gat

"Darktown Strutters Ball," "Old Black Joe," and others. No discussion of race preceded or
followed; they were just songs. Before you conclude my memories are daft and that Mon City
must be a bigoted place, you need to know its tiny population contained the broadest diversity of
ethnic groups living together in harmony. Ninety years earlier it had been a regular stop on the
Underground Railroad. The barn of the Anawalt house was used for that purpose all through the
1850s.
If Vico’s notion in The New Science is correct, we encounter the world in ways first implicit in
ourselves. There can be no filling of blank slates in education, no pouring of wisdom into empty
children. If Vico is correct, the Monongahela I bring dripping to you from the bottom of my river
memory is a private city, revealing the interior of my own mind. Whether you believe that the Fall
is real or only a metaphor for the feeling we get when by losing our way home we find ourselves
cut off from the creative source, who I am and why I taught the way I did is long ago and far
away in that town, those people, that green river, not in any course of scientific pedagogy.
I Hung Around A Lot In Monongahela
The great destructive myth of the twentieth century was the aggressive contention that a child
couldn’t grow up correctly in the unique circumstances of his own family. In order to avoid
having you finish this essay with the feeling it might have been all right for my family to influence
my growth so intensely, but for many children with worse families that just wouldn’t do, fix your
attention a minute on the less savory aspects of my people, as they might be seen through social
service eyes. Both sets of grandparents and my mother and father were seriously alienated from
one another, the men from the women and vice versa.
On the Zimmer side, heavy drinking and German/Irish tempers led to one violent conflict after
another, conflicts to which my sister and I were fully exposed. We grew like weeds as children,
with full run of the town, including its most dangerous places, had no effective curfew, and tended
to excess in everything. Did I forget to mention the constant profanity? By up-to-the-minute big
city standards my family skirted the boundary of court-ordered family dissolution more than once.
Since a substantial number of the families I worked with productively as a schoolteacher had rap
sheets similar to my own by social hygiene standards, I want to offer you my Monongahela years
as a case study of how a less than ideal family by social work standards can still teach courage,
love, duty, self-reliance; can awaken curiosity and wonder; can be a laboratory for independent
thought, well-rooted identity, and communitarian feelings; and can grow in memory as a beloved
companion even when it is composed of ghosts.
The city of Monongahela itself is offered as a case study of a different sort, showing the power of
common places to return loyalty by animating the tiniest details of existence. The town is a main
character in my personal story, a genius loci interacting with my development as a schoolteacher.
I invested an extreme amount of effort in the physical presence of my classrooms, I think, because
Table of Contents
Page 236