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Singing And Fishing Were Free: The Underground History of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Singing And Fishing Were Free
I went Christmas caroling long
before I knew how to read or even what Christmas was
about. I was three. The carolers
stood on a corner diagonally across from my
grandfather's printing office where
their voices filled an informal amphitheater made by
If I had to guess where I learned to
love rhythmical language it would be on that corner at
the foot of Second Street hill.
In Monongahela I fished for carp and
catfish made inedible by river acids leaching out of
the mines and waste put there by the
mills. I fished them out with homemade dough balls
whipped together in Grandmother
Mossie's kitchen. In Monongahela I waited weekly for
the changing of Binks McGregor's
haberdashery window or Bill Pulaski's hardware
display as eagerly as a theater-goer
might wait to be refreshed by a new scenery change.
Mother's family, the Zimmers, and
the branch of Gattos my father represented, were poor
by modern big city standards, but
not really poor for that time and place. It was only in
late middle age I suddenly realized
that sleeping three to a bed — as Mother, Sister and I
did — is almost an operational
definition of poverty, or its close cousin. But it never
occurred to me to think of myself as
poor. Not once. Not ever. Even later on at
Uniontown High School when we moved
to a town with sharp social class gradations and
a formal social calendar, I had
little awareness of any unbridgeable gulf between myself
and those people who invited me to
country club parties and to homes grander than my
own. Nor, do I believe, did they. A
year at Cornell, however, made certain my innocence
would come to an end.
Mother was not so lucky. Although
she never spoke openly of it, I know now she was
ashamed of having less than those
she grew up with. Once she had had much more before
Pappy, my granddad, was wiped out in
the 1929 crash. She wasn't envious, mind you,
she was ashamed, and this shame
constrained her open nature. It made her sad and
wistful when she was alone. It
caused her to hide away from former friends and the
world. She yearned for dignity, for
the days when her clothes were made in Paris. So in
the calculus of human misery, she
exercised her frustration on Dad. Their many
separations and his long absences
from home on business even when they lived together
are likely to have originated in
this immaculate tension.
The great irony is that Mother did
beautifully without money. She was resourceful,
imaginative, generally optimistic, a
woman with greater power to create something from
nothing — totem poles from thread
spools, an award-winning Halloween costume from
scrap paper and cloth, a
high-quality adventure from a simple walk through the hills —
than anyone. She had no extravagant
appetites, didn't drink, didn't crave exotic food,
glamorous places, or the latest
gadgets. She set her own hair and it was always lovely.
And she kept the cleanest house
imaginable, full of pretty objects which she gathered
watchfully and with superb taste on
her journey through life. As if to compound the irony
of her discontent, Mon City was
hardly a place to be rich. There wasn't much to buy
there.
The Greatest Fun Was Watching People
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