Like a River
Roberta Israeloff, PLATO’s co-founder and Board secretary, directs the Squire Family Foundation. Her most recent book, What Went Right: Lessons from Both Sides of the Teacher’s Desk was co-wriitten with George McDermott, her 10th grade English teacher.
Like a River
We like to walk, my granddaughter and I. We walk down the block, around corners, past an ice cream store and a ballet store where we sometimes stop to buy a sequined skirt. Then we head for the waterfall on the nearby river, and our progress is slow. She likes to balance on the pavers bordering the lawns, and to pick up acorns, pebbles, and sticks. Sometimes we walk in silence, sometimes she sings.
Sometimes I’m the one who slows us down. “Look at those tree roots,” I said on one of our most recent walks, “they look like monster’s feet.” She looked but kept walking. “That cloud looks like a feather,” I said as we wait to cross the street. She picked up a rock and I said it looked like a bar of soap.
“Why are you always talking about things looking like other things?” she demanded, curious but also annoyed. I felt challenged, interrogated. We both stopped walking recognizing the legitimacy of her serious question.
Almost immediately I realized I didn’t have a good answer. I didn’t even know where to begin. I mumbled something about how it was fun. She stared at me and rolled her eyes, clearly unimpressed.
As she licked her ice cream cone, I tried to compose a more comprehensive, thoughtful answer. Why was I so quickly inclined to look at something and see something else. Was there something to be gained by this tendency and if so, what? Why did it seem to come so naturally to me? Did everyone walk through the world this way? Did it confer an advantage? Was it of value?
I began to wonder if these were in fact philosophical questions. All philosophical questions are hard, but not every hard question is philosophical. Was I simply wondering about the impulse to generate similes and metaphors? Was this rooted in pretend play? That could be a connection my granddaughter would understand.
Just a few months back, I remembered, she and I were playing restaurant with the multi-piece plastic kitchen set she’d just received for her fourth birthday, each item very realistically crafted. As she reached into her oven to get the pot that held our peas, I mentioned that she’d need a potholder. “But the set didn’t come with one,” she said.
“Here you go,” I said, handing her a sock that I spotted on the floor of her messy room.
“Nana,” she said, looking first at the sock and then at me as if I were dull, “that’s a sock”.
“Or a pretend potholder,” I said.
She shrugged, OK, whatever, reached for it, and wrapped it around the hot pot handle. Then a sly smile bloomed on her face as if she’d uncovered a secret treasure. Which, in fact, she had – the liberating realization that you can start with a sock that somewhat resembles a potholder and the next thing you know, trees turn into monsters.
That’s freedom, I thought to myself as we resumed our walk. It’s a short next step to entertain disparate ideas, to see similarities in dissimilar things. Living with metaphor and simile prepares you to range widely and with confidence when presented with open-ended questions with no settled answers.
As we approached the waterfall, the first roar of rushing water grew louder with each step. My granddaughter ran ahead of me. When I caught up, she was climbing on a rock for a better look. She placed her feet apart to keep her balance, stretched her arms overhead as if they were branches, her reddish hair blowing in her face like wind-tossed leaves. You look like a tree, I almost called to her – but refrained. Maybe she’d had enough teaching for one day.
Watching her move lithely from rock to rock, an A.E. Housman poem came to mind. “Loveliest of trees, “it opens, and in three brief quatrains it’s finished. Looking at my granddaughter, the loveliest tree, I recited the poem to myself for perhaps the fiftieth time and realized for the first time that the last stanza contains the poem’s jewel. The young poet, only 20 years old, so enjoys looking at the cherry trees hung with snow that he calculates how many years he has left to admire them. He concludes, “And since to look at things in bloom/Fifty years is little room…”.
There it was: I felt the familiar, always unexpected, always welcome intake of breath. The conflation of time and space, the idea of one’s life as a room in the open-air room of the world, created an upsurge of pleasure as the poem flowered before my eyes and in my mind. Creating a mental room in which we can sit with unlikely images and ideas finding ways to overlay them, to yoke them in unexpected ways, allows our minds to fly free, to leave the literal, material world behind, to escape what is and dwell in what could be, what may be.
We decided to walk home through the park, the path cutting a swath between the river and a highway filled with cars rushing by. My granddaughter’s pace suddenly slowed. “Nana,” she said, “listen. Those cars going by so fast, they sound like the river.”
And so they did.
