June 4 & 11, 2018 Issue

Rivka Galchen has two excellent pieces in this week’s issue – “The Teaching Moment” and “Mum’s the Word.” “The Teaching Moment” is about a recent teachers’ walkout in Oklahoma, protesting low pay and cuts to education spending. As Galchen points out, Oklahoma is a deep-red Republican state. She reports, 

Oklahoma has essentially been under single-party rule for about a decade. The state legislature is eighty per cent Republican, and in the most recent midterm elections the Democrats didn’t field a candidate in nearly half the races. Governor Fallin is in her eighth year, and during her tenure nearly all state agencies have seen cuts of between ten and thirty per cent, even as the population that those agencies serve has increased. 

But, according to Galchen, the teachers’ walkout might be a political turning point: 

The walkout mostly failed to secure more funding for classrooms, but it was a baptism by fire for a movement of politically literate and engaged Okies. In the 2014 elections, eighty-seven Democrats ran for legislative office in Oklahoma; for this fall’s elections, the number has more than doubled. 

Galchen puts us squarely there with the teachers in the packed visitors’ gallery of the Oklahoma House of Representatives as they watch the Republicans vote down three proposed tax reforms that would generate new revenue. She writes:

As the session continues, Democrats try, within the constraints of parliamentary procedure, to bring to the floor a discussion of education funding. After all the scheduled bills for the day have been dealt with, the Republican floor leader asks the members of the House to stand at ease—take a break without adjourning—because of “some ongoing discussions between the majority and minority parties.” It seems impossible to me, I confess, having been among the teachers at the capitol, that the legislature won’t pass something.

I relish that last sentence. Galchen’s reporting style is at once factual and personal. You can tell she identifies with the teachers. I do, too. 

“The Teaching Moment” is one of the most heartening political pieces I’ve read this year. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The other Galchen piece in this week’s New Yorker is “Mum’s the Word,” a delightful personal essay on her four-year-old daughter’s preoccupation with death. It contains a fascinating passage in which Galchen appears to liken her daughter’s thinking on death to a cluttered kitchen drawer. She says,

A few weeks later, we have dinner at a friend’s house. The friend’s brother has just died. I don’t think my daughter knows. There’s a giant boxer-faced dog there, under the table, gnawing on rawhide. “Did you ever give a dog a bone, Mama?”

I said that as a little girl I had a dog who loved bones. I had another dog in college who—

“Are they died now, those dogs?”

Fair enough. I have a strong childhood memory of my mother removing the cluttered kitchen drawer from under the Kermit the Frog telephone; she removed that drawer and shook its entire contents into a garbage bag. Terrible! I was fond of opening that drawer, knowing that anything could turn up: a pink auto-insurance key chain, a plastic watch (not ticking), a scrap of paper that read “bears—robinhood.” I will always let the clutter live, I thought. I will always be open to these surprises.

These days I love an empty drawer.

I’ve read that passage at least a dozen times. I’m not sure I get it. The daughter’s question (“ ‘Are they died now, those dogs?’ ”) triggers Galchen’s memory of her mother cleaning out a cluttered kitchen drawer. From that memory, Galchen draws a moral: don’t mess with your kids’ thoughts, “let the clutter live,” “always be open to these surprises.” Is that what it means? It’s one of the damnedest things I’ve ever read. Kafka would’ve loved it.