I struck up a bit of jovial correspondence in early 2020 with Mark Gozonsky, just before we published our second essay of his. Several members of our staff were planning to attend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in San Antonio, Texas, that year, and Gozonsky invited us to play Wiffle ball. But the pandemic had other plans for us that spring. So, when we all got sent home in mid-March, I spent many hours out in my yard relieving stress by hitting gumballs from our sweet gum tree over our house with a Wiffle ball bat I found in the bushes. In those early months of lockdown, my backyard batting average got pretty good, and Mark and I shared a few videos with each other of our respective hitting techniques. Then I was diagnosed with golfer’s elbow and spent several months in physical therapy, ending my Wiffle ball career.
When I called Mark at the end of January for this conversation, he said that he’d recently been inspired (after reading my 2023 Sun interview with Kelefa Sanneh) to play an Eric B. & Rakim song for his three-month-old granddaughter. She is his first grandchild, and we talked for around twenty minutes about parenting, grandparenting, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and the responsibility an older generation has to a younger one. The last point, Mark said, was the impetus for the fence that gets built in his essay “Wattle,” in this month’s issue of The Sun. The character Abner, who tries his hand at grafting an apple tree and in the process builds a fence partly out of other surrounding trees on his property, is Mark’s alter ego, and the fence is a kind of bulwark for his granddaughter—he may not be able to fix the climate crisis, he told me, but he can at least build something to keep the deer away from the apples he hopes to cultivate with her.
Unfortunately, once I got off the phone with Mark, I realized that my iPhone recording app had not captured all our great dialogue, so I had to call him right back and have the conversation again.
MARK GOZONSKY
Finn Cohen: All right, let’s pretend that we’re doing this for the first time. Are you still a teacher?
Mark Gozonsky: I have been a teacher, and I’m returning to it with a multi-generational storytelling class at the library in our village where “Wattle” takes place. I retired from public school teaching in Los Angeles after twenty years—part elementary school, part high school. I was kind of following my daughters around without actually popping out from their lockers. But when they started kindergarten, I remember them walking down the aisle to join their kindergarten teacher and classmates. And I remember thinking, Hell no, I’m going to become an elementary school teacher so I can stay current with them. And so I taught until they were through middle school, and then when they got into high school, my elementary school sagas just didn’t seem as relevant. So I thought, I know what I’ll do—I’ll become a high school teacher, which was a better fit for me. Sometimes my witty references caught my 5th graders unawares. We did have a successful after-school Don Quixote club in elementary school, though I made a bunch of videos about that, and my daughter said, “Hey, Marko, remember those Don Quixote videos? You still got those?” So I sent those to her, and it looked like the kids were really engaged—they were recreating scenes of all the mayhem and the madness, and it seemed like it was flowing pretty good.
Finn: We were talking a few minutes ago about interacting with younger generations about the future of the planet. Did you have those kinds of conversations in class?
Mark: I did. We did a whole series that was in Lit Hub about climate change. I gave them titles of things they might want to read, and they outsmarted me by saying they wanted to read The Lorax. So we read that and The Jungle. One of my favorite things that I did as a high school teacher was right after the 2016 election: We collaborated with a high school in Ohio, near Youngstown—an area that looked like it had gone pretty red—on making the Los Angeles Museum of Ohio. The website is still online; I kept it because the students were connecting with each other, like, “Hey, what kind of memes do you have in Ohio? What do you like the most in life?” Everyone agreed that what they liked the most in life was roller coasters. So I thought that was pretty good: finding common ground between our deep blue LA and the red part of Ohio.
Finn: What do you feel you learned from your students about the climate situation, or how to respond to it?
Mark: A student once told me that losers gain something that winners never have. That really stuck with me.
Finn: When you had these conversations with them, were there moments where you felt a sense of, not necessarily guilt, but I guess responsibility?
Mark: I was riding my bike into school, and that was a good twelve- to thirteen-mile ride. So they would see this teacher just coming in with his bike, you know, full of endorphins, full of energy. I’ve burned a lot of gasoline in my days, and I’ve disposed of a lot of plastic, but I have been probably in the top-ten percentile of bike riders and public transportation takers. I felt like, even if I was personally responsible, or my generation was responsible for the ruination of the planet—which is big!—at least I was doing what I could. That, according to my understanding, is all you can: do what you can, maybe a little bit more, and then hope to connect with people.
You and I have talked about standing up for your values regardless of the outcome, and not quite knowing the end. We don’t know how this is gonna play out exactly. So why not stick around and find out, and then while you’re at it, why not stand up for the values that you believe in, and why not stand up for beauty and truth and fairness and mercy and joy? I think all of those things are still here and worth showing up for.
Finn: You can’t know the end of what is going to happen to our planet and to our species. As a parent, on a microscopic level it’s, Who is this person going to be that I helped create? Until you become a parent, you have no real appreciation for what your parents went through. And then you see them as grandparents, and you get a little bit of a sense, but you still don’t have the full appreciation of what it’s like to be a grandparent. I wonder if there’s the same fear of, Who is this going to be?
Mark: I feel like my granddaughter and I vibe on a preverbal or nonverbal level. But I can definitely sense her inner, nascent wisdom. I like the way she really looks things over. You can already tell, she’s a very keen observer. And I feel a tremendous confidence in her ability to navigate and contribute to the world that she’s part of.
I think that’s something that my wife and I were good at as parents: letting our kids be the kids they were. Like flying a kite and letting out a lot of string. Parenting is different for everybody, and I wouldn’t prescribe any rules about how to do it, but I think recognizing your kids’ autonomy is good just for your own parental sanity.
Finn: There’s a woman who takes care of our son for a few hours a week. He goes to her house, and she’s got at least two other children in her care, and her adult daughter is taking care of two other kids too. She’s basically surrounded by babies and toddlers every day. She said something last week while she was looking at him: “They’re so much smarter than we are.” And I was like, “He eats Cheerios off the floor! He’s licking the couch cushions!” Her point is more about the way that children see things and absorb things. Obviously we don’t remember that experience—to have your consciousness not be fully formed.
Mark: It’s truly wonderful to see this three-month-old being figuring out what her hands are: What do these things do, and what are they? Where do they come from? And the pleasure she takes from putting them in her mouth. It’s the combination of discovery, pleasure, newness. But there’s also questions, like, Where am I and what’s all this about? When am I going to understand language? I just like looking at her and watching the way my wife interacts with her. I love the way that my daughter and son-in-law interact with her, and seeing those loving connections, I think that’s a good reason to nurture a kid. You’re bringing in love. You’re bringing in nurturing.
Finn: Yeah, you’re also bringing in a lot of crusts that form in different areas of the child’s body.
Mark: What?! Crusts?
Finn: Yeah, there’s just a lot of fluids that come out of a child. You’re bringing in a lot of love, and you’re also bringing in a lot of baby wipes.
PREVIOUS