It’s been a late summer of milestones for the McNeils. I turned 50 in July – which felt biggish but less unsettling than turning 40 – and our son last week started Kindergarten. He is now a yellow bus rider and he and his classmates take their padded bench seats, the PTA informs us, as ostensible members of the Penn High School Class of 2036.
What a number!
But even that date, impossible in its abstraction, represents just a future gateway to the real and transformative lessons of the university, a place that changed my life and thinking, and also my wife’s, and that will loom throughout our son’s primary and secondary schooling as the principal point and expectation of it all.
It is cynically expedient in darker corners to traduce the academy but not in our house. College isn’t for everyone but it was for me, the son of a floundering JUCO dropout who once told me, “Those who can do; those who can’t teach,” and whose lessons in adult life were purely experiential and almost purely Hobbesian.
My dad had a collection of Chilton manuals and liked Louis L’Amour novels but I don’t think I ever saw him read another book. We certainly never talked about any.
***
My wife and son and I visited the new school a couple times over the summer – slow-mo drives through the parking lot, trips to the playground – to get him accustomed to the place and excited about the big leap from daycare.
Since we live in America, and the firearm sanctuary of Indiana, these trips also involved some scrutiny of the facilities. You figure the gunman starts at the front door, as they seem to do. The approach from the parking lot. The lines of sight from inside. The avenues of retreat. All the disgusting equations of geometry and ballistics and probability that horrify us parents, if not yet our youngest school-aged children.
But those lessons will come. The shelter-in-place drills, the run-for-your-life drills.
A bleak and feral country.
***
At an annual physical before my birthday the doctor asked, “How’s your mental health?”
He’s about my age. Has a wife and kids. Has a nurse type notes while we talk.
“How do you think, doc?” I asked. “You live here, too.”
Sinead O’Connor had just killed herself. I mentioned some others from our age group, including David Berman, sundry artists and singers, sensitive and perceptive types drawing the kind of harsh conclusions that writers and poets have long reached at the end of the road.
A wince from the doctor. “Yes, well, maybe ignorance is bliss.”
Maybe!
***
The principal wrote in the passive tense: “We also wanted to share that legislation was passed … that all schools prepare a catalog of materials found in the school library. Classroom teachers have been asked to create a master list of titles in their classroom libraries.”
Inventories for a book ban.
I don’t blame the principal, or the district – everyone just doing their jobs and saving their jobs, rowing against the eddying currents that would scuttle public education in Indiana.
A bottom-10, low-wage, brain-drain state with a child literacy crisis.
What would Hillsdale College do?
***
We did some business a couple years ago with a family-owned company in Elkhart and they tapped a young, homeschooled daughter-in-law to handle the quote. She was polite and surface friendly but could not perform arithmetic. The father-in-law had to get involved.
The young woman worked behind a counter festooned with religious tracts. She was from Oklahoma and had never been to South Bend.
“I heard it’s dirty,” she said.
“You could see for yourself,” I said.
She smiled wanly and looked away.
Wanly is a word I learned reading. It has a specific meaning and particular coloration and you accumulate these words by reading widely. Things generally go from there, ideas-wise – nuance, context, dimension, block on block on block.
And the slogans,
the symbols and shibboleths,
you know,
they just kind of fall away.
Music: “Hammer and Hoe” by JD Allen
