Overcoming Bullying: A Personal Journey of Strength and Advocacy.

Discover how standing up to a bully in sixth grade taught me invaluable lessons about courage and speaking out.

Hey, y’all. In support of anti-bullying efforts, I want to share a personal story with you. When I was in the sixth grade, a kid in the lunch line bullied me. Every day, he would stand behind me and push me relentlessly. So, I went home and asked my parents, “How can I deal with this bully?” My dad suggested, “Just push him back,” whereas my mom cautioned, “Don’t listen to him; you’ll end up in trouble.” Fast forward to another day in the lunch line. Did I push him back? Yes, I summoned the strength, feeling empowered like Naruto, and pushed him. He fell to the ground, and I was astounded by my own strength. Panicked, I ran to the bathroom—the girls’ bathroom—and hid there for the entire lunch period: five minutes, then ten, then twenty. Eventually, the assistant principal called out, “Are you in there?”

I was then taken to Missus Schott’s office. Why she was named “Missus Schott” intrigued us all, as rumors suggested she kept a shotgun in her office. She asked why I was hiding in the girls’ bathroom. I explained how the boy who had been bullying me all year provoked me to push him. I apologized profusely. She reassured me, “It’s okay. We’ve been aware of his behavior. I’m glad you brought this to our attention. You’re okay.” That boy was disciplined for his actions.

But the story doesn’t end there. Upon returning to my sixth-grade class, guess what happened? He was suspended—not me. When I entered the classroom, to my surprise, my classmates applauded. It dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one suffering from his bullying.

Ever since that incident, the boy never bothered me again. I can barely remember what he looked like. So, what’s the moral of my story? I don’t advocate for physical retaliation, but it’s crucial to stand up for yourself. Bullies operate on a simple principle: as long as they believe they can evade consequences, they will persist. Perhaps the best approach is to speak up and make it clear that their behavior is unacceptable.

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On the Pleasure of Silence: Remarks from a Modern Human (and Apologies to Alluding to Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation)

In this post, I reflect on the importance of silence and reading in forming ideas. Reading allows for a more immersive and contemplative experience, as opposed to passively consuming external stimuli like TikTok or television. I also speak about the value of storytelling and being called a poet by a child named Evan. I conclude by recounting a story about finding and decorating a Christmas tree in the forest.

On a quiet night in early winter, even in New York, there is an inspiration to read, and think, and look out my window.

No Books at the Dinner Table

The one freedom left to me is silence. In silence, there is the freedom to read, to think. Reading is a form of silence. A silence filled with words. In reading, I choose words like a savory meal; the brain queues words into the mind in waking life, but in reading life, I can choose carefully. Reading a book is sweet indeed. On a train, at the dinner table. Prone on my back. Against a tree. As a kid, I could not read at the dinner table. ”Bad manners,” my father would tell me. ”Put the book down, Greig. It's dinner. Get your head out of that book." Zero in on me looking forlorn. And include a wide shot of how awkward the family dinner became.

I don't fault my father. He was not a reader. But he enjoyed good conversation and didn't like being alone — even at the dinner table. As an adult, I have not turned into my father. But not because I am a reader and he is not — but I let children read whenever they want. Children should never be allowed NOT to read.

The Freedom of Reading
But back to my thesis. The freedom to form ideas is buttressed by silence. Is this the contemplative life? Silence is active in a book full of ideas. The ideas in a book are like taking one bite out of a delicious meal and savoring each morsel. Ideas pumped into the brain from external sources like TikTok, YouTube, random channel surfing on the television — do not have the freedom of “one bite at a time.” It's passive consumption. However, podcasts and audiobooks — I don't argue these are as passive because I find audio more immersive than visual. Don't get me wrong, though. I love the visual. And I love TikTok. I am more or less arguing for reading (and not suggesting one throw the baby out with the bathwater). 

Why read? I read for epiphanies. Not for epiphanies I have had but for epiphanies, I have not had.

I am silent, so I can learn of an epiphany in a poem.

When I Read a Good Story
When a story is told, your eyes grow bigger, and you rest awhile, knowing something good is about to come, and you know the pleasant color of a story put together as I go along is sufficient.

I am a storyteller. I tell stories. And I was confirmed in that role today. He called me a poet. His name was Evan — about nine or so. He called me a poet. I pay attention when kids say something important. Which is most of the time.

I told a story about finding a Christmas tree in the forest. We cut it down, a nice one — it was a sufficient size — and we drug it back home to decorate it. Sort of like that scene in Christmas Vacation — the one with Chevy Chase as the avuncular but hapless father -- where he takes his family into the woods to cut down the tree. Something like that. Now that's family.

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Thinking About the Roman God Janus On New Year’s Eve

The Roman god Janus as depicted on an ancient coin.

New and old faces to anticipate the new year.

     The Romans had a god named Janus. He had two faces - one looking backward into the past and the other looking forward into the future. For me, the New Year represents this paradoxical view - looking forward and 👀 looking back.

To be Janus-faced is to face this contradiction.

     And this time of year it’s customary to reflect on a year gone by and to make resolve for the upcoming annual. Now whether you assert that the 2010s are for sure done with or not (yes, there is a controversy about this) - I feel like a new decade has begun (and I’m anticipating a ton of jokes about 20/20 vision and Barbara Walters).

Faces - familiar and novel - to ring in a new year.

Stray Comments On New Year’s Resolutions for 2020

• I want to walk more. That means 10,000 steps a day.
• Read more books this year.
• Write every day.
• To remember my resolutions throughout the year (but wait - I don’t recall last year’s resolutions!)

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Icarus Falls to his Death; a Cautionary Tale from Greek Mythology

"Icarus", Henri Matisse

How many stories exist about a father who loses his son? How many stories are there of a son who fell away from his father? How many stories are there about a father, a flawed father, whose ambition causes him to lose sight of what’s closest to him? Of a son whose first taste of freedom is so great, he cannot contain it?
Visualizing the Story of Icarus in Art

Image source: Icarus (from the Four Disgracers) Hendrick Goltzius, 1588.

The story of Daedalus and Icarus is one such story. It’s a cautionary tale that originates from the Grecian isle of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Ovid and Apollodorus are the writers we have to thank for not allowing the tale to extinguish into non-existence. I prefer Ovid’s telling of the story. But both writers tell the basic plot. It’s not spoiling it to say that Icarus dies at the end. It’s the part of the story most mentioned and memorialized in commentary and in art.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, one can see Hendrick Goltzius’s engraving of the tale (from an ignominiously titled series “The Four Disgracers”). Goltzius’s Icarus depicts a monstrous-looking body plummeting to its death (which the viewer witnesses in a neat trick of visual toe-on perspective). This Icarus looks up at the sun, his hair blown wild, and his face a contorted mix of rage and regret. His body is massive, too much weight to bear in the air. His rage is palpable - directed towards the sun as if the sun is a villain. Yet looking closely at the details of the engraving, the viewer sees Icarus forever fixed in this position, as if he is similar to Sisyphus who rolls the rock to the mountaintop only for it to fall back down again. We see Sisyphus at the top, almost there, almost victorious, and we freeze the frame. Goltzius does the same. We can almost imagine Icarus is victorious in his flight. But there is a clue to the tragedy of the tale. Daedalus is drawn into the image, placed visibly far way, and the shape of his body shows that he remains in flight, while his son, too brazen, will be banished by the sun’s blazing glory.

In Célestin Nanteuil’s depiction, and perhaps many like it, Icarus is a stretched-out angel, his body perfect and unscathed, but his wings are broken. Icarus lies dead on the craggy rock. The setting of the scene is the sea and not the sky. Icarus’s body looks dainty as if he were never meant to fly. Nanteuil’s print reminds me of a video game incarnation of Icarus.

Kid Icarus from Nintendo

As a kid, before I knew anything substantial about Greek myths, or ancient gods and goddesses, my brothers and I played Kid Icarus, a 1986 Nintendo gaming system title that featured a boy angel named Pit; he had wings, but he couldn’t fly (or had lost the ability). He looked more like Cupid, the baby child of Aphrodite, the goddess of Love; than the tragic son of Daedalus, the ambitious inventor of Crete. In the video game, Pit had agency despite his clipped wings; he carried with him a bow and a plentiful armory of arrows. The game was a side-scrolling 2D affair; the player collected hearts and I believe, if my memory serves me correct, there was a princess. And the goal was to regain Pit’s ability to fly. I think. Yet. It’s funny because the game actually has no link to the original myth at all - except for the wings. And in the myth, unlike the game, Icarus has no agency. Like most children, he is limited by the agency of his parents. And, in fact, the myth of Icarus really is about the limitations of parenting, and the sometimes destructive relationships that can arise out of dysfunctional family dynamics.
The Origin Story of Daedalus Foreshadows the Fate of Icarus

Film still from Jim Henson's "Storyteller" version of the Icarus Myth

Some sources say that Daedalus, Icarus’s father, was born in Athens. He fled to Crete after accidentally killing his nephew (yet Apollodorus’s account of the story suggest foul play). In the Jim Henson Storyteller version of the myth, this event is connected with Icarus’s later death. Daedalus’s nephew was amenable to learning and generously caught on to the craft of possibly building a machine that could fly; this may have caused Daedalus to have envy and it is this envy that arose in Daedalus a moment of insanity when he lifted the boy up to fly at the top of the Acropolis and he tragically fell off the roof to his death.

In Crete, Daedalus starts a new life in Crete. It is during this time that Icarus is born (most likely the result of a relationship between Daedalus and a Cretan slave named Naucrate). After the events of the minotaur, Icarus is confined to a cave with his father, held there by the mighty king Minos, who, after Daedalus had constructed a miraculous maze to entrap his son, the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, kept him in Crete on indefinite retainer. Reading the original sources, the story of the Minotaur, of Theseus, the hero who slays the creature, Minos, the king, and Daedalus the inventor are very much tightly knit together. It is Icarus and Daedalus who lead Theseus out of the labyrinth, with Ariadne to freedom. Yet that’s another story (for another blog post). Myth has a tendency to radiate out into different spokes. But for this story, the story of Icarus and Daedalus, the central conflict is played out between father and son. Imagine Icarus grew up amazed and bewildered by his father’s inventions, but as he grew older, and approached adolescence, he grew cagey and restless. In the Jim Henson version (which I love) Icarus is portrayed as fragile and clumsy, almost incompetent and difficult to love. Icarus had lived his entire life constrained, so when his father drew up a plan to build him wings so they both could escape Minos’s grasp, the news must have felt like a dream and a relief. But if you grow up never experiencing even a little bit of freedom, once freedom is granted, it’s like how first-year, coddled college freshman feels after being raised by careful, plodding helicopter parents. You’re going to break bad fast. And that’s exactly what happened to Icarus. Tasting the salt in his mouth and feeling the tang of the ocean air, once he was aloft in the mechanical wings his father had constructed for him, the exhilaration was too intense. Icarus had tasted freedom, and like an addictive drug, he wanted more. Daedalus had warned him: “Fly too low to the sea and the saltwater will saturate your feathers weighing you back to the earth. Fly too high, close to the sun the warmth will melt the wax that keeps your wing enclosure intact. It will fall apart”. Icarus most likely replied, “Yes, father” and flew off. Teaching restraint to a teenage boy is like asking a child to not eat the chocolate ice cream or giving him an iPhone loaded with video games and telling him to do his homework.
What is the Moral Message of this Greek Myth?
Traditionally, the story ends with a cautionary warning that those who do well to refuse to listen carefully to their totally well-meaning father will find peril and destruction. He should have listened. Why didn’t he listen? To return to the Jim Henson version of the story (which I love!) the connection is made to the beginning when Daedalus killed Talos, which in turn killed something inside of Daedalus which was also unconsciously transmitted to his son. When Talos fell, so did Daedalus and Icarus fall. That’s some deep generational toxicity. Should the son pay the sins of the father? It reminds me of another ancient tale, of Abraham and Isaac. While Abraham doesn’t slay his own son, he is about to do it (when at the last moment the angel stays his hand). There is something electric in the concept of the “sins of the father” - of this idea that the father’s downfall sets the stage for the son’s eventual demise. Is there a way to break the chain? I think this why this story resonates so strongly. We want Icarus to fly and survive, to thrive. No one wishes, deep down, that Icarus dies. We want an alternative narrative. We want to see a story where Icarus and Daedalus live happily ever after. In this story, however, things would have had to have been different from the get-go. Icarus would not have grown up in the shadow of his father’s guilt. He would not have felt so constrained. What would this Icarus look like? It is a good question because so often I see the Icarus-effect. And as a son myself, I see how we as men are often tied up to our fathers (even when we do not consciously recognize it).
The Story of Icarus Resonates With Me Personally
Cultivating agency is the stuff of adulthood. To go away from Icarus and to become something different, something alive and thriving is hard. To fly away from the comfort of the nest. How does the expression go? He flew the coop. I do think of another story of fathers and sons - which comes from the Christian New Testament Greek writings. Jesus talks about a son who flies the coop; he leaves the nest and squanders his father’s inheritance; yet, he comes back poor and laid low. The father forgives him and takes him back. His sins are forgiven. At any stage of life, I feel like, one is between this prodigal son feeling and the need (and want) for redemption and the fear that I can be burnt up by the sun if I fly too far.

I say “I” because of the story of Icarus, of the Prodigal Son, and other stories of freeing oneself from the nest is a powerful one. I can relate to it and I am sure many can. I think about my own upbringing, and how I grew up; I learned from my parents how to live in the world, for better or for worst, and then at High School graduation I was thrust into the world. I had a second upbringing. Then I graduated from college; lived in a monastery for a while; then, I left and became a school teacher! I look at the successes of my adult life, my teaching, my career, projects I have completed and articles and stories I have written and I compare those things to how I was as a kid. Did one lead from another? Is it possible to trace who I am now from who I was then? The line is not continuous; there are broken lines; new lines drawn over old ones; and lines that are going in opposite directions. That’s probably why, as a teacher, I have gravitated to teaching this story a lot in my career. I have taught it to Sixth Graders, and to Ninth Graders. Kids like the story, and they are appalled by the tragedy. But they all say they would never fly too close to the sun. Or, they remind me, “Mr. Roselli, why didn’t Icarus just use better glue?!” Good point!
Teaching the Myth of Icarus to your Students in a Middle or High School Classroom
The story of Icarus and Daedalus is a powerful one. So, I put together a simple 3-day lesson plan that teachers can implement in their classroom with kids (preferably Middle or High School students). There are a ton of books that have reprinted the myth and there are a ton of artistic representations. I like using Edith Hamilton’s Mythology by the book Parallel Myths is my favorite. There is a gorgeous children’s book version of the Icarus myth that is fabulous because the illustrations are evocative. Use my lesson plan with any text of the story and guide your students through this remarkable tale.

"Rats!" by Robert Browning (excerpted from the Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1842)

Do you love rats? Read a delightfully bombastic excerpt from Robert Browning's 1842 poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin".

Frontispiece, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Chicago, McNally, 1910

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats
And even spoiled the women's chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats . . .

Robert Browning, excerpted from The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1842

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child's Story. Chicago, McNally, 1910. Print.                                                                                                                                                                    PDF Copy for Printing

Subway Diary: That Time I was Struck by a Man on the F Train

Riding the F*#) train one morning . . .

So, I was just sitting next to a mother and her son on a chock-full F train this morning. The mom and son were talking about the "fake poetry" posters that have been splayed about subway cars as of late - a marketing ploy by the Internet start-up PolicyGenius (they compare life insurance policies - *boring*). Noticing the rapport between the two of them, I laughed and acknowledged that I also found the ads a bit twee and said, "I know how you feel. Fake poetry. It hurts my heart." The kid wanted to get out of his seat and explore the other posters, but the mom pulled him back.

Suddenly, Out of Nowhere
At that moment, a man appeared in front of me, a white, middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair, a bit harried, and in sweats, said to me, "I have something for you. It's your turn next." And he struck me in the face. Unprovoked. I did not know the man nor did I expressly notice him in the car until that moment. The woman and the child immediately got up and huddled in the corner and, I said, "That man just hit me." The train pulled into the 63rd street station and, I got off - and so did the woman and the child - I heard someone say they were calling the police. We three went up to the upper level to escape. The woman asked if I was OK and I told her I was an English teacher on my way to work - and that I was worried I'd be late. I then texted Ms. S and wrote, "A man just hit me on the train unprovoked." After a few beats, the nice woman who had become my reluctant protector told me she was an English teacher, too. I started to cry. I think she was worried about her son about to witness a grown man have a nervous breakdown so, she gingerly asked, "Do you want a moment alone?" I said "Yes," and the woman smiled at me warmly. I felt comforted. As I watched her go, I wondered if she would look me up later and we would figure out why this random act of violence occurred.

Getting the Heck Out of Dodge
I figured it was safe so I went back down to the lower level and, the same F train was still lingering in the station. The conductor, the guy who sits in the middle car and announces the train stops, noticed me and said, "They apprehended that guy who hit you and, the police are looking for you." I did not want to deal with the fallout - and I was also relieved that the police had caught the guy, so I just got on the train. And I went to work. I felt shook all day - like a mild shock had invaded my system. Mr. V made tea. Doc consoled me and, Ms. S hung out with my first-period class. Mr. H told me his own story of subway assault and Mr. G. said I should try to get the violent men thrown behind bars. I am just relieved that the man did not have a knife or a sharp object. So. What's the moral of the story: stay alert but don't let one man's crazy act of violence ruin your life.

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Family Photograph: "Mamaw"

There's a photo in my mother's album of my paternal Grandmother, Veronica Greig sipping a cup of coffee.

In 1992, my family moved to a new house in Mandeville, Louisiana.

Mamaw and Pawaw came to visit us very soon after we moved. Mom made sure the house was spotless. My brothers and I were more or less happy because we liked our new neighborhood. And we had a new dog - Maggie.

I must have been in the Sixth or Seventh grade.

Veronica Greig Roselli is my paternal grandmother - from whence I get my name, "Greig"!

There's a photo I found in mom's album. I like how Mamaw is holding her cup of coffee gingerly. I love her glasses. She used to get dressed up on Sunday to go play BINGO. She'd put powder on her face, and it would smudge her glasses but she wouldn't notice.

Mamaw was very sweet. Pawpaw wasn't so nice. He was gruff and vindictive. I'm not sure why - probably a fight between my father and Papaw - but I don't think my grandparents ever visited us again in our house on Live Oak after the day this picture was taken.

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