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conuly
First, two sets of pictures:
One dealing with young, gay, homeless people in New York
And another dealing with the recent powwow, also in New York.
On the Jacob Riis Bathhouse's renovations
By the Sea, a Moorish Palace Reborn
By JILL EISENSTADT
A movie theater? A teenage center?
"Ice skating would be cool," says a young girl in a bright yellow bikini, peering through the locked gates of the newly renovated Jacob Riis Park Bathhouse.
Her father suggests a museum. After all, it was on this sliver of ocean beach in Queens that the first trans-Atlantic flight originated in 1919. Her sand-coated little brother would prefer a chocolate factory. Or swimming.
Indeed, an Olympic-size pool was the preferred plan until studies deemed the maintenance too expensive. Two pools could have fit inside this vast, twin-turreted structure reminiscent of a Moorish palace, the Rockaways' finest architectural gem. There are also a lifeguard station, refurbished in the mid-1990's, and a small police station.
But these uses occupy only a fraction of the pavilion, a city landmark that is eerily empty and still on a recent Sunday afternoon. Despite $22 million in renovations under way, the plans for the building's use seem as hazy as this midsummer day. The only movement is two lanky off-duty lifeguards tossing a tennis ball back and forth.
National Park Service officials don't relieve a visitor's curiosity, saying only that the pavilion will be used as "community space." They say they hope that contractors will complete renovations in time for the 2006 season.
Meanwhile, the curious admire the newly planted hawthorn trees that flank the entry pavilion's Corinthian columns, touch the sandstone wall with its beach motif - scallop shells, crabs and sea horses - and read the plaque announcing the pavilion's opening. "Erected by the City of New York for the Recreation of Its Citizens in the Year 1932."
Back then, the bathhouse had a staff of 600, a rooftop solarium, 9,000 lockers and three restaurants, the largest of which, the Empire Room, had seating for 2,000 and a dance orchestra. But political patronage soon plagued the park's management. Aged lifeguards (those who could swim) spent their working hours fishing and selling their catch to the public. First aid stations became flophouses.
By 1937, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses had fired many workers and rebuilt the vandalized bathhouse, adding, among other features, 11,500 cabanas. Despite the lack of public transportation (then as now), an estimated 125,000 people visited Jacob Riis on a typical weekend day that summer, parking in what was the world's largest paved lot.
Today, only a few dozen souls dot the mile-long beach, boardwalk, barbecue and recreation areas to enjoy one of the best views in the city, encompassing the Atlantic Ocean, Jamaica Bay, the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan and, now that the chain-link fence has been removed, the famed bathing pavilion, originally designed by Stoughton & Plonck.
"So what will it really be?" the girl in the yellow bikini wonders. Dare one suggest bathhouse? For now, she and her family are still changing their clothes in the car.
On Muslims in Europe
An Islamic Alienation
By DAVID RIEFF
Even if they produced no other positive result, the attacks on the London Underground have compelled Europeans of all faiths to think with new urgency about the Continent's Muslim minority. Such a reckoning was long overdue. Some left-wing politicians, like London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, have chosen to emphasize the proximate causes of Muslim anger, focusing on the outrage widely felt in Islamic immigrant communities over the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the harsh reality is that the crisis in relations between the European mainstream and the Islamic diaspora has far deeper roots, consoling as it might be to pretend otherwise.
Indeed, the news could scarcely be worse. What Europeans are waking up to is a difficult truth: the immigrants who perform the Continent's menial jobs, and, as is often forgotten, began coming to Europe in the 1950's because European governments and businesses encouraged their mass migration, are profoundly alienated from European society for reasons that have little to do with the Middle East and everything to do with Europe. This alienation is cultural, historical and above all religious, as much if not more than it is political. Immigrants who were drawn to Europe because of the Continent's economic success are in rebellion against the cultural, social and even psychological sources of that success.
In a sense, Europe's bad fortune is that Islam is in crisis. Imagine that Mexican Catholicism was in a similar state, and that a powerful, well-financed minority of anti-modern purists was doing its most successful proselytizing among Mexican immigrants in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago, above all among the discontented, underemployed youth of the barrios. The predictable, perhaps even the inevitable, result would be the same sort of estrangement between Hispanics and the American mainstream.
Whatever the roots of the present troubles, what is undeniable is that many immigrant Muslims and their children remain unreconciled to their situation in Europe. Some find their traditional religious values scorned, while others find themselves alienated by the independence of women, with all its implications for the future of the ''traditional'' Muslim family. In response, many have turned to the most obscurantist interpretation of the Islamic faith as a salve. At the fringes of the diaspora, some have turned to violence.
So far, at least, neither the carrot nor the stick has worked. Politicians talk of tighter immigration controls. Yet the reality is that a Europe in demographic freefall needs more, not fewer, immigrants if it is to maintain its prosperity. Tony Blair just proposed new laws allowing the deportation of radical mullahs and the shutting of mosques and other sites associated with Islamic extremism. But given the sheer size of the Muslim population in England and throughout the rest of Europe, the security services are always going to be playing catch-up. Working together, and in a much more favorable political and security context, French and Spanish authorities have, after more than 20 years, been unable to put an end to the terrorism of the Basque separatist group ETA. And there are at least twice as many Muslims in France as there are Basques in Spain.
At the same time, it is difficult to see how the extremists' grievances can ever be placated by conciliatory gestures. It is doubtful that the British government's proposed ban on blasphemy against Islam and other religions will have a demonstrable effect. (What would have happened to Salman Rushdie had such a ban been in force when ''The Satanic Verses'' was published?) Meanwhile, the French government has tried to create an ''official'' state-sanctioned French Islam. This approach may be worth the effort, but the chances of success are uncertain. It will require the enthusiastic participation of an Islamic religious establishment whose influence over disaffected youth is unclear. What seems clearer is that European governments have very little time and nowhere near enough knowledge about which members of the Islamic community really are ''preachers of hate'' and which, however unpalatable their views, are part of the immigrant mainstream.
The multicultural fantasy in Europe -- its eclipse can be seen most poignantly in Holland, that most self-definedly liberal of all European countries -- was that, in due course, assuming that the proper resources were committed and benevolence deployed, Islamic and other immigrants would eventually become liberals. As it's said, they would come to ''accept'' the values of their new countries. It was never clear how this vision was supposed to coexist with multiculturalism's other main assumption, which was that group identity should be maintained. But by now that question is largely academic: the European vision of multiculturalism, in all its simultaneous good will and self-congratulation, is no longer sustainable. And most Europeans know it. What they don't know is what to do next. If the broad-brush anti-Muslim discourse of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France or the Vlaams Belang Party in Belgium entered the political mainstream, it would only turn the Islamic diaspora in Europe into the fifth column that, for the moment, it certainly is not. But Europeans can hardly accept an immigrant veto over their own mores, whether those mores involve women's rights or, for that matter, the right to blaspheme, which the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh so bravely asserted -- and died for.
Figuring out how to prevent Europe's multicultural reality from becoming a war of all against all is the challenge that confronts the Continent. It makes all of Europe's other problems, from the economy to the euro to the sclerosis of social democracy, seem trivial by comparison. Unfortunately, unlike those challenges, this one is existential and urgent and has no obvious answer.
A "Lives" article on a man who is no longer a Jehovah's Witness. With a useful bit of advice for what to say when they come a-knockin'.
Turn of Faith
By JOY CASTRO
Adopted at birth in 1967 by a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, I was asked from an early age to behave as much like an adult as possible. Three times a week in the Kingdom Hall in Miami, my brother and I strove to sit perfectly still in our chairs. Our mother carried a wooden spoon in her purse and was quick to take us outside for beatings if we fidgeted.
At 5, I sat onstage in the Kingdom Hall in Surrey, England, where my father's job had taken us. Nervously pushing my memorized lines into the microphone, I faced my mother, who was seated across from me. We were demonstrating for the congregation exactly how a Bible study with a ''worldly'' person, or non-Witness, should go.
I had played the householder before -- the person who answered the door. That was easy: you just asked questions that showed you didn't know the Truth. Portraying the Witness was harder: you had to produce the right Scripture to answer any questions the householder might ask.
But we had written our parts on index cards and rehearsed repeatedly at home. I was well dressed and shining clean. I said my lines flawlessly and gave looks of concern at the right times. Finally, the householder agreed with everything I had said: her way of life was wicked, and the Bible clearly proved that Jehovah's Witnesses were the only true Christians who would be saved at Armageddon. Her look was grateful. Then she smiled, becoming my mother again. Everyone clapped, and she glowed with pride. At last I could go out in service.
From the age of 5 until I was 14, I knocked on the doors of strangers each week with memorized lines that urged them to repent. I didn't play with worldly children. I didn't have birthday parties or Christmas mornings. What I did was pray a lot. I knew the books of the Bible in order, by heart, and could recite various verses. My loneliness was nourished by rich, beautiful fantasies of eternal life in a paradise of peace, justice, racial harmony and environmental purity, a recompense for the rigor and social isolation of our lives.
This bliss wasn't a future we had to work for. Witnesses wouldn't vote, didn't involve themselves in worldly matters, weren't activists. Jehovah would do it all for us, destroying everyone who wasn't a Witness and restoring the earth to harmony. All we had to do was obey and wait.
Shortly after our return to the States, my father was disfellowshipped for being an unrepentant smoker -- smoking violated God's temple, the body, much like fornication and drunkenness. Three years later, my parents' marriage dissolved. My mother's second husband had served at Bethel, the Watchtower's headquarters in Brooklyn. Our doctrines, based on Paul's letters in the New Testament, gave him complete control as the new head of the household; my mother's role was to submit. My stepfather happened to be the kind of person who took advantage of this authority, physically abusing us and forcing us to shun our father completely.
After two years, I ran away to live with my father. My brother joined me a tumultuous six months later. We continued to attend the Kingdom Hall and preach door to door; the Witnesses had been our only community. Leaving was a gradual process that took months of questioning. I respected all faiths deeply, but at 15 I decided that I could no longer be part of a religion that condoned inequality.
After she finally divorced my stepfather, my mother moved out of state and married another Witness. Our occasional correspondence skates over the surface of our strained deténte. I feel for her struggles. A smart, capable woman, she subjugated her will and judgment, as the Witnesses teach, to her husbands'. If she damaged my brother and me or failed to protect us, she did so out of fear and belief. She wanted to save us from certain destruction at Armageddon, from a corrupt and dirty world. She wanted nothing less for us than paradise.
I love my mother, but I also love my ''worldly'' life, the multitude of ideas I was once forbidden to entertain, the rich friendships and the joyous love of my family. By choosing to live in the world she scorned -- to teach in a college, to spare the rod entirely, to believe in the goodness of all kinds of people -- I have, in her eyes, turned my back not only on Jehovah but also on her.
It's strange when Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door now. I know discussion is futile; they have a carefully planned response for any objection. Finally, I say, ''I'm an apostate,'' and their eyes widen at the word: someone who has willfully rejected Jehovah, far worse than a worldly person, who is simply ignorant of the Truth. A threat to the faith of others, an apostate deserves to be shunned, as we were forced to shun our disfellowshipped father. The Witnesses back away from my door.
On Eco-friendly burial sites
Eco-Friendly Burial Sites Give a Chance to Be Green Forever
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
MILL VALLEY, Calif. - Tommy Odom's remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon.
When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures - literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.
Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.
With Fernwood's debut, Mr. Cassity, who likened Mr. Odom's burial to the musical "Hair," became an impresario in a fledgling movement that originated in England.
Fernwood, which has designated about half of its 32 acres green, tries to make death palatable to baby boomers and to simplify an inevitable aspect of life dominated by "the black suits" in America's roughly $15 billion funeral industry. In the United States, the "green" concept is now in use at a handful of cemeteries, compared with about 140 woodland cemeteries in England.
In the green scheme of things, death becomes a vehicle for land conservation and saving the planet. "It is not enough to be a corpse anymore," said Thomas Lynch, an author, poet and Michigan funeral director. "Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse."
But just what is a politically correct corpse is an increasingly thorny issue. In recent months, there has been a struggle for the soul of the emerging industry between Mr. Cassity, an enfant terrible of the funeral business, who has made a fortune producing A&E-style digitized biographies of the dead, and Dr. Billy Campbell, who pioneered the movement in the United States and who has the studious intensity of a somewhat nerdy birder.
Dr. Campbell, a small-town physician prone to quoting John Muir and Coleridge, opened the first of the United States' green burial grounds, the 350-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, S.C., in 1998. There, the departed are buried dust-to-dust-style without embalming - a practice called toxic, artificial and bizarre by critics - in biodegradable coffins or cremation urns that make impervious coffins and grave liners obsolete.
Dr. Campbell was consulting until seven months ago on Fernwood, where eco-interment, also known as an "easement," can cost upward of $15,000 for a prime plot or as little as a few hundred dollars for a scattering of ashes.
Frustrated that conservation easements were not yet in place, he left to form a nonprofit group and a consulting firm in Marin County, Calif, dedicated to land conservation and "little boutique cemeteries with a social justice component," in the words of Joe Sehee, 44, a former Jesuit lay minister and marketing consultant, who is Dr. Campbell's partner.
Dr. Campbell and his former partner are a study in contrasts: Mr. Cassity fantasizes about being buried in cashmere; Dr. Campbell, in a shroud made up of old T-shirts, including "inflammatory ones from the last election," he said.
They are vying for the millions of baby boomers who are expected to die by 2040. The generation of composters who wrote their own wedding vows and opted for natural childbirth is expected to look for something different in death, as a lead character in the HBO series "Six Feet Under" did recently, receiving a green burial in a wooded nature preserve.
"There is a huge generation of people entering accelerated mortality who grew up with the first Earth Day," said Dr. Campbell, who started his eco-cemetery after he was left cold by the prepackaged funeral for his father. "People are ready for something more meaningful."
Mr. Cassity, a GQ-ish sort with rock-star stubble who wears sunglasses indoors, has cultural feelers well tuned for the business. He previously did an extreme makeover of Hollywood Memorial Park, the formerly bankrupt final resting place of Cecil B. DeMille, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sr. With his brother Brent, 38, he runs Forever Enterprises, a Missouri company with cemeteries, cremation societies and a coffin business.
Together, they transformed the once-derelict cemetery into Hollywood Forever, a pastoral "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" of death, where weekend screenings of classic films projected onto the side of Rudolph Valentino's mausoleum attract 2,500 picnickers.
As Forever Hollywood tapped into the zen of Southern California, an oasis for the Rodeo Drive dead, so Mr. Cassity anticipates Fernwood will do for the mountain-biking, Luna bar-eating culture to the north.
"We're in a market, Marin County, where 81 percent chose cremation, an extreme and unprecedented number," Mr. Cassity said.
"Death goes in cycles," he continued. "My best guess is we're finished with the nihilistic 'Let's get it done quick and throw me into the sea thing.' Now, it's, 'Return me to nature and help save the planet.' "
The presence of Fernwood, where the official hearse is a black Volvo S.U.V., in the cool verdant shadows of Mount Tamalpais, reflects Northern California's status as the nation's capital of alternative, artisanal death. The area is home to the death-midwifery movement, supporting home funerals, as well as a cottage industry in plain pine boxes and Funeria, a fraternity of funerary artists who have their own Biennale in San Francisco.
Those opting for eco-burial at Fernwood can buy coffins made of wicker or bamboo, shrouds in a hemp-silk blend and soon, $5,000 "Eco-pods" - a British import made from recycled newspapers and non-toxic glue meant to be a cross between a sarcophagus and a seed pod.
Near the forest path here lies Carolyn Reese Sloss, who died this year at age 84, her cremated remains interred in a biodegradable papier-mâché urn.
Her daughter, Martha Sloss, 52, a psychotherapist, and son-in-law, Murray Silverman, 62, a professor of management at San Francisco State, have reserved their easements in the natural part of the cemetery, a woolly landscape devoid of conventional headstones and navigated by a handheld GPS system. (To come is a lightweight computer that will allow strollers to view digital biographies.)
"As an American, I take up too much of an environmental footprint already," Mr. Silverman said. "To me, taking up more of one after I die is pathetic."
This year, Dr. Campbell, 49, "went ballistic," he said, when he discovered that Fernwood was not adhering to strict environmental precepts, planting inappropriate trees in coastal prairie and digging up land reserved for natural burial with a backhoe.
Dr. Campbell also said he thought that refrigeration would be promoted rather than embalming, which still endures in the older, conventional part of the cemetery, accomplished by a freelance embalmer, known as Dead Ed, on a bicycle.
Dr. Campbell's nonprofit Center for Ethical Burial is developing environmental standards and a strict eco-aesthetic that will preclude hothouse flowers or "gaudy markers marching up the hill," he said.
Ernest Cook, senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land, the national conservation group, who is on the center's board, said that although cemeteries were by nature essentially open spaces, conservation easements to nonprofit land trusts or government agencies would ensure that "the environmental values and concepts you're buying into would be absolutely guaranteed in perpetuity."
If the cemetery is part of a larger landscape undergoing conservation, people who wish to be interred or their heirs could bequeath money to the cause. "If land can be preserved and restored," Mr. Cook said, "it could potentially change the way Americans feel about burial."
The future of green burial may lie with people like Jerry Draper, 53, a computer systems analyst and organic farmer in San Anselmo who is thinking about putting in a green cemetery on an 11-acre lot he owns to avoid selling it off for subdivisions.
"It's about taking responsibility, leaving the campground cleaner than when you left it," he said. "It's about being a Prius instead of a Hummer."
"The Wrong Way Out of a Housing Project"
The Wrong Way Out of a Housing Project
By MICHAEL BRICK and KAREEM FAHIM
They call it the Pink Houses, short for the Louis H. Pink project in East New York, Brooklyn, squat brick towers turned inward around concrete pathways. To a young man, it can seem as if the only jobs around belong to the officers on patrol and the cooks at the fried chicken restaurant on Linden Boulevard.
Two kinds of exits from tough projects like the Pink Houses make people take notice: In the first kind, a ballplayer or rap star gets rich; in the second kind, a hustler dies trying. Plenty of people stay, working, making quiet lives or focusing their energies close to home. And some seek other ways out, ways that do not put your name on a T-shirt or a mural. Keshawn Seeley took one of these.
Childhood was eight brothers and sisters, hip-hop dreams, a drunken father, foster care and juvenile detention, but at age 19, Mr. Seeley was within reach of a modest, steady life. He had a job as a mentor with an arts group, where his musical prowess, gentle nature and street smarts counted. His name became known in homeless shelters and art galleries, and he gained the means to support his daughter, Amanda Love, who turned 2 yesterday.
But for Mr. Seeley, the road turned back. Laid off when the arts group ran short of money and on the outs with his baby's mother, he returned last month to the Pink Houses. When the end came, it barely made the newspapers. Hours before dawn, on a clear 73-degree morning, someone started an argument with a girl, and between the elevator doors of 1212 Loring Avenue and the concrete dolphins out in the courtyard, Keshawn Jamel Seeley bled to death in a spray of gunfire. He was 24 years old.
Over the years, accounts of life in the projects have become the stuff of urban lore, full of spectacular escapes and tragic returns. In a city of less crime and more opportunity, the paths followed by young men like Mr. Seeley offer humbler, more attainable promises, but still no guarantees. The route he took was built on the authenticity of growing up in the projects, for some an abstract symbol of urban menace, for others a place of familiarity, blood and memory.
"This is the 'hood, man, like they always say," said Dominick Page, 29, who watched Keshawn grow up in the Pink Houses and who returns to visit his own mother there. "When you grow up in the 'hood, you always come back."
In the Beginning
Donald and Laverne Seeley became parents together for the fourth time on May 2, 1981. They would have five more children, but Keshawn was the frailest, born premature with a soft spot over his brain.
"A cousin used to call him Light Bulb for his light skin and the shape of his head," Donald Seeley said. "We made his brothers and sisters not touch him."
The family knew troubles and bore them together for a while. Outside the Seeleys' first home, on Gates Avenue, one daughter was killed by a car. When a fire later damaged the house, the ghosts became too much too bear, Mr. Seeley said.
"So much pain struck our family," he said, "I used to drink."
After the fire, the family left Gates Avenue for the Pink Houses. There on Loring Avenue, the 10 remaining Seeleys shared an apartment, and in the courtyards and streets below their cramped rooms, Keshawn made friends.
"Like any other kids, we all got into trouble," said Keith Mason, a friend of Keshawn Seeley's since childhood. "Having rock fights, things like that."
Family life grew volatile, and the authorities removed Keshawn from his parents at age 8, relatives and friends said. He would rejoin the family more than once as a boy, but never for more than two years, instead spending formative years away from his brothers and sisters, several of whom were also in foster care.
As a teenager, Keshawn sold drugs and owned a gun, his friends said. He grew his hair long and wore a bandana. His nickname was Casino. At Graham Windham, a juvenile home in Hastings-on-Hudson, he made a friend, John Banks, and they pursued a course of mischief and petty robbery, Mr. Banks said.
"Throughout our lives, we were in the system," said Mr. Banks, who is now 23. "Our parents weren't stable enough."
But Keshawn's own behavior was unpredictable too. At one group home, he tore up the office, throwing papers everywhere, said Bernadetta Heyward, a counselor. He left an impression, though, that made people want to help him.
"I understood his anger," said Ms. Heyward, who was close to him. She saw him struggle to change, she said. "He learned how to come to someone and say, 'I need to talk.' "
In September 1999, at 18 years old, Mr. Seeley was sent to Rikers Island, where stories like his frequently end. But he was about to catch a break.
A Different Route
Art Start, a nonprofit group in Manhattan, says in promotional materials that its Hip Hop Project helps teenagers who are "on the verge of dropping out of high school, are surviving on the streets or have just been released from prison."
For Keshawn Seeley, it was an immediate fit. In the spring of 2000, as part of a program that finds alternatives to jail for juvenile offenders, he began an internship. Within six months, he had the paid position of office manager, teaching art and performance to children in homeless shelters, said Hector Arias, an artist who works for Art Start.
"He had this experience from life where he would connect with young people," Mr. Arias said. "It was his heart, it wasn't training. The kids would see him and say, 'He's cool. He dresses like me, walks like me, and he looks like me.' "
Mr. Seeley designed an antigun poster and he inspired his charges with rhymes. In 2002, he wrote:
I used to be that grimy cat these rap dudes
Is talking about, now I take a different route.
And the job took him to new places. He showed up at arts fund-raisers in the Hamptons and at a taping of the HBO "Def Poetry Jam," said Danny Simmons, a trustee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and brother of Russell Simmons, the hip-hop impresario.
"He had an intensity about him," Mr. Simmons said, describing Mr. Seeley's appeal to teenagers. "He came from where they came from, but showed them you don't have to be a square to do things a little differently."
When he outgrew the juvenile care system in 2002, Mr. Seeley rented a room above a garage in Englewood, N.J., from an Art Start colleague, Simon Fulford. It was sparse but neat, with a large armchair, a bed and a big television, Mr. Fulford said. There was a kitchen downstairs, and a large bank of windows faced the sunrise over a garden.
Evelyn Chappelle, a girlfriend Mr. Seeley had met three years earlier at Graham Windham, moved to Englewood to be near him. Within months, she was pregnant. Amanda Love Seeley was born Aug. 11, 2003, and the new family eventually took an apartment in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium.
"These were good times," Ms. Chappelle said.
The Road Turns Back
Donald and Laverne Seeley's apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant is next to a lot with a barbed wire fence and a sign that says, "This area is not a bathroom, don't get caught here."
Inside their two-room space, three beds take up most of the floor. Keshawn began sleeping in a bed by the door last year, when his relationship with Ms. Chappelle grew strained.
"He took a shower every day, changed his underwear every day," Donald Seeley said. "He had to wear a tie and stuff like that."
In May, that fell apart too. Art Start lost some financing, and the group laid off Mr. Seeley and two other staff members.
"He really found a home in that program," said Elizabeth Hendler, a former colleague. "It meant having a support system."
Scott Rosenberg, the founder of Art Start, said the group had tried to help Mr. Seeley find work. At first, he seemed fine to his former colleagues.
"He was doing some catering," said Mr. Arias. "He wasn't the type of person to let things bring him down."
But Mr. Seeley had become increasingly negative, anxious about money and even more concerned about what he might have to do get some, according to Rodney Fuller, a friend from Art Start who spoke with him last month. "He left a message on my phone, saying he was worried about the direction things were heading," Mr. Fuller said.
Mr. Seeley had also started spending more time at the Pink Houses.
"He was coming around for a minute," said Mr. Mason, his childhood friend, using a slang term for a lot of time. "The job had laid him off, so he had a little extra time to see his friends."
He was also spending time with Mr. Banks, the friend from the juvenile home. They set about recording a rap album and trying to make money on the streets.
"We did whatever we had to survive," Mr. Banks said, "whatever kind of hustles."
Donald Seeley said he had warned his son away from the Pink Houses.
"I said, 'Don't go over there,' " Mr. Seeley said, "but he was grown."
After midnight on July 15, investigators said, Mr. Mason and Mr. Seeley were standing in the lobby of a building in the Pink Houses where Mr. Mason lived. Another tenant, a man named Michael Nix, was arguing with a woman. That argument had nothing to do with Mr. Seeley, investigators said.
Mr. Nix threw a beer at the woman, she threatened him and he went upstairs. When he came back through the elevator door around 3:30 a.m., investigators said, Mr. Nix was firing a handgun.
On Chickens in the suburbs
Scratch a Suburb, Find a Chicken
By KEN DRUSE
Augusta, N.J.
IT wasn't clear who was more excited on Saturday, the Bove family or their chickens. The family's two older sons, Gene, 12, and Christopher, 10, had entered four birds in the 4-H poultry competition at the New Jersey State Fair here and were waiting with their parents, Gene and Michelle, for the judgment to come down. The chickens, which were scratching at the floors of their cages and cocking their heads to get a good one-eyed look at the gathering crowd, were among 50 exhibited by participants age 8 to 18, as well as 308 more in the adult category, at the 10-day fair, which is expected to attract 200,000 visitors by the time it closes on Sunday.
Mr. and Ms. Bove, who moved early in their marriage from Staten Island to semirural Frankford Township in New Jersey, have 4 children and 24 chickens. They are among a growing number of exurban and suburban Americans who keep the birds not for commercial reasons but as pets, family egg producers, show animals or some combination. The development has been noted by agriculture experts, hatchery owners and chicken-supply sellers across the country, and has been attributed variously to the rise in popularity of organic foods, the desire of parents to expose their children to nature and the influence of Martha Stewart, who has featured "fancy" chickens like the ones at the fair in her magazine and on television. "We have seen a growth in the urban counties and surrounding areas," said Bud Wood, an owner of the Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, the country's largest supplier of two-day-old chicks. In the past, he said, sales to areas where the buyers are likely to be amateur keepers, like cities and towns, were too few and sporadic to keep track of, but he estimated that amateurs are now buying 1,000 of his chicks a week.
Ric Ashcraft, the secretary and treasurer of the American Poultry Association, originally founded for commercial growers, said the organization's membership had tripled in five years, to 12,000. More than half of the members' birds are bantams, smaller heirloom-breed chickens that lay small eggs and are not raised for meat, suggesting that many or most of the organization's members may now be amateurs.
And Russell Masker, the retiring leader of the Sussex County 4-H poultry club, Kicken' Chickens, said that membership in 4-H poultry clubs is on the rise. Many rural members tend sheep, goats, cows or other livestock, but in areas with smaller plots of land, smaller animals make sense. The Sussex County club started seven years ago with 6 members; at this year's fair there were 23, and 3 new members signed up.
Young Gene and Christopher Bove are both members of Kicken' Chickens. Their parents said they left New York in part so their children could learn the responsibility of caring for animals, and like many 4-H parents they see chickenkeeping as a way of interesting their children in something other than video games and computer screens.
Gene, who is vice president of the club, displayed an impressive depth of interest and knowledge as he talked about his chickens; explaining the breeding of his Blue Wyandotte bantam, Flake, for example, he said that for genetic reasons, "you have to breed a black and a blue."
"If you breed two blue ones," he said, "you won't get blues," but mostly blacks.
Gene, although nervous about picking his chickens up, stroked and kissed them gently on the back of the neck once he got a good hold.
Both boys clearly love their birds, as was evident from the way they talked about them. "I took eggs to school and hatched one and took it to all the classrooms, which I wasn't supposed to do," Gene said of a chicken named Peeps, whom he called his favorite.
"She was named after the yellow marshmallow candy," Christopher said.
Peeps came to an untimely end, as do many chickens (whose normal life span is seven to eight years). The exposure to death as well as birth seems to be an important part of the educational experience.
One winter day Peeps was found frozen on the ground near the ramp to her straw-lined box, and fatal raccoon and opossum encounters are common even in the backyards of suburbia. Karen Unrath, the secretary of the American Bantam Association, a group for keepers specializing in the smaller birds, said her son Dieter's favorite bird was killed recently when the pen door shut on it.
"There was a lot of crying," she said, "and much of it was mine."
Robert Powell, the district director for the mid-Atlantic states of the American Poultry Association, was the poultry judge at the fair. He patiently explained every detail of the process to the children, who listened intently. Chickens are given marks of 1 to 4, with 1 being the best. There were few 1's, but no 4's.
First Mr. Powell took a walk around, observing the birds. Then he removed them one by one and gave his critiques. Chickens that were skittish lost points, but Mr. Powell tried to be encouraging: "This bird has a bright future," he said of one obstreperous but comely hen. A chicken that was tame and did not object to being taken out of its small cage was praised, as was its owner.
"This is really hard," Mr. Powell said at one point. "To have three to five birds of this quality in such a small show is remarkable." He held up one hen - a red, white and tan Buff Brahma bantam - and said that it could win in a show with a thousand entrants.
Despite the stiff competition, Gene and Christopher received blue and red ribbons for their birds. "She's happy to be here," Mr. Powell said of Christopher's Black Wyandotte bantam, Ashes. "I can tell she is a superior bird just by picking her up." Flake, he said, was "very well taken care of, very clean."
The best in show trophy went to the Buff Brahma bantam. She was one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever seen, and I found myself fascinated by her.
When I write about plants for this newspaper, I inevitably become so excited that I buy a few from mail-order sources. But I was determined to not let that happen with chickens, which I have successfully resisted keeping even as my neighbors have fallen one by one under their spell. Although I am a sucker for most animals, sharp beaks and leg spurs scare me, and I have always found chickens to be ... well, not very bright. When I hear an enthusiast claim that they have wonderful personalities, I chalk it up to the mania of a zealot.
Even so, when I went to visit the Boves and was asked if I wanted to handle a six-week-old chick from the last "hatch," the avian equivalent of a litter, my heart melted.
The little hen went home with me in a cardboard box, and she is really quite bright. She is a mutt rather than one of the fabulous breeds I saw at the fair, but I do find myself imagining a rustic Adirondack chicken cabin for her, or perhaps a miniature chalet. I have yet to name her, but for now I call her Peeps.
Essays in Search of Happy Endings
And related entry at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
languagelog
Essays in Search of Happy Endings
By MICHAEL WINERIP
LOS ANGELES
LAST spring, not long after a ninth-grade girl was murdered in a drive-by shooting in front of Locke High School, Liza Levine, an English teacher, assigned an essay about what it was like being a student at Locke.
Teachers rarely know the full story behind their students, and this is particularly so at Locke, in South Central, one of the city's poorest and toughest areas. "So much goes on away from school," says Ms. Levine, who loses students to homelessness, pregnancy, work, drugs and jail. She never knows which ones will make it through. Most don't. The ninth grade at Locke four years ago had 979 students; in June, 322 graduated.
The 657 who disappeared? Much of current education reform is aimed at developing a formula to accurately calculate their disappearance; creating programs and new schools to prevent their disappearance, and punishing schools that lose them.
But those who disappeared are teenagers and remain elusive, even when you can ask them why.
Ms. Levine's favorite "Day in the Life" essay was by Lesly Castillo, 15, who was repeating ninth grade, and, the teacher feared, on the verge of dropping out. The teacher liked the quiet honesty of the essay. Ms. Levine usually has three or four students in each class who cannot read and more who do not focus, but says, "I can count on Lesly to be cognitively all there."
Being physically all there is another matter. From Lesly's tattoos, Ms. Levine suspected she was a gang member. Lesly has a history of skipping, and has been taken to court by school officials for truancy. When she missed a few days early in the semester, Ms. Levine called home.
Lesly's mother came in immediately. The parents are Mexican immigrants who do not speak English, common at Locke, where two-thirds of the students are Hispanic, the rest black. Her father works nights for a demolition company removing asbestos, and her mother is a housewife. Lesly's younger brother and sister get A's in elementary school.
"Lesly has two responsive parents," Ms. Levine says. "That's a big part of the battle. I told her mom, she's the kind of kid who can graduate, go to college."
Lesly's attendance improved, which gave Ms. Levine hope. Her midterm grade was C. Then she disappeared the week the class was preparing for the final on "Lord of the Flies," returning in time to try and bluff her way through.
"I gave her a mercy D," Ms. Levine says. "Was it right to pass her? Probably not. But the course teaches them to write for the state test and she has the capability. If I gave her an F, it would have just put her five credits further behind."
A Day in the Life. English, Period 3. Every morning I wake up around 6:30 ... and I tune in the oldies radio station ... My little brother runs to the bathroom first and he takes forever in there so me and my little sister just have to wait ... I wake up arguing with my mom for any reason, so I just can't wait to get to school, just not to be home any more. Once I'm in school I can't be there anymore. I get bored and sometimes that just makes me want to go back home.
When I get to first period it's boring throughout until third period, but not all the times, only sometimes when the lesson is hard to understand or sometimes it's just hard to concentrate in school when you have problems and you're thinking about when it's your next court date or after a whole day in court ... Or just thinking of a way to stay safe when you walk home.
Locke is one of the city's lowest performing schools, although the principal, Dr. Frank Wells, who is starting his second year, and several teachers say there have been gains in recent years. A new after-school program and night school give failing students the chance to make up credits; a second algebra class a day was added to help students pass the state test; a college-prep support program for midlevel students is credited with adding 100 graduates this year.
"Six seniors are going to Ivy League colleges," Dr. Wells says.
Even at Locke, the motivated find opportunity.
As with many city schools, a major obstacle to improving Locke is the exodus of veteran teachers. A quarter of Locke's teachers last year were new; three-quarters had been at Locke five years or less.
The principal is constantly filling vacancies. Lesly's summer school English course was taught by Ammarin Vacharaprusadee, 23 - or Mr. V - a recent college graduate, dispatched to Room 226 at the last minute. "They just gave me the key the first day and said take the class," he says. "They didn't give me a curriculum. No books. I'm making it up as I go."
Several of the 23 students had their heads down much of the class. A few slept. They were supposed to do a half-hour of silent reading and write about it, but only a handful brought books. The rest, including Lesly, were allowed to write an essay on why it's important to bring your book. "If I write, 'I ain't got it; that's why I don't got it,' is that worth points?" asked one of three boys who taunted the young teacher the entire two hours.
Lesly arrived that day in late July having turned in only 5 of 11 assignments. In an hour she handed in the missing six, and Mr. V quickly gave her credit in his grade book. "I was getting a failure and Mr. V said that boosted it to an A," she says.
Mr. V acknowledged that he barely skimmed the dozens of papers handed in that day. "As long as they're turned in they get credit," he says.
THIS is why veterans like Ms. Levine, 47, who started at Locke in 2001, are so important. "She's mastered her craft," says Dr. Wells, the principal, "and I love her heart."
Ms. Levine made a dozen home visits last year. When they read Elie Wiesel's "Night," she took the class to the Holocaust museum in Los Angeles. When they read "Romeo and Juliet," they translated it into modern speech. When a senior with a baby hadn't arrived to take the AP English test, Ms. Levine raced to the girl's home, dropped the baby off at day care and delivered the girl on time.
But it is hard to hold the Ms. Levines. At urban schools a major exodus comes by the fourth year, and Ms. Levine recently decided to leave, for a suburban job.
"I'm racked with guilt," she says. "But you burn out. There's always this feeling that something else bad is going to happen to the kids that's out of your control."
She was angry after hearing why Lesly missed the week before finals. "I called the house," Ms. Levine says. "She told me she'd gone to live with her boyfriend. She said, 'Don't worry, Miss, I'm not with him anymore, he's 24.' I said, 'Lesly, that's statutory rape, he can go to jail.' "
And Lesly? "Didn't say anything," Ms. Levine says.
After fourth period is lunch and I like to kick back and just chill and talk about the problems we have and to find a way to fix them. We only get to kick it for a little while because sometimes we get searched just in case we have any type of weapons or drugs. Then the bell rings to go onto fifth period ... My friends have that class and we just make fun of the teacher.
At the end of the school day my mom picks me up and I go home and just talk on the phone until my dad gets home and starts ripping on me, then we all just start arguing over using the phone. Then around 5:30 me and my mom leave to go to the park to work out ... When I get home I take a look at my caller ID ... My boyfriend calls or just one of my friends calls to tell me about a new problem we have on our backs. Or I also receive calls from homies telling me that one of the homegirls or homeboys got shot or killed or just simply put in jail. Not long ago my homie Caprice, rest in peace, got shot and killed by the police ... It was all over the news.
The Castillos came from Mexico when Lesly was 4. As they struggled up the ladder, they moved eight times in 11 years. Her dad, Ramon, wanted to own a house, and the area he could afford was South Central. It is a small immaculate home on a street bordered by a freeway and junkyard. He says he hopes to sell for a profit, then move away, so his younger children do not have Lesly's troubles. "Everything I do in this country is for my family," he says.
In eighth grade, Lesly says: "My parents were real strict, they wouldn't let me go out. So I went out during school. I had a schedule. Monday I went to school. Tuesday to Thursday I didn't. Friday they gave tests; I went a half day and left after lunch."
Lesly looks mature for her age and liked the attention of older boys, even if they were gang members. "I was 13 they were 18, then like 20, 23, 24." She now attributes much of her trouble to her relationship with the 24-year-old gang leader. At one point, she was sent to court for truancy, another time for a fight when she kicked a girl's eye shut. She had her gang name tattooed in inch-high letters on her left breast. "My dad wouldn't talk to me," Lesly says. "He kept saying why did you do it? You have a family, why do you need them?"
Why did she? "I don't know," Lesly says. "I guess I was just hanging with the wrong people, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time."
Moving in with the 24-year-old was a turning point. It was miserable, she says. He was lazy, wasn't around much, spent most of the time at the house of another girl he'd gotten pregnant. After a week, she returned home.
Recently, through a mutual friend, he sent back her love letters and photos. She tore them up. "He has no power over me," she says. "He can't force me to go back to him."
I also have to go to counseling. Counseling is mostly given to you by court or your parents sign you up ... It's when you do bad in school or at home and in counseling they try to help you ... Personally I think it doesn't work.
When I get home I take a shower. I like to draw ...and listen to some oldies and start to worry on what you have done bad and the consequences. I also think on how to do things right and not to get caught doing bad things. I also try to find a way to stay out of probation, house arrest or do things right so I won't get locked up. After I get tired I put everything away and I go to sleep.
The guidance counselor told Lesly that she still does not have enough credits for 10th grade. Lesly says this fall she will go to after-school from 3:30 to 5 and night school from 5 to 8 to make up the credits. But Ms. Levine says it is a bad sign that Lesly dropped her second summer course, algebra.
"I hope she'll make it," Ms. Levine says. "But I'm too much of a realist. I don't think so."
Lesly's father, too, is guarded. He says he sees small signs of change, but wants to see the grades.
Lesly herself is not sure. "Sometimes I think I can," she says, "but I may not. I've been in ninth grade so many years. Ninth grade! What's hard about ninth grade? I think it's that I haven't been to school so much."
The only person Lesly is allowed out with now is Stephanie Zamora, her best friend since seventh grade. Stephanie is in 11th grade with a B average and has plans for college. Stephanie takes Lesly to her church. Her boyfriend is a senior who plans to join the Marines.
"My boyfriend treats me right," she tells Lesly. "He tries to help me in school. He shows me he cares about me. He's a serious person."
"So serious," Lesly says.
"He cracks a little joke," Stephanie says.
"Only with you," Lesly says.
"Lesly's problem is she goes for the easy stuff," Stephanie says.
"I do."
"She just thinks about the right now," Stephanie says.
"Yeah," Lesly says.
"I'm still worried she'll go back to this guy."
"I'm not going back to him," Lesly says.
One dealing with young, gay, homeless people in New York
And another dealing with the recent powwow, also in New York.
On the Jacob Riis Bathhouse's renovations
By the Sea, a Moorish Palace Reborn
By JILL EISENSTADT
A movie theater? A teenage center?
"Ice skating would be cool," says a young girl in a bright yellow bikini, peering through the locked gates of the newly renovated Jacob Riis Park Bathhouse.
Her father suggests a museum. After all, it was on this sliver of ocean beach in Queens that the first trans-Atlantic flight originated in 1919. Her sand-coated little brother would prefer a chocolate factory. Or swimming.
Indeed, an Olympic-size pool was the preferred plan until studies deemed the maintenance too expensive. Two pools could have fit inside this vast, twin-turreted structure reminiscent of a Moorish palace, the Rockaways' finest architectural gem. There are also a lifeguard station, refurbished in the mid-1990's, and a small police station.
But these uses occupy only a fraction of the pavilion, a city landmark that is eerily empty and still on a recent Sunday afternoon. Despite $22 million in renovations under way, the plans for the building's use seem as hazy as this midsummer day. The only movement is two lanky off-duty lifeguards tossing a tennis ball back and forth.
National Park Service officials don't relieve a visitor's curiosity, saying only that the pavilion will be used as "community space." They say they hope that contractors will complete renovations in time for the 2006 season.
Meanwhile, the curious admire the newly planted hawthorn trees that flank the entry pavilion's Corinthian columns, touch the sandstone wall with its beach motif - scallop shells, crabs and sea horses - and read the plaque announcing the pavilion's opening. "Erected by the City of New York for the Recreation of Its Citizens in the Year 1932."
Back then, the bathhouse had a staff of 600, a rooftop solarium, 9,000 lockers and three restaurants, the largest of which, the Empire Room, had seating for 2,000 and a dance orchestra. But political patronage soon plagued the park's management. Aged lifeguards (those who could swim) spent their working hours fishing and selling their catch to the public. First aid stations became flophouses.
By 1937, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses had fired many workers and rebuilt the vandalized bathhouse, adding, among other features, 11,500 cabanas. Despite the lack of public transportation (then as now), an estimated 125,000 people visited Jacob Riis on a typical weekend day that summer, parking in what was the world's largest paved lot.
Today, only a few dozen souls dot the mile-long beach, boardwalk, barbecue and recreation areas to enjoy one of the best views in the city, encompassing the Atlantic Ocean, Jamaica Bay, the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan and, now that the chain-link fence has been removed, the famed bathing pavilion, originally designed by Stoughton & Plonck.
"So what will it really be?" the girl in the yellow bikini wonders. Dare one suggest bathhouse? For now, she and her family are still changing their clothes in the car.
On Muslims in Europe
An Islamic Alienation
By DAVID RIEFF
Even if they produced no other positive result, the attacks on the London Underground have compelled Europeans of all faiths to think with new urgency about the Continent's Muslim minority. Such a reckoning was long overdue. Some left-wing politicians, like London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, have chosen to emphasize the proximate causes of Muslim anger, focusing on the outrage widely felt in Islamic immigrant communities over the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the harsh reality is that the crisis in relations between the European mainstream and the Islamic diaspora has far deeper roots, consoling as it might be to pretend otherwise.
Indeed, the news could scarcely be worse. What Europeans are waking up to is a difficult truth: the immigrants who perform the Continent's menial jobs, and, as is often forgotten, began coming to Europe in the 1950's because European governments and businesses encouraged their mass migration, are profoundly alienated from European society for reasons that have little to do with the Middle East and everything to do with Europe. This alienation is cultural, historical and above all religious, as much if not more than it is political. Immigrants who were drawn to Europe because of the Continent's economic success are in rebellion against the cultural, social and even psychological sources of that success.
In a sense, Europe's bad fortune is that Islam is in crisis. Imagine that Mexican Catholicism was in a similar state, and that a powerful, well-financed minority of anti-modern purists was doing its most successful proselytizing among Mexican immigrants in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago, above all among the discontented, underemployed youth of the barrios. The predictable, perhaps even the inevitable, result would be the same sort of estrangement between Hispanics and the American mainstream.
Whatever the roots of the present troubles, what is undeniable is that many immigrant Muslims and their children remain unreconciled to their situation in Europe. Some find their traditional religious values scorned, while others find themselves alienated by the independence of women, with all its implications for the future of the ''traditional'' Muslim family. In response, many have turned to the most obscurantist interpretation of the Islamic faith as a salve. At the fringes of the diaspora, some have turned to violence.
So far, at least, neither the carrot nor the stick has worked. Politicians talk of tighter immigration controls. Yet the reality is that a Europe in demographic freefall needs more, not fewer, immigrants if it is to maintain its prosperity. Tony Blair just proposed new laws allowing the deportation of radical mullahs and the shutting of mosques and other sites associated with Islamic extremism. But given the sheer size of the Muslim population in England and throughout the rest of Europe, the security services are always going to be playing catch-up. Working together, and in a much more favorable political and security context, French and Spanish authorities have, after more than 20 years, been unable to put an end to the terrorism of the Basque separatist group ETA. And there are at least twice as many Muslims in France as there are Basques in Spain.
At the same time, it is difficult to see how the extremists' grievances can ever be placated by conciliatory gestures. It is doubtful that the British government's proposed ban on blasphemy against Islam and other religions will have a demonstrable effect. (What would have happened to Salman Rushdie had such a ban been in force when ''The Satanic Verses'' was published?) Meanwhile, the French government has tried to create an ''official'' state-sanctioned French Islam. This approach may be worth the effort, but the chances of success are uncertain. It will require the enthusiastic participation of an Islamic religious establishment whose influence over disaffected youth is unclear. What seems clearer is that European governments have very little time and nowhere near enough knowledge about which members of the Islamic community really are ''preachers of hate'' and which, however unpalatable their views, are part of the immigrant mainstream.
The multicultural fantasy in Europe -- its eclipse can be seen most poignantly in Holland, that most self-definedly liberal of all European countries -- was that, in due course, assuming that the proper resources were committed and benevolence deployed, Islamic and other immigrants would eventually become liberals. As it's said, they would come to ''accept'' the values of their new countries. It was never clear how this vision was supposed to coexist with multiculturalism's other main assumption, which was that group identity should be maintained. But by now that question is largely academic: the European vision of multiculturalism, in all its simultaneous good will and self-congratulation, is no longer sustainable. And most Europeans know it. What they don't know is what to do next. If the broad-brush anti-Muslim discourse of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France or the Vlaams Belang Party in Belgium entered the political mainstream, it would only turn the Islamic diaspora in Europe into the fifth column that, for the moment, it certainly is not. But Europeans can hardly accept an immigrant veto over their own mores, whether those mores involve women's rights or, for that matter, the right to blaspheme, which the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh so bravely asserted -- and died for.
Figuring out how to prevent Europe's multicultural reality from becoming a war of all against all is the challenge that confronts the Continent. It makes all of Europe's other problems, from the economy to the euro to the sclerosis of social democracy, seem trivial by comparison. Unfortunately, unlike those challenges, this one is existential and urgent and has no obvious answer.
A "Lives" article on a man who is no longer a Jehovah's Witness. With a useful bit of advice for what to say when they come a-knockin'.
Turn of Faith
By JOY CASTRO
Adopted at birth in 1967 by a family of Jehovah's Witnesses, I was asked from an early age to behave as much like an adult as possible. Three times a week in the Kingdom Hall in Miami, my brother and I strove to sit perfectly still in our chairs. Our mother carried a wooden spoon in her purse and was quick to take us outside for beatings if we fidgeted.
At 5, I sat onstage in the Kingdom Hall in Surrey, England, where my father's job had taken us. Nervously pushing my memorized lines into the microphone, I faced my mother, who was seated across from me. We were demonstrating for the congregation exactly how a Bible study with a ''worldly'' person, or non-Witness, should go.
I had played the householder before -- the person who answered the door. That was easy: you just asked questions that showed you didn't know the Truth. Portraying the Witness was harder: you had to produce the right Scripture to answer any questions the householder might ask.
But we had written our parts on index cards and rehearsed repeatedly at home. I was well dressed and shining clean. I said my lines flawlessly and gave looks of concern at the right times. Finally, the householder agreed with everything I had said: her way of life was wicked, and the Bible clearly proved that Jehovah's Witnesses were the only true Christians who would be saved at Armageddon. Her look was grateful. Then she smiled, becoming my mother again. Everyone clapped, and she glowed with pride. At last I could go out in service.
From the age of 5 until I was 14, I knocked on the doors of strangers each week with memorized lines that urged them to repent. I didn't play with worldly children. I didn't have birthday parties or Christmas mornings. What I did was pray a lot. I knew the books of the Bible in order, by heart, and could recite various verses. My loneliness was nourished by rich, beautiful fantasies of eternal life in a paradise of peace, justice, racial harmony and environmental purity, a recompense for the rigor and social isolation of our lives.
This bliss wasn't a future we had to work for. Witnesses wouldn't vote, didn't involve themselves in worldly matters, weren't activists. Jehovah would do it all for us, destroying everyone who wasn't a Witness and restoring the earth to harmony. All we had to do was obey and wait.
Shortly after our return to the States, my father was disfellowshipped for being an unrepentant smoker -- smoking violated God's temple, the body, much like fornication and drunkenness. Three years later, my parents' marriage dissolved. My mother's second husband had served at Bethel, the Watchtower's headquarters in Brooklyn. Our doctrines, based on Paul's letters in the New Testament, gave him complete control as the new head of the household; my mother's role was to submit. My stepfather happened to be the kind of person who took advantage of this authority, physically abusing us and forcing us to shun our father completely.
After two years, I ran away to live with my father. My brother joined me a tumultuous six months later. We continued to attend the Kingdom Hall and preach door to door; the Witnesses had been our only community. Leaving was a gradual process that took months of questioning. I respected all faiths deeply, but at 15 I decided that I could no longer be part of a religion that condoned inequality.
After she finally divorced my stepfather, my mother moved out of state and married another Witness. Our occasional correspondence skates over the surface of our strained deténte. I feel for her struggles. A smart, capable woman, she subjugated her will and judgment, as the Witnesses teach, to her husbands'. If she damaged my brother and me or failed to protect us, she did so out of fear and belief. She wanted to save us from certain destruction at Armageddon, from a corrupt and dirty world. She wanted nothing less for us than paradise.
I love my mother, but I also love my ''worldly'' life, the multitude of ideas I was once forbidden to entertain, the rich friendships and the joyous love of my family. By choosing to live in the world she scorned -- to teach in a college, to spare the rod entirely, to believe in the goodness of all kinds of people -- I have, in her eyes, turned my back not only on Jehovah but also on her.
It's strange when Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door now. I know discussion is futile; they have a carefully planned response for any objection. Finally, I say, ''I'm an apostate,'' and their eyes widen at the word: someone who has willfully rejected Jehovah, far worse than a worldly person, who is simply ignorant of the Truth. A threat to the faith of others, an apostate deserves to be shunned, as we were forced to shun our disfellowshipped father. The Witnesses back away from my door.
On Eco-friendly burial sites
Eco-Friendly Burial Sites Give a Chance to Be Green Forever
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
MILL VALLEY, Calif. - Tommy Odom's remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon.
When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures - literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.
Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.
With Fernwood's debut, Mr. Cassity, who likened Mr. Odom's burial to the musical "Hair," became an impresario in a fledgling movement that originated in England.
Fernwood, which has designated about half of its 32 acres green, tries to make death palatable to baby boomers and to simplify an inevitable aspect of life dominated by "the black suits" in America's roughly $15 billion funeral industry. In the United States, the "green" concept is now in use at a handful of cemeteries, compared with about 140 woodland cemeteries in England.
In the green scheme of things, death becomes a vehicle for land conservation and saving the planet. "It is not enough to be a corpse anymore," said Thomas Lynch, an author, poet and Michigan funeral director. "Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse."
But just what is a politically correct corpse is an increasingly thorny issue. In recent months, there has been a struggle for the soul of the emerging industry between Mr. Cassity, an enfant terrible of the funeral business, who has made a fortune producing A&E-style digitized biographies of the dead, and Dr. Billy Campbell, who pioneered the movement in the United States and who has the studious intensity of a somewhat nerdy birder.
Dr. Campbell, a small-town physician prone to quoting John Muir and Coleridge, opened the first of the United States' green burial grounds, the 350-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, S.C., in 1998. There, the departed are buried dust-to-dust-style without embalming - a practice called toxic, artificial and bizarre by critics - in biodegradable coffins or cremation urns that make impervious coffins and grave liners obsolete.
Dr. Campbell was consulting until seven months ago on Fernwood, where eco-interment, also known as an "easement," can cost upward of $15,000 for a prime plot or as little as a few hundred dollars for a scattering of ashes.
Frustrated that conservation easements were not yet in place, he left to form a nonprofit group and a consulting firm in Marin County, Calif, dedicated to land conservation and "little boutique cemeteries with a social justice component," in the words of Joe Sehee, 44, a former Jesuit lay minister and marketing consultant, who is Dr. Campbell's partner.
Dr. Campbell and his former partner are a study in contrasts: Mr. Cassity fantasizes about being buried in cashmere; Dr. Campbell, in a shroud made up of old T-shirts, including "inflammatory ones from the last election," he said.
They are vying for the millions of baby boomers who are expected to die by 2040. The generation of composters who wrote their own wedding vows and opted for natural childbirth is expected to look for something different in death, as a lead character in the HBO series "Six Feet Under" did recently, receiving a green burial in a wooded nature preserve.
"There is a huge generation of people entering accelerated mortality who grew up with the first Earth Day," said Dr. Campbell, who started his eco-cemetery after he was left cold by the prepackaged funeral for his father. "People are ready for something more meaningful."
Mr. Cassity, a GQ-ish sort with rock-star stubble who wears sunglasses indoors, has cultural feelers well tuned for the business. He previously did an extreme makeover of Hollywood Memorial Park, the formerly bankrupt final resting place of Cecil B. DeMille, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sr. With his brother Brent, 38, he runs Forever Enterprises, a Missouri company with cemeteries, cremation societies and a coffin business.
Together, they transformed the once-derelict cemetery into Hollywood Forever, a pastoral "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" of death, where weekend screenings of classic films projected onto the side of Rudolph Valentino's mausoleum attract 2,500 picnickers.
As Forever Hollywood tapped into the zen of Southern California, an oasis for the Rodeo Drive dead, so Mr. Cassity anticipates Fernwood will do for the mountain-biking, Luna bar-eating culture to the north.
"We're in a market, Marin County, where 81 percent chose cremation, an extreme and unprecedented number," Mr. Cassity said.
"Death goes in cycles," he continued. "My best guess is we're finished with the nihilistic 'Let's get it done quick and throw me into the sea thing.' Now, it's, 'Return me to nature and help save the planet.' "
The presence of Fernwood, where the official hearse is a black Volvo S.U.V., in the cool verdant shadows of Mount Tamalpais, reflects Northern California's status as the nation's capital of alternative, artisanal death. The area is home to the death-midwifery movement, supporting home funerals, as well as a cottage industry in plain pine boxes and Funeria, a fraternity of funerary artists who have their own Biennale in San Francisco.
Those opting for eco-burial at Fernwood can buy coffins made of wicker or bamboo, shrouds in a hemp-silk blend and soon, $5,000 "Eco-pods" - a British import made from recycled newspapers and non-toxic glue meant to be a cross between a sarcophagus and a seed pod.
Near the forest path here lies Carolyn Reese Sloss, who died this year at age 84, her cremated remains interred in a biodegradable papier-mâché urn.
Her daughter, Martha Sloss, 52, a psychotherapist, and son-in-law, Murray Silverman, 62, a professor of management at San Francisco State, have reserved their easements in the natural part of the cemetery, a woolly landscape devoid of conventional headstones and navigated by a handheld GPS system. (To come is a lightweight computer that will allow strollers to view digital biographies.)
"As an American, I take up too much of an environmental footprint already," Mr. Silverman said. "To me, taking up more of one after I die is pathetic."
This year, Dr. Campbell, 49, "went ballistic," he said, when he discovered that Fernwood was not adhering to strict environmental precepts, planting inappropriate trees in coastal prairie and digging up land reserved for natural burial with a backhoe.
Dr. Campbell also said he thought that refrigeration would be promoted rather than embalming, which still endures in the older, conventional part of the cemetery, accomplished by a freelance embalmer, known as Dead Ed, on a bicycle.
Dr. Campbell's nonprofit Center for Ethical Burial is developing environmental standards and a strict eco-aesthetic that will preclude hothouse flowers or "gaudy markers marching up the hill," he said.
Ernest Cook, senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land, the national conservation group, who is on the center's board, said that although cemeteries were by nature essentially open spaces, conservation easements to nonprofit land trusts or government agencies would ensure that "the environmental values and concepts you're buying into would be absolutely guaranteed in perpetuity."
If the cemetery is part of a larger landscape undergoing conservation, people who wish to be interred or their heirs could bequeath money to the cause. "If land can be preserved and restored," Mr. Cook said, "it could potentially change the way Americans feel about burial."
The future of green burial may lie with people like Jerry Draper, 53, a computer systems analyst and organic farmer in San Anselmo who is thinking about putting in a green cemetery on an 11-acre lot he owns to avoid selling it off for subdivisions.
"It's about taking responsibility, leaving the campground cleaner than when you left it," he said. "It's about being a Prius instead of a Hummer."
"The Wrong Way Out of a Housing Project"
The Wrong Way Out of a Housing Project
By MICHAEL BRICK and KAREEM FAHIM
They call it the Pink Houses, short for the Louis H. Pink project in East New York, Brooklyn, squat brick towers turned inward around concrete pathways. To a young man, it can seem as if the only jobs around belong to the officers on patrol and the cooks at the fried chicken restaurant on Linden Boulevard.
Two kinds of exits from tough projects like the Pink Houses make people take notice: In the first kind, a ballplayer or rap star gets rich; in the second kind, a hustler dies trying. Plenty of people stay, working, making quiet lives or focusing their energies close to home. And some seek other ways out, ways that do not put your name on a T-shirt or a mural. Keshawn Seeley took one of these.
Childhood was eight brothers and sisters, hip-hop dreams, a drunken father, foster care and juvenile detention, but at age 19, Mr. Seeley was within reach of a modest, steady life. He had a job as a mentor with an arts group, where his musical prowess, gentle nature and street smarts counted. His name became known in homeless shelters and art galleries, and he gained the means to support his daughter, Amanda Love, who turned 2 yesterday.
But for Mr. Seeley, the road turned back. Laid off when the arts group ran short of money and on the outs with his baby's mother, he returned last month to the Pink Houses. When the end came, it barely made the newspapers. Hours before dawn, on a clear 73-degree morning, someone started an argument with a girl, and between the elevator doors of 1212 Loring Avenue and the concrete dolphins out in the courtyard, Keshawn Jamel Seeley bled to death in a spray of gunfire. He was 24 years old.
Over the years, accounts of life in the projects have become the stuff of urban lore, full of spectacular escapes and tragic returns. In a city of less crime and more opportunity, the paths followed by young men like Mr. Seeley offer humbler, more attainable promises, but still no guarantees. The route he took was built on the authenticity of growing up in the projects, for some an abstract symbol of urban menace, for others a place of familiarity, blood and memory.
"This is the 'hood, man, like they always say," said Dominick Page, 29, who watched Keshawn grow up in the Pink Houses and who returns to visit his own mother there. "When you grow up in the 'hood, you always come back."
In the Beginning
Donald and Laverne Seeley became parents together for the fourth time on May 2, 1981. They would have five more children, but Keshawn was the frailest, born premature with a soft spot over his brain.
"A cousin used to call him Light Bulb for his light skin and the shape of his head," Donald Seeley said. "We made his brothers and sisters not touch him."
The family knew troubles and bore them together for a while. Outside the Seeleys' first home, on Gates Avenue, one daughter was killed by a car. When a fire later damaged the house, the ghosts became too much too bear, Mr. Seeley said.
"So much pain struck our family," he said, "I used to drink."
After the fire, the family left Gates Avenue for the Pink Houses. There on Loring Avenue, the 10 remaining Seeleys shared an apartment, and in the courtyards and streets below their cramped rooms, Keshawn made friends.
"Like any other kids, we all got into trouble," said Keith Mason, a friend of Keshawn Seeley's since childhood. "Having rock fights, things like that."
Family life grew volatile, and the authorities removed Keshawn from his parents at age 8, relatives and friends said. He would rejoin the family more than once as a boy, but never for more than two years, instead spending formative years away from his brothers and sisters, several of whom were also in foster care.
As a teenager, Keshawn sold drugs and owned a gun, his friends said. He grew his hair long and wore a bandana. His nickname was Casino. At Graham Windham, a juvenile home in Hastings-on-Hudson, he made a friend, John Banks, and they pursued a course of mischief and petty robbery, Mr. Banks said.
"Throughout our lives, we were in the system," said Mr. Banks, who is now 23. "Our parents weren't stable enough."
But Keshawn's own behavior was unpredictable too. At one group home, he tore up the office, throwing papers everywhere, said Bernadetta Heyward, a counselor. He left an impression, though, that made people want to help him.
"I understood his anger," said Ms. Heyward, who was close to him. She saw him struggle to change, she said. "He learned how to come to someone and say, 'I need to talk.' "
In September 1999, at 18 years old, Mr. Seeley was sent to Rikers Island, where stories like his frequently end. But he was about to catch a break.
A Different Route
Art Start, a nonprofit group in Manhattan, says in promotional materials that its Hip Hop Project helps teenagers who are "on the verge of dropping out of high school, are surviving on the streets or have just been released from prison."
For Keshawn Seeley, it was an immediate fit. In the spring of 2000, as part of a program that finds alternatives to jail for juvenile offenders, he began an internship. Within six months, he had the paid position of office manager, teaching art and performance to children in homeless shelters, said Hector Arias, an artist who works for Art Start.
"He had this experience from life where he would connect with young people," Mr. Arias said. "It was his heart, it wasn't training. The kids would see him and say, 'He's cool. He dresses like me, walks like me, and he looks like me.' "
Mr. Seeley designed an antigun poster and he inspired his charges with rhymes. In 2002, he wrote:
I used to be that grimy cat these rap dudes
Is talking about, now I take a different route.
And the job took him to new places. He showed up at arts fund-raisers in the Hamptons and at a taping of the HBO "Def Poetry Jam," said Danny Simmons, a trustee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and brother of Russell Simmons, the hip-hop impresario.
"He had an intensity about him," Mr. Simmons said, describing Mr. Seeley's appeal to teenagers. "He came from where they came from, but showed them you don't have to be a square to do things a little differently."
When he outgrew the juvenile care system in 2002, Mr. Seeley rented a room above a garage in Englewood, N.J., from an Art Start colleague, Simon Fulford. It was sparse but neat, with a large armchair, a bed and a big television, Mr. Fulford said. There was a kitchen downstairs, and a large bank of windows faced the sunrise over a garden.
Evelyn Chappelle, a girlfriend Mr. Seeley had met three years earlier at Graham Windham, moved to Englewood to be near him. Within months, she was pregnant. Amanda Love Seeley was born Aug. 11, 2003, and the new family eventually took an apartment in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium.
"These were good times," Ms. Chappelle said.
The Road Turns Back
Donald and Laverne Seeley's apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant is next to a lot with a barbed wire fence and a sign that says, "This area is not a bathroom, don't get caught here."
Inside their two-room space, three beds take up most of the floor. Keshawn began sleeping in a bed by the door last year, when his relationship with Ms. Chappelle grew strained.
"He took a shower every day, changed his underwear every day," Donald Seeley said. "He had to wear a tie and stuff like that."
In May, that fell apart too. Art Start lost some financing, and the group laid off Mr. Seeley and two other staff members.
"He really found a home in that program," said Elizabeth Hendler, a former colleague. "It meant having a support system."
Scott Rosenberg, the founder of Art Start, said the group had tried to help Mr. Seeley find work. At first, he seemed fine to his former colleagues.
"He was doing some catering," said Mr. Arias. "He wasn't the type of person to let things bring him down."
But Mr. Seeley had become increasingly negative, anxious about money and even more concerned about what he might have to do get some, according to Rodney Fuller, a friend from Art Start who spoke with him last month. "He left a message on my phone, saying he was worried about the direction things were heading," Mr. Fuller said.
Mr. Seeley had also started spending more time at the Pink Houses.
"He was coming around for a minute," said Mr. Mason, his childhood friend, using a slang term for a lot of time. "The job had laid him off, so he had a little extra time to see his friends."
He was also spending time with Mr. Banks, the friend from the juvenile home. They set about recording a rap album and trying to make money on the streets.
"We did whatever we had to survive," Mr. Banks said, "whatever kind of hustles."
Donald Seeley said he had warned his son away from the Pink Houses.
"I said, 'Don't go over there,' " Mr. Seeley said, "but he was grown."
After midnight on July 15, investigators said, Mr. Mason and Mr. Seeley were standing in the lobby of a building in the Pink Houses where Mr. Mason lived. Another tenant, a man named Michael Nix, was arguing with a woman. That argument had nothing to do with Mr. Seeley, investigators said.
Mr. Nix threw a beer at the woman, she threatened him and he went upstairs. When he came back through the elevator door around 3:30 a.m., investigators said, Mr. Nix was firing a handgun.
On Chickens in the suburbs
Scratch a Suburb, Find a Chicken
By KEN DRUSE
Augusta, N.J.
IT wasn't clear who was more excited on Saturday, the Bove family or their chickens. The family's two older sons, Gene, 12, and Christopher, 10, had entered four birds in the 4-H poultry competition at the New Jersey State Fair here and were waiting with their parents, Gene and Michelle, for the judgment to come down. The chickens, which were scratching at the floors of their cages and cocking their heads to get a good one-eyed look at the gathering crowd, were among 50 exhibited by participants age 8 to 18, as well as 308 more in the adult category, at the 10-day fair, which is expected to attract 200,000 visitors by the time it closes on Sunday.
Mr. and Ms. Bove, who moved early in their marriage from Staten Island to semirural Frankford Township in New Jersey, have 4 children and 24 chickens. They are among a growing number of exurban and suburban Americans who keep the birds not for commercial reasons but as pets, family egg producers, show animals or some combination. The development has been noted by agriculture experts, hatchery owners and chicken-supply sellers across the country, and has been attributed variously to the rise in popularity of organic foods, the desire of parents to expose their children to nature and the influence of Martha Stewart, who has featured "fancy" chickens like the ones at the fair in her magazine and on television. "We have seen a growth in the urban counties and surrounding areas," said Bud Wood, an owner of the Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, the country's largest supplier of two-day-old chicks. In the past, he said, sales to areas where the buyers are likely to be amateur keepers, like cities and towns, were too few and sporadic to keep track of, but he estimated that amateurs are now buying 1,000 of his chicks a week.
Ric Ashcraft, the secretary and treasurer of the American Poultry Association, originally founded for commercial growers, said the organization's membership had tripled in five years, to 12,000. More than half of the members' birds are bantams, smaller heirloom-breed chickens that lay small eggs and are not raised for meat, suggesting that many or most of the organization's members may now be amateurs.
And Russell Masker, the retiring leader of the Sussex County 4-H poultry club, Kicken' Chickens, said that membership in 4-H poultry clubs is on the rise. Many rural members tend sheep, goats, cows or other livestock, but in areas with smaller plots of land, smaller animals make sense. The Sussex County club started seven years ago with 6 members; at this year's fair there were 23, and 3 new members signed up.
Young Gene and Christopher Bove are both members of Kicken' Chickens. Their parents said they left New York in part so their children could learn the responsibility of caring for animals, and like many 4-H parents they see chickenkeeping as a way of interesting their children in something other than video games and computer screens.
Gene, who is vice president of the club, displayed an impressive depth of interest and knowledge as he talked about his chickens; explaining the breeding of his Blue Wyandotte bantam, Flake, for example, he said that for genetic reasons, "you have to breed a black and a blue."
"If you breed two blue ones," he said, "you won't get blues," but mostly blacks.
Gene, although nervous about picking his chickens up, stroked and kissed them gently on the back of the neck once he got a good hold.
Both boys clearly love their birds, as was evident from the way they talked about them. "I took eggs to school and hatched one and took it to all the classrooms, which I wasn't supposed to do," Gene said of a chicken named Peeps, whom he called his favorite.
"She was named after the yellow marshmallow candy," Christopher said.
Peeps came to an untimely end, as do many chickens (whose normal life span is seven to eight years). The exposure to death as well as birth seems to be an important part of the educational experience.
One winter day Peeps was found frozen on the ground near the ramp to her straw-lined box, and fatal raccoon and opossum encounters are common even in the backyards of suburbia. Karen Unrath, the secretary of the American Bantam Association, a group for keepers specializing in the smaller birds, said her son Dieter's favorite bird was killed recently when the pen door shut on it.
"There was a lot of crying," she said, "and much of it was mine."
Robert Powell, the district director for the mid-Atlantic states of the American Poultry Association, was the poultry judge at the fair. He patiently explained every detail of the process to the children, who listened intently. Chickens are given marks of 1 to 4, with 1 being the best. There were few 1's, but no 4's.
First Mr. Powell took a walk around, observing the birds. Then he removed them one by one and gave his critiques. Chickens that were skittish lost points, but Mr. Powell tried to be encouraging: "This bird has a bright future," he said of one obstreperous but comely hen. A chicken that was tame and did not object to being taken out of its small cage was praised, as was its owner.
"This is really hard," Mr. Powell said at one point. "To have three to five birds of this quality in such a small show is remarkable." He held up one hen - a red, white and tan Buff Brahma bantam - and said that it could win in a show with a thousand entrants.
Despite the stiff competition, Gene and Christopher received blue and red ribbons for their birds. "She's happy to be here," Mr. Powell said of Christopher's Black Wyandotte bantam, Ashes. "I can tell she is a superior bird just by picking her up." Flake, he said, was "very well taken care of, very clean."
The best in show trophy went to the Buff Brahma bantam. She was one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever seen, and I found myself fascinated by her.
When I write about plants for this newspaper, I inevitably become so excited that I buy a few from mail-order sources. But I was determined to not let that happen with chickens, which I have successfully resisted keeping even as my neighbors have fallen one by one under their spell. Although I am a sucker for most animals, sharp beaks and leg spurs scare me, and I have always found chickens to be ... well, not very bright. When I hear an enthusiast claim that they have wonderful personalities, I chalk it up to the mania of a zealot.
Even so, when I went to visit the Boves and was asked if I wanted to handle a six-week-old chick from the last "hatch," the avian equivalent of a litter, my heart melted.
The little hen went home with me in a cardboard box, and she is really quite bright. She is a mutt rather than one of the fabulous breeds I saw at the fair, but I do find myself imagining a rustic Adirondack chicken cabin for her, or perhaps a miniature chalet. I have yet to name her, but for now I call her Peeps.
Essays in Search of Happy Endings
And related entry at
languagelogEssays in Search of Happy Endings
By MICHAEL WINERIP
LOS ANGELES
LAST spring, not long after a ninth-grade girl was murdered in a drive-by shooting in front of Locke High School, Liza Levine, an English teacher, assigned an essay about what it was like being a student at Locke.
Teachers rarely know the full story behind their students, and this is particularly so at Locke, in South Central, one of the city's poorest and toughest areas. "So much goes on away from school," says Ms. Levine, who loses students to homelessness, pregnancy, work, drugs and jail. She never knows which ones will make it through. Most don't. The ninth grade at Locke four years ago had 979 students; in June, 322 graduated.
The 657 who disappeared? Much of current education reform is aimed at developing a formula to accurately calculate their disappearance; creating programs and new schools to prevent their disappearance, and punishing schools that lose them.
But those who disappeared are teenagers and remain elusive, even when you can ask them why.
Ms. Levine's favorite "Day in the Life" essay was by Lesly Castillo, 15, who was repeating ninth grade, and, the teacher feared, on the verge of dropping out. The teacher liked the quiet honesty of the essay. Ms. Levine usually has three or four students in each class who cannot read and more who do not focus, but says, "I can count on Lesly to be cognitively all there."
Being physically all there is another matter. From Lesly's tattoos, Ms. Levine suspected she was a gang member. Lesly has a history of skipping, and has been taken to court by school officials for truancy. When she missed a few days early in the semester, Ms. Levine called home.
Lesly's mother came in immediately. The parents are Mexican immigrants who do not speak English, common at Locke, where two-thirds of the students are Hispanic, the rest black. Her father works nights for a demolition company removing asbestos, and her mother is a housewife. Lesly's younger brother and sister get A's in elementary school.
"Lesly has two responsive parents," Ms. Levine says. "That's a big part of the battle. I told her mom, she's the kind of kid who can graduate, go to college."
Lesly's attendance improved, which gave Ms. Levine hope. Her midterm grade was C. Then she disappeared the week the class was preparing for the final on "Lord of the Flies," returning in time to try and bluff her way through.
"I gave her a mercy D," Ms. Levine says. "Was it right to pass her? Probably not. But the course teaches them to write for the state test and she has the capability. If I gave her an F, it would have just put her five credits further behind."
A Day in the Life. English, Period 3. Every morning I wake up around 6:30 ... and I tune in the oldies radio station ... My little brother runs to the bathroom first and he takes forever in there so me and my little sister just have to wait ... I wake up arguing with my mom for any reason, so I just can't wait to get to school, just not to be home any more. Once I'm in school I can't be there anymore. I get bored and sometimes that just makes me want to go back home.
When I get to first period it's boring throughout until third period, but not all the times, only sometimes when the lesson is hard to understand or sometimes it's just hard to concentrate in school when you have problems and you're thinking about when it's your next court date or after a whole day in court ... Or just thinking of a way to stay safe when you walk home.
Locke is one of the city's lowest performing schools, although the principal, Dr. Frank Wells, who is starting his second year, and several teachers say there have been gains in recent years. A new after-school program and night school give failing students the chance to make up credits; a second algebra class a day was added to help students pass the state test; a college-prep support program for midlevel students is credited with adding 100 graduates this year.
"Six seniors are going to Ivy League colleges," Dr. Wells says.
Even at Locke, the motivated find opportunity.
As with many city schools, a major obstacle to improving Locke is the exodus of veteran teachers. A quarter of Locke's teachers last year were new; three-quarters had been at Locke five years or less.
The principal is constantly filling vacancies. Lesly's summer school English course was taught by Ammarin Vacharaprusadee, 23 - or Mr. V - a recent college graduate, dispatched to Room 226 at the last minute. "They just gave me the key the first day and said take the class," he says. "They didn't give me a curriculum. No books. I'm making it up as I go."
Several of the 23 students had their heads down much of the class. A few slept. They were supposed to do a half-hour of silent reading and write about it, but only a handful brought books. The rest, including Lesly, were allowed to write an essay on why it's important to bring your book. "If I write, 'I ain't got it; that's why I don't got it,' is that worth points?" asked one of three boys who taunted the young teacher the entire two hours.
Lesly arrived that day in late July having turned in only 5 of 11 assignments. In an hour she handed in the missing six, and Mr. V quickly gave her credit in his grade book. "I was getting a failure and Mr. V said that boosted it to an A," she says.
Mr. V acknowledged that he barely skimmed the dozens of papers handed in that day. "As long as they're turned in they get credit," he says.
THIS is why veterans like Ms. Levine, 47, who started at Locke in 2001, are so important. "She's mastered her craft," says Dr. Wells, the principal, "and I love her heart."
Ms. Levine made a dozen home visits last year. When they read Elie Wiesel's "Night," she took the class to the Holocaust museum in Los Angeles. When they read "Romeo and Juliet," they translated it into modern speech. When a senior with a baby hadn't arrived to take the AP English test, Ms. Levine raced to the girl's home, dropped the baby off at day care and delivered the girl on time.
But it is hard to hold the Ms. Levines. At urban schools a major exodus comes by the fourth year, and Ms. Levine recently decided to leave, for a suburban job.
"I'm racked with guilt," she says. "But you burn out. There's always this feeling that something else bad is going to happen to the kids that's out of your control."
She was angry after hearing why Lesly missed the week before finals. "I called the house," Ms. Levine says. "She told me she'd gone to live with her boyfriend. She said, 'Don't worry, Miss, I'm not with him anymore, he's 24.' I said, 'Lesly, that's statutory rape, he can go to jail.' "
And Lesly? "Didn't say anything," Ms. Levine says.
After fourth period is lunch and I like to kick back and just chill and talk about the problems we have and to find a way to fix them. We only get to kick it for a little while because sometimes we get searched just in case we have any type of weapons or drugs. Then the bell rings to go onto fifth period ... My friends have that class and we just make fun of the teacher.
At the end of the school day my mom picks me up and I go home and just talk on the phone until my dad gets home and starts ripping on me, then we all just start arguing over using the phone. Then around 5:30 me and my mom leave to go to the park to work out ... When I get home I take a look at my caller ID ... My boyfriend calls or just one of my friends calls to tell me about a new problem we have on our backs. Or I also receive calls from homies telling me that one of the homegirls or homeboys got shot or killed or just simply put in jail. Not long ago my homie Caprice, rest in peace, got shot and killed by the police ... It was all over the news.
The Castillos came from Mexico when Lesly was 4. As they struggled up the ladder, they moved eight times in 11 years. Her dad, Ramon, wanted to own a house, and the area he could afford was South Central. It is a small immaculate home on a street bordered by a freeway and junkyard. He says he hopes to sell for a profit, then move away, so his younger children do not have Lesly's troubles. "Everything I do in this country is for my family," he says.
In eighth grade, Lesly says: "My parents were real strict, they wouldn't let me go out. So I went out during school. I had a schedule. Monday I went to school. Tuesday to Thursday I didn't. Friday they gave tests; I went a half day and left after lunch."
Lesly looks mature for her age and liked the attention of older boys, even if they were gang members. "I was 13 they were 18, then like 20, 23, 24." She now attributes much of her trouble to her relationship with the 24-year-old gang leader. At one point, she was sent to court for truancy, another time for a fight when she kicked a girl's eye shut. She had her gang name tattooed in inch-high letters on her left breast. "My dad wouldn't talk to me," Lesly says. "He kept saying why did you do it? You have a family, why do you need them?"
Why did she? "I don't know," Lesly says. "I guess I was just hanging with the wrong people, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time."
Moving in with the 24-year-old was a turning point. It was miserable, she says. He was lazy, wasn't around much, spent most of the time at the house of another girl he'd gotten pregnant. After a week, she returned home.
Recently, through a mutual friend, he sent back her love letters and photos. She tore them up. "He has no power over me," she says. "He can't force me to go back to him."
I also have to go to counseling. Counseling is mostly given to you by court or your parents sign you up ... It's when you do bad in school or at home and in counseling they try to help you ... Personally I think it doesn't work.
When I get home I take a shower. I like to draw ...and listen to some oldies and start to worry on what you have done bad and the consequences. I also think on how to do things right and not to get caught doing bad things. I also try to find a way to stay out of probation, house arrest or do things right so I won't get locked up. After I get tired I put everything away and I go to sleep.
The guidance counselor told Lesly that she still does not have enough credits for 10th grade. Lesly says this fall she will go to after-school from 3:30 to 5 and night school from 5 to 8 to make up the credits. But Ms. Levine says it is a bad sign that Lesly dropped her second summer course, algebra.
"I hope she'll make it," Ms. Levine says. "But I'm too much of a realist. I don't think so."
Lesly's father, too, is guarded. He says he sees small signs of change, but wants to see the grades.
Lesly herself is not sure. "Sometimes I think I can," she says, "but I may not. I've been in ninth grade so many years. Ninth grade! What's hard about ninth grade? I think it's that I haven't been to school so much."
The only person Lesly is allowed out with now is Stephanie Zamora, her best friend since seventh grade. Stephanie is in 11th grade with a B average and has plans for college. Stephanie takes Lesly to her church. Her boyfriend is a senior who plans to join the Marines.
"My boyfriend treats me right," she tells Lesly. "He tries to help me in school. He shows me he cares about me. He's a serious person."
"So serious," Lesly says.
"He cracks a little joke," Stephanie says.
"Only with you," Lesly says.
"Lesly's problem is she goes for the easy stuff," Stephanie says.
"I do."
"She just thinks about the right now," Stephanie says.
"Yeah," Lesly says.
"I'm still worried she'll go back to this guy."
"I'm not going back to him," Lesly says.
