During my second year of undergrad, I took a class on power and infrastructural inequities in American education. My classmates and I were required to attend class twice a week, as well as complete a minimum number of placement hours as teaching assistants in local public schools. Additionally, we had to write a weekly short paper, our professor asking us to reflect on our placements, our coursework, and our personal experiences as both students and humans. It was a wild semester, exhausting in the best possible way— it felt like I was always on one of the poorly-timed, badly-driven buses that stumbled across Lansing and East Lansing, Michigan. And if I wasn’t on said buses, I was scrawling out lesson plans, inventing ways to trick eleven-year-olds into thinking reading comprehension was An Exciting Endeavor, swapping brainstorms with my peers, reveling in the baby-sized successes and dumpster fires that resulted.
One week, the prompt for our short paper was basically a polite rephrasing of the question “how the hell did I get here?” By “here,” our professor meant “into radical education work.” She wanted us to reflect on how we had each fetched up in her classroom. I probably initially thought I was going to write about my whiteness and how it informed my education practices, combined with how I had always loved working with kids and working in schools just fell into my lap as a result. But by deadline a few days later, the work I submitted was a different creature entirely. The paper was part memory, part re-telling of a children’s book, and part reflection on the meaning of care in the context of schooling. But above all, that paper was a love letter to my father.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a book household. My parents had time and energy to spare for reading to my little sibling and I, and made an aggressive point of doing so. Mum and Dad also both enjoyed reading, and bookshelves abounded in each of the apartments and houses we lived in. My sibling and I were well stocked; we’re talking Magic School Bus, decades-old rhymes and songs from the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, Beatrix Potter, the Max and Ruby books, the Alfie and Annie-Rose series, Vera Williams’s books about chairs and cherries, Ezra Jack Keats, and the nightmare genius of Maurice Sendak. Books about animals that talked, siblings that fought but made up (nice try, Mum), food, and adventures. Short chapter books, epic novels, picture books with watercolor or collage illustrations— our parents diligently read seemingly any and everything to us for years.
One of the picture books we returned to many a time was called Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney. The story recounts the life of Alice Rumphius, a fictional character partly based on one Hilda Hamlin, a woman who lived in Maine in the 1800s and was locally known as the “lupin lady” because she spread the seeds of lupin flowers everywhere she went. In Miss Rumphius, main character Alice does the same, after living a full and varied life all over the world. At the start of the book, she is a child in an unnamed American shipping town, learning about faraway places and the glories of travel from her grandfather. Little Alice declares that when she grows up, she will travel and see all the things that her grandfather has spoken of. Her grandfather informs her that while all that is well and good, it is of utmost importance that she find a way to make the world more beautiful, too. Little Alice promises her grandfather that she will do as he asks. She’s unsure of how, exactly, but is confident that she will. She then goes on to not only become a world-traveler, but a single woman world-traveler, trotting the globe at a time when such conduct was unheard of. (This, in particular, is something I really love about this book.)
As it turns out, though, keeping her promise to her grandfather gets no less confusing as Alice gets older. Over the course of her travels (this part of the book does not age entirely gracefully; there’s some white gaze and othering/fetishization of non-whiteness in there), she grapples with herself. How does one make the world more beautiful? What is enough? How does one know when one has succeeded? Ultimately, it is not until Alice has retired from her journeying, slowed by a back injury, that an answer presents itself. As she recuperates, she falls in love with the many lupin flowers outside her window, back in an unnamed town in the United States. She orders packets of lupin seeds in the mail, and when she is able to walk independently again, Alice (now known as Miss Rumphius) spreads the seeds all over town. Initially, the neighbors are bewildered by Miss Rumphius’s behavior. But when spring rolls around, seemingly every square inch of space bursts into bloom with lupins, and Miss Rumphius is satisfied at long last. She has kept her promise to her grandfather, and done something to make the world more beautiful.
The book ends with the revelation that Miss Rumphius’s grand-niece, another Little Alice, has been narrating all along, and that she herself is now committed to keeping the same promise that her great-aunt kept. This Little Alice has her own doubts about how she will make the world more beautiful. But, like her great-aunt before her, she is sure that she will find a way. And it was this that I eventually found myself fixating on as I prepared to write my “why do I do this work?” short paper.
The more I thought about it, walking back to my dorm room, hunching over my laptop, trawling my mental back catalogue, the more insistent my memories surrounding Miss Rumphius became. During my adolescence, social engagement and action were fairly present in my nuclear family’s zeitgeist, courtesy of my mother and father’s career switches into care and education in their 40s. Not to mention, my mother has been a gun-control activist since well before I understood what that meant. She was participating in group actions with other mothers in support of getting America’s decades-old epidemic of gun violence under control as early as the mid-1990s. But my first concrete memory of talking about contributing to the betterment of larger society in the context of my life, I came to realize, was (and is) anchored by this Barbara Cooney book, and what my father had to say about it.
As I remember it, there was a specific read-aloud of Miss Rumphius that my father did for my younger sibling and I, when we were maybe six and three. This would’ve been the billionth reading of the book, probably— I have a history of going through phases of fixation. (Around age five, I became obsessed with the soundtrack from the musical Annie and forced my family to listen to it nonstop for over a year.) My mother and father were probably forced to read Miss Rumphius, along with plenty of other books, aloud to us ad nauseam. But I specifically remember this one reading with Dad because it concluded with him closing the book, looking over at my sibling and I, and saying, “this is what all of us have to do. Both of you, and everyone else, is responsible for helping to make the world more beautiful.”
“What’re you and Mum doing about that?” I asked.
“Your mother already had you two,” he said. “She already made the world a better place. I’m still figuring out what it is that I can do.”
My major takeaways from this exchange, as a six-year-old:
ok, girls have an easy out with beautifying the world. We have the stomach thing that lets us make babies, so I can do that if I can’t come up with anything else.
wow, Poppy has a lot of work ahead of him. That sounds hard.
It wasn’t until thirteen years later, prompted to reflect on my path into radical education by a college instructor, that I realized exactly how foundational my father’s words about Miss Rumphius had been in my development as a human being (also, exactly how fanciful my six-year-old take on childbearing had been). I could trace through lines from my childhood into my adolescence that stemmed from that early urging to find a way to make the world more beautiful. I was a difficult pre-teen, and an absolutely corrosive mess of toxicity as a fully-fledged teen, but the push to care, to make, to do was always there. Even in my ugliest moments. Miss Rumphius started it, I wrote in that paper. My dad and Miss Rumphius.
My father is turning 60 next week. It’s a bit of a deal.
The youngest of eight, he’s the last of his siblings to hit every significant age benchmark. I remember his 40th birthday, and the shirts one of his sisters had made: a bluish-black-and-white picture of him as toddler screened onto them, and red-orange text shouting “LORDY, LORDY, THE BABY’S FORTY.” For his 50th, when asked by my mother what he wanted for gifts, he (in typical fashion) said he didn’t want any, but if gifts HAD to be given, new cushions for his work office would be fine. Mum decided to commit to this bit, and told his siblings about the request. The spectrum of cushions that resulted (sequins, weird animals, fluff, squish) was historic. 60 is certainly a big deal for everyone, too. Especially given how little time he has gotten with his siblings since March 2020.
Dad is the last of one generation, and deeply tied to the next; he’s had nieces and nephews for longer than he’s been a legal adult. He is a parent and a partner, but also a sibling and relative. So while I have proverbially gathered you all here on Substack today in order to listen to me talk about how my father not only helped me grow into some of the best parts of myself, but how he has done his own work to help make the world more beautiful, I cannot talk about him without talking first about where he comes from, specifically in the context of family. Here he is: father, husband, brother, cousin, uncle, godfather, great uncle. And here he also is: a person of deep muchness, deep capacity for creating beauty in the world, that an unknowing observer might miss, given how diligently my father avoids centering himself in company.
Unfortunately for him, as his daughter, I have free rein to center him, whether he likes it or not. To add insult to injury, he’s one if the ones who has been telling me (and the world at large) that I am a writer for over twenty years. So.
Reap what you sow, PMC.
My father is a devoted member of his professional community; a lifelong learner who is committed to improving in his craft of care for others. He is a beloved friend. He is an emphatically friendly neighbor. He is the family dog’s bestest-ever alpha. He likes doing yard work. He loves being in the kitchen. He enjoys routine. He is not upset by stale toast. He can eat more popcorn than you, then make you your own popcorn (with fresh caramel if you want it, but also, have you tried it with coconut oil and sugar?). He can drive for eight hours without stopping. He will show up for pretty much anyone, whether it’s to be of use or just to be there. One of my favorite photos of him features his legs sticking out of a rain barrel into which he had crawled, just so that he could help his neighbor fix the barrel’s faucet. Another favorite picture: him trying on one of his sisters’ new wigs while visiting with her between chemo treatments.
My father gets stuck in a frustrating situation and calls it an opportunity for meditation. He will help you move. He will learn the barista’s name, and the name of the barista’s dog and boyfriend. He will not watch violent movies. He will wear a pair of shoes until they are no longer shoes. He makes art. He has learned to accept cats. He reads books for his continuing education courses and enjoys it so much, he then reads MORE books for work and calls it a “fun time.”
My father made up (and sang) more nonsense songs during my childhood than Elton John and Bernie Taupin did in the 1970s. He left my sibling and I scavenger hunts when he had overnight work trips when we were little, with boxes of chocolate milk as prizes. He is excellent at cooking with potatoes, but also with za’atar. He slept in blanket tents next to the humidifier with me when I was little and my lungs were bad. He cooked for, entertained, and changed the catheter for, his best friend after they got surgery. He went back to school in his 40s, upended his career trajectory, and became the professional he hadn’t known he was meant to be.
My father coached my sibling’s childhood soccer team, even though he knew exactly nothing about soccer. Neither my father nor my mother nor I fully understand the graduate research my sibling is doing, but Dad will ask questions and absorb answers endlessly about it because he loves hearing his children talk about what they do. My father loves Peanuts cartoons. My father can communicate solely in Peanuts cartoons. My father is a Peanuts cartoon. He has been preparing gluten-free food for me since the day I was told I had to stop eating wheat, and keeps wheat and wheat-free cooking utensils separate by the stove like he’s been doing it since he was born.
My father loves photography. He gets his hometown newspaper sent to him in the mail from hundreds of miles away. He mostly does not answer calls on his phone, but almost always answers my mother’s phone when my sibling or I call because he knows what our ringtones sound like (I am a duck. My sibling is a rotary phone.). My father has not had a drink in fifteen years. He works on being a better father every day, the ages of his children be damned. My father devotes himself to deepening his understandings of anti-racist practices and rhetoric in order to enact them in his work. My father has an emoji for everything.
My father curates sets of YouTube videos about animals getting rescued and rehabilitated for my mother. He bakes my mother cake. He lets himself laugh with my mother in a way he does not laugh with anyone else. My father chooses my mother every day like it’s still 1988 and the Red Bird trains are still operating on the tracks of the New York subway and he and my mother are falling in love for the first time.
My father is. And the world is more beautiful because of it.
Knowing him, Dad is never going to tell you he’s done the beautification thing successfully. He’s playing the long game, and that’s how he thinks about it— keep going, keep trying, until you’ve run down the clock. I get it; I am the same. I get it from him. Though we work in different fields, our Venn diagrams overlap often, and our attitudes towards our professions are eerily similar: plant the seeds, do the labor, accept responsibility for the privileges afforded by whiteness and class, and deploy them as tools of change as best we can, do not attach to outcomes. We want good things to happen, but for now, we’re here and we’re working. And he’s turning 60 next week, and it’s a bit of a deal, because he is a brother and father and partner and uncle and cousin and great-uncle and godparent and friend and neighbor and a hardworking care professional and someone who loves deeply and everything else and more. He is part of the reason why I am what I am, and why I do what I do.
My father is turning 60 next week, and it’s a bit a of a deal. But then again, so is the fact that we have him in the first place. He has made the world more beautiful. And he will continue to, too.