Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

fixation on population statistics and lists of principal crops had bored me stiff. But Mr. Bishop had been to the places he talked about. When he taught us about New Guinea, it wasn’t in National Geographic images of men in bird-of-paradise headdresses. He told of slogging through viscous mud to meet tribes whose hunting grounds had been laid waste by international mining companies. He described the status of women in many highland villages—somewhere below the status of pigs. Mr. Bishop connected the wiring between my fascination with Elsewhere and the facts to be had in the geography textbooks.

He also taught English, introducing us to off-the-syllabus poets such as Wilfred Owen, whose antiwar poems opened my eyes to the fact that our generation hadn’t invented pacifism.

I wrote to Joannie about Mr. Bishop, and she was gratifyingly impressed. “My English teacher this year is bowlegged, funnyfaced, and a staunch conservative anti-communist. He tries to indoctrinate us in class—‘You just can’t let Communists stay around—if you let one germ live it’ll multiply and soon the whole world will be taken over.’ Etcetera. I have had a strong temptation to say ‘Bullshit’ to his face several times, but I generally don’t curse and besides if I told him that, I can imagine what grade I would receive.”

I understood her predicament. Despite my radical pretensions, I was doing quite well at the hands of the evil Establishment. I’d won a government scholarship that was paying all my school expenses. My painting of a melting face, heavily influenced by the psychedelic poster art of San Francisco, had taken first prize at the Ashfield art exhibition. That winter my mother and father and I vacationed in Tasmania—the first time any of us had been on a plane. It was a trip I’d won in a Young Reporters’ Contest run by the national newspaper, the Australian.

That year, also, our debating team won the final of the citywide tournament by arguing for the proposition “That Science Is a Menace.” I could argue with some feeling, because another prize I’d hoped to win, in the statewide science fair, had certainly created a menace to my mother’s mental health. My project, to prove the food value of certain common garden weeds, had required keeping mice. My mother’s lifelong fear of the rodents lost the war with her desire to encourage all my academic endeavors. Even though the project only required adding small amounts of nontoxic weed to the mice’s diet each week and weighing them to see if they continued to thrive, I couldn’t face actually experimenting on an animal. So I volunteered to care for the control group.

Joannie, who had been keeping mice for four years, sent me reams of advice: “I feed my mice a mixture of birdseed, oatmeal, and cornmeal all swished together, plus a little lettuce for each mouse, and a dog biscuit once a week.… They like shredded paper towel to make a nest in, or a small cardboard box. Don’t give them newspaper because the ink will rub off on their fur and they’ll eat it while attempting to clean themselves.”

In thanks, I named one of the control mice Joannie, although since all were albinos I had difficulty telling her apart from the others: Spock, Rudolph and Margot (the latter two named for a balletomane phase I was passing through).

“Do you know that I never had a mouse named for me before? I was very flattered—and to have my name in such a company of distinguished persons!” Joannie, of course, had already had several Spocks in her mice cages: “Mr. Spock the first (black and white) who lived to be almost two years old and died last 8 August 1969, when we were in Europe. Mr. Spock the second was eaten by his mother before his eyes even opened. Now I have Mr. Spock the third (black) who’ll be a year old on October 12. Long live the Spocks!”

Unfortunately, my Mr. Spock met a grisly end, along with the noble attempt to alleviate world hunger and the run at the science prize. The project fell apart when my mice—the control group, fed on the gourmet mouse mix—began eating each other. The day we gave away the sole—and very fat—survivor of my doomed experiment was a happy one for my mother. Joannie was consoling: “Perhaps you just had paranoid mice.”

Joannie probably could have gotten away with saying “Bullshit” to her English teacher. Her high school seemed to be in the kind of tumult where a few “bullshits” here or there wouldn’t have been noticed. Her first letter of 1971 contained an account of a performance in the school assembly hall of a band called Voice of America—“They used amplifiers and light boxes and electric guitars.… I had to get up and leave because the sound was really murdering my ears.… Just before I left, there was a disturbance on stage; a couple of students wanted to make an announcement about how they had been unjustly treated. A couple of teachers dragged them off. Now the whole school is in uproar about it.”

She sent me copies of the student samizdat being passed around. One poorly typed handout was addressed:

TO ALL THOSE SMOKING IN THE BATHROOMS (and we ain’t just talking about cigarettes either).

 … has it ever occured to you why the school talks about getting draft counseling but never does get it? they know that if enough people took a look at the draft, they would find it immoralx if you are 18 youx z can vote for the president of the u.s., and fight in a war and kill or be killed, yet you cant walk the halls or go to the bathroom with out a pass.… what it xallx comes down to is you are either part of the problem or part of the solution, which side are you on? do you want to lead the zombie life: black suit and tie, nine to five, five days a week, sipping martinis on the 8o”clock train