In 1995, my goal was simple: to become the toast of the New York literary town. So I began to scribble down my autobiography. I thought I had an interesting story about being confined to special education, the obligatory drug  and alcohol abuse and then going on to live a life full of “fish out of water” situations.

I rushed the first draft and sent it off to some literary agents. One guy told a friend of mine that the book was so bad it should be renamed “My life as an Idoit.” I loved it, and immediately added it as a subtitle to my book.

Oblivious, I felt that if I could get a forward or blurb from a famous writer or media personality, it would help me get in the door with some publishers. I had met Molly Jong-Fast at a party in Manhattan. Molly was/is a writer and a Manhattan socialite who was friends with many writers. More importantly, Molly’s mother, Erica Jong, was one of the pioneers of women’s literature in America.

When Molly said she would be glad to “look at it,” I started dumping heaps of typo-ridden manuscripts off with her doorman. Then I would call to see if she had read it; I always got the answering machine: “Hi, Molly, Jeff Nichols here. Look, I don’t know if you picked up my manuscript yet with your doorman, but if you have read up to page 130, don’t read anymore. I changed pages 135 to 155, beefed it up a little. Anyway, I have dropped those revised chapters off with your doorman, hope I caught you in time.” Eventually I realized Molly was not going to read my horrific book.
But my ace in the hole was a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of one of the bestselling books of all time: Angela’s Ashes. This would be tricky because my connection to Frank McCourt—my stepfather—could also be my obstacle. I sank my stepfather’s large fishing boat and accidently burnt his house down to the ground, among other injustices. A decent guy with a big heart, he handled it better than anyone would.

My mother, always the insufferable cheerleader, must have wrestled Frank’s number from my stepfather, and I got the old “I’ll have a look at it” from Frank.

I began to stalk Frank the same way some creep would stalk Pamela Anderson. I did everything but rifle through Frank’s garbage. Time passed. I found out that a golf club in the Hamptons was having a tournament in Frank’s honor. I caught him right before he teed off. Throwing caution to the wind, I walked up and said, “Frank, I am Jeff Nichols, Cynthia Nichols’ son.”

In his wonderful brogue, he looked up at me and said, “Oh, I know who you are, and let me tell ya, I am not writing any (expletive) forward for you book!”

Horrified that I had upset this wonderful man, I stepped back in genuine concern and horror.

“Oh no, you don’t have to. I am a big fan, no problem,” I said.

Then Frank, possibly picking up on my earnestness and latent empathy added, “But I might give you a burb.”

Two years later, Jeff’s book was made into a major movie. His book, Trainwreck: My Life as an Idoit, was published by Simon and Schuster with Frank’s blurb on the front cover. For more information, visit www.jeff-nichols.com.

By Rosemary Kalikow

“Don’t you want to be alive to dance at my wedding someday?” asked my 18-year-old son, Brett.

My husband and I were up in Cambridge for the first parents’ college weekend. Brett was apparently majoring in Jewish guilt at Harvard. “How can a mother possibly reply to that question?” I thought as I reluctantly snuffed out the cigarette I was smoking. It’s not that I hadn’t tried quitting before. I had, in fact, stopped smoking when I was pregnant with Brett, but ran to buy a pack of cigarettes the day I returned from the hospital. Twice I’d attended a “smoke enders” course at the 92nd Street Y. I’d get down to smoking two to three cigarettes a day (from a full pack), but then I’d have a bad day at work and start puffing away. I’d gone to see a hypnotist. I can’t say whether I was put into a trance or not, but when I left his office I couldn’t wait to light up. I tried Nicorette gum, then started smoking cigarettes along with the gum. The nicotine patch was also a bust.

Quite truthfully, I never stopped because I really didn’t want to give up smoking. For 30 years, cigarettes were my best friends. They calmed me when I was anxious. They enabled me to overcome my desire to snack, thus helping me stay thin. They were my comrades when I chatted on the phone. They were my companions when I went for a walk. They remained my best date in a social cocktail setting.

Then my favorite newscaster, Peter Jennings, announced to the world that he was diagnosed with lung cancer from smoking, and died soon thereafter. How could that be? He was so vibrant and strong. Then my son challenged me to stay alive for his wedding. This was throwing down the gauntlet, especially since Brett hadn’t even started dating a girl yet. I might have to wait years for that wedding to materialize.

As a final effort, I got acupuncture. Not a traditional Chinese technician, but rather a Jewish doctor named Naomi Rabinowitz. It seemed like an interesting combination of Eastern meets Western philosophy. Each session, I lay down on a table while she stuck needles into various parts of my body, including my head. “This really isn’t painful,” I would think to myself, as she turned out the lights and I slumbered for the next half hour. I was glad, however, when the needles were removed and I got Chinese herbs to take away my withdrawal symptoms.

During those six weeks, I did not have my usual withdrawal jitters, nicotine cravings or weight gain. I did quit smoking all cigarettes.

It’s been four years now without even a puff, yet I still walk by a newsstand and get such a yearning. I know that if I have even one cigarette I’ll be hooked again, so I completely stay away from this evil addictive weed.

My son is now 22 and a college grad. To my great joy, he has not only started dating but has fallen in love with a fabulous young lady. They’ve been a couple for two years now. I wonder if this might be the one. I can’t help but ruminate, how many more years will it be before they want to get married? There isn’t even a remote chance that I’ll pick up another cigarette until I reach that milestone. Then I’ll have to ask myself, “Don’t you want to stick around for grandchildren?” 

–
Rosemary Kalikow was a talk show producer at ABC and Court TV Network for 25 years. She is currently working as a freelance writer in New York.

A native Californian, I now live and work on the Upper West Side as a full-time nanny. My workday is spent pushing a bright pink stroller, passing strangers I will probably never meet.

Still, I didn’t give a second thought to helping a high school kid who dropped a $10 bill on the ground while strutting to his headphones. I picked it up and ran down the block after him, the baby shouting, “Faster, faster!” as I tried to catch up.

That same week, I was shopping with my friend Gina when a girl in a studded black hoodie rushed past me, a $20 bill falling to the linoleum floor behind her. I darted after her.

“You could’ve kept it. This is a recession,” Gina said.

“No way, it’s not my money,” I responded.

Being in a recession shouldn’t mean humanity regresses as well. In a city that can seem rather overwhelming, I still believe in trying to do what is courteous and considerate, even in the smallest of ways. Like pulling someone aside to tell them if there is food stuck in their teeth, or running after a person who drops lunch money.

Two weeks later, my gal pal Scarlett and I were braving the cold, trying to hail a cab on Fifth Avenue. My teeth chattering and paralyzed by a swirling breeze, I watched as Scarlett sprinted down the block in 4-inch heels after an available taxi van. She hopped in and we leaned back in our seats feeling warm, thankful, relieved. I saw a piece of paper on the floor and scooped it up without looking, suspecting Scarlett dropped it while stepping into the cab. It wasn’t until we passed under a traffic light that I glimpsed  a balding man staring back at me, a stoic expression on his face. It was Benjamin Franklin on a $100 bill!

Was it coincidence? Luck? Karma? I can’t say. All I knew was that I wanted to spend it in a generous manner. I mentally went through my options: hand it over to the driver, donate it to Haiti relief, take Scarlett out to dinner. As I envisioned my friend running in platform shoes against a 25 mph wind chill for me, the decision was made.

“Are you sure you want to share it with me?” Scarlett asked.

Her question made my decision all the more satisfying. That is the neat thing about New Yorkers: They are often surprised when you do something kind for them.

Instead of going out for cocktails, Scarlett and I dined at a French restaurant. We took a picture of good ol’ Ben and sent him back on his way through the Manhattan currency exchange.

Buying lunch one Friday soon after, I placed my $15 change in a shallow coat pocket. Standing in the drugstore only a minute later, I felt the money was gone. I backtracked, but it was rush hour—probably 50 people had strolled in my steps within that time. Maybe a morally crooked person saw me drop it and, saying nothing, claimed ownership of my Manhattan moolah. Or perhaps someone found the abandoned cash and it really helped him or her out that day. I’m inclined to believe in the latter. Many of us may be strangers in this city, but practicing compassion adds up to a lot more than dollars.

–
Sarah Elder is a writer living in Manhattan and working on her first book. The other day she found another $6.

As would be expected, such an offer attracts hordes of New Yorkers, with the most resolute opera fans arriving as early as 10 a.m. to assure their place in line. The line itself is quite a scene, a miniature New York, complete with eccentrics, local politics and plenty of kibitzing. There are young professionals in suits, little old ladies in fur coats, couples sitting next to each other silently passing back and forth sections of the Times, students from Julliard analyzing scores, packed lunches from Fairway and Zabars and foreigners reading books in their native language. Every kind of chair-like apparatus imaginable is used to avoid sitting on the floor. On opera Tuesdays, I have my own routine to deal with the rigors of the rush line. Peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Check. Bottle of seltzer? Check. Plenty of reading material? Double check. Over the course of numerous rush lines, I have developed

The author and his father, rush ticket regulars at the Met. Photo by Daniel S. Burnstein

demure line habits. I treat it as if it were study hall, a chance to catch up on reading and get some work done. My father, on the other hand, believes in a more convivial approach, often striking up conversations with our line-mates, using slight variations of the nightclub classic, “Do you come here often?” as a conversation starter. I’ll leave the line to get a cup of coffee and when I get back, my father fills me in on the details of
our neighbors.

“She’s from Japan, told me about a great noodle spot in Midtown, likes to snowboard.” Or, “See that girl in the front of the line? She’s from Austria, got here at 9 a.m.!” The limited number of rush tickets makes your position in line crucial, and people often perform head counts upon arrival. It also makes operagoers extremely vigilant of any surreptitious activity in the line.

“People sneak their friends in all the time,” one rush line veteran told me. “They say they’re just talking, they’re not going to buy tickets, but they do get tickets, and then the people behind them are out of luck. Like these guys,” he says, pointing to a group of people in front of us. “They weren’t here an hour ago!”

The opera line is like a sociological experiment in self-governance. With no central authority to regulate it, the people themselves are the police. My father and I don’t possess such a misanthropic view and tend to believe in the best of people. Patrons who are talking to their friends are just talking to their friends. At the same time, we secretly hope that others will bring swift justice to brazen line intruders. At around 5:30 p.m., the line begins to tighten as people prepare for the tickets to finally go on sale. When the box office does open, the whole process is over in a flash. People new to the opera scamper over to seating diagrams to find out where they will be sitting, while the serious opera buffs know simply by looking at their seat number: “Row M, seat 26, hmm, not bad, although I would have preferred row L, seat 24.”

After the line, there is about a two-hour break before the opera begins, just enough time to grab dinner and return the beach chairs to the closet. The rush tickets are given out in consecutive order; often you’ll find yourself in close proximity to your newly minted friends from the line.

“There’s the woman from Japan,” my father points out at intermission. “I’m going to ask her what she thinks about this production.”

I just stay seated and read the synopsis for the second act.

As Tuesdays at the Met continues, we learn more opera etiquette each week. We know when to clap (and more importantly, when not to), have acquired more discerning ears—“The soprano was a little shrill, no?”—and recently, I was even brave enough to shout my first “bravo.” My father and I are now regulars on the opera line, and with that we often run into other rush habitués.

“Remember the line for Carmen? That was crazy!” my father says to Christian, from Paris.

“It was,” he answers, “but not as bad as La Boheme.”

We both nod in agreement.

–
Lucas Corcoran is a jazz performance major at the City College of New York. He also writes and edits for the college’s newspaper, The Campus.

This luxurious outfit, however, is not for jogging on the treadmill; in fact, the soft, thick fabric and sagging lines suggest the very opposite of physical activity. Bryan was instead recognizing my favorite weekend ritual: puttering around the house.

To be clear, puttering is not about being lazy, nor is it “dawdling,” which is about delaying something you should do. To putter is to move aimlessly, usually indoors. We zone out much like we’re stoned, but are in motion and vaguely productive. I know quite a bit about this. For as long as I can remember, I have puttered once a week, usually on Saturday. My mind, jelly by week’s end, regains its shape, and I feel rejuvenated—ready to get back to work, ready to be social or ready to dawdle about something really important, like eating a whole grain or calling my mom back.

Here’s a quick seven-step guide to a rewarding putter:

1. Carve out enough time. I block out at least four hours, so I can be loose with the time. I avoid goals or plans unless it’s to create a new iTunes playlist (“Moody” or “’80s TV Theme Songs”) or to craft a limerick for a relative’s birthday card so mine stands out from my brother’s and sister’s. I dress comfortably for the indoors—thick socks. No pajamas. I am not sick, nor a child.

Mat Zucker mid-putter in his gray velour tracksuit. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

2. No need for a plan. Puttering means wandering rooms of my apartment, sitting down and standing up at will, petting my dog and watching him eat, rubbing my ankles, re-tagging my LinkedIn contacts, looking at friends of friends’ Facebook photos or calling my friend Adam from college at work. When he asks what I am up to, I don’t have to say, “Nothing.” I now can say, “I’m puttering.” Same goes for updates on Twitter.

3. Change your mind mid-stream. One minute I am re-folding my jeans in light-to-dark order when, for no apparent reason, I feel compelled to compare the filmography of Joan Allen and Annette Bening on IMDb.com. Staring out the window is a good bridge from one activity to another for me. It’s like dreaming wide awake. Plus, there are pretty things to see. Like trees and birds. Or if you live near the High Line, a peep show in the Standard Hotel.

4. Accomplish minor tasks that make you feel good. For example, I might clean out one single desk drawer, untangle my headphones’ earpiece, group my books by spine color and label plastic bins with “White T-Shirts” and “Travel-Size Bottles.” If it turns into spring-cleaning, however, I stop immediately. Puttering is not chores. That’s why I hire a housekeeper for alternate Fridays.

5. Nosh versus lunch. When puttering, I don’t eat full meals, but I also don’t eat right out of the pretzel bag or frozen yogurt container. I prepare a nice plate like cheese and crackers, and I slice an orange and use a napkin instead of a paper towel. Coffee’s good at first. Wine is better later. I think about all my food allergies, compare my restrictions to my sister’s celiac disease and imagine how different my life would be if I could eat tomatoes. And then I think of Dan Quayle.

6. Enjoy light entertainment. Real Simple magazine and reruns on cable of The Devil Wears Prada keep me focused enough, but I save full novels and new movies for “Mush Day,” which my mother-in-law’s friend coined as a full day to curl up on the sofa with a big book. Internet quizzes of which celebrity I am most like are good since they have a quick payoff (Michael J. Fox before the Parkinson’s). Or if I am feeling intellectual, I play a game comparing lead stories in USA Today (“Boy Reunited with Dad”) to the New York Times (“Democrats…”).

7. Unexpected upsides. Relaxed, my mind now goes places it hasn’t visited in a long time. I discover a new, useful app for my smart phone (NYC 311), a new neighbor’s window to peer into (he’s cute!), a new favorite color (mauve) or simply notice my toenails are uneven and do something about it. Clip.

Everyone should putter now and then. We would be more pleasant to be around because we are relaxed, but we’ll also have something, albeit modest, to show for it. I was thinking of starting a puttering website, but that’s just too much effort. Instead, I’m hoping Bryan will next get me slippers. n

–
Mat Zucker is a creative director in advertising who putters around in Chelsea with his partner Bryan and dog, Ezra Pound.

In 1994, I was one of five female producers at Live with Regis & Kathie Lee. Regis would often come into our meeting and request a specific guest, always a sports star. I consistently volunteered to take the assignment because the other female producers had no idea who he was talking about. Fortunately, I had a secret source at my disposal: my precocious 7-year-old son, Brett, who knew everything about sports. I immediately dialed my son’s grade school and got him out of class and on the line.

“Brett, Regis wants me to book Jerry Rice. Who do I call to get him and why is he important?” I asked.

My son irreverently referred to me as “Rosie” rather than “mom” when he asked if I was living under a rock. “You didn’t watch the Super Bowl this weekend? Jerry Rice helped win the game for the San Francisco 49ers with 10 catches and three touchdowns. He’s a great wide receiver,” Brett said.

Rice was booked for the following Monday, and Regis told me his vision for the segment: sit-down interview followed by a football pass between Reege and Rice on Columbus Avenue. No problem.

On the day of Rice’s arrival, I went to the ABC guard and said, “I’m going to need you and a couple of other large guards to hold back the crowds when Regis and Rice come out for a football pass.” He looked at me with attitude as he proclaimed, “We are not authorized to go outside of this building.”

There wasn’t another staff person who was free to assist, so I sought out the largest cue cards I could find to use for barriers.

Rice was handsome, upbeat, well-
spoken and engaging—a producer’s dream. As the tête-à-tête was ending, I ran outside with my giant cue cards and started shouting at the crowds to move back. Regis threw the football. Rice ran to the opposite side of the street. All of a sudden, a giant construction dude jumped in front of my cue cards and knocked the football out of Rice’s hands. All I could think about was how upset my beloved Regis was going to be. I dropped the cue cards and started pummeling the guy as I screamed obscenities at him.

When I re-entered the studio, the audience started to applaud and cheer: My maniacal behavior had been caught on camera. My incredulous son, who had never heard me raise my voice in anger or even use a curse word, meekly asked, “Was that really you out there?”

Someone at the news desk apparently thought the incident was humorous and WABC aired the clip during the evening news sports report. Then Regis, who never missed an opportunity to milk a segment gone awry, decided to re-air that same clip—in slow motion—the next morning.

I’m sure there isn’t a soul today who remembers this incident, except for my now-grown son. Every year when the Super Bowl comes around, Brett loves to come back home to watch the game. He never fails to toss a football my way while quipping, “Here’s to a Jerry Rice catch.”

–
Rosemary Kalikow was a talk show producer at ABC and Court TV Network for 25 years. She is currently working as a freelance writer in New York.

The last thing we want when we surface is to feel like we’re still down below. But, thanks to the ever-present scaffolding blighting our sidewalks, the city often feels like one long tunnel. The line between below ground and above ground—which used to be the sidewalk—is blurred.

Despite all that, I’m not here to write about the misery of seeing yet another scaffold going up. I’m here to write about the joy of scaffolding coming down. And what an unexpectedly glorious, uniquely New York moment it is when you happen upon it.

Before we get to that, a little clarity. When I say scaffolding, I’m referring to the steel pole structures, about one-story high, that butt out from building facades, covering the entire sidewalk. Atop, they’ve got wood planks and lots of men speaking a frenzied combination of Spanish, Polish, Slavic and sometimes even English. Walking through these structures is not dissimilar to walking through a mineshaft, right down to the dim light bulbs spaced every eight feet. (Occasionally, after midnight, you’ll encounter a solitary red bulb. Not sure what the point is, aside from terrifying you and your dog by making you feel like you’re on the set of Saw VI.)

Confession: I’ve been mislabeling these structures. Technically speaking, they’re called sidewalk sheds, but only by Department of Building employees, sidewalk shed manufacturers and building supers. I learned this from my own building’s super, Angel, when I walked outside one morning and saw half-a-dozen guys unloading a truck full of poles and planks in front of our Upper West Side building. “Oh no,” I uttered. “Scaffolding.” “You mean the sidewalk shed?” Angel said.

Why I thought my building would be spared, I don’t know. There was a silver lining, though, however slight. Maybe Angel could answer a question that had been tugging at me for quite some time: Why were these scaffolds—I mean, sidewalk sheds—in front of every other building in the city? When one comes down, another goes up. I assumed it was due to the renovation craze.

“All buildings over six stories have to repoint their facade every five years,” Angel said. “It’s a city code.”

Well, he got it mostly right. According to Department of Buildings website, Local Law 11/98 mandates that “the periodic inspection of the exterior walls and appurtenances of buildings greater than six stories in height… shall be conducted at least once every five years.” Inspecting, not repointing, is the mandate. (Yes, I had to look up appurtenances—“any built-in, nonstructural portion of a building, such as doors, windows, vents, etc.”) But, as most of these buildings are pre-war, that almost always leads to repointing, or replacing the mortar joints between bricks. So if it seems like this cycle of scaffolding is never-ending, that’s because—with more than 12,000 six or more story buildings in the city—it is.

New Yorkers need light, crave it like seedlings. We judge our apartments by how much light we get (one of the first questions we ask a realtor). We choose to walk on the sunny side of the street, crossing if need be. A sidewalk covered with scaffolding robs us of our prized light. Especially if it’s part of our normal going-to-work, going-to-the-gym, walking-the-dog route. Bright, open and scaffold-free one day, dank, claustrophobic and scaffolded the next. We mutter to ourselves and trudge through it, wondering how long it will be up. Repeating the ritual day in, day out, month after month, sometimes for a couple of years. We get used to it, eventually accepting it as part of our everyday surroundings.

Then one day, we’re walking down the same stretch and something feels different. It hits us. The light, that is. We feel the sun’s rays and look around and notice the scaffolding is gone. With only a few rust stains here and there on the sidewalk as proof it was ever there in the first place. And, as crazy as it sounds, we’re elated, basking in the glory of this previously nondescript, now beautiful stretch of sidewalk, ignoring the rat poison traps and smeared dog poop. It is a sublime New York moment, one out-of-towners would never understand. And one, per Local Law 11/98, we get to experience all over again in 2014.

–
Chuck Pagano is currently working on a collection of short stories. He can often be found playing fetch in the West 87th Street dog run with his indefatigable chocolate lab, Bailey.

This is how I’d imagine a Frank McCourt memoir about our teaching days together at Stuyvesant High School might begin.

We used to meet in the hallway near the principal’s office—Frank shuttling off to his fifth-period creative-writing class and me to my junior journalism students.

We’d stop and chat, exchanging tales of woe—like two inmates in the prison cafeteria before afternoon kitchen duty—but I’d always linger longer than I would with the other teachers because with Frank you knew you’d get a fun story, a fresh insight or a provocative question that would relieve the numbing grind for the rest of the day.

Teacher, mentor, colleague, friend. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Even then, Frank was recognized as a gifted storyteller by his students and colleagues who would listen raptly in the classroom or huddle around him at the bar as he regaled us with his now-famous epic tales of childhood misery.

To many of us, it wasn’t a question of if, but when, Frank’s talent would reveal itself to the world outside of East 15th Street and First Avenue.

Foreshadowing: at a Stuyvesant student awards ceremony, Jerzy (Being There) Kosinski offhandedly told McCourt that he, too, would make it one day.

“Yeah, but when?” said Frank.

*

During one of our impromptu chats in the hallway, Frank became animated when I told him I was the child of Holocaust survivors. “So, you think you’d ever marry a non-Jew?” he asked.

“No,” I remember answering quite definitively. “It would betray all the suffering my family has experienced.”

Frank told me he was intrigued by the whole question of intermarriage; two of his brothers, Malachy and Alphie, good ol’ lapsed Irish Catholics, were, at one time or another, married to Jewish women.

“It reminds me of what my mother, the late Angela McCourt, once complained about,” he said in the endearing brogue of his. “There’s notin’ in this family but Protestants and Jews, Jews and Protestants. God above, every time I cross the floor I’m trippin’ over little Protestants and Jews.”

I strolled on to my classroom grinning.

*

At my wedding, about four years later, I was reminded of the comment I made to Frank about never marrying a non-Jew. Technically, I had kept my vow; my Presbyterian-born bride had converted to Judaism, but the twinkle in Frank’s eye when I told him about my fiancée spoke volumes.

When the time came for toasts, a few close friends from college followed my brother up to the podium, and then a British fellow who worked with my wife. Right after he made his brief remarks, Frank sauntered to the microphone.

“I wasn’t planning on making a toast, but when I saw an Englishman get up here—and since they’ve oppressed the Irish for hundreds of years—I knew I couldn’t leave it at that…”

He got the crowd going with that. The rest of his discursive comments are a bit foggy in my memory—except a George Bernard Shaw quote that he cited as an admonition: “Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”

When Frank’s comments went on a bit longer than the Englishman who preceded him, the Brit heckled, “Shaw also said, ‘All the world’s a stage…unfortunately.’”

Frank’s toast is the one highlight missing from the wedding video. I never bothered to check if the guy we hired went to the john and missed it or if in his seemingly indiscriminate editing, he decided for some reason to slice it.

I guess it’s hard to blame him because, after all, it was 1993, three years before Angela’s Ashes appeared, four years before the Pulitzer Prize and six years before the movie premiere and long awaited sequel, ’Tis, that would continue to burnish the Frank McCourt legend.

One old high school friend kidded me that if I had that toast on videotape I could probably sell it to a TV newsmagazine or auction it on eBay, at the very least.

*

I miss those chance meetings in the hallway with Frank between classes. He had moved to the Upper West Side, not far from where I live, but I’d only run into him once or twice in the past few years.

We spoke every few months, when I could catch him at home between book tours, lectures, writing conferences, interviews, book parties, charity events and other demands on his time. It was a vicarious thrill to see his name pop up everywhere and to see that sometimes in life talent does win out in the end.

“I’m a beacon of hope to all geriatrics,” Frank once told me. “Don’t give up, you can keep doing it into your 70s, practically your 80s.” And sometimes listening to him talk about teaching, you realize that in spite of society’s view, it is a noble calling. At least in Frank’s case, it worked out for the best.

“Whatever I know about writing I learned from teaching,” he said. “They kept asking me questions and provoked me to tell stories, and in return I would provoke them to tell stories. The interaction was very fruitful.”

So wasn’t it a great profession altogether?

’Twas.
–
Tom Allon is president and CEO of Manhattan Media. He taught at Stuyvesant High School with Frank McCourt from 1986 to 1987.

The need for his new binder is also testament to the demise of the textbook. In social studies, in science, in Spanish, for reasons both financial and ideological, the school he attends hands out Xeroxed worksheets, Xeroxed pages of textbooks and websites, and somehow my son’s 7th grade brain, three-quarters of which is taken up with inchoate longings and Gary Larson cartoons, is meant to organize the scattered pages of information into a coherent whole.

I’m afraid to ask my son what he understands about Boyle’s Law, the Civil War draft riots or the conjugation of certain Spanish irregular verbs. Without the plodding linearity of the textbook to organize his thoughts on these topics, I wonder how he copes with the accretion of information from all these loose-leaf pages. It is only in math that he has a textbook, one that weighs about 50 pounds, and only in that topic, perhaps fittingly, that we see a progression from point A to point B. When he came home with a math textbook in the first week of 6th grade, he was ecstatic. He told us, not once but thrice, that if he got so much as a pencil scratch on its pages we would have to pay the school $50. It was then I realized, sadly, that he’d never had a textbook in all the years of grade school.

I fondly remember some of the textbooks I had while attending school in Northern Virginia in the 1960s. Most of all, I loved my 4th grade Virginia history textbook with its delicate painting of Gunston Hall in shades of pale pink, yellow and Wedgwood blue. In its creamy pages, I read the story of the Lost Colony and saw an illustration of the colonists looking at the mysterious word, “Croatan,” carved in the tree. My 4th grade English grammar textbook was filled with sentences parsed in patterns that looked like flight plans or football plays. And there were science textbooks with diagrams of electrical circuits and wind currents and experiments in shaded boxes. Yet, for all the textbooks I toted home, along with my groovy denim covered three-ring binder with its jean pocket on the cover, it’s hard to remember what I learned, especially in 7th grade. Somehow, one almost feels like at a certain point, after you’ve gotten the basics down, school is beside the point.

The point is that my son, by asking, well, actually, begging, for a new three-ring binder—and also by refusing to weed out ANY papers from his old stuffed one—is taking ownership of his education. I can imagine how he will painstakingly transfer each page into the new binder. For the pages in which the holes are ripped, my son might stick on a tiny white donut-shaped “reinforcement,” a touching remnant from my childhood, along with the satisfying manila dividers with their clear-colored cellophane tabs.

Yet, as my son goes about his ritual of transplanting papers into a new three-ring binder, I need to use mental “dividers” and separate my own nostalgia from the reality of my children’s school life, a life that is almost totally hidden from me. I must come to terms with the fact that just as my son’s and my 9-year-old daughter’s childhoods are theirs, with their play dates and schedules rather than my 1960s devil-may-care existence, so is their schooling, with its reliance on hyperlinks and idea webs rather than encyclopedias and sentence diagrams.

I know now it is a violation to do what I used to when my son was in 6th grade: take the loose papers he had left on the floor or dining room table and put them into his binder with a satisfying snap of the metal rings.

“Mom, where’s my math test???” “It goes in the pocket,” he would complain. Or, “The Spanish worksheet goes in my folder since we’re still doing it.”

Butt out, Mom.

My 4th grader daughter means this, too, when I try to clean out her red vinyl homework folder.

“Why do you have math worksheets from a week ago in here?” “Why do you have this ELA test reading about a ham radio? You already HAD the test?” I ask her, on my way to the recycling stack.

“Nooooo,” she protests. Somehow, in all the numbing boredom of the ELA test prep, which she complained bitterly about for weeks, she has cottoned on to the excitement of owning a Ham radio—two words I hadn’t heard joined together since my own childhood.

“We have to keep this,” she says, and snatches the paper from my hand.

“Mom, can we get a ham radio? Can we? Can we?” my daughter asks me this as we are out the door on the way to school, her heavy backpack filled with library books, lunch, water bottle, folders and composition books.

Like the word “Croatan” carved on a tree, the one true thing etched in my brain from that entire Virginia history textbook, she has picked up a signal in the static of worksheets, test prep and workbooks. She doesn’t quite know what it means, but it’s lighting up a circuit in her brain. And that’s enough.

Nancy J. Brandwein is a freelance writer and editor who has had essays published in The New York Times, Brain, Child and West Side Spirit and Our Town, where she is a featured contributor for her weekly “Snack Attack” column.