<p>I was soon to make an even greater discovery. One day on one of my rare visits to Brentanos, I left the store through the 47th Street exit, and walked down the street. 47th, between 5th and 6th Avenues, is still the center of the New York diamond district, and the street was full of bearded and forelocked Hasidic men, in black gabardine coats, white shirts, and hats, noisily proceeding from store to store where, through the windows, one could see the diamond cutters in skullcaps at their machines. But in the middle of the block on the north side was a little store that proclaimed Gotham Book Mart on the window, with slightly peeling letters reading Wise Men Fish Here. You had to take two steps down to get in. Inside, along the walls of what seemed almost like a long, poorly-lit corridor, and on shelves protruding from the walls, and on tables arrayed in a straight line the full distance of the store, were books, often piled high, and not even too neatly, as well as several desks. It didnt feel at all like Brentanos, no, it was more like a shrine. An elderly grayhaired woman sat by the window, taking in what was left of the late afternoon light. (I was much later to learn that this woman was Francis Steloff, the proprietor of Gotham, the New York equivalent of Paris Shakespeare & Co. – the most important literary bookstore in the United States and who championed the work of Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, e.e. cummings, and Gertrude Stein, and whose other customers read like a whos who of the Twentieth Century literary world.) She smiled at me when I walked in, but didnt say anything, and that was welcome enough.</p>
<p>My first emotion was one of fear. The books on the wall facing the entrance way were all expensive-looking, leather-bound editions, often tooled with goldleaf and I frankly would have been afraid to touch them. It was both Ms. Steloffs smile and nod, and my fear of the volumes out front that propelled me further into the store. For whatever reason, I picked up books of poetry, I who had never heard of Keats or Shelley, Blake or Byron, and who had been tortured with Shakespeare in junior high school along with the rest of my classmates, and forced to learn all ten uplifting stanzas of Felicia Hemans Casabianca (The boy stood on the burning deck
), with which I can torture others to this day. (I warn you not to ask unless you are prepared for the consequences.) But, no, these were first editions from little presses from around the world, and I discovered Diane Wakoski and Diane di Prima (two of the three huntresses of my life, the other being the singer Laura Nyro), and Kenneth Patchen and I became friends. This wasnt anything like what they taught in English class! This was secret knowledge, obtained during stolen moments after school, in a place that no one else in my world would even be able to find unless they knew what they were looking for, and they wouldnt.</p>
<p>But wait, there was more. I discovered that the second floor of the Gotham Book Mart was inhabited by the James Joyce Society. I never got to go in apparently, all the meetings were held in the evening (when I was home in Bellerose with my four hours of homework), and I wouldnt have known what they did at the James Joyce Society in any case. I barely knew who he was (I didnt read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Ulysses until I was in college, and, actually and I say this with a little bit of shame – never liked them particularly.) But someone told me that one of the activities of the James Joyce Society was to, once a year, do an all day/all-night reading of Finnegans Wake. (Note: Gotham sold its old location, but has since reopened two blocks away at 16 East 46th Street, between Madison and 5th Avenue. The Joyce Society, Finnegans Wake Society, and the Wake Watchers Reading Group have all relocated there as well. <a href=“http://www.finneganswake.org/GothamBookMart.htm[/url]”>www.finneganswake.org/GothamBookMart.htm</a> .If you are ever in New York
.)</p>
<p>For some reason, their obsession became an obsession of my own. Ah, the workings of the teenage brain! I bought a copy of Finnegans Wake, one of the most impenetrable works in the English language if it could be said to be in English at all!, and decided, for reasons of which I have no memory, to make my own annotated edition. In hindsight, this was an odd choice, as I knew absolutely nothing about James Joyce, Ireland or Irish history, Dublin, Gaelic mythology, Freudian or Jungian psychology, or philology, all of which being absolutely critical to understanding the book. And these were the days before computers, no less the Internet. Virtually every line required a trip to the Atlas, a dictionary of mythology, a biographical lexicon, a map of Dublin, etc. It took me around 14 months to go through 80 pages, and filled three entire notebooks what I would give to have those notebooks today! My parents really had no clue as to what I was doing, and I dont recall them asking for an explanation. (Five years later, an annotated edition not mine LOL! was actually published, which made me pretty excited, and slightly miffed at the same time.)</p>
<p>At the end of the process of exploring these secret spaces
I had nothing to show for it. A college admissions officer would never find anything on my list of extracurricular activities. I hadnt won any contests, published a novel or even a short story or a poem, been a member of a knowledge bowl team, traipsed around Ireland (still havent), formed a high school literary society. I am still searching for a fifth person who might appreciate my recitation of a 283-word sentence from Finnegans Wake, though I think that search has now become rather pointless (as if it were ever anything but) as the sentence is fast fading from my memory. Use it or lose it, as they say. But these secret spaces in the world became hidden places inside me. I knew then, even if I couldnt put words to it, that I would become a writer, and a publisher, or simply a lover of words as they play across the heart.</p>
<p>When I look back upon the experience and try to make sense of how it has applied to our familys homeschooling journey, and might apply to yours, it would be too simple to suggest that my parents benign (and loving) neglect was amply rewarded. Had I not had my daily subway adventure beginning at age 14, and the opportunity to escape the provincialism of my big small town, it is hard to know if any of this might have occurred. Assuredly there was nothing in my previous experience, and certainly nothing that happened in school itself, that would have led me toward it. I was gifted with the luxury of finding my own secret spaces for myself, in the interstices of what was essentially a 15-hour school day. The process could likely have been easier (and likely more fruitful) had I been provided with (or at least knew how to locate) mentors outside of my family, preferably a range of them from which to choose, who could have helped guide me in my quest.</p>
<p>But once I have helped my children locate and develop a range of interests, and assisted them in finding mentors and guides or simply the spaces where they can take root, I have learned to take special care to butt out. With my older daughter Aliyah, once we found the matched music composition teacher, I didnt need to know what it was she was learning (which I wouldnt have fully understood in any case), or hear works in progress, or even talk with the teacher about what they were working on together. I hoped they would share, of course, and was gratified when they so chose, but this was her world, not mine. And when Id want to join Aliyah for a walk in the woods, I would be careful not to ask to be taken to those special places that Aliyah had chosen for herself. (In fact, to this day, I dont know exactly where they are.) The naturalist skills she has acquired over the years from teachers and mentors are conveyed to me, when she chooses to do so, as if she is talking to a friend.</p>
Then there is the story of how I got from Oxford to Iran because I knew the son of the Shah’s chief procurer, who had been sent to Williams as a trial run for the Shah’s kid, and ended up working for the CIA without knowing it.</p>