A sky full of stars

How my son's homework helps me remember who I am.

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain famously said, “but it often rhymes.” The quote has been top-of-mind all fall as I’ve watched my son sweat out his homework in geometry, a class that gave me fits in high school. When he slaps the table in frustration, I feel the tingle in my palms.

I knew 9th grade would be a big change of pace for him. I didn’t anticipate what it would mean to me.

Week to week, his assignments propel me into a past I’d nearly forgotten: I’m 15, self-conscious and sweating at my desk, a Nike T-shirt and shoes, jeans rolled just right, gold chain going green, bored out of my mind, lonely, awkward, acned, afraid, Indiana cornfields endlessly rippling out the window and down the highway to the horizon. All the details I studiously resisted learning anything about in school now pop up in my son’s assignments: Euler’s line, centroids, isosceles triangles. I have to remind myself that that’s not me studying at the kitchen table—it’s my son. We aren’t in Indiana; we live in Massachusetts. I’m a grown man, a published writer. Hell, I’m a professor. Still, all it takes to send me back is someone saying chloroplast.

I hated high school but there are things I wished I’d learned or at least paid more attention to when I was there. This week my son has been writing an essay about John Brown, and we watched the PBS American Experience documentary John Brown’s Holy War. It’s a fascinating portrait of the man and his moment in history. I was surprised to learn the extent of his brokenness: poverty, disease, the deaths of his wife and many of their children, the massive debts he owed, his religious zealotry, his grief, as well as about his charisma and the scope of his influence among his fellow abolitionists. By the time he rolled up to Harper’s Ferry, he had nothing left to lose.

But this is American history. Now that my son is taking it (and I’m paying attention as I should have the first time around,) I see it for what it is: a bloodbath.

While we watched the documentary, I couldn’t help but think about a story that has dominated headlines this week: the murder of the UnitedHealthCare CEO. I wondered if the shooter felt as though he had nothing left to lose. I wondered what experiences might have animated his actions. A friend or family member denied life-saving care? Moral outrage over the ways the rich keep their boots on the throats of the poor? People smarter than me can argue the morality of the shooter’s (or John Brown’s) violence. But is there any doubt that the systems both men struck out against were evil? In the wake of the CEO’s murder, I (like a lot of people) am left to wonder why individual acts of violence, like the shooter’s, eat up so much of the public’s attention when violence that’s baked into a system like for-profit healthcare—which represents a truer threat to you and me, and which that CEO was richly rewarded for championing—too often goes unnoticed and unremarked upon.

I have my own stories of denied insurance claims, and I can tell you: yes, it’s a kind of violence. When my son was small and chronically ill, he required expensive medications, multiple sessions of therapy a week, and a host of doctor’s appointments. While my wife and I struggled to help him (he was crying all the time, not sleeping the night) our insurance provider routinely “lost” our claims, denied coverage, and flagged our file for review, which delayed our reimbursements. I spent hours on the phone, talking to underpaid and undertrained representatives, trying to navigate a purposely burdensome and confusing system, tracking down what we were owed so we could pay our bills.

“If your employer didn’t pay you on time,” I yelled at more than one poor rep, “would you want to wait another 30 days for it to be processed?”

“Sir—”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Sir—”

“You owe me! I want what you owe me!”

On it and it went, every damn time. They wanted us to give up. For a staggering number of sick people and their caregivers, these delay tactics work. The most vulnerable among us don’t have the time and/or energy to fight their insurance company while also fighting for their lives.

But this is American history. Now that my son is taking it (and now that I’m paying attention, as I should have the first time around,) I see it for what it is: a bloodbath. Enslavement. Genocide. Stunning corruption. Religious zealotry. The insane hunger for power and domination, over other human beings and also the land. A whole continent used and abused, axed to splinters, a million bison skulls piled high on the prairies. I wasn’t ready for that story at 15. My son probably isn’t ready now. But we’re doing what we can for him, working to invite him into an understanding. Already in English class this year he’s read James and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, books that represent another part of American history: the re-writing and re-telling of it from the vantage of the oppressed, whose accounts bear witness to profound grief and also incredible resilience.

I don’t know when things began to take a turn for me. I don’t know how I somehow transformed myself from a bored and middling high school student in rural Indiana into a writer. I can point to the moment, however, when something about history first clicked with me.

One summer, when I was 25, I traveled to a remote homestead in southern Oregon, along the federally protected Wild and Scenic Rogue River, deep in the Klamath Mountains. No electricity. No neighbors. Only mountain after mountain, folded one atop the next and blue in the distance. That night, without a drop of light pollution to dim their glow, an infinitude of stars mobbed the sky. I remember thinking: How could anyone claim to know anything about history without first seeing this? This was the sky my grandparents slept under as children. This was the sky the ancients slept under, dreaming their myths. It had been taken from me, from all of us, and I wanted to know why. And I wondered if, in some small way—with my words and my life—I might help bring it back.