Tennyson Street School: fellowship
Welcome to fellowship. I’d applied for and been accepted into Denver Public Schools’ Literacy Fellows program, a one-year commitment to tutoring students in the inner-city schools, specifically working on improving reading and writing skills. I’d submitted my application late, after the school-year had already begun; nevertheless, the program had an opening and I was placed at Tennyson Street School, an expeditionary learning school in North Denver nestled just below the ever-streaming traffic of I-70.
I figured my years of experience working with homeless families had been my ticket in. However, memories of my grandma had sealed the deal for me.
Back in the mid-1920’s, my Grandma Jensen had been a dark-haired, serious young woman named Florence attending Iowa State College to earn an elementary teaching certificate. But before Florence really had a chance to use her certificate, my tall, lanky grandpa, Holger, a Danish-speaking horticulture student who’d just completed his program at Iowa State, made his romantic proposal in English along the lines of, “So – are you going to marry me?”
How could a girl refuse. They exchanged wedding vows in June 1927. My father, their first child, was born in May 1928. Florence found herself a farm wife with a second baby boy as the Great Depression fell across the country in 1929 and 1930. Six more babies followed in the years after. Her teaching certificate remained safely tucked away in a drawer.
As I was graduating high school back in 1984, I was offered a scholarship to Colorado State University – if I pursued teaching. I had collected a pretty string of shiny scholarships, enough for a full-ride to CSU without it. So I turned down the teaching scholarship.
Who wanted the tedium of repeating the same stale lessons to the same bored kids, day after day, year after year? Not me. I had plans. Big plans. An academic overachiever graduating 10th in my class, I decided to double-major in Technical Journalism and Biology. Honors Biology. I wanted to write for National Geographic magazine and travel the world, exploring cultures and people’s lives, writing their stories. I had everything arranged.
Halfway through my first semester, I quit. Six months later, I was engaged; in 1985, I got married at age 19 – and got pregnant. In 1986, my first child, a son, was born. In 1987, my second son arrived.
Behavior out of context is easy to judge – but harder to understand. We are born into contexts, into settings among characters, given roles and models and lines to say, marks to toe.
True fellowship is recognition of the very mortal tropes being played out endlessly before us and between us. Human literacy is reading between the lines, where very messy writing happens. Everybody’s lives are stories.