Omphalos, Omphalos, Omphalos

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Reilly, 2012)

I.

Seamus Heaney tells of the effect of saying the word, omphalos, aloud again and again and how the repetition of the word led him to recall, remember.  He writes:

I would begin with the Greek word omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door. It is County Derry in the early 1940s ...There the pump stands, a slender, iron idol, snouted, helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle, painted a dark green and set on a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling between empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket and then another as the man pumped and pumped, the plunger slugging up and down, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.  (Kindle Locations 72-79). 

II.

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

Across the street from the house where I grew up, sat the Corker's home.  A week ago on my way to the Bronx, I passed by it.  The Corkers were the grandparents I never got from family. Behind their home stood the tallest of hemlock trees. This tree remains today, still towering over the roofline of the house. An elegant tree for sure. Sturdy and yet, welcoming.  Many afternoons I stretched out beneath its branches, drawing and writing in a small diary that locked, occasionally munching a few saltines. I did this throughout my childhood. Safe on the soft needles not knowing how drawing and writing would save me. This was my secret place--one I did not visit with any of my neighborhood friends--not even Tommy Lane.  This was a gift the Corkers gave to just me--a secret place.  And in that crowded neighborhood where I grew, a secret place was no small thing.

Early on, Tommy Lane and I would strip from a clothesline, a newly washed sheet some mom had washed, wrapping ourselves in it. Somedays it was his backyard. Other days mine. Somedays, neither. The sheet was always so much bigger than us.  It was prop of sorts that we used as we played. Wrapped in a white or pale blue sheet, I was a saint--a saint who liked to dance. Some days we would snap the sheet above us and rush beneath it. A sky falling. I don't recall what Tommy thought although he joined me as we moved about the backyard, tumbling in the grass.

There was no point to our games, no sought outcome.  There was only the now--framed by the call of voices across driveways, disembodied.  These bits of disconnected sound worked their way into the stories we told ourselves, told one another, until we dozed.

III.

I loved that boy and knew that life in his home was tough well before my ma told me so.

We know more than we can say.

IV.

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

Tommy Lane marked the centre of the world when I was a child.  His ma would screech his name from the top of the stairs over and over and over and we'd run fast from some corner of the neighborhood to see what was the matter for there was always something wrong and there she would stand, leaning her large frame into the doorway, clothed in some old duster that snapped up the front, wobbly, loose-faced and always so angry.

I don't know when we stopped being friends, when our interests vied or how we moved away from one another as surely as we did.  I remember meeting him late summer one afternoon by accident. I was 16, stunned by his height and that he had dropped out of school. We talked like strangers, hesitant, unsure and breached that distance by leaving in his green two-door Plymouth Road Runner for a party he knew on the cliffs.

It's nearly impossible to run from your past.

V.

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

Here. Now. I can recall the sound of his name, always both names,  a steady vibration across my vocal chords like a mantra I repeat.  I can recall his voice more than I can see his face.

There's a temptation to soften the past, to recast it in some soft light, hear it differently. A falling sky. Some cued music. For me the temptation is not to romanticize the past, but rather to intellectualize it--to distance it from my heart, to not say what must be said.  To write it instead in some book I can lock.

The last I heard Tommy Lane was clean and worked as a short order cook at a diner in Jersey City, his older sister had moved north near the Canadian border and married, and his ma had finally gotten sober right before she died.

VI.

There was no room at school in those days for the lives we actually lived. School was not the place to drop the occasional bomb. Causal worlds, like schools and churches, make little room for irrationality. That which is outside simply does not exist.

We kept such secrets--the price of doing school, of doing religion, of doing life at our homes.  I've lost track of Tommy Lane across these decades and I am the worse for it.

I left home at 18, never to return to that neighborhood and I never saw Tommy Lane again.




Cited
Heaney, Seamus (2014). Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

This Moment

Bob Geldof screenshot from film, This Moment

"The paradox of the heart of individualism is that it only works when we act in concert for the common good."   

Bob Geldof from here.

Using Advanced Organizers with 4th Graders

An example of an Advanced Organizer for chapter 5.

At one site where I work, students are having difficulty comprehending the text, The Iroquois: The Six Nations Confederacy (Mary Engler). In addition to a density of facts, the text is not well written and I suspect one might argue does not represent the complexity of the Iroquois people very well. The text is included in the Grade 4 module from Expeditionary Learning.  

In order to help facilitate comprehension, I introduced teachers to the use of advanced organizers. An explanation of advanced organizers, along with organizers for each of the chapters (2 - 5) is included in the slideshare below.  Please use freely.

Advanced Organizers for The Iroquois from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Poetry Break: Bones

Between Here and There (M.A. Reilly, Dublin. 2009)

Bones

  -  Sheryl Luna

Once, as a girl, she saw a woman shrink
inside herself, gray-headed and dwarf-sized,
as if her small spine collapsed. Age
and collapse were something unreal, like war
and loss. That image of an old woman sitting
in a café booth, folding in on herself, was forgotten
until her own bones thinned and hollowed,
music-less, un-fluted, empty.

She says she takes shark cartilage before she sleeps,
a tablet or two to secure flexibility and forget
that pain is living and living is pain.

And time moves like a slow rusty train
through the desert of weeds, and the low-riders
bounce like teenagers young and forgiving
in her night’s dream. She was sleek in a red dress

with red pumps, the boys with slick hair, tight jeans.
She tells me about 100-pound canisters of lard
and beans, how she could dance despite her fifth
child, despite being beaten and left
in the desert for days, how she saw an angel
or saint glimmer blonde above her, how she rose
and walked into the red horizon despite
her husband’s sin.

I’m thinking how the women
in my family move with a sway, with a hip
ache, and how they each have a disk
slip. The sky seems sullen, gray, and few birds
whisk. It’s how the muse is lost
in an endless stream of commercials, how people
forget to speak to one another as our ending skulks
arthritically into our bones, and the dust
of a thousand years blows across the plain,
and the last few hares sprint across a bloodied
highway. Here in the desert southwest, loss
is living and it comes with chapped lips,
long bumpy bus rides and the smog of some man’s
factory trap. And there are women everywhere
who have half-lost their souls
in sewing needles and vacuum-cleaner parts.
In maquiladoras there grows a slow poem,
a poem that may only live a moment sharply
in an old woman’s soul, like a sudden broken hip.

And yet, each October, this old woman rises
like the blue sky, rises like the fat turkey vultures
that make death something beautiful, something
towards flight, something that circles in a group
and knows it is best not to approach death alone.

Each October she dances, the mariachis yelp
and holler her back to that strange, flexible youth,
back to smoky rancheras and cumbias—songs
rolling in the shadows along the bare Mexican hills.
She tells me, “It’s in the music, where I’ll always
live.” And somehow, I see her jaw relax,
her eyes squint to a slow blindness
as if she can see something I can’t.

And I remember that it is good to be born of dust,
born amid cardboard shanties of sweet gloom.
I remember that the bare cemetery stones
in El Paso and Juárez hold the music, and each spring
when the winds carry the dust of loss there is a howl,
a surge of something unbelievable, like death,
like the collapse of language, like the frail bones
of Mexican grandmothers singing.

—“Bones” from Pity the Drowned Horses by Sheryl Luna (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). © 2005 by Sheryl Luna. Reproduced by permission of University of Notre Dame Press.

Not Waving but Drowning

The Constancy of Waves (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Not Waving but Drowning

  - Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.





Read by Janet Harris.

Simple, Important Instruction in Grade 1: The Handmade Book

Jaslene showing the cover of her new book (Newark, NJ)

I was reminded that simple is often best in matters of instruction. I was able to model today what one-on-one book making looks like in grade 1 and how a 6-minute 'lesson' can be used to teach a child reading, writing, and phonics that they need, while building on knowledge and skills they have. This lesson is based on a modified Language Experience Approach.

Today, six-year-old Jaslene helped me model what comprises a quick book making project. Jaslene and I met and she selected a book type (flip book, 8-page booklet) and then we discussed what story she might like to tell. Jaslene was all about playing and her book illustrated what she most likes to do: play with friends, play with her dolls, and play with her dog.  Because the child dictates the topic and each sentence, they are better able to reread their work.  This is particularly important for beginning readers.

Jaslene's new book (Newark, NJ)

Each page in the book contains one or more sentences that Jaslene dictated and she or I wrote. I began recording her ideas on the opening pages and turned that process over to her as we progressed. Jaslene also used scrap paper to practice writing tricky words.  She created the cover after thinking about the general topic of her book.

She reread each page (in her case without using a finger to match the text) and then the entire book. She did this with great joy.  Buried within this fun are opportunities for Jaslene to learn foundational skills (sight words, letter/sound combinations, letter formation, spacing, appropriate end punctuation) and composing skills (planning what you want to say, checking to see if what you wanted to say is written, importance of rereading, considering audience when writing, creating illustrations that extend meaning). It also provided me and her teacher with an opportunity to learn about Jaslene and her capacities as a reader and writer.

Children love to make and reread their books and this interest helps them build reading and writing fluency, as well as item knowledge.  By the end of the center time in this first grade classroom, Jaslene had authored and  shared her book with several friends, all of whom wanted to make their own books. Jaslene's book will travel home with her (she plans to read it to her dog who I'm told will be the subject of her next book) and eventually will be included in the classroom library so her friends can borrow it to read. As there are iPads employed in this classroom she might even want to involve a friend in making an audio recording of her book.

In order to make a more high tech version of the handmade book, children might want to use an app like Doodlecast where they can draw and narrate their books and then share these with others.

Being Tested

The Weight of Living (Reilly, 2011)

I.

My grandfather was a piano player.  I'm told he took great joy in sitting down to play and did so most days--sometimes for himself, most times for an audience. He died the summer before I was born.

He was a complicated man who drank too much and never studied piano. He just had an ear for it. As did his son and his four daughters.

"Pop could hear any tune and play it," my Da would tell us, a smile broadening across his face. I grew up listening to Art Tatum and stories.

When my Aunt Pat died, the family piano came to me. I had taken formal lessons until high school, as did my middle brother and earned some awards, but never really did feel the music.

Neither of us play these days, although now and then I sit at the piano and coax from the keys the opening to Bach's Two-Part Invention in D Minor--a piece I taught myself.

My husband and son would tell you that I don't play it well. Fortunately, I don't need to.


II.

And Full of Sleep (Reilly, 2012)

When I was no more than 8, I traveled with my mom to visit her friend who lived up the coast in Rhode Island.  We left my brothers in NJ. It was late June.

The friend's home I can't recall, but I'm thinking it was some sort of cottage--or perhaps hoping that was true. How we narrate events corresponds with who we see ourselves becoming.

What I do remember is that it was filled with canvases she had painted.  I had never met an artist, nor a woman who lived on the coast all on her own.  Most everyone I knew was connected to someone else and most certainly this was true for the women.

There was a lushness to her work and though I can't recall the subjects she painted, I feel the thickness and smell of the paint that permeated the rooms.  I can recall how primary the colors appeared and how sticky her homemade jam felt on my fingers as I painted a cat on a fence with a tree again and again on a large, round white plate. She took a look at these attempts and told me I was destined to be an artist and to lose no time starting.

When I arrived home I painted pictures on the back of the six-panel door to my bedroom. There was no hesitation. No need for permission. These panels were my canvases, save the painting I got to do at school,  until I moved from that house at 18 and married a painter just a few years later.

I stopped painting completely in my early 20s and didn't begin again until I crossed 40.  It's hard to predict a future. There are no school-based tests that can ready us to live a life.

III.

When I first met Rob, what I most recall was the cadence of his voice as he spoke about a Richard Powers' novel he had just read. His was a voice tipped in pleasure.  We were in graduate school. English majors. And whereas most of the other students waxed on about reading Dante or Woolf, here was this young guy from Brooklyn telling us about three farmers on their way to the market.  I talked about reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening and how it filled me with necessary courage.  I was 28.

During that semester I would come to know Rob's work as poet and novelist and years later I still hear the rhythm of his poet voice resound in the ordinary acts of ordering at a restaurant, talking to his mom on the phone on Sunday mornings.

There is no test that can predict the immense love triggered solely by the sound of your lover's voice. There is no readiness for this. It can't be taught although it will be tested.

Christmas in Harlem (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

IV.

None of things I most love to do are tested at school--well at least not the high stakes variety.

Perhaps this is true for you too, for there are far more critical things in our lives than our capacity to "do" school math and school reading.  Nor are good performances on these measures accurate indicators of a life well lived.

We know this in our bones.

We know this at the critical points in our lives when we are truly tested.  I need only recall the rattle in my own mother's chest as she died to know what is important and what is just folly. Watching the life slip from her body has tested me in ways little else has ever done.

When I think about schooling in 2014, I wonder how it is that our obsession with testable minutia could ever have gotten so far whacked that we now pay obscene amounts of money to testing corporations to give us information we have never needed while pretending that such bare offerings have some significance.

They do not.

In the name of certainty and testing, we are sacrificing spaces of permission and replacing these with spaces of compliance--both for teachers and children.

Let's forget getting kids ready for college and career.  That's not really our job.  Let's help them to live better. Here. Now.