Outreach
at Christmas
I like to write in the third-person just to get some distance from myself!
A little before 3:00 am, Tina rolled
up the down comforter she was sleeping with on the sofa and went softly into
her room, where her son Jonathan, in SF from Manhattan for the holidays, was
sleeping. He lifted his head as she
entered.
“I can’t find my Literary Christmas,” she said.
“Oh,” he replied, his voice kind but
scratchy. “You can take mine.”
“Is it all right if I write in it?”
she asked. She couldn’t read without
talking back, underlining, or taking notes.
She’d learned from the Midnight
Disease, a book by a neurologist, that she was a hypergraphiac. She couldn’t not write.
“Sure,” he said. He knew about her affliction.
So she took his book, returned to
the living room, and lit the votive candle she used in memory of her sister,
her father, her mother, her aunt, and now a friend who’d just died, and she settled
down in the recliner, where she took in her minimalist effort at Christmas. She and her son had gone to the Emerald
Forest on Sloat, across from Stern Grove
and a block from their Nineteenth Avenue home,
right after they’d had a late lunch at the Indian Clay Oven on West Portal, his
treat, “Since you’re hosting me.” That
was on Wednesday, right after she’d picked him up at the Glen Park BART station,
where he’d come from the San Francisco Airport. For years she’d picked him up at the airport, a straight drive from their freeway home, but it had usually been with the help of the man in her life (sort of), who would bring his four-door car but was now
feeling tired and anxious about traffic.
When they had anticipated a big Thanksgiving rush, she’d suggested that Jonathan
take BART to their favorite station, and
he’d agreed good-naturedly. They’d tried
that a second time a month later.
So there it was, the tree, somewhere,
she felt sure, under all the ornaments that hung like charms on the chain of a
charm bracelet—each ornament full of meaning.
Her son’s paternal grandmother had crocheted the red and white bells,
and her own mother had made the
gingerbread man whose missing eye Tina and Jonathan had replaced with a white
circle she’d shaken out of a hole-puncher and glued on with Elmer’s stick
glue. There were also ceramic bells his
godmother had gotten for them in Mexico.
And on the top of the tree stood the antique doll Tina’s sister Dana had
gotten at a garage sale because she thought it looked like their mother during
the period when she had a perm framing her round face. She couldn’t remember the year, but searching
for the history of the diminishing tree, she’d looked through old albums and
found a picture of the angel on a tree in a home they’d left when she’d married
a second time in the summer of 1990, so it went back at least as far as
1989. This year they had put the angel
up so high on the tree that the wire hoop was showing under her white satin gown,
so Tina had moved her down and placed her facing the sign on the window: “CITY COLLEGE IS OPEN ENROLL NOW
CCSF.EDU The letter was in all caps
first in yellow and then in red, and in the middle there was a yellow circle
with a red heart and white letters saying, “We are all City College.”
That was what she was supposed to
get to today—to doing outreach at local
book stores.
But first a little bit more of
Christmas.
The Advent wreath with purple
candles left over from the previous year was on the coffee table along with the
ceramic blue and white nativity scene Jonathan’s godmother had brought back
from Mexico. Every other year Tina had
waited until Christmas Day to put the figure of Jesus in the manger, and she
had waited until January 6 to put the wise men there because she’d read
somewhere that that was the tradition in Mexico. But this year, she’d put everything in the
manger the same day. There would be no
more waiting now that classes were out and exams were over.
She opened A Literary Christmas and began with the story her son had been
reading aloud when she fell asleep on the sofa, Ann Beattie’s “That’s Where
You’ll Find Me,” which had a sister-in-law resembling Tina much too much for
her comfort. She read Raymond Carver’s “Put
Yourself In My Shoes,” which reminded her only a little bit of the Christmas a
year earlier when she and Jonathan had, on the spur of the moment, decided to
visit his first home and had been let in by the present owners, who gave them a
tour before mother and child went next door to see Jonathan's first baby sitter. She then read Leo Rosten’s "Night of the
Magi,” which would have resonated with her more if she had still been teaching
non-credit ESL, where gifts for the teachers ranged from a size DD bra with a
bar of soap in each cup to a ceramic statue although close to the end of her
non-credit years they’d started giving gift certificates instead.
But—and this was the thing—she had
to get on with the day. She had to
accomplish her mission, which—even before writing Christmas letters or creating
a year-end collage—was to do outreach for City College. She had picked up the material and gotten
the orientation a day early—on a Friday-- so that she would be able to visit a
friend just back from the hospital, this time with hospice, on Saturday. The great organizer of the outreach had come
in early and explained just what each book store might be willing to put up a
poster or take cards for a book graphics class at City College. After the 8:30 AM briefilng Tina had gone to a 9:30 appointment with
a retirement counselor, who asked her to sit down just as Tina’s cell phone,
which never rang, rang. It was Bill, a good friend, who asked her “Are you sitting down? Karen died last night.”
Tina, still in the two layers of
pajamas she wore, moved into the study, which had clutter instead of the
earlier squalor--the closest she'd come to getting the place in shape. There were Christmas
letters from people who sent out such things before Christmas, Jonathan’s daily plans for the days he would
be in San Francisco—an average of two-to three reunions a day—and not quite
tucked away the remnants of the semester.
The waste paper basket held the student information forms.
Before attending to the business
from City College, she needed to contact a friend visiting from Oregon, so she
turned on her computer and went into her Outlook inbox, where there was a
Jackie Lawson greeting card from this friend.
Tina responded and got a “Failed” message, so she tried again in the
time-honored but now obsolete e-mail way that had been replaced by Facebook and
maybe now by Wechat.com
Then…then…she looked at the two
boxes full of CCSF-related material. One was for her to take to community based organizations and one was for book
stores. She would go first to the book
stores so that Christmas shoppers would be likelier to see the material and she
would be able to see the books. She had
a green and white brochure saying “Build your future/study English” from the
ESL Department which was already diminished because of the cuts and dropped
enrollment once the ACCJC had threatened the accreditation of the city college
that had been part of the community since 1935. But this
was a day for looking forward even though she wasn’t looking forward to it. She had to get started, take that first step
that begins “a journey of a thousand miles.”
The organizer was a brilliant woman
who had sued the school district the year that Tina and another teacher had
gotten full-time positions over her.
There had been no hard feelings on either side, and years later Tina had
realized just how articulate and bright this woman was—though she’d learned
from a recent Audible recording of Mindset that she should think not in terms
of brilliance, which was a fixed mind-set, but of effort, which showed a growth
mindset. (She noted this with a smirk.)
Tina would make an effort to get out
this material.
“And the Transitional Studies
Department at City College has free non-credit classes to help students pass
the GED at four campuses including John Adams,” she would tell the book store
managers.
There were yellow schedules for the
day foreign language classes and blue for the night ones, and the languages
included American Sign Language, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Filipino
(why not Tagalog? Tina wondered),
Russian and Spanish. (Why not
Arabic?)
The organizer was a realistic
person, so she’d given Tina only one copy of each schedule per bookstore. They could post it, tape it down for people
to see.
The poster
for “Bookbinding” was prominent with its
GRPH 153 tear-off complete with e-mail contact and 1125 Valencia Street Mission
Campus address. There were beautiful
cards also promoting Book Structures, Boxes,
Bindings, a two-unit short course running for 10 weeks starting January
25 and meeting from 10 to 3 in the Mission Campus Basement, room 012. There were twelve colorful (as opposed to
last semester’s black-and-white) schedule of classes , and twelve flyers saying
“CCSF only $46/unit Fees waived for
those who qualify for BOG waiver.
Noncredit classes free.” It gave
the start date and the website with the plea “Don’t delay!”
That was advice that she’d have to
heed.
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