A Jury Of Nuns

A JURY OF NUNS

Vacant lots In the neighborhood of my youngest years were simply holes at the ends of a block. For a city still pulling itself out of a muddy swamp, those corners were the last low lands not yet filled in to the level of newly-raised streets. The lots cost more to buy and were also taxed as facing two streets, so they were the last to be developed in my Chicago working-class ward. Left alone and ignored, the empty lots flourished. Their self-selected architecture became thickened lattices of wild flowers and volunteer green with a complex interweave of insect and animal tenants. Sometimes, people from the neighborhood who thought themselves ever efficient travelers, would cut across those open corners on a diagonal, descending into the milkweed, each one flattening and expanding their successive paths, disturbing the feeding monarchs, then silently rising to reappear at the far corner and continue their journey along the sidewalk. Clearly less purposeful and allowed the time of childhood to wander, I would often detour from that grey-packed efficient path and push off into the curtain of sentinel weeds. Tiny to the adults, a corner lot was a thousand square yard jungle for me--with garden snakes for crocodiles, crickets for Amazon parrots, and a sulking stray dog as a moment's fierce lion. Imagination and wonder were limitless in my jungle, learning and discovery effortless. After being newly trained in the secret art of seed shooting, I searched those nascent prairies for the special green pods that burst when you squeezed them a certain way and arced their seeds off into the distance. Those particular treasures were rare indeed and more often I only encountered new pockets of stinging nettles and burrs that offered little sense of scientific quest and completion. Like any wilderness, the corner jungle exacted a painful toll from its explorers. One morning near the end of May, I followed the big people's route, straight up and around the right angle of the sidewalks, with no dalliance in the corner's sunken bowl. My walk was a purposeful stride because it was opening day of library exhibits where students submitted their own work for a week's display. A few day's earlier, I had deposited what I knew was a prize-winning piece in the big wooden tray on the librarian's desk.

Uncharacteristically, I looked forward to school that day and the trip was strangely short, not tortuously extended. The school's cast-iron stairway, which was always a chore as longer and taller than it had any right to be, magically held only a few steps that special morning. At the top of those stairs, I was surprised and happy to see a new natural history case hung on the wall of the corridor. Clearly, this was another omen of a good day. The wooden cases usually contained stuffed animals, birds, or flowers chosen by the city museum and were changed periodically. I never actually saw anyone exchange the displays; they would just appear. And I never would have understood any scheduled changes anyway because weeks and months were still incomprehensible to a third-grader, but I did get the clear impression the cases often stayed around too long. Like school, these displays were a strange tension of interest and boredom. Whatever its topic, the exhibit inside the wooden case looked as if it had been dipped in tea with a light brown cast to the printed paper tags and text, and then sprayed with a greyed patina of dust on the mummified participants. Whatever interest the case might have held, it was at the same time token and antiquated with long Latin names in a school where children still read with their fingers. The cases, I decided with the wisdom of youth, had sadly seen too many schools and had their bright colors sucked out by too many inquisitive eyes. Still, even on this very special day, I stopped in front of this new case because it was my jungle prairie; it was my corner lot at 22nd and Washtenaw. The scene wasn't quite complete, but it was close enough to have me pause in my journey and carefully study the contents. Inside were two plain sparrows, common enough and familiar city birds, but for me this new pair were instantly fascinating. These birds were frozen in mid-step--they never moved, while mine in the prairie never stopped--never let me near. For the first time ever, the sparrows were mine to really see! The only movement inside the display was the reflection of my face as I moved back and forth peering at the contents. There was a single broken bird's egg in the corner, just like one I had come across myself in one recent morning's wandering. I had turned that egg over and over in my hands for some time, trying to guess its occupant from the flakes and shards, but this new egg was glued down in place, frozen and kept smugly safe by the front glass from any childish examination. Still, I was pleased with the familiarity of those fragments, I furrowed my brow at the long accompanying text that would need to be read

later, and stepped away from the dull sepia print of a scene I that I personally knew on my street--one where its colors were always fiercely bright under a scalding sun. The library piece I had done, I thought proudly turning toward my classroom, was brilliant too in its colors; the brightest primal colors of crayons that I owned. Each part had been painfully and meticulously crafted, and I worked on it for a long time--for all a seven year-old knew, perhaps months. My cover was color-penciled construction paper wrapped over cardboard, glued down with a LePage mucilage that smelled noisily of fish and always turned crystalline at the edges. The new cover was bound through two holes by a shoe string and evolved from an earlier third grade project where we were required to endlessly repeat our initials in some geometric pattern across a page. I thought that task stupid at the time--and 30 years later confirmed that judgment in coming across it again stuffed in an old book. But for my first public exhibit, that assignment seemed to be fine training for a cover to grace a great new piece of work. My choice of a display topic had been absolutely inescapable. My parent's little round-screened TV offered me The Little Rascal Comedies at lunch time when I came home to eat, and then later on an evening's fare of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and The Adventures of Captain Video. The first programs were rooted twenty years in the past and clearly dated even to a seven year old, but the night stories were twenty years in the future; always exciting, completely fascinating. So, there was never any question about what this child of the 40's should write. I was compelled to write about outer space and rockets, illustrating each page with my best drawings. The spaceships were the only ones I knew; V-2 rockets, shiny, pointed and tapered with large fins at their bottoms. My story's enemies were space worms who attacked the Earth and our rockets had been sent to defeat the new invaders. In the critical encounters of the open universe, the crayoned creatures wrapped around our valiant ships and attempted to crush them. While these battles swirled on the pages, I fought my own drafting tools, finding wax crayons to be a very difficult medium indeed. Once committed to paper, my pictures resisted alteration and only allowed thickening overworked layers that deepened and dulled their colors. As a result, my corrections with increasingly stubby waxen sticks alarmingly expanded the lines and distorted various proportions; the rocket fins lost their symmetry and the worms became bloated and unseemly. It became clear that I should quit while I was ahead, so I did,

and submitted a final piece that I was too young to know was both prophetic and joyful beneath its well-worked wrappings. Class that morning dragged on more outrageously than usual. Sister Mary Donatilla droned endlessly and I passed my time in solitary conjecture about a long hair near one of her chins that was either a head hair escaped from confinement and peeking out past her linen collar, or a face hair that she had forgotten to shave. That divertissement was all I had in a room where a steadily watched second hand on the big clock took at least 6 minutes to get around the dial. When 10:30 came at last, the time for the opening the library exhibit, we all stood up and were marched like prisoners out into the corridor. Taking third-graders to either the bathroom or the library was somewhat indistinguishable to the dear Sisters. The nuns escorted their brood to the door of whatever occupancy it happened to be and simply released their flock to surge inside. I was carried along with the initial flow, then separated myself to look over the table top displays for my masterwork. Each display caught at least a few kids, some exhibits snagged a few by interesting them, others by the required attendance owed as friends of the creators. I elbowed a few shorter bodies out of the way to see if my work was on a table, and not seeing it there, scanned, jostled and pushed my way around the large room. With growing apprehension and bewilderment, I realized that no single table held my work--and there was also no special place of honor. I looked on the floor to see if my book had been knocked down accidentally, and then underneath some large exhibits in case it had been covered inadvertently. Nothing. No trace of my work. Finally, I went to the librarian's desk where a nun moved hands I couldn't see back and forth across her tabletop. Adult furniture kept many things a mystery to us urchins because we were too short to see what was going on above a certain level and our views were limited to things like the undersides of door knobs or the grand piano. Every now and again, a file card appeared in one of her hands, so I assumed she was doing some library busy work and she was clearly unhappy that I was interrupting her instead of being quietly clustered at the exhibits with the other children. I explained the problem, but I don't remember if I said the work was mine. I described it, telling her about the cover and the drawings, then waited while she thought for a few seconds. "Oh yes," she said, "that one. We threw it away."

If I gasped, she didn't notice. And already past the moment's interruption, she dusted some white powder of chalk from her black sleeve and was quickly re-absorbed in her paperwork. I stood there for a while as if I had been punched in the stomach, shaken and unable to speak, and finally left the library. Walking past dulled display cases that never were in any danger of being thrown out, I thumped my way down the stairs to the playground. It was a long painful walk home. The next month I showed up at the library on the day just before the exhibit, having vowed to never again submit anything to a jury of nuns. When no one was around, I took a number of blue-capped baby food jars out of my pockets and placed them on the center table. Each contained a chicken embryo in progressive stages of growth, floating in alcohol, and marked with an adhesive tape strip that said only First Week, Second Week, and so on. Actually, I had no clue as to the actual relation-ships of embryos to those periods, the best I could do scientifically was to just make sure each successive week's occupant of a jar was larger. I had discovered the existence of these embryos quite by accident while watching my mother make breakfast. I was fascinated by these little discarded creatures and kept the first one in an available baby jar. The need for alcohol became quickly apparent and I modified my preservation techniques to reflect olfactory reality. Once I realized the potential for a new library exhibit, no egg was safe. I had learned about candling, holding an egg up to the light to see what was inside, so my parents were allowed to keep the uninteresting eggs and the ones I selected were quickly cracked open, examined, and pickled if passed. For the day of the next exhibit, I was just as excited as the first--and the clock in class moved just as slowly. At this show, my submission was a great hit. The nuns didn't quite remember its entry in the first round, but each assumed that another had allowed it. They were perplexed by the absence of a name, but thought perhaps its card was misplaced and the student would step forward. Well, no one ever did appear to be congratulated on a prize-winning entry. The students were fascinated with the embryos for the first few days, but their interest expectably waned, and so no one noticed or cared when the jars simply disappeared one afternoon. They were buried later that day in the corner prairie. There was no sense of drama; no special ceremonies. In fact, I had forgotten all about their interment until now.

That young boy simply stopped off on the way home, having finally tasted a small reconciliation and snippet of personal triumph. He quietly placed some once-interesting things in the sand, down beneath the stretching shadows of rocks and the fragments of sparrow's eggs; he rolled them from his hands reflective and gentle, rather than throwing them away.

A PRAIRIE REVISITED

Now some 40-odd years later, I stood in another vacant lot and looked over the site of one of my new projects. This one was nearly a block square and had been abandoned and forgotten for years, littered with scrubby thin-twigged brush and caricatures of sumac and cottonwood trees in rolling grey folds of gravel fill. Its working life had included a railroad yard and cold storage buildings, and as the industrial core of this city was gutted, it slipped to spotty service as a parking lot. Unable to sustain even that, the lot was finally left fallow, overtaken and filled with a cemetery of dulled green weeds and trees surprised to find that they too could just barely stay alive. I squatted in a trench with the workman gathering around, having left their machines one by one to listen to my concepts of the new park. The flaps on the exhaust pipes of the bulldozers stuttered to a stop and I drew lines and circles in the dirt, putting words into pictures as best I could until the air finally became quiet. The men leaned forward with interest and crowded in a rag-tag line for a better view of my scratches, nodding their heads as they understood, then smiling and explaining in turn to their slower or somewhat bored companions. Their smirks and feigned patience began to change as I said that these lines in the sand had never been done before and that they would be inventors and pioneers with me in making these drawings work. They nodded now in excitement and growing pride as they began to understand my invitation to join in the creation of new ideas meant to keep landscapes alive and beautiful. "You can bring your kids to this park," I said, "and show them what you built. Tell them what you've done, tell them about your contributions." I talked about what the park would look like and how we could keep it alive for a hundred years if they listened carefully and helped me. I also asked them to teach me their crafts and how important it was for me to learn from them as well.

I asked them to be sculptors; to push the earth beneath them in huge curving walls and trenches in new ways; to use their coughing diesel machines to shape the delicate and subtle contours of soils to fit the landscape plantings that would come at the very end. Silence affirmed the moment between us, each one resolving what they felt and thought about the project, and they seemed genuinely respectful and pleased at being offered the chance to think and work in a new way. We all had returned for a few moments to the green tumbled bowl of the corner lot on my old street. Each of us pictured it in their own way, each forced to use their imagination to see the fresh green with flowers and bushes and trees that could now be rebuilt here from those rarely touched memories of youth. Each of us could step down off the sidewalks of efficient and familiar workdays and descend into a new small personal world of discovery and pride. Finally, I took pictures of the scraggly line of workers with a small camera and wrote down their names saying that each had the right to contribute and be recognized for what they had done. We parted as the best of friends and I felt I had captured their loyalty; they would guard the project as I never could alone and I should be truly pleased with that morning's meeting. Those thoughts buoyed my step as I loped down Wabash Avenue, dropping off my films for printing, and smiling at my ability to coordinate my various wandering missions of the day. Finally at the end of my route, I turned into the multi-storied glass and red steel building that housed the DePaul School of New Learning. This was exciting for me as well; returning to school in an evening program designed for the adult and recognizing the value of their work and life experiences in obtaining a degree. I now had the time and the funds to go back to school and finish college. Not having a degree had been consistently troubling for me--some times more so than others. Still, more than once, I had leapfrogged different job requirements and escaped the rituals of obligatory credential sniffing. It was unheard of fifteen years earlier, that I, as an electrician, should manage an old private school without a degree. The fundamental absurdity of this was pointed out one morning by a teacher, furious over some inconsequential item, who shook his fist at me and shouted "You're nothing but an ignorant construction worker." It was equally difficult to build parks and other big projects without an hour's worth of time in engineering courses to validate my competency

to present new ideas and solutions. I sat in meeting rooms filled with chuckling and smirking engineers who ridiculed my presentations because the ideas weren't taught to them in schoolbooks long since forgotten or granted the imprimatur of accepted formulas and tables. In their arrogance and aggregate, these juries would have required the Wright Brothers to get pilot's licenses before they could fly the first airplane and the engineers were absolutely smug in the sense they alone held the final edges of knowledge in their hands. In part, and in defense for these confrontations, I had wanted a degree--as if somehow it might change the audiences; as if somehow I would be accepted as a professional. But in truth, they were the ones who weren't professional. Far too often, the juries were just anointed and credentialed magpies, strung out on a wire of a fence, squawking and mocking in the joy of their own company, their shrill voices increasing as anything unfamiliar drew near. I would be lying if I said I wasn't bitter and exhausted over battling antiquated and calcified positions defended with a fervor that was proportion to the fear of change. In those battles, there seemed to be a number of practical reasons to get my degree. But quietly as well, I was embarrassed in not having a degree, a kind of residual shame of having failed some larger unspoken expectation. My father once talked about not finishing high school and he too talked of being a disappointment--even though his family had no choice during the Depression. Each of us viewed ourselves by our own generation and had failed our educational imperative; each considered, alone in our thoughts, what we might have been. In a still ambivalent mood, I finally signed up at DePaul and found an opportunity to test out of the English writing requirements. I called ahead to pick up a packet of materials to prepare for the test, but instead I was told that the two week closing date had just passed and that materials were not given out after that date. I naively answered that I could waive any complaints of not having enough time to prepare, and it was my responsibility if I flunked the test. "No, it can't be done," I was told, but I decided to stop in anyway that morning and try to be more persuasive face to face. Perhaps it was the gravel and sand stains on my trousers, or some recent event where one of the homeless that haunted the McDonald's below had stumbled off the elevator on this floor, because I cooled my heels for quite a while until someone came out to see me. Finally, allowed to sit across the table from a young anointed woman, I explained my request again and was told it was simply not possible. Obviously prepared for this kind of debate, she said it wouldn't be

done. "There's one thing I'll tell you," she said with pointed firmness, "you won't leave here today with that material." She stood smugly fast against arguments coated with rationality, compassion, or the general theory of insignificance. Humor and righteous indignation merely glanced off of her. And when it was clear that I was profoundly dull-witted and unable to accept the obvious, she excused herself by saying she had a meeting and bid me good-bye. I sat at the table for a few moments, finally decided it wasn't worth it, and wandered away. My timetables made no difference to them; they were the center of the universe and everything revolved around them. How foolish to question the keepers of the tabernacle. In DePaul's Discovery Workshop later, a required introductory meeting which resolutely combined educational tokenism with crass revenue generation, we were asked to bring a short autobiography--a reasonable enough request, and also to read a few selected short essays. In the first few hours, I was struck by the honest revisitings of long-past emotions and memories in the various autobiographical pages that were passed back and forth between the prospective students. Many people admitted to crying while they wrote their individual pieces and the rest kept their heads bowed in silent affirmation of their own emotional effort of reaching back and plumbing their childhood. I was surprised at how many spoke of abuse, how many of prejudice, how many of loss. The woman next to me, Thelma, wrote in halting and awkward prose of a childhood filled with quiet tragedy and she wrote about her hopes of what she still might be. One of the assigned reading essays was by Richard Rodriquez, the son of Mexican immigrants who went on to get a Ph.D. in English Literature. He told a story of coming quietly one morning into his own library and finding his father, back to the door, looking over the some of the many books on his son's shelves. His father gently touched each book in one particular set, his fingers moving slowly over the tooled leather spines with a reverence born of his own inability to read any of the words suspended inside. Rodriquez watched his father for a long time, unwilling to interrupt, realizing at that moment what sacrifices his father had made to send him to school, and that those very acts of love had insured a new cultural divide between them forever. He wondered if his father might have given up those same things if he had truly understood the profound consequences of his only son's further education which

meant losing him to a distant language and caste. When his father finally turned, they spoke for a few awkward moments and both finally left to finish a larger family visit. Rodriquez used that moving epiphanal scene to introduce his thoughts for his essay on the subtle cultural losses that minorities face in higher education. The combination of my required reading of Rodriquez and seeing for just a moment, the raw vulnerabilities exposed in that class between people with a common dream, formed a new perspective for me that I never would have experienced--a respectful appreciation of how each prospective student wanted a resolution of issues, probably never before spoken or admitted. They had wrestled with shame, disappointment, a lust to learn again, or the recapture of things denied. I was truly privileged to see and understand this, and then suddenly I felt very much alone as a spectator, very much isolated in my insight, very much unsure of what this school would ultimately mean to me.

At the age of seven in a Catholic school, instead of the joy of discovery, I learned the litany of things believed in, worked on, and then cruelly dashed. I resided in that place where asking questions was to risk being mocked and teachers pivoted noiselessly through lessons that had little substance beyond rote. Indifference, repression, and ignorance were familiar companions to a boy who was unable find his own measure in systems that didn't care and where an assembly line of little faces was continually replaced by other little faces. In defiance and survival, I learned to step back inside the library, quietly place my contributions on the table, and evade the jury of nuns. The new insights for me in those autobiographies were how many others had been crippled in the same ways and that it hasn't stopped for any of us. It didn't matter what the particular cruelties were, or their weight, or their frequency. We shared the unspoken losses that followed our abandonment; we were kindred spirits of soft melancholy, awkward skeptics of what we might be. It continues today; not just as the defects of the institutions of the 40's and 50's. Our public schools still engage in the most ugly betrayal of the innocents in their charge and turn out so many listless, sad, dulleyed, and hollow--perhaps forever unable to ever really taste the sweetness of their own successes and accomplishments. Those children will soon become the same parents who grow impatient and

irritable in meetings on their schools; adults who speak poorly at the podium, inarticulate except for their passion in demanding better for their children. Educational reform will lose to teachers who know better and brook no interference. Change will lose to educators who hover at the center of the universe and cannot be challenged. Those educated and sophisticated strings of magpies will turn away again from the generations to be taught, those new generations will be lost in the swirl, and the poignant cycle will continue. I think the ear of the educated in the universities hardens to the soft sound of those asking to be taught. Rodriguez speaks with gentle brilliance of the subtle losses that face the minorities as they are urged to learn and grow outside their cultures and families. I grew up in a more simple and gentle time in a very white world, by many measures pampered and sheltered, yet still feeling wanting and somewhat embittered about the lapses and shortfalls of my life. But I stand truly sobered by what I see in the schools today, and on the streets each passing morning, and by what I now understand to be the crucibles endured by minorities. In my life today, I'm more concerned with the soul of education than its pontifications and I can never escape what I learned from the people at a workshop on a quiet Saturday. Instead of pedantic clichés and illusions, I prefer the humanity of a lesson taught by a black woman who worked for 30 years at the Post Office and still dreamed of being a writer. Those are the companions I should seek; those are the innocents I should defend. DePaul University had no clue as to the folds of magic in that Saturday's morning meeting, and sadly stepped past the hopes of the assembled people there who touched the backs of long-forgotten books and dreamed of reading the things inside.

Bob Wulkowicz © 1996