2 Adam Bunnell – Mystic Significance
This narrative essay was originally written for Introduction to New Literacy Studies course as a response to Mike Rose’s wonderful memoir Lives on the Boundary. It ended up drawing on the parallels between Rose and myself to become something of an origin story for how literacy has shaped me as a teacher and person. Adam hopes to be a teacher again someday! Kelly Blewett admired this work stating, “ Adam’s literacy narrative is full of beautiful and evocative vignettes—I found myself utterly immersed and even looking up the picture of the chocolate cake from his childhood picture book!”
Mystic Significance
It’s the slice of chocolate cake I remember the best. The drawing of it rich and dark and decadent, mahogany on the yellow page, in the scene where Papa lifts Little Bear up on his shoulders to carry him to bed. I’d think of that cake sometimes as I splashed water onto my Toasted Os to make the milk last another day. I’d imagine the happy look on Little Bear’s face as he rode his daddy’s shoulders to bed when my stepfather would clench his fists and order me to mine. I don’t remember the name of it now, but that was my favorite book in the stack of two dozen Little Golden books that I treasured throughout my childhood.
The books were collected by my mother and father, perhaps one of the last parental acts they would perform together before their rotten marriage collapsed, and given to me in an old wooden milk crate my dad stole from a dairy farm. Mike Rose had the right of it when he explained that being impoverished is less an act of active suffering and more an inescapable fatigue. I remember this tiredness everywhere around me as a kid, but I see it most clearly in the memories of my parents. My mother, bangs like a hair-sprayed ocean wave, bags under her eyes the color of storm clouds, reading to me from The Poky Little Puppy. My father, when he showed up, eyes sparkling blue but shoulders slumped, an open can of Budweiser in his lap, hands gripping the steering wheel of his classic Chevy too tight, telling me to remember to bring my books.
My parents failed me in many fundamental ways during my childhood, but they read me those books every night at bedtime until I could recite each one from memory. Far from the detached way Rose’s parents viewed books, my own seemed to invest in them a mystic significance. My folks had more in common with Ruby and the other late life learners in the memoir, those for whom literacy “is intimately connected with respect, with a sense that they are not beaten…revealing the deepest impulse to survive” (216). My parents wanted me to survive and to thrive, and they instinctively gravitated towards the power that literacy and knowledge might one day grant me. Like Rose’s parents, they talked of me becoming a doctor. The truth is that my parents were already living like they were beaten, but to them, the figure of their deliverance was their chubby little boy with his stack of beloved books.
Reading became a core facet of my identity as I grew up, and, along with imagination, it was one of my primary weapons in the fight to survive. Growing up like I did is an act of defense. Rather than childhood being a gradual building up of the child, it instead becomes up to the child to remain ever vigilant that more should not be taken from them. There is a core reserve of love, hope, and self-worth every child is born with that is a constant target of attacks from those who are meant to nurture and protect them: the big brother whose eyes glitter with malice, the stepfather winding the belt around his knuckles, the footsore mother who doesn’t know that a cup of warm milk and a hug won’t fix all the damage. When the threats at home are endured, the threats outside in the world of the impoverished stalk in: pieces of your cheap shoes scattered like flower petals on the playground, scraping most of the blue-green mold off a slice of bread to make toast, the endless line of neighborhood bullies who have learned that offense is the best defense.
Rose’s narrative reveals a similar experience. He explains how “consistently I defended myself against the lessons I couldn’t understand and the people and events of South L.A. that were too strange to view head-on,” and he goes on to recount how he “drifted more and more into a variety of protective fantasies” (19). Banished to my bedroom for hours at a time while my parents got high, I did the same. In my room, with my toys and stuffed animals, I emulated the stories I knew from my books. In solitude, I cultivated an imagination that worked like a getaway car, pulling me out of my own life and experience and into a world of fantasy and make-believe.
With this skill perfected in early childhood, I found myself in public school where it immediately came in handy. Like Rose, I vanished into daydreams and, especially, into books. You couldn’t talk or get up or completely zone out in most classes, but there weren’t many teachers who would object to a student reading a novel, and so the library book on my desk started to feel like the cipher to a secret code I had somehow cracked. The amount I read increased gradually as I moved up in the elementary grades and the seat work became more and more and the hands-on work less and less. I would finish my work quickly (or pretend to) and then flee through the open cover of my book.
Reading gave me a way to participate with my peers, and even to compete, that I had never experienced. My parents usually managed to scrape together a few dollars to give me for the Scholastic Book Fair, and I was able to join my peers in the excitement of the new Goosebumps book. I became known among the other kids and my English teacher, Mrs. Cox, for having the ability to read the entire book by the end of the school day. Then Mrs. Cox had the genre competition, where each student’s name was written on their own construction paper ice cream cone stapled to the bulletin board. For every genre of book you read that eight weeks, you would receive a different-colored scoop of bright paper ice cream on your cone. I’ll never forget my rainbow of scoops reaching up onto the wall a foot above the board, vanilla and chocolate and strawberry self-esteem.
When you’re a little boy who can’t run or jump or dribble a ball or even do math problems, you’ve got to have something to fall back on inside of yourself. I was the kid who could read and write and tell stories. These were the same stories I had been building by myself for years, only now I found my peers wanted to hear them. I even did characters and voices, and I remember putting on performances for my friends at the lunch table and at recess, where I sat on wooden benches with friends instead of playing soccer or shooting hoops. I lacked the resources and, honestly, the imagination to truly apply myself in school, though. I moved forward, grade after grade, aging up into the kid with a lot of promise but not much work ethic. Mike Rose and I would have recognized one another, for sure.
Where Rose and my literacy journeys truly diverge is in the high school experience. I never had a Jack MacFarland to lasso me and drag me to good literature. Instead, I had the earnest Mr. Blythe, an odd, mustached man who often wore a plum-colored shirt and who tossed KitKats to the kids that answered his questions the best. He exposed me to great literature, Death of a Salesman, Hamlet, A Farewell to Arms, and to some of my favorite poets, cummings and Eliot, but he never really reached me because he never engaged me on a personal level. Once, during a paper conference, he looked me in the eye and said, in a very tender voice, “Gosh, you sure can write.” And that was the extent of my academic mentoring.
Rather than embrace academic possibility, I instead fled deeper into fantasy. I was old enough to recognize the cruelties I had endured at the hands of my parents and I wanted nothing more than to escape their presence by any means necessary, and this included getting a job at the Sunoco gas station at age 15. With my first paycheck, I walked into our town’s modest media store, OnCue, and went straight to the books. I picked up the Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual and took them to the register. I had been planning this moment ever since I had been allowed to sit on the floor and listen during a few of my stepfather’s Sunday night D&D games when I was five years old. It was time to take my friends into the stories with me.
And I did. I gathered a group of friends and started a D&D campaign. I was the Gamemaster, or GM, the one who reads all the rules, does all the planning, and facilitates the telling of the story for the players by inhabiting the villains and allies in the game world. We played the game all through high school and into college. There were no mentors for me in this, no kindly professors at Loyola. Instead, I was self-taught, and I read voraciously, devouring rulebooks and supplemental reading materials with my page count easily in the thousands by the end of high school.
Meanwhile, I could barely be bothered to finish my assignments for class. School came to represent something so foreign from my daily life and my limited possibility space that I despised it. I became a worse and worse student, skipping school all the time and barely earning a high school diploma. I didn’t recognize that the literacy I studied in school had anything to do with the odd stories and poems I would sometimes write for fun, or the stories about necromancers and medusae I was telling on the weekends with my friends.
Even so, I understood that I had to get an education. I wasn’t good with my hands, and I had no stomach for hard labor. I went to a small community college to get my grades up and then transferred to IU after I had finally learned to apply myself. I defaulted to teaching English because it was the only subject I had ever been good at and, as much as I disliked school, it was the only thing I had ever known. I sat through classes where we read books and analyzed poetry, careful to raise my hand only as much as I needed to for participation points, not realizing that students should get to know their professors and peers and truly engage them. I spent my time as an undergrad at IU quiet and alone, ticking the boxes for assignments while driving forty-five minutes back to my hometown every weekend to play D&D and see my girlfriend.
Whether they realize they’re doing it or not, every teacher crafts a persona for themselves. Mr. Bunnell was, unsurprisingly, known as a storyteller. My stories would be handed down from older sibling to younger, from junior to sophomore, until students I had never met before would show up in my classroom during lunch to hear me tell them. I was a comedian, too, holding court at the podium and delighting when I could make a student laugh to tears in their seat. My unspoken personal motto was something like Rosalie’s “Do something nice with them” (93). I wasted entire class periods telling stories and jokes, and they loved me for it.
Of course, some teaching had to be done, too. I had too much pride to be ok with being bad at a job, and so I picked up pedagogy by paying attention to my colleagues. I had learned to read and write and analyze like an academic in college, just enough to get by, but now I had to understand and apply that knowledge. It was slow-going, and I still don’t know how good I got at it. I tended to teach towards the top of the class, and, in a cruel irony, I was hardest on students who seemed lazy or disinterested or who skipped school a lot. I suppose there is a hardness that can grow in oneself for the negative traits they once expressed, and growing up impoverished cultivates contempt for human weakness in almost everyone who manages to make it through that gauntlet intact. I would have failed myself in my own class without a second thought.
It broke my heart to quit teaching after 8 years, but there was no money in it, and I had two very expensive children. I have been trying to find a way back in that will still pay the bills ever since. There is a power and an allure to writing, reading, and speaking that has always gripped me. There is a spell woven through the idea that writing might one day suddenly and unexpectedly deliver me. That it could, without any conscious effort, save us all. I think my parents understood it back then, gripping the idea tight as a stack of golden-spined books to their chests.
I still play role playing games with the same group of guys from high school and have been for the past 20+ years. I still aid professors in developing online materials, and it keeps me reading and talking and thinking about pedagogy. I still write poems and stories, and I fantasize, like every English teacher, about one day writing a novel or a poetry collection or a memoir. And when I look at my son and daughter, I understand that I have come into my own significance where literacy is concerned. I believe I came by it honestly.
And, without fail, I read to my children every single night.