Postcards from the Rogue Valley

        

I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end. ― Michelle Obama, Becoming

When I was eight, growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, I spent many Saturday’s skating at the university ice rink, dreaming of becoming a figure skater. When I was ten and learning “tourist” French at school, I imagined becoming a translator at the United Nations. When my parents divorced and, at age thirteen, I moved to Los Angeles with my mother, who had remarried a professor at UCLA, cross-country flights to visit my father and brothers back in Princeton got me thinking about becoming an airplane stewardess. 

It didn’t stop there.

When I fell in love with Big Sur on sightseeing trips up the California coast, I hoped to marry someone rich who could afford a house along this breathtaking stretch of highway. The career inventory test I took in tenth grade suggested a different path: becoming an orchestra conductor. (I played the violin and apparently showed leadership potential.)

One thing was certain. I was growing up privileged. 

And one thing I knew for sure: I didn’t want to become a mathematics professor, my family’s business for what was two generations, then, and now four. 

By the time I graduated from Santa Monica High School, a block from the Pacific Ocean, I had landed on a cause and not a career: supporting public schools that served all children well. I may have been out of touch with my 3,000 classmates, but I was undeniably idealistic. Like Horace Mann, I believed in education, “beyond all other devices of human origin,” as the balance wheel of democracy.

I headed to Boston for college. The second week of my freshman year, I found myself in a car with three other classmates headed to teach a class at an elementary school in Roxbury, long considered the heart of Black Boston. Eventually sent packing by the principal who didn’t favor our ideas about “enrichment,” we started an afterschool and a summer program for middle school students in Cambridge’s largest housing project. When I graduated, the program was still going strong. 

Diploma in hand and more degrees along the way, I spent the 1970s (my 20s) starting alternative high schools across the country; the 1980’s as a researcher and community foundation director; the 1990’s coordinating the largest private initiative to re-design high schools in the nation’s history; and the 2000’s founding and leading the national nonprofit What Kids Can Do (WKCD), dedicated to championing adolescents and young adults  — and the schools that nourished them — as knowledge creators and community builders. Students marginalized by race, class, ethnicity and language were my focus. 

Becoming a grandparent

When Tony and I left Rhode Island, where we had lived for 35 years, to join our older son, Ethiopian wife and new baby in Brooklyn, I added an additional chapter in my becoming: grandparenting. I kept a finger in several WKCD projects — finishing a book, ironically titled Belonging and Becoming — but hanging out with Lucas while his parents worked (which for Carl often meant travel to East Africa) became my priority and passion. 

Actually, I told friends and family that I had a new role: conversation partner. Starting from the day he could talk, Lucas loved posing questions about the world around him. One winter day, when I collected him late at daycare, a rising moon accompanied us on our mile-walk home. It kept changing position in the sky as we changed streets and directions. “How many moons are there?” Lucas finally asked. 

Another time, when we came across a homeless man asleep in a Manhattan subway station and I explained why he was sleeping there, Lucas, fighting back a tear, responded “How can we help?”

“What makes you grown up?” he wondered one spring afternoon as we watched kids roller skate in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

Changing directions

Like Lucas, I lean towards questions with not-so-clear answers (except how many moons there are). “Where am I heading?” is one of them, Tony will tell you with some dismay. My biggest fear: that I’ll stop becoming.

The business of becoming turned upside down when Tony and I moved to Ashland six years ago. The decision was as precipitous as the one that led us to put our house up for sale in Rhode Island and move to Brooklyn in all of two months.

We knew Brooklyn was a waystation for somewhere else, although leaving Lucas and his parents behind, we also knew, would be wrenching. Tony, who had arrived in New York by ship from Italy when he was 13 and done everything from shining shoes to driving a cab to contribute to his family’s income, was not a fan of the city.

(Please forgive me if I now repeat what you already know.)

A spontaneous detour in 2017 on a summer cross country trip from New York to Los Angeles brought us to the doorstep of my best friend from “Samohi,” Kathy, who had recently settled in Ashland. We had kept in touch over the 50 years we lived on opposite coasts. When I rang her doorbell, we were dressed in the same clothes.

Despite the August wildfire smoke (which we later learned was the norm) we were smitten — with the spacious Rogue Valley lined by mountains and forests, the laid back vibes in Ashland’s downtown where 1960s hippie mixed with Shakespeare, the Sequoia trees and four-point bucks that shared living space with the city’s residents, and much more.

Back in Brooklyn a few weeks later, we scoured Trulia and Zillow and soon made an offer, sight unseen, on a small house a stone’s throw from some of Ashland’s best hiking trails.

“What’s wrong with the Hudson Valley [stretching north from NYC]?” our son Carl quipped when we told him our plans.

This is how six years ago, Tony and I found ourselves standing on the top of Lower Table Rock, in the heart of the Rogue Valley. In the distance, the Siskiyou Mountains, home to some of the most botanically diverse coniferous forests on the planet, kept their counsel. Barely visible, the snow-capped Mount McLoughlin (alt. 9,493) touched the clouds. Below, the Rogue River snaked through a mosaic of green and gold pastureland.

We felt blessed—and, for my part, uncommonly unanchored.

Being known and heard

While theoretically retired, Tony and I had not moved 3,000 miles across the country to age. One day, out of curiosity, I googled “becoming over age 70” (one of the arts of googling, of course, is knowing what to put in the search box) and my screen filled with articles about wrinkling and memory loss.

I still hungered to be known and heard.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that “improving schools for adolescents marginalized by race and class,” my lifelong tagline (not to mention a mouthful), was dead on arrival in largely rural, almost all-white Southern Oregon.

I’m a deep believer in serendipity, however. Shortly after arriving here, I attended a lecture by maverick novelist Ann Lamott that left me both inspired and changed. I’d written all my life, invariably tied to my work: books for teachers, articles, opinion pieces (one about the importance of student-teacher relationships that was read out loud on the floor of the US Senate), grant proposals, more than 200 stories about the contributions of young people for our What Kids Can Do website. Little of this carried my own voice, though.

Lamott reminded me of the joys of writing for yourself. “There is ecstasy in paying attention,” Lamott said. “If you start to look around, you will start to see… The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.” She was right. Postcards from the Rogue Valley — posting a new essay every couple of weeks — quickly became my way of looking around my new home and paying attention. It still sustains me.

I also wished to become a public contributor, however modest, in deeds and not just words.

I got off to a strange start: fighting a pig farm near me whose operation broke every rule while the County commissioners charged with holding it accountable looked the other way. I didn’t intend to become a ringleader for the community group fighting the farm, but my skills (videotaping, drafting strong arguments, filing public requests for information) were useful. More, I became consumed with safeguarding the public integrity that lay at the heart of the dispute.

I finally ended my campaign as land protector last summer when the opposing attorney at our umpteenth court hearing branded me an East Coast intellectual who knew nothing about raising pigs. (By this time, the pigs were long gone. ) I responded by agreeing that I didn’t know much about farming, but I did know “right from wrong,” a comment that almost got me thrown out of the courtroom.

As drought and wildfires took up residence in Southern Oregon, I flirted with becoming a climate activist, though pressing governments and industry to make better choices were never my strengths. I took a ten-week course that certified me as a “Southern Oregon Climate Protector,” but I never turned my new knowledge into action. Instead, I did what I knew best: I wrote a handful of climate related articles for local newspapers. A story I wrote about the explosive demise of the Douglas Firs that fill the mountains on our doorstep — victims of  insects, drought, and heat — won thanks from local forest minders and wildfire fighters.

I turned my attention to the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Southern Oregon University, which since 2007 has been a center for learning and community among Ashland’s older adults. Some folks teach; as many as 1,000 enroll each term. 

I couldn’t come up with anything I was qualified to teach that I thought would interest my “peeps.” (I share what I know about writing with first-generaton students at Ashland High School.) But I landed on an idea for a course I could host, one where I would be a learner alongside participants. I organized a series of panels that featured rarely heard nonprofit voices from the Rogue Valley — small farmers, river keepers, animal and wildlife protectors, winter safety net providers (from logged wood for stoves to food). Enrollment fell short of my hopes, but the recognition, one small farmer told me, “was worth more than a bushel of sweet carrots.” 

The following year I assembed three panels featuring SOU students who were the first in their family to go to college, students in the university’s Honors College, and students active in SOU’s Sustainability Center. Although OLLI occupies space in the thick of the university, the two age groups rarely mix. 

This time, perhaps thanks to the class occurring over Zoom, the enrollment was substantial and the chat box filled quickly. When one OLLI participant asked whether any student on the Honors College panel would be interested in having a grandmother on call, sophomore Cam began to cry saying it would mean a lot. “COVID put me in a dark hole,” he said.

Knowing and hearing others

I made videos of the student panels and circulated them among those I thought would find them of interest. “I had no idea” was a common response.

I was reminded of something I’d forgotten in my move here: There’s power in being known and heard, and there’s grace in knowing, hearing, and sharing the voices of others. 

“This, for me, is how we become,” writes Michele Obama.

Inspired by the possibilities of cross-generational exchanges, I decided to host small gatherings at our house — with my Italian-chef spouse providing the dinner — that brought together SOU students and older community members. The point wasn’t “elders” telling their stories and then entertaining questions from students, but spirited conversation around topics of mutual interest—on teaching and learning, becoming a leader, making a difference, environmental activism, and more. 

As I hoped, these gatherings have been occasions for grace. Next week’s “dinner plus conversation” focuses on marching to the beat of one’s own drum. 

One would be hard pressed to talk about finding grace canvassing. When I was little, my mother took me door-to-door with her in Princeton (on behalf of school integration, Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 run for President, fluoridation…). I’ve now canvassed several times here for campaigns that mattered to me and each time, putting aside my fear of rejection, I’ve felt it was a gift. I’ve talked, often at length, with people I’d never meet otherwise in our siloed world. Their stories and hunger to be heard, whether they signed the petition or not, have left me humbled.

Friendships become even more important as we age, researchers tell us. 

Constitutionally more shy than not, I’ve grown hiking partners here with whom I accumulate confidences, not steps, under towering firs. I never knew much about independent films until I met Lorrraine.

Many days, I join 91-year-old artist Betty LaDuke in her hilltop studio, helping her create an online archive of her bold artworks from 60 years traveling the globe, chronicling the lives of indigenous women, migrants, and others living close to the land.   Her works are huge, from large canvases to wood totems stetching six feet tall. Color, whimsy, and social justice are here currencies. For the past two years she has been chiselling brilliant 4 X 6’ turtles, now a tribe of 45, carrying wisdom on their back. 

Sunday mornings, I meet up with 25-year-old SOU alumna Sarah, who was part of one of my OLLI student panels. We pass the morning talking about whatever crosses our minds, which is a lot. Our backgrounds couldn’t be more different, or the ways we see and experience the world more similar. I think we started out with the idea that I would mentor her, but I think it works the other way around.

Tony and I spent last week in Portland with our Denver grandson and his parents. Damian, who turned four this week, is a thinker-talker like his older Brooklyn cousin, Lucas. When asked whether he thought I was a grown up, Damian paused, then smiled and said “Yes.” 

When asked what made me a grown up, he gave an answer I didn’t expect: “Because you can do whatever you want.”

I’m still figuring that out. 

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