Crane School

I struggle with the game, “if you were an animal what would you be?” There are simply too many compelling species for me, a social creature, to choose from. Dolphins are at the top of the list, but elephants, lions, and prairie dogs all make a good case.

It seems somehow always easier to find what animal someone else would be. Or better yet what inanimate object they would be.

There can be no better means possible to explain my mother to you, for example, than to describe her as a bookcase. Not just any bookcase, in fact, but four specific floor to ceiling units installed shoulder to shoulder in her upstairs hallway. I call these bookcases, by the way, because bookshelf implies too greatly the presence of a shelf, and though I’ve known these oak behemoths most of my life they are so laden with books, objects, images, and other sundries than I’ve never really seen much of any shelf. 

The weight of paper these structures bear is enormous. These are no Billys from the IKEA catalog, which quickly concave from the weight of a few textbooks or a row of forgotten DVDs. These are solid oak, uncompromising vessels for holding the library of a woman of broad and diverse interests.

And a library it is, though defined by contents and organization more esoteric than Mr. Dewey had in mind. There’s the section of gold embossed compendiums of fairy tales. A hoard of paperbacks boasting prices listed in cents purchased mostly in the 1960s. Biographies run the course of many linear feet, often with the evocative obituary of the life that inspired the purchase of the book. Cookbooks, garden planners, guides to home building, tomes to tarot, and shelves on the history, philosophy, and practice of astrology. 

As I said, if my mother were an inanimate object she would surely be this set of bookcases—learned, expansive, maybe a little obsessive, but dedicated to the relentless pursuit of knowledge.

//

It’s funny, therefore, that when I approached the end of high school and began to look ahead to college, my mother sat me down with a proposal. It went something like this:

“Crane operator.”

We were at the table in my grandmother’s house. My mother’s cheekbones were elevated, suggesting some sense of levity regarding the suggestion. But there was also sincerity.

“The world needs crane operators.”

I still could summon no response.

“As a skilled crane operator you can travel the world and earn six figures. And as a woman you’ll meet union hiring quotas!”

Listening to this was as surprising as if I had pulled on a certain hardcover, the wall of bookcases swung around to reveal a hidden chamber and that chamber was a high glass box attached to an enormous crane. 

//

The way I learned the story of my mother’s path through education interweaves so closely with the major events of the family it is more family history—even national history—than it is the story of my mother alone. 

My mother was bright and on the college track offered by her Pennsylvania high school in the mid-1960s. Her guidance counselor urged her to apply to Bennington College—a private liberal arts college in Vermont that at the time only admitted women. But her father refused to pay for anything other than secretarial school. Somehow this refusal ignited—intersected? The order of this part I’m not certain—my grandparents’ divorce. As the story goes, my grandmother’s lawyer fronted the money for my mother to go to college and she enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston, based in large part on a picture of an unrepresentative tree in the brochure. 

But Boston’s youth and intellectual class soon became embroiled in the anti-war movement. Apparently a philosophy teacher at Northeastern told my mother’s class to join the university of the streets. And so she heeded that advice and dropped out after a few semesters. I vaguely recall my grandmother mentioning that she was unaware of this change in enrollment status and continued to pay tuition for a semester.

With half a degree and a lot of passion, my mother spent a decade pursuing education beyond the high walls of academia. She built a house with her anti-war friends, high up in the hills of Maine amid a blueberry barren. In the depths of the Maine winters she left to earn money needed to support the building project that would resume when the ground thawed. She took odd jobs around the northeast and even went down to New Orleans to cook for an oil rig on the Gulf of Mexico, which paid good money despite the sexism. All the while she collected books. 

College didn’t resume until she was in her 30s when she drove cross country to enroll at Sonoma State University to study Jungian Psychology. This was a new version of college: a time of personal motivation with enthusiasm for doing the reading and submitting the assignments. She made friends with administrators and professors and pushed back against the students who sought to dominate the discussion, especially to the exclusion of their female classmates.

But marriage to my father called my mother back from the West Coast. Then her pursuit of a master’s in education coincided with divorce from my father. As I said, her educational path seemed at all times to intersect with these greater beats of her life. 

//

Back at the table in my grandmother’s house. “I really believe: education is wasted on the young,” she continued. “What do you know about who you are, what you want to study, and what you want to do with your life? Take a few years, become a crane operator, save money, read on your own time, and then when you know what you want to do go to college!”

//

Suffice to say I did not take this advice. I did not go to “Crane School.” But something inside me that could have been pulled too tight was loosened by her saying this.

You see, I went to an academically rigorous public high school in a privileged part of Connecticut. The administration posted at the front entrance a banner that read “Through these doors walk the best students in the world,” or something to that effect. We were the kind of school that took extra standardized tests, both to practice and provide further evidence to the state of how well we took them. I took classes like Journalism, Film Analysis, and Public Speaking which included going to the school’s AV studio and filming the delivery of our speeches. I don’t know what would have happened if my guidance counselor or the school college counselor got wind that a parent was suggesting trade school.

But I was the kind of kid who wanted to go to college. I knew enough about who I was and what I wanted to study that I earned admissions to excellent programs and was offered scholarships and financial aid.

However the college process never affected me as much as others. Many of my essays were written and submitted on the same day—can you believe? I think back now and believe that I was unique amongst my classmates for not feeling the pull of pressure from school and from home. My options felt flexible, even in the face of institutional pressure or crisis at home. 

And so I embarked upon an education that was itinerant but ultimately uninterrupted. I spent my first year at a Canadian university’s satellite campus outside of London where our Monday-Thursday classes were augmented by field studies Fridays and Saturdays. I had hoped to continue at the Canadian university, but the withdrawal of financial support from my father meant that I had to find a cheaper alternative. The day I returned home to the U.S. I submitted an application to transfer to Smith College—a rigorous all women’s college that kicked my butt academically. I chose Smith in large part because they didn’t have any general education requirements and they seemed like the kind of institution who would honor the intentionality of an idiosyncratic student like me. Sure enough, Smith let me study abroad again for my third year, which I spent at the University of Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews, where I studied English, history, film, and religion. While abroad I proposed a self-designed major, which Smith accepted. 

I graduated feeling empowered by my college’s support of my unusual, but intentional path, and ready to take my love for storytelling into the world. But this was 2008 and those tender aspirations were some of the hardest hit by that economic frost. The winter of 2008 and 2009 I was living with my then boyfriend, first outside of Dublin and then outside of London. Those cities just 6 months before had been booming with money and jobs and building. I remember seeing countless cranes on my inbound flights the summer prior and wondered if I’d come to regret my decision not to go to Crane School. But as I flew back to the U.S. in February 2009 I could see the cranes of London immobile, their high glass boxes empty while the financiers of the rubbly site below scrambled to validate their liquidity. It seemed that the crane operators were at a loss as much as the recent liberal arts graduate in the face of a global economic crisis. 

//

A few months after returning to the U.S. I found myself accidentally starting a career at another rigorous liberal arts college. Sometimes I would encounter a senior worried about their future, that there are so many jobs out there but they can’t tell if they had the skills for any of them. Sometimes they asked for my opinion about how to get a job with a liberal arts degree that seems no good for no one particular job. I would say how much I appreciate the people who train for particular skilled jobs, but remember those skills change or sometimes are no longer needed. So if you find yourself at the end of your time at a liberal arts college, remember you went there for four years to learn how to think. I would remind them how they’ve practiced taking in great volumes of information, taken time to consider what they’d learned, and proven their ability to articulate a perspective. And it doesn’t matter if they’d study biology or art history; more important than the choice of major is the process of taking information in, considering it, and externalizing it again. Developing those three steps allows someone to step out into the ever-changing world and convince someone else that you have skills to contribute. And hopefully it allows you to be continually curious about the world, with the bookcases to prove it.