Threading Through Life Funny how negatives can propel some into a career. I have spent much of the last 50 years writing for a living, even though I was not a member of Miss Annan’s vaunted English class. I was relegated to Mrs. Mooney’s class. Maybe the truth is that I was miffed; and determined to prove one of those Miss Mulroys wrong. I was a St. Annan reject for several reasons; most importantly, I couldn’t make any consistent sense out of parsing sentences. It turns out that my confusion was well founded and that I have been vindicated Shortly after our 1959 matriculation, Noam Chomsky proved to the world that there are an infinite number of exceptions to all grammatical rules, a postulation that led to the computerization of language. (Nevertheless, Microsoft Word has warned me that my first sentence above has some syntactical errors. Dele!) Fortunately, in our sophomore year, I read “The Thread that Runs So True”, by Jesse Stuart, a one-room school teacher in Appalachia. Jesse offered that writing is about first getting the reader’s attention. (See second sentence, first graph above), setting a theme and threading that idea through to a conclusion. To this day, I can’t write a quick email without running a thread through it. Writing is like looking back on life. We can find so many threads that run through it to the end. Some call it degrees of separation. We’re now learning in the New York Times science section that our brains are programmed to look for the thread. They speculate that dreams seem real because our brains need to find logical connections –- threads, if you will -- between random nocturnal flashes between synapses.. So here’s the theme that runs from our alma mater to today : Another reason I didn’t get into Miss Annan’s class was that I was, if not a class clown, a master of the inappropriate One boring day, Mrs. Mooney asked our class, “What is the definition of an animal?” Many hands shot up, wiggling eagerly at her. Among them was that of John Kane, a jolly fellow who is no longer with us, so I can tell this story with impunity. “Mr. Kane?” Mrs. Mooney said in quick order. “That’s right,” I said. I got some great guffaws out of that one, but ended up in the principal’s office. (I had a very close relationship with the Mulroy girls.) As a result, I was booted off the basketball team. I spent the spring semester of year two as the basketball score keeper and a lot of time in Coach Inman’s office, where I told him that I expected a growth spurt very soon. “Coach,” I said. “I grew 11 inches between the ages of 11 and 12.” “That right?” he said in his amused way. “Yeah, and everyone has two major growth spurts when they’re young,” I said. “Next year when I grow another 11 inches, I’ll be six-foot nine. Inman had a way of stroking his chin and fixing you with a twinkle in his eye. “That’s great Currie,” he said. “You’ll be the tallest score keeper in the league.” Let’s continue this thread. Thirty years later, while waiting for an elevator in the Daley Civic Center I was standing next to John Lesch, who was in Boy Scout Troop 595 with me. We exchanged some breathless greetings and a few memories, before he asked me what I was listening to on my Walkman. “Celtic music,” I said. He rushed to inform me that his wife, the former Mary Mooney, was the great granddaughter of Francis O’Neill, the most important collector of Irish and Celtic music in the world, O’Neill was also Chief of Police in Chicago at the turn of the century. Somehow, the conversation turned to how his wife was also the niece of Julia Mooney, who taught English at South Shore (gulp) . He astounded me by saying, my nemesis, Mrs. Mooney, was the daughter of Capt. O’Neill, who published nine books of Celtic music and who is said to have rescued the lexicon of Celtic music from proscription by the bloody English and ultimate extinction. But for O’Neill, there would be no Chieftains. Wow! The thread continues. The Lesches and I eventually founded the Capt. O’Neill Foundation, which re-fueled my interest in Celtic music, so much so that I ended up working for a small newspaper and living on the Isle of Skye on the West Coast of Scotland where there is no difference between the Irish and Scots: they speak the same language, eat the same food, bury their dead in the same manner, play the same music and dance the same dances. More importantly they share a passion for the written word. The only difference is that they worship their Christian God in a different way, the cause of much bloodshed. Meanwhile, I continued my study of Celtic music in the Mecca of the Great Highland Bagpipe. One wet and wild day I drove across the Cuillin mountains, taking this thread to a rather weird Celtic celebration of fire to write an article and listen to some of the local music; and to coincidentally meet one of the only other Americans in this very remote corner of Western Europe between the Irish and the North Seas. Her name was Nancy, Greising, I think. My God! She too was from Chicago. And – hold on to your hat , she went to South Shore High School. I didn’t see much of her afterward. It’s a pretty big island and I wasn’t there to meet Americans. She did interest me In the Isle of Skye History Museum, which focuses much on the forced emigration of Scottish Highlanders and Islanders to North America. These “clearances” were remarkably similar to those “evictions” in Ireland that brought boatloads of Irish to America and eventually to Chicago. Stay with me fellow Tars. I do not digress. The thread is running so true. In Irish families in Chicago, few of the girls had career options other than that of school teacher. I was fortunate enough to marry a beautiful woman of Irish descent, whose mother was a Chicago school teacher. She explained to me why a great majority of our teachers at South Shore, Bradwell, Coles, Horace Mann, Bryn Mawr, and O’Keeffe, were what I always referred to as “little old blue-haired Irish ladies.” An untold number of them, my mother-in-law explained, were educated by the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs) at South-Side girls’ schools and especially at St. Mary’s High School at Polk Street and Damen Ave., a dedicated feeder for the Normal School, which eventually became Chicago Teacher’s College. Since the Irish controlled politics and jobs the turn of the century, off they went in legions to fertilize our public schools. I’ll tie the thread up here. The majority, like my mother-in-law, are gone now. They were the Miss Annans, the Mrs. Mooneys, the Esther and Mary Mulroys, the Miss O’Shaughnessys of our youth. They were the inspirations for the Lorraine Hansberrys and the James T. Farrells of the Chicago literary world, among others. Maybe some of them were still at Bryn Mawr when Michelle Obama sat at the tiny desks there, cutting her teeth on life. If not maybe some of her younger teachers knew and learned from them as we did. There’s my thread; that six degrees of separation that makes the world still tiny 50 years hence.
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