Leila and Claire at the Prom.

Leila will graduate next week and I will retire, so our ways really are parting. In the past, kids always knew where to find me when they came home on break from Cal or Davis or from the Army. Room 306 will belong to someone else next year, so the future of the Class of 2015 with me is less certain.

Each class leaves its mark–when last year’s Seniors broke into a mass flash dance at graduation, it was so unexpected and so delightful that I will never forget them.

Leila is one reason why I have a special fondness for this year’s graduates. The smile you see on her face is a constant: she radiates the kind of warmth and openness that captures others, but there is nothing calculated in the capturing. Leila’s smile comes from Leila’s heart. Today, at the Senior Assembly, she gifted me with a bouquet and fought her tears and seeing her struggle to master her feelings was an even greater gift. It’s good to know the love you’ve spent means something to someone so important.

I have rarely read a college letter that brought me to tears, but Leila’s did. One part told of her family’s trip to Egypt, to visit her grandmother. I saw photos of the woman and she has a kind of Leila-ness about herself, as well.  You want to volunteer to be her grandson.

Her health has not been good.  She had to have a mastectomy, and the passage I remember is when Leila volunteered to change the dressing on her wound. Her grandmother apologized for its appearance, but Leila did not hesitate and did not flinch, and I don’t think anything so clinical has been done with such gentleness and compassion.

The experience only reinforced Leila’s dream to become a doctor. We have common heroes–Doctors without Borders, a group I donate to even when I can’t really afford to. I could easily see Leila do their work. I immediately thought of her while listening to an NPR story about a doctor who lost 19 of the first 20 patients he’d treated for Ebola in West Africa. That had to be daunting,  but this doctor was a man of spiritual depth. “Curing disease isn’t the most important thing a doctor does,” he said. “The most important thing a doctor can do is to enter into another’s pain.” Leila has that kind of empathy and she has the spiritual strength to sustain it.

I will come to the obvious part. Leila is an observant Muslim, and as captivating and welcoming as her smile is, there are those–some have been in the news lately–who are blind to the kindness of others because it’s so threatening to the comfort they find in hating. Leila can take care of herself–she gets those reservoirs of strength from the deep wells her family has made for her–but she also is the kind of student who can provoke every paternal instinct a male teacher has.  You want to protect her from the blind and the bigoted who also have the unpleasant tendency to be loud.

The comfort is knowing that those people do not matter and have no enduring impact, unless you count, of course, the agonizing depth of the pain God feels when they broadcast their hatred.

I gained a lot of wisdom by talking to Haruo Hayashi this weekend. The Hayashis are a lot like the Assals–I saw three generations of a family whose bedrock is hard work, relaxing on a Sunday, watching television, reading, raiding the refrigerator, and all of them were present, were living in the moment, and the love you sensed among them was unforced and unpretentious, which only made it more powerful.

Haruo went through, after Pearl Harbor, the kind of bigotry that I fear so much. But, while the bigots were loud and threatening, they did not matter to him, 75 years later. They were small people whose names he’d lost. He hasn’t lost the names of Don Gullickson or Gordon Bennett or John Loomis, who were constant friends whose constancy lasted four lifetimes. He smiled when he spoke another name, of a tough Italian-American kid, Milton Guggia, who said to him in the week after Pearl Harbor:  “Haruo, if any kid calls you a ‘Jap,’ I will personally beat the shit out of him.”

Milton Guggia is a name worth remembering, because there, I think, is a real American.

As is this American girl, who goes to Proms, who serves on the ASB, who plays Powderpuff Football, who participates every year in Mock Trial, who plays in the school band.  So did Haruo.  You can see him with the 1941 AGUHS Lettermen’s Club–his bad eyesight ruled out sports, but he managed for every team and earned his spot, with all the jocks, right next to Coach Max Belko, the kind of big, boisterous and indestructible coach whom every kid idolizes. The Japanese would destroy Max Belko–a round to the gut–soon after the Marine landing on Guam.

So there, in the old yearbook, are Max and Haruo, shoulder to shoulder: two more real Americans. The faith of the Assal family, their fidelity to each other, their quiet insistence on hard work and service to others, and the openness of their daughter’s heart–all of these have been blessings in my life. They are, I think, the kind of Americans we would all wish to be.

Not far away from us is the grave of Marine Sgt. Pete Segundo, killed in action in Vietnam in 1969. Pete was once President of the Arroyo Grande High Letterman’s Club, and his yearbook photo is typical: his broken arm is in a sling, and a bright, contagious smile crosses his face. To know Pete was to love him.

Twelve feet from Pete’s grave are two people I love. My parents are buried here. My father was a captain in the U.S. Army. I am writing a book about Arroyo Grande in World War II—my father’s war–and because it is the 70th anniversary of that war’s end, I am thinking of another grave in a cemetery 5,500 miles from here.

It is the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, above Omaha Beach in Normandy.

That beach is the exclusive property of the men and women of my parents’ generation. We honor the fallen of all American wars today, but I would like to direct my remarks to the World War II generation and, by extension, to their families.

Omaha Beach today.

9,000 young men who will always be young men are buried at that impossibly beautiful cemetery in Normandy. Three came from our county.

One of them was Pvt. Domingo Martinez. He is buried at Colleville-sur-Mer in Plot C, Row 13, Grave 38. Martinez knew the hard work of driving bean-stakes into the soil and he knew the smell of sweet peas of the prewar Arroyo Grande Valley. He was a farmworker, a refugee from Dust Bowl New Mexico.

But in late June 1944, Martinez was a rifleman, fighting in the streets of Cherbourg with the 79th Infantry Division.

Cherbourg was vital to securing the Allied supply line after D-Day.

It was also difficult to take. Its bristling anti-aircraft defenses would kill a San Luis Obispo fighter pilot named Jack Langston. Massive coastal batteries kept naval support for the Americans at bay, and the city’s defenders, although garrison troops, were securely dug in.

79th Infantry Division GIs, Cherbourg.

They had nowhere to go, for they were backed into a corner of France, and so isolated that the only alternative to fighting was to leap into the sea.

Once they’d entered Cherbourg, 79th Division G.I.’s learned to hate street fighting almost instantly. Death came instantly from illusory shadows that a fallen soldier’s comrades never saw, and from gunfire they sometimes never heard.

In peacetime, a French city block can be noisy with the cheers of a cafe crowd during the World Cup or the comical horns of tiny cars or the singing of children at play.

In combat, that same block, seemingly empty, can muffle the report of a sniper’s rifle or generate echoes that make soldiers look anxiously in every direction at once.

So the 79th fought house by house and street by street and eventually they captured the fortress that dominated the city, on June 26. Military historian John C .McManus notes that the men of the 79th that day were filthy, exhausted, and bearded, “like burlesque tramps,’ as one G.I. said.

They got little rest. The division quickly shifted from urban combat to a drive through the farms and villages of the Cotentin Peninsula.

American soldiers in Normandy now faced a new, even more difficult challenge. By the third week after D-Day, they were falling far short of the objectives set for them by Allied staff officers in crisp uniforms working over crisp maps that lacked one crucial detail.

The offensive in the Cotentin stalled because the Germans had the advantage of fighting defensively, in the bocage, the Norman hedgerows, and they winnowed units like the 79th Division down.

The bocage, Normandy.

The hedgerows the maps never showed enclosed fields plowed since Agincourt, or pasturage for fat Norman cows, and were a hopscotch of natural fortresses.

This meant that the G.I.’s had to assault them, one by one, to try to extract defenders who gave ground and their own lives stubbornly.

When G.I.’s broke through a hedge and entered a field, the superb German machine gun, the MG42, hidden in the next hedge beyond, or positioned on the Americans’ flanks, annihilated entire rifle squads. It fired so rapidly that a burst sounded like canvas ripping.

The MG 42 machine gun.

So the Americans could hear, but never see, in the tangle of the hedges, who was killing them so efficiently. The bocage quickly transformed G.I.s, with supreme indifference, into either hardened veterans or into casualties.

American soldiers, adaptive and imaginative, eventually would develop the tactics to overcome the kind of war the Germans fought in the bocage. 

But for Martinez’s 79th Division, what lay beyond the hedgerows in early July may have been worse, because the Germans would not wait for them this time: this time they would attack.

The 79th, fighting in echelon with the 82nd Airborne and the 90th Infantry Divisions, seized a ridge and several hills around a key crossroads at a village called Le Haye du Puits.

79th Division GIs taking fire, Le Haye du Puits. The GI at the right carries a Browning Automatic Rifle.

This should have compelled the enemy to abandon the town. They didn’t. They attacked instead, on July 7, intent on destroying the 79th in their positions on the ridge above the town.

The German soldiers, including SS-Panzer units, attacked with great ferocity and with great courage. These were not garrison troops, but hardened and determined professionals. They attacked in surges all day and only at nightfall did it become clear that the 79th had stopped them.

This was the turning point. On the next day, in another day of street fighting, the Americans would capture Le Haye du Puits.

Afterward, Signal Corps photographers attached to the 79th captured the images of some soldiers, their faces as blank as those of sleepwalkers.  They are utterly worn out, used up, by a month of ceaseless combat.

By the time Le Haye de Puits was secured, Domingo Martinez was gone. He was killed during a furious series of assaults on a little village called Le Bot, just to the south, and so would not experience the energy and the jubilation of the breakout from Normandy, which came soon after.

For the next three weeks, the Americans would roll up the Germans, then uncover Paris and liberate the city, standing aside to let Free French units enter first.

The Graves Registration record of Martinez’s death. He was most likely killed by German artillery–his regiment came under intense fire from 88mm guns.

You cannot help but wish that Pvt. Martinez had been granted enough time enough to follow the French into Paris, and maybe, even better, a week’s furlough for a farmworker, now a soldier, to explore the incredible city.

Domingo would decide to visit Notre Dame. Once he had entered the great church, he would remove his garrison cap, dip his fingers in the holy water font, then cross himself.

He would turn, blinking a little, to take in the vastness of the place, and then he would walk up the nave—the silence pressing on his ears–slowly past the clutter of pews. There, at the transept crossing, he would stop suddenly to stand, smiling with delight, as he was bathed in brilliant, colored sunlight.

This is the gift of the Rose Window to men and women of good faith.

It is your good faith, and your faith in your country, that has marked the World War II generation. Your faith sustained America during the war, and it made my life as a free American possible afterward.

I can’t thank you adequately enough today. But five years ago, I found your brother, Domingo Martinez, in the American Cemetery at Normandy. I gently touched the cold marble of his soldier’s cross and so did eight of my Arroyo Grande High School students. We spoke to him without the encumbrance of words.

That was one way of saying thanks. Now this young soldier belongs to a new generation of Americans.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByxvSMfhElGCWUQ2MXdEU29HVzA/view?usp=sharing

My Grandfather’s farmhouse and the Blue River in Texas County, Missouri. It is beautiful there, but this is where a gunman killed six and then shot himself last week.

There was a very disturbing article in The Daily Beast: Texas County today is marked by the suffocation of Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches who keep vigilant watch over the ugodly, which probably includes a smattering of Episcopalians and Catholics. They’ve bought up nearly all the local liquor licenses to keep the area dry, in an Ozark variation on Sharia Law.

Life there is also marked by chronic and deep-rooted joblessness, by a thriving trade in meth and by meth addiction, and by violence. Sometimes folks just vanish.

It sounds like a scary, hopeless place, and it was once a place of pretty little farms, pasturage grazed by horses that were a family’s pride, forests full of game, and neighbors who looked out for each other.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal and electricity–and hope–came to Texas County, because we agreed that we all have an obligation to look out for each other. Today, all Congress can do is bicker, delay, posture and sulk. These are good people. What is to be done?

I feel that I must apologize in some way for hammering away at Lucia Mar with my very small hammer on Facebook. It’s not that I’m important. I just have a big mouth. I will return to my usual cheerful self, one way or another, soon.

Since I am retiring, I really don’t have much of a dog in this fight: retirement is determined by averaging the last three years of a teacher’s salary, and I would have to make more than Leo DeCaprio this year to make any substantive difference.

But I do not like to see good people get pushed around. I do not like to see them patronized. I do believe that loyalty should always go both ways. I do believe that the teachers in my District are dedicated, compassionate and skilled and I believe most of all that they love children.

I do believe that the District, too, will find a way to get even with me and with others who have called them out. Lucia Mar has a long and well-deserved reputation for vindictiveness, so there’s a good chance that someday soon, a meteor will fall and squash me flatter than a copper penny on a rail. That is the way life works.

From Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons:”

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all… why then perhaps we must stand fast a little –even at the risk of being heroes.

No heroes live here. I am a small and fearful man whose fear is tempered by an Irish temper. People like me, and people far braver than me, must be squashed. We call that Progress.

Before I get too awfully flat, I’ll throw in a photo of me where I have always been at my happiest: in the classroom, with the teens who are your children–and mine, too.

I will now be quiet until I can talk about better things and remind myself that I must not be taken too seriously, no more than the man who rows the Thames taxi carrying More back to his beloved daughter, Meg.

Another hard morning. Elizabeth is dusting,  vacuuming and moving furniture to sweep underneath. I have gotten up twice and gone back to bed twice.

This adrenal fatigue ( not medically official)  stuff is insidious. It can leave you breathless. Sitting up makes you dizzy. Getting out of bed feels like attempting  a reversal , in wrestling, against an opponent three weight classes above yours. I’ve had times, working at the computer, when my head droops, my chin hits my chest, and I go to sleep. At school, lunchtime and passing periods are the worst, because you have to fight off the urge to lie down, or, worse, the urge to feel sorry for yourself, and you have to summon the energy for the next class of kids.

At the end of the day and on weekends, there’s no energy left to summon. This is not remotely like depression–been there, done that. This is like living in a body, heavy, stiff,  leaden,  that refuses to do what you want it to do. It’s infuriating , or would be, if you had the strength to be angry. Now, I want to sleep and I want to resist sleeping, and there’s no victor in a fight like that.

Mmmmm. Inari sushi. Haven’t had it for years. Used to have it when I was young at Ben Dohi’s house–a great man– but only on special Japanese holidays like Christmas, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. (And Thanksgiving, of course.)

On one visit, I had the honor of holding Ben’s baby niece, who still has not forked over the royalties I am sure she owes me for not dropping her. Her name was Kristi Yamaguchi, and I liked to think I had a small part in making her athletic career possible.

The sushi was wonderful, but even better were Kristi’s aunts, the Yamaguchi sisters–Ben’s wife, Ty, was a Yamaguchi– preparing it in the kitchen. They were very, very funny. (Witty, because they were also very intelligent. They made the air kind of crackle.). They liked to needle each other and, even more, the men in the living room watching football or baseball on TV in various semi-horizontal positions. I think they were out there for protection, kind of like when they circled the wagons in Westerns.

I love sports, but I used to hang out in the kitchen because the women were far more entertaining, and they had the same kind of giggle that sisters can have, and that was a happy and endearing sound, but there was something else, and it was just a little magical. For just an instant, they were teenagers again, pleated skirts and bobby sox and saddle shoes, and you had the distinct sense that for Mr. Yamaguchi, these three daughters were a handful. If it’s not already obvious, I loved the Yamaguchi sisters very much.

.

Last week, a student left a Valentine on my teacher’s desk at Arroyo Grande High School.

It read: “Thank you for believing in me.”

She was born in Guerrero, a Mexican state I know from my college studies of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who was from nearby Morelos, south of Mexico City.

Zapata’s life, ended by assassination in 1919, empowered peasants who wanted a little land to farm. He fought rapacious sugar planters who both monopolized the land and guarded it with Maxim guns. The planters, in fact, wanted to expand their holdings, threatening to plant cane even in the naves of little churches in Guerrero.

My life is ordinary. I’m no Zapata. I am a bespectacled and aging teacher who has been inspired in watching this girl empower herself.

Her family’s first language is Spanish, but she is mastering the arcane details of Advanced Placement European History, with its Hapsburgs and Bourbons, Calvinists and Anabaptists, Girondins and Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Spartacists.

She is getting an “A” in one of the most difficult classes we offer, and she has just turned sixteen. I want to see her in a UC when her time with us is done in the Lucia Mar Unified School District.

My mother would’ve had the same hope. I wrote about her in an essay called “To the Girl on the Lawn at Cal,” which was purely imaginary. She was trapped in poverty, abandoned by her Irish father, a man who liked his liquor and had a penchant for borrowing cars without notifying their owners, in 1920s Taft.

Like this student, she loved to learn. My mother’s mind was forever hungry, just as she’d been, in the physcial sense of the word, as a little girl. The laundry room of our home on Huasna Road faced a pantry with cupboards filled with canned food that we would never eat because there were times when she never ate.

In the essay, I imagine my mother, about nineteen, in a sweater, pleated skirt, bobby socks and saddle shoes, on the lawn outside the Bancroft Libary. Her notebooks, dense with her precise handwriting, were at her feet. She was, I think, studying for her final in Cultural Anthropology (a course I later, and very happily, got to teach to my high school students), and she was devouring information as quickly as a hungry girl can devour bread.

Twenty-five years later, she shared the education I’d wished for her, in my imagination, with me.

My mother taught me how to read, how to appreciate music, art, justice and faith.  Fifty years after her death, I took my sons to Gettysburg and was able to describe where we were, in tracing the landmarks of the three-day battle, and what had happened there. The words came out without me willing them, in brigade-strength paragraphs, the story-telling gift that was my father’s.  I was summoning ghosts. 

But the meaning of what I was telling my sons was my Mom’s doing. As a mother, she felt the pain of Gettysburg.  It was her spirit moving inside me and it was her voice speaking, lovingly but bluntly, to the grandsons she never got the chance to meet. 

The two of us—her voice entwined with mine—left my sons visibly shaken, a little grief-stricken and, I am now sure, better human beings.

They weren’t the only young people my mother cared for. Everything she’d taught me was was meant for students exactly like my Valentine, the teenager from Guerrero, a girl who might have been hungry, too, once upon a time.

My mother knew this girl, and she loved her just as much as she’d loved me.