Early version of what appeared in The New York Times.
Adding what I've heard to what I'm sure of, I can now account for the whole front row of my class photo, plus a couple of children in the middle and rear. By "my class," I mean one of the fifth grades in Public School 2 on the Lower East Side, where I taught when Kennedy was president.
I found that old photo after a friend transferred to CD the decaying reel-to-reel tapes from when I had lugged my newfangled recorder into the classroom just for fun. The CD, rising from the tapes' ashes, revealed a young teacher talking and singing with students and rehearsing "Lonesome Train," the folk oratorio that was our class play. Getting the children together again, to hear the CD and share memories, sounded like a great idea. With naive enthusiasm, I set out to round them up.
New York SCHOOLS don't track their graduates, although Caroline Kennedy, in her new role as fundraiser for the Department of Education, says she hopes to form an alumni association of some kind, [optional BECAUSE “THERE’S A LOT OF ENERGY AMONG ALUMNI WHO WANT TO SEE SOMETHING DONE.”]
(THIS AFORE TRUE AS WRITTEN)) So for now, the one doing the homework is me. After a series of dead ends, I'm thinking it's easier to find informants in a witness protection program. Class records from before the computer era are unavailable. Colleagues are retired. Everyone I knew in the administration is dead. I don't find my kids on Classmates.com or through directory assistance. Detectives want the moon--Social Security numbers and girls' married names.
I WISH my former students COULD reconnect with being 10, with what they once learned, with forgotten friends. During my search, though, someone suggests that I'm the one looking to recapture my youth. It's true: as I grow older, I become a nostalgia-seeker, a retriever of memories. Shared history makes time fall away. The bond forged by knowing someone early in life should endure.
Perhaps I'm the one learning the lessons.
((DROP CAP))
Once, long before P.S. 2 was built, the Lower East Side teemed with immigrants who arrived with nothing, sometimes not even their own names. Their children, among them the Irving Berlins, the Danny Kayes, the Al Jolsons, took advantage of free education and worked their way out of poverty, pointing with pride to the picturesque pushcarts and tenements of their beginnings.
But by the late 60's the streets had an aura of incipient danger _ "West Side Story" with less charm and more drugs. It wasn't a neighborhood where boys fled the Vietnam draft by going to college or Canada. They left high school and went into the service. Not all came back.
I study the smiling boys in the class photo sitting cross_legged down front. (Notices were sent home, and the children who weren't going to doll up just didn't come that day.) Left to right: Chinese, Italian, Hispanic, Greek. In other rows more of each, plus blacks, Poles, a Hawaiian _ the original Rainbow Coalition.
Eddie (front row, far left) joined a gang and Mike (far right) thinks he's long dead (I certainly can't find him). A couple are listed on the Vietnam Wall Memorial, and I find two OTHER death certificate matches. (Someone thinks Gary P. is dead, too, but about 35 years ago he looked me up and visited with his fiancee. He wanted me to know that after reform school and prison, he had a job paving sidewalks and was taking night courses in algebra so he could be a construction manager. So I believe he's out there somewhere.)
Andrew (front row, red jacket) now lives in Minnesota. He had won a merit scholarship to Brown University from Seward Park, where most P.S. 2 graduates go but only 28 percent of entering students graduate. (At Stuyvesant, within walking distance, it's 93 percent.) The number of Seward Park applicants admitted to Brown in the past decade is zero. “Maybe the best thing you did was show us what’s out there,” he observed.
In my day at P.S. 2, teachers were busy scooping batches of students into the next grade and forgetting them, as they forgot us. So when Mike, my first find, hears my name on the phone, he growls, "Get out of here" with inflections right out of "The Sopranos." He startles me back when I ask, "How old are you now, Mikey?" I am ready to hear 30, but he's 52. (Surely that's older than I am, isn't it?)
When I say I remembered him as a perfect child, he shouts to his family, "Hey, the teacher says I was a perfect child!"
When I telephone Effie, now an artist, she has a very old bone to pick: "Do you remember when you took us on a trip to the Cloisters?" Sort of. "And you lost your watch?" Oops. "Well, you made us all look for it."
I regret spoiling her trip. I remember that the watch had been a gift from my father. I speak of my worry over the loss, and my fear of disappointing him. Mollified by an unexpected apology, she speaks of her own father's savage temper. She goes on to recall being the narrator in the class play, and mentions my interest in the cello, the first time she noticed that a teacher could have a life beyond school.
We finally meet. She has never had a REUNION, AND IS SUSPICIOUS at first. She listens to the tape, and we talk and talk. "You're not going to make me leave now, are you?" she says after the afternoon is gone. No I’m not. We figure out a couple more names on the photo, AND SHE MADE a date with Mikey.
I ask Mike if he will get hold of classmates so we can get together. "No," he says, "I want to meet witcha alone."
I would have put on a pleasant expression on the way up the subway steps, but Mike is too quick not to guess that, and evidently wishes to see my face when I recognize him. He is down on the platform watching for me. We are both dazed.
We sit in a downtown Greek diner where he knows the owner, for three and a half hours, during which time we have one cup of coffee that we don't want. I remember Mike as someone I could rely on to get a job done, a stable child. "Nam" was devastating for him. What he saw there, and did, left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, documented in a government file as "permanently unemployable" because of "episodes of unprovoked violence." So he beats a path to the V.A. hospital and lives on disability he would give up in a heartbeat for a decent job.
I hear about heroin, armed robbery, prisons, diabetes, liver problems and dentures. He says, though, that when he was in prison, he asked for the job of librarian "because the morons and maniacs who can't read won't be in there." It turns out he writes a little, and what I see has none of the common grammatical errors that annoy me. "Wonder where I learned that," he snickers.
I'm beginning to grasp what courage it took to come out to that diner to meet me. I wonder if the sudden appearance of Teacher, assigning him to compare who he was to who he is, isn't a greater danger to him than he is to me. "We're us," says Mike. "You're them."
But in those direct eyes I see again the reliable co-captain of the P.S. 2 safety squad--the other co-captain's name is on the Vietnam Wall--and across an abyss of time and class, we remember each other with love. I'm sure of that.
This isn't turning out like any reunion I have ever gone to. It will be a long time before my fifth graders sit in the same room eating cookies, or whatever I was imagining, and listening to that tape. What I've found is less complete but no less compelling. Mike is also beginning to retrieve a couple of names, and I persuade him to read his journal to his veterans' group. "It's hard, but not impossible," he tells me after he has tried it. "Just when I thought there was no more road, another half-mile showed up."
As my search continues, connecting with each of them is like a half-mile showing up for me. THE END
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