 “Oh, I see that Mrs. Leary was in today,” I exclaimed delightedly as I entered the store underneath the big ‘Patrick O’Toole’s Shoe Repair Shop’ sign. “Is her daughter doing any better yet?” Mr. O’Toole cut two slices of the homemade Irish Soda bread on the counter, shook his head a sad ‘no’ as he buttered the thick slices with creamy yellow butter and handed me a piece. While I ate he explained, “She was especially downcast today. Doctors don’t think she’s going to ever be able to walk again. Such sadness it is.”
It was June of 1960 and I was 10 years old and living in Passaic New Jersey. My dad had sent me to Mr. O’Toole’s shop back in February with a pair of his damaged wing-tipped shoes to be fixed. I intended to just drop them off but instead got intrigued by some of the equipment in his shop. I asked a lot of questions and while I was in there Mrs. Leary came in with a child-size shoe in a brace and a round loaf of bread which she placed on the counter and said, “Patrick, would you mind adjusting this for me please. Little Rose just can’t manage that wobble there.” “Sure enough, Mary. Just let me get my tools,” he responded. She looked over at me anxiously and in what seemed no more than a minute, he was done. “That’ll hold her in tight. Thanks for the bread, Mary. Tastes just like me mother’s it does!” he exclaimed. She smiled broadly and left into the cold winter afternoon. “Mr. O’Toole, I think she forgot to pay,” I helpfully pointed out. “No,” he answered, “she paid me in bread. See, her daughter got polio a few years back and needs those braces. They don’t have money for much these days, so she pays what she can.” I responded, “My grandmother did that at her store too. She made the most beautiful hats anywhere. People came from far away to buy them. But sometimes when someone really needed one and they couldn’t pay, they would pay with something else.” Then I giggled and told him the story of the live chicken Mrs. Tambores brought one time that chased my mother all through the store, out the door, and into the courtyard. After that day through the winter and spring and into summer, I stopped in to see him every few days. He loved telling me stories of his childhood in Ireland and of his dangerous and difficult voyage to America when he was only fifteen years old. “Aye. Lucky for me I learned this skill outside of Dublin. The whole family lost everything and my father apprenticed me when I was just 12. Danny MacCarthy was a good man he was. Taught me everything.” And then Patrick O’Toole would tell me stories of the people he met and the lessons that Danny taught him. “Aye, one time a man, all raggedy and dirty, comes into his shop. I was ready to throw him out, I was, but Danny shakes his hand. ‘Mr. Connors, how are you this fine morning?’ he says to him and then continues, ‘I see you be limping a bit. Can I have the honor of fixin’ that shoe for you?’ And wouldn’t you know it, the man takes off his shoe and Danny takes care of it right there and gives it back and says, ‘thank you for coming in. See you again soon. Top o’the mornin’ to ye.’ And I turned to Danny and I asked him what that was all about. He told me Mr. Connors had been down on his luck since his wife died and slipped more and more into another world. No one could help much, but Danny says, he says to me, ‘Patrick my boy, you got to do right by the world. You got to mend the world. Mend it one shoe at a time.’ He taught me everything that man.” I loved hearing his stories and being in his shop. Sometimes his little girl would come in from upstairs. I took to helping her with her kindergarten work. She was often coughing and tired and had missed so much of school that she was far behind. Her mother had two new babies to tend to and didn’t have much time left for Katherine. I would sit with her on little benches in the corner of the store and teach her to sound out her letters and words. Sometimes I’d come with little stories I wrote using her new vocabulary. Mr. O’Toole would look over at us delighted with his daughter’s smiles and laughter and progress. He would tell me how she looked forward to my visits. “She’s a smart one, you know. She’s going to make us proud. She’s getting stronger every day now.” The school year was almost over and at this point in our fifth-grade classroom Mrs. Jenkins was teaching us about different careers. This posed a great difficulty for me. I had no real skill or talent that I could measure. Like Janet, who was a wonderful dancer. Or Patty whose mother made delicious homemade pasta and was teaching her that special skill. Or Ruth Ann who could add and multiply and even divide in her head! I mused about my dilemma with Mr. O’Toole that afternoon. “I have no talent that I can think of,” I told him while finishing the buttery bread. But I want to do what your Mr. Danny McCarthy said. I want to mend the world. But I have no tools,” I sighed. Just then Katherine came bounding in and our afternoon of reading –she could read easy Golden Books now—and giggling began. As I left the store later, Mr. O’Toole told me to be sure to come next week on my very last day of school for the year. He wanted me to have something. When I walked into his store the next Monday Mr. O’Toole and his whole family were there to greet me. Katherine jumped up and down with excitement. “This is for you,” she shouted handing me a box. And beaming with pride she added, “I wrote the card all by myself!” Even the two babies were gurgling happily. Her mother hugged me and thanked me for helping out. “Katherine is so happy now. Her asthma is almost cured and she can sit and read on those days when it’s too hard to play outside. It makes my heart so pleased to see her like that.” The note on top from Katherine said “Thank you. I Love You.” I tore the newspaper wrapping paper and string off and found a beautiful brown box. Carved on the top it said, “Sylvia’s Tools.” I opened it to reveal pencils, a pen, and some chalk. “That’s how you will mend the world, Sylvia,” he said smiling, “With stories and teaching and kindness. One shoe at a time. One shoe at a time.”  “I guess it wasn’t too unusual for an only child, but still it bordered on obsession.” From the time I could talk I would ask my mother for a baby brother. In the early 1950s in Montevideo, Uruguay one of the ways to deflect discussions about where babies come from was to tell young kids that mail-order like, babies come “from Paris.” So, I would ask if my baby brother had come from Paris yet. I was really insistent about this point. “What about a baby sister?” people would ask. “No, a brother,” I would demand. A few years after my mother was divorced from my biological father who had deserted us when I was an infant, she married Fred Kuhner who I immediately called my real father. We moved to a house in an area called Carrasco, Uruguay, and at age 4 I started school. Senora Gonzales was a particularly beloved teacher. While the other kids took naps on floor mats I helped her sort materials. If anyone awoke upset or fearful I would run to their side to talk to them and make them feel better. Nap time was my favorite part of the day. Sometimes during that time I would be allowed to wander down the hall to the school library. That’s where I saw it—evidence that my parents were totally ignorant about conception and birth.
“Senora Gonzales! Look, look what I found!” I called to her in as controlled a whisper-yell as my young mouth could produce. “You need to tell me the absolute truth. Do babies really come from Paris?” Well, dear readers, she felt she had no choice. The book detailed a lot and she knew I was desperate for facts. So she explained, in what I imagine must have been rather ambiguous terms, how pregnancy happens. Apparently I was not shocked about the process—but I was shocked at my parents’ lack of information. “She called us from the school before you came home. She warned us about what had happened,” my mother told me years later. “You came in the house, threw down your sweater and demanded that your father and I sit down in the living room the instant he came home. Then you went to your room and slammed the door shut. Slammed it. I couldn’t imagine what was next. I called your father to warn him and we decided what our approach would be with this situation. But I underestimated you.” She sighed. She always sighed when she told this story and always emphasized how she underestimated me. I’d heard it many, many times throughout my life, but the last time she told it was in 2001, three years before she died. Then it became different. But now she continued the often-told story, “When your father came home and we settled ourselves on the sofa I called to you that we were ready. You came out of the bedroom with a book, some paper, and some pencils. There was barely controlled anger and disappointment in your face. You were always such a sunny child that this took us by surprise. And then, putting the writing materials in front of us, you began your lesson. ‘Babies do not come from Paris. You have been doing things all wrong. You have wasted letter after letter sending for a baby. Let me show you what needs to happen.’ And then you began drawing and explaining.” At this point she always stopped because embarrassed laughter would overtake her and anyone else listening. She then continued, “You asked us if we had any questions. When we shook our heads with a ‘no’, you said you expected that this knowledge would lead to a baby brother, and you pivoted and marched resolutely back to your room.” When my own daughter was 3 years old, in 1981, my mother was visiting us during a particularly cold day in February, and she once again over tea and cake told the story. I then asked a question that had not occurred to me before. “Mom, when did I give up this quest for a brother? I must have given up at some point.” “Well,” she began, “it was really very strange. For most birthdays or holidays when asked what you wished for you’d say a baby brother. But several days before you turned 6, you asked for something else. It was odd. ‘You don’t want a baby brother anymore?’ I asked you. And you answered in the strangest, most eerie way, ‘No, I don’t need to ask anymore because he’s already born.’ So strange, Sylvia. So strange. But then, children say such strange things.” My mother and I laughed about this as we sipped some tea and watched my daughter, her granddaughter, play with dolls. Twenty years later, to the day, (pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-easy international communications) my half-brother who—completely unbeknownst to me—searched for me most of his life, contacted me. He was currently living with his wife and three young children in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he was born on January 21st in 1956—one week before my 6th birthday. I’m not a tattoo person. But, I find some of them really beautiful and lots of them come with interesting and meaningful stories. I enjoy asking my students about them and seeing them delightedly telling me the background of the design. So it was a strange sensation when today my hand surgeon (routine checkup) asked me about mine. I asked him what he meant. “That spot on your pinky finger is a tattoo. Well, we call it that. It came from a pencil point. You must have had it for a long time because it seems to be fading a bit.” “Yes! I got this in 1961.” Wow! I have a tattoo. And really, I have often looked down at that spot and fondly remembered the time I absolutely realized I was born to be a teacher. I was in 6th grade in New York City, and one day in the spring I came across a first grade girl in the bathroom crying—sobbing. She couldn’t write, she told me, and her teacher said she was stupid and would not be promoted to second grade. Her name was Marina, she said, and her parents didn’t speak very much English so they could never help her with her work. Somehow, I sensed I could be of use to her. I told her I’d help her at recess. So, after lunch we sat down on the cold asphalt play yard and I asked her to show me how she made her letters. She was really shaky and her first attempt with a very sharply pointed pencil stabbed me in the pinky. I wrapped it in tissues and just kept going. I recognized the problem right away—the pencil was too thin for her hands. I arranged to meet her the next day and came equipped with a fat pencil, crayons, a notebook, and several books from the library. It worked! From then on we would sit almost every day and write or read. Soon a few more kids from her class started to join us and we had quite a gang together writing notes and reading stories. And I realized: this is what it meant to be a teacher—to not only have skills, but to share them to help others become stronger. And to realize that everyone has different needs and sometimes just a small adjustment in materials or attitude can make a huge difference. At the end of the year Marina was promoted. Her parents came to the school to pick her up and they asked to meet with Miss Sylvia. No one had any idea who this was. Finally Marina saw me in the hall and waved me down excitedly. Her mother, with tears in her eyes, handed me several loaves of freshly baked bread. “So kind. So kind,” she kept repeating. “For you. This bread it rises in the right temperature. So my Marina. You give her the temperature she needed. Thanks you.” And she hugged me. And I knew (I KNEW) this was my life’s calling. And now in my 48th year of teaching, I still know what a privilege it is to empower others with whatever skills and knowledge and warmth I can bring. See my tattoo? It’s who I am: a teacher.  Sixty nine years ago, I was three weeks away from being born. My mother was on bed rest waiting for the end of this miserable pregnancy. There had been a lot of problems and many times the doctors told her that she might lose the baby. My grandmother would tell me about how amazing it was that I ever made it, “The doctors said it was like a miracle that you kept hanging on, but I told them that my grandchild was going to be strong and fierce and someone who would take on the world.” My mother would tell me somewhat wryly: “I knew you were stubborn from before you were born. You refused to give up and then you refused to be born a minute before your appointed time. And when you were born you were smiling.. Other babies cry right at first but you pursed up your little face into a smile before gasping for air. Everyone was so surprised.“ And then she sighed and said—not always as a compliment: “You’ve always been so…so yourself.” So here I am, today, playing tennis with my buddies, a month before my 70th birthday, still trying to take on the world—sore knees, damaged wrist, various internal ailments—still stubborn as hell, still smiling, and still, hmmm…well, let’s call it “unique”.  “So much destruction—I can’t bear to look at it. My heart hurts.” My father’s parents came to The U.S. from Germany in 1923. Transatlantic travel being much harder back then, their first trip back to their birth country for a visit was in 1938. He spoke often of the visit and the realization of what their country was becoming. “So civilized a place—great philosophers, composers, artists, scientists—now it turned to brutal ideas. A great place torn apart.” The next visit was in 1951—a few years after the end of WWII. I was surprised to learn that my grandfather, Max, kept a meticulous journal of that journey. I read it recently having been given a box of mementos rescued from his attic’s eaves by a kind neighbor and by the demolition company tearing down my grandparents’ house (after it had changed many hands). In the writings, Max recounts the ocean voyage, the changing colors of the sea, the anticipation. And then, when in Germany, he writes of the horror and sadness of his wife’s first sight of her old neighborhood. “All of downtown destroyed! Can’t find way around anymore—museum damaged—destruction—ruins throughout—most houses burned out…Wilma too shocked to cry.” He writes this not in his native language, but in English, as if, I thought while reading, he was communicating these things to me--his only grandchild and someone who did not speak German. I put the journal down, so saddened by the vivid descriptions. Then, this afternoon, I got a text from a kind friend: It was a photo he took this very morning of the home my parents had lived in from the early 1970s until their deaths 30 years later. It was being bulldozed to make way for new townhouses. So much upheaval. So much destruction. How much, I thought, do we tear down in our lifetime? Not even buildings with solid foundations survive. Not human lives. Way leads on to way. So what lasts? What can we count on in this ever-changing world? Where are humanity’s struggles and joys and loves and angers and fears and sadness and transcendence? Maybe—maybe— it’s all in the telling of its stories. And in the listening.   “She died of a long illness,” they told me when I asked about my great-grandmother Anna. My mother remembered her from when as a child she lived in Poland. “Oh, she was wonderful. I had typhus when I was six, your age, and she brought me back to health. My fever was so high she had to put me in an ice bath to lower it. They thought I was going to die.” I could not imagine such a misery. It was 1957 and we were sitting around the big dining room table in Montevideo, Uruguay with some of my family’s Polish friends. Even as a young child, I loved their stories and the word-pictures they would paint of that old world they had left. In 1930 my grandmother had managed to escape the horrors of Poland with her two small children in tow, but not before having to say a painful farewell to her beloved mother-in-law. My mother remembered (in Polish) her grandmother’s parting words, “Sara, you be a good girl and listen to your mother. She will help you to a better life. It is not safe for us here. Be very brave.” She knew she’d never see her grandchildren again. The 1940s brought horrors to the extended family in Poland with many killed in concentration and labor camps and many others simply murdered in their homes. All communication had stopped. It was not until many years later, the early 1950s, that several of the remaining relatives and friends were able to emigrate and some came to Uruguay and now, here they were, sitting around the big wooden table talking and laughing. “Remember that time Solomon was so full of beer that he couldn’t get up the stairs and Herman tried to help him but they both ended up rolling down? Achhh, what silliness that was, they chuckled. And then, “We didn’t know how bad it was going to get later. No one really knew,” as they grew suddenly solemn and quiet. I took that lull as an opportunity to ask about my great grandmother and was told of her death. And then they continued, “But it was an amazing thing when she died. Back then, in 1939, it was instructed that Jews were not allowed formal burials. They were just dumped into graves. But not your great-grandmother.” “Why not?” I asked. They continued, “Because all of her life she helped the poor. If she had one piece of bread left she would give half of it to the poor and half to her family and she herself would eat nothing. If she had two pieces of cloth she would sew a dress for a desperate child.” “So, she helped the Jewish community,” I mused. “No,” I was told, “Not just that community. She helped everyone who needed her help. The poor people of the village of all religions loved her so much that when she died, they found a way to buy a coffin for her and then they carried it in a long procession to the cemetery. There must have been more than a hundred people walking together. Even the soldiers on watch did not disturb the ceremony. No one had ever seen anything like that before. A Jewish woman carried with so much dignity! We knew, all of us, we knew that this was the last moment we could all honor goodness in the world.” And then these old Polish people, survivors of unimaginable suffering and grief, cast their heads down with long, heavy sighs. Even as a child I felt their sighs in my bones. I feel them still.  “Why do we have to see a battleship? It’s not doing anything. It’s just sitting there.” I was a disgruntled 7 year old in 1957 as my father traipsed my mother and me to yet another historic site. We had arrived from Montevideo, Uruguay, in the winter and now that it was summer my dad wanted to show us history—the history of his country that was going to become my country. In truth I was horrified when we visited Antietam and saw the mass graves and I could not understand how so many people died in one battle of the Civil War. There, and at so many other sites, my father patiently explained the complicated history of The United States. I didn’t realize it at the time of course, but all of these excursions and all of these lessons were building something monumental inside of me. “This battleship,” he explained as we stood before the massive structure, “was full of men who were deeply committed to the concept of freedom. They were willing to die for it. See, we live in a country where we believe freedom is a fundamental right.” Then I remember asking him, point blank, “So, is this country perfect now?” He sat me down, right there on the deck of the ship, sat next to me and said, “No. It’s not. So many people still don’t have basic human rights. There is a lot of inequality in our system. Too often people in power abuse it. Too often people think money is what matters. Too often there are angers and grievances of one group against another.” “Then why is this such a great county, Papa? You said we were great. And why did so many people die?” I asked almost in tears. This made no sense to me. “Because,” he began, “we keep perfecting our system. One of the greatest things is that our country fixes and adapts and refines all the time. What makes us great are our ideals. Have we met them all perfectly? No. Not yet. But we keep working at it. You and your children and their children will keep working at it. Because America is not perfect country—But it is a perfect ideal. A perfect goal.” I understood this. I understood not being perfect but trying over and over to get it right. And so, here we are, on the eve of the contentious and strife-ridden election of 2020. We are not perfect. But I believe in America. I believe in our great ideals even while recognizing our flaws. I believe in our rule by law and, when needed, in our ability to peacefully change laws in a civilized, reasonable, constitutional manner. I believe that we are a people full of pride in our nation. Much of that pride comes from how we conduct ourselves when we win or when we lose an election. We do not want to resort to savagery, because we know the process of our democratic system will prevail. Eventually. I believe in our shared understanding that truth and justice ultimately not only will prevail but will increase our strength and compassion. I believe that our nation wants to lead the world not just in capital and power, but in lighting the beacon for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all. I believe in America.  |
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