A Chair for My Mother 25th Anniversary Edition (Reading Rainbow Book)
Vera B. Williams

Some children's books speak to our lives in special ways.

I'm stepping away from a teacher to a "person teaching" tonight, it isn't the same exactly. Pretty close. I came from my past into this life, my valuing, my struggles, and I look from those eyes on what happens in my life. It's a book that allows me to talk about how important I find it for us to use books to let children share from their lives, as they really can be, like this one. I find this isn't a homogenized story life as our mandated basal portrays it.
This is "About the fire that burned away the things a family loved". Where I teach, in poverty, many things are burning all the time. Things included. My kids know words, even at six, not all children know: eviction, landlord, payments, lay-away, pawn shop. Last year I almost cried at how a child brightened hearing pawn shop to tell me of what of hers was staying there. And so we got her toys back. That little girl now in 5th grade has not missed a morning working in my room before school.
Do you know Elizabeth Cotton? Do you know the tune Shake Sugaree, try these two versions with kids:

Shake Sugaree ~ Elizabeth Cotten

Pawn shop blues.


They connect to our experiences in my classroom, as literature allows, validates. It doesn't say "think positive" or that your struggles bore me, just be in the now, or that you need to speak happy tales to me, no, it tells a child they are valid because they speak. We can hear it. For me to believe in anyone I want to know who they really are. This book says you are more than the sum of the parts shaped in an imperfect world, you are a blessed child. In the arts we celebrate your struggles. We will know the " you."

My now 18 year old daughter introduced me to the Vera B. Williams books. (Here she was when she got me to reading them with her at the table I made her...based on the song Bobby Shafto she learned at about 14 months. It was her first song. I liked Bobby Shafto, so she heard it from me.) I never separate her from Vera B. Williams.

She never let us down. Sylvia was extraordinary reading Cherries and Cherry Pits as a very young 4 year old to her new kindergarten class. It's a bit of a marvelous read. But this lovely one is called "A Chair For My Mother" one she shared with me after taking it out from the library. That's where we found these Vera B. Williams books in Monterey, but as the years went by I got those I could find for my classes of 1st graders and my children.

So let me tell you about this. I don't want to be misunderstood. it is a story that spoke to me, as me. A book about momma. My mom is having her birthday in a few days, a milestone birthday, so she would not appreciate my posting her near centurion date but I want to remember a little story I tell the children at some point. With some editing I'll not do today. I don't tell as much as I'll put here. She's sitting looking at TV perched on the corner of the arm of a chair. This Momma doesn't sit.

We watch the Grammy's and feel really disconnected from "music today." Like Tina Turner and Aretha. Do you remember the Grammy awards when Paul Simon sang about 50 ways To Leave Your Lover? I do. And I think My Little Town at another. Dave Grohl Foo Fighters, I'm waiting for the 2nd coming. it's different to me. And what did they do to Alicia Keyes? Produced it I guess. But at least we heard Hancock on Gershwin. And that lovely humble Amy Winehouse give her tribute to the Queen's English and the rehabilitation that will certainly fail her.

This is a child's story about a family that lives barely making ends meet. Told from the perspective of a young child, in their voice. Vera B. Williams often narrates in child voice,
wonderfully so. It's so powerful and dear and in many ways teaches a child they can narrate their own story. Among the many things needed for a child to write is the "sound of that writing." This is a model for that.
This family had their home devastated by fire. It isn't unknown in the classes I teach. Apartment fires happen quite a bit more than I ever knew. This is the story of saving into a big glass jar all the coins for a very long, long time to go get their dear Momma a new chair. What holds the readers is the love of the mother, the tenderness of acknowledging her struggle to make ends meet, and the feelings of how hard she works to have anything, and replace things after the fire.

Listen

"When we can't get a single other coin into the jar, we are going to take out all the money and go and buy a chair. Yes, a chair. A wonderful, beautiful, fat, soft armchair. we will get one covered in velvet with roses all over it. We are going to get the best chair in the whole world. That is because our old chairs burned up. There was a big fire in our house. all our chairs burned. So did our sofa and so did everything else. That wasn't such a long time ago. My mother and I were coming home from buying new shoes. I had new sandals. She had new pumps. We were walking to our house from the bus. We were looking at everyone's tulips. she was saying she liked red tulips and I was saying I liked yellow ones. Then we came to our block. Right outside our house stood two big fire engines. I could see lots of smoke. Tall orange flames came out of the roof. all the neighbors stood in a bunch across the street. Mama grabbed my hand and we ran. My uncle Sandy saw us and ran to us. Mama yelled, "Where's Mother?" I yelled, "Where's my grandma?" My aunt Ida waved and shouted, "She's here, she's here. She's O.K. Don't worry." Grandma was all right. our cat was safe too, though it took a while to find her. But everything else in our whole house was spoiled.

I knew those shoes. My family grew up much richer than my grandparents who lived in a hand built cabin with no plumbing, but my life wasn't easy.
I actually did geta pair of shoes a year. Had two or three toys at Christmases. This in my case was compounded by a monster father, professor, that wanted the love of others and resented his obligations at home. He raged all the time and made the life of a mom with her own issues so difficult she broke when I was in my teens. After he left to father another child with a girl my age ( all of this is the part I omit for kids of course) and contribute about $100 a month to our survival monthly my mom was in pieces. So it is. Off he went not really looking back except to lie/rage some more. But she had a tiny house, mortgage still to be paid, and troubles because we had no dishwasher, broken oven, furniture from my babyhood. It was all very hard and unnecessarily depressing as my father was out buying himself his well deserved life.

She called me one day from town having taken a second mortgage. I was upset really to deal with this, it indebted me to more work, but met her at the furniture store walking the 6 miles to get to her. we never had a car. Took an hour or so. She was so happy as I went in to find out what on earth was going on, sitting in this enormous shaggy bright orange chair. She wanted me to sign so that we would buy this huge burnt orange sofa and chair set. Huge pieces. I had to pay $50 to get it to the house. And so into our tiny split level with my grand mom dying of Altzheimers and all the issues of those times, we were swallowed up in the biggest brightest couch and chair I ever saw. Dad never let us change the carpet or improve anything, so the floor in our home was this slightly sour light tan stained nightmare it just swallowed up any esthetic with the paneling of thin cabin wood. But I never woke up and walked out in our main room I didn't from then on think, can that really be in this room? Is it really this bright. It couldn't be hidden under any afghan I made. And my grandmom poured a gallon of milk on the chair one midnight as she wandered about a month new. I found orange hard to decorate around. We ended up painting what we had orange.

Now how does this possibly relate to this Williams story?
This is a story about the feeling I had then. I wanted my mom to have what she liked.
I've never seen my mom sit in a chair in her life, except that day I went into the furniture store and saw her wrap it around her injured heart trying to stop the bleeding from the years of pain, dad's rejection and the damage all of it did to her. She had this smile that day like a little lost puppy child, like she might be worth a big burnt orange chair.
She said that she had never chosen a piece of the furniture she'd lived with for 28 years.
I can't forget that.

Williams captures in this book the vulnerability and the reality of being poor.
In her beautiful, beautiful watercolors.
Of having to save pennies and change in a jar for a very long time to get your mom her chair. She does this without pity or pleas for someone to save them. No one will.
She just presents and honors the life that is led everyday by many faceless, voiceless people. Ones that are damaged by hurricanes, fires, heart breaks with nothing left to do but struggle to go on. They aren't the ones jumping around tonight on the Grammy's on highwires doing whatever that is to sing a so called tribute to the Beatles or in some blacklight costumes in some Pyramid rapping in some weird-o tribute to the song of this year. They are probably working the diner many blocks down. Long ago they gave us our music.

Anyway it talks about what is lost in a fire. Possessions. It talks to children that know about these things. So it does fit my Sheltered Immersion 1st grade place teaching in my neighborhood. One of my little boys crying recently all morning, all morning, inconsolable but not talking for so long until I was breaking... over the car stolen from his family over the weekend. It speaks to these kids that save and save for what they have. Or know it in their families.

One of teachers, after I read it to her class years ago told me her story. She saved and saved for new furniture buying a set for a couple thousand. This meant everything to her, her life harder by far than mine. And the company the next day went into bankruptcy so she lost her money, got nothing due to leins on the stock of the store. And she had saved years and years.
No one to shed a tear. It just is, she said to me, looking broken, looking lost a few seconds. Needing the care of someone.

Vera B. Williams writes stories that honor the beauty and fragility of human life. Our pennies collect into our jars as we reaching deep inside try to find ways to give our mommas a big chair for a little rest. Rest from their burdens. Days that bring us up on their laps for time to share our stories.

I like to read this at Mom's day and then the children enjoy conducting a Mom's Day Tea. You have the children pick and learn very well a poem. They can even write it about their mom's, grandmums, about you if you stand in as I have done for children left alone. Each child says their poetry. It can be filmed and played. It can be acted out or sung. It can be songs. Then they serve tea in pretty little cups you have been collecting all year from yard sales and junk shops in your town, (absent that bring in some china) if you yard sale they keep them to remember. in our town the stores for various charities have the things to get plus you are giving them business. After the tea and cookies then it's time to take Mom in arms for a little waltz to a nice tune. I like the Circle Game, by Joni Mitchell. Send everybody home with a box of tissues. It will be worth all the trouble.

Happy Birthday Mum. Your life was not an easy one. I do owe you my life.

This came to me from my spouse. I' was going to respond but it is just not necessary.We are beginning a series of pieces sharing our views. His role is a small schools Superintendent. I believe this was written as a letter to the editor.

What do Schools Need: Better Spending, Less Spending or More Spending?

The CA Governor's recently proposed, across-the-board, 10% budget cuts have a variety of complex meanings for public schools. There are also some simple meanings that these they bring to mind in terms of the state and condition of Californian public schools. During my twenty-plus years in California's public schools, I have witnessed under-budgeted schools getting less and less of the essentials of a world-class education while the demand for results in mandated-testing grows ever more ambitious and perhaps unrealistic. My research suggests that this less funded trend, which began with the passage of Prop 13, has left California schools ranked 47th out of the 50 states in level of money spent on schools. Our results on tests are equally low in the national comparison. Comparing California students and American students to international test results also yields a stark and disheartening analysis.
While much of the last twenty year's public rhetoric about education suggests its not how much we spend but how we spend it, I suggest that many problems cannot be solved by prudent spending alone. Some schools spend their money more wisely than others and achieve marginally better results, but all are suffering from depleted budgets. All are struggling to provide what are considered basic components of schools in other states and nations. Nurses, counselors, small class sizes, reading and art specialists, effective special education programs, smaller administrator to student ratios, even librarians. I am told we once had some of these things in California. We don't now and 10% cuts won't yield them.
These cuts and the generally inadequate funding of Californian schools are the fundamental cause of the very achievement gap that the state and federal government claim to want to shrink. Poor children and children of color are experiencing a greater gap in their relative achievement and educational opportunity even as many in government pat themselves on the back for marginal, aggregate test score gains. Here is a word to the public about testing. Regardless of the test, scores tend to go up after several years, until the deficiencies of that test become apparent. A new test is instituted, and the process repeats. While this gives the appearance of improving schools, little is accomplished in the areas of innovation and transformational change.
The skewering of Californian schools as failing institutions is a smokescreen for interests who'd rather not pay for public education, and if they have to, desire to do so at the lowest possible levels. This rhetoric suggests it’s not what you spend but how you spend. Clearly it’s both.
In my mind, this is the time for schools, communities, and citizens to use their vote and their money to fund public schools at world-class levels. Together, we can determine what our aims are, and we can facilitate and encourage innovation and creative change processes. It is not the time for cuts: it is time for world-class funding and world-class hope. It is time for the average citizen to realize that the quality of public schools is directly related to their own financial, social, and civic well-being. It is also directly related to the quality of their community and the quality of their local and state economy. We need to invest in the future and expect great things rather than cooking stone soup and hoping for a bouillabaisse. Our model ought to conjure the image of a family saving for their children’s future or a business investing in capital equipment and infrastructures. Our children are the bridges and roadways of the future. Instead, we fund education at the level of basic utility, letting the grass turn to weeds and minds turn towards other avenues.

California has likely always produced a large crop of world-class learners and young people. They enter our world class colleges, pay enormous fees, develop enormous debt yet do amazing things in life that foster the economy and the society of the next generation. While it’s a large crop in overall numbers, it’s a small percentage of the total population. Our rhetorical goal so often stated is for every child to have this type of achievement, access, and opportunity. We are running on three cylinders of an eight cylinder V-8. When we feed the engine, already sputtering and backfiring, with less and less fuel, things happen.

When you spend as little as we do on basic needs for children, two sorts of things happen. Families with more resources to draw from seek rich experiences for their children's learning in the private sector. They buy private lessons, libraries, computers, sport team participation, vacations, and private school enrollment. At the same time, the poorest children have fewer resources to deal with basic, more pressing needs like rotting teeth, hunger, and reading help. There are no free Sylvan learning classes and less and less accessible health care. Our goal, an admirable one if sincerely put forth, is to create such a condition that the negative impacts of poverty, racism, segregation, and classism can be overcome in one generation by a majority of American youth. If we succeeded or even began to make headway towards this loft and transformational goal, I would predict a greater development of wealth making and prosperity than has been seen since we rallied to fight defeat Fascism in World War II.

The state of California is on the same track it has been in these many years since the passage of Prop 13. It's a formula for economic disaster. We do not inhabit a trickle-down economy. We live in a creative-class economy measured and valued by patents and inventions. Whatever was left of California’s golden age of education has long since trickled away. We are now in a creative economy where those who are educated and innovative succeed. They can take their dollars, their talent, their technology, and their tolerance and leave when things get too messy. They are not tied to a region or state or even nation. The Creative Class wants public schools that bring the arts and sciences and technology to their children. They want to be involved in the school and community and they want their children to have the best.

What is needed in my mind is a collaborative desire for these same essentials for all kids. Regardless of whether the motivation for funding is altruistic, democratic, or self-interested; all three seek the same results, because good schools beget good communities and good economies.
I suggest we find a level of funding in California that can provide every child, regardless of race, family income level, or geographic location with an education we often develop for the student we label the "Gifted and Talented." It should fund a school day rich with the arts, science, math and technology; full of hands-on, real world experiences, with linkages to career and community. The school day and year should also be highly interactive with universities and the business community. This is the sort of education we are trying to develop in our little District in Ventura County, obviously using the meager resources we have. This is the type of education we believe will develop the creative and innovative skills and knowledge sets necessary for all children to thrive, not just survive in the 21st century.
Just as we need adequate resources, it is also time to shed generations-old patterns of repetitious, mundane, disconnected, bureaucratic, compartmentalized, and non-responsive, compliance seeking rather than empowerment producing organizational behavior that has come to be associated with schools and government-run institutions in general. It is time to do as the nation of Scotland has; declare our children our state and nation's treasure.
Let’s begin by making sure our children's teeth don't rot, that they are well fed, feel safe, can read and solve problems well by the end of the third grade. This will cost more money than we currently spend. It will also require dramatic change in some places that have continued to repeat the same ineffective processes for decades.
I believe these changes can come when we as schools, communities, and citizens realize that we are all directly, financially, civicly, and socially linked to the success of our state's children. How well they do is the most important factor in how well we will all do in the long run. One can use the image of thinking of other people’s children and a future where they will be your daily care-taker. Together with our students we can build schools that will graduate students who can care for us personally as well as stewarding the democracy, the economy, and the very survival of the species and planet.
Let us all make a commitment to move onward and upward towards a world-class education for every child, the same education that we all want for our own kids.


My unwanted wife comments might include a laptop for every child both at home and at school. With access to the learning taken for granted for the children entering our Harvards, MIT's, CalTechs, Stanfords.

Tree of Cranes
by Allen Say

There is a distance in Allen Say books, a calm and separate peace.

Using his beautiful artful pieces with children is always an interesting moment. I read this today with my 1st graders. We are studying Asian works, cultural experience. We are folding paper cranes, making kites. We are trying to articulate the experience of cultures. We are living the experience of growing up figuring out who we are in “this” moment. And so this book suggested its way into my afternoon between a bluegrass band from Alaska and my returning from an AM test rather loopy and the need to have a lovely Friday.
I went looking for a book to speak through which I could convey feeling and thoughts not entirely within my grasp verbally or in written form. That led me of course to Say.

This story is beautifully/distantly told through his artwork and speaks to a child's ability to take an experience from childhood that shapes the him through perhaps a mistake, or a discomfort, a broken request, an intrusion into things unknown and maybe a bit frightening. It does touch guilt through the commission of a wrong that is translated then into life as an avoidance, impression, it symbolizes I think in a concrete way a door being shut. The child does what the mom has requested he not do, she fears, has always feared, he will drown in a carp pond. He then is drawn to the pond, falls in and lives of course. But immediately he is sick needing her comfort feels her withdrawal. He has physical care but senses an emotional distance. It is a symbol-laden piece. My children sat riveted, utterly riveted. Able to talk to me a great deal about this disappointing a mother with his exploration.
When Say relates the child's impression of his mother's response to his falling in the carp pond, the feeling of disapproval breaks all over you.

Sometimes I think coming out of my work with children, and my own past, sometimes I'm not looking for books about perfect harmony and comfort, compliments and the falseness of the etiquette systems that separate us from truth. Sometimes I am grateful and want to shout my thanks as a roar, or adoring and want the weeks of wagging my tongue on the ground in lapping love, sometimes I'm feeling a dissonance and want the strangeness wearing my hats, sometimes I am wanting to look at artwork by Dali, or the images of Close. Sometimes a Philip Pearlstein with the blue veins of a headless nude draped in a kimono in a rocker looking heavy and liquid is the type of concretization of this internal place I'm in and I want to look for a long while at an ugly thing. Say manages I think to catch a feeling that children do know. They would like I think to examine it a bit.
We know the relationship to other, be it in a mother or in the partner we ultimately are drawn to know better. A space, distance, curtain is drawn to our finding perfect understanding. My girl friend and I were speaking of the receiving of the female the holding and as I felt I understood for a second what becomes a oneness in the two partners male/female in the relationship it rose right out of my mind and fled. Seeking wholeness and unification I am lost in the way. Cannot intellectualize to knowing.
But not necessary to our acceptance. And that I think is important.

In this story the child feels the mother has withdrawn from him in someway from his actions and then time moves this into learning something more of her unexpectedly.

Two times in particular in my childhood I recall in the relationship to my mother and several more with my father incidents where the situation almost of my innocence lead me unexpectedly into a territory beyond my ability to process or speak about. Just found out something. And the resultant feeling of being left alone there with that, of being fully alone, a being separate was uncomfortable. But I recall it viscerally. In one particular incident when I learned of my mothers first marriage and her life before me just mildly asking her about a ring in her jewelry, it brought me a sense of disassociation. It is to this Say allows into his work here.

They suggest this is falling out of finding way to address his two-culture gap that certainly would fit here, a Mom of California with Christmas traditions and a life in a traditional Japanese home. This would fit my feelings I think a bit marrying into a very different kind of family, moving across a country, working in very different cultures than my Appalachian one in a South Central or a Salinas Valley Migrant town and then having my children while struggling to interpret “me” to them in these different contexts. My sense of them unable to "know” me and my own struggles with the roles, responsibilities, the carrying of my background, my talents, my feeling of the challenges has been so much like the experience of art. I understand it through art but that was my background.

The audience of an artwork receives within an other, an audience, a “themness.” It is not the place that made the work but there may be echoes or ripples in the lake. Sometimes the work made cannot speak through all of these veils. I recently read a long involved review of a painting. Long explanations of the artist’s circumstances, life, loves, techniques, developments of style, their historical context, actually the writing was a showpiece of encyclopedic and interpretive writing of a critic. As I read I felt less and less confident, more and more unworthy of looking at this piece, further and further removed from the meanings. With so little knowing to this level I thought perhaps I have no right to look and be with this work at all. I almost lost my stance in front of the work as if falling through the floor. Tilting.
And looking up I thought of myself as I paint and make. Thinking of my own meager work. But still considering the process and the pieces. Would I want all of that life and that evaluative interpretive critical layer really to be known by someone looking at the work? Could that be the way it should be seen? The evolution of my style, my statements or what I am deeply saying? Could anyone know, do I know? Was my making just there because I had no way to speak to things I do not know how to say?

Art is a separation in the talk. It is frozen time, it walks into the evoking of responses in the viewer. But what happens then often surprises me. When I looked again at this piece , about which I read, regaining myself I preferred my set of connections, though I was not hurt or disturbed by the interpreter/critic piece. I just heard something from an artist and it was special to me too. It is that dissonance I always find in Says’ stories. It speaks to me very privately and my private feelings we hold alone.


Origami cranes brought me to this book too, expressions of flight, of folding them for the celebrations of the fleeting nature and beauty of a life. I like to make them. I like to touch paper. It is a kind of religion for me. Peace. You'd like this.

Sadako Story

I just received beautiful gifts donated for my class. Here is the list they used.
The gesture of this very moving to the whole school, or those that know of it, with many aware. It was the loveliest of things to do I’m actually shocked. And I did disassociate really. I connected to the kind of feeling that my children in my class know a teacher that speaks a language they are just learning, experience daily the discomforts of interpreting me, a very different person, the school, the differences from home. They know there is a world, but not yet if it is a town or a country, not really where a friend might be thinking of giving them a gift.
But I watched. They know the concrete joy of playing with the blocks, or setting up the reptile habitat, or the joy of hearing a book. But they grasp fleetingly something more than this. They are able to grasp that I hold something "else” that comes into play as I share these special gifts with them. We sense the things speak other languages to me. I am honored. And in my way these things honor for me the importance of my children.

Like the paper cranes that are folded within this story to decorate the Christmas tree of this child’s mother with her distances, the cranes are folded as symbols beautifully dimensional, momentarily alluding to the ideal of the gesture. The flight, the crane as it lifts up and into the sky. A paper to say my heart lifts to you dearly; your kindness is folded into the totality of where I am now, lifting you into the mind's eye.

Or so it is for me.

Say’s child senses that his parent is him, yet not him. They have been united; he was inside of her womb and shares their past but that their flights are their own. As soon as we hold the painting to go to something I can use to explain, in the time of our looking, in our flash of insights it escapes us into a kind of flight. Our next meeting, our next experience to be both familiar but also the possibility of a different, refreshed, unknown newness for us.

This child carries sadness from this day and a joy, something felt as his mistake, he could not know playing in the carp pond again without feeling that he would evoke disappointment from his mom. I relate this a bit to my gifting, I would like to be able to share with these friends something that might be worth their kindness, my class being so dear to me I share them as the beautiful and special persons that I hope will live in their world touching the lives of others as positively.
I wish almost with wistfulness that these children could really be known as expressions of the miracle of life, the possibility in life. I had a child last year so dear to me. I look at her photo knowing that I shared her with a friend, writing of her adventures, to try to give something of myself and this place we live within lacking anything else really of worth to ever give.

Ah. Maybe I am not up to the expression in words of Say. He made a book that I find unique in children's literature It asks of us a willingness to be uncomfortable, to be changes, to speak to deep rivers running through us. As we reach the sea a part of the humanity of the life we have experienced a book such as this allows us to say that there is so much we will not know, never explain, that affected us profoundly and moved through us. A part of the water, the river the sea and yet held within the self, our concrete self. A drop. Look at his cover as a child tries to understand who he is.