by Laura Brodie
When we reached Waddell and pulled up in the drop-off line, my younger girls hopped out, with Rachel pausing to blow me a kiss before taking Kathryn’s hand. The day before, I had walked Kathryn inside the building for “Meet the Teacher,” leading her to a classroom just beyond the front door. There we had found her name at a cluster of four desks: “Look! Kelly is sitting across from you!” Kathryn had arranged her notebooks and pencils, donated her glue and tissues to the class supply, and listened shyly while the teacher showed her where to put her lunch bag, backpack, and coat each morning. Between the brightly painted walls and the teacher’s friendly smile, Kathryn felt comfortable enough so that now, on her first day of kindergarten, she didn’t need me to hold her hand. Her big sister was sufficient, and much more cool. Meanwhile, a teacher stood outside at our open car door and waited.
“Aren’t you coming, Julia?”
“No,” Julia announced, glad to be asked. “I’m being homeschooled!”
The teacher glanced at me with surprise, and I nodded confirmation. Julia would not be coming to school this day or the next. Children within hearing distance turned to stare, and Julia waved, grinning out the back window as we pulled away.
She and I had agreed that if her sisters were going to attend school from 8:30 to 3:00 every day, she should follow a similar routine. No sleeping until ten—a luxury some homeschoolers enjoy. No finishing school by noon, even though much of our academic work could be compressed into less than four hours. For the sake of sibling equality, we would find activities to fill six and a half hours each day.
This didn’t mean that Julia needed to ride in the car every morning. On most days she could linger in bed for an extra hour while Rachel and Kathryn dressed and ate. According to our agreement, by 8:45, when I got back from depositing her sisters, Julia had to be sitting at the kitchen table, dressed, fed, and ready to learn.
But this first morning was special. Julia had good reason to ride along in the car, apart from her desire to gloat at her school-bound peers. It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesday mornings the Lexington Coffee Shop opens its back room to any bluegrass musicians who feel inclined. The players range from intermediate to advanced; some perform in weekend bands, some play every blue moon. Some have names like Rooster and Burr, others answer to Steve and Joe. A few arrive in professional clothes: the upscale real estate agent in his crisp shirt and silk tie who picks at a guitar for an hour before opening his office at ten; the campus minister whose frizzy gray ponytail hangs down the back of a tweed blazer. Most wear denim and flannel.
They trickle in between 8:15 and 8:45, lugging black instrument cases and pouring free cups of the house blend before negotiating a short, narrow hallway into the back room. There they join tunes in progress, with the group growing from duet to trio, quartet to quintet. When Julia and I stepped into the shop at 8:30 we could hear strains of “Old Joe Clark.”
Visitors to Lexington often ask for the nearest Starbucks, but they never seem disappointed by our home-grown alternative. The Lexington Coffee Shop, situated in a 150-year-old stretch of brick-front stores, has wood floors, a white ceiling molded like a frosted wedding cake, and peachy-salmon walls spattered antique-style that provide a gallery for local painters and photographers. Regular customers hang mugs on hooks near the counter, beside the muffins, pound cake, and scones made by a nearby baker. High on the walls behind the counter, chalkboards list flavors that range from the local (Blue Ridge Blend, Lexington Blend, Mrs. Hennis’s Blend, named after Julia’s beloved first-grade teacher) to the international (Ethiopia Harrar, Sumatra Mandheling, Tanzania Teaberry). Most are made from beans ground in a small warehouse outside of town, next to the drive-in theater.
For years, I had wanted to bring Julia to the coffee shop for a little bluegrass—to share with her the delight of starting the day with hot drinks and warm music. Julia had a wonderful ear for all types of music, but on Wednesday mornings she was usually at school, or sleeping late in the summer. Homeschooling was our chance to sample the local pleasures together.
On that first morning, Julia ordered hot chocolate, I bought an orange juice, and in a back room barely twenty feet by twenty feet, we edged our drinks past a half-dozen musicians and settled at a small table near the elbow of Jay Mills, a man in his late thirties with auburn hair and a broad moustache. Jay leaned over a small round table and opened the clasps on what looked to be a leather briefcase. Inside lay more than a dozen harmonicas tucked into two columns of crushed velvet.
“Look, Julia.” I pointed. “Did you know that harmonicas come in different keys?”
Jay lifted one and it disappeared within his palms, cupped at his lips as if he were blowing on his fingers to warm them. Out came a chord like a train whistle, Jay’s fingers flapping in a sideways wave goodbye.
“What instruments do you recognize?”
Julia noted the stand-up bass, the guitars, the harmonica, the violin (a fiddle in this context, I explained).
“But what is that round, twangy one?” she asked.
“That’s a banjo.”
“And what is that small instrument hunched in the man’s arms?”
“A mandolin.”
In Julia’s mind these two words blurred, so that, over the next few weeks, she would sometimes say, “Look at the guy playing on his manjo.”
“Banjo,” I always replied, not mentioning that manjo sounded like an obscene Austin Powers euphemism.
On that first morning the group played “Rocky Top,” and Julia did what comes naturally to her: she sang along. No words, just a harmony of ooooos and aahhhs.
A few eyes glanced our way, and I did what comes naturally to me: I shushed my daughter.
“Sing quietly, Julia. Not so loud.”
My daughters are all spontaneous singers, as if life were one big musical, and I welcome their songs as expressions of joy—so long as they limit them to our car, our house, our walks in the woods. In public places I am a coward, determined not to disturb the peace. I tend to care about other people’s opinions—although that inclination fades with age—and Rachel and Kathryn share my instincts, confining their melodies to private spaces. But in Julia’s early years she was blessedly free of inhibitions. Throughout elementary school she was prone to sing and dance at public concerts, whether the music was classical, bluegrass, or jazz. As a young mother, I learned to take her to loud performances in venues with dark corners where she could dance to her heart’s content, for Julia didn’t dance with an adult’s reserve. She spun, she jumped, she shook with exuberance, like a God-struck devotee at a tent revival. Rock concerts would have suited her well, but our small-town fare leaned toward string quartets and college musicals and John’s band performances. Often, we listened to concerts from outside auditorium doors while Julia danced in the lobby.
At the coffee shop there was no room to dance. Listeners filled every table and barstool, some lined the wall, and Julia’s singing dwindled as she dipped her lips into her whipped cream and chocolate flakes, emerging with a speckled moustache.
“Oops,” she murmured, spying the hot chocolate that had dribbled onto her shirt. She wiped at her lips and shirt with her palm.
“Use a napkin,” I said. Table manners would have to be added to the top of our curriculum.
In the meantime, I took out a small notebook.
“We spent two-fifty on your hot chocolate, one-twenty-five on my juice, and two dollars on that cranberry-walnut muffin. Can you calculate how much we spent?”
I passed the pencil and notebook to Julia, and she dutifully did the math.
“Now, tax is eight percent. Do you know how to translate eight percent into a decimal number?”
8.00? she wrote, and pushed the notebook back to me.
“Good guess, try again.”
.8?
“No. Think about the word percent, how it has the word cents in there. How do you write eight cents as a decimal?”
.08?
“Right.”
“So how much tax did we just pay for our drinks and muffin?” I asked. Julia multiplied the bill by .08.
“That’s right, good job,” I nodded. Julia added the result into the total charge, and I showed her that it matched the number on the receipt.
On that first day I had elaborate visions of practical math lessons that could take place throughout our town. At the grocery store, Julia could carry a pocket notebook and pencil and estimate how much money we were spending. She could weigh fruit and vegetables to fulfill Virginia’s SOL measurement requirements, and practice multiplication: If we buy three pounds of bananas at fifty-nine cents per pound, what’s the total price?
I hoped to show her that our everyday lives are filled with arithmetic. If regular gas costs $2.92 per gallon, and we buy 15 gallons, how much will we pay? How much more will it cost if we buy the premium gas for $3.12? (We never do.)
Home improvements could provide lessons in geometry: “If we want to cover this L-shaped porch in green tile, how do we calculate the area of the space? And how many pieces of six-by-six tile will we need?” Menus might be more interesting than math worksheets: “Julia, how much will both of our lunches cost? If we tip the waitress eighteen percent, what does that come to? And what about the tax? Why do you think the tax at a restaurant is more than the tax at a grocery store?”
Oh, how naïve I was on that inaugural morning. I thought that Julia would appreciate these calculations, that they might be a kind of game, as well as a useful lesson in how quickly the daily expenses of life add up. But our first math lesson at the coffee shop offered a sign of things to come. Although Julia was willing to calculate our total for that day, when I gave her another problem, with hypothetical numbers (“What if we had ordered two coffees and a blueberry scone?”), she rolled her eyes.
“Can’t I just enjoy the music, Mom?”
Good for her, you might say. Here was a child who knew what she wanted: to learn through sensory experience, to see and smell and touch and taste the world, and not be asked to add decimals when she could be watching a fiddler’s bow. Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t get you far when it comes to mastering long division. Practical math would require that Julia calculate more than one problem in an hour. Julia, however, clearly felt that the coffee shop was not a setting for math. As she put it: “Nothing ruins a good time like math equations.”
Part of our challenge lay in the matter of de-schooling. Children from public schools are often locked into the belief that “education” happens at a desk, slumped over a textbook. It can take months of deprogramming for new homeschoolers to break their institutionalized habits—to open their minds to all the math and science and history lessons unfolding in the community around them, and be willing to spend time doing “schoolwork” outside a classroom setting.
Had I been more clever, I might have presented practical math to Julia in the form of a written contract: no math lessons at home on Wednesdays and Fridays so long as you agree to do a dozen math problems during our errands outside the house. Julia, a child enamored with making deals, who has a strong belief in justice and the sanctity of promises, would probably have signed on the dotted line. Then I could have waved the contract whenever she balked at calculating the fines on our overdue library books. Perhaps this would have worked, perhaps not. Homeschooling is a matter of constant experimentation.
When I saw that Julia resisted doing math problems at the coffee shop, I changed tack.
“Want to play cards?” Gin rummy could offer a brief lesson in arithmetic.
While Jay sang “Mustang Sally,” taking a break from the bluegrass mode, Julia added up trios of kings and queens, threes and sevens, multiplying by fives and tens. Thus began a ritual that she and I would maintain on most Wednesday mornings for the rest of the year: listening to live music while playing cards, checkers, backgammon, dominoes, or mancala, all provided on the coffee shop’s game table. Occasionally Julia would calculate three or four math equations. More often, I settled for the logic lessons that come from playing chess. As the weeks went by and Julia learned some basic French, we would also begin to converse in tiny foreign fragments:
“Tu as soif?”
“Oui, Maman.”
“Qu’est-ce que tu veux boire?”
On that first morning, we left the coffee shop after forty-five minutes and drove less than a mile to the Virginia Military Institute. A drive through VMI’s Post (what we civilians would call a “campus”) provides an education in itself. Founded in 1837 as a kind of Southern West Point, VMI was the last all-male military college in the United States up until 1997, when it admitted women grudgingly in obedience to a Supreme Court ruling. VMI argued that women weren’t suited to the school’s “adversative method” for training freshmen, a system that was on display as Julia and I drove by. Cadets were clustered on the parade ground, sophomore cadre members in black T-shirts, camouflage pants, and army boots, barking into the faces of freshman “rats” with shaved heads. (Cadre members sometimes get so close that the rats’ faces are showered with spit.) Graduates explain that VMI’s program instills discipline and camaraderie, but in John’s darkest moments he just shrugs and says, “VMI—where fun goes to die.”
The military world, with its uniforms and guns and strict hierarchy, is more John’s cup of tea than mine. Years ago, after his stint as a public school teacher, John shipped off to Marine Corps boot camp to preface four years of trumpet playing with the Marine Drum and Bugle Corps in Washington. So these days he feels comfortable with students who salute and call him Colonel Brodie, and he’s completely at ease wearing camouflage to a parent-teacher conference. As for me, I feel a little apologetic every time I arrive at VMI, like I’m an agnostic visiting someone else’s church.
Nevertheless, Julia and I proceeded down VMI’s maple-lined avenue and she pointed to a statue across the parade ground. “There’s George Marshall,” she said, acknowledging the college’s most famous alumnus. Julia once wrote a poem for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday that contained these lines: “There are warriors for Peace / King, Gandhi, Marshall / These are their swords, / Life, light, and hope.”
“Why did you put George Marshall next to King and Gandhi?” I asked.
“Because he’s the only soldier to have won the Nobel Peace prize.” She had learned this on a school field trip to VMI’s Marshall Museum, which now stood one hundred yards to our left.
Clever answer, I thought, but a little odd. Only in Lexington, Virginia, would a child group George Marshall alongside Gandhi.
That morning, we parked in front of VMI’s Preston Library, stepped out of the car, and surveyed the buildings around us. VMI employs a similar architecture to its more famous counterpoint on the Hudson: tan stucco walls molded into castle façades, complete with parapets and cut-glass windows. However, the resemblance to West Point ends at the northern end of the parade ground, where an imposing statue of Stonewall Jackson assesses the field. He stands erect in his Confederate uniform, from angled hat to thigh-high boots, binoculars in one hand, sword in the other, an imaginary wind blowing open the flaps of his coat. Jackson taught at VMI before the Civil War began, and the school’s rats are required to salute his statue every time they exit the barracks, a gesture that makes me flinch, though most of the cadets don’t seem to mind.
Lexington treats Jackson as a kind of patron saint. Julia was born in Stonewall Jackson Hospital, and if she chooses to spend her entire life in this small town, she might live on Jackson Avenue or Stonewall Street. She might purchase a burial plot in the local cemetery, which radiates outward from a statue of the general that marks his grave. In fact, “Julia” was the name of Jackson’s daughter, but we didn’t know it at the time of our child’s birth. We named her after John Lennon’s song from the White Album.
That morning, Julia and I turned away from Jackson a
nd entered Preston Library, where we walked upstairs through a room filled with solemn portraits of Confederate officers, mostly VMI alumni. A sign by a sofa contained the circled word SUPINE with a backslash through it.
“What does supine mean?” Julia asked.
“Lying down,” I replied. “The cadets are sleepy all the time because they stay up late studying, and they wake at dawn for breakfast. They can’t take afternoon naps because they have to roll up their mattresses in the morning and lean their bed frames against the wall, since they live four or five to a room, and there’s no space for them to have their beds and desks out at the same time. The rats, in particular, are always exhausted, and the librarians don’t want them coming here and sleeping on the couches.”
Julia and I walked to the entrance of an enclosed room at the far end of the library, where a sign beside the door read “Timmins Music Room.” We opened the door and entered a small oasis in VMI’s Spartan world: comfortable armchairs, multiple CD players and headphones, and filing cabinets filled with classical music CDs. In the middle of the room stood a thin black sculpture of Orpheus, pitched forward in a balletic leap, toes pointed, a lyre held on his shoulder, shaped in a V. For “Victory”? For “VMI”? The sculpture’s stone base read, “John W. Timmins, ’49 / Killed in Action, Korea, 1950.”
How sad, I thought. He died one year out of college.
“He’s a pea brain,” Julia remarked.
She was contemplating the sculpture’s head, and she was right. Although Orpheus’s body was a tapestry of muscles, anatomically well proportioned, his head was little bigger than his fist. All brawn and no brain.
“Maybe he’s angry because the sculptor gave him a pea brain,” Julia mused, staring at Orpheus’s contemptuous sneer.
“Maybe he’s angry,” I said, “because his wife died shortly after they were married, and although he had a chance to get her out of the underworld, he blew it.” I briefly recounted the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, thinking how homeschooling, just like parenthood, could inspire all sorts of impromptu lessons. I hadn’t planned on talking about mythology that day, but there we stood, inspired by a statue I had never bothered to examine closely. This year’s improvisations were bound to make me more attentive to the world around me, seeing it from Julia’s perspective.
