[Menvi-discuss] Someone wrote a short memoir about me!

[Chela Robles]

Here is something someone wrote about me it is awesome and we keep in touch!

November 18th-25th,  2010
 Bil 	Hawkins

             THAT SONG BY BUNNY BERRIGAN

It was early in September 1988 when I was working for Contra Costa
County S.E.L.P.A. as an Itinerant Teacher of the Blind that I was sent
to White Pony Preschool in Lafayette, California. I had a large
caseload spread between 14 school districts which took me all over the
county. My schools ranged from Orinda and Moraga to Richmond, and all
the way up to Walnut Creek, Concord and out to Port Chicago. I spent
more time driving than I did teaching.

I waited for the school bus to arrive with the student. I was
wondering how to fit her into my schedule and wondering at who had
allotted her five hours a week of my time. I had no idea how I was
going to squeeze her into the teaching and driving schedule.

The bus pulled into the parking lot and I watched the driver, a
stocky, cheerful, middle-aged Native American Lady, unbuckle a student
and pick her up.

The girl was tiny. I had heard she was a preemie, but I had no idea
how small. She was wiggling, energetic, laughing…

And happy.
The driver was bouncing her and singing a song with a ‘cha cha cha’
chorus and the little girl was giggling and bouncing in time to it.

The driver put the little girl down on the ground and when I knelt in
front of her and said ‘Hi,’ she reached her arms out for me to pick
her up. I did. She was as light as she was small. She was wearing
jeans shorts with a red t-shirt, and blue sneakers and white socks
with frills. It was September and chill, so she was wearing a blue
jacket.  Her hair was all ringlets and curls. Someone, her mother
presumably, had taken exquisite care of her hair. She was as small and
perfect as a doll.

She smiled, then she laughed. Her entire face lit up with joy.  And at
that moment I didn’t care about schedules, I was going to see her
every day…for as long as she needed.  The rest of the kids and the
other schools could wait.

Her name was Chela. She was born early and very tiny, about a pound
and a half with bleeding into her brain and a hole in her heart. And,
against all odds, she survived. She was four, I think, but with a body
the size of a small two year old.

Although small, she wasn’t fragile. She was all energy and wiggle and
curiosity. She wasn’t talking yet.

I got a cane for her, a sturdy one made out of fiberglass and
super-glued a nylon marshmallow tip on the end and we set out across
the campus to explore. The White Pony Meher School had formerly
belonged to the Lafayette School District and they were renting it to
the Meher Baba Group. It was a sprawling elementary school with
staircases, terraces, tunnels between the buildings, and inner courts
with playgrounds built onto a hillside. It was bounded by a parking
lot on one side, an enormous playing field on the opposite end, a
plateaued playing area on the top of the hill and a residential street
on the bottom. It was ideal for teaching a little girl how to use a
cane.

Chela’s hands and fingers were tiny and it would be a while before she
could hold and move the cane entirely by herself. I bent over and
helped her hold it and we started touching things…

‘Touching’ was probably too calm a word. We banged, crashed, bashed
and poked, bopped, tapped and slammed every wall, door, garbage can,
handrail, banister, and pole in the school with that cane.  Every
fence post and anything that stood vertical had a musical tone. Every
wall, vertical plane, door and bench had its own sound and touch.
Bushes all had a different kind of ‘give’ and the leaves and foliage
that she knocked off all had individual smells.

Chela loved the to and fro movements of the swings on the playground
and, with some support and guidance, her favorite thing in the world
was to slide down banisters.

The teachers at the school were amazingly supportive. The school was a
Meher Baba School. It was named after the adept who taught, ‘Do your
best; Don’t worry; Be happy.” We could do worse than living by those
rules alone.  The teachers were loving, mellow, and gentle folks who
dressed in white and soft shades of yellow. They tolerated a high
level of exploration on the part of the kids and never raised their
voices. I never saw one of the staff angry at a child. Had I known
this school existed, I wouldn’t have spent a year of my life building
my own preschool fifteen miles south.

On the second day, as we walked through the tiled hallway up near the
upper playing field I played my mouth trumpet. In the smooth tile
tunnel it sounded exactly like a real musical instrument. Chela stood
stock still and listened with rapt attention. She moved her head as
she tried to follow the ricocheting echoes. A look of intense
concentration swept across her face.  I played my favorite mouth
trumpet song, Bunny Berrigan’s I Can’t Get Started

I’ve flown around the world in a plane
I’ve settled revolutions in Spain
The North Pole I have charted
But I can’t get started with you

Around the golf course I’m under par
Metro Goldwyn want me to star
I’ve got a house, a show place,
But still I get no place with you

Suddenly Chela squeeled and exploded into laughter. She clapped her
hands. Then, as her laughter trailed off into a bubbly giggle, she
started to explore the tiles with her hands as if the music was coming
out of the walls. She reached for her cane and touched the walls and
floor--she was looking for the music.

I knelt down, put her fingertips on my cheek and adam’s apple and she
felt the vibrations as the trumpet sounds echoed across the tile
walls. We moved away from the hallway and I gave her the cane.  She
turned around, banged her cane on the wall as she moved toward the
hallway, and found the opening. As she walked inside with the cane,
searching for the music, I played more verses of the song:

You’re so supreme, lyrics I write of you
Scheme, just for a sight of you
Dream, both day and night of you
And what good does it do

In 1929 I sold short
In England I’m presented at court
But you’ve got me downhearted
Cause I can’t get started with you

Chela opened her eyes wide, she leaned her head back as if she were in
some sacred precinct. She listened to the music with that intense look
of concentration all over her face. She held the cane still…then she
reached it out and touched it to the wall…

The little white cane had become a tool.

Blind children have a more difficult time learning balance because
they don’t have the advantage of using their vision to monitor their
position in space by observing the vertical lines of objects and
features in their immediate area. A lot of the things her teachers and
I did were to teach Chela the kinesthetic and proprioceptive cues that
would enable her to control her body position using her own internal
cues.

Chela also had to learn to use her hearing to find things and to sense
objects in her immediate vicinity by using sound alone. I stood in
front of her, calling her name, then moving. As Chela sensed my
movement, she would turn to me. As soon as she touched me, I would
pick her up, lift her above my head, swing her around and put her down
again. She loved being lifted up high and spun around. She squealed
with glee at the movement.

I started moving further and faster. At first I called her name, then
sang, then whispered, then I tip toed silently as I moved and,
finally, said nothing at all. When we did this on the playground with
noisy children behind us, Chela heard me as I blocked the childrens’
sounds. I shifted and so did she. I turned and she followed me.  Chela
had learned to hear ‘sound-shadows.’

Sound does funny things. It ricochets, it bends, it sneaks around
corners. It gets absorbed. It can’t get through some objects, but it
moves around them like flowing water.   Blind people can learn to read
these properties just like seeing people learn to deal with light. If
they start early and have immediate feedback, blind children learn an
amazingly complicated set of skills to navigate the world.

If you stop to analyze it, reading sound shadows becomes so
complicated that the only way you can teach—or learn—how to use them
is through play.

Taking up a lot of space at one end of the play yard between the
buildings was a massive wooden play structure. Chela loved to climb
it. There was a long slide on one side which she liked to slide
down—on my lap. When you think of it, for a blind child to commit to a
slide…that long dash downwards into a void…it takes experience, faith
and supreme confidence.

At the end of the hour I brought Chela back into the large main
playroom where the head teacher, Bea Terry, was doing the morning
lesson. Later in the Fall, I watched Chela weave her way among the
children. They were laughing, taking part in the lesson. She edged
between them on her way to Bea who was whispering her name.  You would
swear Chela could see, but she was listening to the sounds coming from
the floor; the childrens’ bodies were absorbing sounds and not
reflecting them. She winded her way across the room through the
scattered sound cues refracted from the floor and plopped right onto
Bea’s lap.

As well as being Chela’s mobility teacher, I was also her Teacher of
the Visually Impaired. For a while every day, we did braille. We were
using one of the standard Perkins Braillers, a huge, clunky, and heavy
cast iron machine. Chela’s fingers were too small to push the keys.
She pushed my fingers and my fingers pushed the keys.

We did braille with M&M’s and Cheetos. We used a small paint tray with
six holes to simulate the six possible dots of a Braille cell. We made
an ‘a’ with one dot on the inner key on the left side of the brailler,
then placed a Cheeto in the top left hole of the paint tin, she
giggled and ate the Cheetoh.

Chela loved Braille.

When you push all six keys on a brailler, you make the word ‘for.’ So
a series of the word ‘for’ makes for a line of bumps.  Chela made long
strips of the word ‘for’ and we cut them out, then taped them to the
poles all the way up to the upper level of the school and the ‘trumpet
tunnel’ and pasted them to poles where she could reach them.

Each day, as she got off the bus, she headed uphill and was soon able
to find the tunnel on her own. As soon as she felt the “bumpity bumps”
on the pole, she turned into the tiled hallway where I played Bunny
Berrigan’s  song.

I have never seen anyone in my life love a song as much as she loved
“I Can’t Get Started.” It was almost as if, after Bunny Berrigan’s
death, she was the one Fate had chosen to take it over as her own and
carry its soul into the future.

She never hummed or sang to it, or even moved to it, she just
listened, absolutely still and rapt with amazement. It was like she
was memorizing every note…internalizing it into her own bones.

Chela was very small. Her tiny legs would move as quick as she could
to keep up with me when I was trying to move fast. On the games when I
would make noises and she was to find me I had stopped making any
sound at all. She was using my sound shadows, where I either blocked
sound from behind me, or when I pressed myself against a hard surface
behind me, my body absorbed ambient sounds and didn’t reflect them
back. As her hands became stronger, she bopped her own cane on the
ground to generate the sounds that became the echoes and reflections
that drew her world. I would tip toe back and forth across the face of
a wall and she mirrored my slightest motion as she found me.

As soon as she touched me, usually bopping my shoe as she found me,
she got picked up and twirled through the air. She emitted a squeal of
such glee as she ascended into the skies that I never was tired of
hearing it.

We had started walking through the neighborhoods near the school. This
was a piggy-back ride down the stairs and through the halls as we
contacted [bashed] each landmark of pipe, rail, banister, fencepost
and sign on the way down to the sidewalk.

We headed toward the sun, or toward a sound and, when we made a turn,
it was a crisp 90 degrees. She learned to feel the warmth of the
morning sun balanced on her face or ‘ride the sun line’ with the sun
squarely and warm on one cheek.

I walked with a pronounced bounce and each footstep was in time to the
sound of some rhyme I made up. She seemed to like one rhyme more than
the others:

Rickety tickety tin
Lord, a beautiful din
Rickety tickety
Rickety tickety tin

Bomp
Bompiddy bomb bomp
Rickety tickety
Rickety tickety tin

Most kids cling on tight during piggy back rides. And considering that
Chela was almost six feet off the ground, you’d think she would be
hanging on for dear life. She gradually acquired the balance so that
she held on just with her legs. Pointing with her cane, she learned to
steer me like a rider does a horse. Now she could use the sounds of
hallways, distant cars and the sounds of children in the classrooms by
her sides to navigate.

The braille bumpity-bumps were now taped higher and she stopped at
each one to feel her progress. At each successive tunnel, hallway or
stairway the rhyme changed.

Rickety tickety man
Rickety tickety ring on his hand
Rickety tickety
Rickety tickety tin

Bomp
Bompiddy bomb bomp
Rickety tickety
Rickety tickety tin

 On the sidewalk, holding her cane now, she was starting to move it
back and forth to feel the edge of the curb or the fringe of grass at
her other side. As she passed parked cars, she initially stopped,
suspecting there was ‘something out there.’ She was listening to the
traffic behind them. The parked cars blocked the traffic sound so she
heard the outline of the car at the curb. A few months into traveling
in the neighborhoods, she was using the ambient sounds to detect not
only cars, but telephone poles, street signs and even the thin metal
posts of signs in the parking lot.

Professor Wurzburger, in charge of the Orientation & Mobility
Credential Program at San Francisco State University, came over
several times to videotape Chela and we actually have video footage of
the first time she reached her cane out to touch a car.

She would bop each sign or car with her cane to show me she knew where
they were. Chela was literally ‘seeing with her ears.’
The public sees a blind person with a cane and ascribes something like
second sight to them, some magical confluence of powers that comes to
them because they are blind. These auditory and tactile skills start
early and are hard won. They are learned through play by repetition
and immediate feedback. Each day as we swung by the playground
structure she would climb the ladder and walk across the wooden bridge
to the slide. There she would wait for me to scramble up the slide and
take her down the slide on my lap. She loved the slide, but still
wouldn’t do it herself.

Math consisted of counting real objects and playing with Cuisenaire
Rods. I had learned to use these in Australia where they are the
standard way to teach math to students from kindergarten up through
Algebra. Each rod, from one to ten, has a color and corresponding
length. The system was the brainchild of Georges Cuisenaire, a Belgian
educator in 1952. They have never been equaled for effectiveness in
teaching mathematics. The rods are different colors, of proportional
lengths so that three white cubes representing ‘one’ would fit on a
green ‘three’ rod triple its length.

Chela couldn’t see the colors, but she soon learned how many of one
rod would fit against another. She did it all by feel, but she was
‘doing’ addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with her
fingers and mind long before her peers were doing it on the blackboard
and on paper. How Georges Cuisenaire knew that four American pennies
would fit perfectly on one of the purple ‘four’ rods, I’ll never know,
but we played with pennies, nickels and dimes and Chela fit the five
and ten cent pieces on the upended tip of the yellow five and the
orange ten rod.

When babies are developing in their mother’s womb, the right brain
develops first. If the baby is born pre-term, the left brain lags in
development. The left brain is in charge of language, a great deal of
the task of reading, phonics and the tasks of logic. The right brain
deals with music, spatial recognition and the ‘music,’ of language,
its stress, tone, pitch, inflection and rhythm.

About 92% of a population group has their left brain deal with
understanding language and speaking. When babies are born severely
prematurely, as Chela was, language function and speech is more
globally processed, and often there are severe learning disabilities
as a consequence. These children often don’t choose a left or right
hand as ‘dominant,’ they rarely learn to read or write well, and some
never speak. To see a child choose a dominant side early is a clue
that language is placed in the dominant left hemisphere of the brain
and there is more of a chance that communication skills will develop.

In preemies, these skills often develop…but always with severe delays.
  One day with just one of my fingertips to support her, Chela slid
down the bannister on the long stair case. She was holding her cane in
her left hand and as she slid off onto the ground, she switched her
cane over to her right hand. She was doing this consistently.
I had great hope that language, speaking, reading and writing were on
their way.


I spent three years with Chela while I was finishing my doctorate at
night and on the weekends. I got my degree in May of 1991 and a month
later, Chela would be graduating from White Pony Preschool. Professor
Pete came over to White Pony for one last session of filming and as
she sat on the edge of the slide and I called her name before
ascending the slide, she pushed off down the slope. As she reached the
bottom, laughing all the way down, I swung her up into the air and
twirled her around. It was just spontaneous on her part, but it was
caught with the camera rolling. On the video I could hear myself
laughing and saying over and over again, “You flew….you flew…”

I met Chela’s mother and grandmother at the graduation ceremony. The
likeness of grandmother to her daughter and from mother to Chela was
astounding. Her mother was a stunningly attractive brunette woman with
large, dark, intelligent eyes, with a ready smile and laugh.

I gave Grandma an album of photos of Chela showing how I taught her
and assured them she would be in good hands as she started in regular
public school. She would have Collette Perry, whom I considered among
the absolute best of the Teachers of the Blind. I had several other
students in her classroom and had spent three years watching Collette
teaching and empowering children to love braille and to succeed in
mainstreaming classes at Valley Verde School.
Her mobility teacher would be Petal Turner, a wonderful Teacher, who
taught through play as I did. She too, was taught by my professor,
Pete Wurzburger.

I had resigned from my position as Itinerant Teacher of the Visually
Impaired in Contra Costa County and had begun my job search, looking
for a university position.

The time had come to say goodbye…

I knelt down and gave Chela a last hug, then started to leave. I
turned back and looked through the window at the graduation party. I
watched Chela awhile with the other children and could hear her
laughter even above the sound of the other children and guests in the
room. There was a wide, sweet smile on her face.

Some blind children, brought up by overprotective and guilt-ridden
parents, come to expect a terrifying and dangerous world. Life for
these children can be scary and foreboding.

Life held no fear for Chela…

I went out to the car. I sat there for a little while and looked back
at the school. Most people, looking at the White Pony School, would
see a multi-level building with stairs and tunnels. I saw rails that
sang, poles that spoke with their tones, fence posts that rattled and
tunnels that magically played trumpet music. The whole school and
neighborhood were musical instruments that Chela played with her cane.
I hoped Chela would be happy and that she would find the world a
forgiving place where she would be successful, find love, and where
she would discover music everywhere…

There were kids at the California School for the Blind whom I had
taught since they were children and I looked on with a mix of pride
and sadness as they each graduated. I had taught some every word they
spoke and every letter they read.

But Chela was the hardest to leave because I had only started my work
with her. I was leaving when everything was right on the verge of
happening.  Others would have to carry on. I would not be the one who
taught her to talk, to read braille, to do braille math…to cross
intersections at rush hour with total confidence and safety…I would
have to trust other teachers to do what I knew I could do well…and
loved doing…

And even though I knew she would have excellent teachers, giving over
that trust was very very hard…I backed out of the parking lot and
headed home. The last thought I had, as I took one final glance at the
school, was realizing that Chela would never know me, never even
remember me…

but I would never forget her…



It was some time in 2008, seventeen years since I had left California
for Arizona. Just on a whim one night I Googled:

Chela [and her last name] the word ‘Blind’ [and the last town where I
knew she lived]

Two hits came up . One was a letter she had written to a computer
company asking about a problem she was having with a program. It was a
pleasant, but not unexpected, surprise. It was obvious not only that
she knew how to talk, but that she had a far better handle on
technology than I did myself.

The other link —and I had no idea what it was—took a long time
loading. It was a computer generated light show accompanying what
seemed to be a jazz performance.

I heard a trumpet…

A beautiful trumpet…

Sweet and strong, sassy and bold, smoothly gentle and

confident …

Giving a loving birth to each measure and phrase.

The song was familiar…it took a moment to realize that the song was:

I Can’t Get Started by Bunny Berrigan.

The only phrase that could possibly describe what I felt when I
realized Chela had grown and discovered music…

That of all the instruments in the world, she had chosen a trumpet for
her own and picked for her song the one she had heard as a small child
even before she could talk…

was a stunned, reverent silence…

I saw again that tiled hallway…saw the look of concentration that
swept over her …the slow smile simmering on her face. And as I
listened to her sweet playing, I heard her draw out those notes,
control them, shape them, stretch them without breaking them…

I could feel the smile on my own face. And the thought I’d had long
ago, that when Bunny Berrigan died…it was a long time coming…but
someone had come along to make that song special again.

To claim it as her own…

The comprehension washed over me that memories can be so deep, so
true…and so long lasting.

And for Chela, this was pre-verbal memory. A song that she heard even
before she had words to remember its name or who played it.
I sent an e-mail to Chela, telling her how much I loved that
performance. When she replied, I gradually enclosed more information
that I had worked with her and about where that song had come from.

I found that Chela was good in math. She was taking Algebra at Diablo
Valley College and passing it. That was more than I had ever done.
Algebra to me was a closed and locked door in an impenetrable wall.
English composition was difficult for her, but all things considered,
I have a doctorate, but still have as much trouble with math as she
does with English composition. She sends me an e-mail occasionally to
this day, sometimes forwarding things she had written to her friends.
Her e-mail letters to friends on the web show a competent mastery of
writing, leavened with an astounding awareness of the world, humor,
irony--and just the slightest edge of funny sarcasm. One picture she
sent of her, leaning her cheek against that of her boyfriend…

I saw that smile again, one I saw on her face the first instant she
stepped off that school bus at White Pony…

As she shared her life with me, and I mine with hers, the realization
came that Teachers have a sacred task:

It is to give children the skills to understand the world and an
expectation that the world is a trustworthy place; that it is full of
light, and love, and music and that each student deserves--and will
have--their own place in it and the chance to play their own song.
And, as much of these expectations are transmitted non-verbally—and in
Chela’s case--out of sight…it is the voice and touch of a Teacher that
sheds light on what the world can be.

Academics—and no one will ever change my mind on this—take a distant
second place.

Last year I was driving through San Francisco north on 19th Avenue,
heading to the bridge through Golden Gate Park. I took a detour off
25th Avenue and pulled over to the side of the road and got out.

Elk Glen Lake. Nothing much had changed. I saw the grassy hillside
where I sat on a stump the day after I came home from Vietnam,
wondering why I had returned alive and so many of my friends had not.

I wandered over to the hillside. The stump was gone. It had not
survived the forty years since I sat on it, wondering what I was going
to do with the rest of my life.  I remember staring across the wind
rippled waters of the lake that day and wondering what I was going to
do with the gift of time I had been given…hoping that I would not
waste it.

I started walking around the edge of the lake and I was deep in
thought, thinking of work, the kids…and that morning forty years ago
in the stillness of this place remembering my friends who had been
killed and wondering how I could honor them with my life.

People have told me that when I’m lost in thought, I hum…

I stopped suddenly, as I realized that I had been humming all along
the edge of the lake…

And I recognized the tune…

It was that song by Bunny Berrigan…

Note from Chela:
Just to be clear that wasn't my boyfriend, I've never had one before
must have been my sister because I remember leaning my face against
her's. The only other person it could have possibly been would have
been my pianist friend, Jim, but I doubt I'd press my face against
his, intentionally. More like unintentionally. Anyway, glad you all
like it.
-- 
--
"To me, music that breaks your heart is the music that stays with you
forever. It's one thing to be melancholy and one thing to be sophisticated,
but when you get the two of them together in a way people can relate to,
then I think you're on to something. You want the sophistication to lie in
the purity of the sound, the beauty of the arrangements, and the quality of
the performances."-Trumpeter Chris Botti
--
Chela Robles
E-Mail/GoogleTalk/AIM/Twitter/MySpace/LinkedIn: cdrobles693 at gmail.com
WindowsLive Messenger: cdrobles693 at hotmail.com
E-Buddy ID: cdrobles693
Skype Name: jazzytrumpet
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/chela.robles
I volunteer for a non-profit organization called Bookshare, to learn more
and to join us, visit: http://www.bookshare.org
Visit my blog piece from Learning Ally and after reading and listening to
the song selection, fill out the form which requires no CAPCHAS unless
you're a robot at:
http://www.learningally.org/Blog/Access-and-Achievement/144/vobId__2525/
Cell: 19252505955
--