Porches are, like summer, are sloth-inducing and community-inviting.

The American poet Robert Frost is famous for—among other things—penning the line, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

Frost’s lines concern a stand of birches observed in winter, bent down, as those trees tend to be, by snow and ice. It is as if, Frost observes, a small boy had shinnied up the trunk, and, with the bravado of the young, reached the end of the tree, and flung himself, clutching its topmost branches, feet-first into the blue winter sky and “ridden” the tree to the ground.

The image of the birch-swinger is a metaphor for the poet’s on-again, off-again relationship with the world: “It’s when I’m weary of considerations,” he writes, “and life is too much like a pathless wood…I’d like to get away from earth awhile, and then come back to it and begin over.”

Now given the fact that it’s July in New England, as opposed to January, I will make bold to offer a seasonal amendment to Mr. Frost and note that, fine as birches are, one could also do worse than be a sitter of porches.

Bear with me, and I may actually get you to believe that homely, un-“hot” objects like birches and porches can actually be the stuff of meaning, allowing us to revel in life rather than merely regarding it as a conquerable commodity or something to be endured.

Porches are ephemera to many modern home builders and largely to the 21st century mindset in which everything seems to require justification via a specific purpose.

Real porches–and here I exclude so-called “three-season rooms” which are made practicable,  and therefore justifiable, by insulation or infomercial awnings; and “decks” which many times dangle in space supported only by four by fours and which function as a grilling stations and occasionally collapse, sending bratwurst, steaks and grill person into the sump-pump bog some 18 feet below—are, like summer, short-lived, sloth-inducing, and community-inviting.

And to have one, especially a front porch, is to be blessed.

First, porches represent the once-upon-a-time in architecture. A time when folks strolled streets after dinner; a time when neighbors knew their community as faces and names met over day-to-day dealings; a time when social interaction was spontaneous rather than marked on an agenda three weeks in advance.

So once upon a time, after supper, you spied Fred and Mabel over your flower boxes and invited them up to your porch for ice cream and/or gossip.

Porch furniture, likewise, embodies a largely abandoned approach to existence: It does not warm, vibrate or advertise as orthopedically approved. Rather, it rocks, but back-and-forth; it swings, but in the wind.

So once upon a time, Junior de-camped to the porch and poured over Treasure Island, or Pop left the edging until tomorrow and expended his strength willing Ted Williams to first base while downing a lemonade.

“A good porch,” notes writer Garrison Keillor, gets you out of the parlor; lets you smoke, talk loud, eat with your fingers—without apology and without having to run away from home. No wonder that people with porches have hundreds of friends…Me and the missus float back and forth on the swing, Mark and Rhonda are collapsed at opposite ends of the couch. Marlene peruses her paperback novel in which an astounding event is about to occur…the cats lie on the floor listening to birdies, and I say, ‘It’s a heck of a deal, ain’t it, a heck of a deal.’ A golden creamy silence suffuses this happy scene, and only on a porch is it possible.”

As I said, one could do worse than be a sitter of porches.

Happy summer.

Trish Bennett is the former associate editor of the Main Street News. Her award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in that paper for many years. She holds a master of science degree in journalism and now lives in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where she currently works at an inner-city elementary school in West Philadelphia with disadvantaged kids as a “library lady” and reading specialist. She can be reached at pwbennett@verizon.net

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It is the absence of the “fine” in our kids’ lives—deliberation and discernment skills—that worries me:
 
To the ever-expanding pile of words denuded of practically all meaning, I’d like to add “fine.”
 
Witness the range of synonyms offered, for example, by my Macbook onboard thesaurus: “very well,” “well,” “all right,” “okay”: which is a little like saying “thriving,” “healthy,” “so-so,” and “breathing, but little else” all mean the same thing.
 
Show me a med student who maintains that “thriving,” “healthy,” “so-so,” and “breathing but that’s all,” are interchangeable descriptions of a patient’s state, and I’ll show you next week’s road crew member.
 
What got me ruminating on “fine’s” decline is several recent examples that demonstrate how very absent from our children’s experiences are the word’s other uses.  That is, “fine” as in “subtle”; “delicate”; “refined.”
 
Now before I am accused of advocating that kids be inculcated with the rituals of high tea at four o’clock, and the care and feeding of Granny’s bone china, allow me to explain.  Or perhaps paint you some word pictures.
 
I volunteer in an inner-city Philadelphia school built in the 1920’s.  The library, where I help teach first, third and fourth graders is a relatively bright oasis of clean, sturdy tables and raspberry-hued upholstered chairs.  Outside the library, strong-armed, alarmed doors keep intruders out of the sunless halls where rusty pipes often leak into containers meant for recycled paper.
 
To many of my kids, the library can mean “fine” in the sense of an alternative: one of only a few places regularly available to them where nursery rhymes, biographies, and Harry Potter can offer beauty or delicacy in contrast to the gritty realities posed by poverty and absent parents.
 
Since school began, though, my volunteer friends and I have been alternately surprised, bemused and discouraged by our students’ choice of books.
 
Call it “elitist” if you will, but we can sigh when there are tug-of-wars over the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” and “Captain Underpants” series while grade- and ability-friendly volumes featuring Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein and Anne Frank seldom get a glance.
 
Is this “fine” in the sense of just okay (“hey, at least they’re reading”)?  Perhaps.  Is a steady diet of only pop culture and familiarity helping these kids to develop finer qualities like critical thinking and subtle reasoning?  I think not.
 
And lest you think that disadvantaged kids are the only ones who lack for examples of higher aspirations, come west about nine miles to the quite advantaged Main Line where the children of privilege, like their 8- to 18-year-old counterparts country-wide spend—according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation—more than seven and a half hours a day in front of a smart phone, computer, TV or other electronic device.
 
For the moment, leave aside concerns of rampant childhood obesity and the 47 percent of “heavy” media users who, according to the study, had mostly C grades or lower.
 
Instead consider the example of Baby Trey, who, the New York Times related, was parked by his well-meaning mother in front of Baby Einstein videos and “Dora the Explorer.”
 
“By the time he was 4, he had all these math and science DVDs…and he learned to read and do math early,” said Trey’s mother, Kim Calinan.  But now that Trey is 9, Calinan observes, video games have displaced after-school activities, and her son shows little interest in any social interaction or independent exploration—such as reading—that might cut into his gaming time.
 
“[Heavy media use has] changed young people’s assumptions about how to get an answer to a question,” says Donald F. Roberts, a Stamford communications professor emeritus who is one of the authors of the Kaiser Foundation study.  “People can put out a problem…and information pours in from all kinds of sources.”
 
And as a former communications professor myself, I can attest that even college age students, while they may be whizzes at harvesting factoids, are becoming less and less adapt at culling and discriminating between the finer points in that information avalanche.
 
To some degree my privileged former students are no further along in their ability to engage in refined, subtle thought than my challenged present charges.
 
So what we have here may be “fine,” in the sense of “okay” for many: Democracy is not yet threatened by many kids’ hampered ability to reason.
 
But it is the absence of the “fine” in our kids’ lives, represented by deliberation and discernment skills, that worries me: the impetus to be curious beyond the familiar; to be enlightened beyond the obvious; to consider rather than simply emote; to be educated rather than simply amused.
 
And absent those fine points of the human experience, we and our children are not fine at all.

Trish Bennett is the former associate editor of the Main Street News. Her award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in that paper for many years. She holds a master of science degree in journalism and now lives in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where she currently works at an inner-city elementary school in West Philadelphia with disadvantaged kids as a “library lady” and reading specialist. She can be reached at pwbennett@verizon.net

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“Razors pain you; rivers are damp; acids stain you; and drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful; you might as well live.”

God bless Dorothy Parker, wherever she is. You might be trapped in a dark tunnel, the only light being that of the on-coming train that’s about to mow you down; but if Parker were with you, she’d convince you that you were about to be dispatched by the Orient Express—how chic—and that there was still time for a scotch before the final impact.

A bit twisted, perhaps, but I like that in a person. Matter of fact, I’m fond of curmudgeons in general: those folks who shudder at the thought of political correctness, self-esteem, and other feel-good sentimentality in favor of good old unvarnished invective and crotchety quips.

Malcontents and misanthropes take life straight up and neat; they leave the chocolate mud-slide (so-called) martinis to the unshaven and the wimps. They truss up hypocrisy, cant, pretense and sham and promptly impale them on the skewer of humor, as author Jon Winokur notes.

“In a nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses,” Winokur continues, “it then becomes an honor to be labeled a curmudgeon.”

So with election babble vying with financial collapses to bubble our stomachs and ravage our brains, it’s not a bad survival mechanism to explore what some notable wags made of life’s assorted plagues and pestilences.

Before we degenerated into the unadulterated vitriol that now passes as informed political discourse, Americans used to poke amused fun at the opposite political pole. Robert Benchley, once upon a time, noted that the only way to tell Republicans and Democrats apart was to examine the detritus littering their post-convention meeting rooms. Republicans, Benchley said, tended to leave about more gin bottles while the Democrats seem to have gone in for more rye.

Somewhat after the time South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner over a minor tiff called the Civil War, but before the “Axis of Evil” was invented, humorist Dave Barry observed that Democrats seems to be basically nicer people than Republicans. Alas, Barry continued, Democrats had not only demonstrated time and again that they had the management skills of celery, but that, while they were kind enough to stop and help you change a flat, they’d also manage to set your car on fire. Republicans, on the other hand, would decline to stop to help, bereft as they were, of the knowledge to fix a tire. Besides, Barry maintained, they’d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.

Politics has always been ready fodder for souls who despise double-speak that says nothing.

Journalist H.L. Mencken once opined that if an office seeker had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. He went on to declare that nine out of ten politicians were knaves who maintained themselves by preying on the idiotic vanities and pathetic hopes of half-wits: rather perceptive in an age of identity politics where we imagine “likeability” or the ability to shoot moose (or miss quail) to be qualifications for high office.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw saw more identity foibles at play in national rah-rah-ing, although it must be admitted that he lived in an age before flag lapel pins (or lack thereof) determined loyalty to one’s country. Patriotism, Shaw postulated, is the conviction that one’s country is superior to all others because we were born in it.

Worrisome notion, one might think, if everybody in the world thought that way.

Remember the junk bond melt-down? No matter. Substitute “sub-prime lending” and you’re in the same ballpark. Film critic John Bloom (nom de plume, “Joe Bob Briggs”) once went on a rant that recently deposed Wall St. Masters of the Universe should have heeded.

“How does something like this happen?” Briggs raved. “How do people spend ten years buying and selling something with junk in the name, and then say, ‘Oh, my God, you mean those weren’t good investments? They sounded so great!” You can almost hear the whining today from one-time Merrill Lynch tycoons, “Sub-prime lending. We thought we couldn’t go wrong with a name like that!”

Right.

It’s as though the finance gurus read Wilson Mizner’s fertile, irreverent mind. “Money, to be worth striving for, must have blood and perspiration on it—preferably that of someone else.”

Mark Twain (as usual) nailed it. “Honesty is the best policy,” he maintained, “when there is money in it.”

No doubt about it, it’s nasty times out there. And it’s tough, too, because so many cures for the national blues are either illegal, immoral or fattening, as Alexander Woollcott observed.

When I get the funks, I go running, which, if I keep to my habits, should mean I’ll have run three marathons by a week from Tuesday. Or maybe I’ll just see if Oscar Wilde had any thoughts about hockey mom-ism and pig lipstick.

 
Trish Bennett is the former associate editor of the Main Street News. Her award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in that paper for many years. She holds a master of science degree in journalism and now lives in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where she currently works at an inner-city elementary school in West Philadelphia with disadvantaged kids as a “library lady” and reading specialist. She can be reached at pwbennett@verizon.net 

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It may be ours to redirect our energies, from thrusting greedy fingers into stockings for a prize, to discerning what our neighbor might not crave, but desperately require.

There is a beautiful symmetry to the ebb and flow of the academic year, a sense of security in the certainty of beginning, middle, and end.  Task announced, studied, and—as actually happens in some cases—mastered.
Then there are times when an instructor sees, over the course of 13-odd weeks, the kernel of inquiry sprout.  And slowly, perhaps in fits and starts, grow to be a self-sustaining quest that might, just might, continue beyond the semester’s end, to absorb the student in a life-long journey: not to master, but to continue to discover.
Ideas like that represent the tender mercies of teaching, making the slings and arrows bearable.  And one can think those thoughts to within an inch of their lives, which was what I was doing when I stumbled across an intriguing study out of Stamford University.
Briefly, an educational researcher selected a group of fourth graders, students she had determined to have roughly the same learning abilities, and to whom she administered two rigged tests.
The first was ridiculously easy, allowing the students to breeze through almost completely unchallenged.
The second, was the first in reverse: a devious doppelganger, calculated to be well beyond the capabilities of most fourth graders.

Having set the stage, the researcher observed.

One group of students—determined by their behavior in the face of the problem—first changed their posture.  They doubled down, giving the test their full attention, summoning all their resources, to arrive at a solution.
These the researcher dubbed “mastery” students.  The quest for them, she concluded, was to understand what at first seemed un-understandable.  No matter what time elapsed, no matter if an adult was watching, no matter whether ego was risked on trying and perhaps failing to come up with an answer, the mastery students plugged away, fueled by their curiosity, intrigued with the challenge.

By contrast, the second group—again, self-designating based on their behavior—the researcher called the “helpless” students.

Their behavior was defined first—again—by posture.  After studying the test for several minutes, they began to relax in their chairs: backs against seats, feet stretched forward, in a languid, disinterested fashion.  These children, the researcher found, became passive in the face of difficulty.  Verbally, they began criticizing the test (“This is so dumb”); some time later, they began criticizing themselves as “dumb.”
These students, the researcher concluded, had interpreted difficulties, not as intriguing puzzles, but as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible.

The researcher went further, theorizing that the “helpless” students were also “performers,” looking always toward some real or imaginary gallery, where adults sat ready to give approval.

In short, the “helpless” kids did not explore from some inner motivation to satisfy curiosity.  Rather they “performed” for what they expected and hoped: quick recognition and praise.  And when those immediate rewards didn’t materialize, the students decided the puzzle was not worth their energy, and soon disengaged.

I made notes on the study for my next semester’s teaching, but, given the almost universal push-backs and knock downs our society has faced over the last several months, it was obvious that the “mastery” and “helpless” student study has relevance far beyond the Stamford testing lab.

The thought occurred that there are precious few of us who are not grappling with issues that may well strike us as insoluable.  Many, if not all of them, tend to crescendo during the holiday season, when popular understanding has it that, at the very least, life should be merry and bright.

To be sure, home foreclosures and the evaporation of life savings are more than December downers.  They are life-shaking, if not shattering.  They are not easily surmountable, and are made no more palpable by insipid philosophies that call for seeing the eggnog glass as half full, rather than half empty.
 
I would submit, however, that, though our issues are real and threatening, the attitude with which we face them need not—and for productivity’s sake, must not—mimic that of the helpless students.
We need, I think, to seek out the tender mercies.

It may be our task, in this solstice season, to remember the mastery students, who, like Eleanor Roosevelt, lit candles instead of cursing darkness, and lived into childhood’s best promise, choosing to explore, rather than to expire in a heap of self-pitying indignation.

It is ours at this time of year, I think, to begin to value, rather than evade, the trials that daunt us, and in their grim faces, to dare to whistle, if for no other reason than to dispel the greatest enemy, which—because it paralyzes, and distorts our vision—is fear.

It is ours, I think, to redirect our energies, from thrusting greedy fingers into stockings, hoping for a prize or peace that we think we deserve, to, instead, probing gently and lovingly, to discern what our neighbor might not crave, but might desperately require.

Finally, I would submit, it is ours to decide whether we will be helpless or masters.
Having elected a man from Illinois to lead us out of the muck and mire of the last eight years, it may be our task and privilege to discern again the distant voices: not the old seductive siren songs of greed and gold and gotcha-ism, but rather—to paraphrase another man from Illinois—to heed the better angels of our own scarred, but still steadfast, nature.

Trish Bennett is the former associate editor of the Main Street News. Her award-winning column, “Between Us,” ran in that paper for many years. She holds a master of science degree in journalism and now lives in Bryn Mawr, Pa., where she currently works at an inner-city elementary school in West Philadelphia with disadvantaged kids as a “library lady” and reading specialist. She can be reached at pwbennett@verizon.net

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