Love in a Time of Homeschooling (11 page)

The military world, with its uniforms and guns and strict hierarchy, is more John's cup of tea than mine. Years ago, after his stint as a public school teacher, John shipped off to Marine Corps boot camp to preface four years of trumpet playing with the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps in Washington. So these days he feels comfortable with students who salute and call him Colonel Brodie, and he's completely at ease wearing camouflage to a parent-teacher conference. As for me, I feel a little apologetic every time I arrive at VMI, like I'm an agnostic visiting someone else's church.

Nevertheless, Julia and I proceeded down VMI's maple-lined avenue and she pointed to a statue across the parade ground. “There's George Marshall,” she said, acknowledging the college's most famous alumnus. Julia once wrote a poem for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday that contained these lines: “There are warriors for Peace / King, Gandhi, Marshall / These are their swords, / Life, light, and hope.”

“Why did you put George Marshall next to King and Gandhi?” I asked.

“Because he's the only soldier to have won the Nobel Peace
prize.” She had learned this on a school field trip to VMI's Marshall Museum, which now stood one hundred yards to our left.

Clever answer, I thought, but a little odd. Only in Lexington, Virginia, would a child group George Marshall alongside Gandhi.

That morning, we parked in front of VMI's Preston Library, stepped out of the car, and surveyed the buildings around us. VMI employs a similar architecture to its more famous counterpoint on the Hudson: tan stucco walls molded into castle façades, complete with parapets and cut-glass windows. However, the resemblance to West Point ends at the northern end of the parade ground, where an imposing statue of Stonewall Jackson assesses the field. He stands erect in his Confederate uniform, from angled hat to thigh-high boots, binoculars in one hand, sword in the other, an imaginary wind blowing open the flaps of his coat. Jackson taught at VMI before the Civil War began, and the school's rats are required to salute his statue every time they exit the barracks, a gesture that makes me flinch, though most of the cadets don't seem to mind.

Lexington treats Jackson as a kind of patron saint. Julia was born in Stonewall Jackson Hospital, and if she chooses to spend her entire life in this small town, she might live on Jackson Avenue or Stonewall Street. She might purchase a burial plot in the local cemetery, which radiates outward from a statue of the general that marks his grave. In fact, “Julia” was the name of Jackson's daughter, but we didn't know it at the time of our child's birth. We named her after John Lennon's song from the
White Album
.

That morning, Julia and I turned away from Jackson and entered Preston Library, where we walked upstairs through a room filled with solemn portraits of Confederate officers, mostly VMI alumni. A sign by a sofa contained the circled word
SUPINE
with a backslash through it.

“What does
supine
mean?” Julia asked.

“Lying down,” I replied. “The cadets are sleepy all the time because they stay up late studying, and they wake at dawn for breakfast. They can't take afternoon naps because they have to roll up their mattresses in the morning and lean their bed frames against the wall, since they live four or five to a room, and there's no space for them to have their beds and desks out at the same time. The rats, in particular, are always exhausted, and the librarians don't want them coming here and sleeping on the couches.”

Julia and I walked to the entrance of an enclosed room at the far end of the library, where a sign beside the door read “Timmins Music Room.” We opened the door and entered a small oasis in VMI's Spartan world: comfortable armchairs, multiple CD players and headphones, and filing cabinets filled with classical music CDs. In the middle of the room stood a thin black sculpture of Orpheus, pitched forward in a balletic leap, toes pointed, a lyre held on his shoulder, shaped in a
V
. For “Victory”? For “VMI”? The sculpture's stone base read, “John W. Timmins, '49 / Killed in Action, Korea, 1950.”

How sad, I thought. He died one year out of college.

“He's a pea brain,” Julia remarked.

She was contemplating the sculpture's head, and she was right. Although Orpheus's body was a tapestry of muscles, anatomically well proportioned, his head was little bigger than his fist. All brawn and no brain.

“Maybe he's angry because the sculptor gave him a pea brain,” Julia mused, staring at Orpheus's contemptuous sneer.

“Maybe he's angry,” I said, “because his wife died shortly after they were married, and although he had a chance to get her out of the underworld, he blew it.” I briefly recounted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, thinking how homeschooling, just like parenthood, could inspire all sorts of impromptu les
sons. I hadn't planned on talking about mythology that day, but there we stood, inspired by a statue I had never bothered to examine closely. This year's improvisations were bound to make me more attentive to the world around me, seeing it from Julia's perspective.

Julia eyed the statue critically. “So now he's going to be torn apart by wild women,” she said, imagining the maenads. “That sucks.”

“Stinks, not sucks,” I murmured as I opened a filing cabinet full of CDs.

On that first day of homeschooling, I had the noble idea that each week I would introduce Julia to a famous piece of classical music, teaching her about various composers and musical genres. She had already been exposed to more music than most children, but up to that point she had never studied it in any systematic way. She liked Disney's
Fantasia
, versions one and two, but she couldn't name more than one of the composers featured in those films. Homeschooling, so I hoped, might give Julia a chance to become acquainted with a small repertoire of famous pieces. We could play them in the car—there would be lots of driving in our daily routine: fifteen-minute trips to town for violin lessons, tennis lessons, library visits, and shopping errands. In my rookie enthusiasm, I intended to pack those minutes with Brahms and Beethoven; God forbid that there be any unproductive gaps in our school day. (It would take me a couple of months to realize that unproductive gaps can produce wonderful, spontaneous lessons.)

In the mauve-walled Timmins Room, I flipped through the filing cabinets thinking, “Let us begin with something memorable for a child,” maybe something used in the old
Bugs Bunny
cartoons. One reason that Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes cartoons still outclass today's Japanese imports—despite Julia's love of
anime
—is because the creators had good taste in music.
Peer
Gynt
accompanied each animated sunrise; Rossini's
William Tell Overture
sped every foot race; Bugs Bunny donned bullfighting gear to strains of
Carmen
.

I pulled out Richard Strauss's
Also Sprach Zarathustra
, a piece baby boomers know from
2001: A Space Odyssey
. It's a favorite musical selection for television advertisements and videotaped moon shots. The title, I explained to Julia, means “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” and it was taken from a book by a German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The main character in Nietzsche's book (are you listening, Julia?) was a deep-thinking, strong-willed man named after a prophet from Persia (now Iran) who lived thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The Persian Zarathustra was called Zoroaster, and he was one of the first men to preach a monotheistic religion, with a clear idea of heaven. (Pay attention, Julia, this is important.) Judaism and Christianity are thought to have taken many of their beliefs from Zoroastrianism. But Nietzsche didn't believe in heaven. His Zarathustra hails the coming of a Superman, an Ubermensch who transcends traditional morality.

By now Julia's eyes were focused out the window, watching cars drive by. Children, like most adults, cannot absorb abstractions that have no connection to their daily lives.

“You don't need to remember any of that,” I said. “When you listen to the music, just try to imagine a solitary prophet walking through the Persian desert, and think about how his ideas inspired a German philosopher to write about a superman.”

She nodded vaguely. Mom was still speaking in riddles.

I knew I sounded like the Professor on
Gilligan's Island
, but that was okay. I didn't mind if Julia couldn't grasp everything I was saying, because it was valuable for her just to hear an adult's vocabulary. I've never felt that children need to fully comprehend all that they hear and see. Better to let them absorb a little
more with each new conversation and each new book—to sense that the world is full of knowledge yet to be learned, and mysteries still to be fathomed.

That afternoon I also pulled out Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake
. Julia already knew the tunes from
The Swan Princess
movie, just as she knew the melodies from the
Nutcracker Suite
and the central theme in Disney's
Sleeping Beauty
. She didn't know, however, that all of these pieces were taken from ballets written by the same Russian composer.

We went downstairs and checked out the CDs at the circulation desk, then walked back to the car, where I put the key in the ignition and turned on Strauss.

“Let's listen to the opening before we drive home.”

Outside our windows, cadets jogged by in narrow columns, singing their usual jodies: “I don't know but I've been told / Army wings are made of gold. / I don't know but it's been said / Navy wings are made of lead.” Inside our car, the music started quietly. First the trumpets, playing three slow, ascending notes gradually getting louder, with the third note held to the limit of the trumpeter's breath, until the whole orchestra entered with two descending tones, one short, one long, holding the long note with a steady crescendo, cut off with a ringing aftertone. Then came a seesaw pounding of tympani, slowing steadily until the trumpets began the pattern again.

“Do you like it, Julia?” I asked at the end of the prelude.

“Yes,” she said.

“What does it make you think of?”

She hesitated. “A bird, learning to fly. And it takes three tries.”

We played the piece again, and Julia's fingers fluttered across the dashboard, lifting and falling. “On the third try,” she said, as the music blossomed into major chords, “his wings open into beautiful colors and the bird flies up toward heaven.”

We listened to the rest of the music as we drove out of town and into the countryside, the subdivisions giving way to fields peppered with cattle. We passed a friend's pasture where a group of two dozen deer regularly graze. Julia counted seventeen that morning; brass chords floated out our window toward the does' pricked ears, and I hoped that Julia would appreciate the beauty of it. In just looking out a car window, she might feel freed from the sadness of classrooms that had weighted her down over the past several years.

“Windows are the only thing that rivet me to this world,” she once remarked. On that day, when I asked what she saw outside a window, she looked out from our living room at the trees and answered, “Everything that is really there that
you
can't see. Camels and a guinea pig and a kangaroo head.”

“So you find trees to be just as evocative as clouds?”

“Oh,
clouds
,” she said dismissively. “Clouds are so obvious.”

 

The best homeschooling lesson I ever taught would come a few months later, on that stretch of road where Julia counted the seventeen deer. All three of my girls were in the backseat that day, bickering, poking, whining—their habitual state—when I turned on Rimsky-Korsakov's
Scheherazade
.

“Have you ever heard of Scheherazade?” I asked over their noise, and they quieted enough to mutter a negative.

“There was once a sultan of Arabia,” I began, “with a beautiful wife whom he loved very much, but she betrayed him.”

“You mean she had
s-e-x
with another man?” Nine-year-old Rachel had an unlimited, disgusted fascination with s-e-x.

“Yes,” I said, “she had
s-e-x
with several other men. As a result, the sultan was convinced that all women were unfaithful and should be killed. So each night he married another young
woman, and every morning he ordered her to be strangled, until all his people were terrorized, fearing for their daughters' lives.”

By now my girls were silent. Any story that contains both murder and sex can hold their attention. I told them the whole gist of the
Arabian Nights
, and how Disney got the ideas for Sinbad and Aladdin from Scheherazade. Then I turned on Rimsky-Korsakov, and the music began with loud brasses playing a few forceful notes.

“That sounds like the angry sultan,” I suggested.

Next came the solo violin, sweetly melodic, with a harp in the background, playing a winding, twisting tune—the voice of Scheherazade weaving her stories. Rimsky-Korsakov titled his first number “The Sea and Sinbad's Ship,” and when the full orchestra launched into its rhythm of rolling waves, Julia nodded: “It sounds like the ocean.” And so it continued, with Sinbad's ship cresting wave after wave after wave. (Rimsky-Korsakov can be maddeningly repetitive.) Every so often the orchestra stepped back and the solo violin intervened with its lovely song, reminding us that Scheherazade was still there, narrating this sea story.

My girls were hooked. They asked to hear
Scheherazade
every day for two weeks, before school, after school, driving to errands. I checked out an illustrated version of the
Arabian Nights
from our local library, and we read some of the stories at bedtime. Once we took out the globe and located Saudi Arabia. And where is Iraq, they asked, home to the Thief of Baghdad? And why are our soldiers in Baghdad now?