As I attempt to do what I’m sure many sons do in the years following their fathers’ passing; that is, as I do my best to reconstruct the life of the man I loved and miss, one of the gaping holes I find myself looking into from time to time is my father’s service to the United States Army.

In the current issue of Fast Company magazine, there is an article called “Teacher-Replacing Tech: Friend or Foe?” by Gregory Ferenstein. The author explores the research of Sugata Mitra, whose ted.com video you may have seen, in which he leaves a computer kiosk in an impoverished town in India and observes how children use the computer to teach themselves. If you haven’t seen it, you should; it’s pretty fascinating, and he’s a gifted speaker. (Click here if you’re interested.)

There are certain teachers — some of them among my Facebook friends — who are having violent responses to the ideas put forth by Mitra and Ferenstein. Were I still in the classroom, I might have the same reaction. How dare some egghead anthropologist or business journalist posit their theories on what I do on a day-to-day basis? Before we get defensive, however, I think the teaching profession has to look at this new debate as an opportunity, and that we need to “get out in front of it,” as they say on Madison Avenue.

Basically what I’m saying is that those of us who still believe in public education as the democratic right of all Americans need to control this discussion. We need to embrace a line that Ferenstein glosses over very quickly in the article, when he says that “[new technologies] might mean a redefinition of ‘teacher’ as research assistant or intellectual coach, since subject-matter lecturers are no match for access to the entirety of human knowledge.”

To those of us who have been trying to do things in a less traditional way, these are not new ideas. A good teacher is a research assistant and intellectual coach to their students. In fact, if I ever run a school, and I find out my teachers are not doing that, there will be a problem, and a big one at that.

We run into trouble when we start making assumptions about what students want based on who we were as students. Yes, I had teachers who were good lecturers, sure. And yes, there are some kids today who still dig a really good lecture. Listen, I just referenced ted.com, which is a series of lectures, really, isn’t it?

“Yet the student-driven classrooms do have serious flaws,” Ferenstein concedes. “In the condition without any adult supervision, Mitra found that children only achieve half of what their peers in face-to-face instruction can.”

If the bottom-liners who are looking for ways to make profits from the failure of our public school system are allowed to control the discussion, then what Ferenstein alludes to above will, indeed, happen, and it will create a whole new industry, predicated on the remediation of the students who have been failed by robo-teachers.

We, as teachers, can take control of this narrative, but we won’t get there by being defensive or dismissive. Technology is here, whether we like it or not, and dismissing the possibility of being replaced will put us on the dole. Instead, we’ve got to take a good look at what we’re doing in the classroom. If you’re a “this is what I know” teacher, who feels the need to bestow your knowledge, versus a “this is what I learned” teacher, who wishes to coach your students to learn it too by asking good questions, then be afraid. It’s very subtle, but there is a difference.

And it may mean the difference between having jobs for teachers or not, some time in the not-too-distant future.

My son Jackson’s nightly ritual is very specific. First, he has to grab my face in both hands and plant kisses on me, starting at the left ear, crossing to left cheek, lips, right cheek and ending at my right ear. Then I have to “fix his covers.” Finally, he asks me the same question every night: “Are you going to do dishes, Daddy?” He asks the question, despite knowing the answer, as do his mom and older brother.

“Yes, son,” I answer wearily, “I’m going to do the dishes.”

At first, I thought I was doing this simply to be a comfort to him. I used to perform a similar service for my younger brother who was extremely anxious for a time about being the last one awake in the house. “Can you make sure I’m asleep before you go to sleep?” he would ask me on the occasions that we bunked together as boys.

Last night, however, as I was doing the dishes, I had one of those memory flashes I often have during that meditative activity. This time I traveled back to the early 90’s, when I first lived in Manhattan. After sharing a few places — first with the Swedish actress Linda Udd, who was then a play writing student with me in William Packard’s class at HB Studio, then with my old college buddy, Sonia Murrow, and finally in a squat in the fashion district with my girlfriend and a friend of hers from her native Toronto. When the girlfriend and I decided to get married, we found a duplex apartment at 255 West 14th Street, near 8th Avenue in Chelsea. It sounds more glamorous than it was. The details that have stuck in my mind are how narrow the apartment was, how loud the weekend nights were, when the taxis would queue up in front of Nell’s, across the street and the coke-heads who closed the club would come shrieking out into the late night air, and, finally, the infestation of roaches from which we suffered in that blue-brick building.

A couple of side-notes — other unrelated memories — have to do with a couple who lived next door to us. I never had a conversation with either of them, but I sometimes heard them fighting through the walls. Both were middle-aged men, bearded, one tall the other not. Both weary-looking. One night I woke up when my cat sprang from a dead sleep, hissing and arching his back in that cat way that means danger. Downstairs, I could see a figure outside my window trying to jimmy his way into my apartment. My wife was not home at the time; she was, as usual, out. The breath left my body, and I made my way down the stairs, trying to yell, but not being able to, as often happens to me in my nightmares. I grabbed something hard and banged it on the window sill, as the man I now realized was the shorter fatter one from next door began tearing the screen from the window. “What the fuck are you doing?” I managed to get out. “Oh, sorry,” he slurred. “This isn’t my apartment.” He backed away on the fire escape toward the correct window. “If I’d had a gun, I would have fucking shot you,” I said, as he began clawing at his own screen. All I could do was shake my head and assay the damage to my window. “Okay. Sorry,” he muttered again before disappearing back into the apartment next door.

The other memory is of walking to the elevator on my way out one day and hearing what sounded like a roll of thunder coming from the stairwell. Before I realized what was happening, a phalanx of six or seven uniformed cops were upon me, yelling in that loud, theatrical way you hear on TV. I braced myself for their nightsticks, but they turned me around and had me assume the position, and one of them patted me down with surprising gentleness.

“Which apartment are you coming from, sir?” he asked me. I momentarily forgot my apartment number, before answering.

“Thank you, sir,” another said — their sergeant, I think — before they knocked on the door of my bearded next door neighbors.

But back to the roaches. You’ve got to have a lot of money (a LOT) in order to avoid roaches in New York City. I always had them, no matter where I lived. You can spray them and bomb them, but they always come back. We had the added misfortune of being above a supermarket, which didn’t help matters. Add to that the fact that my new wife was caught up in an existence consisting of late nights and all that accompanies that lifestyle, and there I was, a new teacher in my late twenties, trying to keep up with her, and you’ve got a perfect combination if what you’re trying to create is a giant, over-priced Roach Motel.

Eventually, she and I took a look at the landscape of our lives and realized that the seven years that divided our ages was a world of difference at 21 and 28. She was doing what I was doing at 21, exploring, taking risks, at some degree of peril. I, on the other hand, was getting up early, heading to work, and doing my best to try and make a difference in the lives of young people. Trying to keep up with her became a joke, and I remember the day we decided to end things, she told me she would have her father arrange for a truck to come and pick up her share of the furniture we’d gotten as wedding presents a year and a half earlier. She would stay with her friend in the squat until she would fly home to Toronto.

My first official act after the furniture was carted away was to do the dishes. I kept the now empty apartment as clean as I could for the cat and me, until we were able to find a new place in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn. I’d like to say I’ve never left a dish overnight in a sink since that experience, and maybe it would make for a better narrative, but that’s not the case. Like everyone, I leave the occasional dish. When I do, however, I get a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I recall those sad, eventually liberating days living in the Roach Motel on West 14th Street.

You should have seen us, the first time Mignon Young and Alice Reedholm brought us to Central Market for lunch. I had no idea where the hell we were; it felt like we were in a supermarket. Why in the hell were my friends from high school taking me and my wife to a supermarket?? For a moment I thought it might be some sort of practical joke. Then I heard Mignon’s younger son, Jackson, excitedly ask permission to go to the playground. Before she could answer, he was gone.

Now we were REALLY confused. So wait, we’re at a supermarket. In the middle of a city. And there’s a playground? What gives? Jeanette and I exchange a look and I consider asking Mignon if she’s not a bit worried about letting Jackson run off like that, while we go to order our food at the supermarket. As New Yorkers, we are suspicious, but then we go out back to get the full effect of the picnic area. There are shade trees everywhere, and barefoot children running and cris-crossing, so that you have to dodge them on your way to your table. In the distance there is a small pond with geese and ducks floating around, and a giant live oak tree with children adorning it like Christmas tree ornaments.

The food was delicious, much to my surprise. And sure enough, Jackson found his way to our table, ate some pizza and zoomed off again to climb something somewhere. When we got back to our hotel, Jeanette and I discussed how freaked out we both were. Though it turned out to be a pleasant dining experience, we both found it completely foreign and well, weird, to borrow a phrase.

Today, nearly three years later, Central Market on North Lamar has become a haunt of ours. My friend Seth Levin has a blog ingeniously called “Dadventures in Beantown” in which he features all the cool things he does with his two sons in the Boston area. I would consider submitting this blog as a guest piece — a “Dadventure in the ATX” — or something, because we spend many a Saturday or Sunday there, Jeanette doing the shopping for the week, while I sit by the playground reading, emailing and drinking Shiner Bocks, and the boys do what boys do best — run in merry circles, playing tag with total strangers and defying gravity on playground equipment.

It is now so familiar that I’m convinced my car could find its way there on its own if it had to. (I won’t try it, so don’t worry.) We are no longer concerned for even a second about letting the boys go and be on their own as we sit and guard our food from the grackles who swoop in at the first opportunity when you turn your head. There’s live music on a regular basis, because this is Austin, after all. And there’s even a really cool cooking school where Jeanette and I have taken a couple of classes, as have the boys.

If you come and visit us here in Austin, we may very well take you to Central Market, and although you may at first wonder why the hell we’re taking you there, give it a chance. You’ll understand, and you’ll enjoy.

The pages of my mother’s scrapbook are yellowed and crumbling fast. The photos, like this one taken in Des Moines, Iowa at 3 years old, are black and white, and they too are beginning to fade. My hope is to preserve this book, innocently titled “Things and Stuff,” by scanning its pages and saving it digitally. I’m not sure how well this will work, but it’s certainly worth a try. I’ve talked about doing what Jeanette suggests — having it restored and/or preserved by an expert in this sort of thing — but I’ve never actually gotten around to it, and I’m not so sure that I ever will. Scanning just seems more likely to me.

The title is ironic, in that the things found inside this scrapbook are so much more than mere stuff, and I don’t just mean this from my entirely biased point of view as my mother’s son. Rather, I believe, the more I study its contents, that this book is an important historical document. My mother was born in 1930, just at the start of the Great Depression. Her father worked extremely hard in the maintenance department on the Rock Island Railroad throughout those lean years, just to keep from going under, the way he’d seen so many of contemporaries do. It makes me wonder how much it cost him to dress his young child in this dress and baby shoes, what kinds of discussions he and my grandmother had to have about whether or not to buy her the doll in this picture, and if they ever considered selling the cast iron Jack Russell terrier doorstop, which I still have today.

As the pages progress, you find newspaper clippings declaring the end of World War II, when my mother was fifteen years old. (“Peace! Remember how it came on the night of August 14, 1945? No matter where it caught you — on Times Square, Market Square or Main Street — the big news made a noise like the birth of a bright new world.”) Suddenly, the world had changed completely. A new era of prosperity came about, just as my mother was graduating from high school, in 1947. She had no way of knowing, of course, that exactly ten years later, that school, Little Rock Central High, would become the first integrated public high school in the south.

The book has many of the other usual items you’d find in this sort of compilation. In fact, my mother checked off the “rough outline” provided in the book’s introduction:

• your pet dance programs
• goony telegrams
• menus from your favorite haunts
• place cards from fun parties
• dreamy birthday cards
• snapshots of friends and fiends
• gift and corsage cards
• items from the school paper
• funny valentines
• a page of autographs from the gang
• invitations

In addition to these items, there are some other interesting things, as well. There are pencil drawings my mother did of her teachers, parents and friends. There is evidence of various honors, including mention of “first place in the statewide short story contest of the Little Rock chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters,” “The Distinction of Being the Most Gorgeous Girl, awarded to Carol Runyan on the night of the Delta Phi Omega spring dinner dance, June 23rd in the year of our Lord, 1949,” and her signed membership card to the National Junior Honor Society of Secondary Schools. There is a letter from a German pen pal and former soldier named Klaus, dated June 28th, 1948, in which he states, “I was wounded [in Holland] and came to a hospital for three weeks. Then I came to the Air Force headquarters in Berlin. I often saw there Herman Goering, Hitler and Goebbels.” Enclosed with his letter is a studio portrait, date stamped April 1943, in which he looks like a boy, leaning forward, perhaps a little bit scared of what his future may hold. Like a movie star, he has signed it “As ever, Klaus.” She has several letters from a sailor in the British Navy named Arthur, with whom she also corresponded.

I’m both thrilled and sad to learn new things about Carol as I flip through the decaying pages — that she was a member of a Masonic girls’ group called the Rainbow Girls, that she lived in Trenton, Missouri, Rock Island, Illinois, Des Moines, Iowa, and Molline, Illinois, all before the age of four. I say sad, only because I’d love nothing more than to be able to ask her about all these little gems I’ve uncovered here.

I believe what I’d like to do is this: I would like to contact someone in Little Rock, some sort of Historical Society archivist, and see what the interest would be in restoring and/or preserving the items in my mother’s scrapbook. They might be able to help me find someone in my mother’s family or group of friends who is still alive. And if that were the case, maybe I could have some of these questions answered after all…

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Manor, where I now live, is a small town. There is a block of four store fronts, with a corrugated tin awning over the sidewalk, and an old-fashioned water tower, pictured at right.

Downtown Manor has always evoked a strong feeling in me; I’m not sure why. Recently, however, I’ve come to learn that they filmed “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” (directed by Lasse Hallstrom, 1993) here, and suddenly that feeling makes a lot more sense.

I watched the movie the summer after its release, on DVD, or probably VHS, at a rented house in Big Indian, New York, in 1994. It was a summer of healing, as I was coming off of a divorce, as were a couple of my friends at the time. I spent most of my healing time drinking and doing other things to “self-medicate,” as they say. Generally, it was a lot of fun. A good distraction — “just what the doctor ordered.”

I fell in love with the film, because it has all the aspects of films I tend to enjoy: quirky characters, a strong sense of place, and no guns or loud explosions. The director’s previous film, “My Life as a Dog,” is one of my favorites, so when I heard it was the same director, I was excited to see “Gilbert Grape”. Leonardo DiCaprio, who was basically an unknown at the time, was unbelievable in the role of Arnie. Johnny Depp was, as usual, strong in the title role. Good supporting performances by Juliette Lewis, John C. Reilly, Mary Steenburgen, and Crispin Glover. And Darlene Cates, the 500+-pound non-actress they recruited to play Gilbert and Arnie’s mother managed to steal the movie from all these name actors.

As the film came to its climax, and Arnie faced a harsh realization (I won’t say more, in case you haven’t seen it; and by the way, you really should), I lost it. I didn’t just cry. I didn’t just bawl. I didn’t just weep. My emotions exploded out of me, and I was lucky to have my good friend, Susan Dreyer (who has always said she wants to write a piece about that Big Indian summer called “Bridesmaid to a Divorce”) there to pat me on the back and remind me that everything was going to be all right in due time.

Since learning that the movie was filmed here where I live, I have been giddy. I smile as I pass the iconic silver-painted water tower (pictured, above) that Arnie climbed up. I have plans to go look for the Grapes’ house (it’s out on Route 973, by the new football stadium), and, yes, I took a picture of the sidewalk in front of Manor Grocery, where Johnny Depp scrawled his initials and the date of the production, 1/93.

If I seem a bit star-struck, it’s really not about that. Instead, I think it’s just this odd convergence of an emotional moment in my past, and where I am living right now. Who knew, back when I watched this film in the summer of 1994, that I would eventually live in the small town that played such a large part in the lives of those characters? It’s just so random. And yet somehow, deep in my core, it makes absolutely perfect sense, too.