A Personal Story

Wednesday night, I walked home, two miles through a steady rain from my ex-wife’s house, where I had been tutoring my kid in chemistry as she prepared for a quiz to be given the next day. I’ve been doing this for close to three months now, working with her in math and science (she’s a music major at LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts). We’ve had a lot of fun and she’s made great strides, going from a D to a B+ average in chem and from an F to a C+ in math.

It’s the sort of thing that candidate Obama wisely and stirringly encouraged all of us to do. It was good to hear that kind of talk from a presidential candidate, even if his tiresome stories of 4 AM study sessions with Mom were kind of self-indulgent, not to mention potentially harmful as behavioral models — among the dangers to proper development in children, sleep deprivation rates somewhat higher than a poor understanding of Euclid’s theorems.

Yet in the way of Nature, among all animals (humans included), political speeches are not necessary for parents to do the right things by their kids. Parents are not heroes; we do this sort of stuff because it comes with the territory, because we opted into it when we took our pants off and swam in the pool of ecstasy that brings children into this world. Thus, I am in no position to expect that my culture will reward me for helping my little girl along in a couple of challenging subjects. I won’t be in the audience at the next SOTU address; there will be no parental tutoring tax breaks for me; and no corporation in America would dream of extending me a job offer because I’m geeky enough to teach the periodic table and plane geometry proofs and make the lessons stick.

Our greatest contributions to life are those we make with no consciousness of making them. They are just done, with no thought of any reward beyond the simple doing. It is the sense I hear in Hayden’s shimmering poem and its closing line, “love’s austere and lonely offices.” The action and its effect are one; there is no intention and no expectation. Whether we warm a winter morning or help penetrate the abstractions of algebra, these are the clearest and brightest moments of our lives, the ordinary epiphanies for which we may be remembered a generation or two hence, until the manifest traces of our former presence on this earth vanish.

Our government, our media, and our corporate institutions have no language, no sense for such moments. In the world of the charity golf tournament and the bumper sticker (“my child is an Honors student at…”), there can be no public recognition for “love’s austere and lonely offices.” Yet these endure; perhaps these alone are what outlast our life’s winter.

Science tells us that cognition forms in utero and develops at quantum rates of speed from there on in the child. I would add that the same almost certainly applies to re-cognition. As I gave her a hug and said good night, Maria held me a little longer than usual and said, “thank you for being here for me.” There is no prize, no award, no money, no fame to equal this.