that Promise many, many years, asking big, wide questions. Life will reveal it to you by giving you clues and bringing many wise people into your world. Those people will tell stories that will help you feel more alive. Pay attention the way you do to riddles, because they can lead you forward.”
We’re standing in her kitchen next to the window where sunshine pours in on a table covered with shiny red oilcloth. Her gnarled fingers turn an oversized glass bowl upside down, and a mound of newly risen golden bread dough plops out. She slaps it down hard and says, “This is what the world does to you sometimes. It slaps you into shape, pushes you around, stretches you. This can make the talents you bring even stronger, Ketzaleh. The yeast in the dough is like the Promise that wants those talents to rise and reach out to others.” As her fingers knead the dough firmly, she insists, “You must not give up. Keep searching for that Promise and for people that will help it rise again. There are forces and choices that flatten life and those that grow and inspire it.”
I can’t wait another minute, so I ask, “Grandma, will the wise people tell me what my Promise is? Do I have to make bread every Friday like you do to find it?”
She wipes her hands on the apron and covers the bowl with a yellow checked dishtowel. As I push it back into the sunny spot, she says, “My Promise is like the bread, Ketzaleh. I sit with people helping them be born. I do what I can to help the Life Force, the yeast, rise and take form. Your Promise is more like the bowl. That’s all I can tell you now.”
“My Promise is like a bowl?”
“Yes, like a bowl that will shatter when challenged. You need to learn how to mend the Bowl of Life so it is stronger than before to realize the Promise inside you.”
The questions in my mind push out of my lips. “One more question, Grandma, just one. I’m sorry to keep asking, but I have to know—what happens after I find the Promise and keep it, then what?”
She turns to me, holding each of my cheeks in her warm palms and looking with infinite patience into the mirrors of my eyes. “You never have to apologize for your questions, dear one. Risk reaching for them, risk following them. As for what happens after you live out the Promise, well, by then, you’ll be an old wise woman. Your prayers, your dreams, your gifts will flow beyond you into the River of Life so it can touch whoever comes after you.”
In high school, I perfected the art of the shrug. The thing I said the most often was, “I’m bored.” I had skipped a grade twice in elementary and middle school, and, at fifteen, the last thing I wanted was to stand out as special in any way. I was a flat-chested senior who still hadn’t gotten her period. I figured out how to dumb myself down by simplifying my vocabulary and putting enough wrong answers on tests so that I could maintain a C average. But I was bored, bored all the way down to my bone marrow. All I wanted was to be left alone under the blankets with a flashlight or in my school locker, reading anything and everything I could find.
I decided my salvation would come in college. My mother and father both thought it was a waste of time, but I convinced them that I’d just be moping around the house and driving them crazy if I didn’t go. They finally agreed, but only if I studied something that could lead to finding a husband: nursing would be best because it would expose me to a lot of doctors. Teaching was second-best, because I’d at least learn how to prepare for motherhood. Morton Barron, my high school counselor, suggested that, since I had a straight C average, the only safe school that I could get into was Syracuse University. I followed his “guidance,” because at least it would take me away from boredom.
Of course, first I had to take the College Board exams. Unfettered by the need to dumb myself down, I surfed right through the waves of questions easily. A few weeks later, Morton Barron called me back into his office to ask how I had managed to cheat on the College Boards. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just shrugged. He explained that I had earned virtually perfect scores on all the tests and that no girl with a straight C average could do that. He insisted I take them again. A week after I did so, he called me back and said the results were exactly the same. Maybe I hadn’t cheated, he conceded, but it was too late to apply to a better school, perfect scores or not. My mother became concerned that no prince would want a wife who was smarter than he. My father looked around the 721-acre campus of Syracuse with its tens of thousands of diverse students and knew his little princess was going to be lost.
Which I was, of course. Lost, and still bored, bored, bored. In education classes, they taught me how to draw Easter bunnies and put swabs of cotton on their backsides. But in sophomore year, my mind broke open like buds on a spring cherry tree. I didn’t “take” classes, I consumed them: anthropology, biology, cognitive psychology, neurology, philosophy. After three years devouring the undergraduate curriculum, I applied for a grant to an experimental master’s/doctoral program at Columbia. I was admitted. I knew my parents wouldn’t pay for such a “waste of time,” so I got a job taking care of the fifth graders no one else wanted to teach in a Harlem elementary school to pay my tuition.
I didn’t think teaching had anything to do with my Promise. I just assumed it was a way of earning enough money to pursue the questions that nagged me more than my mother. Why couldn’t my father learn to read when he was such a brilliant leader? Why was I so miserable at learning to throw a softball or swim even though I could master Latin with ease? The kids I was teaching were another riddle. They came to school with rat bites on their cheeks, but my grandmother had taught me that each one of them mattered to the world in a very specific way. I assumed they were all riddles. I noticed that Myron did best when he bounced a basketball while saying the alphabet but spaced out when looking at written words on a page. Jason hated phonics, but he could focus his eyes on a whole paragraph, read it silently, and then draw what it was about. Charlene could read only if she was in a rocking chair or pacing around the room.
None of the classes I was taking at Columbia helped me to understand these differences. I was taught how to classify, recognize, and treat pathology. This would have been useful if I wanted to help these kids get sick, go crazy, or grow up dumb, but never once did I ever hear a professor describe what a healthy human mind is, how it learns, or how one mind can communicate effectively with another.
Just as my grandmother had predicted, inspiring life-giving forces were also available to me. In the spring of my last year, I took a course at NYU with a brilliant neuroscientist named E. Roy John. He considered himself a quantitative electroencephalographist. Whatever that was, he reminded me most of a very tall dessert cactus, a night-blooming cereus, that produces immense white blossoms every June. In Roy’s case, the blossoms opened when he placed little electrodes all over a person’s skull and hooked them up to electroencephalographic equipment he had invented. I stood next to him and watched in awe as a child’s brain lit up in its own unique way. He had developed a mechanism to actually watch a human think and learn! I knew that what I was seeing would change the way I thought and taught for the rest of my life.
One by one, I brought the kids from Harlem to the lab and we hooked each one up. I suggested specific things for them to think about. Myron’s brain lit up when he imagined doing kinesthetic activities such as running. It spaced out, however, when he thought about writing or reading. Jason’s brain lit up imagining writing or drawing but spaced out with auditory tasks such as speaking or music. Miranda’s spaced out imagining running or dancing but lit up when she thought about talking or singing. Both Roy and I were stunned. Child after child gave us more corroboration that, although each brain’s structure was similar, each one was energized by a different method of processing information.
One night, while listening to a concert of “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin, it dawned on me that brains functioned just like musical instruments. Instruments all used vibration to produce sounds, but some
