Do you remember where you were and who you were with at a life-changing moment?  On occasion in my English classes, my students share their memories for choosing their majors or their professions. Many of them come from immigrant families. They represent the first family members to pursue a college education.   The description of their choices always seem so much more vivid that anything I would have written when I was their age.  Family separation.  Language challenges.    Economic depression.  Increased competition in the job market.  This is what they write about:  Hardship, Pride, Family, Challenge.  They share their American Dreams.  From reading their essays, I realize we – their instructors  – not only come different backgrounds but from distant worlds. 

Writer Sandra Cisneros remembers where she was when she got the idea for her first novel.  This was in the eighties. She was in grad school at Univ. of Iowa on a scholarship.  Because she may have been the only person of color in her classroom,  she often felt cold and isolated. Her classmates were from upper-class neighborhoods, and Sandra was not.  She  often self-describes as “ghetto.”  Her professor, an older white man, liked to bring up his “House of Memory” theory to inspire students to write of their American Experience.  He thought that everyone came from somewhere, and each of his students should bring memories from home that they could build into their stories.  Sandra readily admits, she felt her experiences were looked down upon by her instructors and her classmates. More than a few times, she wanted to bolt.

Sandra didn’t understand the direction of her professor’s lectures.  The memories of the houses that she had grown up in in had nothing to compare with the memories of  her classmates.  She grew up poor.  The only daughter in a family of six sons.  Her father was a Mexican immigrant who was forced to forgo his education to learn upholstery in order to provide for his family. Her mother was Mexican-American, and  from what I read, she appeared to despise the life she led. The family was always moving from one house to another.  They never felt the stability or security of that her classmates must have known.  In my English classes, We read Sandra several times during the semester.  My students seem to connect with her experience and perspective.

Next semester, I plan to share excerpts from Sandra’s first novel, The House on Mango Street. Maybe her second novel Caramelo, too.  I don’t plan to approach any literary discussion, but House changed Sandra’s life forever.  In the middle of one of her tense grad school workshops, she fully realized what she would do for the rest of  her life.  She would focus on her own memories, but write differently than anyone else in her program.  She would write about her family, friends and barrio.  Of course, much of her writing would focus upon the houses she lived in throughout her life. Sandra would soon become the first woman of color to become a major force in American literature.  I will tell my students her life-changing moment came from a sad and frustrating moment in English class.  Jaja.

This week, I read the memoir of another unorthodox artist of independent thought and incredible ambition:  Michael Nesmith of the Monkees.  When Michael was the age of most of my students are now, he was a struggling songwriter living with his pregnant girlfriend in Dallas, Texas.  Writing songs didn’t come easy for Michael.  Not with the pressure to provide food, clothing and shelter for his new family.  He must have felt like an untethered young man, for  his life had little direction.  He sang his folk songs for tips in restaurants and bars, and the rest of his income came from reading books out loud to a blind PhD history student, who happened to be the son of his landlady.  Things looked bleak.

That was before his life-changing moment.  This was February 9, 1964, the night that the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.  I will also share this story with my students.  The moment came to Michael out of nowhere.  Sadly, Michael didn’t have the means to afford a television in 1964, so he politely invited himself along with his girlfriend to watch the Beatles at the home of his PhD student. Before the Ed Sullivan show,  Michael had never heard anyone like the Beatles before and certainly never seen anyone like them. There was Michael on a couch, in between his pregnant girlfriend and George, the blind history student, to whom he promised to describe the action play-by-play.

If you are reading this deep into my post, are you familiar with Raymond Carver’s  short story “Cathedral”?  I often share this story in class.  This is where the narrator of the story struggles to describe the architecture of a church to a blind man sitting next to him on the couch.   Together they run their fingers over the drawings in a coffee-table book.  Not only is the blind man able to “see,” but the young narrator sees something entirely new in  his life.  Michael had the same problem describing the phenomenon of the Beatles. If you could not see the performance with your own eyes, how could you feel the electricity?  If you could not feel the electricity –  seventy three million people  tuned in to the same channel at the same time – how could you ever understand the Beatles?  After Ed introduced the band, there was so screaming from the girls in the audience, it was nearly impossible to hear the music from through the television  speakers.   Michael had no  idea what to say to George, but that moment would change his life forever.   He saw POSSIBILITY like he had never seen it before.

I’m not going to write a book report here, but I appreciate both the book and the author.  I grew up in the sixties, so I knew the story behind the Monkees.   The plan was to hire actors based on their looks and personalities.   The producers didn’t count on their passion for the music.  That’s when things changed.  Michael, Peter, Mickey and Davey; they all wanted to play.   Michael describes the fight to make their dreams happen, despite all corporate obstacles that got in their way.  That’s what this book is about.  It’s about Pinnochio coming to life.  Michael uses this metaphor several times throughout his memoir.   Each chapter is about a new struggle and a new challenge.  Michael had a complicated relationship with his Christian Science mother.  Several of his closest relationships crumbled and disappeared.  Hollywood was a place of sharks and predators.  Along the way,  he experienced more than his share of failure.  But he also maintained his vision.   Michael’s life was full of wonder, joy, and spirituality.    In each chapter, Pinnochio seems to raise his head.