"So how many of you have lived in a mobile home?"
I was leading my Florida Lit class in a discussion of Judith Rodriguez's poem "Adult Mobile Homes" (read it here) with its image of infant mobile homes dreaming of pulling up stakes and heading to the land of their dreams--Florida!--when it occurred to me that some students might have never enjoyed an interior view of a mobile home. So I asked how many have lived in mobile homes, and my hand was the only one that went into the air.
"Come on, step up, you're in good company," I said, but still, my hand remained alone in the air.
I've known mobile homes! My soul has grown deep like the mobile homes that sheltered me through grad-school poverty and early parenthood. My daughter's first nursery was in a mobile home squeezed between seminary and railroad track, and when the trains went through, they may as well have been roaring through our front door.
At the time I didn't associate the mobile home park with poverty so much as with discipline--a whole bunch of raggedy tin cans stuffed full of grad students intent upon a goal. It was a place to live between stages of life, when we were just passing through grad school before heading off for jobs and the future. Like the infant mobile homes in Rodriguez's poem, we were eager to pull up stakes and start rolling down the highway.
None of my students have had that experience, and maybe that's a good thing, but living in mobile homes is just another item to add to the list of experiences my students can't comprehend, like dialing a telephone, consulting a print copy of the MLA International Bibliography, or putting a 45 on a record player. Which makes me feel like the adult mobile homes in the final stanza of Rodriguez's poem: tired, crumbling, tow-gears rusted, so old they're no longer mobile.
Don't mind me. I'll just sit over here in the corner rusting.
4 comments:
Hah! I've never lived in one, though friends have. Good solution for some things!
On feeling ancient: I have a "Haight" street type sign on my office door window. In class today, I was telling students how to find my office, and said something like: it's the one with the Haight sign, but the street, not the emotion.
And they all stared blankly at me.
Not a single one had heard of Haight Ashbury. Not a one.
Yep, we're old all right, but we wouldn't even know about these things if we hadn't once been young.
I never lived in a mobile home, but I had friends who lived in them. My experiences there were ones of poverty -- friends with tiny rooms, insufficient kitchens stuff with poor quality (cheap) food, etc.
For me, the cheap grad school and young life living means group houses or small apartments. I'm pregnant, and we'll bring our baby home to a 2 bedroom, 1 bath apartment that still feels luxurious because we have laundry in the kitchen. We do share some walls with the dorm boys (we are dorm parents -- free rent!), but it's a small price to pay.
I find the ending leap, to condos, intriguing. I'll have to keep mulling over this poem. There's a lot there. I also find the line about gulping detergent stands out.
Let's see, we lived in our first (horrible) mobile home when I got pregnant with our daughter, but it was too unsafe for children so we moved to a better mobile home. The couple who bought the horrible unsafe mobile home from us had two toddlers. How they lived in that rustbucket I'll never understand.
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