My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

of the round-the-clock health aides who stand guard over my parents. Unlike the children, however, my parents are able to articulate their feeling of being held prisoner in their own home. They are indignant when I question plans that will leave them alone for several hours on the day when a health aide must be late for work or that will send my mother to the eye doctor appointment on her own. Don’t I think they can manage without her? How hard is it to get a taxi?

In a frequently referenced book, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes the introduction of the Panopticon, a tower that enables a single guard to survey all prison inmates at once, as emblematic of the intensification of technologies of social control in the nineteenth century. I prefer to reflect on the following scene, which I witnessed at the Jefferson Avenue School, for insight about our continuing obsession with controlling the bodies of young children.

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Erica, a young and enthusiastic kindergarten teacher, wants to implement a more progressive curriculum but knows that she will be judged by the year-end test scores of her five-year-olds. The first hour of the day is devoted to a review of the schedule, calendar, weather chart, and morning message that is designed to reinforce basic reading and math skills. Erica takes the children through these exercises with the exaggerated zest of a cheerleader. Unfortunately, the routine is as exhausting as it is exhaustive. At 9:50 the squirming group is lined up, the boys on one side of the door and the girls on the other.

Quieting the children with an organizing song, Erica prepares to lead them down the cavernous hallway, lined with gigantic silver radiators and musty pink walls, to the main lobby and school bathrooms. During past visits, I have stayed behind in order to catch up on my note taking. My impulse to follow the group this time does not go unno-ticed by Hector. “You coming with us, Jonathan?” he asks. I answer in the affirmative but hope that he doesn’t probe further. After all, my usual refrain, “I like to see what you are doing and how you learn in school,” just doesn’t seem appropriate to this activity.

Arriving at our destination as another group is about to leave, Erica props open the heavy wooden doors to the bathrooms and sta-tions herself between them. As the children are called two at a time to enter, she hands each one several pieces of toilet paper from the roll she has brought from the classroom. After everyone has had a turn—

no one demurs, though the waiting children are restless, fidgeting with each other’s hair and clothing—the next group can be seen entering the lobby.

As we return to the classroom, I suddenly recall a similar ritual, one that I have only read about but that resonates with my own gay history. In A Restricted Country, Joan Nestle describes the all-important bathroom lines in Mafia-owned lesbian bars of the 1950s.

Here the door monitor allowed only one person in at a time for fear that salacious interactions might occur if two women entered together. The line, emblematic of the policing of lesbian desire, is also a site for cruising, joking, bantering with the door monitor, and ultim y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 21

mately for resistance. The lines of children I observe are not so very different. They are about containing the bodies of those who are assumed to be potentially out of control, about supervising basic functions, and insuring that peer interaction is always open to surveillance.

My experiences as a gay man growing up and coming out before the Stonewall Riots, the woman who lived restricted and judged on the bathroom line, and the children who live regimented lives in institutions, all attest to the way that vulnerable populations in our culture are closely watched even as they engage in small moments of resistance. Little wonder, then, that I bring particular sensitivities to the complaints of my middle-class parents about the new forms of surveillance they are subject to in their declining years. Indeed, it was in the tiled bathroom designed for younger, more able-bodied people that my father had a serious fall in 2000, despite the fact that his health aide was with him. She turned her back for only a moment to reach for his eye drops and he collapsed. The broken hip was either the result or the cause of the fall. No one knows for sure, or really cares. The surveillance is always imperfect, something every good teacher acknowledges, something every good health aide fears.

The best of the educators that I observe, like the best of the health aides, teach me that care is often delivered through thoughtful reserve and a balanced respect for the emotional needs and physical safety of those who depend upon them.

Catherine is one of these remarkable teachers. When I reach her classroom at 10:15 am, she is sitting on the floor in a large circle with her group of twenty-seven anxious five-year-olds. Upon arrival at school, the children have learned that a teacher in the next room will be late because of car problems. Subsequently, Catherine has overheard them theorizing about an explosion in the car and life-threatening injuries to Ms. Lewis. Six months pregnant, Catherine awkwardly shifts her body weight in an attempt to find a comfortable position, as she patiently walks through the steps of Ms. Lewis’s morning, from leaving her house and trying to start the car, to calling the 22 n jonathan g. silin

repair service and notifying the school that she will be late. No matter how many times Catherine reassures them, many children persist in their belief that a major catastrophe has occurred. Frustrated by the worried looks on the children’s faces, she calls on her assistant for help. The assistant draws an analogy between the sluggish car unable