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July/August 2002

The Ocean

I stand on the ocean shore, watching the waves go by. The sun is going down but I don’t leave. I will stay out on the ocean shore. Seagulls fly overhead, they land down on the beach. Their far-off cries bid the day good-night. Out in the sunset I see dolphins leaping through the waves. Their turning, jumping transforms the setting sun into the start of a new day. They call out to me and I long to join them in the freedom that is the sea. Sunset is a dark, purple haze, recalling everything that is beautiful. I grab a boogie-board and float along with the water. A giant wave comes over me and I tumble head over heels underwater. In the sea I am a new creature. When I return to the surface I laugh out loud. I look up and see the first stars. The sky is becoming black. It is time for me to be going. Tomorrow I’ll come back and watch from the ocean shore. William Ilgen, 9Berkeley, California

Turning Point

Gabriella DeFrancesco dug a fingernail into her eyebrow, resting for a moment in a state of utter fatigue. It was nearly midnight, and the bed in her room taunted her. She sighed, “Why me?” Gabby was on the verge of committing to an entire summer cooped up in the cloistered science lab of one of the country’s most prestigious universities. The application form lay on her rolltop desk. All she could think was, “How did I get myself into this?” Closing her eyes, Gabby recalled a conversation earlier in the day with her Advanced Placement Biology teacher, Mr. Bennett.   “Miss DeFrancesco,” Mr. Bennett said, presenting her with an application and a brochure, “you’re the first student that, in all my years of teaching, I can send to this program with complete confidence that you’ll benefit from it.” Gabby smiled an embarrassed smile and thanked Mr. Bennett in as few words as possible. She slung her brick-loaded backpack onto her shoulder and left, completely ignoring Mr. Bennett’s frenzied shouts of “Two shoulders, Gabby, put the pack over two shoulders. You’ll destroy your back!” When Gabby returned home and told her parents how she planned to spend the summer, her mother grabbed her face and kissed both cheeks over and over until it became annoying. Her father, for his part, was completely befuddled. But he ended up yelling “Magnifico!” and several other Italian phrases all meaning “wonderful” and ending in “-ico!” Gabby’s summer dreams of vegetating on the porch vanished into thin air, their particles becoming so condensed that they imploded. *          *          * Downstairs, the grandfather clock in the living room tolled twelve times. Gabby pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to focus on the application. The next question was, “What are you passionate about?” The irony of the query bugged her. The fact was that she could never participate in normal teenage life because of her lack of passion for anything. This was disturbing. The nagging feeling that she was wasting her childhood kept her up at night. Her feet remembered their old grace, their old love Gabby wrote a neat, cursive “B” on the page, then vigorously erased it. She had dismissed the thought of writing “Biology” before she put her pencil to paper. Although it was the answer that the sponsor, Cell Division, Inc., wanted to hear, it somehow didn’t satisfy her. The ghost of the “B” shimmered on the page. She looked up from the application. Her eye caught the edge of an old photograph tacked to the bulletin board which hung above her desk. Hidden by her jam-packed schedule and reminder notes, the photo had become part of the board, just another thing in which to stick thumbtacks. Gabby disengaged the picture from the hole-riddled cork. It fell a little, before being firmly secured by Gabby’s pointer finger. She brought it close to her face. In the photo, a small girl, smiling an unblemished eight-year-old smile, was ready for her big dancing debut. Gabby grinned at the little girl, knowing that her every dimple was identical to those of the child. Gabby remembered that day so well. It seemed to have been the beginning of her life. This long-ago recital was the first thing she had done that really mattered. Oh! How Gabby had loved dancing! She would twirl and leap and sparkle and smile, until her toes begged for mercy, but her mind begged for more. What a phenomenal ride! And she would dance until she was sure she was lame. Gabby hadn’t danced since she was thirteen, when the three-hour practices, dress rehearsals, and the commute to and from The Rock School began to affect her grades. Just remembering the day that she had quit made Gabby tingle.   “You failed a science test?” her mother asked, hardly expecting an answer. “You could’ve failed with a 64, but you had to get a 58! You never even mentioned a test!” “Esther, Esther, please calm down,” Gabby’s father said. But when his wife glared at him, he turned his full attention to the pages of the test. “It slipped my mind, what with dancing and all.” Gabby tried to keep her voice reasonable, not wishing to provoke her mother any further. “If you can’t handle both school and dance, then you’ll just have to cut back on one of them. And it won’t be school!” Her mother bit her lower lip in an effort to control her anger. “That little place in Berwyn has a nice ballet program . . .” “Forget it! That’s a lame program. It’s for little kids. I’m serious about dancing!” Gabby shouted without thinking. “I can’t cut back on dance at my age. It’s now or never!” Gabby knew she should have stopped there, but she didn’t. “I’d rather quit than go halfway!” “Fine! You know what, that’s fine!” her mother said, as she turned and swept out of the room in an angry daze. Gabby fled out the front door, slamming it so hard that a porcelain Madonna fell from the mantel and shattered. Gabby’s father, who was an engineer and could have passed the failed test in his sleep, yelled after Gabby, “If you’d answered all of the questions E = mc² , you would have gotten half of them right.” He also yelled that he could say E = mc² in Italian, and, just to prove it to the wall, he did. So Gabby quit dancing, and suddenly formerly disapproving teachers became models of praising, encouraging educators. A year later, when she announced to her parents that she had been accepted into a highly selective advanced biology course and had decided to start down the road to becoming a doctor, her mother began crying, completely overjoyed. Her father, thinking that his wife was upset, tried to comfort her. The whole ordeal was rather funny. *          *          * The grandfather clock chimed the quarter-hour and snapped Gabby out of her daydream. She stood, stretching,

Elegy on the Death of Cesar Chavez

Elegy on the Death of César Chavez by Rudolfo Anaya; Cinco Puntos Press: El Paso, Texas, 2000; $16.95 I remember that my mother cried on the day César Chavez died. I was four years old but I remember that my whole family was sad. When I read Elegy on the Death of César Chavez last month, I understood why my mother cried. The book is a poem expressing the grieving of people when César Chavez died. It is twenty-six pages with collage illustrations by Gaspar Enriquez. The collages mix black and white and color pictures that make the reader remember the faces of the campesinos (farmworkers) and César Chavez. It’s short but it’s like a sad song that gets stuck in your head. I am a sixth-grader at DePortola Middle School. I had to write a biography so I read about the life of César Chavez and did a biographical report on him. I read books on him, but those books were only about facts and chronologies. My history book just had a paragraph about him in it. I learned about the important things he did for farmworkers, but this book, Elegy on the Death of César Chavez, helped me understand how people felt about him—that “he lives in the hearts of those who loved him.” I learned about the labor leader from my grandparents and my mother. My family worked in the fields and that is why he was important to my family. My grandfather showed me the short hoe he used to use when he worked in the fields. César Chavez made it against the law for workers to use the short hoes because it hurt their backs. The author described how César Chavez was the “guide across the fields of toil” and it made me remember how tired my grandfather looked when he came back from the fields because it was very hard work. In this book the author weaves some Spanish words into the poem like el lucero (bright star) and “across the land we heard las camparias doblando” (the bells tolling). It makes the poem stronger for people like me who are bilingual. It would have been good if the author had included the definitions for the Spanish words for readers who only understand English in the back of the book, like explaining that huelga means strike and the word campesino means farmworker. Younger readers will have to look up some of the English vocabulary in this book, but you can understand the words by the way they are used. After reading this book about Chavez I felt how people felt about him and how they felt about the world around them. Even if someone never heard of him before, this elegy would make him sad and feel that César Chavez was a hero. Thomas Arguilez Smith, 12San Diego, California