issue vi

campo review ‘16

campo review MARCH 2017

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campo review ‘16

THE CAMPO REVIEW MAR. 17 2

campo review ‘16

the roots issue

The New Colossus

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"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.�

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letter from the editor I am a year older and the kitchen is pervaded by the smell of decaying flora. I am seventeen this week, a title I've worn for a sum of eleven days and so which I wear as one wears a new thing unaccustomed, with a sense of discomfort, a looseness about the shoulders.

There are slivers from where the flowers were before their decay became too pungent for us to bear; their yellow flesh has made dust the color of the saffron rice we buy at Whole Foods on the back of a textbook; shriveled petals abound in almond slivers rimmed with a ruddy brown.

The flowers didn't begin this way, and neither did I. They had been banana flowers those few days back; those few years back I had been a child with limbs frail as toffee sticks wearing boots too large for my frame.

When the flowers first came, I was disappointed to greet them on the counter how once is disappointed to greet some good for a wanted-after great, or some adequate substitute for some more than adequate demand—a selfish, entitled disappointment. Next had been a guilt when the great had followed, with a twodelay, in a bubblegum-colored card in the mail: $50 on a blue Chase bank check and an embarrassment that, in standing before the counter, the banana flowers should witness my ingratitude.

Yellow usually means alarm but the banana flowers instead were a calm, a salve, for they were a yellow born of jungle instead of street signs, yellow escapes cove and not streetlight, and though I met them with my embarrassment, my nose downturned as my fingers unknotted the envelope, it was a calm embarrassment in which thrashed none the sting of surprise.

My father turned fifty this year, his birthday on the heels of mine, and the occasion, like the banana flowers’ presence, struck me as both sad and strangely unobtrusive. When my mother rented out an overpriced restaurant room, a room with walls the color of pale tangerine and honey mustard with oyster-shell shaped sconce lights a translucent aquamarine robbed clear toothpaste, we watched his life on a projector screen and a shoddily-amplified soundtrack.

One of the photos featured my father in dark hair and a buttercream colored sweater; his face was downturned, Thinker-like, in the direction of a turquoise span of water, some great fountain or pool. He looked so alone, my father, solitary in his life’s weight. I thought how when the banana flowers arrived they looked like that too, solitary in their parakeet-hued overabundance, lonely like my father.

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campo review ‘16 It is strange to be seventeen, to know my father as fifty. I remember cul-de-sac bike rides with purple handlebar grips and a dog whose paws made rain patter on the hardwood, a pair of Finding Nemo pajamas and how he used to change the batteries on my nightlight, but now we are different people with the same relation to each other with only frozen bits of those selves— VCR tapes, silver-framed Kodak prints in the space on the shelf beside a hand-burned woodblock bearing the letters REINECKE, the sounds of our name—to assure us any claim to those past bodies whatsoever.

He still tells the same family stories he told ten years ago, and probably twenty years before that and probably as he lived them, still has the wide mouth which mine owes its genesis, but I am no more the child who gave him a box of air wrapped in pink tissue paper than he is the father buying Olivia and I mint chocolate chip flavored energy goop in the bike store; he’s practicing Buddhism in his basement office when I go down in the morning for the stapler, and I’m studying when he calls me to dinner. He has the same features, the same spirit, and yet he is different now. We are different together. Things are now expected of me: A’s, test scores, a willingness to push out my passenger side door to take in the orange plastic covered roll of the newspaper, speckled and soaking from the rain.

This is what I realized at dinner, conversing with my father’s friend at dinner, neglecting a bowl of tomato soup to ruminate over politics. It was a conversation removed of my father, a conversation with no pre-set jumping off point—the mention of a speech contest, a ballet recital, a juvenile soccer game in which I’d had some role—but one substantiated with rosemarystudded bread and mutual interest. This conversation, which reminded me of a floating dock we had seen at a jet-ski club in Nice, a platform you swim out to which lacks the land-connecting stretch definitive of such protrusions, reinforced what my camel-colored pump shoes, my bluesmelling cologne, and jet mascara already told me: that despite my efforts to convince myself otherwise, my attempts at suppression, my failure to obtain my driver’s license, the plush tiger guarding the books on my desk, I was an adult.

It was then that the significance of the banana flowers, their almost synthetic hue, the wet quality of their accompany scent struck me. I came home today to counters cleaned of saffron dust and wilted petals, to counters stacked with my father’s age apparent in goose-necked whisky bottles and a set of cut-glass tumblers household addition my mother, in deeming them an “old person’s gift” had deemed appropriate.

At home, the smell of decay played even under cleaning fluid’s faux-evergreen mask, and I understood them, then, these banana flowers, that bread, the harrowing thing they had set out to clarify: that I, too, content with my SAT score, resplendent in my birthday earrings, had been and would be, no more and no less indelicately subjected to such infidelities, such betrayals of time.

One of the realizations I’ve had this year, along with the realization of my growing age, is that of America’s being a heterogenous instead of a homogenous society. While the current presidential administration has decided otherwise, I understand America’s strength as being derived from its diversity, from the meeting of those various cultures, traditions, and racial ethnicities of which it is composed. With this roots issue the campo review editorial staff worked to capture this multi-faceted America which we love and know through series of interviews which trace the roots of various individuals, from Paul Verbanszky’s Hungarian-German boyhood, to Lori Thelen’s young experience with juvenile delinquents, from Elaine Nunn’s move west to Yong Zhong’s mulberry-stained start in China. Here’s to a future of “teeming shores.”

Alexandra Reinecke, EIC 6

campo review ‘16

from the issue “I read somewhere not to make windows of men’s souls.”

“The bumblebee theory in aeronautics is that a bumblebee’s body should not be able to fly based on its size and its wingspan and all that.”

“No one was talking and we were just staring at each other not knowing what to do about this Greek philosopher.”

“A huge piece of steak at a Black Angus restaurant . . .

That was a moment of America.” “youth eats fruit plucked off a bush. / it leaves its fingerprints in mulberry juice.”

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editorial staff EDITOR-IN-CHIEF alexandra reinecke MANAGING EDITOR elena koshkin SUBMISSIONS MANAGER brigitte jia SUBMISSIONS TEAM fiona deane-grundman (poetry) katie nunn (fiction) betsy alter (art) isabel owens (photo) WEBSITE DESIGN tanya zhong SPREAD PHOTOGRAPHER sierra warshawksky PUBLICTY MANAGER fiona deane-grundman ADVISORY COUNCIL lindsay webb-peploe sarah morgan emmanuel williams 8

campo review ‘16

contributors alexandra reinecke (’18) elena koshkin (’18) brigitte jia (’18) katie nunn (’17) isabel owens (’17) tanya zhong (’18)

betsy alter (’18) fiona deane-grundman (’18) sierra warshawsky (’18) hannah eberhardt (’18) maya jenn (’18)

interviewees chris walsh paul verbanszky peter jay alter elaine nunn lori thelen yong zhong maia vinogradova

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campo review ‘16

food for thought from the campo review editorial staff

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campo review ‘16

tCr contributed

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rise by isabel owens

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to know the difference by alexandra reinecke The first time I was born was in a generically bedded, white-linen stretcher in a California hospital; the second was across a fake wood-topped table from a classmate whose sister had gone to Harvard, a finished softbound copy of a very famous American novel in my lap. The first time I was given all the normal constituents afforded an infant—arms, legs, two slivered excuses for human eyes—and the second a purpose for which to use them.

Though I’ve never met him, I keep a photo of the man responsible for my second birth in a grainy Shutterstock image tucked into my wallet; maybe he’s my third parent or my patron saint, the priest who has utilized the space my father’s half-hearted, haphazard Buddhism and my mother’s shed Catholicism have left for the spiritual education of their eldest daughter. That very famous American novel was The Great Gatsby. That man, of course, is F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Someone once told me that the English language is a warehouse of words in which the contents of other languages converge, but despite that this observation was reinforced for me through lists of synonyms in royal blue Expo marker, the English language, my native and only tongue, was just that to me: my tongue. I fought in it, groveled in it, complained in it of string beans and sunburns and the smell of our Labrador retriever’s damp black coat, but long did the extent of its extraordinary reaches escape me.

I came to understand my own language, however, when I read Fitzgerald, and I was born again to the world through a perspective altered so that I, to use a phrase his own, “revalued everything . . . according to the measure of response” it drew from his discerning eyes. The English language became my language, the effective weaving of its many threads my goal.

Fitzgerald says that “part of the beauty of all literature” is that “you discover that your longings are universal longings,” but the mutualities that we share, I found, went beyond those desires we call universal. I found we were both sensitive, both observant; I had, like he had had, the kind of extremity of willpower which proves itself conducive to either extraordinary success or harrowing defeat.

Given the occurrence of this rebirth at age twelve, when my classmates were discovering the texture of other people’s mouths and seeing to the best of their abilities that the Orinda Intermediate School locker room was choked in clouds of Victoria’s Secret PINK perfume, I was approaching the estimation I now harbor: that it is those very traits which had made me a difficult and unhappy child which render me so oftentimes breathless today.

Baptism into the English language—his individual use of which I’ve decided, for lack of a better comparison, is a room of textual Calder mobiles—was not the only rite for which I am indebted to Fitzgerald. He also did for me what hundreds of years of ancestors and the cultural Petri dish of the New York metropolitan area somehow failed in: he made being Irish cool.

My interaction with heritage had, for a long while, consisted of not much more than a report I did once in which I’d affixed the more aesthetic Google image search results of the country—these deep green and abundant with sheep—and a rosary on which I knew not how to count in the stomach of my American Girl doll’s wooden suitcase. Five years ago, I would have been lying if I said I’d have had no difficulty locating the island on a map.

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campo review ‘16 Now, however, having been introduced my culture through its romantic portrayal in Times New Roman, I find myself unwittingly smiling at the cultural appropriation of the color green in my neighborhood Starbucks, combing the internet for stories of the saint whose name marks the day. Where a year ago I was unoffended to have first my friend tell me that I couldn’t ask to celebrate a “white holiday” and next my Spanish teacher tell me that “You celebrate that in your English class!” I now find myself resolved to do just that.

On the eve of today I stood in our kitchen with such a purpose, making soda bread and nursing a leg cramp in a room dark and solemn, flat, almost, as is the background respective to the Dutch Masters. I stood indignant at what had been a year past of silence, a year in which a part of me—that part drawn to discourse—had felt the simultaneous need for expressing and the inability to express that the freedom for which America is heralded is not one earned of a reigning homogeneity, but rather a mosaic in which I, by way of my Irish heritage, was no more and no less than any other American entitled chips of glass.

Last night, it seemed romantic to me that the metaphoric story of Patrick driving the “snakes” out of Ireland is centuries old, a fact which encourages the theory that the island’s mountains were morphed as much by mythology as by tectonic plates, its shores shifted as seriously by sentence as by erosion, for, it always did appear, to use Fitzgerald’s phrasing, to be a land which “sprang from [its] Platonic conception of [itself].”

As I stood watching the square, tomato-colored numbers on the stove timer, waiting for the soda bread, I worked to reconcile those images of my childhood with the access to use of the word ‘heritage’ which I have presumably been barred: the intersection of lines in the soda bread which is supposed to represent the cross but which instead conjures first the X and Y components of a mathematical graph, my grandparents’ account of Kennedy’s election as the first Catholic president on our way back from the JetBlue terminal at JFK which is like being underwater, the familiar Tiffany glass and dark paneling of pubs where I ate mac and cheese and didn’t drink but smelled the shades of the different ambers, the moan of bagpipes up 5th Avenue in pleasure derived of a procession of firefighters and policemen.

I checked the bread, and bothered to find it unfinished, returned the mound to the tray.

When I’m the Statue of Liberty in honors English, I found myself wanting to say, I’m reimbursement for work long unpaid, a voice which speaks not alone but as representative of a people whose past resolve pushed them to risk electrocution to jam pennies into sockets to hold the lights on, who witnessed burnt books and killed brothers and dinner table tensions over religious nuances which then served as walls.

The branch of my family which grew in Brooklyn, I wanted to say, is a microcosm for the Irish people—their transcendent hope, their indefatigable resolve—and however sappy it may be that my grandparents point out their respective landmarks—street corners, small parks—in episodes of Blue Bloods, this sentimentality itself is a kind of luxury they could not always afford.

I found myself wanting to explain to someone who had once referred my feeling of injustice to a chart in which boxes of shades ranging from printer paper to buttercream were labeled with words such as “eggshell” and “snow,” that despite our melaninic dearth my people struggled once, too, suffered under the same discrimination other Americans do today, were on the island “a people yearning for self-determination while proudly believing themselves unconquerable, despite a long history of brutal British rule that proved otherwise” and in America an immigrant class whose deviances from Protestant English norms was not forgiven until 1960.

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campo review ‘16 The reason Fitzgerald chose Princeton (in those days when such decisions were still in the hands of the prospective students), I wanted to say as I waited for the bread, was not that it was the powerhouse it is today, but rather, inversely, because he “imagined the Princeton men as slender and keen and romantic,” as their football team was one he often saw “nosed out” by the more brutish players in Yale’s baby blue. After living arguably closer to grace than most in history, I wanted to say as I watched the numbers flip lower on the oven timer, he was denied admittance, like people are to America today, to a Catholic cemetery on the basis of religious grounds.

I wanted to say that I love as fiercely the capacity my culture has allotted me—that of discerning chessboards in Band-Aids and constellations from black BMW-X5 windshields speckled with pollen—as they do their respective cultural attributes and traditions, that however completely my father’s German severity has managed to usurp my features it is not the lens through which I view the world. My people is in all ways a gentle one, I wanted to say, a population beat both by the British and the Americans, a population for whom, as I’m in line at Starbucks looking out at people through the same microscopic discernment Fitzgerald employed, others are playing jeering games of beer pong and slinging slurs over Guinness.

I put the tray on the counter. That is the posterchild of my people, I wanted to say, the Irish-American whose grandparents were immigrants, the Irish-American who lost often and used hardship, rather than as a justification for the rejection of, as a Swiss Army blade with which to winnow an acuter empathy. My people, I wanted to say, while it is a gentle one, is equally as resolute; my grandmother muddling through strict parochial school and daily potatopeeling, my riding two buses in order to attend a competitive polytechnic high school, the two of them, against better judgement and advisable probability, entangling their livelihood on the investment of my grandfather’s PhD proves as much.

My people is made of the determination which caused my mind to have caught last night on the word “cannot” as I uttered the old verse—“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—in assessing the burnt mound of dough, the same determination which earlier had condoned the prospect of bringing a sand colored, raisin-studded Irish loaf to distribute, welcome or not, to my classmates in honors English.

I burned the bread, however, and the cramp in my calve, similarly hard, wouldn’t vacate my muscle however long I proceeded to knead it. As I assessed the flour coating the floor I found myself, like the IRA (Irish Republican Army) had been with so few riffles, ill-equipped, for the first time maybe in years, at a loss for words. I wondered then, in the black room, if it was that the church lacked something, too: the discernment to know the difference between the giving and taking of life. Was that why they had rejected him, I asked myself, because they had mistakenly assumed he had performed the task reserved a higher power?

They must have rejected his body for unorthodoxy, I decided, for that extremity of willpower it housed in life which enabled him to act, post-mortem, as a proxy father for a similarly Irish, similarly minded, however totally genetically and generationally unrelated little girl.

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bone by hannah eberhardt

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fern: duet by maya jenn

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to make windows by alexandra reinecke The word “yard sale” to most draws an image of dust bottomed glassware, to the soft of mind it conjures prospect of silverware to reveal, with lye and metal wool, the initials of a president’s cousin or another man of once-removed significance, and to another it calls forth a picture in the Post, titled “Somber Communion,” by a watercolor man named Paulson.

It happened that Paulson did it for a friend. The day Gerald died, she’d gone to class with her wool coat, and Paulson (who was also a painting teacher) asked if she was mad at the painting she’d done that day. She’d informed him of the accident. Paulson had known Gerald as a broad shouldered man, tall, friendly enough to ask him for tonic and waters a few Sundays.

George Brady didn’t know Paulson’s “Somber Communion” beyond that it sat beside a half-eaten turkey sandwich on his desk. That isn’t to say he was an unintelligent man. He was a Thinker and only the previous week a small, but by all means reputable, newspaper had estimated the worth of his brain at four million and seventy five thousand dollars. The notice was mailed to the office that Thursday. He hadn’t left his office since then and it was Friday afternoon.

“Brady?” a voice said through the door.

Brady took his four million dollar head from his folded elbow, where he’d made a pillow for himself on the desk. He put the half-eaten sandwich on the floor. “Yes?” he answered.

Thoms turned the door handle. “You lock this?”

“No—I don’t know.”

“What are you doing with the door locked?”

“I don’t know.”

“Harboring another regiment?”

“Yes, Thoms. The 5th Vermont, this time.” Brady stood to unlock the door. He opened the door and stood, with his hands in his coat pockets, before the desk. “Germans too. Those in sleeping bags beside the bookcase— “You love yourself, don’t you?” Thoms walked to the couch Brady kept under the window. It was a velvet couch tired with cigarette burns and spots from the rain. He removed his coat. “I get the general idea you’re in love with yourself.”

Brady leaned back against the desk. “You hand me the ashtray?”

“You answer the question?” said Thoms.

“No.” “No you won’t answer?”

“No. No I’m not in love with myself. Hand me the ashtray.”

“Fine.” Thoms reached across the back of the couch with it. It was porcelain and an apple green so light as to be white.

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campo review ‘16 Brady took a piece of hard-coated licorice from it. He’d used it as both its natural occupation and a catchall tray and he liked best to keep mints and things in it. “It’s Saturday, isn’t it?” he said.

Thoms pulled one of his legs onto the other. “’ts what the box clock says.”

“It’s been two days then.”

“Yeah.” Thoms unlaced his shoes, set them beside the radiator and stretched himself out, with his hands knit around a wool pillow behind his head, the length of the maroon colored couch. “You been home yet?” he said.

“No.” “How about some sleep?” said Thoms.

Brady let seven licorice into his palm. “You know how I feel about it.”

Thoms closed his eyes. “And that is?”

“I don’t feel for it.”

“Don’t start at that again,” he said. “Not good for the health, Brady. Bad business and you know— “You know I don’t care about my health.”

“You’ll die young,” said Thoms with closed eyes. He’d seen the line coming and had rehearsed his response in his head on the train.

Brady set the apple green tray aside. “My mind’s a hundred anyway.”

Thoms laughed. “You mean four million.”

Brady took the turkey sandwich plate back up from the floor. “Five million.”

Thoms sat up on the couch and closed the glass. The wind had been coming through the screen and made the wool pillow cool against his neck. “Thought you weren’t in love with yourself.”

“That’s true,” said Brady.

“You had your head financed.”

“That’s also true.”

Thoms settled again with his arms behind the pillow. “You know I like you well as anyone, but I’ve had my day’s fill of talking about you,” he said.

Brady coughed.

“Do you know what Lucy said?” said Thoms.

Brady began picking the crust off the turkey sandwich. “McIntosh?”

“Yeah.”

“Enlighten me.”

Thoms opened his eyes and looked at the bookcase and carpet, as though to better orient himself with his audience. He laid back on the couch. “I was finishing lunch. It was cold chicken, the fried kind. Kind with the cornmeal in the batter. She was watching something in the sitting room. I don’t know. “All about Eve” I think, and the room blue from the screen because she’d pulled the shade down on the corner window— “Yeah,” Brady said.

“Everything blue or black. Yeah. It was “Eve” she was watching.” Thoms adjusted his arms behind his head. “I asked if she’d like to come to the newspaper party for you at the office but— 20

campo review ‘16 “You know I didn’t go to that,” said Brady.

“I know.”

“You know you don’t have to explain— “No—I know that.” He interlocked his fingers behind the wool. “She asked if we could have a small dinner at a big hotel. She said it with the blue of the screen on her face and with her nose kind of scrunched up like—you know how she— “I’ve only heard your twenty poems about it.”

“That’s not fair.”

“The McIntosh nose scrunched, like a Pennsylvania peony bud and the whole of New York were everyone wearing pink overcoats and crouched to dive— “And good verse for an infantryman,” said Thoms.

“You’re right there.” Brady began breaking the crust into pieces.

“Well she said, with her face blue, that she wanted us to have a small dinner at a big hotel. I told her that’s what everyone wants. She nodded and said, from the bridge of her nose, that she wasn’t having potatoes again. ‘I’m telling you upfront that I won’t,’ she said.” Thoms breathed as he laid on the couch and his sweater moved with his breath.

Brady put the sandwich down and thought how there was something sturdy about Thoms.

It was the sturdiness, he thought, which had counted for all the good he’d known in the world.

The good with Lucy and everyone else.

“Are you leaving the office today?” asked Thoms.

“I don’t know,” said Brady.

“Why’s that?”

“Karen’s having a yard sale today. Gerald’s Karen.”

Thoms sat up. “You should go.”

“What’d you have said if I’d said other Karen?”

“The same. But I’d have told you to put a good coat on and shave.”

“I don’t need to shave.”

“Well you ought to. I bought you the damned nicest shaving kit for Christmas. Lucy even agreed.” Thoms took his coat from beside him and began putting it on. “Nicest shaving kit she’d seen. Tan leather and enough little pocket compartments for three five-blade razors and all your portable egos.”

“Yeah, yeah. But I should go?” Brady said. “Tomorrow at three. At seven I have to meet again with that journalist from the Turner.”

Thoms put his coat on, a tan wool coat with a buttons on the inside, and nodded. “Casey Waters?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Just meet him at eight with a story. You go at eight but with something smart for him to write under whatever headline he’s made up and he’s fucking happy as a horse. The yard sale in Poughkeepsie?”

“Yeah.” Brady looked out the window. It had started to rain a summer rain.

“Great. You think up something smart on the drive there. Why don’t you take yourself out for a late afternoon dinner while you’re at it? Yeah. Drive back at eight, even. Feed Waters

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campo review ‘16 some shit he’ll think is gold and go out afterward and buy yourself some potato chips and those seltzers with the mint leaves— “And it’ll be alright about Waters?” said Brady. He stood and went to the window. He felt tired and wanted to let the storm in on the couch.

“To hell with him,” Thoms said, tall in his wool coat. “You could pay his rent with a thirty-sixth of your head.”

He walked to the door.

“Now you try to sleep or something? Eat, also? We kind of need you here.”

“What a military compliment.”

“Just take care of yourself.”

Brady nodded.

“And try and not ruin that carpet, will you?”

“Fine, I won’t. Let me alone.”

Thoms pat his dark brown hair back, then put his hand up in departure. He went out through the door and closed it gently, as one would a nursery door, behind him.

Brady walked to the couch. He took his shoes off, put his coat over him like a blanket and laid down with his face next to the pulled up glass. He went to sleep with the storm making pleasant sounds against the screen. *** It was very green in Poughkeepsie. It took Brady a while to drive there and a while to step out of the car when he arrived. He parked across the street from the house and opened the glove compartment. There was a box of matches and a roll of crackers and some notes from Beatrice, all more or less identical to the one he held. Go to dinner at the Claremont, it said.

Stock the guest room with toothbrushes, said another.

Karen’s was a good house with a wide lawn, a brick exterior and a tennis court made of imported clay. She had a folding table on the lawn and a hunter green wool coat buttoned at her neck. “Brady,” she said, when he approached the lawn, “The million dollar brain.”

Brady stopped at the folding table. His nephew stood at Karen’s legs with his six year old palms tight to her jean-clad calves. “Hey Bumby” he said.

Bumby clung tighter.

“Say hi, Bumby.”

“Where’s Dad?” said Bumby.

“Dad’s sleeping,” said Karen.

“Will he be up soon?”

“I don’t know.” Karen tucked her dark blonde, thin hair behind her ears. “Can you get Uncle John a cocoa?” she said.

“Fine.”

Brady put his hands in his coat pockets. “You tell ‘em— “Yeah. That he’s sleeping.” Karen looked at the imported clay court, then turned back to Brady. “I feel like nothing’s real. Do you ever feel like that?”

“That you could be sleeping?”

Karen nodded. “That someone’s ‘gonna wake me and tell me he’s only in the shower.

Only, I don’t know, at the store for a carton of milk and bread and eggs.” She unbuttoned the top 22

campo review ‘16 button on her collar, as though to allow room for the whole of her grief. “A fake, John. The capsize and all of it.”

Brady ran his hand over his dark brown hair, held it a minute where the shore of it met his forehead, as one might hold a bandage, an ice pack, a handful of mint sprigs for a headache.

He was smarter than swimming in grief, he thought. He’d retreated from that high dive and was better for it. The insomnia had subsided enough to allow three hours on the couch if he could hear the rain coming through on the screen.

Bumby returned with a Styrofoam cup. He looked like Gerald, with eyes both navy and gray but not really either, and that thin mouth.

Brady tried not to think about Gerald or the capsize and tried to filter his mind as he accepted the cup. “Thanks.”

Bumby shirked away and pressed his chest tight against the greyhound’s thin, front legs.

“Why isn’t Robert sleeping with him?”

Karen looked down at her son. “With who?”

“What do you mean who? Dad.” Karen tucked her hair behind her ears. “Dad’s sleeping alone.”

“Why not Robert?” he said. Gerald had named the greyhound Robert E. Lee when he brought him from the breeder in Maine. Like a gray coat, Gerald had said, like the Confederacy.

A joke, he’d said to Paulson over seltzers. A joke, Paulson. You get it?

The air was soft from the warm rain. Karen coughed. “Because Robert does his own sleeping, dear.”

Bumby was unappeased. “I want Dad.” “I told you he’s sleeping.”

“I don’t care he’s sleeping. I want him.”

Robert E. Lee, whose left ear the comment hard largely been cast into, turned his head and gave a feeble attempt at standing. When Bumby failed to release his arms he let out a military bark.

Bumby leaned his olive-skinned, six year old face beside Robert’s bony gray one. “Why don’t we go on inside? Wouldn’t you like some of those crackers, Robert?” he said.

Karen opened the side door, where the warm rain still perched on the screen. Bumby and Robert went in through the mudroom.

A woman, maybe sixty or seventy, approached the table. She began picking things up, weighing them in her palms, sometimes discreetly and sometimes not discreetly turning them over for the price labels, trying to scrub dust off some things with her sleeve. She nodded respectfully at them.

“I’ll be right with you,” Karen said loudly, then turned to Brady. “I’m sorry. He’s just a kid. He doesn’t understand family or courtesy or,” she paused to pick up a blue-tinted glass, “or societal normalcies— “Don’t worry about it. Really.” Brady picked up a chipped, cut-glass ice bucket, attempting to reassume his role as buyer. He wouldn’t talk about Gerald. Not the will or whether or not they would burn his clothes, the coats and leather equestrian boots and the good things, in the fireplace or store them until Bumby came of height and shoulder width.

“I know. I’m still sorry. I’ve made a mess of him.”

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campo review ‘16 “That’s not true.”

Karen put her hands in her hunter green wool coat and leaned a little backward with the shift of weight. “You know someone stopped me yesterday at the post office? I was buying a thing of stamps and had him with me. He asked if I was the nurse,” she said.

Brady set down the ice bucket and moved, further down the table, to a silver item. An apple press or a sculptor’s stamp. “Oh, don’t be unreasonable. Bumby looks just like you.” He picked up the silver item and turned it over in his hands. “He’s got that,” he searched in his sister-in-law’s small featured face for a similarity in the boy’s. “That brow you’ve got.”

“That’s shit. Someone might’ve hung Gerald’s regiment picture above his shoulders.”

She took her hands out of her wool pockets. “The same face, John. The mouth and all of it.”

Brady set down the apple press and held up set of glass coasters, with fake snow and what looked to be dried cranberries sealed in them. “Can I buy these?” he said.

“You don’t have to buy anything.”

“Isn’t this supposed to be a yard sale?”

“Yes.” “Isn’t selling the primary objective?”

“Fine. Buy whatever you want. Buy all of it. You can pay me in philosophy. Something from that four million dollar head?” she said.

Brady set down the coasters. “You read that, too?”

“Me and the Eastern Seaboard.” Karen took a canvas, framed in faded gold and thick with oil paint, along with a felted cap hat, from the table. “Let me try a sale. We can’t all live on crackers and cold chicken, you know,” she was saying when he tuned out, “we’re not all Brady’s— Brady analyzed the spread of belongings. He might buy some things, he thought. Trash for Thoms for a laugh. Hadn’t that been an extinct word for the past few months? Laugh. He could buy lots of them. Buy from Karen the things which used to be Gerald’s. All nice things.

All worthy of a place in the apartment. Might put something besides potatoes on the table for her and Bumby.

“How about this one?” he said, “How about this box of soap bars? The English type with salt melted in?— “Just a minute, John,” she said.

He picked up the bar soaps and dried cranberry coasters and began making a pile for himself. It was five and the sky warm and full again with the prospect of rain.

Bumby and Robert watched the yard sale from the mudroom window. Other people had arrived, maybe out of obligation, maybe out of want. Two graduate school age men stood, hands in pockets, assessing the jewelry. Things Gerald had bought all those years ago. Sapphires, he’d said once to Paulson over seltzers. Lakes for her Karen’s fingers. You understand?

A girl in a Wellesley t-shirt, gray with purple lettering across the front, and a thick cotton sweater over, assessed some photographs. A clean looking family tried to imagine the blue-glass set in their home. Most of it was glassware. The blue-tinted glassware and the giant cut glass punch bowl Brady had bought for the wedding, a frozen pond on the table. Forty-five, the sticker on the bottom asked.

“Karen?” he called across the table.

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campo review ‘16 This time she answered.

“This one for forty-five?” he directed the question more at her hunter green wool coat, than any other extension of her form.

She put her small hand on the back of the elderly lady’s shoulder and so extracted herself.

Brady held the bowl at his chest. His coat was tan underneath and pressed against the glass looked like dirt covered in cracked ice. “Forty five?” he said.

Karen looked at the bowl, looking a little too, at her features in it. The outline mostly, of her small nose. The dark shadow her square jaw made in the center of the glass. “Isn’t that what the sticker says?”

“Yeah,” he said.

She looked at his turned in mouth; Gerald’s turned in mouth. Bumby’s too, but not hers.

Hers was plaintive as the Boothbay jetty. Plaintive as the rudder stuck and the lake around them, salty and cold, the capsize and— “That’s fine,” she said, “you can have it for thirty.”

Brady nodded.

Familiar porcelain, in a pink china pattern, wore sweaters of dust. A wooden school desk, long neglected in the garage, sat beside a hardwood dresser, and the three-fourth pile, green carpet, worn and dented with the ghosts of coffee tables, linen couches, arm chairs, and the brocade piano bench they’d had done to match the Rockefeller one in that year’s Mansion Section.

One of the graduate-aged men approached Brady. You the guy they assessed in the newspaper? He expected. And Gerald Brady? Know him? Saw him once on the Northeastern circuit— “You buying those?” he said, instead.

“What?” said Brady.

“Those,” he spoke to a set of gold-rimmed liquor glasses. “It’s fine if you are. Napoleonic Code and whatnot. You had them first.”

Brady stepped back from the glasses. He could see the dust over all of it then; time spilt over Gerald’s things like flour or salt by a child’s incautious palm. “No. Go ahead.”

“Thanks,” said the graduate. He put liquor glasses atop a linen-covered book he’d already selected. The cover of the book was dark blue, almost black, the title shielded with his coat arm.

“Really. These’re great.”

Brady nodded. He thought of the graduate taking them to wherever he lived. He might use them as catch-all trays or to hold toothbrushes in the bathroom or to drink coffee. He didn’t, for some reason, anticipate their utility as the alcoholic kind.

“You know what this’s for?” asked the graduate.

“You mean the sale?” he said.

“Yeah. Someone must’ve died, huh?

Brady returned his hands to his pockets. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t see yard sales at places like this unless someone died.”

He looked at tennis court with the imported clay. “I guess you don’t.”

“You know the guy or something?”

“No,” Brady said to the clay.

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campo review ‘16 “Interesting things they’ve got.”

Brady looked at the table house and felt a pang of second-hand defensiveness for it. “I think it’s a pretty good show.”

The graduate nodded. “A good show—yeah. I didn’t mean bad interesting, only—” he rubbed a bit of the liquor glass dust with his coat sleeve, “I like estate sales, okay. I just can’t shake the idea they’re selling existences.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know. Pieces of the deceased for five dollar sums and whatnot.”

Brady did not give a response. He found a gum wrapper in his left hand pocket.

The graduate rushed to fill the space his unanswered words had left. Brady thought that interesting, the way people tried so hard at making filling the creases of things, tying knots of torn hems, cutting hang nails, pressing egg salad sandwiches together so the eggs meshed and didn’t leave any gaps.

“I don’t know,” he said, “what do I know more than anyone? I don’t know the family.”

He looked very skinny when he closed his mouth, as though the words had accounted for bulk in his frame.

“Everyone knows more than anyone about something,” said Brady. There he was, like everyone else, filling the creases. Only a man before the newspaper assessment and only a man then.

“I guess you’re right,” said the graduate. His face was wide and there was something painfully honest in the composition of his features. “That’s a nice bowl. You should get that.”

Brady looked at the table. “It’s forty-five dollars.”

The graduate nodded. “That’s what I meant. Don’t you think it’s worth a lot more than that?” he said.

“I don’t know.” Brady felt tight in his coat, though he hadn’t eaten much in a month and he could, in the bathroom mirror, see the desert dunes of his ribs through his chest. I didn’t used to be like this, he thought. I used to make good conversation. The priest in Edgartown had a habit of allowing me two wafers at the Eucharist.

“I guess I’ll go and pay. It was good talking— “I know the family,” Brady said, “I know the family and the father died in a sailing accident.”

The graduate put the glasses down.

“I know the brother,” Brady continued, “I know him from college. It was a capsize, the accident. The rudder got stuck— “Is he taking the loss alright? I know that’s hardly, but— “I don’t know.”

It was darkening with late afternoon and Brady saw Bumby and Richard through the window, Richard sprawled on the cool extension of the fireplace, where the marble lip of it met hardwood. There was a comforting yellow glow from the pane and Brady remembered an old axiom from his sophomore year at Georgetown. Elizabeth the first.

“They’re fine, though? The family.”

Brady looked in at Bumby with his turned in mouth. “I don’t know. I read somewhere not to make windows of men’s souls.”

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sprig by hannah eberhardt

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doesn’t by sierra warshawsky

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tCr interviewed

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reflections on a nonexistent world an interview with maia vinogradova by elena koshkin Before the Fall: INTERVIEWER How did the Cold War influence the environment in the USSR? MAIA VINOGRADOVA There were always preparations for war. I remember we had to sew cotton-stuffed gas masks in case of a bombing. I remember a soldier once came to our school and explained to us what the atomic bomb was and how if it would explode, we would all die. We were taught how to fire a shotgun; I was quite good at it. Everyone was very good to each other; we were all terrified of an attack, but I was young and spirits were high and the community was so close. Everyone was fairly poor, but everyone was happy. One summer during high school, I went to Czechoslovakia, as part of a community service summer camp. We gathered potatoes during the day and we would have sing-alongs beside the campfire every night, things like that. Everyone hated doing the work, but reflecting back on it, we all remember it as some of the best, happiest times of our lives.

After the Fall: INTERVIEWER Why was this such a bad time?

VINOGRADOVA Everything disintegrated. The country I was born in and grew up in was torn apart.

Communications between different regions was broken. Industries were destroyed and deliveries were ruined. The country was so unstable. Crime was on the rise. There was no leader to help us recover. People were paid extremely small salaries and lots of people resorted to drugs and stealing to get by. It was a nightmarish time.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER How did you survive?

VINOGRADOVA We didn’t eat much, that’s for sure. We had a summer house out in the country and we had a small piece of land where we planted our own potatoes during the summer. In the winter, we would eat the potatoes we had to harvest ourselves. We also collected wild mushrooms, grew some berries... My family was lucky that my dad was a soldier and was still being paid for his service. My friends, who weren’t as lucky, would buy products from factories and sell it at the highest price on the street.

INTERVIEWER What was some of the crime that happened during that time?

VINOGRADOVA Oh, it was horrible. People were get killed on the street and we saw daily reports of dead bodies on TV everyday. There were so many drug deals and robberies everywhere. In my building, 4 people who were about the same age I was at the time, went to jail for drugs and stealing. Loads of people would resort to that-- they were poor. It was a really frightening time. The lamplights on the streets were all broken and we had some guards and troops protecting our neighborhood at times. The preschool center right outside my building was turned into a drug dealing center.

INTERVIEWER What were you doing at the time?

VINOGRADOVA I was getting my PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Moscow. I worked as a laboratory technician to get some extra money at times. I remember this one time we were paid in raw meat from a cow they butchered right outside on the street.

INTERVIEWER How would you describe the overall sentiment of the people in your community at this time?

VINOGRADOVA Oh, we were all scared to death. When I rode the metro from school everyday, all of the people would sit reserved, with mean looks on their faces. At first, everyone still cared about each other and would help out in every way possible. But as the years went on, the sense of community sort of fell apart and everyone sort of started living for themselves and trying to survive.

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ussr by elena koshkin from “reflections on a non-existent world” In a time of uncertainty, It was all for one In a world that is now forgotten.

Easy to dismiss, Not something to be understood But a lifetime ago there might have been a country.

The transition was slow We awaited, patiently Starting from scratch...

Irreplaceable.

The shadows of anarchy lurked on every street the kids no longer played on the structure.

Digging potatoes, the tiny piece of land A dirt patch to save humanity.

Not far from the chaos, But with youth for a shield, A time not to be remembered peacefully. “the fall” as it’s known, But to us is more than a simple tragedy.

Somewhere, we’re all dispersed in the world, Still reeling from the loss of our loved ones, The innocents who rode on the subway to home Who walked into the alley, wrong time, wrong place But whose headstones now read “taken unfairly” By the shadows that lurked on every street And haunted the memory of the Country that had once existed, Perhaps a lifetime ago.

A country where there was barely food to eat But each loved each other undoubtedly.

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in the same container an interview with chris walsh by alexandra reinecke INTERVIEWER I understand that sports have played a central role in your life. How would you explain the impact athletics has had on you personally?

CHRIS WALSH Oh, where do I start? It just ended up defining so much—it defined so much of who I am because I’ve grown up with it since I was about 8 or 10, which just helped lend itself to creating things I believe in. But mostly, if I had to quantify it, in a short arena it’d be trying to overcome struggle, reach a higher level. Not necessarily always of competition, but that overcoming self, you know, and overcoming barriers to see what’s out there. See what’s next level.

INTERVIEWER Can you briefly explain your first experience in which you enjoyed athletics or in which you recognized your skill and talent in them?

WALSH Well, yeah. I remember when I was about 10, or 12, my dad was a counselor at a high school in Connecticut, and he took me to work one day, my brother and I. And it was about this time of year, it was February, it was overcast out. And back in those days they didn’t have fancy like rain jackets or dry-fit, they had the old gray sweats. And around the corner came about 8 or 10 of these distance runners and it was old-school gray flannel sweats with the towel around the neck and I don’t know why, but I just thought that looked cool. And then--because they saw a lot of times in yoga that things that are important to you, you don’t find them, they seek you out ‘kinda thing. Like, that looked really cool. When I was about 12, 14 I went out for, you know, basketball, football and baseball and I wasn’t very good, but there was something captivating about the running that it was neat to be on a team but I wasn’t dependent on a team and as long as I worked pretty hard I could compete, as opposed to maybe trying out and sitting on the bench.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER Do you think that generally enjoyment of and respect for athletics correlates to skill in athletics, and do you think that athletic prowess is inherent or do you think it can be taught or learned?

WALSH Excellent question, Lexie. Well there’s an old saying when I was up at Oregon, I trained with a lot of Olympians, and they, our couch had a saying that if you want to be an Olympic champion, choose your parents wisely. So genetics plays a big role in a lot of our composition, but there’s also a thing called the bumblebee theory. The bumblebee theory in aeronautics is that a bumblebee’s body should not be able to fly based on its size and its wingspan and all that. And so our coach used to talk about that if you want to be good and you find an interest or a passion in something, then regardless of what the parameters might be that qualify whether you would be good in that don’t always apply, and the bumblebee thing. So, I was kinda heavy as a distance runner and I wasn’t very good; when I first started I was horrible. I had to walk during races. I sucked. But something dawned on me sophomore year of high school, junior year, sophomore or freshman year that I wasn’t very talented but I just had a sense that I could outwork other people.

And that’s kind of how I traveled along. And then, you know, we talked about, if you do the work, the good things come.

INTERVIEWER. Okay. What role did sports play in your younger life and how did your experience change as you entered high school and then college?

WALSH When I was a little kid I loved sports and I think a big part of that is that we used to play outside.

You know, these days kids don’t play as much outside. But we could not wait. During the summer time, man, we were out the door. We played baseball in the morning on the street. We didn’t have organized sports really much in our town. So, all the kids, we rode our bikes, and when we got tired of that we’d go play hide and seek for a while, we’d ride our bikes--and this was about when I was 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And then we would ride our bikes downtown and shoot baskets and then we’d come home and maybe play football. I mean we literally, we’d run in and have a sandwich for lunch and then run out again. We were outside all the time. We’d build forts, climb in trees, all the stuff we used to do as kids. And we never had a whole lot of organized sports, so it was good because we could ‘sorta design by trial and error, you know, decide who got picked, we’d settle our differences by either fighting or, you know, whatever.

Um. But, so I was around it all as a little kid, and then in high school the real catalyst was I had an excellent coach. His name was Willy Nakonecznyi, and he’s in the hall of fame, now, in Connecticut. And he was a magnificent coach. And he was really disciplined, but he always challenged us. But he always had that little thread that he believed if we just kinda did the work 34

campo review ‘16 good things would happen. And he was a major, he was a major force in my direction as an athlete.

INTERVIEWER Then, did your passion follow you throughout your career or did you ever take breaks from athletics?

WALSH Well Prefontaine, the great American distance runner who ran at Oregon, I think you watched a video about him when you were in P.E., he said, particularly during the winter, he had a great quote in Oregon, where it rains so much: ‘That’s when the training gets grim.’ So you just have to do it. And Coach Nack, our high school coach, discipline is doing that which you would rather not do in the absence of authority. So, I’m used to running blizzards, snowstorms, in the summertime when it was a hundred degrees out—but there were times when, my sophomore year in college particularly I kinda hit a roadblock. I was decent, but I wasn’t that good. I went to a state school in Connecticut, Southern Connecticut State—Go Owls! We used to run against Wesleyan. I almost quit. I almost quit running to join gymnastics because we had a phenomenal gymnastics team. Our P.E. instructor and our gymnastics coach at Southern Connecticut, his name was Davy Grossfeld, and he was a three time Olympic coach for the U.S. nationals, U.S. Olympics. And he was a phenomenal teacher, and I liked him so much that I almost quit track to do gymnastics, but I didn’t. ‘Cuz my friends got mad at me.

INTERVIEWER Were athletic feats always easy for you or did you come to a place where this ease in athletics seemed to cease or bottom out?

WALSH Well, it came easy in the sense that I always enjoyed it. I always enjoyed sports, I still enjoy sports, love being around athletes, but I wasn't very good. In fact, my senior year in high school I won an award, I was captain, I had the school record in the mile, but I was so bad when I started that senior year when Coach Nack gave the award, he’d never had cuts, he said, if we had had cuts when Walsh was a freshman he would’ve been one of the first to go. And he didn’t say it mean or anything, but it was just the opportunity that he gave me, and then I built on that. It never really bottomed out. There were times when some of the races were discouraging, where I was just, you know—and it happens to every athlete.

I was reading a great book once by Greda Vites, five times she broke the world record in the women’s marathon, she was a three time Olympian for Norway, and I read her book and there were some days, Lexie, where she’d come home from a workout so mad that she actually threw 35

campo review ‘16 her track spikes in a fireplace one time with the fire on. So, everybody goes through that. And our coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman, guy who starred at Oregon, he was an Olympic coach for track for the U.S. Olympic team in the year 1972, I was very fortunate to get him for a coach for a couple of years. He said championship athletes are volatile. And I remember I had to go look it up. (Laughs.) It doesn’t take much to spark ‘em off because, you know, the competitive juices run high. I only necessarily started losing interest in running when I started getting into my late 50s and started getting injured a little more. But it was a pretty good gig.

INTERVIEWER Some people worry over their athletic abilities. One of the prime examples of this would be kids who worry about facing cuts from athletic teams or who struggle in P.E. class with their mile times. When you were younger, was there some other force in your life that posed a challenge athletics pose for many?

WALSH Not much. Well, my mom made me play the piano but she would’ve had to chain me to the bench. In fact, I wanted to play outside so much, sports when I was a little kid, I told you I was always on the streets with my buddies, that we used to have chores on Saturday mornings and I used to pay my sisters my allowance. So, they would do the vacuum for me, and I said, ‘Here, just take the money, I want to go play.’ So, facing cuts is real. And I got—I remember trying out for baseball when I was 12, I got cut. I tried out for basketball when I was 12, 13, I got cut. I just wasn’t very good. But that was one of the attractions of running, you know, people call it--it’s like swimming—they call it an individual sport. It is in a sense. You can design your own path of how hard you want to work, but you’re still on a team. And not having cuts was something that attracted me to track and field because it’s a terrible feeling to get cut, but it is an invitation to figure out what you have to do to work harder so that next year you don’t get cut. But there wasn’t much out there I liked. I just always liked sports.

INTERVIEWER How do you think athletics are viewed in contemporary American society and do you think that the role of athletics has been constant or have you watched it grow or fluctuate over time?

WALSH Well, particularly at the college and the high school—well, from college all the way to the pros it’ changed dramatically since cable sports. You know, when I was a little kid there were about 3 big bowls on New Year’s Day. There was the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl and maybe the Sugar Bowl. Now there’s something like, I think 26 bowls, and it’s mostly because of TV exposure, which is good. High school--I mean, when I was a kid in high school, if you get your name in the paper, your picture in the paper, that was pretty big, in the hometown paper, and now all these kids are playing on television, which I think is great. It’s great for kids.

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I think the major shift that I think’s been difficult for young adults, young teenage kids, especially middle school and high school, is that there’s such a push now to try and get in ‘the right sport’ to get into college. And that’s real, because it works. I mean, my son got into Cal to play rugby, which is great, because they won a national championship and he did fine, he got a good degree, but I’m not sure if the sense of play, what sport brings for kids when they’re in their middle school and high school years is still there. It is if you read, there’s studies on why kids go out for sports, when they do, like, polls or whatever, the number one reason still is fun, which is good. But there seems to be an encroaching like ‘what sport would be good to get into college.’ And that’s real, and if it works, that’s fine because colleges are so difficult to get in, as you know, but I just worry about, is it still fun for the children. But it doesn’t have to be fun all the time, because there’s a lot of work involved.

And then, just the nature of the sports products. You know, the shoes, the clothes. It brings a lot of opportunity, but it can also cause some problems. But one of the guys who started Nike, Bowerman, one of my coaches at Oregon, he had a great quote, and this is the guy who started Nike, Mr. Running Shoes, of course. He said that the shoe doesn’t make the athlete, the athlete makes the shoes. So some of this materialism like if I have all the right stuff, am I ‘gonna be faster? Well you’re ‘gonna be faster if you get out the door and work harder, you know, regardless of what you’re wearing, so, I think that’s a big part of it.

INTERVIEWER One could argue that athletics are valued over other activities which children pursue. For example, if you take a random kid off the street and ask what activities they participated in at a young age, it’s almost a sure bet that they’ll list having played kiddie soccer while their having participated in theatre or art classes is less of a sure bet. What do you think the reasoning is behind this overemphasis on sports for kids as well as for this overemphasis on sports in American society generally?

WALSH Well, I think there are two major factors compared to when I was growing up, and the first one is that the kids don’t play as much. You know, like I said earlier, when I was a little kid we’d play and go and ride our bikes all over the town, and these days there’s concern about the safety of the children, which is real, and that should be the number one priority of any family or neighborhood, so I don’t know if the kids can play or can cut loose as much as they can. The good thing about the sports, though, is that the kids usually want to go where their friends go.

You know, if Lexie goes, I’m ‘gonna try out, too. And that can be really positive. And then the families, all of a sudden the families get to know each other, and then they can have more freedom with the kids.

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campo review ‘16 For example, when our kids were playing like youth soccer and all that, and swim team, if we knew the parents, and there was ‘gonna be a sleepover or a party at the kid’s house they could go, if we didn’t know the parents, they couldn’t go. And the idea was that we had to have that bond and trust with another family. I think that youth sports can provide some of that, but for sure, I agree with you that the well-balanced child is the way to go. There are a lot of opportunities, though, especially at a school like Campo. I hear kids all the time talk about going to band camp and math camp and Mock Trial stuff, and so, I think it is out there.

I think sports gets a little more of a look because, you know, it’s healthy for kids. It’s healthy for them to get out and move around. It’s also healthy for them to learn how to lose, you know, because not always--there’s ‘gonna be disappointment in life and, you can’t really teach that, but you can help provide the platform for them to be successful so that if they fall, it’s maybe one step back and two steps forward instead of it being, like, a major devastation.

INTERVIEWER If you had to make an argument or a case for athletics, what would you say? Do you think the value you find in athletics lines up with what most people find? Do you think any of the value you see in sports has been prompted by your own personal experience?

WALSH I think--One of the things athletics does is it challenge, it challenges our homeostatic being, if you will, of being competitive. It’s a competitive society. We live in a society where you have to compete for grades, positions on sports, down the road careers, jobs. So I think if you learn how to compete and find the best within yourself and overcome your limitations that’s the stage athletics provides. It’s not so much about the wins and losses. It’s about the kind of dynamics of the person you become. And I’ve been around kids that have just worked so hard and they’ve just overcome so much in terms of their limitations, they’ve gone on to be very good runners, and it was self-made. So then when they take that same set of principles of success to a different platform, such as college, major, career, another club on our campus, the same dynamics are still there. You know, it’s like set a goal, decide what you’ll give up to try to accomplish your goal, associate with people who can help you to get it, and make a plan and work.

So, I think there’s a lot of things. But it can really be life changing for kids, particularly freshman and sophomore year when they’re trying to look for a group to maybe bond with at high school.

If you’re on a team and you’re around maybe twenty, forty, a hundred kids like on swimming or track, where you have the same common goal, you make good friends, it can really lift you, because you have a better chance of being successful on a team than as an individual because there’s more component parts. You look at some of our teams like swim team where they emphasize character and accountability and integrity, those are all prime traits that any employer would want in hiring a worker.

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INTERVIEWER If you had to pinpoint the personal qualities which drew you to athletics, or which athletics fostered in you, what would they be?

WALSH I think it’s what I talked about earlier. When I first started I wasn’t that good at all; I had to walk during races, I used to get the cramp, I used to get the rash under my arms, you know, all the things you get as a young, inexperienced athlete, but I just remember one day, Lexie, I remember during a workout I was getting beat by a bunch of better guys, and I know they hadn’t trained as hard over the summer, and I said ‘Next summer I’m ‘gonna train harder.’ Because you know, cross country’s in the fall, track’s in the spring, so you did all of your training in the summer for cross country and in the winter for spring, and I just--a little epiphany went off in my head. It was early 1970s and it just said, ‘If I work harder than most of those guys, I will be better.’ And so I went home that summer and I think I ran 350 miles, which is about four miles a day. But then the next summer I really wanted to be good so I went up to my coach, Coach Nack, and I said, “Coach, next year I have to be really good, what do I have to do?” And he said, “Go home and run a thousand miles.” Now, this is June 1972, and he had a summer program where you’d run for 75 days or something like that and you’d try to average a certain number of miles--just easy running--and you’d try to make 300, 500 or a thousand. I said, “Well, Coach, next year I want to be really good’ and he said, “Go home and run a thousand miles,” and I said, “Yes, Coach.” So I went home and I averaged 14 miles a day for 75 days. And all the years that I spent in athletics, almost 30 years, I’ve had great opportunities and I’ve had some success but that was the clearest representation of challenge I ever had. Everyday I had to run for like 2 hours, and summer in Connecticut—you know how hot it is in New England. And there were some days it was so hot I’d have to get up and run at 3 o’clock in the morning. And then, at the end of the summer, my dad made me have a job working construction, putting in pools, and I used to run to work, and one day I passed out at work carrying a wheelbarrow full of rocks, but I still had to get my miles in, so I ran home anyway. I mean, it was just a—it was just a constant, like you’ve ‘gotta get it done, ‘gotta get it done, ‘gotta do it. But that was probably the biggest pinnacle right there, was doing that thousand miles.

INTERVIEWER In English class we talked about the Taoist concept of Wu-wei, or actionless action, which can be described as when human actions become spontaneous and mindless as those of the natural world. Many have cited this actionless action, or the achievement of thoughtlessness, or an almost unconscious state during the completion of athletic events, as cause for many individuals enjoyment of athletics and the difference between athletics and other activities. In English class, for example, when you’re writing a composition, you’re actively conscious in the action, and even if you enjoy the act of writing, it can be argued that you’re incapable of achieving mindless 39

campo review ‘16 tranquility, whereas in tennis, when you move to return a ball or orchestrate a serve, it can be argued that you are not tasked with the weight of consciousness at all. You just act. First, do you believe in the existence of this concept, and second, have you ever witnessed its manifestation in sports?

WALSH Wow. That’s pretty heavy. We should have a yoga session first. (Laughs.) Yeah. I believe in it a hundred percent. In yoga they talk about the seer becoming the seen, and meditation, and what I’ve thought for many, many years, particularly if you’re in a beautiful, beautiful place, once you’re in shape where you can run for an hour, an hour and a half, 2 hours, there’s actually a thing called the ‘runner’s high.’ And it relates to the number of our endorphins that kick in as our body starts getting to a fatigued state, after about maybe 60 to 75 minutes, then there’s a whole new surge of endorphins that some people call the runner’s high.

So, I’ve often thought of running, particularly if I’m in Redwood Park, or at the beach, or up at the Sierra, you think of it as moving meditation. So when you watch these elite runners running, they’re running a marathon, sub 5-minute mile pace, their face is totally relaxed, but there’s an awareness. And I think that very much as a musician. You know how the musician becomes the instrument, because without the instrument there’d be no musician, and without the musician it’d just be an instrument, so the two become one. So how do you separate the musician from the instrument, because they both contribute to the sound?

So, it’s that same intrinsic kind of ying-yang, there’s energy conserved, there’s energy released, the seer becomes the seen, and I’ve actually, in runs, had these kind of, I don’t want to call them hallucinations, but these runner’s high kind of things, and, I don’t know, it’s really like a meditative state, even though you’re actually running. Same with tennis, like, if the serve is perfect, how can you separate the motion from the athlete or the racket, in this case the instrument, from the player? So, when you become one with the entity in what you’re trying to do, then everything becomes kind of peaceful even though it’s stressful. So, yeah, it’s a really beautiful ying-yang, Chinese philosophy, kind of exchange.

INTERVIEWER What do you think draws students most to athletics and then what outlet do you think athletics provides for students that other activities such as academic or creative pursuits do not?

WALSH Well, I think the first thing is their friends. You know, it’s so important when you’re 14, 15 years old, your family’s your stable, but your life is your friends, pretty much. If your friends go out, you go out. And then, once a sport kind of grabs you, you decide how far you want to go. It doesn’t have to be sports. It could be drama, the arts, journalism, music, whatever, but the other 40

campo review ‘16 thing is it’s a magnificent physical release after sitting all day and studying, you know, you guys work so hard, you know, there’s so much to do, so when do you release that—that lid off the teapot? And one of the beautiful things about athletics is that it’s a physical release of energy and so the athletics balances the athletics and then the scholastic balances the athletics. And like the Buddha says, as you do one, you shall do all. And so you do well in one arena, it’s ‘gonna help the other. So they become symbionic and that’s where we come up with the phrase to an athlete and one of the reason they give awards for that because one complements the other.

INTERVIEWER The famous boxer Muhammad Ali once said “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something that they have deep inside of them, a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill and the will, but the will must be stronger than the skill. Do you believe what Ali says about willpower accounting for more successes in athletics than inherent talent and why, or why not?

WALSH Well, yeah, absolutely. Well, he knew, because he used to actually predict what rounds he would knock people out (Laughs.) But yeah, how do you measure the will? And that’s one of the reason we never had cuts. I never cut an athlete ever because you never know—you cannot measure the human heart. And that’s one reason, Coach Nack, I didn’t get cut, and I ended up having some success there, way back in high school. But yeah, the will, you can’t—the indominable will is the drive, and if the drive becomes the bliss and you love what you’re doing, and you’re doing what you love, and the drive is there, then there’s unbelievable potential. Now, from coaching, I saw it from a little bit of a different angle.

So, when I used to go to USA track and field coaching schools, they talked about the four different types of athlete. There’s the athlete with great talent and great will, they’re your champions. Then the athlete who has great will but not much talent, and they can become champions. And the most frustrating was the one with great talent but not a whole lot of will or drive. They’re the most frustrating. And the fourth, they really don’t have either. Trying to deal with the athlete who has a lot of talent and not a whole lot of will was frustrating, because they wouldn’t come up to the level you wanted them to, and you couldn’t bring your expectations down.

The person with a strong will, you actually have to hold them back, because sometimes they just work themselves into the ground. And they really beat themselves up a lot. There’s a quote, it says that an artist is always most critical of her work, or his work, and athletes are like that, too.

So, you have to find that balance between, it’s good to have will and drive, but you have to be able to enjoy just being in the sport. Yeah, but the will is indominable. Absolutely.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER Do you think that Ali’s belief about willpower being more important than natural born talent applies to any situations outside of athletics?

WALSH Yeah, because I believe that every person—the fact that we’re all different, every single person in the whole wide world is different, it provides an avenue right away. You have a special talent that nobody else in the whole wide world is going to have—ever. Ever again, ever since. And so, then it becomes, almost, ‘What are you ‘gonna do with your talent?’ And that’s why you want to cultivate it. How do you cultivate it? You get around people that can help you. So, the talent thing, or the will, is like a plant. It has to be nourished, and it’s nourished by, in athletics, good diet, good workouts, being around good coaching, but in other realms it’s the same exact situation. You want to put yourself around people who are ‘gonna help you get where you want to go, or help you get where they’ve gotten. It’s the third principle of success.

And if you have the will, you simply won’t be denied, because if you want to keep going, who’s going to stop you? Yourself. Yourself. And your gift has an exact spot in the wheel, that nobody else can fill. And you know, when you get it, it’s just like ‘I’m on.’ Like you have that sense in journalism, as a writer. The world is just forever. Forever. And there’re people in their nineties who still run. They’re slow (Laughs.) The world record for a man’s mile under 40 years old, or over 40 years old is 3:59. So, you know.

But I love the will. I love the heart of a champion. I don’t know much about a lot of things, but if I had to pick one thing that helped me to be a fairly successful coach, it’s that--and I got it from my mom--it’s that, I just I have a gift. My little, tiny gift in the world, in athletics, is that I can get to the heart of an athlete. Even though some other coach may know more, way more than I do, volume wise, and that’s like, that’s a cool place to be, because it’s a gentle place, because you’re talking about what somebody loves to do. So, you have a responsibility to help cultivate it.

INTERVIEWER In terms of athletics working as a positive force in a life, what are some examples of sports altering the course of lives you have discovered?

WALSH Um, just the belief in yourself. You see a kid walk away from a race, when I used to coach, and a kid walk away from a race—even in P.E. They did their best mile, there’s that ‘Uh, I kinda did it.’ And you notice it in their posture. They kinda walk a little taller, their head’s up a little more, there’s a sense like ‘Mmm-hmm.’ And once you do something you don’t think you could have done, what does it do?

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INTERVIEWER It gives you new confidence.

WALSH New confidence for the next step. Like, we used to talk about in P.E., once you break 9 minutes in the mile, and you’re in the eights, okay, you start thinking ‘What if I could make 7:59’? And it’s the same with elite athletes. You run a 4:20 mile and you start thinking about, four-teens, and then, once you’re under 4:10 you’re in a whole different neighborhood. It’s just overcoming where we were to get better than what we are currently, just evolving, but being able to control that through your hard work, and then you take those tools, Lexie, and just plug them into other responsibilities as you get older, so that when you get out in the world you can be depended on, you can be counted on to do what’s right because you love what you do and you create. And you create when you’re most grounded. You’re most grounded when you do what you love. And once you’re grounded, what can you do? Create.

And when you create is when you’re at your best. That’s why I love that saying by Einstein, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ Books are important, but, you know, you set your foundation and when you’re set to do on what Lexie wants to do, it’s just boom. It’s awesome. It’s like standing in front of a giant force. It’s like ‘What’s it ‘gonna be, man? This is exciting.’

INTERVIEWER Can you briefly tell the story of what’s been your most difficult experience in your athletic career, and how did you persevere and or conquer the challenge?

WALSH Yep. May, 1973. I had the school record in the mile, and there was a guy on my team named Richard Kayer, good guy. He didn’t run much, but he was very talented. I mean, he was born— he was real skinny and all. And we were at the CVC League Championships, I think it was in Glastonbury, Connecticut and I was running, I was on pace for a school record, I had the school record in the mile, and with literally about 60 yards to go, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a little white singlet—which was our school colors—and I was like (Yelling) ‘No! No! That’s not Kayer!’ And he beat me by 2/10 of a second and beat my school record, and I was so devastated that I ran right off the track, and, you know, it was wood, it was New England, and I ran onto this path, and I just ran for half an hour. I was crying.

It was not so much that he beat me, it’s that that summer before, almost a year before I’d run that thousand miles, I sacrificed so much, I ran 2 hours a day, ran a thousand miles, he ran maybe like 300, and he beat me. And I was devastated. I almost thought about quitting. In fact, I didn’t run 43

campo review ‘16 for about a month. It was ‘kinda immature, like big baby. (Laughs.) But then that little thing kicked in again, like ‘Okay, well, I’m going to overcome this.’ And so I ended up going to college and breaking school records in the 2 mile and 3 mile, and Kayer never ran competitively again. Which was not a bad thing, it was just, like, that tender innocence of, ‘I worked so hard, I was ‘sposed to get this, it was taken, what the heck?’

INTERVIEWER Yeah.

WALSH But I remember it, as clear as a bell. ‘Noooo!’ I still remember his little white shirt. Like ‘Nooooo!’

INTERVIEWER Can you tell me the story of how you came to practice yoga?

WALSH Yogi Bear. Yes, coach. Well I was actually at UFC. You know what UFC is? And so, I loved boxing. That’s why we talked about, I always loved boxing. So I was like, okay, I’m ‘gonna take boxing lessons. So I went out to UFC and I was taking all these boxing lessons and getting my butt kicked, but it was a great workout and I saw on the schedule it said ‘yoga.’ And I committed to myself, because I had the membership, I was ‘gonna try everything. I even tried Zumba, which I wasn’t very good at, but it was cool. I did some spin classes. And one day, it said that 4:30 yoga or something so I went up there. There were about 5 people in the room, and all of a sudden this big guy came in, this big muscular guy, and I was like, ‘He doesn’t look like a yoga teacher.’

And he goes, ‘Okay, come to the front of your mat.’ And his name was Harvey. He actually was one of these trainers that trained the UFC men and women that did the big UFC fights. And I was like, ‘What’s this guy doing, teaching yoga?’ So I got to be friends with him, and he used to teach hand to hand combat for Navy seals, he was a U.S. Navy seal, and then he became a yogi, he studied in India for a while.

And, it’s interesting that you asked that question, because, just like when I was 13 years-old and running just ‘kinda grabbed me, even though I wasn’t that good--remember I told you about those guys running?—yoga did the exact same thing at age, I guess I was like 55. So almost 40 years later, the exact feeling I had for running when I was 13-ish, I was like ‘This yoga’s cool.’

There was something cool about the names, the Sanskrit names, and the poses reminded me a lot of gymnastics, which, I told you that guy Grossfeld was our great gymnastics teacher, and I just thought, ‘This is cool.’ So I asked him. I said, ‘What are some good yoga places?’ And he said, ‘Well, Yogaworks, Walnut Creek has a great place.’

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campo review ‘16 So I went to Yogaworks and started taking classes and I just fell in love with the practice, and I also wanted to see if I could get strong without lifting weights, because I used to love lifting weights but I was starting to have some shoulder issues. And some of these yoga people are in good shape, men and women, all ages, and I said, ‘I want to see if I can get strong without lifting weights.’ And yoga ‘kinda chose me, once again. And since then, I’ve done almost like a thousand hours of classes, and, I got my 200 hour certification in 2013, and then in April, this year, I’ll be done with my 500 hour teacher training, which is kinda a big deal.

INTERVIEWER That’s so cool.

WALSH Yeah. So it started as like a whim, like ‘I’ll try it,’ and just pshh. It’s really kind of a cool—you know what’s interesting, Lexie? All those years of running, we talked about moving meditation, it’s the same thing but on a mat. The same dynamics.

INTERVIEWER So it really transferred.

WALSH Yeah. Yeah, it’s really weird. But it was cool.

INTERVIEWER How does yoga play a role in your day to day life, and what are some of its positive effects?

Have you seen it has affected other facets of your life separate and apart from your physical health, or do you think that it’s results are largely self-contained?

WALSH Well, first of all, I try to practice every single day. Sometimes twice a day. And practice could be anything from a 20 minute yoga session, like, if I’m busy I’ll come here in the morning, right in this room, or I’ll go to class for 60 minutes or an hour and a half. But I try to practice at least 4 or 5 days a week, and it just kinda grounds you. I don’t get as upset about stuff. I realize, like, there’s a place in the universe for everything, and everything sort of fits. And we are where we are now because of all these things that have happened to us, and that makes us who we are now, so if we get more settled with ourselves, then those things that have either been good or bad, they’re all good, because that’s where we are now. And then it opens up that whole new realm, from day now, onward, like, you get to choose. Your happiness. Your attitude. How you react to things. So it quiets--the whole idea, really, in traditional yoga, is that it quiet the mind, so that you can just be in touch with your true self, what they call the purusa, or something. And so,

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campo review ‘16 once you’re happy and grounded, we’re back to that, you can create. It’s like that shirt, you know, Life is Good. Do what you love, love what you do.

INTERVIEWER Can you briefly speak to the highlight of your athletic career?

WALSH The friendships. Yeah. But if I had to pick one thing, I was blessed to be able to set some records. I ran in races against Olympic medalists. I ran races with people that run under 4 minutes in the mile, and I was like ‘Woah, what am I doing here?’ I mean, Olympic medalists, national record holders. But I think doing that thousand miles in 1972 was the one thing, because that was ‘kinda just the grunt work. Like, you’re either ‘gonna do it or you’re not. You either ‘gonna do it, or you’re not. And that’s a great way to make a decision, from yoga. Something is bothering you, ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.’ Either you do it, or you don’t.

So, you solve the problem, you move on. You know, I mean, it’s kinda the simplicity of it is overwhelming.

INTERVIEWER What has been the highlight of your experience with yoga?

WALSH I would say, if I had to pick one word, I would say, or two words: more accepting. I try to be more accepting of differences in people—not necessarily differences, but recognizing differences, and if I have a problem with it, for whatever reason, it’s not them, it’s me, and then I can construct a response within. Because you realize we’re all connected, we’re all together, we’re all in the same boat sort of thing. So, why do the simple differences cause so much friction and hate? It’s almost ridiculous, when you think of it analytically. I don’t get as upset, as I said, especially driving. It happens mostly when I’m driving, it’s ‘kinda weird, like someone cuts you off and you’re on the horn. You have to be like ‘Go ahead,’ and be patient, you know. And yoga, as we know it in the West, is 5,000 years old. There’s such a rich, deep tradition to it. Everything from the osanas, the postures, to the practices to how it became kind of westernized with Lululemon and yoga pants and all that, and yoga practices in the West. But at the end of the day, it’s just trying to connect with yourself. And why do we know you’re important? Because there’s nobody else like you. So why not get in touch with that and try to build off your talents, instead of beating yourself up and clouding--that’s what it’s called in yoga, clouding. Just clouding yourself with doubt and sadness, this and that. Like, that doesn’t really accomplish much.

There’s so much abundance there, and it’s just fun, it’s just cool. All different people—it’s like running. When I used to race, Lexie, when I was on the starting line for these races, nobody 46

campo review ‘16 cared if you were a millionaire, nobody cared if you’re a circuit court judge, or a garbage collector, or unemployed, or a billion—nobody cared. You’re all in the same container. And it’s the same with yoga. You’re sorta in that sample place with yoga, you’re searching for the same thing, which is a little quieter mind, a little more mindfulness. And through that, once you get settled, once you’re at peace, life becomes easy peasy. You know. Less stressful. Oh, well.

That’s what one of my teachers says a lot. She says, ‘If you’re having a hard time with something do your best but add a touch of ‘oh, well.’’ And that’s powerful. It’s like the old saying, you know, please give me the strength to change what I can change, and what I can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. You’ve ‘gotta know the difference of what you can change and what you can’t. If you know what you have control over, then you can do a little bit of ‘oh,well,’ and it just lightens the load. It’s like probably a bunch of stuff your mom and your grandma told you as a kid, you know, the wisdom of the days.

INTERVIEWER If you had to sum up athletics in one word or one phrase, how would you do it?

WALSH For me, if I had to pick one word—and I ran at a pretty competitive level for about 20 years—I would just say ‘fun.’ It’s just enjoyable. The friendship. You know, going on a 10 mile run with your buddies, talking about movies, the state of the world, and all this stuff. It’s one of the great ways to see a city. One of the beautiful things about being a runner is that once you can get up to about a half hour or further, you go to a city, you just run the streets, or the forests, or the hills.

You just see different parts of the city that you might not see. You know, if you’re driving, because you’ve got to watch the road, obviously. But I would say fun. Very beautiful memories.

Mostly the long runs up in the woods. You know, summers, sunsets, running at sunset or sunrise.

I remember one time it was Christmas, 1971 or 2 and I went off on a run on Christmas Eve—it was all dark—but the snowflakes—it was Connecticut—were the big fluffy ones, like you see in the Charlie Brown movies (Laughs.) And it was so quiet, because nobody was out. And, you know, you see your breath, and just the big fluffies, it’s just so—it was like running in one of those—what do you call it?

INTERVIEWER Snowglobes.

WALSH (Laughs.) Snowglobes. Yeah. So you can’t—I mean, where else do you get that? Unless you live in a snowglobe.

INTERVIEWER

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campo review ‘16 Do you have any anecdotes or stories from your time running in high school or college that you wish to impart?

WALSH I got a really funny one. So we had a meet one against our version of Miramonte. And I was captain. I was running the mile that day, and I was in the bathroom because I used to get so nervous, so I was trying to go to the bathroom. I was in the stall. And this is a true story. And the fire alarm went off (Laughs.) And it was like 10 minutes before my race. And my coach was like, ‘Walsh, Walsh, get to the track!’ and I was like ‘I can’t, coach, I’m in the bathroom.’ And he was laughing, because luckily it was a false alarm, and I was laughing, and it was ‘kinda like one of my life’s most embarrassing moments, it was like, yeah, that was, once again, a high school time. That was pretty embarrassing but it was funny, because I didn’t have much choice.

INTERVIEWER If you could give one piece of advice to the athletically challenged individual in dealing with sports, what would it be? And inversely, if you could give one piece of advice to the athletically gifted individual in dealing with another aspect of life, such as standardized testing or school, what would that be?

WALSH Well, the first part of the question, advice to the athletically challenged, I think it sort of depends on what you mean by the word ‘challenged.’ Maybe it isn’t the right sport. You would— Bowermen, you know, our coach at Oregon, the great coach at Oregon, who’s an Olympic coach 1972 Olympic games, he said there’s an athlete in everybody, you’ve just got to discover it. So, most people find their ‘athlete’ in them when they find an activity they really love. That’s why running’s not for everybody, swimming’s not for everybody, weightlifting’s not for everybody, but once you find what you love, then the athlete will advance. Because the word athlete, as I understand it, it’s roots mean contest or challenge. So, you kind of want to challenge yourself.

So, you find what it is, tennis or golf or racquetball. One of the beauties of running is that you don’t need court time, you just get out and go. You don’t have to worry about tee time at a golf course, or if the club is open, or if the teacher doesn’t show up. You just go. It’s kind of the simplicity.

But one of my best stories, one of my buddies up at Oregon, Kenny Moore, he was a three time Olympian, and he almost won a medal in the ‘72 Olympics, he finished fourth. He won Beta Breakers 7 times. He almost broke 4 minutes in the mile. He was an elite, college, national level Olympian. He never won a race in high school. So, be very very careful that what you think your early success should be. That’s why if you love your sport, keep going. They’ve done studies at 48

campo review ‘16 the U.S. Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, Lexie, and they say it takes roughly 10 years to reach the elite level. So, if you start when you’re 14 and you quit after four weeks, well, that’s no good. You just haven’t given it a chance. And then, as far as people who are really good, I’d say, just make sure you appreciate your talent, whatever your talent is in that sport, and take the principles of success to whatever venue you go to. Because two things will happen, the principles of success never change. A principle doesn’t change, it’s always the same. So, whatever you do in tennis, you’re ‘gonna do in writing, you’re ‘gonna do as a family member, a mom or a dad or whatever.

And the other thing that I’ve found helpful in my life, personally, is that whenever I’ve gone through a difficult situation as I’ve aged, I always asked myself, ‘Is this as hard as the hardest workout we used to do in college? Is this challenge as difficult as doing mile repeats under 5 minutes?’ We used to have to run 4 to 5 miles like one mile under 5 minutes, take a 3 minute rest and then do it again, and do it again, and do it again, and do it again. And then we used to have this one workout where our coach would make us run two mile intervals, up a long hill, and then, it was so hard, like death. Twice. And, to this day, if I’m going through something challenging, I chuckle and say, ‘Is this as hard as trying to run 5 minute mile repeats at Edgewood Park in New Haven, getting ready for national championships?’ And it’s like ‘No. This is not as hard.’ So, it ‘kinda develops a strength within you that will become a huge tool later.

INTERVIEWER Do your activities outside of athletics connect in any way to athletics, and what are some of your other pastimes and or joys?

WALSH Well, my first joy is my family, of course. And my wife and I actually met at a track meet.

INTERVIEWER Really?

WALSH Yeah. They used to have an indoor track meet at the Cow Palace back in the 80’s and we met there. Then we used to run all the time and my daughter was a very good water polo player and shot-putter, so I loved being at all my kids’ competitions. My son played football. He played Cal Rugby, so I used to go love and watch him play, you know, as well as his teammates. So, the sports have been a nice connect all throughout our lives, but, just watching my kids grow. And being around athletes, to me, this day, is still exhilarating. I get around young athletes like you, and people your age, it lifts you up. Their energy, that kind of panache, like ‘Yeah, we’re pretty good, we’re Campo and we’re ‘gonna get it done,’ that’s just, that’s very elevating as opposed to other parts of life that can be dull, like chores.

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INTERVIEWER Is there anything that you’d like to cover that we didn’t speak to?

WALSH Just enjoy it, you know. If there’re young people reading your thing—reading your article in the Campo Review, just enjoy it. Enjoy it, enjoy it. Don’t get too caught up on all the negatives or all the coulda-shoulda-wouldn’t, don’t blame the refs and the coaches and all that stuff, just enjoy the experience, because high school athletics, I was president of the California Coach Association, and I was on their board for many years, and the number one thing that we used to talk about is that the number one goal of high school sports should be to create positive memories. So just enjoy it. Because, I’m telling you, when you’re 56 years old, like we’re having this beautiful discussion now, I can come back and think about some of those things from high school as if they were literally, like, 11 o’clock this morning. The people, the events, the funny things, the hard things, the challenging things, yeah. That was good. So just enjoy the ride. It’s a good ride. .

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edgewood park, new haven, CT by alexandra reinecke (from “in the same container”) Whenever I’ve gone through a difficult situation I always asked myself, ‘Is this as hard as the hardest workout we used to do in college? Is this challenge as difficult as doing mile repeats under 5 minutes?’

As running at Edgewood Park?

(We used to have to run 4 to 5 miles, one mile under 5 minutes, take a 3 minute rest and then do it again, and do it again, and do it again, and do it again.)

It was so hard, like death twice.

And, to this day, if I’m going through something challenging I ask myself: is this as hard as sprints in New Haven? As running at Edgewood Park?

(No. This is not.)

This is not.

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from Greek philosophy to scientology an interview with peter jay alter by betsy alter INTERVIEWER Hi! We can sit down right over here. Please introduce yourself to everyone.

PETER JAY ALTER Hi, I’m Peter Alter, obviously your dad, and I am a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California who has a beautiful wife, an amazing daughter, and the best dog in the world.

INTERVIEWER Let’s start with a quick question. When did you know that you wanted to be a professor?

ALTER I knew since I was eight. This is all I have ever wanted to do.

INTERVIEWER So, I have two questions. Who do you think has had the most influence on you professionally that you have met and who do you think has had the most influence on you that you have never met?

ALTER That I haven’t met, it has to be Skinner.

INTERVIEWER How come?

ALTER I mean he was the father of human behaviorism and that really dictates almost everything I answer when teachers ask me what to do in a situation and I try to approach it from a behaviorist perspective. And then that I have met professionally, I mean mom because of her compassion 52

campo review ‘16 and Terry, who was a long time coworker when I was at the University of Louisville with like the way he seems to get how teachers think.

INTERVIEWER That’s good! So, out of all the occupations in the world, why did you choose to be a professor?

ALTER Because it’s just the right amount of structure in a job for me. Like today, my friend Laura up at Napa told me that she wanted to do this grant. So in the middle of the day at around 11:30am, I was zooming up to Napa and I had my music and it was great and I get to the district building which is beautiful and looked similar to the White House in a sense. We were talking about funny stories about kids and behavior and stuff and it was great. It’s something where I can answer peoples’ questions and be pretty sure of myself.

INTERVIEWER And, do you ever regret becoming a professor?

ALTER Absolutely never. I have never wanted to do anything else and I absolutely love it even when I am at my most angry when someone does something dumb at work.

INTERVIEWER Tell me something interesting about being a professor or any interesting story that you have had as a professor.

ALTER So, I had an interesting day today. I was talking to some undergraduates and we were reading a book by a Stoic philosopher and it’s pretty dry and the discussion really wasn’t going anywhere and all of the sudden, one of my best students said the saying where the Stoic philosophers want to remain detached from emotion and passion sounds a lot like this cult I have been learning about called Heaven’s Gate and they were all in Los Angeles and eventually committing some mass suicide and some crazy thing and I said yeah and there are other components that kind of remind me of this thing I have been watching on A&E about scientology and I went from a classroom where literally no one was talking and we were just staring at each other not knowing what to do about this Greek philosopher to talking about scientology and we went to beyond the end of the period and people were still telling stories about people they know that have to do with scientology and it is probably relevant to mention that a lot of my students are from the Los Angeles area and I think scientology has a much bigger hold down there. People made Tom Cruise and John Travolta jokes so it was pretty funny, but it is just amazing how people can take something that some guy wrote in the first century about stoic philosophy to turn it into this thing 53

campo review ‘16 about telling stories about people in scientology being locked in something called “the hole” and how they lock you in there. And it was amazing because I never thought you could get from Greek philosophy to scientology that quickly, but that was a really fun class and I enjoyed it.

INTERVIEWER Anything else that you want to say about being a professor?

ALTER Some people think that we are some keepers of some hidden knowledge and that is just not the case. We are just normal people who spend a lot of time reading and a lot of time writing. I think there’s a lot to be said about that and that there is a lot of value in that because it really forces you to think about things and not just go by what you see on television and what you hear on radio ads because you are never getting more than 120 seconds of information. This is about really sitting down and thinking about if this makes sense. So, that works for me and I like that idea and I also have been fairly ambivalent about pretty much everything. I never got a tattoo or a bumper sticker because I never felt strongly enough about anything to have it permanently on my body or permanently on my car because that is part of being an academic that you are ambivalent. So, I don’t know that is kind of where I am at.

INTERVIEWER Thank you so much for doing this with me and providing such interesting comments.

ALTER Anytime.

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a moment of america an interview with paul verbanszky by alexandra reiencke INTERVIEWER I understand you spent your childhood in Europe and your high school years in America. Can you tell me a little about how your family’s move to America came about? Do you remember the day your parents told you you’d be moving to America? How did you react?

PAUL VERBANSZKY Alright, so, what happened, basically, is my mom passed away. After my mother passed away my father, basically my brother and my dad, we traveled around Europe and lived in different parts because my dad was a professor of music, so he taught at various different universities, but he was never, ever happy being in Europe. He just missed my mom too much, and he didn’t like it, so, an opportunity came up for him to get a position at a hotel, a small hotel chain based out of the East Coast, to be entertainment director. And, of course, he always had the dream of coming to the United States. So, he decided to do that.

And I remember very vividly when I came home from school one day and my dad and my brother, and I came home from school, and my dad said. ‘You know, I was thinking about it, and we’re going to move to New York.’ And, we’re like ‘What?’ I was devastated because I had just started to build--I had just transitioned into middle school, essentially, I had started building friends, there was this girl I was ‘kinda attrac—I thought she was cute, you know. So, I was all— it was hard. But it was also exciting. Of course, my first image of the United States was America.

It was just America. That’s what we’d call it there. It was cowboys and Indians. It was New York City’s ‘gonna be a big city but then everything beyond that is ‘gonna be cowboys and Indians, and it’s ‘gonna be awesome. Because that’s what I saw on T.V. So, I was excited. So, I was disappointed about leaving friends, and my home, but I was excited about seeing cowboys and Indians (Laughs.)

INTERVIEWER Before you moved to America, what were your initial qualms about moving to a new country?

Were any of these fears about moving to a new country realized when you reached America?

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campo review ‘16 VERBANSZKY You know what’s funny, is, I didn’t even think about the language barrier, but that was like the biggest challenge when I first arrived. It was so weird. I just didn’t even think about that. My biggest fear was, I thought everybody is ‘gonna be so much bigger than me. Because everything, at least when I was a kid in Europe, everything in the United States, everything in America is bigger. Because, you know, what do we see on T.V.? We see action movies, and Schwarzenegger and we see, like, the T.V. shows which were very popular were those showing, like, the wealth of America. Like Dallas, Dynasty, those kind of things. And game shows. So everything’s very big and loud and I was worried about getting overwhelmed by the loudness of the country.

When I came to the states, when we first got off the airplane, definitely when we got out of the airport, it was just so much noise, so much commotion, so many people yelling, and it was taxis, it was New York airport, it was everybody running around. The first English word I learned was the F word, actually, and the mother F word, because that’s what the cab drivers were yelling, what the cab driver was yelling as he was driving us. So, ‘You mother—,’ you know. But the language barrier was something I didn’t think about and that was a big shock. Luckily, speaking German, speaking Hungarian, those two main languages and a little bit of French as well, I was able to make my way, muddle my way through learning English.

INTERVIEWER Having moved around Europe during your childhood, did you find the experience of moving across seas to be any different? What was the nature of your trip—were there outlined parameters for when you were returning, or did you understand that you’d be immigrating to America permanently?

VERBANSZKY I did not understand that. I thought we were going the same way we had done everything else before. We’re ‘gonna move to a new place, we’re ‘gonna live there for a little while, and then move back, or move somewhere else. It was significantly more of a grand spectacle to move to the states. We put everything into this giant container, whereas when we lived around Europe we left our stuff in storage, or we—and distances were short. Oftentimes we would move, which at the time seemed far, but we moved like an hour away from my other location, and it felt like we were so far away, a world away, but now we were like an ocean away. Now, this was like equivalent to if I would now just travel to the moon or something. Just the distance was definitely an impact.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER Can you give us an image of your carry-on bag? How do you remember the flight? What kind of gum were you chewing, etc.? What were some of the things you brought abroad with you? What were some of the things you left?

VERBANSZKY So, we flew Lufthansa, I remember that very vividly. It was the first time, or the second time I was on a major big airplane—I was once before on a smaller one—and so, my little bag was basically, kind of like--not a backpack. Kind of like a backpack. And in it I had my camera--I was very proud of that camera, a little film camera—a couple of comic books—I loved to read Asterix and Obelix, which were comic books really popular in Europe, not so much here—and I read those. Let’s see, what else did I have? I didn’t bring any food or snack or gum, candy—yes.

Gummy bears. I remember that. It was cool though on the flight, Lufthansa, it was neat, flying big like that. They took care of us. There was lots of food—I just remember how exciting it was, but also ‘kinda scary during takeoff. I remember looking out the window constantly, and just being surprised at, there's just water. And water. And it just never stopped being water. And it felt like forever.

INTERVIEWER Tell me (briefly) your favorite anecdotal experience or story from your early days in America.

VERBANSZKY Well, I already shared the one about when I first arrived. The other one was, what was cool because we arrived in October, October 27, so 4 days before Halloween. So, we stayed for the first couple of days in New York City, and then we went to the suburbs, in Fairfield, Connecticut, and on the way over there I noticed, I really saw, you know, colored leaves. I was shocked how slowly everybody drove. 55 was the speed limit, and we were on the freeway, on the highway, and I thought we were going so slow, because I’m used to the Autobahn, in Europe, right, and just going slowly. With one of my dad’s contacts, who picked us up, she was explaining to us, she was trying to teach us the address so we wouldn’t get lost, and it’s just the language sounded like wah-wah-wah to me, as opposed to what it is now.

I remember the Halloween decorations. The pumpkins. I’d never seen pumpkins before. And then, another story is that when I started school it was after school, so I started school in November, so Halloween was super exciting, obviously. I went to Toys-R-Us for the first time to get a costume, never knew about Toys-R—it was so amazing to see all the toys everywhere. I’ve never seen that many toys. Oh, kickball. Not kickball. Yeah. kickball was very popular in P.E. my first year. And it was just a lot of fun. Yeah.

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campo review ‘16 NTERVIEWER Describe the America you found when you arrived. Did anything strike you as glaringly different from the life you had known in Europe? Did anything strike you as glaringly different from what you had expected America to be?

VERBANSZKY Well, (Laughs) it wasn’t cowboys and Indians. It was big, that was true. It was roads, tall buildings. Loud was true. But it didn’t scare me as much as I thought it would. I actually enjoyed it. I loved—what I really was surprised with was the openness of the American people. How welcoming they were. And I think that has changed with recent political situation. When we arrived it was around Thanksgiving, so we were invited by one of our neighbor’s to come over for Thanksgiving, and I didn’t know Thanksgiving, so that was like the coolest thing. And I was happy and joyous. I was surprised, though, how people didn’t drink as much. I was a little bit surprised by that. And that they didn’t perform the same music as much. But that could have also been because I had a musical family, but in European culture, music is a big part, drinking is a big part, you know. I loved it—everyone was super nice, welcoming, gave us gifts, you know. It was definitely a surprise.

INTERVIEWER How were your opinions of America formed before you arrived? (ie. Did you have access to American media or products? etc.) How did these opinions change or remain the same as you grew accustomed to the realities of American culture?

VERBANSZKY So, at the time, not as many movies came to Europe, and they were all dubbed, into German or whatever, except the songs, you know. What was really cool with, like, musicals, was to understand what they were singing instead of just listening to versions of theirs. In terms of media I think I got a little more desensitized over the years to the violence we have on television.

That was something I was very surprised about, because in Europe I saw movies, like Terminator, or something that was an action movie, I don’t know what it was, but it was so edited, because they edited out all the violence, that when I came to the states I saw it and it was more violent, like ‘Gosh,’ and that was a big thing.

INTERVIEWER To many, America is understood as the Promised Land. Did you have a similar view of the country before you arrived? Did your time in America change this view or do you still view America through such an idealized lens?

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campo review ‘16 I definitely—and that was my dad’s dream. The promised land. He used to listen to, I think it’s Neil Diamond’s song, ‘Coming to America.’ (Singing.) We’re coming to America, yeah. Very much so. The promised land. And it was fine at first. But then, unfortunately, which I’ve, I don’t know if I’ve shared with you already, but we hit some hard times. My dad lost his job. The recession hit. And he—I mean, who’s ‘gonna hire a musician when they can’t hire a waitstaff or whatever? So, we were homeless. We lost our home. We lived in a hotel for a couple of weeks.

We lived in a Buick for a couple of days, and then we got help from the Salvation Army to go to a shelter. So, that was rough.

So, I was very, um, disheartened by the American Dream, but for some reason, stuck in my heart and in my head was the idea, ‘But if you try, if you continue and you persevere, it’s ‘gonna be okay.’ And so, you know, I continued doing well in school. I—that was the only thing I could do because education was the only way that I was able—it was free. It was cheap. And I just worked--I worked hard. I made my way up. I consider myself very successful now. As a teacher, in terms of paycheck, not, but in term of my lifestyle that I have, I’m incredibly successful. I was--after I graduated college I was able to get a job that paid well. It made me realize, like ‘Oh, I’m able to do all this.’ But I also realized that the American Dream is about being happy. And happiness does not equate to how much money you have. You have to have some money, to live, but, I figure, you know.

So, the American Dream is still alive, but it is not as easily attained as it would have been. And it might have been harder for people of minority back then. That’s something people don’t have.

I’m lucky that I’m bright. That I’m smart, naturally. I have an easy time with academia. But if I wouldn’t have been, the opportunities wouldn’t have been put in front of me. And I wouldn’t have sought out those opportunities. The American Dream is there, but it’s not as easy as you just put your flag into a piece of land, like ‘This is my land, and I will build it, and I will guard it, and I will become somebody.’ Now you have to have a little bit of a head start. And that has to be given. Either by trust money, or by where you grow up, or things like that.

INTERVIEWER What has been your personal experience with the American Dream? Do you believe in the concept? Why or why not? If yes, how have you seen it manifested in your own life? If not, in what ways have you experienced its absence?

VERBANSZKY The American Dream is not the same as it was. I think we as people, we as Americans have to understand that it’s evolving into a different form of it. It used to be, as I said earlier, having land and a house and property, and owning things. I think now the American Dream is turning into having rights, liberties, freedoms. That’s becoming more important. The current political climate, you know, what’s happening, with people fearing their safety, you know, people fearing being 59

campo review ‘16 deported. And I think people will still always look at the United States as a place of freedom and liberty and that’s going to become the American Dream to achieve now, I think, to keep that. It’s too bad.

INTERVIEWER Were people welcoming to you when you came to America?

VERBANSZKY Yeah, very incredibly welcoming. I was a novelty, you know, like here’s this random kid, where is he from, weird accent. But I also had people who weren’t welcoming. People bullied me in high school. I was bullied by a group of African Americans. So not everybody was welcoming.

That was a shock, too. I was judged by how I looked like. I remember going to school in Germany and, my friends, also, there were black kids, Asian kids, and in Europe they were predominantly white, so that was never--race wasn’t so much of an issue then. It was more like, ‘Are you French? Are you German? Are you Hungarian?’ Now, it’s here in the states, I came to the states, I was excited to become an American, and I was called a Nazi, I was called all kinds of things because I was white. That is something that—not everybody was welcoming. But, when I was around other white people, they were super friendly, and I was welcomed, I was getting gifts of--I forgot what the toy was, but it’s like, not a remote control car, but something like that, I don’t remember the detail. But it was, like ‘I’m ‘kinda old for this, but’’ INTERVIEWER Upon making friends in America, did you notice anything different about your American peers than those you’d known in Europe? In general, how would you compare and contrast the European culture you knew as a boy with that you came to known as a teenager?

VERBANSZKY American culture brought a perspective on things, then what I saw in my European culture.

Europeans knew a lot about history, knew a lot about arts, knew a lot about things, but, weren’t that—it’s me, I don’t know if it’s accurate—but I felt like they weren’t as involved with people, weren’t as gregarious, like, they knew there was a world outside of themselves, but they’d only leave their town only once. It was different. The second part of your question was about how has my opinion changed about America? Now I realize that a lot of the time that welcoming is just part of the show, and, not for everybody, but I still think Americans are way more welcoming than Europeans. However, Europeans, once they open up, are way more open in expressing how they feel. Like once you get to know them, they’ll tell you they love you, they hug you, and in that way they’re more affectionate than we are here as Americans.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER Can you (briefly) explain all the homes you lived in before you turned eighteen? (Where was each located, what was its surroundings, etc.) How did you feel towards each respective placed you called home in your youth?

VERBANSZKY First it was a refugee apartment complex. I remember vague memories from that because my parents escaped and I was born—not born—but I lived there for the first couple of years. Then there was an apartment. I don’t remember much of that. Then we moved to a nice, tiny house in southern Germany, and that’s where I spent a lot of years when my mom was alive, and that’s where she got sick. I had a backyard, never had a dog—I always wanted a dog—there was a cherry tree, there was a creek down a little bit where my brother and I would go and collect frog eggs and try to catch them and put them in an aquarium and grow them to frogs. Fireflies.

Catched those, too. And it was really, like, idyllic.

And then my mom died and we moved and we lived in various city apartments. Not much memory with them. They all kind of blend into each other, but sometimes when I go back to Europe staying at some hotels that they’ve converted from old apartments, it reminds me of those. They were often built at the turn of the century, some of them after World War II, depending on whether or not they got bombed. Then when we came to the states, in Fairfield, we lived in a very cute typical New England house, which had a huge yard. Bigger than what we had. Had a big tree to climb on. Everything was just big.

Then, when we moved to California, we lived in an apartment, then we lost my dad’s job, so we lived in the hotel, then the car, the homeless shelter, which was pretty rough. I can’t really describe it other than that there was no air conditioning, it was an old motel that they had converted and it was really hot and it was just stuffy and the smell was weird, like the weird cleaning--Lysol, wintergreen or something, the smell. The smell was really strong. It was weird.

It was really weird. After that we moved to a couple of other apartments, I moved off to college, and after college I lived in Arizona, in a mobile home in Arizona (Laughs.) then moved back to another apartment set. Then I finally got a house in Orinda. So, that’s where I live now.

INTERVIEWER Can you (briefly) explain a weekend day in Europe? What are some of the leisure activities European kids partake in? How did you find these differed from or aligned with those we are familiar with in America?

VERBANSZKY Well, you’ve ‘gotta remember that at that time we didn’t have cell phones or Internet and all that stuff so it was a different time. Lots of playing outside. It was actually surprised, how, when I 61

campo review ‘16 came to the states, kids didn’t play outside as much. They had organized sports, like a lot of my peers had, like, organized things after school or on weekends, but they didn’t play otherwise, they wanted to watch T.V. and Nintendo. Nintendo was the thing then. Everybody had Nintendo.

And I wanted a Nintendo and didn’t get one. But, so, when I had money I finally bought myself a Nintendo. So, now it’s sitting in storage (Laughs.) You know, that was one thing I was very surprised about, we used to play outside all the time, we used to play on playgrounds, used to play a sport, soccer was a common one, go down to the creek to collect frog eggs. We were outside all the time. We did active things. Then we came to the states and it was more just kind of like, unless it was organized, people didn’t do it.

INTERVIEWER Did you know how to speak English before you moved to the States?

VERBANSZKY No. Cowboy. Indian. Happy birthday. Goodbye. Hello. Basically, that’s about half of the words that I actually knew. So, I learned everything. It was hard. In my school they didn’t have an English language program, so I was basically put into regular classes with everybody else. It was rough. The teachers were really kind. They would give me extra handouts, stuff for lower level reading. And I just learned. But what is amazing is how quickly language works when you’re thrown into a situation like that. But, by halfway through my first year, I was doing well enough that I could have conversations and participate in school and still do well.

INTERVIEWER So, what language did your family speak at home?

VERBANSZKY Hungarian. We spoke Hungarian at home. My brother and I spoke German to each other, but we spoke Hungarian as a family.

INTERVIEWER How many language do you speak, what are they, and how and when did you learn them?

VERBANSZKY Okay, so Hungarian and German were learned simultaneously because I lived there. French I learned in school; I was fairly fluent when I came to the States, but then I took it in high school a little bit, but then not anymore. Spanish I picked up in college, beyond learning just what you learn in California. I took the class in ‘99, 2000, and, yeah.

INTERVIEWER So, now you speak 5 languages?

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VERBANSZKY Yes. Hungarian, I’m totally fluent every which way. English, obviously, same. French I can understand it, I can read it, but I can’t speak a lick of it. German, I am good, but rusty, and it takes me a couple of days, but it comes back and I am totally fine, I can simultaneously translate.

And then, Spanish, just like everybody else.

INTERVIEWER How did moving to America change you personally? Do you think you began to look at yourself differently upon becoming an American and growing accustomed to American life? Were there any changes you experienced? Were these gradual or immediate?

VERBANSZKY There were some immediate changes. In a way my mannerisms—well, my mannerisms are in some ways still very European. Those haven’t changed yet. But the way I dress changed almost immediately. The European dress style versus American. I try to bring that back now as I’m older, and I don’t care anymore, but I used to care a lot, so that’s one thing. I’m an American first, but I’m also very proud to say I’m Hungarian-American. I find myself lucky to be a citizen of both Europe and the United States. I try to take the best of both worlds, and that’s what we try to do with my household at home. My wife and I, we try to do the best of Europe, the best of the United States, we try to create that, but in the end we’re American first. It always comes back to that. I find sometimes that if I would have been in Europe things would have maybe turned out differently for me, in my life, very much so, but the experiences that I’ve had in America, especially being homeless and things like that have really made me a stronger individual, and my experiences, because of what happened, were awful at the time, have helped me to be more understanding of people, helping students when they’re having issues or problems or anything like that.

INTERVIEWER How do you feel about America today, as an adult? Do you see it as the same land you came to as a child, or have you watched it change and either positively or negatively progress?

VERBANSZKY I’ve definitely seen a lot of changes. I remember when I arrived it was in the high point of the Reagan era. It was the 80s, and America was the pinnacle, like the top of everything. And the enemies were the Russians, and it was very clear cut and simple. Especially the big change happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and the Berlin Wall collapsed in ‘89 and ‘91 and so the union’s gone, and I graduated high school in ‘92, so I felt like I was at this new beginning of America, this global peace, and Bill Clinton became president, and everybody thought it’s ‘gonna be this amazing, new world. And, unfortunately, that was not the case.

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The America that happened after that was more war, fear of terrorism, of course after 9-11, but even before that. Enemies began to change, Internet kicks in, so that was a big change. All of a sudden people are connecting in ways they’ve never connected before. So, I noticed that among my friends, for example now—I don’t know if this matters, but—if somebody now says ‘Oh, we met on Match,’ or on Tinder, or whatever, people are like, ‘Oh, cool, whatever.’ But I remember when people started online dating and it was so embarrassing, like, people wouldn’t admit— I have friends who are married that have a fake story of how they met because they actually met online, on the Internet. So, that’s like a big change. The acceptance of social media.

Big changes, for me personally, in terms of just how I approached life. I felt like life was slower.

A little simpler. And not because now I have children, and as an adult, in that sense, but there weren’t all these different pulls happening, like everybody’s screaming at me. What I mean by that is, you know, we’re constantly bombarded by social media. If I go on my phone I have emails, I have advertisements popping up on websites I look at, if I go on the computer there’s always emails, there’s always constantly—and there was a different time. There was a time where if you don’t pick up the phone physically and dial and call, or somebody calls you and rings the phone, then you’re not in contact. I think that is something that has really affected my generation, generation X. Because generation X, we were at the end of the old way, and at the beginning of the new way, while the next generation after us, they were always in the new way.

In terms of politically, I feel like we have become way more open to talk about how we feel, but, at the same time, I think we touched upon that earlier, I’m concerned about the direction we’re going, in terms of--we talked about the immigrants issue and all those kind of things. I’m not saying it was great in the 80s, trust me, it wasn’t. People could say things that you couldn’t get away with today. Like people regularly would use the F word to describe a gay person, right.

Now I can’t even say the word, because it would be inappropriate, like we talked about before.

So, yeah. I don’t know if it’s necessarily positive. I don’t know if it’s necessarily negative, either. I don’t know. It’s not as positive as you would think it could have been.

INTERVIEWER As a father, do you believe there is anything special about giving your daughters access to all that is available to them in America? Would you have considered raising them in Europe?

Why/why not?

VERBANSZKY The only reason why I would definitely raise them in Europe is for personal self-esteem. The body image. That’s a big problem. I see this with my daughters. She—my first grader—she has peers in her class that are on diets, or that are, when they look at cupcakes they say ‘I can’t have that, it’s too many calories,’ just the whole idea of body image. And that’s the same thing for 64

campo review ‘16 boys, too. I remember--I don’t look like a typical American. I have a beard, you know, and so forth, things like that. There’s more to that, but the point is that in Europe people don’t care what you look like. You don’t have to have your hair properly coiffed, I mean, I don’t want to bring up names, but you know of teachers at this school who are always very well put together.

Always properly—their hair’s always gelled nicely, everything. They would be teased in Europe for being too much concerned about their looks. And the body image part is something that’s one thing. I wish I could take my daughters to live in Europe from 5th grade through high school, when that really hits, about how you have to look.

In terms of academics, we’re lucky in Lamorinda, that it’s on-par. If I was living anywhere else in America I would have to supplement a lot, my own education to my daughters. So, the one thing that they can do here that it’s still limited in Europe is, as women, they can be more. It seems like Europe is more accepting of women, in terms of we have more women in politics, things like that in Europe, but there’s still a lot of sexism that, here in the states we have it, too, but women don’t care, they just keep going. More glass ceilings get shattered here. So, my daughter, she believes that, if she wanted to she could be president, and I’m like ‘Yes, you can, if you wanted to.’ That wouldn’t have necessarily have been the same in Europe. There’re still a lot more traditional aspects of society that are still expected of people. Now, of course, my experience is limited. I haven’t been to all over Europe, but just from the countries that I’m familiar with. In Hungary, for example, women still play a traditional role. It’s very very---it’s getting more common, but it’s not as common for women to work as for men to work. So, it’s the woman at home, and the man goes to work. And that’s changing for economic reasons, not because of equal rights reasons.

INTERVIEWER Do you see any other positives, outside of body image, that you think would have been more positive in raising your daughters in Europe?

VERBANSZKY It’s funny that you say that about body image, because that makes a huge difference about how you feel about yourself, and I think the thing is that you don’t have to be number one to still be accepted in the society. That’s a big part of it. And self esteem, for me, is a very big part. The pressure of that. The other thing that would have been great about living in Europe is the proximity, you’re just so close to all these other countries, different cultures, and different people. We have diversity here, where I can, you know, go to Berkeley and go down the street and have 4 different types of ethnic foods, which is awesome, but it’s still Americanized, ‘gringo’d,’ you know, what the Mexicans would say. But in Europe you can literally travel 2 hours and be in a totally different language, world, culture, style, architecture, beliefs—that would be exciting. The other thing that I would love to have more of here—it sounds kind of silly—but the festivals. You know, the big summer festivals. Yes, we have like Coachella and 65

campo review ‘16 Snowglobe, you know, but those are like a big deal, it costs a fortune to stay, and go, and it’s a drive to get up there and over there, while in Europe every town has constant festivals. In winter they have their Christmas markets, and in the summertime they have, every time, all the time, just carnivals and festivals, and giving people the opportunity.

The other thing that I love, that I wish we could have here is to allow children in bars (Laughs.)

Because, in Europe you can. They’re not allowed to straddle up to the bar, but they’re allowed to be in a bar. I remember when my wife and I, we were in Mendocino and trying to find a place to eat, and because it was a bar restaurant, we had our 6 month-old daughter with us, and we’re trying to find a restaurant to eat, and everything was full, but we found this one place, and they said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Nobody under 21 allowed.’ And I’m thinking, like ‘What do you think my 6 month-old is ‘gonna do? Try drinking anything?’ But it was just that stupid—I think our country is a little too uptight about certain laws when it comes to people’s liberties. I think Europeans allow more liberty in terms of ‘Hey, okay, you want to enjoy yourself? Enjoy yourself. Just as long as you don’t bother the rest of us.’ So, that’s a big positive, the sense of community. It tends to be a little bit better. And that could be just me comparing it to California. I haven’t lived in the Midwest or anywhere else.

INTERVIEWER We are witnessing a backlash about immigration in our country today. As an immigrant yourself, how do you view this phenomenon? If you had to empathize with those who want to continue to close America’s borders, how would you do it? If you had to make an argument for what immigrants like yourself can bring to a country like America what would you say?

VERBANSZKY I find it terrible that we are blaming all immigrants, but I’m, of course, preaching to the choir on that. I understand where they’re coming from with the idea of closing the borders for safety reasons and economic reasons. Yes, there’s a lot of arguments, like, immigrants bring in this much and illegals, even though they don’t contribute on this kind of tax, they pay other taxes, and all this is true. And they do jobs that nobody else is willing to do. I mean, if you just think about it, you look around, the Mexican workforce does most of those menial jobs that most people don’t want to do. Everything from custodians at the school picking up kids’ trash, I mean they’re legal, obviously, if they’re working in the public sector, but, you know, streetsweepers.

Yesterday I was driving, the car wash people, I drove by the car wash, and I saw that they were all Mexican, or assumed, Latin, and who’s ‘gonna do that? I don’t think any Lamorinda person’s ‘gonna wash somebody’s car.

But, the fear that we have of the bad guys coming into this country is what’s motivating the wall, and the fear that the illegals are taking away jobs is what’s motivating the wall. And that’s not the actual reason. I mean, obviously, we shouldn’t be afraid. Of the thousands who come 66

campo review ‘16 through, maybe a couple of dozen are bad, but that’s with anything. I mean, we have people coming legally that are just as bad. We have people that are born here that are bad, right? So, I have a hard time with it. I don’t think any immigrant, though, should be like, ‘Oh, we should all strike and protest, because immigrants have rights, too.’ Yes, they do, but my opinion is: assimilate. My family assimilated. We still are very proud of our heritage, but we are Americans.

When we could, we became citizens, we vote, we pay taxes, we assimilated to speak English, but we’re Hungarian at home, we still make Hungarian food, we’re still very proud to be Hungarian.

And I think the problem that we’re running into is that now the new immigrants who are coming in kind of want to keep their way of life in the United States. And this country is built on blending cultures. And that’s what makes us great.

Not that this is a great example, in terms of what came out of it, but World War II. The United States developing the nuclear bomb. It was immigrants from all around Europe who fled from the Nazis, that helped the Americans here to build--to do the Manhattan project. So, when you hear these names in the Manhattan project, there’re a lot of immigrant names. These were Americans first. Even though they didn’t quite know, but they did know about this bomb would destroy their home countries, if Hitler hadn’t backed down etc. you know the story, they wouldn’t have defeated him.

But the point is that we need to work as a team. You can’t show up at the party, when it’s somebody’s party, and then stay in a corner with your clique and just mad-dog everybody, because they’re not agreeing with you. Well, then, don’t come to the country. Why come to the United States, if you’re not happy here? But I understand why people flee their country, and so, what we need to do as Americans, our politicians need to work with world leaders and somehow stop the wars and the economic turmoil in other countries that makes people leave.

INTERVIEWER If you could bring one lesson or aspect of European culture to America, what would it be? Vicea-versa.

VERBANSZKY You know what’s funny, that’s the conversation we have every time we come back from Europe, like how we want to have the best of both worlds. I think, this sounds really silly, but the food, we have, we are so lucky, especially in California. Fresh vegetables, fresh—we have access constantly to fruits and vegetables, and food products that are more seasonal in Europe. Or, you can get them, but they’re very expensive. So, I think that’s a big thing. I know groceries are expensive here, too, but they’re not expensive as they are in Europe. The variety of that, of the food. Take that to Europe. Also the things being open more, to have that easy access, you don’t have to make sure that by 6 o’clock you have everything, or the stores will close. Definitely. I think the vast amount of entertainment we can have here is fabulous, even though, like I said 67

campo review ‘16 earlier, it kind of overwhelms you at times, it’s also great that you have all those things. Yes, Europe is catching up with that, but we still have limited channels, things like that.

What I’d want to bring here, as I kind of mentioned earlier, is the festivals. I’d love to—my wife and I were talking about, like, we should make mini festivals at our house. Like invite a bunch of our friends over and be like, ‘Okay, we’re going to have the Oktoberfest. Now we’re gonna have the Christmas market,’ and things like that. I would love to incorporate a little more of, selfishly, the respect for teachers here. Bring that from Europe, because teachers are respected and paid really well in some other countries because they are qualified. The problem is here in the United States we have so many teachers, we need that many teachers, that we have to kind of scrape the bottom of the barrel sometimes to get teachers, and then those teachers, do they deserve to be getting paid as much as a teacher who is qualified? No. In Europe, there’s not as much of a need for teachers, so the demand is low, and they supply, and they can be very selective. But I wouldn’t mind having a little more respect for that, just for the profession in general, and then, this is going on a tangent, but I look at some of my colleagues, not maybe at this school, but in the teaching profession, and I’m going like ‘No wonder people don’t respect teachers.’

I would love it that sports wouldn’t be as big a deal here. I mean, Europe loves their sports, but it does not play as big of a role in education. I mean, it’s ridiculous--I don’t know if I should say this--but how much money and time and energy students spend on sports more than anything else with that hope that they’re going to get into college or even go pro even though it’s not a chance in hell. Instead it should be for fun, and enjoyment. And, you know, it’s pride. Europeans get all excited, they get into fist fights over soccer matches, they do, but afterwards they shake hands. It’s not a big deal. Here it’s just that constant sports, hour after hour.

INTERVIEWER Do you have any stories you understand as definitive of your move to America? Would you be willing to tell one, or two?

VERBANSZKY When we drove across the country and I saw, for the first time, one of those big semi-trucks. One of the big ones, that have the big front nose and everything. Big old massive trucks. Another one was steak. A huge piece of steak at a Black Angus restaurant, slapped down in front of me, maybe just a pound or something. But I’d never seen meat that huge. Definitely. That was a moment of America. Fourth of July. Red, white, and blue. Fireworks. I felt America. Those are all positives. I can’t really think of specific stories, more moments. Color. The style of things.

Stuff like that.

INTERVIEWER Is there anything we didn’t cover you’d like to speak to?

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VERBANSZKY I just want to say that the American Dream is definitely still possible, it’s just not the one of our—Americans--parents and grandparents. It’s very different. It’s a different American Dream than my dad’s. My dad’s American Dream was to come to the states, get a job, get a nice big house, a yard, retire. That’s not the American Dream anymore. The American Dream has evolved, and I don’t know exactly what it has become. I feel like that’s a big one. But I was just—it was just—the proudest moment of my life was May of 2004, when I became a citizen.

And I was in that room with thousands—over a thousand people in a stadium—and they put on, on a big screen a video—probably it was taped—but it looked like it was live, of George Bush, President George Bush at the time, congratulating all of us. And then they called out the countries, one after another. And there were a hundred countries represented. And it was that—I was proud to be an American. I still have that little American flag from when I became a citizen, May of 2004.

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seeking sound by alexandra reinecke from “a moment of america” As a boy, my father, who later became a music professor, used to listen to Radio Free Europe from beneath thick mountains of wool. That’s part of what I think our move to the States was, an effort at escape, the violent motion to achieve at last the casting off of that blanket which, even outside of use, in its folded form in the basket beside the living room door, stifled his eardrums’ proximity to the sound of the word freedom.

After my mother left him in this world he left Europe for America. He said he was tired of the land, couldn’t live there any longer, but even as a middle schooler I could discern in with what soberness he spoke of the move his motive of finding her there, or of salvaging some refuse from the life her death had punctured.

My only conduit to America before the move was the T.V. the country dubbed into German. Our charcoal gray cube convinced me that America was going to be a plain of cowboys and Indians middled by a cluster of spires called Manhattan grown straight up like bamboo sprouts. Action movies came from America, and Dallas, and Dynasty, and I understood it as a place whose size was exceeded in scope only by its accompanying noise.

Faced with news of the move at age ten, I was sure the country’s loudness would drown me, an outcome I understand now was precisely the one my father sought for himself. As a man whose boyhood had been petered out in soundwaves delivered through wool, he must have wanted just that. To drown in noise. To transcend circumstance in sound.

Maybe over the noise the whispered diagnoses and clinical sympathies would go mute, the post-mortem silence recede and we’d again have a property line marked with the boundaries of cherry tree and creek in which we collected frog eggs in Ziploc bags. Maybe he thought America’s strident amplitude would level our European sadness, would interrupt the melancholy language of coughs and hums we’d orchestrated those last weeks so as to avoid inexpediency in talk of the doctors’ conclusions, and had remained long after the need for such a mechanism had passed us.

My American orientation to sound required none the attention to auditory nuance my father had taught me. The English obscenities our taxi-driver shouted out of the stomach of his black-worn-gray and tape bandaged cab pushed at my father’s mouth, and from the first I loved America, as one loves secondhand the person or circumstance who has done a friend well, for the deliverance of that promised sound. America, I understood then, wasn’t like the southern and northern German regions to which we’d moved back and forth. America was the final locale, the platform from which he would manage, with that audacity of spirit respective the country, to simultaneously live and grieve, to at once exalt and forget my mother.

Pumpkins introduced me to Connecticut. Halloween decorations flanked the oaks. Purple and orange and black glitter-glued bats and ghouls of various mediums—tissues, toilet paper, plastic shopping bags, white towels emblazoned with the local country club’s shield torn and hung and martyred in the name of October—all of which so removed from the actual effects of 70

campo review ‘16 haunting that even my death-bruised brother and I found ourselves exuberant to joke of headstones and coffins over Snickers and Twix.

Cubed stuffing and turkey laced in browned filigree, cranberry clumps the shape of hills welcomed us to a neighbor’s Thanksgiving the next month, but when we went home, we became aware, not long after the only remains of the leftover fruit-sauce was a pale magenta tint to the plastic Tupperware, that however assured we were in our role as Pilgrims at that table, in this land, we too were Indians, outsiders at home.

A recession hit. A slip the color of Revolutionary red years-worn in the sun informed my father that the country to which he had emigrated in seeking sound hadn’t a need for directors who worked to produce its auditory spectrum. And we were Indians then, carrying bloated duffel bags and memories of sheathed corn hung on neighbor’s doors which now, as we traversed long miles in from the East, stirred with new relevance in our recollection.

In California, apartments smelled of must, Salvation Army mandated housing harbored a stench of apparently source less Evergreen Lysol, and the cramped quarters of the Buick we called home three weeks encouraged ironic comments about the need for tucked knees in a country we’d mistaken as one of open plains.

Hardship followed hardship like the plastic row-ducks classmates had given me when I first arrived, a toy for which I was much too old. A group of African American students bullied me for being white; standardized tests whose results determined my adulthood projection were indifferent to my unfamiliarity with the language in which they were administered. But just as something about sound stuck for my father, something about education—first its costlessness, next my discerned skill in it—stuck for me.

There was always sound. It varied as the apparatuses for our hearing it changed—from apartment to apartment, apartment to motel, motel to car and back—but even as my father’s hands fumbled over bags of quarters with which we were supposed to extract a sum to eat, he managed to ensure the influx of noise was constant. Likewise, school became for me a rectifying and steadying force. Beside the various radios there soon emerged a colony of highlighters, pencils, books, a scholastic civilization which met my father’s ever-present sound with an equal and remarkable persistence.

I learned about chemical compression in a system as the cramped Buick compressed my own bodily system; I read Rupert Brooke in the choking fake-tree-smelling motel air inside a strange and exterior parallel of the Great War soldiers of whom I read. Things happened. Loss and more loss and just enough good to keep the scheme together, like the sliver of frosting on grocery store cake which manage against better probability the equilibrium of the whole. Shared laughter with my brother. Gas station gummy bears. High marks on tests. An increased fluency in the language I had come to befriend.

In classic American spirit, I kneaded myself out of the available resources, free library time, rented textbooks, an acquired appetite for long work. I put myself through college, graduate school, life. After college, I bought a Nintendo which I once wanted more than anything tangible in this world. That Nintendo has now been reduced to residence in a storage unit, because the awful has been superseded by the good and the very good. A dog. A Tahoe house. A Volvo station wagon years of study has assured in which my children will never sleep.

America is a lot of things, not all of which are positive. I remember those things.

Remember and live with them. Hold them up sometimes, as a scientist raises a microscope slide or a child a dollar bill to the scrutiny of light: in unmetered fascination. A political speech. A hum in the ears. My hands beating out tempo on the Buick dashboard. I remember the first 71

campo review ‘16 Fourth of July in a crescendo crush behind the eyes, a visual throbbing in red, white and blue, the noise of firecrackers that of buckeyes breaking beside that boyhood creek. I felt America that day. I’ve considered it a privilege, however costly, to have continued to feel it all this time.

I don’t know if he ever joined my mother. I don’t know if it was naïve to think he had, though I’m sure such a conclusion is just the sort it takes an American to come to. What I do know, however, is that, somewhere between grief and saved quarters, we were happy with each other. With the radio on.

Not once did my brother or I suggest that he turn down the sound.

i miss them on holidays an interview with elaine nunn by katie nunn INTERVIEWER Where are you from?

ELAINE NUNN I’m from Long Island, originally from Queens New York and then we moved out to Long Island when I was 8.

INTERVIEWER Describe your childhood.

NUNN I was an only child, and so, my childhood was a bit lonely, pretty stable, my parents fought a lot.

I had a big extended family of cousin we were pretty close knit. Suburban.

INTERVIEWER Suburban? *Whispering* I can’t think of anything else to ask you. Why did you decide to move to California? If all of your family was on the East Coast?

NUNN I had been to California a few times in my childhood, because my father worked for American Airlines and we got to travel a lot, and then, I came out with my best friend from college and liked it again, and came into San Francisco, and then I had a boyfriend who lived in Los Angeles and we had a long distance relationship for about two years. I knew I wanted to come out to

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campo review ‘16 California, and had planned to move out to the Bay Area, but then I, uhh, moved to LA when I was 25. I wanted to try something new and I thought I was young and I might as well try it.

INTERVIEWER How do you think you relationship with your family was affected by moving to California?

NUNN I think my parents missed me a lot, and then I probably, and then at point I was no longer apart of my extended family. I didn’t see them for a long time.

INTERVIEWER Do you still see your extended family?

NUNN I did, I used to, until my mother moved out to California and now I don’t see them that much.

INTERVIEWER Do you miss them?

NUNN I do, I miss them on holidays, I had a couple of people pass away over the years so one favorite uncle and one favorite aunt died, so, umm, so as I got older the connections loosened.

INTERVIEWER Do you think you still try to keep your heritage alive in your own family?

NUNN I do, I would say I grew up in a family that was Italian American, cause my Dad’s influence was pretty strong, so I keep the family traditions alive by cooking Italian meals, just, just cooking in general, being a little, hot headed sometimes, being, ‘kinda on the stricter side, a little less loose.

Emphasis on family, togetherness.

INTERVIEWER Cool. (Laughs.)

NUNN Thank you.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER Do you think there has been any major cultural differences, that you have gained since moving to California, like do you think you were one way when in New York and now suddenly, maybe you value organic food more?

NUNN Yes, I think I enjoy being outside more. I think I value, just being more outdoorsy, I think I value good food, I think I’m more progressive. I think I was always liberal, I was a teacher in New York City, umm, I think I appreciate diversity more, I think, yeah.

INTERVIEWER Good job, mom.

NUNN Gracias.

INTERVIEWER Is there anything you regret when it comes to your family?

NUNN My family in my childhood, or my family now?

INTERVIEWER Anything, anything?

NUNN Anything I regret. Umm . . . (long pause). No, I think the only thing that comes to mind is wishing i could express my feelings better with my dad, but he wasn’t very good at expressing his feelings for me.

INTERVIEWER It’s okay.

NUNN Yeah.

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snow white by katie nunn from “i miss them on holidays” Home was a world away, and for now she liked it like that. Away from her cousins and mother, and most of all her father, the idea of Long Island seemed almost ridiculous. She shooed it out of her brain, out of her knee length skirt, and small sunglasses. For now, she thought, it would only be about new experiences. About the sun on her face in February, about seeing him, about glamour and friends and living a life away from her domineering family.

She would soon learn that Los Angeles was a maze of sex, short skirts and blonde haired women. She was a tall, well educated teacher, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. Her hair was to her shoulders, and bobbed when she walked purposefully, which she was the way she was usually walking. She looked like sleeping beauty, except with more self-determination and worth. She walked with anxiety in her footsteps and excitement on her face throughout a maze of traffic and glamorous smog.

She missed New York and its snow and busy, rude people. She missed staying indoors, reading her books on the Holocaust, missed good pizza.

Her students made up for her longing. South Los Angeles was entirely the same and yet entirely different from New York City. She watched her students bring children to class, be killed in gangs. At 25, she knew she had found her calling as a teacher. She encouraged her students to graduate, to go to college. She faced another world every time she went to her work.

She met an Englishman on night in the summer. English, but he was from Germany. Came to America to sell relaxation CDs. 6 months later, they were married.

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roots of the juvenile court system an interview with lori thelen by brigitte jia Alameda County Education Department staff member Lori is a teacher and mentor who works with the county’s juvenile hall. For eight years, inspired by the disparity between the way society treated juvenile delinquents and other youths, she’s been working in juvenile law and rehabilitation for juveniles who’ve been through the system.

Before I interviewed Lori, I’d read a New York Times article claiming that the juvenile system inadequately protected youths who’d been exploited, and I wanted to find out if that was true. Were the roots of the juvenile court system in fact unjust? Did they protect the rights of minors fairly? Were staff members actually in it for the paycheck, or were they genuinely invested in helping these kids readjust to society?

Talking to an experienced staff member helped clear things up. Lori is absolutely invested in these individuals---she finds joy in seeing her students succeed and believes that every minor deserves an education. She told me that many of the youths who pass through the system are not resentful of it---they look forward to this educational opportunity. The system, Lori states, affects different individuals in different ways. A generalization of resentment or happiness can’t describe what they feel. The roots of the juvenile courts are not sinister, she and I both conclude, and as a whole juvenile hall is a facility that tries to help kids before they must suffer major consequences as adults. The system doesn’t uproot individuals, it helps them establish themselves.

Lori is involved in watering the roots of the system and her students alike. She voiced her opinion about the faculties juvenile hall provides---she would include additional transition aids like community service and more stable housing to the facilities available to the youths. She has established herself in this field for noble reasons, and continues to uphold them with her thoughts and her advocacies. Students under her wing have turned around and really found themselves enjoying their education. Lori and I both found that the court system tries to root itself in justice, and that staff members like herself are deeply invested in helping the kids find their paths and root themselves within society.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER How long have you been working in this field?

LORI THELEN Well, I worked with juvenile hall for eight years, in coed and then with just girls.

INTERVIEWER Wow, so you’ve got a lot of experience! What was your role in your work?

THELEN I was a teacher, within the units---the kids are divided by units, and they stay with these units, and I taught, well, different subjects. English, math, science, and history. And right now I help with independent study, with Alameda county. I tutor three days a week at International boulevard.

INTERVIEWER That’s incredible. What was your motive, for starting this job, like what did you want to achieve?

THELEN Well, you know, I used to live in the residential area of Denver. And I would see these kids, these “throwaway” kids, who deserved an education just like you and I wanted to really make a difference for them and their upbringings.

INTERVIEWER Wow. That’s just amazing. Damn, now I feel like I should be doing something better with my life! Anyway, my next question is, do the juveniles who have been involved with the system think that it’s just, or---how do they feel about the system once they go through it?

THELEN Well, individually---it really depends on the kid. Some find the system to be, you know, kind of a relief. Some want to escape their time, and a lot of the time it gets old, monotonous---a lot of these kids will come in and get out, and then weeks later they’ll be back in and it really does get old for them. While they’re there, you know, they get school.

INTERVIEWER Yeah, definitely. Are there ever any turnabouts from a student of yours not liking school to liking school?

THELEN Yes! Overall, most of the students I would say like school. They receive credits for college and a lot of them really do enjoy it.

INTERVIEWER That’s wonderful to hear! That’s really great. Yeah, I guess school is really sort of an escape at times. Do you think that those who are exploited resent the system? Or are they just, you know, passing through?

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campo review ‘16 THELEN I don’t feel like they’ve been resenting the system, I mean, there are a lot of services in juvi to help them transition back into life. Youths who have been exploited are often incarcerated for something other than exploitation, you know, we try to protect girls who have gone through a lot.

INTERVIEWER Definitely. You mentioned transitional services—what are some of the faculties available?

THELEN Well, there’s transitional housing for older teens and there are group homes, and kids can get an education from the court that can be transferred to another school in the county, or near them. In my work I help exploited youths, which is the Emerge program. Generally I would say that we need safe and stable housing and community services—I’d like to make the transition more stable, I think the girls would really benefit from integration.

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find mulberries an interview with yong zhong by tanya zhong INTERVIEWER Where did you grow up?

YONG ZHONG I grew up in a rural area of China, the Southern part of China in Jiangsu province.

INTERVIEWER What was a typical day like?

ZHONG At that time there was no TV or videogames, so we would just go find two or three friends and find something to do.

In the summer what we typically do is go to school then after school the most interesting thing was to go to the pond or river and swim. Of course parents didn’t want us to go swimming because it was too dangerous in the river but we would always find a way to go somewhere to swim and come home and lie about it and say “hey, we didn’t go swimming…”

In the summer it rains a lot and right after the rain [...] the pond would overflow and wash the fish and shrimp out and we would try and catch them.

And we also go in the springtime and summertime we would go find mulberries growing around... and climb the trees and pick mulberries to eat. Then we would come home with clothes smudged with all the purple red color.

INTERVIEWER Who did you live with when you were a kid?

ZHONG I lived with my mom and my sister. My father was in a neighboring county working for the county government.

INTERVIEWER What did your mom do?

ZHONG 79

campo review ‘16 My mom was a high school teacher. She eventually became principal of a high school.

INTERVIEWER What was school like?

ZHONG School back then, you don’t have good school buildings, our track and basketball courts were dirt and we didn’t have grass fields. Mostly we played basketball and table tennis and some track and field.

The most fun thing was to ride bikes. Bikes cost a lot of money at that time [...] In high school on Sunday when there’s no school we just ride bikes somewhere, to another little town to go play.

Usually one person pedals, and on the back rack a friend would hop on and sit there. Sometimes in the front there’s another person. There could be at least two people on one bike and we’ll ride around.

INTERVIEWER And you would also go to other towns to watch movies, right?

Y: Yeah, go to other towns at night and watch a movie, and when the movie ends it’s all pitch black. There’s no streetlamps, just fields, and you go with the crowd and roughly pick a direction to go and get home.

ZHONG So your whole town would just go…

Yeah in one spot just to watch a movie. IN the summertime the movie people on motorcycles go from one town to another town, then in the afternoon we all bring our stools out to save a spot. In the summer there’s still daylight until 9 o’clock, so the movie starts around nine, usually a short documentary first and then a movie.

INTERVIEWER It seems like there were a lot of fun things…

ZHONG Yeah not a whole lot of schooling. Mostly arithmetic and some Chinese language.

INTERVIEWER At school?

ZHONG Yeah. At that time… Well, it was the Cultural Revolution time so most learning was on the practical side. We would go to the field and try to cut down weeds and grass and make compost, and we measured fields to figure out the area of a piece of land, things like that.

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campo review ‘16 INTERVIEWER Any other fun memory that sticks out to you?

ZHONG Sticks out? The kids were all very independent. When I was about nine or ten years old, my sister is two years older than me so she and I would travel to the neighboring county to visit my father. We would transfer to Zhengjiang, a bigger city, which is about one day’s travel even though it wasn’t very far. And We would travel, just the two of us.

youth has no fear by tanya zhong from “find mulberries” youth has no fear. it tumbles from trees and skates the surface of dirt roads on stolen bicycles kicking dust into the past. youth eats fruit plucked off a bush. it leaves its fingerprints in mulberry juice and collects scented stamps of reds and purples on its face. youth goes to movies in the warm open air. when the screen dims to match the pure nighttime void then, with its dreams just behind its heavy eyelids youth finds its way home.

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campo review ‘16

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campo review ‘16

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