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Zusatztext San Jose Mercury News Without self-pity or pretension! a young girl tells the story of her climb from foster homes! shelters! and dank apartments to the Ivy League. Informationen zum Autor Lauralee Summer Klappentext Free of self-pity and pretension and bursting with meaning! this memoir of a resilient girl who went from "homeless to Harvard" is a masterwork of the genre. Chapter One: Mother Keeping all this from them -- when they might have helped -- Adrienne Rich After fifteen months of being homeless my mother moved into a new apartment. I stood nervously -- hovering in the room's center, not wanting to get too close to the edges -- as if I was on a ship. The further to the edges I went, the whole place might shift under my feet, tipping me off the edge. If I went too far to the edge, I might be thrown to the walls or couch or the sink piled with dirty dishes. I might land in the midst of one of her quaint experiments. For Christmas, she placed the tree in a pot full of thousands of pennies, to keep it upright. The pennies are now soaking in water, being cleansed of the Christmas tree's sticky sap. Broken bits of toys, confiscated from the church nursery, lie in a colorful plastic heap in another corner. As my mother stands in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, she says to me, "They were too small for safety -- one and five-eighths inches is the government standard for toys for children under three. One and three-quarters is safer yet." The late afternoon sunlight shines on her hair. She sometimes dyes it black or blond, but the gray always grows back in. My own hair is as straight as uncooked spaghetti, but hers spirals in loose flyaway curls around her face, or is tucked behind her ears with bobby pins. She looks girlish and innocent with her little space-rocket curls, salt and pepper colored. I do not feel at home here though this might have been one of the homes of my childhood. All I see now is the poverty. The bleak walls are broken by yard-sale finds. My mother tries to fill the space with the contents of two bags she had while in the shelter. The refrigerator and cupboards are bare -- only a few items from the food bank: cans, stale taken-off-the-shelf pretzels, a new brand of cereal that didn't sell. All I feel is home's lack. My mother can spend hours, days, even months on projects of her own devising, projects that utterly absorb her. There are the three hundred small plants growing in styrofoam cups and egg cartons on her porch. She knows each type of plant and recites its name lovingly. To me they are just plants, although they look beautiful and green in the washed-out yellow sunlight. In her refrigerator sit row upon row of sprouts: bean, alfalfa; and no food, only half a bottle of flat Pepsi, and some condiments. I worry -- this can't be healthy, Mother. She says she eats oatmeal every day, and uses powdered milk. There are Popsicles and vanilla ice cream in the freezer, which she blends together to make "orange crèmes." This was plain poverty, but it was also what she liked. I was a snooty college student, a sophomore. I tried to analyze my mother -- distance and detach in an attempt to bring, gather her closer into my understanding. "Mother, do you feel generative or despairing?" I think of Erik Erikson's stages of ego development. The seventh stage, the one my mom should be going through: Generativity versus Stagnation. I sense these feelings pitching back and forth in my mother and I am inadequate to be at home with her. Yet what I have been taught to see as degeneracy (a disorganized house, leaving it only every few days...) may be my mom's way of generating new ideas. Going to Harvard was in many ways a journey away from home for me. At Harvard, one of the favorite buzzwords of academics is discourse . A discourse is an ongoin...
