Category Archives: General

Coop’s Childhood Part 6 – Childhood’s End

long nook beachMy mom rose to the occasion after the divorce with my dad. Though she continued to have a great deal of unresolved anger towards him, and ongoing worries about paying the bills, plus other disruptions in her life, it seems it was perhaps the first real opportunity in that life to be truly on her own, and not pulled and tugged by parents, fiancée or spouse. She was beginning to learn to navigate as a completely autonomous person, including as a single parent, and I was just beginning to become sophisticated enough about this sort of stuff to notice, now that I had started to move her down from the former pedestal I had previously elevated her to.

She was getting enough in child support each month from my dad so she could barely, just barely, pay the bills if we lived frugally. And though some of the couples that had befriended her based on her status as a professor’s wife now distanced themselves from her as a divorcee, her irresistible extroversion and heart on her sleeve emotional honesty was beginning to win her a new community of friends and comrades. Our little household, now three instead of four, was definitely becoming the “Jane Roberts Zale Show”, for better or for worse.

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Coop’s Childhood Part 3 – In School & Out

Bach Elementary School
Bach Elementary School
Nowadays K-12 school has become such a high stakes endeavor that academically oriented parents like mine might do their best to “game” the system by letting their kid start school a year later than possible, thinking to give them some sort of developmental and competitive edge relative to other kids. But in 1960 when I turned five, judging me to be an intelligent and precocious kid, my parents had me tested to see if I could skip kindergarten and start public school in first grade instead.

I recall that I found the IQ test they gave me intimidating. Anytime adults focused on me, particularly in a more formal or judging way, I felt uncomfortable. All adults, including my parents, felt like another species entirely rather than simply older versions of us kids. They seemed like large all-knowing deities even, that had me at a total disadvantage.

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Coop’s Childhood Part 2 – Play, Play School & Other Explorations

Me & Molly age 5
Me & Molly age 5
Though I was born in the 1950s with all its conventionally stark division of gender roles, my mom and dad were a pretty unorthodox couple, with a much more egalitarian relationship than the norm. They had been acquaintances and friends for a number of years before their relationship became a romantic one. They were both intellectual and athletic, and both comfortable with parenting tasks ranging from changing diapers to throwing a ball.

I believe theirs was a natural inclination to parent in the most progressive way, but it was certainly aided by the new parenting wisdom championed by the most popular pediatrician of the day, Dr. Benjamin Spock. His bestselling book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, challenged the rigid childrearing practices that had been prevalent since the beginning of the century that included warnings against excessive affection to prevent children from becoming spoiled or fussy. Instead, Spock advised parents to be flexible in order to treat each child as an individual. He also educated parents about the stages of child development and how to create an appropriately safe but nurturing environment for each of those stages. And perhaps most importantly for my mom and dad and how they raised me, Spock urged them to trust their own common sense, instincts, and judgment.

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Please Support North Valley Caring Services!

nvcs_logo

Los Angeles is an amazingly diverse megalopolis including so many immigrant communities struggling to build roots in our city and our country.  I have gotten involved with one such community…

Spring each year is my one big yearly effort to raise money for a critical community organization here in Los Angeles, North Valley Caring Services.  They are and organization that provides free services to youth and their parents in a very poor, at-risk, mostly Hispanic neighborhood in the Panorama City area of Los Angeles, just three miles east of where my partner Sally and I live.  For those of you who know the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, the neighborhood is located between the 405 freeway to the west and Sepulveda Blvd to the east and between Roscoe Blvd to the south and Nordhoff to the north.  One of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the whole city!

North Valley Caring Services program for their neighborhood includes…

1. Family Literacy Program – Giving both young people and their parents the opportunity to improve the literacy skills they will need for family life, work and schools

2. Youth Program – Includes organized sports, schoolwork assistance, a library, and a place for neighborhood kids to hang out after school before parents come home from work

3. Childcare Training & Certification – Training adults in the neighborhood to be certified child care providers and provide care for the small children of other neighborhood family members so they can work outside the home.

4. Breakfast Program & Food Pantry – Providing free hot breakfasts for neighborhood residents and free donated groceries.

Please consider making a donation in honor of my upcoming 58th birthday.  I have set up a PayPal site to collect donations from my friends and family.  Click this link to access my PayPal account and make a donation, or if you are more “old school”, email me at cooperzale@gmail.com for information about sending a check.  You can also find out more about the organization at their website.

I have been volunteering with the organization for the past seven or so years, focusing mainly on collecting food for their food pantry and assisting with their fundraisiing events.  It has been a great and humbling experience for me to fully understand the extent of my own economic privilege and the narratives of some of the most recent immigrants to our country whose history has been built around other immigrants’ stories, including different components of my own families of origin who came to the states at various times from various places in Europe.

Lefty Parent 2010 Year in Review

As I continue to try and broaden my writing skills I occasionally try my hand at a different sort of content than my typical essay featuring a personal experience that I link to what I see as a broader trend, straight out rant, or a wrestling with ideas I’ve encountered in a book or article I read. Like recently I did a piece trying to capture the zeitgeist of the moment in US education as reflected in a selection of recent articles in Education Week magazine and the Public Education Network weekly e-blast (which was a challenge and tons of work and something I’d do again but not all the time).

Today I’m going to try my hand at another genre of short essay, the end-of-year year-in-review type piece, calling out some highlights or trends from the year past. Given that, I won’t even attempt to be comprehensive, other than scoping my piece on the items from 2010 that I’ll be curious to see play out going forward in 2011 and beyond. Here goes… wish me luck!

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Two Years of Lefty Parent!

Well its the anniversary of many harvest feasts, but particularly that 1621 event at the site of the Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts where the English immigrants feasted with the Wampanoag Native Americans who had helped the “pilgrims” cultivate the land and fish, saving them from starvation. For me it is also the two year anniversary of the start of my “Lefty Parent” blog, now more than 250 posts later!

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Update on My Status

Me today post staples and haircut
Me today post staples and haircut
Just a quick note that I have had a really good couple weeks of recovery and am back to writing and typing reasonably well. I am right now working on completing my “Confessions of a Lefty Parent” book proposal that I plan to send to a literary agent that my brother Peter has a connection with. I hope to be posting pieces on my blog again by the end of this week.

I appreciate all of you checking in presumably to see if I am posting again.
My scar
My scar

Cooper Zale… aka Leftyparent

Help Me Support North Valley Caring Services

FLI Christmas Event 071FYI… I am recuperating well this week from my surgery Feb 1 to remove a 3 centimeter hematoma (blood clot) from my brain caused presumably by my bicycle accident last November. I am off work and my other normal volunteer activities until my neurosurgeon sees a CAT scan that shows my brain has returned to its proper position inside my skull from where it was displaced by the blood clot. But one of my yearly efforts is too critical to let even this stop me…

It’s nearly March again, and the one time in the year I pitch my circle of family and friends for a donation to a worthy cause… Continue reading →

Thoughts on Keillor’s Christmas Rant

Garrison KeillorSo a UU Facebook friend alerted me and the rest of our circle yesterday that Garrison Keillor had published an editorial rant, “Don’t Mess with Christmas”, on Salon.com directed at Unitarian-Universalists and their penchant for revisionist hymns and carols. My friend’s few sentences were full of anger and denouncement of Keillor as unworthy of making such a criticism, and were very uncharacteristic for my fellow UU’s usual demeanor. His words had definitely pushed her buttons somehow. Continue reading →

A Life of Thoughtful Choices

My partner Sally the other day, after reading one of my blog posts, commented that an overarching theme of most of my writing is having the opportunity, the wisdom, and the courage to lead a thoughtful life, which involves making thoughtful choices, in as many areas of life as possible. Though I had never framed it quite that way, I think she is right on. Under that umbrella of choices are ideas of liberty, agency, partnership (rather than hierarchy), and what seems to still be a radical idea that these things can be applicable to both youth and adults. Continue reading →