{"id":12781,"date":"2011-09-02T04:38:05","date_gmt":"2011-09-02T09:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=12781"},"modified":"2011-10-19T04:01:06","modified_gmt":"2011-10-19T09:01:06","slug":"autoblography-part-7-neighbor-john","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=12781","title":{"rendered":"Autoblography Part 7: Neighbor John"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two doors up from us lives an eccentric fellow named John. He’s married, and his children are grown. He’s a large, wild-looking fellow. Big black beard. Thick black curly hair. Thick glasses. He’s also amazingly gentle and soft-spoken, as well as enormously humble and polite. In all my years knowing him, I would never once hear him speak ill of anyone.<\/p>\n

My brother Pat – two years younger and about a thousand times more outgoing – talks to Neighbor John now and again. Eventually John discovers that Pat doesn’t know his states and capitals. He quizzes me, and finds I am similarly deficient. He insists that This Won’t Do, and asks our mother if he can help us learn them.<\/p>\n

I am skeptical. This sounds like school, and I do not like school. School is the place with bullies (the teachers) and jerks (the other kids) who disapprove of me and let me know how much they don’t appreciate me or my scholastic efforts. It’s a constant assault on my sense of worth and my sense of agency. I spend all day watching the clock and waiting to escape, hoping I can make it home without experiencing any major humiliations. I spend my non-school hours avoiding thinking about school, and trying to ignore the dread that tomorrow, or Monday, or next fall, I’ll have to go back again. There is no end to this punishment, and the best I can do is put it out of my mind for a few hours.<\/p>\n

So I do not like this idea of a neighbor showing up and giving me MORE school during non-school time. However, he’s very different from my teachers and his approach is very different from their fetish for bureaucratic paperwork. I humor him.<\/p>\n

He hand-traces a map of the United States somewhere, and pays to have them photocopied. (In the 80’s, you didn’t surf to a webpage, look something up, and hit “print” to get a nice color copy from your fancy inkjet printer. You drove to the printer and you paid to have copies made<\/em>.) These look like worksheets to me. On the other hand, he made them himself and he cares that I fill my sheet out. Even better, if I fill in this map he isn’t going to turn around and make me fill in another one just like it, and another, forever. We have a finite goal, and we were working towards it. We are trying to accomplish something. <\/p>\n

Slowly the map is filled in as I learn each state (I’d always been hazy on all of those square states in the midwest) and then each capital. When we succeed, he presents us with a gift: A massive five-foot color map of the United States. (That map still exists today, and is hanging in my parent’s basement. Thirty years old, and it’s still in good shape.) <\/p>\n

Having accomplished this together, I become friends with John. I visit him regularly. When I arrive at his house, he greets me warmly, offers me a drink – usually lemonade – and a seat. (We have to sit on his porch, since he has dogs.) He treats me just like any adult would treat another. He asks me how I am and is genuinely interested in the answer. We sit together and talk about history. <\/p>\n

In school, I hate history. History is this:<\/p>\n