The Cathedral Within, page 3
Both of the senators for whom I worked ended up running for president—a popular pastime in the U.S. Senate. Neither Gary Hart nor Bob Kerrey ended up getting their party’s presidential nomination, but the temptation of presidential politics shifted my focus to the power of leadership embodied in a single voice. Powerful as it can be, though, that chosen voice is sometimes drowned out. First it must be chosen, but even then it sometimes fails. Four presidents have passed through the White House over two decades. More than a hundred men put themselves forward for the job. The words of few are on the lips of schoolchildren today.
I didn’t leave government disappointed or a disbeliever. I left with a new awareness of its limitations and a conviction that what I’d learned there would have an impact in the nonprofit sector.
Twenty years is too short a period to bestow wisdom, but too long not to have learned anything at all. One central lesson I’ve learned is that social science is far too narrow a discipline with which to address social problems, especially problems concerning children. Bart Harvey, president of The Enterprise Foundation, which has worked to help neighborhood-based organizations and local residents revitalize some of the most distressed communities in this country, explains: “We are frequently asked, ‘What will it take to change conditions in the inner city?’ The answer to that question depends on how we answer another, more deeply rooted, quandary. What are our obligations to each other in this, one of the greatest, democratic, free-enterprise systems the world has ever seen?”
The greatest truths are timeless, as are the spirits of those who teach them. On March 3, 1968, about a month before he died, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. For three generations, his family’s history had been entwined with this redbrick church. He joined when he was five, and was ordained there at nineteen. Both his father and grandfather had been pastors. The sermon he delivered that morning, at the same podium from which he’d delivered his first sermon and would deliver his last, was about King David’s ambition to build a great temple, one of the most significant challenges facing the Hebrew people.
Dr. King read what he described as “not one of the most familiar passages” from the Old Testament. The “overlooked” passage from the eighth chapter of First Kings reads: “And it was in the heart of David my father to build an house of the name of the Lord God of Israel. And the Lord said unto David my father, ‘Whereas it was in thine heart to build an house unto my name, thou didst well that it was within thine heart.’ ”
King asked the congregation to contemplate the phrase “Thou didst well that it was within thine heart.” This was what he really wanted to talk about that morning. His interpretation of the phrase was that God had spoken “as if to say, ‘David, you will not be able to finish the temple. You will not be able to build it. But I just want to bless you, because it was within thine heart.’ ”
King went on to catalog leaders from Gandhi to Woodrow Wilson to the apostle Paul, all of whom had not lived to see the fulfillment of their dreams. Slowly but powerfully, he built to this conclusion: “So many of us in life start out building temples: temples of character, temples of justice, temples of peace. And so often we don’t finish them. Because life is like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. At so many points we start, we try, we set out to build our various temples. And I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. . . . Well, that is the story of life. And the thing that makes me happy is that I can hear a voice crying through the vista of time saying, ‘It may not come today or it may not come tomorrow, but it is well that it is within thine heart. It’s well that you are trying. You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but it’s just good that you have a desire to bring it into reality. It’s well that it’s in thine heart.’ ”
King’s temple “in thine heart” was really just another way of describing “the cathedral within.” It was a frequent theme of his sermons. It must have been what he meant when, on another occasion, he said, “Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. All it takes is a heart full of grace, and a soul that generates love.” The pages that follow are dedicated to those with hearts full of grace.
CHAPTER TWO
Starting Points
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Our overriding goal ought to be to save the children. Other goals—reducing the cost of welfare, discouraging illegitimacy, and preventing long-term welfare dependency—are all worthy. But they should be secondary to the goal of improving the life prospects of the next generation.
—William Julius Wilson, social scientist
I
On September 30, 1998, my son, Zach, became a teenager, a status he has long coveted.
Thirteen probably sounds young to you—not many years, a baker’s dozen, still a mere child. Zach, however, has taken a more entrepreneurial approach to childhood. His preteen career has been marked by innovation and experimentation. What you might measure in years, some of us have had to cope with one day at a time, and there have been 4,745 of those days, each one’s safe passage a celebration of sorts. As certainly as they go by quickly, it is a lot of them.
At thirteen, Zach sleeps late. His legs hurt. He invites girls to movies. He listens to rap and rock. He lights matches. He makes his own sandwiches. He changes faster than a Compaq laptop can document. That’s what kids do, of course. They change. Mostly, they change from one stage of childhood to another, but at thirteen, there’s another dimension. He is still a boy, but no longer just a boy, no longer all boy. And of course he is not yet a man. He is on the cusp of manhood.
His room is littered with evidence of sweet paradox: part museum to childhood, part laboratory of the future. The radio blasting alternative rock is plugged into the same outlet as his night-light. The hockey trophies on his dresser tower over miniature Playmobil figures that he still arranges and rearranges like a general deploys troops on a battlefield. Next to the shoulder pads of his hockey gear lies a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. The room is a collage of his interests, development, and growth, a time capsule of the last twelve years. Like a crime scene cordoned off and untouched, it is rich with as much telling evidence as any witness’s words. Most revealing of all is what it says not just about who this child is, but what he needs.
Like Zach, the room is still a work in progress. Over time, the blue-checked wallpaper has been covered over by posters, sports jerseys, T-shirts, magazine photos, bumper stickers, expired license plates, street signs, and hats.
On the wall across from his bed is the Andy Warhol poster of Superman that I bought at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, when Zach was four years old. It was the first item put up on the now crowded walls and the only one put there by me. Superman is descending from the top lefthand corner, cape aflutter, blowing a huge puff of white air onto billowing gray clouds of smoke. There are words coming out of his mouth in a black-bordered balloon. “Let me tell you what he’s saying without looking,” Zach will boast, squeezing his eyes shut. “ ‘Good! A mighty puff of my super-breath extinguished the forest fire.’ ” He gets it verbatim. I can imagine how many nights he fell asleep staring at it, an entire adventure unfolding in his mind. I know I got my money’s worth from this poster.
Next to Superman is a poster of the entire Super Bowl XXXI Championship Green Bay Packer football team. Four hockey jerseys are thumbtacked to the walls, sleeves spread wide like an old friend’s greeting, enough of them to join Zach in making up a full five-man team. One shirt has Pittsburgh Penguin great Mario Lemieux’s number 66, another says TURCOTTE STICKHANDLING SCHOOL. There are also mounted action photos of Lemieux and his teammate Jaromir Jagr, and full-color magazine pictures of Michael Jordan at the basketball hoop and Pittsburgh Pirate legend Roberto Clemente with bat ready to explode in a swing across the plate. The front of a Wheaties box featuring the 1991 NHL Champion Pittsburgh Penguins is nailed to the adjoining wall. The arms of the players are raised to hoist the Stanley Cup over their heads as they skate a victory lap.
If nature has taught us anything universal, it is that kids tell us, by showing us, what they need. Zach could not be more explicit if he’d taken out want ads in The Washington Post. Kids need heroes. They need someone to look up to. They need to believe in strength over weakness, in success over failure. They want proof that practice and hard work lead to achievement. They need positive role models to keep their compass needles pointing in the right direction. Zach has all but erected a highway billboard to advertise his pitch.
That’s not all this room has to tell. Two battalions of soldiers, not two inches high, face off across from each other on top of the chest of drawers. It is what Zach, since the age of four or five, has called a “setup.” A battle is raging, and only Zach knows where and why and how. Every formation comes with a new story.
Zach’s night table is crowded with fourteen small hockey trophies stacked under a shelf holding additional trophies for swimming and baseball. They are a measure of success. In the corner of the room, hidden by his open door, more than two dozen broken hockey sticks are propped against the wall, as if to say: Here too lives a hero, albeit a young and aspiring one.
The night table also holds the one lamp used to light the room. It is within arm’s reach of his bed, which was my bed as a child growing up in Pittsburgh. The base for the bulb and shade is an admiral, sharply dressed in red, white, and blue, standing at attention on top of what could be a drum with patriotic draping. Shoulders squared, hands tight to the side, his steadfastness is beyond question. The lamp is more than thirty-five years old and has been rewired twice. When I turn it off after tucking him in each night, I’m twisting the same switch that my dad twisted after tucking me in, and leaving the same loyal sentry there on watch.
At times, self-awareness sneaks up on Zach like a cat brushing a leg. One afternoon while kneeling at a table in the family room, he’s building a fort out of Legos. The phone rings. It is a girl from school who likes him. If there is a conversation under way, she’s carrying it. He is monosyllabic. I feel for her. Afterward, he puts down the phone and smiles. He looks up from his toys, half understanding and half not, and says: “I’ve got girls calling me, Dad, and I’m still playing with Legos.”
Writing about one’s own children is fraught with danger for many reasons, not least of which is that what one parent cares about or thinks important, others may not. But writing about children only in the abstract has its dangers, too. Thinking of children in the abstract is part of the problem in the first place. There is nothing on the planet more real to me than Zach and his sister, Mollie.
Of all the times to write about my son, this is the one that feels right, not only because the changes he’s going through are so pronounced, but because he is more than halfway to adulthood. I’ve helped get him there, and like the driver of an eighteen-wheeler hauling a precious load cross-country, I am finally past the midpoint. That’s not to say I can take one hand off of the wheel. He hasn’t even entered high school yet, so of course there are plenty of dangerous curves yet to come; some of the darkest highways and steepest hills lie ahead. I can’t even pretend to know what the rest of the journey will be like, but at least the Continental Divide is in my rearview mirror and I’m comfortable at the wheel. No coasting allowed. No cruise control. But if there’s a time to pull over at a rest stop, unfold the map, and retrace the trip thus far, that time is now.
Zach turned thirteen just in time for his weeklong eighth-grade field trip to New York. On a cool, wet fall morning right after his birthday, I woke him at 5:30 A.M., an hour earlier than usual. It is hard to get used to the effort required to wake him. The St. Patrick’s Day parade could march through his room without disturbing him. He was stretched across a bed that seems to shrink more each week. I squeezed a bare shoulder, flopped his wrist, and eventually shook him until he got out of bed and, without saying a word, walked into the bathroom.
We weren’t going to the bus stop, but rather directly to school to meet the special touring buses for New York. It seemed awfully far away for him to be on his own, knowing the kind of mischief he gets into when he’s just in the next aisle at the grocery store. Of course, there were teachers as chaperons, but there were only six or eight of them, and that may not have been a fair match.
Zach was too tired to shower and not hungry enough to eat, so we jumped into the Jeep, where he immediately turned on the radio, almost in synchronization with my turning the ignition. I was grateful for this indication that he was breathing and conscious. He was quiet until we got to school. Shouting over the radio, I told him about his grandfather’s 1911 arrival at Ellis Island, since that’s where the school trip would begin. Then there would be a tour of the Lower East Side, the New York Stock Exchange, Central Park, Broadway, and more.
We got to the school’s parking lot by 6:00 A.M. Two large touring buses were loading. Zach opened the back door of the Jeep and grabbed the backpack that had been stuffed with clothes, a disposable camera, and Snickers bars. He started to run off, but I yelled, “Hey!” He turned back and we touched fists, the bottom of his to the top of mine, like a basketball player coming off the court with his replacement coming off the bench. It’s one of our few permissible public displays of affection.
He ran off to join his friends while I stood around with the other parents for about a half hour waiting for the buses to depart. Zach never looked back or over again. He was either unaware of my presence or oblivious to it. Maybe he had just grown familiar and comfortable with always being watched, the way a president or celebrity learns to ignore the press and paparazzi.
Through the large windows of the touring bus, I saw him find a seat at the back. He pointed to something that made his buddies laugh. He seemed relaxed but acutely aware of the reactions of his peers. He pulled his baseball cap down tighter on his head. He teased a girl with a blond ponytail in the seat ahead of him so that she grabbed his hand and then he her wrist. The teasing stopped and the conversation shifted. Both held on a few seconds longer than necessary.
Outside, a few of the kids who arrived late checked in and then ran over to give their parents a farewell hug. There was no kissing, or even eye contact. The drizzle got a bit stronger, and a deep chill seeped in for those of us who had been standing around for more than thirty minutes. We shifted our feet and plunged hands deeper into pockets. Having waited so long, no one wanted to leave before the buses did, but there were other kids to drive to school, jobs to get to, and traffic to avoid. Eighth graders don’t sit still long. If you take your eye off of any one, you need to work a moment to relocate them, sometimes finding their friends first, like locating a special star by recognizing the constellation it helps comprise. I tried to keep my eye on Zach.
The night before, I had sat on the edge of his bed and talked to Zach about New York’s dangers and the necessary precautions. I said nothing of my own eighth-grade class trip to New York. After all, that was back in 1969. What did he need to know of my losing forty dollars to a ticket scalper, of Kathleen Shinhoffen knocking on the door of my hotel room after midnight? I spoke instead of strangers and crowds, of pickpockets and con men, of drugs and alcohol, even of sex and condoms. It wasn’t quite fire and brimstone, but it was close.
He was no more overtly attentive than usual. Eyes glued to the TV, he worked the remote with one hand and stuffed a sandwich into his mouth with the other. Only one of the topics I raised was even remotely interesting to him. I’d known it would be and had intentionally thrown it in like bait to hook him: pickpockets. “Here’s how they work, Dad. In teams. One of them creates a distraction . . .” He held forth at great length on the nuances involved. Somewhat alarmingly, his knowledge seemed to be state-of-the-art. I hope he understands condoms as well when he needs to.
Out in the parking lot that next morning, in the misty twilight before dawn, the teachers were not easy to distinguish from the students. At six-foot-one, Zach’s well-dressed friend Joey looked older than his five-foot-three media teacher, Ms. Lee, clad in tennis shorts and T-shirt. I recognized her and world studies teacher Mr. Goldberg. Zach had not had an easy year with them. Their names were familiar and inextricably linked to the large, seven-dollar bucket of golf balls Zach and I split at the driving range just the previous weekend. Zach would carefully reach down to balance a ball on the tee, step back and raise the iron club high over his left shoulder, stop, flash a Jack Nicholson grin, and say, “Hello there, Mr. Goldberg’s little head.” Then he’d whack the hell out of that ball.
Finally, the buses were fully loaded and the luggage stowed. The kids were counted one last time. The bus drivers could be seen fastening their own seat belts. Parents sought out their children one last time for that all-important send-off wave and the attempted look in the eye that repeated in silent but unmistakable code whatever their most fervent warning had been.
As the engines turned over and the wheels began to roll, every parent’s arm waved in a great arc. I can report with certainty that not a single student waved back or interrupted their conversation to look up or out the window.
A collective sigh went up from the parents as they looked at each other and shrugged in chagrin. We’d been found out. Our covers were blown. We had not been standing there that whole time for the children after all, but rather for ourselves. They were fine. They were oblivious. If not for the fact that they were our flesh and blood, we might as well have been standing on another planet. We headed back to our cars.
It has been said that at precisely this point in their development, when our children seem to need us the least, they actually need us the most. This is either one of the last of the great delusions that parents feel bound to defend, or a profound truth that, like all profound truths, must be accepted on faith. Either way, the work remains unfinished. Thirteen years—4,745 days—are just a few truckloads of bricks, enough to start a cathedral, perhaps, but not to finish one.
