Summer Enrichment
If I am being honest, there is more to my fear than screwing up parental lessons about the real world. There is a deeper fear. We all know someone who has been lost to addiction. I am, by no means whatsoever, an exception.
I run through the email checklist sent to me by the camp director. It seems excessive.
Sunscreen? Check. Check.
Water bottle? Check. Check.
Water shoes for sprinkler play? Check. Check.
Towel? Check. Check.
Dry clothes? Check. Check.
Healthy snack 1? Check. Check.
Healthy snack 2? Check. Check.
Sandwich? Check. Check.
I chirp the keys to unlock the door to the Corolla. We buckle in.
Catherine, my seven-year-old daughter, and Kieran my six-year-old nephew have been chatting since they woke up in her room at 6:00 a.m. They are still a little nervous even though this is the second day of gymnastics camp. These are pandemic children. They look at most new social experiences with a bit of a side-eye.
I turn the NPR way down so can I listen to them continue their conversation about butlers.
Kieran- (Pointing to a neighbor’s house) Do those people have a butler?
Catherine- We have a butler.
Me- No we don’t.
Catherine- Well, we used to.
Me- No, we have a butler’s pantry. It’s where Daddy is storing all of his tools for the kitchen remodel.
Catherine- But didn’t we used to have a butler? Daddy said so.
Me- No. We have a back staircase that servants may have used a long time ago before we were even alive.
I try to explain to them that their great-grandparents would have been the butlers and maids in our 120-year-old Philadelphia twin back in the day, but this goes over their heads.
Catherine- I wish we had a butler.
Kieran- Why do they call them a butler? Is it because they wipe butts?
Uncontrollable laughter ensues.
There are innumerable paths from my East Falls home to get to the camp in Kensington. None of them are easy, especially on a hot rush-hour morning. My WAZE app is a godsend because I never know whether to avoid I-95 or Roosevelt Boulevard or Fox Street or Lehigh or… I could go on. Something always needs to be avoided. All of the routes are unpredictable and traffic prone.
Today WAZE demands that I take Wissahickon to Germantown Avenue, which is, for me, the most disorienting of the routes. Once I am on Germantown Ave but not in Germantown proper, I never know what familiar-sounding cross street might pop up and signal to me that I have left one neighborhood and entered another. Am I in Nicetown? Am I in Olney? Am I in Logan? Am I in Fairless Hills? I don’t know. Since it’s usually not important that I know, I don’t bother to find out.
I have inexplicably bad spatial reasoning skills. Maps make almost no sense to me. I often think about roads in terms of what they feel like, and Germantown Ave feels like a series of strange zig-zags.
Years ago, I heard the sociologist, Dr. Elijah Anderson, talk about the opening chapter of his book Code of the Street. I don’t remember the nuances of the episode, but I remember his premise that you can understand Philadelphia, sociologically speaking, by understanding Germantown Avenue.
The discussion was at least in part about what anyone with eyes can tell you. A trip down the thoroughfare makes all of the racial segregation and absolutely sickening levels of social inequality in this city as shocking and plain as possible.
Here I pass the turn I would make to the leafy and serene Germantown Cricket Club, where I attended a pool party a few years back. Tired of trying to navigate the erratic schedules of city pools near my house, I looked into a membership. It was, if I remember correctly, the equivalent of a year of a college education. A non-starter for us. But this is no problem for my family. We can always hop in the car and visit friends and family at their swim clubs in the suburbs. We are always free to escape to my parent’s house at the shore when the heat becomes unbearable.
Two blocks later there is no shade. I pass homes that I would have assumed were abandoned given the crumbling concrete, but I see two sidewalk blow-up pools filled with joyful kids playing in the blazing sun. Some grandmothers and aunties look on from the protection of the slanted porch. A fan spins in a second-floor window.
This scene makes it easy to understand how such a family might not have the bandwidth to devote energy to the current fight for asbestos-free school buildings- a fight that fills up my social media feeds and energizes fellow teachers and neighbors.
This family has plenty of environmental hazards to deal with before they set foot off their own property.
I keep thinking about trees. The poor can’t even have trees in this city. How did we commodify trees I wonder?
Now that I cross Cambria Street, I sort of know where I am. I used to teach at a middle school nearby. For reasons that are very specific to my life, I feel at ease in communities like this one, where I can hear merengue blasting from a car, and where I see I can buy una botella de coquito.
When I was around Catherine’s and Kieran’s ages, my family moved to Lima, Peru for my dad’s job. My parents dropped me off at a school where everyone spoke Spanish. I was as warmly welcomed as a child could be. Actually, I was warmly welcomed everywhere in Peru. As a result, I still feel automatically welcome when I hear Spanish. And, once I start speaking Spanish, and I don’t sound completely like the gringa that I am, other Spanish speakers are often pleasantly surprised and quick to engage with me.
When we lived in Peru, my parents would sometimes take us to a mission where they volunteered to help nuns care for abandoned children. One of the clearest memories of my life is our first drive-through of “La Parada”, one of the poorest of many poor places in Peru. I remember a moment when someone tried to open the door of our station wagon and how my dad panicked and managed to turn to push the lockdown on my door. I also remember staring through the closed car window into the face of a barefooted girl who was about my age. The streets were all mud and trash. Our eyes met. She was trying to sell us chicle, gum. I needed no further experience to understand that the world is a deeply unfair place.
Catherine interrupts my conflations of Philadelphia and Peru to ask me to settle a debate. Given that this trip ends near the epicenter of the epicenter of the opioid crisis, given what my passengers might have seen on yesterday’s ride past a couple of blocks I wasn’t sure how to avoid, (surely they must have seen at least some of the dozens of addicts shooting up or stooping over no matter how hard I worked to distract them), I am as unsettled as I could be by this question.
Catherine- Mommy- are zombies real?
Kieran- Catherine, stop saying that. Zombies and ghosts are not real. I told you that already.
Me- Zombies aren’t real, but for me, it gets more complicated with ghosts.
Catherine- Right because there are lost souls who are trying to find their way to heaven?
We pass by a Catholic school, not unlike the one Catherine attends, not unlike the one I attended. I have been set adrift in questions of faith and motherhood.
Me: I really don’t know what happens after death, but I do believe in lost souls.
For whatever reason, this response quiets them, and they go back to less existential topics.
I have considered it in every which way, but to get to the gym, there is almost no avoiding at least a bit of the most profound human suffering I have ever seen. And I say this as someone who has spent time in the poorest areas of India, Haiti, and Peru.
Kensington, some say, is gentrifying. And, I guess, the presence of this wonderful summer gymnastics camp housed in a bright building with a shaded courtyard and clean parking lot is evidence of that.
But I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of blight in my life, and I see the frighteningly fast changes happening in so many neighborhoods in this city, but this part of Frankford Avenue? I don’t have enough imagination to see how this place gets from A to B. The only thing I can imagine is a giant broom sweeping hundreds of addicted people who live here further north.
I don’t want my daughter and nephew to know this level of human suffering yet. I want to cling to that part of our privilege. But part of me, the part that through my work as a public teacher knows the children who must walk these streets multiple times a day to get to the school, the library, or the bus- the part of me that has watched grandmothers pushing strollers past dozens of half-clothed skeletal bodies, bodies double over in stupors, bodies wandering carelessly in front of cars like zombies- the part of me that aches as much for those Kensington families as I do for the addicted people- the part of me that has compassion for the young men trying to make a living off of the most lucrative albeit deadly business in town- that part of me thinks it’s only fair my children be confronted with all of it too.
But, if I am honest, there is more to my fear than screwing up parental lessons about the real world. There is a deeper fear. Like many Americans, the most desperate parts of Frankford Avenue are always closer than we want to admit. We all know someone who has been lost to addiction. I am, by no means whatsoever, an exception.
Maternal instincts end up settling the internal debate about how much of this my kids should or should not see, when, unthinkingly, I take a sharp turn avoiding one of the many mini-encampments where addicts tend to their disease and to each other.
Suddenly, I am overcome and completely lost. I am six again and there is a world I can’t comprehend pushing up against my window.
How is such unfairness, such suffering, allowed to persist? What is my role in this? What can I do to fix it?
I am reaching for one concrete thing to hold onto. But there is nothing there.
I don’t have a conclusion for this.
Unless.
Unless I let go of the fact that what I want to say doesn’t match the tone of this piece. Because now that the moment of my disassociation has passed- now that I have left my sad six-year-old self and I am back in my adult body, I can speak to you as an angry 47-year-old mother and teacher and wife of a recovering person. I can speak to you from that part of me that knows that there are people- there is greed- behind the horrors of addiction and violence that plague my beautiful city.
The greedy instigators are every bit as damaged by their cravings for wealth and power as any one of these lost souls I see sitting in puddles under the bridge craving their next fix. The out-of-control grasping for more money, and more power is the real story behind the travesty I see before me. And the lawsuits against those who knowingly allowed this to rage out of control, won’t free them from their greed. The punishment does not fit this crime. What does it mean to take millions or even billions from a billionaire? Does it mean fewer yachts? Fewer planes? It means nothing.
My children don’t need this lesson. It’s a disgrace that so many of my students learned about this before they could even walk. The only people who can make use of this- the only ones who would derive any benefit from some time traversing the most desperate corners of Frankford Avenue are those who made their fortunes on the drugs and the guns that hurt me and my city.
And today, though it is not in my nature to want to mete out punishment, it is in my nature to teach. And so, I wish they were here in my car with me and that it was my job to provide them with their much-needed summer enrichment.
