Gin
One thing about being a younger sister to an older brother is how, now matter what your age, no matter what you are doing, no matter what your intentions, you create situations in which the older sibling is embarrassed by what you do, by what you say, or even by the fact you exist.
My older brother David always aspired to be a grown up, certainly more grown up than his actual age. When he was fourteen, he somehow obtained working papers which verified he was at least 16 and so eligible to work. All the time he was in junior and senior high school he had part-time jobs at some neighborhood store. The stores varied depending on what area of Pittsfield we lived in at the time. Usually he worked at a corner or variety store. In those days, variety stores weren’t just purveyors of snacks, coffee, and cigarettes, they were small markets with fresh produce, butchered meats, fresh sliced breads, as well as lots of canned goods. In my family the store where my brother worked at the time, whatever its real name, was called David’s store. In fact some of my friends thought he owned the store after hearing this phrase tossed around casually at our house.
One day when I was in grade school, my mother asked me to go to David’s store to get a head of lettuce for supper. You might think this was commonplace, me wandering down to his store for errands. The store was close by. You could actually see it from the sidewalk in front of our house. The thing is that David had told me not to bother him at work. I don’t think he expressed this sentiment to my parents, however. The fact was David usually brought home whatever it was my mother wanted.
This particular day he wouldn’t be home until after the lettuce was needed. As a consequence, I was sent on this seemingly simple errand. It sounded simple to me too. That was before I arrived at the produce section. I knew lettuce was green and round but once I found the produce bins, there were two candidates looking up at me, both green and round. I knew only one of them was lettuce. I didn’t even know the name of the other. I picked up one of each thinking I would find my brother to ask him.
I went up one aisle and down another. No sign of David anywhere. I kept moving holding these two round green items tight to my chest. I was timid around clerks. I didn’t want to ask anyone else. I kept walking, looking for David. For a time I considered simply buying both, but I didn’t think I had enough money to do that. I kept going up and down the aisles trying to find my brother. I began to wonder if he had spotted me first, matching his movements to mine so he would always be just out of sight. This would have been in keeping with his sense of humor, but more likely he was in a back room oblivious to my plight.
I am becoming nervous. It's getting late. My mother would be wondering where I was. I walk another aisle. The store isn’t that big. At this point I have likely traversed it three or four times. I am feeling frantic. Eventually an older store clerk stops me. “What do you want?” I must have looked pretty silly holding a head of lettuce and one of cabbage pressed against me while systematically going up and down each aisle. Instead of simply asking, “Which of these is lettuce?” I blurt out, “I want my brother.” This causes him to laugh, loudly calling out, “Hey, David. Your little sister is here. And she wants you!” David appeared from wherever he had been, pointed to the lettuce and then disappeared. I went home with clear instructions never to bother him at work again. I imagine the other clerks teased him for some time about this incident.
Why didn't I just ask some other clerk which was lettuce and which was cabbage? As I relate the tale I talk about being shy or not wanting to bother adults as an explanation. However, that is only a partial truth. I really didn’t want anyone else to realize I didn’t know the difference. I always wanted people to perceive me as smart, competent, knowing. At ten, I associated being smart with knowing everything you needed to know. As an adult I now understand being smart is really about knowing how to find out what you need to know. This distinction eluded me when I was ten. To admit I didn’t know I thought a sign of ignorance. That's what I was trying to avoid.
David’s reaction reinforced my thinking that I should've known the difference between cabbage and lettuce. If he had simply told me which was which sending the message that it was okay to ask, perhaps even thinking of his little sister as endearingly cute, I might have had a different reaction myself. Instead of being embarrassed I might have learned the value of asking questions. Perhaps we both carried around this longing to be seen as adults, a sense of competence being the image we both wanted to present. Ironically this stance gets in the way of actually learning to be competent, a self defeating mechanism I carried with me too much of my early life.
Not all moments of being embarrassed have their roots in feigning knowledge.
There was the time when the playground supervisors at Crane playground announced a costume contest. “Come as a character in a book." I don’t know who decided I should be Huck Finn. Maybe I was supposed to be Tom Sawyer. I wasn’t reading either book at the time. I was too young. I did have an image of these characters, maybe a picture from a library book. My mother and I worked hard to create just the right outfit. I had a large straw hat with the edges fringed and falling apart. (Where in the world did we get that I wonder now!)
I had shorts that had been torn off at the knees, cutoffs long before they were popular. I had a long stick with a string to simulate a fishing pole. The piece de resistance were dots of mercurochrome on my face to emulate freckles. I recall looking at myself in the mirror thinking, "I am going to win this contest." Brimming with confidence, all smiles, I gave my mother a hug and walked out the door.
I kind of whistled as I walked to the playground. I don’t know if that was part of my act, something Tom or Huck would do or if it was just an expression of how cheerful I felt. I entered the playground walking toward the little shed where activities were held. Then I stopped short. Nothing out of the ordinary was going on. A few kids were on the swings, a couple on the slide, some were sitting in a circle tossing a ball around. No one was dressed as Cinderella. No one wearing a pirate outfit. No Pippi Longstockings. No one in a costume. No one at all.
It was clear there was no dress up event going on. I backed out of the playground as fast as I could hoping no one would see me. I ran home along the same streets where just a few minutes before I felt jaunty and cocky, hoping everyone would see me in my great costume. Now dressed the same way, I was mortified. I only wanted to get home as quickly as I could so no one could laugh at how silly I looked.
I don’t recall what I told my mother about the non-existent contest. I never did find out if I had the date wrong or misread the sign. As soon as I got home I washed off those mercurochrome dots with tears streaming down my face. Funny, really. Nothing bad had happened to me. Yet I felt as if I had been taken for a fool. Taken for a fool by whom? It wasn’t like anyone was out to get me or do this on purpose. No one actually saw me in my glory as Tom or Huck. What if they had? So what. Yet, the feeling of being stupid remained. That's the nature of embarrassment. The image I had of myself as smart, competent, always in on what is going on, was shaken by the concern of looking foolish in public.
As I ponder what it means to be embarrassed, another tale occurs to me. It was the summer between seventh and eight grade. I was in my glory at Pontoosuc Lake. I love the water. I love swimming. Not for me to lay on the sand to sunbath or pretend to read. Right into the water as soon as I could. I was now a strong enough swimmer to swim from the top of the H-shaped docks, plunging right into the deeper water out in the lake, swimming to the floating dock, a fifteen-foot square with a diving board on one edge. Some kids lounged around on it resting after swimming; others dove off into the lake. I was proud I could do a good dive.
I knew I was a good diver because my father said so. Not that I ever saw him dive or even swim. My mother was the swimmer. She, like me, really enjoyed the act of swimming. Whenever we went to the lake, she would swim while my father would stay with the younger kids in the shallow water. My father always acted like an expert in whatever was at hand whether he was or not. Hmmm. Maybe that was the source of my definition that being grown-up meant acting as if you knew what you were doing. Perhaps my brother and I both adopted this attitude by watching our father. In any case, he seemed to be knowledgable when giving me instructions on how to dive. As I practiced, he made suggestions I tried to incorporate into my technique until he was satisfied. Earlier that summer, I heard him tell my mother, “Ginny is a good diver.” The fact he said it to her and not me made it feel true.
One day after swimming to the floating dock, I dove off the end and swam back to dive again. As I pulled myself up on to the dock I heard one teenaged boy say to another, “Flat as a pancake.” The other boy nodded and giggled. I was so into the moment I took this as a compliment on my diving technique, straight and clean into the water. In fact, I was so sure of myself I made a special effort to dive right in front of them the next time. I wanted them to continue to notice how good I was.
When it was time to leave the lake to go home I did so without thinking much about what they had said. Later, however, remembering their tone of voice, their expressions, maybe even their body language, I began to realize they were saying something disparaging, not complimentary. Eventually, and by that I mean weeks later, I came to realize what their comment meant. Replaying it in my mind made me red in the face. Just thinking about it made me feel embarrassed. Why? They were long gone. So what was the point of feeling embarrassed now? Was it because I didn’t have a figure yet or was it because I didn't catch the real meaning of their comment at the time. Did that add to the issue I had with defining competence as knowing everything?
Some events didn’t leave me embarrassed; they caused others to be embarrassed. When I was in eighth grade, my English teacher was Mr Nixon. He was youngish, maybe 30, and quite active. He told us about playing tennis, going on hikes, and other kinds of things he did on weekends. We liked him because he shared his life outside school with us. He also had a sense of humor in class and treated us well.
For me the clincher was he let us read books as part of English class. Not just the assigned books. We could bring in books from home or the library. Books we chose to read on our own. He gave us school time in which to read. This started me on the habit of personal reading in school. I continued this even when it was no longer sanctioned. More often than not I needed to read surreptitiously. Once my math paper or notes from the social studies book were done, I’d open a book on my lap to read until the teacher called us to attention for the next activity. I whiled away this extra time with the likes of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Heidi, and Treasure Island. I did this all through junior and senior high school. In high school the books were more advanced, Hawaii, Forsyte Saga and On the Beach. I always felt I was getting away with something because the teachers never told me to put the book away. It was only when I became a teacher myself I realized my teachers likely knew what I was doing. From the front of the room you can easily see someone reading a book on their lap. They simply allowed me to read. I digress. Back to eighth grade.
One day Mr Nixon told the class he was going to be in a play called “You Can’t Take It With You”, a comedy written by George Kaufmann and Moss Hart. Even though I didn't know this at the time, the play was written in a classic three-act structure. During the first act, all the characters (and I do mean characters) were introduced. A family living in New York is composed of a variety of eccentrics, among them a daughter who fancies herself a ballerina. She dances all day and night throughout the house in a tutu with her Russian dance instructor. A son-in-law who makes illicit fireworks in the cellar. An elderly grandfather who never pays any income tax. “The government wouldn’t know what to do with the money if I gave it to them.” There was one apparently normal daughter who is the interface between her nutty family and the rest of the world. In act one she meets a guy. The rest of the play is about their romance with her trying to present her decidedly quirky family as seemingly normal to his more conventional parents. During act two, everything falls apart. The lovers are separated, the grandfather is threatened with jail by a government agent, and just before the second act curtain, the fireworks in the cellar are accidentally set off causing a huge commotion. Since this a farce, act three is there to set everything straight. Of course, I went into the performance without any of this background.
The play was presented by the local community theatre, the Pittsfield Town Players. I had never been to a live performance before. The tap dancers, teen-aged ventriloquists, and magicians who performed before the free movies at the annual GE Christmas parties didn’t count. My classmate Carole and I were determined to get our parents to let us go. As an only child, she usually got her own way in that household. I was surprised my parents were so remarkably easy to convince. After all, Carole and I would be out at night by ourselves. I didn’t know at the time how much theatre meant to them. Over the next few years they would share with me the times they went to New York to see plays and musicals. I began to take note of their comments on theatre people as they read the Herald Tribune or the New Yorker. I came to see they talked about this theatre community as if they were a part of it. But my understanding of their interests was in the very early stages at this point. All I knew at the time was that they were willing to pay for my ticket and drive us to the play.
When we told Mr. Nixon we were going to see the Saturday night performance, he smiled. “Come backstage at intermission and see me.” To make this even more satisfying, the play was taking place in the auditorium of the Berkshire Museum. My family often went to the museum on a Sunday afternoon. I had never been there at night. I was quite animated getting ready, fussing with my hair, trying on different outfits until I was satisfied. I looked like I was “going out for the evening.”
It was amazing to be at the museum at night. Odd too. The halls that led to the exhibits were roped off. Looking into those dark but familiar spaces, I imagined how dramatic the exhibits would look under these conditions: the large topographical wall map of Berkshire County with its buttons which lit up familiar points of interest like Mount Greylock or Bash Bish Falls, the dioramas displaying scenes of native animal life on different continents, the rows and rows of seashells in glass cases and the fluorescent rock viewing area.
As Carole and I walked down the few stairs to the auditorium, I set aside these thoughts of the museum's exhibits to take in the current scene. I liked it that the auditorium was filling up with adults. We didn’t see any other classmates or even any other teenagers. Finding our seats, we settled in. We must have been given a playbill, but I don't recall looking at it. The play began. Mr. Nixon was playing the love interest, Tony Kirby. Every time he entered a scene, we whispered to each other, “There he is.” I say, "We whispered", but what I mean is that we jostled each other with our elbows excitedly pointing toward the stage. This must have driven people around us crazy since Mr Nixon, playing the romantic lead, was on stage a lot and every time he appeared we reacted.
When the first act ended, we went backstage, well, really downstairs, to find Mr. Nixon. He was seated in a small room in front of a big mirror surrounded by bald light bulbs. This was his dressing room. It looked exactly like the dressing rooms I had seen in movies but I imagine in reality it was someone's small office. The mirror with all those light bulbs was all I needed to see to convince me this was real theatre. He asked us how we liked the play. We nodded and tried to sound smart. “It’s very good,” I said. We were talking when I noticed the lights started turning off and on. He must've seen the puzzled look my face. "You should get back to your seats. Intermission is ending." As we were leaving, he called out, “Come back after its over”.
We sat down as the play resumed. We thought the end was very exciting; just as the grandfather is being taken away, and the US agents are accusing the ballerina’s Russian dance instructor of being a spy, the fireworks in the cellar are set off. The characters rushing around amid the sound and light of the simulated fireworks was so animated. Lots of noise. Lots of colored lights flashing. Lots of turmoil. My natural energy and excitability were at a fever pitch. The calm grown-up façade I had managed on our earlier back stage visit was nowhere to be seen when we went down to see Mr Nixon this time. “That was great.” I gushed. “Wow”. We chatted in his dressing room for a few more minutes before he said, “Well, you’d better get back.” “What? There’s more!” I exclaimed. He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “The story isn’t finished…” he started to say just as the lights began to flash on and off. I saw in that moment he was disappointed. We had let him down in some way. I felt embarrassed for him. As I walked back to my seat with Carole, who, being Carole, was oblivious to his reaction, I realized Mr Nixon thought since we didn't know there was a third act that we didn’t understand the play. The plot had been stirred up but not resolved. However, we didn’t see that as a problem. I didn't particularly care if the lovers reunited or if the grandfather went to jail.
What my teacher didn’t understand was that tying up the plot wasn’t the point. We did watch the rest of the play. All the turmoil at the end of the second act was settled. Grandpa wasn’t going to go to jail. The Russian dance instructor wasn’t a spy. The girl and her guy were going to live happily every after. Its funny my desire to be grown up wasn’t bothered by my ignorance the play had two intermissions and not one like some of the movies I went to. I never had a chance to communicate to Mr. Nixon that for us that night wasn’t about following the development of the characters or the playwright’s craft in finally resolving the various crises. For us, it was a magical night out at live theatre, an entry into a grown-up world. The play wasn't as important as the experience.
While this night at the theatre didn’t lead me to pursue my parents’ interest in Broadway, that role would be taken on by my younger sister, it did bring me to read Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, when it was published. As it turned out, Mr. Nixon's disappointment in us at his play was premature. I grew up loving to read, eventually understanding plot and character development. Mr. Nixon's impact on me did carry forward. Like the play it's still being resolved as act three of my life continues.
Of all my junior high teachers, it isn’t Mr. Nixon I would like to apologize to; it's Mr. Martinelli, my ninth grade algebra teacher. He was amazing. In an age when learning math meant first memorizing the rules then applying them, he had ways to make math class more engaging. I recall starting many algebra classes playing “buzz”. He would pick a number, let's say 3. We would start to count from one, each kid at a time. However, if the number you were to say had a three in it or was a multiple of three you said buzz. It went like this, 1, 2, buzz, 4, 5, buzz, 7, 8, buzz, 10, 11, buzz, buzz, 14, buzz… We tried to do it very fast but once you got into the 30’s you needed to keep careful track as to when the 30's ended so you wouldn't incorrectly say buzz when you came to the number 40. You needed to be quick-witted but errors were met with laughter not embarrassment. Let's face it, it was impossible to keep it going too long. Besides, we sounded silly with all the buzzing going on.
Another day there might be a different number game to play, like an oral calculation exercise. “Start with 4." he'd tell us. "Multiply by 5, subtract 2, add 8 …” There'd be a string of these calculations. Then we’d see who among us was able to give the final answer. Perhaps I misremember the emotions. I loved these games in part because I often got the right answer. I wonder now if there were some kids who felt left behind when they couldn't keep up or had the wrong response. What I recall was Mr. Martinelli's playful attitude toward math, something I hadn't experienced previously. Even though he taught algebra in a traditional style by showing a few examples and by having us practice, his lighthearted approach made it enjoyable. He even let us talk to each other in class to compare work and answers. It was partly due to his influence, along with Sputnik and the resulting push in the US to emphasize math and science in schools, that I decided to become a math teacher.
Flash ahead to college. I am a math major on a clear path to becoming a secondary teacher. It's summer break leading into my junior year. I am enjoying being at home with my family. Having a younger sister, nine, and a brother, four, means I can still do things appropriate for little kids without embarrassment. I can take them to see Mary Poppins, listen to Winnie-the-Pooh records, and ride on the merry-go-round. My brother and sister were my cover.
We are at Red’s Dairy Bar on Route 8 in Lanesborough. This started as an ice cream stand (hence dairy in the title) but evolved into a burger place with a family orientation. The Red's complex was a fun place to go on a summer’s evening. There was a playground area, cages with monkeys and a pen for peacocks along with picnic tables.
I'm pushing my little brother on a swing. In the next swing is a little girl. Pushing her is a large man in a T-shirt with strong looking arms and a Marine Corps tattoo on one shoulder. He starts to chat as if he knows me. “Hi. How is college going for you?” I become nervous. He looks tough. I respond to his comments with one-word answers, enough to be polite but clearly not encouraging the conversation. As soon as my brother is willing to leave the swing set, I go back to our family's picnic table wondering why this man was acting so friendly.
Over the next few days it dawned on me. This man wasn’t a stranger. This was Mr. Martinelli. I didn’t recognize him outside the school environment, especially the way he was dressed. I associated him with a suit and tie. Had I recognized him I would have let him know the influence he had had on me. I felt bad. I was barely civil to him. He remained unaware of the impact he had on my life along with the positive feelings I still retain about that ninth grade math class. It was a missed opportunity.
The way I treated Mr Martinelli is something to be embarrassed about. More important than the difference between lettuce or cabbage, than walking around in broad daylight dressed in a costume for no reason, than misunderstanding the format of a three act play. I wasn't able to communicate meaningfully with someone who helped me make an important life decision. To Mr. Martinelli, wherever you are, thank you for being the kind of algebra teacher that inspired me to enter the world of math education, my life’s work. Especially for reminding me that becoming an adult is an ongoing, lifelong pursuit.
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