour, spices, and beans. It’s a working kitchen because my husband, God bless him, does the cooking and I do the baking. And if there is one thing that will set my husband on edge, it is a soon-to-be empty ’fridge. Panic shopping and large grocery bills are something I know a lot about. 

This has been on my mind a lot these days, as I make my daily trips to Key Food and plan in a different way than I ever have before. The lines at the Food Coop are untenable. I go to Key Food every morning when they open. I check in with the employees; ask them how they’re doing. The Miller Lite delivery man says he’s happy he’s still working.

I was looking through some old essays yesterday. I found one I had started years ago, where I wrote that food was never my thing. Did I write that? Of course, food is my thing. I love food, and nothing more than a lovely, home-cooked dinner with friends and family. But food, as it is for many, was a loaded issue when I was growing up because my mother’s family – and, as it turned out, my future mother-in-law’s family – survived Stalin’s Holodomor and subsequently World War II. Needless to say, there were no food choices when I was little. You ate what was put in front of you. End of discussion.  

Times of chaos make you think very differently than times of peace. As with everything else right now, I am thinking about food in a different way than I ever did before.

The Corona Diaries: Day Seven

“My early years as a dad involved many early mornings at the Key Food. The baby woke up early and we needed somewhere to go! During our daily visits to the store, baby in the Bjorn, we were greeted by the two managers. To this day, they greet us by name. Now that my daughter is a teen, I am not always her favorite company. But she is always happy to take a walk to the Key Food to pick up whatever we need for dinner. Those little shopping trips give us a chance to chat about this and that and maintain our connection, even when daily life is stressful. This store is more than a place to buy groceries. It is a part of our community, a place where we see our neighbors, part of the fabric of daily life in the Slope.” -- Ross Levin

It you ask Niko about the sound of her childhood, she’ll tell you it was the delivery trucks unloading in the parking lot at Key Food the grocery store that faces the back of our house. B and I started shopping at there in 1990, when we moved to the neighborhood, and we’ve never stopped.

Key Food has been there for us throughout it all – the early days of parenting, after the horror of 9/11, and many, many snowstorms. The managers, Bob and Delio, knew us so well we were on a first-name basis with them. My favorite Delio quote, as he stood and watched the masses panic-shop before a storm: “My mother was always prepared. ‘Shame on you’, “she would say, if you weren’t. What is wrong with these people who wander in at the last minute?”

What indeed? He was raised in the post-war generation when the stories were still fresh of food privation, and pantries were stocked at all times when the peace finally came. 

I remember a particularly grueling winter when Niko was a toddler and she was sick for days. I finally emerged from the house to grab some items at the store and Bob asked me, “Where have you been?” I haven’t seen you!” When I told him about being homebound with a small sick child he simply looked at me and said, “What is wrong with you? Why didn’t you call? We would have delivered.”

This is the kind of store Key Food has always been. A community grocery store that takes care of the people of Park Slope. And Gowanus. And, actually, lots of other neighborhoods. When we worked on the campaign to save Key food from demolition one of the things we discovered is that the store attracts customers from all over Brooklyn. Partly it’s the variety, partly it’s the parking, Partly it’s the fact that it is accessible to those in wheelchairs.

And then there is the music. Today, when I stopped in for eggs and milk they were playing Meat Loaf, and I was completely transported. Sometimes it’s Paul McCartney and Wings, and suddenly I’m a 12-year-old girl again. 

Key Food is not upscale. Oh, they’ve certainly done their fair share of renovating and keeping up with trends. But, at heart, Key Food is a large, old-school New York grocer that is beloved for the very fact that it isn’t Whole Foods.

One developer has come and gone, and another one is in the works. Key Food was supposed to be demolished years ago – we started working on the campaign to save it in late 2015, and here we are in early 2020 and the store, thank God, is still here to feed us, the people of Park Slope. And Gowanus. And, actually, lots of other neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

The Corona Diaries: Day Six

My motivation is waning; I just want to take a nap, even though I slept late. Am committing to finishing The Portrait of a Lady this month. It’s been amazing discovering a new old author this year; I can’t believe I never read Henry James. Always a fascinating experience, discovering where your literary holes are.

A long bath with my book, a walk to the park. The lovely woman who runs the dry cleaner and always waves at us is not there. The store is dark. It doesn’t seem possible but the city sound that beckons the start of the season – the Mister Softee song – is coming from in front of the Lincoln playground. But it’s all wrong – the man will serve ice cream cones in gloves with a mask on. Everything is wrong.

But we run into old friends, whose children went to school with ours and were part of our community during the days after 9/11. They left school then and they left school now. Everyone is home together again, but for all the wrong reasons. We stand on the street and we laugh; I feel a little better for seeing them. But the hugs and the closeness are gone. Something else that feels all wrong. The other day I thought about the Italians and the French; you cannot tell me that when this is all over they will stop hugging and kissing each other.

Daffodils, magnolias, and Bradford pear blossoms shelter us as we walk to the park. Baby Blue Bells cover the front of a brownstone. As we traverse the path behind the Great Lawn, a man sits on a rock and listens to Miles Davis. Suddenly I feel much better. Do I? Or am I lulled into a false sense of what life used to be like when you heard someone else’s music in the park? On the lawn there are great gaps between people; everyone seems to be getting with the program. This is good, and I hope we can continue to get out, as we just heard that New York state is shutting down, or “pausing,” for the foreseeable future. 

There’s been no time in my life as a New Yorker when the parks were not open; it seems inconceivable. The Botanic Garden is already closed, another harbinger of spring that we were looking so forward to.

Praying for the health of our world, our country, our friends and family, and that this will all end soon.

Corona Diaries: Day Five

In the 1980s, I remember reading speeches by Ronald Reagan, who was a master rambler. His speeches were not made up of ideas but, rather, disjointed thoughts that started in one place and splintered off into many others. 

I’ve been reading some speeches that inspire. They give me hope…

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057/

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/17/629862434/transcript-obamas-speech-at-the-2018-nelson-mandela-annual-lecture

The Corona Diaries: Day Four

There is no more work; all but one freelance gig has simply disappeared with the families who have either left town or the DOE, which has cancelled school for the foreseeable future. I can’t wait to join the 500,000 New York State recently-laid-off workers who flooded the unemployment website on Monday and crashed it. At least I won’t have to fill out those complete waste-of-time job-search logs, when I do. There are no jobs, except apparently at Amazon, which is hiring 100,000 workers to fulfill all those orders for all those people “sheltering in place”. 

In some ultra-bizarre twist of fate, I now have more time for writing than I could possibly conceive in my wildest dreams. No 42nd Street library, though, where I would have spent at least one weekday morning, lifting my eyes to the clouds on that glorious ceiling for inspiration.

The Corona Diaries: Day Three

My rounds usually include the pharmacy – have to refill that inhaler prescription, just in case – Key Food, and today, the liquor store, for some cooking sherry. The woman in front of me continues to make trips to the back of the store, ferrying three 1.75 liters of Skye vodka, and several bottles of wine to the counter. She must have a car because I can’t imagine how she is going to carry all that liquor home.

While I fill a pie crust with apples it slowly starts to dawn on me – all my beloved New York places that are closing – the coffee shops, the book stores, even the Botanic Garden. Really? Well, I suppose the desperation for nature during this beautiful spring would prevent Brooklynites from socially distancing. New York has changed so much – even the skyline of 2005 that we just saw in Mr. and Mrs. Smith the other night is no longer the same – and what keeps me grounded is my burger at Gracie’s Corner, where I’ve eaten since my family had “an account” in the 1970s, and my book habit at the Strand. How odd that in some kind of last-supper endeavor, I had just planned on visiting all the diners on my New York Diner Map – it was going to be a spring-into-summer project. I was even dialing up old friends for research: “What’s the name of the one that was on Columbus and 86th? Was it Three Brothers? Or Three Star?

Yes, the things we take for granted, until, just like that, everything has changed. And everything you do suddenly comes into question.

The Corona Diaries: Day Two

On the street the mood is strange. Life looks normal, and yet it is not. At noon, an older man with grey hair and head hung stares blankly into the distance, almost like my dog when he is about to hunt an enemy animal in the distance. 

At the drug store, the clerks are now in masks and gloves.

Key Food is peaceful and everyone is very well behaved. the lines are short, however the faces are drawn, and, dare I say it, scared? Eyes are without excitement, and some have dark circles under them.

As always, Key Food is there for us – when my children were small, during many a snowstorm, in the days after 9/11, and now. Although I don’t remember seeing the following water, paper towel, and toilet paper sign: “In an effort to satisfy as many shoppers as possible the following limits, per customer will apply…” And this, amidst plans to take down the building and build a condo. One developer has come and gone, another is in the works – the store was supposed to close years ago – and somehow, here it still is for us, the people of Park Slope. As always, I am so grateful. 

The Corona Diaries: Day One

“I could never work at home,” a teaching colleague once said to me. “I have to have a place to go.”

 For many people the idea of working from home is disconcerting. Especially if you live in small quarters, with roommates, small children or an elderly person.

I have been working mostly from home for the past two years, when my contract at the school I was teaching at was not renewed. Whereas I went from going to one workplace every day, I suddenly found myself a member of the gig economy, with four part-time jobs on my hands.

While the very fact of having this many plates to juggle – to say nothing of the rest of life’s myriad responsibilities -- was crazy-making in itself, I will say that working from home turned out to be the least of the issues. With thought and organization, this can be a time to feel safe and grounded and even, if you’re lucky, a time to discover that creativity you may have been nurturing but never had the time to develop.

Here are some thoughts on how I’ve survived the work-at-home stage (thank God this happened at the start of our early spring, at least as long as we can go out):

If you live with others, the most important thing to do is to talk to them and come up with a plan. Are you a morning person? Do you live with a night bird? Being aware of the needs of those around you will make this process much more bearable. Some people are very chatty in the morning, while others are a little dazed. It’s really important to respect different personality types under one roof.

By the same token, introverts and extroverts will have challenges surviving in close quarters because introverts need a lot of personal space and down time and extroverts like to be surrounded by people and conversation. Again, talking to your housemates about a plan and/or schedule for using communal space and getting work done will help keep the lines of communication open and assure that everyone’s needs are met.

Getting organized is key. Cleaning up and getting any work spaces ready for the long haul gives you a sense of control and a feeling that you are in charge of your space, whether it is a desk, an armchair, or a coffee table. One thing I try to avoid is working in bed. All the Feng Shui wisdom I’ve heard is that a bed is for rest, and rest only. Oh, and the bed should be made, by 10 AM, at the latest.

And on a similar note, I feel it’s very important to get dressed in the morning. No sweats or PJs after a certain hour. This helps give the day definition.

I have always found that I have to write first thing in the morning because this is when it comes most naturally to me. I live by the 500-word-per-day rule (thank you Terry Pratchett and Graham Greene) and it is easier to get these words out in the morning than later in the day, when lethargy begins to creep over me and the weight of the day, if it is not a good one, takes over.

In a previously-perfect world I was swimming twice a week; this has now turned into a short morning Pilates workout, with some free weights and yoga mixed in for good measure.

Lesson prep for the teaching and tutoring work I do comes next. This is usually mid-morning work and is often done by 11 AM, at which time I walk Mr. Milo, our crazy Carolina dog. Back from the walk, there is still about an hour to get some more work done before the all-important period of rest. This is when the phone is turned off, the house line is disconnected, and I can actually close my eyes and experience a few minutes of desperately-needed bliss.

Back to reality means doing the errands until it’s time to leave the house for tutoring sessions. Spot cleaning, a load of laundry, picking up a few things from the grocery store, and paying a few bills, take place at this time. 

By 5:30 I am done with my work day, and am able to move on to the dinner portion of the evening. After dinner, I am often found working on a sewing project or practicing the piano. Maybe even a few minutes of Russian on Duolingo.

This was life before the World Health Organization categorized Covid-19 as a pandemic. Now, everything has changed. But my routine, which keeps me sane, will not. Because the DOE has just announced it is closing and some of my tutoring sessions are on hold, I will have much less time out of the house, which will give me more time to devote to writing projects.

Which brings me to young children and their desperate need for routines – this is just one of the things school provides them. Creating routines from the start will give them, and you, a sense of order and control. Perhaps you take them for a long walk in the morning – as long as we can go out – to get their energy out – then settle in for some play time at home. A rest time in the middle of the day is crucial so that everyone stays sane. If children don’t want to sleep, they can stay in their bed and play quietly. This is what many preschool programs do – the children don’t have to sleep; they can look at a book or draw in a notebook with crayons or pencils until rest time is over. There is no talking during this period.

“I can’t get him to stop playing video games,” a father of a four-year-old once told me during a Parent Teacher conference. “There has to be a time frame,” I reminded him. When our children were little, they were allowed to watch one hour of TV after school and that was it. They knew that when the last show was over, they had to turn off the TV. In preschool classrooms, when children are expected to have a time frame for an activity and they have a hard time stopping, a timer is set, and they are told that they will have to stop when they hear the bell. Games, movies, and TV should be reserved for a certain portion of the day, and should absolutely have a time frame, for everyone’s sanity.

A word about worry: try not to. It will overwhelm you if you let it. There is more than enough negative new to go around. Measure your intake. One thing that helped us survive the days after 9/11 was not listening to or watching the news in front of our small children. We read the paper and listened to the radio when they were out of the room or resting. Deciding when and how much news to take in during the day can help gain a sense of control. And all the experts say not to read the news at night before going to bed. 

Life at home can be very challenging during these sad, strange times, but it can also give us a chance to get really creative with the way we use our shared spaces together.

On His Best Behavior

“I know what I forgot – sugar!” I exclaimed out loud on line at Key Food. I looked behind me and the sugar aisle was within eyesight. I looked at the line, and the gentleman standing directly behind me motioned with his arm for me to leave. 

“Really”? I asked.

 “Yes, go right ahead,” he said, with a smile.

 Dashing down the aisle, I grabbed a five-pound bag and ran right back.

 “The only way we are going to survive this,” I said to the man “is because of people like you. Thank you.”

 “You’re welcome,” he said and smiled again.

New Year, New Stack

And this year, the stack is absurd.

January began by finishing last year’s books: Joan Didion’s most excellent The White Album, which followed Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Discovering the holes in one’s literary history is fascinating: I must be the only member of my generation that didn’t read Didion in college. Or high school, as one of my children did. Didion takes the personal essay and marries it to the memoir in a style that is so wholly her own that it simply takes your breath away. The New Journalism meets modern California. An added bonus: you just happen to be watching Season Three of Amazon’s Goliath, starring Billy Bob Thornton, and the plot revolves around water use in California’s Central Valley. Didion was writing about this in the late 1960s.

The move to Clifford Thompson’s What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues could not have been more timely. Thompson bravely took on the 2016 election and decided to examine what happened to race relations in America through the lens of Joan Didion. A perfect choice, as Didion’s New Journalism did what no journalist had done before: inserted themselves into their non-fiction writing. No longer was the voice that of the detached observer; now the feelings and experiences of the writer were, for the first time, allowed to enter into the narrative. As a writer and man of color in America, Thompson looked around after the election and simply began to question everything. He took his incredulity several steps further and courageously sought out voters for the current president to find out their side of the story. His travels, interviews, and questioning of everything, including his own viewpoint, paint a portrait of an America that may no longer be as recognizable as it once was. Or was it? That’s the complexity that Thompson steadfastly tackles.

When it comes to books, I am not a quitter. It’s the Capricorn in me. I push and push, and might give up for a while, but I always come back. Last year’s literary version: The Bolter (Osborne). This year’s? Mrs. Osmond by John Banville. A Christmas 2018 gift from a dear friend, I started it last winter and quickly tired of the oh-so-19th century language, multiple dictionary-requiring vocabulary words, and slow progress of the protagonist, Isabel Osmond (née Archer) through the various European capitals that took her away from her recently crumbled marriage. Where was she going? What was she doing? I happily put it down. And then, this year, I picked it up. And how glad am I that I did. First off, some context: Banville brilliantly picks Isabel up after she’s been left off by her creator, Henry James, in the Portrait of a Lady. My mistake? I didn’t honor this context. Also, I’ve never read any James (another hole). As I continued, I slowly started to see the genius of what Banville had done: he had elevated fan fiction to an art form. 

Oh, an honorable mention has to go to Nick and Nora. In my family, The Thin Man is required cinematic viewing every New Year’s Eve. Completely by accident I discovered another hole: I had somehow missed the 2012 publication of Return of the Thin Man, two novellas that Hammett wrote for the two Thin Man cinema sequels, After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man. These do not disappoint: witty, acerbic and charged with those trademark Nick-and-Nora quips, The Return of the Thin Man was the perfect way to ring in the new year.

The Elegance of Language

An amazing essay that Martin Scorsese wrote in today's New York Times about the changing nature of film and storytelling. One of the things I love about Scorsese is that he is not only an extraordinary filmmaker but he is also an excellent writer, one who keeps it clear and simple, yet retains a sense of elegance of language.

The Dying Art of Filmmaking

The Comfort of Clear Answers

             Is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn about a young girl? Or is it about New York at the turn of the last century? Perhaps it is about the imperative of education…

            Francie Nolan, poor, from an Irish family, and with an alcoholic father, grows up in Williamsburg. The story, told from the classic third-person omniscient point of view, incorporates layers of tale telling so effective that, at one point, 14-year-old Francie imagines herself a successful novelist giving her former English composition teacher her autograph. In reality, said teacher has chastised Francie for writing about harsh realities, instead of “birds and trees and My Impressions.” Meanwhile, Francie, has just lost her father, her mother is pregnant, and there is barely enough money to buy groceries. Why would she be writing about birds and trees? In her fantasy, she gets her revenge by coming back to visit the teacher at school after her first novel has been published. She imagines the dialogue in her head. 

Francie

“Oh, the novel. I dashed it off at odd moments.”

Miss Gardner

(Timidly.)

“Frances, could I ask you to autograph it for me?”

            Because Francie, and her brother Neeley, have been told by their grandmother and mother that education is the only way out of their predicament and because their mother, Katie, never gives up hope (working harder than anyone could possibly imagine) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the ultimate American story. Yet, I can’t help wondering, what Francie and Katie would make of the next turn of the century, with its technology revolution and its gig economy, where very little is guaranteed, and the answers are not nearly as clear?

Math and Writing: A Conversation With Dave Pruett

            “The premise of this book is that most of the received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but harmful.” — Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences about Writing

            It’s September.

            Back to school. Pencils and books. I always loved school and September was a happy time for me. I also loved to write. I’ve since learned that I was one of the lucky ones.

            The more I write the more fun I have. The more I teach writing the more fear of writing I discover.

            “You’re a writing teacher?” someone recently asked me. “That sounds like nails on a chalk board to me.”

            What is this all about? I’ve begun to ask students and those in casual conversation anecdotal questions about this fear. Answers range from,“I HATE writing” (an attorney) to “I hate school writing assignments – they’re boring,” (a fourth grade student).

            My friend, Suzanne Fiederlein, wondered whether there are similarities between fear of writing and fear of math, which her husband, Dave Pruett, taught for many years at Virginia’s James Madison University. Dave is the perfect person to discuss this subject with: he is also a writer. I asked him about his thoughts on the subject and whether, together, we could shed any light on the struggles of our respective math and writing students.

ANITA:  Dave, thank you so much for indulging me in my quest: to find out what causes the fear of writing. Because it comes up so often, in my conversations with children and adults, and in my work with students of all ages, I’ve decided to do a little investigating. Someone suggested I pursue a PhD on the subject but that isn’t happening anytime soon. I’m wondering if there is a similarity between the fear of writing and the fear of math. Can you tell me a little about your experience with this?

DAVE: Well, let me start with a tad of background. I have taught mathematics at secondary, community college, and university levels for a cumulative total of more than 30 years. And, I am also a writer. Reason and Wonder, a 12-year labor of love that explores the interface between science and spirituality, was published in 2012 by Praeger. That said, I’ve never given a shred of thought to the similarities between math phobia and writing phobia until you asked the question. It’s a very interesting question that I hope we can explore together. Upon reflection I can see similarities and differences between writing and math fears.

ANITA:  Do you think there is a difference between math fear and math phobia?

DAVE: Perhaps this is a simplistic answer, but I think of a phobia as a fear that has grown so large that it becomes crippling. And I am feeling a bit guilty in regard to this question because, in reflecting on a lifetime of teaching mathematics, I don’t think I have ever helped a student overcome a math fear or phobia. Not a great track record. In self defense, most of my teaching has been at the college or university level and has involved courses at least as challenging as first-semester calculus. So, most of the courses I’ve taught self-selected “math-philes” or at least those who are “math tolerant.” The one exception is a college algebra course I taught years ago. I try to make mathematics relevant at all levels and bring it down to earth. Perhaps that approach helps tamp down anxieties, somewhat.

There is, however, a math-related anxiety that I myself have experienced: math-test anxiety. I received my PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Arizona. At the time I was a student there, the preliminary exams were brutal, consisting of an exam in each of six areas of mathematics over a two-day period. Each exam was only an hour in length. I failed three of my six prelims. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the material; it was that the one-hour time constraint provoked enormous anxiety. There was no time to think. One had to have anticipated the problems in advance.  Fortunately, my advisors felt I was salvageable, and eventually I retook the three unsatisfactory exams and passed on a second try. And, I might add, the Program in Applied Mathematics has since redesigned their prelims.

Upon reflection, math-test anxiety is fundamentally different from most other types of test anxiety. On a history test, for example, one always knows something about the subject, and one can start with what one knows. On a math test that requires problem-solving or proof, there is often a narrow intellectual gateway to the solution. It takes time to understand what is being asked and time to explore and jettison alternative pathways. Therefore, to try to diminish test anxiety, I always give tests on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the class period is 75 minutes in length, and I allow students to come early and stay late for the final exam, which unfortunately at JMU, is officially just two hours in length. Exam periods at most universities are three.

ANITA:  This makes sense; I can’t remember any of my students being “crippled” by writing anxiety. I can, however, recall many instances when they have simply shut down or been completely un-responsive to the task at hand. My most memorable example is the third grader who would not do any work in his writing journal. Nothing I could do, as a teaching volunteer, would get him engaged (this was years before I got my master’s in education). He would barely speak with me. At the last possible moment, when I was about to return him to class, having completely failed him, it suddenly dawned on me that I knew nothing about him. “What do you like to do when you’re not in school?” I asked him, in a last-ditch, desperate attempt to get some- hell, any- written words out of him. He looked at me like I was crazy, at first, then quietly uttered the word “baseball.” The story ends with me sending him back to class with a page written about his love of little league practice after school. Moral? You have to engage children in writing about something they love, not simply scholastic subject matter. Do you think math anxiety has to do with the way math is taught in the school system?

DAVE: I taught high-school mathematics for three years, and during that time I got a lot of “I hate math” responses either from students or from acquaintances who had just found out what I did for a living. And so, I began to probe a little deeper to find out why. These conclusions are anecdotal and not from any rigorous statistical sampling of “math-phobes.” But a funny thing happened. Ask enough questions and you quickly find out that no one is born hating mathematics. In fact, the opposite is true. Most people actually find mathematics appealing and even magical until one of two things happens: they encounter a caustic mathematics teacher, or they reach a point where they can no longer grasp concepts and become frustrated.  

Also, not all students learn in the same way. Some are visual learners, some aural, some read-write, and some kinesthetic. Toward the end of my career I tried to present each concept from multiple perspectives so that nearly everyone would have an entry point.

ANITA: You have touched upon two concepts that have proven incredibly helpful to me as a teacher of young children for many years. First, when you spoke about no longer grasping concepts, I thought about the amount of support a student needs when they hit the wall for the first time. Some students have the resiliency, another important concept, to move forward, but some require a lot of support from the right teacher/tutor to see that they have simply hit a wall, not that they “can’t do math.” In the early childhood world there is an idea that it is crucial for young children to learn to tolerate discomfort. The sooner they do, the easier it will be to take on life’s inevitable challenges as they grow up. When you can tolerate discomfort and have the right support at the same time, you can move forward in any area. The second concept you mentioned was the one that got me through grad school: the work of Howard Gardner, and his Multiple Intelligences theory (the way all students learn differently). I love the fact that you were teaching your students from differing perspectives! I’d love to see that in action. Finally, as a writing instructor I have found that storytelling works as a writing tool because it is fun and student driven (see my baseball boy above). Is there an equivalent for you in the teaching of math?

DAVE: Well, stories enter in a couple of ways. Mathematics is often taught bloodlessly, as if it were handed down, fully developed, from on high. The older I get, the more interested I become in the history of mathematics and science, in general, and in the principal characters of that history, in particular. What one quickly discovers is that many of these characters led difficult lives, and often their mathematics or science offered an oasis of relatively tranquility in a life of utter chaos. For example, there’s Galileo, who was hauled before the Inquisition for espousing a Copernican world view, or Kepler, whose mother was tried for witchcraft. Or Newton, who felt abandoned by his own mother, was an alchemist in secret, and suffered mental illness, most likely from mercury poisoning, while dabbling in alchemy. As much as possible, I like to tell the stories of these mathematical and scientific giants in order to humanize mathematics and science.

There is an altogether different sense in which stories enter mathematics. What we used to call “word problems” in calculus, we now call “story problems.” The rhetorical shift was supposed to remove some of the anxiety, because many students are terrified of “word problems.” From decades of teaching experience, I have gradually realized that the difficulty students have with story problems is not mathematical in origin. It’s linguistic. There are many ways to define the discipline of mathematics: the abstract science of quantity and space, the handmaiden of physics, the “alphabet with which God has written the universe,” the art and science of symbolic logic, for starters. For my students I often define mathematics as a very terse foreign language. It’s a foreign language in that one has to learn its grammar and syntax, but unlike most other human languages, mathematics is extraordinarily parsimonious: one can express so much with so few symbols. So, the difficulty that students have in story problems is not mathematics, it is in translating from English (or their native tongue) into mathematics. For that reason, we will often parse each phrase in a story problem to extract its mathematical expression.

Oddly then, mathematical aptitude and writing well are closely aligned. In mathematics one says what one means and means what one says, striving for clarity and leaving out all that is not relevant. In writing well, one does much the same: eliminate all unnecessary words.

Speaking of stories, I’d like to tell a personal one to illustrate. When I had completed the first draft of my master’s thesis in applied mathematics, I handed it to my advisor. After a few days, he handed it back and asked a loaded question: “Dave, is this indicative of your writing style?” I answered “yes.” He followed: “It’s got to change. This reads like folklore. Go buy Strunk and White.” I did, and it made a world of difference in my writing. I learned from this classic little guide to writing that every unnecessary word is a parasite that robs one’s writing of a bit of its power. Enough unnecessary “weasel words” and even the most elegant thoughts turn blah.

On this topic, I think of the prolific author of novels, James Michener, whose books have been read by an estimated 75 million people worldwide. He once confessed that he did not write well but that he edited well. Same for me. The first three drafts of anything I write are not fit for human consumption: wordy, poorly organized, and full of weasel words. It takes at least three revisions to trim the fat and scour dictionaries and thesauruses for just the right words. 

ANITA: This is amazing; I always say I learned to write from Strunk and White! Also, I love the idea of math as an “oasis of tranquility.” I have occasionally tutored elementary school students in math, and I have been surprised at how much I enjoyed returning to it, after so many years away. The need to focus on math, the inability to think about anything else, provides that oasis for me. Interestingly, I once met a surgeon who told me he loved his work because he could not possibly think about anything else when he was in surgery. This seems to me to be about the comfort of laser sharp focus.  

Back to anxiety. I once had a parent tell me her daughter was miserable in my class and didn’t want to come to school. “She is?” I responded. “She seems happy when she’s here.” I explained that the beginning of the school year is like crossing a river; no matter how challenging, the goal is to get to the other side. How have you gotten your students to cross the river of math anxiety?

DAVE: The image that your question conjures is quite provocative. I want to go from here to there. But between is a raging stream. How do I get there successfully and safely? Proofs are like this in mathematics. I start here with the hypothesis. I want to go there, to the conclusion. But the way between is uncertain. It’s not a well-worn path. More of a dense jungle with dangers, including stream crossings.

This image then brings me to what I think is perhaps the most seminal similarity between proficiency in mathematics and in writing: both are very, very difficult. It takes courage to do both well. Perhaps the gravest mistake that teachers of writing and mathematics make is in leaving the false impression that it’s an easy process.

ANITA: So, this gets us back to the issue of discomfort. It sounds like you’re saying that teachers have a responsibility to state, at the outset, that the process can be hard but that the students are up to the task and that they will have the full support of the teacher to work through this process. I’m seeing my students and feeling like they think they need to get it right the first time, and that there is something wrong with them if they don’t. Back to needing to tolerate discomfort. Ultimately, do you think there are several factors at play when you talk about fear of math?

DAVE: The antidote to fear is courage, which is the willingness to move forward in the face of fear, a kind of persistence despite obstacles and dangers. Here too, some personal reflections might be useful.

There have been perhaps three times in my mathematical career when I had major conceptual breakthroughs. They weren’t earthshattering to anyone else, but they were important for my projects at the time. In each case, I had worked long and hard beforehand, often in utter frustration, as if I were fumbling around in the dark. Before each breakthrough, though, I’d gotten a gut-level sense of being close to the solution. And each time, I did something to mix up my normal routine, as a way to loosen the intellectual logjam. For example, the first time, when I was a master’s student at UVA, I’d gone to a Christmas party on a Saturday after a day of intense work. Back home, afterwards, I decided to crawl into bed, but to work on the problem in bed for another hour or two, until midnight or one in the morning. During that time the solution revealed itself. That moment was one of immense relief and satisfaction that it had all been worth the effort.

The process of writing Reason and Wonder had similarities. In retrospect, it seemed a bit like how I would imagine sculpting. I did not start the book with a well-formed roadmap of where it would start, how it would end, and how to get there. I started with the vague notion that I had a book in me. It was like setting up a block of marble and having the faith that there was a beautiful object imbedded inside. Only I didn’t quite know what the object was. So, I started chipping away. The early days of writing were so frustrating. Getting words onto paper was so much harder than I’d anticipated, and when I read what I’d written, it was awful. After a couple of summers of this, all I had was a couple of short biographical sketches of scientific characters that I could use as spice in my courses. But I kept making passes through the material, like chipping away at the marble with finer and finer chisels. Eventually something of beauty and value began to emerge. Then, and only then, I let a few trusted friends read drafts. They gave invaluable suggestions. The last stage of writing was like sanding and polishing. It is the latter stages of writing, the polishing, that I enjoy. The early stages are so hard and so frustrating. But in this regard, mathematics and writing are very similar: one needs to tolerate a lot of frustration and a lot of wandering in the dark to give birth to something of beauty.

ANITA: Well, you really hit upon something here, which has haunted me ever since I was a graduate student at City College. I had a very formidable advisor, and on my master’s thesis, she told me I did not do enough outlining of the project; that I had simply started writing. “I never put pen to paper until I know exactly what I am going to say,” she told me. Since then, I have had many conversations with writers about this, and, surprisingly, most tell me the exact opposite. “I write to find out what I want to say,” my friend, Clifford Thompson, explained. Still, I think my advisor had a point, which is that you do have to have a blueprint for what you are presenting to the world; you have to break down the process or you can, as I certainly did, go off in a direction that would later need a tremendous amount of editing, which caused frustration for both her and myself. In math, I think of the order of operations; you always break things down, no? Perhaps math and writing also have this in common, the need for an order of operations.

DAVE: Mathematics is very rational, but it is also very intuitive. Intuitive approaches to problem solving don’t necessarily follow a blueprint or a roadmap. In these cases, the most efficient, logical pathway may become clear only in hindsight. Same for writing, I suspect. Some know where they are headed when they write, and some, as you suggest, “write to find out what … to say.” Whatever works.

This has been an eye-opening conversation for me, Anita. I think the nugget we collectively stumbled upon is the importance of helping students to understand: “This is REALLY hard, and if you at first fail, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong with you. But if you try and try again, it definitely means something is right with you!”

ANITA: And for me, as well! I loved investigating this subject with you, Dave; it really helped me understand the writing anxiety issue, which has been on my mind for several years, from a new perspective: that of mathematics. 

Walking Away

Writing is hard.

And there are days when it seems pointless. The amount of time and energy I am spending on character, dialogue and scene setting when I could be walking the dog, who cares nothing about character, dialogue and scene setting, in the park.

Mad Men’s Don Draper stares at the sky on a rare moment off at a picnic with his family. “This is the only thing I want to be doing,” he says. At another point he states, “I want to live. Not just talk about it.”

Recently I’ve been working on the art of walking away. From writing. Allowing the frustration to simply be and to not continue grinding my gears. I do some laundry, wash the dishes, grateful for the simple responsibility of not having to think about character, dialogue and scene setting.

But I’m a writer. I got myself into this mess. Why not just drop it?

Because, as my good friend Kate, another writer, recently said, “Every time I walk away from creative writing, I’m sorry I did it.” I don’t want to be sorry. And, inadvertently, I’ll just start again anyway. That’s what happened the last time I walked away.

What’s different now?

First, I’ve been able to identify cynicism and negativity as exhaustion. Often the mornings I feel this way come after a night of interrupted or diminished sleep.

Second, I’ve learned to let go. The Buddhists speak of attachment, and there is no question that I am attached to my writing practice. So many needs are met by writing but writing can, especially when I’m tired, exhaust me and make me feel worse about the process. Letting go is my way of giving myself permission to rest and recover.

Third, walking away gives me perspective. Watching the dog, hearing my footsteps, listening to birds, reminds me that there is a whole world out there, completely removed from character, dialogue and scene setting. And sometimes, while not thinking about writing, I even come up with an idea that just might work.

As long as I simply walk away.