Jane Smiley’s The Greenlanders has been a favorite of mine for a long time. It’s a longish tome, a yarn of two families living out their complicated, superstition-and-hunger-driven histories during the final century of that island’s habitation by the descendants of Norse Vikings. In the story, the weather is changing inexorably, and the European settlers adapt as best as they can, trying to maintain their religion, losing little by little all the trappings of their culture; by the last page, the reader knows the end is coming, and soon.
The tired adjective "indomitable" has been used to describe heroines from Scarlett to Emma, but it seems to me it was made for the book’s main character, Margret. She survives misstep after trial after humiliation, as well as the death or disappearance of everyone dear to her, with the dignity and grace that I’ve striven for most of my life.
So I’ve reread the book enough to predict most of the dialogue; but I’m thinking about picking it up again, anyway. Because it seems to me that it has another lesson to teach.
This afternoon I listened to a diplomat muse on the climate change talks in Copenhagen, and their final lack of commitment by anyone, to do anything. He blamed this disaster on China’s government. He also considered the humiliation of the President of the United States dealing with some apparachik, instead of an actual member of the Chinese government, who might be able to affect the actions of a country whose agreement to a meaningful behavioral change is crucial to the aversion of global disaster.
I hated this as much as the diplomat, but it made perfect sense to me; it’s what creditors and debtors do. I don’t get to talk directly to anybody remotely in charge of my credit card company, either. The most I can do when they raise my APR to some usurious level is make nasty comments on the customer satisfaction survey they inexplicably send me a few days later.
It was, in the end, like listening to the news of the Filipino volcano, though. There was nothing I could do about the climate talks, or the level of indebtedness of this country to foreign governments and citizens, but take the blame for my share. No, I didn’t vote for George W. Bush and through my actions help bring about his ruinous tax cuts and wars. But I didn’t do all that much to stop them, either. And my own behavior has been just as fiscally irresponsible as that of my country’s, albeit on a smaller scale.
So, like the Greenlanders, I know disaster is coming. Whether we will end up on Cormac McCarthy’s road, or in some less spectacularly awful denouement, we all know that life can’t go on as before. Smiley’s characters adapted by spending entire winters slowly starving huddled in their beds, hoping to hobble out in the increasingly later springs, as the Little Ice Age descended. Who knows what adaptations we will have to make.
In the meantime, the holidays are here. Jake’s DSi, bought on credit of course, is hidden in a drawer, and I have two boys getting ready to spend the evening cutting out sugar cookies and the night giggling in their attic lair. We’ve eaten our spaghetti and meatballs; for breakfast I’ll make them crepes, and I know I’ll wake up to some extraterrestrial war erupting from the Playstation set. I’ll be like the Greenlanders, maintaining tradition and custom in the fortuitously falling snow, whatever disaster may come in the coming years.
Every year I find some excuse to read , to some group of children whose education I’m in charge of, O Henry’s Gift of the Magi. I’ve seen the parodies; I know the story’s a cliché. But my voice still breaks, every time, on the final line. "They are the Magi." Perhaps, as long as we have these kinds of Magi in our midst, we’ll be OK. Perhaps.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
Solstice Chaos
I sighed and cursed as I turned another plastic storage box over with one hand, training a flashlight on my task with the other.
What did I think I was doing? It was seven pm on Friday, December 18, and I was just starting my Christmas decorating.
Jake and I had already been to Lowe's. We found the perfect tree almost immediately - a Charlie Brown tree, I christened it immediately. A foot-long spike top like a tuft of hair wrapped around a knitting needle, and underneath a fat ball of impenetrable branches that, despite the late day, still retained some green. On sale for half price! Such a deal! On the way out, I remembered that I needed a stand too, and the store was out. Oh well - I used to have a stand before my recent years with a plastic tree -it's gotta be somewhere..
So now I was out in the storage building in my back yard, hoping that if a Black Widow had taken up residence, it was too sleepy for my search to wake it. I'd told Jake that I had a ton of plans for our 11 days together - this wasn't one of them. So far I'd found the box of ornaments, and the one filled with lights, including the half-broken bulbs from twenty years ago that I really ought to just trash. But no stand.
Well, we had a tree, and it had to go into water tonight if it wasn't to turn into brown needles before Christmas Eve. We'd have to buy one.
King Soopers didn't have one, nor did Ace. We finally found a stand at Walgreens, paid twice as much for it as for the tree, and headed home.
I hacked at the bottom of the tree for some 15 minutes before I uncovered a fresh surface to expose to water. Jake heard none of it, busy on the computer, till, furious, I struggled the tree through the front door, yelling at him about his lack of help. He held the tree while I turned the screws on the stand, then ran to get water, and I realized I'd been patently unfair. I'd given him no direction - why did I expect him to be helpful?
At this point the comic part of the evening began. Once the tree was situated in the spot I'd planned for it, there was no way for Jake to get past it to his room. Perhaps it would fit in the bed-dining room? Nope, the stand fell right off the low shelf I set it on. I carried the ficus plant, stem drooping, to another window, and moved its stand further away from its window. There. It's a squeeze, but the tree fits. I set the trunk to something close to vertical, watered it, tightened the screws as far as they would go. It'll have to do.
The house, though, wouldn't. It was amazing how much of a mess we'd made in just two hours. Jake's bag, his trumpet, my quilting, my lunchbag and bookbag, the books and toys I'd moved to make room for the tree, the outerwear we'd both discarded randomly - and over it all a thin film of potting soil from the displaced ficus. I have a house whose downstairs covers fewer than 600 square feet. My mother once said, accurately, that it's so small that one pair of shoes out of place makes it look messy. Right now, it looked hopeless.
Jake got into his bath and I started picking up. I wondered, why did I wait with decorating? Yes, there'd been that very cold week when moving away from the heat source seemed too much effort for any purpose. And daily workouts and frequent school-related training sessions don't leave much time for stringing lights and buying trees - or tree stands.
I'd rationalized, made myself think that it was because I wanted Jake to have the pleasure of preparation for Christmas, not just the big event. There will only be the two of us, and gift-giving will be limited - so if the holiday is to mean anything, the decorating will have to be part of it, I told myself. And there's some merit to that - except that Jake has never shown much interest or joy in that whole light - stringing thing. He likes the finished product, but if it happened magically while he slept, that would be fine with him.
No, the reason why I didn't decorate ahead of time is the same as the reason why I don't go up to his room when Jake's not here. I built that room from scratch, and it's not a masterpiece, but an enormous effort and some considerable part of my credit-card balance went into that space, and you'd think I'd take pride in it and want to spend time there. Instead, I perform the bare minimum maintenance and otherwise seem to pretend it's not there.
No, I'm not some monstrous Susan Smith type who wants to pretend that her children don't exist. My boys are my greatest pride I'm their biggest fan, just as they are mine. My Seattle marathon medal didn't mean a tenth as much to me as the letter Jake wrote me while I was running it. But somehow I've dealt with the fact that sometimes I'm his mom, and sometimes I'm a single woman with nothing more important to do, of an evening, than running 5 miles, by dividing my life into neat portions. There's the life with Jake and the life without Jake, and the two rarely, if ever, involve the same activities, same friends, or even the same spaces.
So after Jake took his bath and ate his grapefruit as I read Tolkien, and brushed his teeth and got tucked in, I started sorting through the mess. And gradually, the irritation of the chaos ceded to some level of contentment. After all, what did I have to do that was more important, or interesting, or meaningful, than making a nest, even if a temporary nest, for my boy and me, at Christmas?
What did I think I was doing? It was seven pm on Friday, December 18, and I was just starting my Christmas decorating.
Jake and I had already been to Lowe's. We found the perfect tree almost immediately - a Charlie Brown tree, I christened it immediately. A foot-long spike top like a tuft of hair wrapped around a knitting needle, and underneath a fat ball of impenetrable branches that, despite the late day, still retained some green. On sale for half price! Such a deal! On the way out, I remembered that I needed a stand too, and the store was out. Oh well - I used to have a stand before my recent years with a plastic tree -it's gotta be somewhere..
So now I was out in the storage building in my back yard, hoping that if a Black Widow had taken up residence, it was too sleepy for my search to wake it. I'd told Jake that I had a ton of plans for our 11 days together - this wasn't one of them. So far I'd found the box of ornaments, and the one filled with lights, including the half-broken bulbs from twenty years ago that I really ought to just trash. But no stand.
Well, we had a tree, and it had to go into water tonight if it wasn't to turn into brown needles before Christmas Eve. We'd have to buy one.
King Soopers didn't have one, nor did Ace. We finally found a stand at Walgreens, paid twice as much for it as for the tree, and headed home.
I hacked at the bottom of the tree for some 15 minutes before I uncovered a fresh surface to expose to water. Jake heard none of it, busy on the computer, till, furious, I struggled the tree through the front door, yelling at him about his lack of help. He held the tree while I turned the screws on the stand, then ran to get water, and I realized I'd been patently unfair. I'd given him no direction - why did I expect him to be helpful?
At this point the comic part of the evening began. Once the tree was situated in the spot I'd planned for it, there was no way for Jake to get past it to his room. Perhaps it would fit in the bed-dining room? Nope, the stand fell right off the low shelf I set it on. I carried the ficus plant, stem drooping, to another window, and moved its stand further away from its window. There. It's a squeeze, but the tree fits. I set the trunk to something close to vertical, watered it, tightened the screws as far as they would go. It'll have to do.
The house, though, wouldn't. It was amazing how much of a mess we'd made in just two hours. Jake's bag, his trumpet, my quilting, my lunchbag and bookbag, the books and toys I'd moved to make room for the tree, the outerwear we'd both discarded randomly - and over it all a thin film of potting soil from the displaced ficus. I have a house whose downstairs covers fewer than 600 square feet. My mother once said, accurately, that it's so small that one pair of shoes out of place makes it look messy. Right now, it looked hopeless.
Jake got into his bath and I started picking up. I wondered, why did I wait with decorating? Yes, there'd been that very cold week when moving away from the heat source seemed too much effort for any purpose. And daily workouts and frequent school-related training sessions don't leave much time for stringing lights and buying trees - or tree stands.
I'd rationalized, made myself think that it was because I wanted Jake to have the pleasure of preparation for Christmas, not just the big event. There will only be the two of us, and gift-giving will be limited - so if the holiday is to mean anything, the decorating will have to be part of it, I told myself. And there's some merit to that - except that Jake has never shown much interest or joy in that whole light - stringing thing. He likes the finished product, but if it happened magically while he slept, that would be fine with him.
No, the reason why I didn't decorate ahead of time is the same as the reason why I don't go up to his room when Jake's not here. I built that room from scratch, and it's not a masterpiece, but an enormous effort and some considerable part of my credit-card balance went into that space, and you'd think I'd take pride in it and want to spend time there. Instead, I perform the bare minimum maintenance and otherwise seem to pretend it's not there.
No, I'm not some monstrous Susan Smith type who wants to pretend that her children don't exist. My boys are my greatest pride I'm their biggest fan, just as they are mine. My Seattle marathon medal didn't mean a tenth as much to me as the letter Jake wrote me while I was running it. But somehow I've dealt with the fact that sometimes I'm his mom, and sometimes I'm a single woman with nothing more important to do, of an evening, than running 5 miles, by dividing my life into neat portions. There's the life with Jake and the life without Jake, and the two rarely, if ever, involve the same activities, same friends, or even the same spaces.
So after Jake took his bath and ate his grapefruit as I read Tolkien, and brushed his teeth and got tucked in, I started sorting through the mess. And gradually, the irritation of the chaos ceded to some level of contentment. After all, what did I have to do that was more important, or interesting, or meaningful, than making a nest, even if a temporary nest, for my boy and me, at Christmas?
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
An Extraordinary, Everyday Victory
I went into Special Education, I once told my old friend Jim, because it's a field that is morally unimpeachable.
To fully understand this, you have to know that my first job out of college was working in the West Texas oil fields. I made amazing money for someone with a fresh bachelor of science in geology; but I was acutely aware, every day on those plains, that we raped the land in a way I've never been a part of before or since. Enormous pools of salty water or oily acid, thickened with guar gum no better for the environment because it was a tree product, littered the ground that we'd spent just a few hours on, all to the benefit of the royalty owner and producer, who thereby made a few more barrels a day of hydrocarbon. And that was all before any awareness of climate change. I owed the earth - something.
But even after I began teaching, there was enough left in me of the higher-education-besotted Central European to always question how I spent my work life. Would it not create greater value, the part of me that still related to that mitteleuropa asked, if I used my brains to teach kids that are gifted, that can contribute great discoveries to the world, if I can't win the Nobel myself? So I quested after the "double-identified" kids - the ones with disabilities, but also academic gifts or talents. And I shied away from the situations that involved working with kids with more cognitive disabilities, even when the jobs offered were ideal in every other way.
In districts I'd taught in before D-11, this was relatively easy - the kids with severe needs had whole separate rooms where they spent most of their day with their teachers and educational assistants. We might get together with them for a party sometimes, or walk through the room on our way to somewhere else, and comment enviously about their cooking facilities, all the while thinking, somewhere deep inside, yeah, but they have to work with those kids..
"Sean," my first student with moderate mental retardation, had Down's syndrome, and he had all of the gifts and deficits typical of it. He loved to be sociable - in fact, had a serious talent in that area. But he also hated to work independently, and generally would show his displeasure with loud vocalization - which made teaching pre-algebra to kids who mostly had some combination of learning disability and ADHD more of a challenge than I was pleased to take on.
Until I got used to it, it bothered me badly - as did Sean's blithe assumption that everything he did was universally loved. Worse, most of the other people in the school played along - they glad-handed Sean, high-fived and low-fived and hugged him, and all I could think of was, the kid is 13, come on, let's teach him some grown-up behaviors here! And then one day it was the last day of 8th grade and I gave him the longest hug I ever gave any kid in my whole life. I don't think I wanted to let him go - ever.
I'm at a different school now, and this year I have not one, but three, kids with significant disabilities! And yes, I'm still the grown-up in the room. I look askance at the sing-song the educational assistants employ to speak to the kids. I could barely swallow my anger when one of them gave one of the girls a Barbie for a 12th birthday present. I give the kids intermittent lectures and advice about being almost grown - and sometimes, perhaps, I make enough sense for them understand. Perhaps because I once worked at helping people with severe, sometimes multiple, disabilities work productively at regular jobs, most of my effort with these kids is directed at where I want them to be when they turn 21, and age out of the school system. They won't be taking up floor space in front of mom's TV if I have anything to do with it..
And sometimes they pay me back. Today's victory belonged to "Leo Dvorak." Leo came to our school afraid of anything new. A kid with high-functioning autism, he likes things to be exactly the way he's used to. If he put his backpack down on a table yesterday, he'll put it there today - even if it's on top of a pile of carefully sorted legal paperwork I'd just spend 15 minutes arranging. If I forget to punch holes so he can put his math paper in his binder, he'll interrupt a fraction demonstration to remind me.
But most of all, when he showed up, Leo worried about unexpected noises, and stairs. He needed an hand to hold going down stairs, and someone to carry his books so he could hold the railing with the other. During the first fire drill, I held him under my arm the whole time to keep him from bursting into tears.
But now it's December. At the end of third period, Leo goes to art, in the downstairs studio. This involves negotiating a staircase full of rushing, loud, mostly bigger seventh graders on their way to the cafeteria next door. But Leo and I have been working on it: gradually, I've increased the distance between him and me, by yesterday stopping at the landing as he made it down the lower set of steps. Today I had to answer the phone right at the end of class. I put the phone down and looked around; no Leo.
Yep, he made it to art. All by himself. I walked down to make sure; he was making his way to his desk like he'd accomplished nothing in particular.
But then.. almost at the end of the day, the fire alarm rang. It was an unannounced fire drill, and Leo was with a substitute educational assistant in a classroom across the building from me. As I walked out, it occurred to me that I should have found him before I exited, but I knew they wouldn't let me back in.
And there he was. "I don't know who was leading who," the educational assistant said. "He knew where to go.."
After the all clear sounded, I walked straight to the phone and called Leo's mom. It was a day of everyday, but extraordinary, victories. It was time to celebrate.
To fully understand this, you have to know that my first job out of college was working in the West Texas oil fields. I made amazing money for someone with a fresh bachelor of science in geology; but I was acutely aware, every day on those plains, that we raped the land in a way I've never been a part of before or since. Enormous pools of salty water or oily acid, thickened with guar gum no better for the environment because it was a tree product, littered the ground that we'd spent just a few hours on, all to the benefit of the royalty owner and producer, who thereby made a few more barrels a day of hydrocarbon. And that was all before any awareness of climate change. I owed the earth - something.
But even after I began teaching, there was enough left in me of the higher-education-besotted Central European to always question how I spent my work life. Would it not create greater value, the part of me that still related to that mitteleuropa asked, if I used my brains to teach kids that are gifted, that can contribute great discoveries to the world, if I can't win the Nobel myself? So I quested after the "double-identified" kids - the ones with disabilities, but also academic gifts or talents. And I shied away from the situations that involved working with kids with more cognitive disabilities, even when the jobs offered were ideal in every other way.
In districts I'd taught in before D-11, this was relatively easy - the kids with severe needs had whole separate rooms where they spent most of their day with their teachers and educational assistants. We might get together with them for a party sometimes, or walk through the room on our way to somewhere else, and comment enviously about their cooking facilities, all the while thinking, somewhere deep inside, yeah, but they have to work with those kids..
"Sean," my first student with moderate mental retardation, had Down's syndrome, and he had all of the gifts and deficits typical of it. He loved to be sociable - in fact, had a serious talent in that area. But he also hated to work independently, and generally would show his displeasure with loud vocalization - which made teaching pre-algebra to kids who mostly had some combination of learning disability and ADHD more of a challenge than I was pleased to take on.
Until I got used to it, it bothered me badly - as did Sean's blithe assumption that everything he did was universally loved. Worse, most of the other people in the school played along - they glad-handed Sean, high-fived and low-fived and hugged him, and all I could think of was, the kid is 13, come on, let's teach him some grown-up behaviors here! And then one day it was the last day of 8th grade and I gave him the longest hug I ever gave any kid in my whole life. I don't think I wanted to let him go - ever.
I'm at a different school now, and this year I have not one, but three, kids with significant disabilities! And yes, I'm still the grown-up in the room. I look askance at the sing-song the educational assistants employ to speak to the kids. I could barely swallow my anger when one of them gave one of the girls a Barbie for a 12th birthday present. I give the kids intermittent lectures and advice about being almost grown - and sometimes, perhaps, I make enough sense for them understand. Perhaps because I once worked at helping people with severe, sometimes multiple, disabilities work productively at regular jobs, most of my effort with these kids is directed at where I want them to be when they turn 21, and age out of the school system. They won't be taking up floor space in front of mom's TV if I have anything to do with it..
And sometimes they pay me back. Today's victory belonged to "Leo Dvorak." Leo came to our school afraid of anything new. A kid with high-functioning autism, he likes things to be exactly the way he's used to. If he put his backpack down on a table yesterday, he'll put it there today - even if it's on top of a pile of carefully sorted legal paperwork I'd just spend 15 minutes arranging. If I forget to punch holes so he can put his math paper in his binder, he'll interrupt a fraction demonstration to remind me.
But most of all, when he showed up, Leo worried about unexpected noises, and stairs. He needed an hand to hold going down stairs, and someone to carry his books so he could hold the railing with the other. During the first fire drill, I held him under my arm the whole time to keep him from bursting into tears.
But now it's December. At the end of third period, Leo goes to art, in the downstairs studio. This involves negotiating a staircase full of rushing, loud, mostly bigger seventh graders on their way to the cafeteria next door. But Leo and I have been working on it: gradually, I've increased the distance between him and me, by yesterday stopping at the landing as he made it down the lower set of steps. Today I had to answer the phone right at the end of class. I put the phone down and looked around; no Leo.
Yep, he made it to art. All by himself. I walked down to make sure; he was making his way to his desk like he'd accomplished nothing in particular.
But then.. almost at the end of the day, the fire alarm rang. It was an unannounced fire drill, and Leo was with a substitute educational assistant in a classroom across the building from me. As I walked out, it occurred to me that I should have found him before I exited, but I knew they wouldn't let me back in.
And there he was. "I don't know who was leading who," the educational assistant said. "He knew where to go.."
After the all clear sounded, I walked straight to the phone and called Leo's mom. It was a day of everyday, but extraordinary, victories. It was time to celebrate.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Conversation 12/1/2009
Glass has no crystals.
Its broken surfaces
Amorphous and jagged
Grate, like transverse faults
Building pressure
For the next big break.
The tumble from top shelves
Smashes vessels proved brittle.
With time we’ll gather the shards
And glue. Till they contain us again.
Its broken surfaces
Amorphous and jagged
Grate, like transverse faults
Building pressure
For the next big break.
The tumble from top shelves
Smashes vessels proved brittle.
With time we’ll gather the shards
And glue. Till they contain us again.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tech Surprises
My first attempt at bringing tech to my classroom was, well, a flop. I’d been teaching the kids how to automatically decode the short /i/ sound – fluent reading is a key cornerstone of reading comprehension. To make it more entertaining, I’d acted out Monty Python and the "Knights of Nik!". Then someone had posted another MP skit on Facebook, and I – finally – realized that Youtube is a treasure trove of material I can bring into my classroom. I cued up the skit to project on my Interwrite screen, pushed play.
I expected the kids to break into laughter, the way my son did over the weekend as I played skit after skit of Brit humor to him on our home computer. But they remained stone-faced. Clearly I still had a lot to learn.
I’ve been at Galileo since August. To say it’s an amazing place is a cliché – but like most cliches, has some basis in truth. The people who thought this place up had an astounding vision – take a school that had demonstrated, in its history, failure significant enough to be featured on national television as an example of educational hopelessness. Close it. Reopen it, a year later. Fill it with enough sturdy laptops for each kid to have continuous access, and document cameras, electronic boards, scanners, I touches. Hire people who are passionate about teaching middle schoolers, and make them spend at least a week in the summer learning how to use all the toys – enough to orient them and wow them – and make sure they keep learning. Establish strong, heavy structure for both behavior and academic support, and encourage staff to use it.
See if you can change some lives.
For me, it’s been a ride. I’m not afraid of technology – I don’t think, anyway – but the learning curve for an Interwrite board is steeper than that for a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. I stumbled around a lot. It didn’t help that the new Special Education laws had their own learning curve, and I spent the first few weeks of school gasping for breath trying to learn those. It didn’t help, either, that I sustained a head injury at the beginning of the school year.
But I figured it out. By the time of my first evaluation, I could at least project a worksheet on the board and write on it. My kids, the lowest readers in the school, had learned what they could and couldn’t get away with in my class, and we played the rhythm that is so integral to successful learning in a classroom. Not that there weren’t stumbles. For these kids, school is only a worthwhile enterprise in its margins – before and after school, and at lunch. They’ve learned that they will only understand and remember bits and pieces of what is taught in an academic class, and mostly they’ve stopped trying.
Then it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I had to figure out what to do on Tuesday. The policy is, of course, "bell to bell teaching." Remember how your teachers showed movies the day before a holiday? No longer allowed – if you can’t demonstrate how the lesson will enhance progress toward the state standards, you don’t do it. And that makes sense; but I couldn’t just proceed with the standard lesson, either.
In the classrooms of younger, more with-it teachers, I’d seen them use a Jeopardy game to review for tests – and someone mentioned that there was a structure available on line that you could feed your questions and answers into. I found it, and took 15 minutes to set up a game based on the stuff I’d taught so far. That still left time – we have 70-minute periods at Galileo. Enough time for a writing project.
I’ve spent most of my Thanksgiving breaks constructing my annual holiday letter. Maybe the kids could to that to learn letter-writing skills… but I already knew what they would say, faced with the open ended task. "I can’t think of anything to write!"
Youtube came to the rescue, this time. My older son played me some clips of Jonathan Coulton a couple of years ago – wasn’t there a snarky holiday-letter song? Sure enough – a quick search revealed "Merry Christmas from Chiron Alpha Prime." If the Andersons could come up with something positive to say about working in asteroid mines whilst abused by Santa-robots, the kids could write something good too! I found a version that was clean enough for middle school and played it for the kids as an intro. Then I handed out notebook paper.
"Couldn’t we use the laptops to write our letters, Ms. Syrovy?"
And yes. Of course they could. And suddenly I found myself walking around, useless, because each kid was, assiduously and independently, constructing a paragraph about their year. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
I think this tech thing will work for me.
I expected the kids to break into laughter, the way my son did over the weekend as I played skit after skit of Brit humor to him on our home computer. But they remained stone-faced. Clearly I still had a lot to learn.
I’ve been at Galileo since August. To say it’s an amazing place is a cliché – but like most cliches, has some basis in truth. The people who thought this place up had an astounding vision – take a school that had demonstrated, in its history, failure significant enough to be featured on national television as an example of educational hopelessness. Close it. Reopen it, a year later. Fill it with enough sturdy laptops for each kid to have continuous access, and document cameras, electronic boards, scanners, I touches. Hire people who are passionate about teaching middle schoolers, and make them spend at least a week in the summer learning how to use all the toys – enough to orient them and wow them – and make sure they keep learning. Establish strong, heavy structure for both behavior and academic support, and encourage staff to use it.
See if you can change some lives.
For me, it’s been a ride. I’m not afraid of technology – I don’t think, anyway – but the learning curve for an Interwrite board is steeper than that for a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. I stumbled around a lot. It didn’t help that the new Special Education laws had their own learning curve, and I spent the first few weeks of school gasping for breath trying to learn those. It didn’t help, either, that I sustained a head injury at the beginning of the school year.
But I figured it out. By the time of my first evaluation, I could at least project a worksheet on the board and write on it. My kids, the lowest readers in the school, had learned what they could and couldn’t get away with in my class, and we played the rhythm that is so integral to successful learning in a classroom. Not that there weren’t stumbles. For these kids, school is only a worthwhile enterprise in its margins – before and after school, and at lunch. They’ve learned that they will only understand and remember bits and pieces of what is taught in an academic class, and mostly they’ve stopped trying.
Then it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I had to figure out what to do on Tuesday. The policy is, of course, "bell to bell teaching." Remember how your teachers showed movies the day before a holiday? No longer allowed – if you can’t demonstrate how the lesson will enhance progress toward the state standards, you don’t do it. And that makes sense; but I couldn’t just proceed with the standard lesson, either.
In the classrooms of younger, more with-it teachers, I’d seen them use a Jeopardy game to review for tests – and someone mentioned that there was a structure available on line that you could feed your questions and answers into. I found it, and took 15 minutes to set up a game based on the stuff I’d taught so far. That still left time – we have 70-minute periods at Galileo. Enough time for a writing project.
I’ve spent most of my Thanksgiving breaks constructing my annual holiday letter. Maybe the kids could to that to learn letter-writing skills… but I already knew what they would say, faced with the open ended task. "I can’t think of anything to write!"
Youtube came to the rescue, this time. My older son played me some clips of Jonathan Coulton a couple of years ago – wasn’t there a snarky holiday-letter song? Sure enough – a quick search revealed "Merry Christmas from Chiron Alpha Prime." If the Andersons could come up with something positive to say about working in asteroid mines whilst abused by Santa-robots, the kids could write something good too! I found a version that was clean enough for middle school and played it for the kids as an intro. Then I handed out notebook paper.
"Couldn’t we use the laptops to write our letters, Ms. Syrovy?"
And yes. Of course they could. And suddenly I found myself walking around, useless, because each kid was, assiduously and independently, constructing a paragraph about their year. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
I think this tech thing will work for me.
The Docent
Eyebrows groomed but bristling
He spoke with soft, precise inflection
Like an aged pastor.
"How do you push the rudder?"
Hands backed with rapt faces
"Soft and easy!"
I put on lipstick.
He had them.
He spoke with soft, precise inflection
Like an aged pastor.
"How do you push the rudder?"
Hands backed with rapt faces
"Soft and easy!"
I put on lipstick.
He had them.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
The Teacher's Voice
Desiree trailed a harried educational assistant into my office.
"She wants to call her mom," Linda said. "I don’t know why, this time. Everything’s fine."
"Sweetie. You need to be in class. Go." I said. And Desiree went to class.
The assistant shot me a look of gratitude. "I wish I could do that!"
Somewhere along the way, in my teaching career, I learned the Teacher’s Voice. Not quite the Voice from the novel Dune, it nevertheless tells my students that what I’m saying is true, that I have their best interests at heart, and that not following through will have consequences.
A few years ago, when Red Rock Canyon first began as an official Open Space, I came across a jeepload of young men who were determined to drive up one of its trails. I was walking by myself, but it only took a couple of sentences to get them to turn around. That’s the power that a teacher’s voice has.
But lately, I’m finding that it doesn’t work on everyone.
Andre is in the sixth grade. Every day that he comes to school, late, we fight the same battles. I ask him to put on glasses; he says they’re at home, or they’re broken. But he can’t see without them. So he sits in the front row – but turns every chance he gets, and talks to the boys behind him. No wonder; written language, to Andre, is inscrutable. His spelling is completely invented. He reads only the shortest, most regularly spelled words, at a rate of roughly 15 words per minute. School is a daily challenge and a daily frustration.
When the year first started, he fobbed my encouragement and direction off with a shrug. "You don’t help me, you help him," he snarled, pointing at a more obviously disabled peer. Now he just tells me that he doesn’t like me.
For my part, I remember an early lesson of working with kids: deal with each behavior on its own merits. Forget the past. Don’t – ever – carry grudges. So when Andre does something right, I shower praise. I celebrate every word he gets on paper. I cheer when I see glasses on his face. I use his name, often, when I talk about positive student behavior.
And a couple of times a day, it works.
The rest of the time, Andre alternates doing nothing with active aggression. He slapped a girl hard enough to leave marks on her face yesterday. The assistant principal and counselor asked me to perform a behavioral study called a Functional Behavior Analysis. And maybe it’ll show us something.
But I think I already know what’s going on with Andre. His current behavior works for him. His mother is nursing a broken shoulder. She claimed yesterday, in a Percocet-altered voice, that it was from the ice on her sidewalk, but it’s just as likely the result of maltreatment by her son. I phoned her early in the year to find out if there was anything that’s worked for her, to make Andre cooperate with her wishes. Nothing, she said. He does what he wants. In elementary school he did nothing, and learned nothing.
I threw a party for the kids the other day, to celebrate that they successfully finished a major unit. They loved playing the Wii the school provided for the celebration.
"I have one in my room," Andre, who was absent that day, sniffed later, "I don’t need to play it at school!" He was probably lying, but he’d made his point.
You’d think Andre was a failure in every area.
My window looks over the school’s athletic field. On nice days, Andre’s been there, surrounded by friends, playing football, every morning and evening. When a play begins, he stands, stolid, in the center of the field, clearly a key player. In the classroom, the other boys don’t follow the leadership he offers – they don’t want the consequences of defying the teacher. But they crave his approval on the football field.
Andre is thoroughly successful in minimizing his weaknesses, and showcasing his strengths.
He makes me remember my own failures: having proved repeatedly in school my total ineptitude with any games involving balls, I now avoid them. Why would I expect a smart kid who can’t read and write to behave any differently, if he has any choice about it?
But I am frightened for him, and my fear has its basis in my own past. In the early nineties, I worked as part of a group teaching young people with disabilities, who were often relegated to spending their days in front of a parent’s TV, how to get jobs in the community. For the most part, we were successful. One failure was a young man who barely spoke. He tried his choice of food service out at a local Village Inn. I attempted to coach him; he ignored me. When I repeated that he was to wipe the tables, not refill the ice in glasses, he turned and screamed clearly, despite his articulation impairment, "Leave me alone, you stupid bitch!" He ripped off his apron, darted out of the restaurant, and never came back to the training.
He succeeded. I left him alone. And is his likely sad, hopeless destination Andre’s, too?
"She wants to call her mom," Linda said. "I don’t know why, this time. Everything’s fine."
"Sweetie. You need to be in class. Go." I said. And Desiree went to class.
The assistant shot me a look of gratitude. "I wish I could do that!"
Somewhere along the way, in my teaching career, I learned the Teacher’s Voice. Not quite the Voice from the novel Dune, it nevertheless tells my students that what I’m saying is true, that I have their best interests at heart, and that not following through will have consequences.
A few years ago, when Red Rock Canyon first began as an official Open Space, I came across a jeepload of young men who were determined to drive up one of its trails. I was walking by myself, but it only took a couple of sentences to get them to turn around. That’s the power that a teacher’s voice has.
But lately, I’m finding that it doesn’t work on everyone.
Andre is in the sixth grade. Every day that he comes to school, late, we fight the same battles. I ask him to put on glasses; he says they’re at home, or they’re broken. But he can’t see without them. So he sits in the front row – but turns every chance he gets, and talks to the boys behind him. No wonder; written language, to Andre, is inscrutable. His spelling is completely invented. He reads only the shortest, most regularly spelled words, at a rate of roughly 15 words per minute. School is a daily challenge and a daily frustration.
When the year first started, he fobbed my encouragement and direction off with a shrug. "You don’t help me, you help him," he snarled, pointing at a more obviously disabled peer. Now he just tells me that he doesn’t like me.
For my part, I remember an early lesson of working with kids: deal with each behavior on its own merits. Forget the past. Don’t – ever – carry grudges. So when Andre does something right, I shower praise. I celebrate every word he gets on paper. I cheer when I see glasses on his face. I use his name, often, when I talk about positive student behavior.
And a couple of times a day, it works.
The rest of the time, Andre alternates doing nothing with active aggression. He slapped a girl hard enough to leave marks on her face yesterday. The assistant principal and counselor asked me to perform a behavioral study called a Functional Behavior Analysis. And maybe it’ll show us something.
But I think I already know what’s going on with Andre. His current behavior works for him. His mother is nursing a broken shoulder. She claimed yesterday, in a Percocet-altered voice, that it was from the ice on her sidewalk, but it’s just as likely the result of maltreatment by her son. I phoned her early in the year to find out if there was anything that’s worked for her, to make Andre cooperate with her wishes. Nothing, she said. He does what he wants. In elementary school he did nothing, and learned nothing.
I threw a party for the kids the other day, to celebrate that they successfully finished a major unit. They loved playing the Wii the school provided for the celebration.
"I have one in my room," Andre, who was absent that day, sniffed later, "I don’t need to play it at school!" He was probably lying, but he’d made his point.
You’d think Andre was a failure in every area.
My window looks over the school’s athletic field. On nice days, Andre’s been there, surrounded by friends, playing football, every morning and evening. When a play begins, he stands, stolid, in the center of the field, clearly a key player. In the classroom, the other boys don’t follow the leadership he offers – they don’t want the consequences of defying the teacher. But they crave his approval on the football field.
Andre is thoroughly successful in minimizing his weaknesses, and showcasing his strengths.
He makes me remember my own failures: having proved repeatedly in school my total ineptitude with any games involving balls, I now avoid them. Why would I expect a smart kid who can’t read and write to behave any differently, if he has any choice about it?
But I am frightened for him, and my fear has its basis in my own past. In the early nineties, I worked as part of a group teaching young people with disabilities, who were often relegated to spending their days in front of a parent’s TV, how to get jobs in the community. For the most part, we were successful. One failure was a young man who barely spoke. He tried his choice of food service out at a local Village Inn. I attempted to coach him; he ignored me. When I repeated that he was to wipe the tables, not refill the ice in glasses, he turned and screamed clearly, despite his articulation impairment, "Leave me alone, you stupid bitch!" He ripped off his apron, darted out of the restaurant, and never came back to the training.
He succeeded. I left him alone. And is his likely sad, hopeless destination Andre’s, too?
Friday, October 9, 2009
A Teacher Who Hardly Teaches.
The principal of my school, where I am new this year, is a Texas Aggie. He cultivates this image to an extent even he is probably not aware of; to me, it's ironic that a quarter century after leaving West Texas in my rear view, never to return, I find myself staring into one of those canny faces I knew so well back in my days in the oil "bidness."
Cultivating an distinct persona has become a recognized enough technique to make it into the enlightened texts written by actual teachers. And in my experience, both as a student and a teacher, the best educators always create a memorable one. There was the senior English teacher who always wore her satin blouses a bit too unbuttoned, exposing a generous slice of bust that perhaps softened the impact of the "Redundant!" that she scrawled across countless themes turned in by us wannabee literates. The college professor that never stopped pacing during lectures, always wore spotless white shirts, polished shoes and narrow ties - and this was the seventies - and taught behaviorist psychology well enough that I can, over thirty years later, give a fair lecture on the power of random reinforcement schedules. As a teacher, I got to know others - the huge math teacher who on occassion exacerbated his height with homemade six-inch platforms on his shoes and a fuzzy red wig, whose voice could be heard across the entire school, for example. My own persona? Oh, the Eastern European marathoner with a heart of gold, I hope... though who knows what the kids really think.
Today my Aggie principal met with me to evaluate my performance in the classroom. He'd observed me earlier in the week, and the kids - were perfect. They ennunciated perfectly, made just enough mistakes to make it a convincing show of learning, participated in reading aloud, moved their arm and shoulder muscles in rhythm with the sounds to activate kinetic learning, all with no visible reluctance. I could've kissed them all. They fell apart five minutes after the Aggie left the room, but he didn't know that.
So his evaluation was, as most of mine are, almost embarrasingly positive. He thought I'd set up a safe learning environment where kids could reach for success without fear of failure. Which was pretty much what I'd aimed for.
Too bad that teaching is maybe a tenth of my job.
What I really do for a living is satisfy - attempt to satisfy, and usually fail - a bewildering bevy of consumers. There are the parents who can only sometimes be reached, and who, when they are reached, are more interested in finding fault with teachers than in helping their kids. There are the teachers who are sometimes understandably stymied with students whose disabilities are so pervasive that there doesn't seem to be a way to get through the storm to anchor an idea.
But most of all there are the rules. There are rules about paperwork that must be completed by a certain date, signed by a parent, whether you can reach them or not. There are meetings that must take place within similarly inflexible dates. There are rules governing kids who move in from out of state, with documents so incomprehensibly written, eventually you just sigh, file them away, and understand you are starting from square one.
Supervisors occasionally arrive from central office, purportedly with advice or help. But really, their function is similar to that of Tim Gunn on Project Runway. Ever watch that show? Usually it's about eleven at night, and the designers are frantically trying to finish some impossible project, like, say, create a gown for a model and her dog that are inspired by a favorite ice cream flavor, and Tim sails in, sniffs over a dress or two, then sails back out, singing "Make it work!" Which is quite entertaining in a reality show. Not in actual reality.
This year there's a fresh new hell. The mandate has come down that all students with special needs are to be tested on every objective on their individual education plan, every week. This means every kid with an IEP needs to take somewhere between 2 and 6 tests a week, in addition to what they already complete in classes. This means someone - me - has to determine what level the tests should be, acquire the tests, copy the appropriate number, gather the students in during their elective period, administer the tests, score the tests, and plot the scores. Every stinkin' week.
This is a job all by itself, and has meant, for me, ten hour days nearly every day of the week. It's meant that planning for instruction gets done in the last twenty minutes before the kids walk in. It's meant that teaching, actual instruction, is taking a back seat to testing.
"The kids get plenty of tests already!" my Aggie principal sniffed in our meeting. But he and I both know that there's nothing we can do. I'll keep giving the tests.
By this afternoon I was in tears, of either exhaustion or frustration, hard to say which.
Cultivating an distinct persona has become a recognized enough technique to make it into the enlightened texts written by actual teachers. And in my experience, both as a student and a teacher, the best educators always create a memorable one. There was the senior English teacher who always wore her satin blouses a bit too unbuttoned, exposing a generous slice of bust that perhaps softened the impact of the "Redundant!" that she scrawled across countless themes turned in by us wannabee literates. The college professor that never stopped pacing during lectures, always wore spotless white shirts, polished shoes and narrow ties - and this was the seventies - and taught behaviorist psychology well enough that I can, over thirty years later, give a fair lecture on the power of random reinforcement schedules. As a teacher, I got to know others - the huge math teacher who on occassion exacerbated his height with homemade six-inch platforms on his shoes and a fuzzy red wig, whose voice could be heard across the entire school, for example. My own persona? Oh, the Eastern European marathoner with a heart of gold, I hope... though who knows what the kids really think.
Today my Aggie principal met with me to evaluate my performance in the classroom. He'd observed me earlier in the week, and the kids - were perfect. They ennunciated perfectly, made just enough mistakes to make it a convincing show of learning, participated in reading aloud, moved their arm and shoulder muscles in rhythm with the sounds to activate kinetic learning, all with no visible reluctance. I could've kissed them all. They fell apart five minutes after the Aggie left the room, but he didn't know that.
So his evaluation was, as most of mine are, almost embarrasingly positive. He thought I'd set up a safe learning environment where kids could reach for success without fear of failure. Which was pretty much what I'd aimed for.
Too bad that teaching is maybe a tenth of my job.
What I really do for a living is satisfy - attempt to satisfy, and usually fail - a bewildering bevy of consumers. There are the parents who can only sometimes be reached, and who, when they are reached, are more interested in finding fault with teachers than in helping their kids. There are the teachers who are sometimes understandably stymied with students whose disabilities are so pervasive that there doesn't seem to be a way to get through the storm to anchor an idea.
But most of all there are the rules. There are rules about paperwork that must be completed by a certain date, signed by a parent, whether you can reach them or not. There are meetings that must take place within similarly inflexible dates. There are rules governing kids who move in from out of state, with documents so incomprehensibly written, eventually you just sigh, file them away, and understand you are starting from square one.
Supervisors occasionally arrive from central office, purportedly with advice or help. But really, their function is similar to that of Tim Gunn on Project Runway. Ever watch that show? Usually it's about eleven at night, and the designers are frantically trying to finish some impossible project, like, say, create a gown for a model and her dog that are inspired by a favorite ice cream flavor, and Tim sails in, sniffs over a dress or two, then sails back out, singing "Make it work!" Which is quite entertaining in a reality show. Not in actual reality.
This year there's a fresh new hell. The mandate has come down that all students with special needs are to be tested on every objective on their individual education plan, every week. This means every kid with an IEP needs to take somewhere between 2 and 6 tests a week, in addition to what they already complete in classes. This means someone - me - has to determine what level the tests should be, acquire the tests, copy the appropriate number, gather the students in during their elective period, administer the tests, score the tests, and plot the scores. Every stinkin' week.
This is a job all by itself, and has meant, for me, ten hour days nearly every day of the week. It's meant that planning for instruction gets done in the last twenty minutes before the kids walk in. It's meant that teaching, actual instruction, is taking a back seat to testing.
"The kids get plenty of tests already!" my Aggie principal sniffed in our meeting. But he and I both know that there's nothing we can do. I'll keep giving the tests.
By this afternoon I was in tears, of either exhaustion or frustration, hard to say which.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Damnit.
Sometimes only a curse, if only a mild one, will do. And it was certainly the only word that occurred to me this afternoon, as I pulled up to the house and saw the white truck.
He's back.
Two weeks ago, I stood on the sidewalk in front of "Kelly's" house. Her boys, the older one my son's best friend, had come over to say good bye.
"Grandma's taking us to her house," one said, "because mom and dad are fighting so bad."
I'd planned to take the boys swimming, so I walked over to see if I could pick "Dylan" up at his grandma's.
She paced the sidewalk, cell phone in hand.
"He won't leave," she said.
The screaming coming out of the house was loud, and, though I couldn't pick out the words, sounded aggressive. Things, I hoped not Kelly's body, were hitting the floors and walls.
"I can't leave until he does," her mother said. "I'm afraid of what will happen."
I herded the boys toward my house. They didn't need to hear the fight, even from the sidewalk.
"You need to call the police, " I urged Kelly's mom.
"I just wish he'd leave, " she said.
I took the boys for the afternoon, gave them lunch, dropped the younger one off at grandma's and took Dylan and Jake swimming.
I thought about calling the police myself, but surely that was Kelly's mom's call to make.
We came home and toasted marshmallows; it got dark and it was time for Dylan to go home. Earlier, Kelly's car had disappeared, but "Greg's" truck stood on by the curb, door open. Now it, too was gone.
I called the number I had for grandma.
"Kelly's just coming back from the hospital," she said. "Greg tore an earring out of her earlobe, so she had to go get stitches."
Well, I thought, maybe he'd get arrested for that. I spoke with Kelly the next day. She was still quite tired. She said it was over now between them, "thank god."
I thought about calling a few times since, just to see how she's doing. But Kelly and I mostly just have the boys in common. She's probably twenty years younger than I. A few years ago, she was in a car accident, and her life since has been a cycle of pain and surgery. Both knees, both elbows, I think the back too. She's on full disability. She speaks of some day going to college and becoming a nurse, but for now she summons energy only for occassional outings with a friend.
Now, Greg's truck is parked in front of her house again. When it began appearing a few days ago, I told myself that perhaps he was just there to get his stuff. Then, perhaps that it was just parked there while he was in jail. When it left and came back at regular intervals, I realized things were back to what, in Kelly's household, passes for normal.
Kelly and Greg, according to their son, fight often. And as with all couples, a bit of the fault lies on both sides. Kelly sometimes sleeps all day. Dylan tells me that it wasn't always so. Once, before her accident, Kelly's family would go camping. They too would toast marshmallows then, he says. And Greg hogs the living room with his elaborate game system. The younger boy is biologically his, and he frequently punishes the older one, excessively it seems to me, for being an inadequate older brother. I can't count the number of times Jake's asked if Dylan can come over to play, only to be told that his friend was grounded again for some imperfection. That this consequence does not seem to improve the boy's behavior is lost on his pseudo-stepdad. That he seems to be acting out the age-old story of favoring his own genes over another man's seems beyond his comprehension.
He's back, and I shake my head. Because this is such a well-worn story, it's almost not worth telling. Greg will hit Kelly again, and maybe next time he'll hurt her hard enough that she'll press charges. And that could be the best outcome. The others don't bear thinking about.
I think about Kelly, there but for the grace of God. There go I, except for my parents' ability and willingness to pay for my education 'till I got a degree that results in a middle class income and a stable position, so I don't have to depend on a man to pay the mortgage. There I go, except for the reverence for physical culture that they passed down to me, that had me out walking two days after a head injury.
And I know how hard it is to leave, or to be left. I was never hit, but even when it was made brutally clear to me that my ex-husband didn't want to be in the same room with me, I still wanted him to stay, on the chance that things might get better. You've built a life, and it seems impossible to leave it behind, when there are even tiny things, a smile here and an evening there, that make it bearable.
But Kelly, next time, it'll be ME calling the police.
He's back.
Two weeks ago, I stood on the sidewalk in front of "Kelly's" house. Her boys, the older one my son's best friend, had come over to say good bye.
"Grandma's taking us to her house," one said, "because mom and dad are fighting so bad."
I'd planned to take the boys swimming, so I walked over to see if I could pick "Dylan" up at his grandma's.
She paced the sidewalk, cell phone in hand.
"He won't leave," she said.
The screaming coming out of the house was loud, and, though I couldn't pick out the words, sounded aggressive. Things, I hoped not Kelly's body, were hitting the floors and walls.
"I can't leave until he does," her mother said. "I'm afraid of what will happen."
I herded the boys toward my house. They didn't need to hear the fight, even from the sidewalk.
"You need to call the police, " I urged Kelly's mom.
"I just wish he'd leave, " she said.
I took the boys for the afternoon, gave them lunch, dropped the younger one off at grandma's and took Dylan and Jake swimming.
I thought about calling the police myself, but surely that was Kelly's mom's call to make.
We came home and toasted marshmallows; it got dark and it was time for Dylan to go home. Earlier, Kelly's car had disappeared, but "Greg's" truck stood on by the curb, door open. Now it, too was gone.
I called the number I had for grandma.
"Kelly's just coming back from the hospital," she said. "Greg tore an earring out of her earlobe, so she had to go get stitches."
Well, I thought, maybe he'd get arrested for that. I spoke with Kelly the next day. She was still quite tired. She said it was over now between them, "thank god."
I thought about calling a few times since, just to see how she's doing. But Kelly and I mostly just have the boys in common. She's probably twenty years younger than I. A few years ago, she was in a car accident, and her life since has been a cycle of pain and surgery. Both knees, both elbows, I think the back too. She's on full disability. She speaks of some day going to college and becoming a nurse, but for now she summons energy only for occassional outings with a friend.
Now, Greg's truck is parked in front of her house again. When it began appearing a few days ago, I told myself that perhaps he was just there to get his stuff. Then, perhaps that it was just parked there while he was in jail. When it left and came back at regular intervals, I realized things were back to what, in Kelly's household, passes for normal.
Kelly and Greg, according to their son, fight often. And as with all couples, a bit of the fault lies on both sides. Kelly sometimes sleeps all day. Dylan tells me that it wasn't always so. Once, before her accident, Kelly's family would go camping. They too would toast marshmallows then, he says. And Greg hogs the living room with his elaborate game system. The younger boy is biologically his, and he frequently punishes the older one, excessively it seems to me, for being an inadequate older brother. I can't count the number of times Jake's asked if Dylan can come over to play, only to be told that his friend was grounded again for some imperfection. That this consequence does not seem to improve the boy's behavior is lost on his pseudo-stepdad. That he seems to be acting out the age-old story of favoring his own genes over another man's seems beyond his comprehension.
He's back, and I shake my head. Because this is such a well-worn story, it's almost not worth telling. Greg will hit Kelly again, and maybe next time he'll hurt her hard enough that she'll press charges. And that could be the best outcome. The others don't bear thinking about.
I think about Kelly, there but for the grace of God. There go I, except for my parents' ability and willingness to pay for my education 'till I got a degree that results in a middle class income and a stable position, so I don't have to depend on a man to pay the mortgage. There I go, except for the reverence for physical culture that they passed down to me, that had me out walking two days after a head injury.
And I know how hard it is to leave, or to be left. I was never hit, but even when it was made brutally clear to me that my ex-husband didn't want to be in the same room with me, I still wanted him to stay, on the chance that things might get better. You've built a life, and it seems impossible to leave it behind, when there are even tiny things, a smile here and an evening there, that make it bearable.
But Kelly, next time, it'll be ME calling the police.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Red Meat and Taxes
Tim and I sat across from each other at Johnny's, both eating our sinful Saturday dinner, red meat and french fries, MGD and Laughing Lab. Around us people were flirting, working on their second or third drink, watching the baseball and football games that festooned the upper walls.
I was lecturing.
Tim had asked, "Would you be willing to pay 20% sales tax?"
"No, that's a regressive tax!" I quoted my liberal-for-Fort-Worth college econ teacher, went on about how we all have to buy toilet paper, but a 20% tax on a $6.00 roll hits a minimum-wage earner much harder than Tim or me; never mind the rich folks.
I'd just gone on a rant about 2C, and how a city isn't a city, not really, if there are no parks or museums or public pools.
Don't blame me; I spent the afternoon at the Eco Fair at Rock Ledge Ranch, buttonholing people about the need to approve a comparatively minor increase in their property taxes to enable the city to provide these services. And I have the yard signs to prove it.
Over and over, I got the comment, "well, if the city would manage the money they already have, better, they wouldn't have these problems. "
But nobody was able to tell me what exactly they wanted the city to cut. A middle aged man did suggest that the city manager didn't need to make as much.
"How much does she make?" I asked the knowledgeable city employee next to me.
"$245,000, or so," he replied.
A lot of money, but not as much as the CEO with a comparable number of employees would make.
An elderly lady stopped by, and wanted to know if the taxes would keep increasing at the rate set for the 5 years forever. No, of course they wouldn't; but I had no proof.
So it went; actually, most of the people who stopped by the booth were quite positive. But this was, after all, an Eco-fair; we were getting the most liberal slice of the population.
Now, Tim asked another question. "How much is enough?"
"Enough what?"
"How much is enough money taken out of your paycheck for taxes? 30%, 40, 50 90%?"
He was being ridiculous, but I was too relaxed not to rise to the bait.
"It would depend on what the money was going for, wouldn't it? I mean, I don't like my money going to military contractors, or to service loans the Feds have taken out to fund a war that is unnecessary and wasteful.."
My voice was rising. I suddenly noticed that the men seated behind Tim had military-style haircuts. Time to alter the tenor of my rant a bit.
"I don't have a problem with military pay, understand. I just don't like it going to Halliburton subsidiaries who, on top of everything, do shoddy work."
And so it went. Tim, of course, works for one of the biggest military contractors of them all. Sometimes I wonder how he puts up with my slant, and my tendency to lecture about it.
Especially since he'd just spent the day helping the son of a friend move, and was so tired he visibly listed on the way to the bathroom.
I guess he likes curly-haired, argumentative women.
I was lecturing.
Tim had asked, "Would you be willing to pay 20% sales tax?"
"No, that's a regressive tax!" I quoted my liberal-for-Fort-Worth college econ teacher, went on about how we all have to buy toilet paper, but a 20% tax on a $6.00 roll hits a minimum-wage earner much harder than Tim or me; never mind the rich folks.
I'd just gone on a rant about 2C, and how a city isn't a city, not really, if there are no parks or museums or public pools.
Don't blame me; I spent the afternoon at the Eco Fair at Rock Ledge Ranch, buttonholing people about the need to approve a comparatively minor increase in their property taxes to enable the city to provide these services. And I have the yard signs to prove it.
Over and over, I got the comment, "well, if the city would manage the money they already have, better, they wouldn't have these problems. "
But nobody was able to tell me what exactly they wanted the city to cut. A middle aged man did suggest that the city manager didn't need to make as much.
"How much does she make?" I asked the knowledgeable city employee next to me.
"$245,000, or so," he replied.
A lot of money, but not as much as the CEO with a comparable number of employees would make.
An elderly lady stopped by, and wanted to know if the taxes would keep increasing at the rate set for the 5 years forever. No, of course they wouldn't; but I had no proof.
So it went; actually, most of the people who stopped by the booth were quite positive. But this was, after all, an Eco-fair; we were getting the most liberal slice of the population.
Now, Tim asked another question. "How much is enough?"
"Enough what?"
"How much is enough money taken out of your paycheck for taxes? 30%, 40, 50 90%?"
He was being ridiculous, but I was too relaxed not to rise to the bait.
"It would depend on what the money was going for, wouldn't it? I mean, I don't like my money going to military contractors, or to service loans the Feds have taken out to fund a war that is unnecessary and wasteful.."
My voice was rising. I suddenly noticed that the men seated behind Tim had military-style haircuts. Time to alter the tenor of my rant a bit.
"I don't have a problem with military pay, understand. I just don't like it going to Halliburton subsidiaries who, on top of everything, do shoddy work."
And so it went. Tim, of course, works for one of the biggest military contractors of them all. Sometimes I wonder how he puts up with my slant, and my tendency to lecture about it.
Especially since he'd just spent the day helping the son of a friend move, and was so tired he visibly listed on the way to the bathroom.
I guess he likes curly-haired, argumentative women.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Coming to America; or, Then and Now
When I was sixteen or so, I went with my honors English class to see the play Emperor Jones. It made a huge impression on me, and I wish I could remember the name of the actor who played the title role, because he might be famous now.
But that, as Arlo Guthrie once said, isn't what I came to talk about.
We wandered around what passed for Dallas's art district later.
"If I didn't speak, could you tell I wasn't American?" I asked my boyfriend.
He assured me he could, in a second. I wondered about this for years; eventually, I think, it stopped being true.
But I was reminded this week.
We have a new student at my school, a Peruvian. He arrived in this country, I guess, last week sometime. And yes, even if he keeps his mouth shut - and he does - it's easy to guess he's a new arrival.
It isn't just his classically Inca face, which could be the model for the codices the Spaniards and Portugese found in their ravages across Central and South America. His entire appearance speaks of his foreign origin. He wears small, neat shoes that no Norteamericano boy would be caught dead in - almost girls' shoes, shiny leather and the kind of Keds - styles American women favored in the late 60's. With white socks, and neat pants and shirts. Yesterday he had a velour tracksuit - not particularly outrageous, but nothing I would consider purchasing for my ten year old. His hair has a kind of bowl cut that is neither short nor long enough to be fashionable, even by middle school standards.
And oh, my heart goes out to him. I got here when I was exactly a year older than he is now. In Czechoslovakia, hot baths were a once-a-week thing, which meant that you washed your hair about every two weeks. Really! So for the first few months, I mostly went to school with hair so greasy that, nowadays, I would be calling my parents to see if they could do something about the grooming issue. I wore the same dress every day for the first week, and I don't think it got laundered in between. It was simply the only thing I had that had come from the United States, shipped to Vienna ahead of time, and thus the only outfit of whose acceptability I was certain.
The only thing I remember distinctly from my first day of American school was that I broke the slide with the algae in my science class, roughly 5 minutes after my arrival. All I knew to say, to most inquiries, was "I don't understand," a phrase I used so often that it became a single, garbled word.
But I learned. By Christmas, I had no trouble memorizing the words to the carols the choir sang, and had taught the class, phonetically, the Russian words to "Katyusha" (incidentally, the song at the end of the wedding in The Deer Hunter..). I was on the honor roll from the first quarter - and yes, those first grades were charity, but after that I earned them. My math teacher, Mr. Graham, stayed after school with me one afternoon, and taught me how not to roll my r's.
"Put the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth," he said. All it took.
My sister still rolls her r's.
That summer, my parents enrolled me in summer school. Having no other options, I didn't object - and by the end of it, earned vocabulary scores in the 90th percentile. And my verbals on the SAT and GRE and all those other tests you take to prove your academic worth continued that trend.
Beyond my math teacher's informal intervention, I never got help of any sort to help me learn the language from the public schools. My mom, bless her, taught me most of my early skills; at first, sitting on athletic mats in the emergency displaced-persons center in Vienna, then in the room where she and my father slept, as we together decoded a children's biography of Clara Barton. By the end of the book I had passable English skills.
The Peruvian student's world is so very, very different.
The educational assistant assigned to him waved to me excitedly today from her seat next to him in science class.
"Look what I found!" she crowed.
It was a science book in Spanish. She was so very pleased, because it defined, in his language, exactly the terms we discussed.
I smiled encouragingly.
But, I wanted to say. Will this help him learn, really? Does it help us, any of us, travellers in foreign lands, to have the option of using our native language? Or does it instead cripple us?
In Vienna several years ago, my sister and I stopped by a uniquely non-English speaking flower seller to purchase a bouquet for a friend.
"How much?" she asked louder and louder, an unwitting caricature of the American tourist. It wasn't working.
I combed the memory banks for my high school German class.
"Wie Viel?" I finally remembered.
"Drei Mark." was his pre-Euro reply.
Would I have bothered to remember, if, like the desk clerk in our hotel, he spoke English fluently? Doubt it.
I've taken the classes in sheltered instruction for non-English speakers. I recognize that my situation was special, because my mother spoke the language of my new home, and that perhaps languages come more easily to me than to most, because I'm an auditory learner.
But I keep thinking about that quiet Inca, reading his Spanish science book. Are we doing him a favor? Or are we assigning him a de facto disability?
But that, as Arlo Guthrie once said, isn't what I came to talk about.
We wandered around what passed for Dallas's art district later.
"If I didn't speak, could you tell I wasn't American?" I asked my boyfriend.
He assured me he could, in a second. I wondered about this for years; eventually, I think, it stopped being true.
But I was reminded this week.
We have a new student at my school, a Peruvian. He arrived in this country, I guess, last week sometime. And yes, even if he keeps his mouth shut - and he does - it's easy to guess he's a new arrival.
It isn't just his classically Inca face, which could be the model for the codices the Spaniards and Portugese found in their ravages across Central and South America. His entire appearance speaks of his foreign origin. He wears small, neat shoes that no Norteamericano boy would be caught dead in - almost girls' shoes, shiny leather and the kind of Keds - styles American women favored in the late 60's. With white socks, and neat pants and shirts. Yesterday he had a velour tracksuit - not particularly outrageous, but nothing I would consider purchasing for my ten year old. His hair has a kind of bowl cut that is neither short nor long enough to be fashionable, even by middle school standards.
And oh, my heart goes out to him. I got here when I was exactly a year older than he is now. In Czechoslovakia, hot baths were a once-a-week thing, which meant that you washed your hair about every two weeks. Really! So for the first few months, I mostly went to school with hair so greasy that, nowadays, I would be calling my parents to see if they could do something about the grooming issue. I wore the same dress every day for the first week, and I don't think it got laundered in between. It was simply the only thing I had that had come from the United States, shipped to Vienna ahead of time, and thus the only outfit of whose acceptability I was certain.
The only thing I remember distinctly from my first day of American school was that I broke the slide with the algae in my science class, roughly 5 minutes after my arrival. All I knew to say, to most inquiries, was "I don't understand," a phrase I used so often that it became a single, garbled word.
But I learned. By Christmas, I had no trouble memorizing the words to the carols the choir sang, and had taught the class, phonetically, the Russian words to "Katyusha" (incidentally, the song at the end of the wedding in The Deer Hunter..). I was on the honor roll from the first quarter - and yes, those first grades were charity, but after that I earned them. My math teacher, Mr. Graham, stayed after school with me one afternoon, and taught me how not to roll my r's.
"Put the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth," he said. All it took.
My sister still rolls her r's.
That summer, my parents enrolled me in summer school. Having no other options, I didn't object - and by the end of it, earned vocabulary scores in the 90th percentile. And my verbals on the SAT and GRE and all those other tests you take to prove your academic worth continued that trend.
Beyond my math teacher's informal intervention, I never got help of any sort to help me learn the language from the public schools. My mom, bless her, taught me most of my early skills; at first, sitting on athletic mats in the emergency displaced-persons center in Vienna, then in the room where she and my father slept, as we together decoded a children's biography of Clara Barton. By the end of the book I had passable English skills.
The Peruvian student's world is so very, very different.
The educational assistant assigned to him waved to me excitedly today from her seat next to him in science class.
"Look what I found!" she crowed.
It was a science book in Spanish. She was so very pleased, because it defined, in his language, exactly the terms we discussed.
I smiled encouragingly.
But, I wanted to say. Will this help him learn, really? Does it help us, any of us, travellers in foreign lands, to have the option of using our native language? Or does it instead cripple us?
In Vienna several years ago, my sister and I stopped by a uniquely non-English speaking flower seller to purchase a bouquet for a friend.
"How much?" she asked louder and louder, an unwitting caricature of the American tourist. It wasn't working.
I combed the memory banks for my high school German class.
"Wie Viel?" I finally remembered.
"Drei Mark." was his pre-Euro reply.
Would I have bothered to remember, if, like the desk clerk in our hotel, he spoke English fluently? Doubt it.
I've taken the classes in sheltered instruction for non-English speakers. I recognize that my situation was special, because my mother spoke the language of my new home, and that perhaps languages come more easily to me than to most, because I'm an auditory learner.
But I keep thinking about that quiet Inca, reading his Spanish science book. Are we doing him a favor? Or are we assigning him a de facto disability?
Saturday, September 5, 2009
8 best things about my head injury
One minute I was happily riding my bike down a wet Gold Camp Road. Well, perhaps not happily. Contemplatively. Carefully. Composing a snappy email to an old flame who'd just married, in my head -ly. The next moment I was looking up at a beautiful EMT with long dark hair who was feeling my limbs for possible fractures.
"I've a marathon in 8 days - can I still run it?" was literally the first thing out of my mouth. After that, it was a dreamy in-out rush to the hospital, and hours of lying on a backboard whilst getting poked and scoped, all to find out that I'd had a brain concussion, accompanied by orbital and sinus bone fractures, as well as some fierce vertigo that stalked me and threatened to overwhelm me whenever I moved my head.
So what's good about that.
Something has to be, I thought, and as I pondered, it occurred to me that most of the good things came down to appreciation, of all the stuff that I, that we, take for granted, but that can disappear in a seconds-long loss of control followed by a minutes-long loss of consciousness.
Here it is, that appreciative list:
1. That my doctor parents, who so often drive me crazy with their concerns for my well-being, can close together in a long-distance, effective rant about the difference between concussion and contusion, and how I WILL recover, I WILL be fine.
2. That my older son can drop everything and rush to my side - even though, and perhaps because, once he's satisfied that mom is fine, is happy to spend his time with his friends instead.
3. That my man Tim can be at Penrose Main roughly 3 minutes after they call him, can make me form a misshapen smile with his wry face at the shape I'm in, and ask the one question that's guaranteed to cause another smile, and ascertain that I still have a brain at the same time - "What kind of bike do you have?"
And then take me out even though I look like hell.
4. That, having had my own brush with brain injury, I now come a little bit closer to understanding all the adults with TBI that I'd tried to help all those years ago - and to being completely astounded at their flat-out courage.
5. That my doctor, whose competence at dealing with my complicated medical history I sometimes question, but whom I keep because he's just so darn nice and besides we've gone gray together, said to me yesterday, when I despaired about my vertigo, "you know, it's your inner ear that's causing it... not your brain."
My ear? Heck, I can deal with a stupid ear problem!
6. That the ADT marathon people changed my registration to a half-marathon in the time it took to type this sentence, once I'd notified them that I got hurt. I'll be walking it..mostly.
7. That the above-mentioned, beautiful EMT ended her report to the Penrose Main Trauma people with "She's an athlete!"
8. That my friends.... were simply there. Being friends.
"I've a marathon in 8 days - can I still run it?" was literally the first thing out of my mouth. After that, it was a dreamy in-out rush to the hospital, and hours of lying on a backboard whilst getting poked and scoped, all to find out that I'd had a brain concussion, accompanied by orbital and sinus bone fractures, as well as some fierce vertigo that stalked me and threatened to overwhelm me whenever I moved my head.
So what's good about that.
Something has to be, I thought, and as I pondered, it occurred to me that most of the good things came down to appreciation, of all the stuff that I, that we, take for granted, but that can disappear in a seconds-long loss of control followed by a minutes-long loss of consciousness.
Here it is, that appreciative list:
1. That my doctor parents, who so often drive me crazy with their concerns for my well-being, can close together in a long-distance, effective rant about the difference between concussion and contusion, and how I WILL recover, I WILL be fine.
2. That my older son can drop everything and rush to my side - even though, and perhaps because, once he's satisfied that mom is fine, is happy to spend his time with his friends instead.
3. That my man Tim can be at Penrose Main roughly 3 minutes after they call him, can make me form a misshapen smile with his wry face at the shape I'm in, and ask the one question that's guaranteed to cause another smile, and ascertain that I still have a brain at the same time - "What kind of bike do you have?"
And then take me out even though I look like hell.
4. That, having had my own brush with brain injury, I now come a little bit closer to understanding all the adults with TBI that I'd tried to help all those years ago - and to being completely astounded at their flat-out courage.
5. That my doctor, whose competence at dealing with my complicated medical history I sometimes question, but whom I keep because he's just so darn nice and besides we've gone gray together, said to me yesterday, when I despaired about my vertigo, "you know, it's your inner ear that's causing it... not your brain."
My ear? Heck, I can deal with a stupid ear problem!
6. That the ADT marathon people changed my registration to a half-marathon in the time it took to type this sentence, once I'd notified them that I got hurt. I'll be walking it..mostly.
7. That the above-mentioned, beautiful EMT ended her report to the Penrose Main Trauma people with "She's an athlete!"
8. That my friends.... were simply there. Being friends.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
a serious waste
Every year, the big districts in this area gather all of its employees in a gym at one of the high schools. The purpose of this gathering is, purportedly, to get everyone jazzed up about the school year.This is not what happens.What happens is that the thousands of teachers, administrators and assistants, who have spent the last few days frenetically preparing their classroom/leson plans/minds for the little angels they will attempt to beguile into learning, and who still have an unmanageable amount left to accomplish before the first bell rings, sit, for an hour and half, while the school superintendent bloviates.And if you think city councilment/countycomissioners/senators know how to do this, I have news for you. Every school superintendent I have ever listened to at these meetings has forgottem more about putting on a long, desperately meaningless mess of jargon and line graphs than any glorified city or county aparatchik has ever learned.What is more, they are able to present this stunningly dead series of slides accompanied by commentary combining the most obvious statements (we want all our students to graduate!) with the most fantastic claims (by 2014, all our students will be proficient or advanced [really? the little 6th grade girl I met earlier today, who does not speak understandably, and who needs her mother to literally hold her by the hand and lift her into seats, will be proficient or advanced in high school? Praise Jesus!!]), all delivered in a monotone worthy of, well, Ben Stein if Ben Stein wasn't funny, to thousands of caffeine-deprived people sitting in bleachers. Have you ever sat in overcrowded high school bleachers while listening to an hour and half long speech? It's pretty much pure hell. But we are the ultimate captive audience, aren't we? We have to be there; we're happy to be employed (like Dylan once sang); and about the only recourse available to us is to refuse to applaud. Which I pretty much did.And oh, yes, there is usually a cute little joke, or, in this afternoon's case, a mime of a children's book enacted by the school district big shots, that is supposed to make you leave laughing and feeling better about the whole dreadful affair.It didn't work.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Interns
Interns
I was about to turn the radio off and go weed my garden, when I heard Scott Simon’s interview with the intern in her 40’s. Cute, I thought at first; then my mind crashed back 40 years to the first time I heard that word, “intern.”
When I was 12, my parents made the incomprehensively brave decision to move our family from our relatively comfortable home in Czechoslovakia, to America, where they had never been. Prague Spring had just ended with the invasion of the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They’d both been children under the Protectorate during World War II, and, in their words, did not want their daughters to live under an invading force.
We spent the first six months in America living with kind relatives – but put eight people in a three bedroom house with one bathroom, and the most marvelous intentions turn to pure hell. I was a communist-schooled atheist back then; still, I prayed, for the first time in my life, for my parents to pass the ECFMG, the exam foreign medical graduates must complete to practice in the United States.
They did. And so that we could move out on our own as quickly as possible, my parents got the only jobs they could - as interns at the Doctors’ Hospital in Seattle, Washington. I can’t imagine their humiliation. My father had been the head of pediatrics in a largish county hospital; my mother had developed relationships of trust and candor with tens of thousands of mothers who came to her clinics. Suddenly they were glorified students, expected to answer difficult medical questions about topics they hadn’t addressed in decades.
At the first birth at which he officiated, my father was told the parents had decided on the name “Jason.” Did they know where the name came from, he asked. And there in the delivery room, in what must have been barely understandable English, he told the story of Jason and the Argonauts to the parents, the nurses and the other doctors.
Some intern.
I was about to turn the radio off and go weed my garden, when I heard Scott Simon’s interview with the intern in her 40’s. Cute, I thought at first; then my mind crashed back 40 years to the first time I heard that word, “intern.”
When I was 12, my parents made the incomprehensively brave decision to move our family from our relatively comfortable home in Czechoslovakia, to America, where they had never been. Prague Spring had just ended with the invasion of the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They’d both been children under the Protectorate during World War II, and, in their words, did not want their daughters to live under an invading force.
We spent the first six months in America living with kind relatives – but put eight people in a three bedroom house with one bathroom, and the most marvelous intentions turn to pure hell. I was a communist-schooled atheist back then; still, I prayed, for the first time in my life, for my parents to pass the ECFMG, the exam foreign medical graduates must complete to practice in the United States.
They did. And so that we could move out on our own as quickly as possible, my parents got the only jobs they could - as interns at the Doctors’ Hospital in Seattle, Washington. I can’t imagine their humiliation. My father had been the head of pediatrics in a largish county hospital; my mother had developed relationships of trust and candor with tens of thousands of mothers who came to her clinics. Suddenly they were glorified students, expected to answer difficult medical questions about topics they hadn’t addressed in decades.
At the first birth at which he officiated, my father was told the parents had decided on the name “Jason.” Did they know where the name came from, he asked. And there in the delivery room, in what must have been barely understandable English, he told the story of Jason and the Argonauts to the parents, the nurses and the other doctors.
Some intern.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Traveling Dreams
We were driving through the Klamath range in northern California. Somewhere between Burnt Ranch and Weaverville (I kid you not, these really were the names..) we saw the huge plume of a forest fire. Lit from below, it glowed purple and a vivid yellow and reached far, far into the midday sky.
We stopped at a tiny store to stock up on caffeine and soda. A couple of guys were just leaving, saying a few final words about the fires - guess there were more than one. The owner/operator of the establishment sat in a folding chair, a settled kind of smile on his face under the baseball cap and white hair.
I pointed to the picture on the cooler. "You got any Red Bull or just the picture?" I teased, somehow knowing that this was the way in this little valley full of twisty trees and sunshine. "Nah, everybody likes that Rock Star stuff now," he muttered contentedly.
I made sure the Rock Star had caffeine (it's vile, by the way!) and as I paid, I asked about the plume we saw. "Yeah, they've got most of the fires under control, but that one's givin' them trouble," he said.
"We've never seen anything like that before. We don't have fires in Colorado," Jake piped up. "Sweetie, we do too," I corrected him. I turned to the man behind the counter. "Ever hear of the Heyman fire?"
"What was that one?"
"Oh, you know, this woman's boyfriend left her, and she was burning his letters, and set the biggest forest fire in Colorado history!" I found myself easing into the country store rhythm, and it felt good, just to tell stories and be all aw-shucks about it.
"Why was she burning his letters?" Jake wanted to know.
"Oh, you know... women!" commented the store owner with a smile and a look under the brim at me.
We were flirting now, with our eyes, in the unabashed way people who know they will never see each other again, can, and I said something about how guys are like that too, only you don't hear about it, and we both laughed and looked.
And just for a second, I imagined what it would be like if I decided to stay there in that sweet valley with the smiling-eyed man. It was silly, of course - no doubt he had a wife back behind the store, and I've a whole life here. But I still thought about it that night, and it's one of those roads not taken that will always stay in my mind. Lovely, and totally unspoiled by reality!
We stopped at a tiny store to stock up on caffeine and soda. A couple of guys were just leaving, saying a few final words about the fires - guess there were more than one. The owner/operator of the establishment sat in a folding chair, a settled kind of smile on his face under the baseball cap and white hair.
I pointed to the picture on the cooler. "You got any Red Bull or just the picture?" I teased, somehow knowing that this was the way in this little valley full of twisty trees and sunshine. "Nah, everybody likes that Rock Star stuff now," he muttered contentedly.
I made sure the Rock Star had caffeine (it's vile, by the way!) and as I paid, I asked about the plume we saw. "Yeah, they've got most of the fires under control, but that one's givin' them trouble," he said.
"We've never seen anything like that before. We don't have fires in Colorado," Jake piped up. "Sweetie, we do too," I corrected him. I turned to the man behind the counter. "Ever hear of the Heyman fire?"
"What was that one?"
"Oh, you know, this woman's boyfriend left her, and she was burning his letters, and set the biggest forest fire in Colorado history!" I found myself easing into the country store rhythm, and it felt good, just to tell stories and be all aw-shucks about it.
"Why was she burning his letters?" Jake wanted to know.
"Oh, you know... women!" commented the store owner with a smile and a look under the brim at me.
We were flirting now, with our eyes, in the unabashed way people who know they will never see each other again, can, and I said something about how guys are like that too, only you don't hear about it, and we both laughed and looked.
And just for a second, I imagined what it would be like if I decided to stay there in that sweet valley with the smiling-eyed man. It was silly, of course - no doubt he had a wife back behind the store, and I've a whole life here. But I still thought about it that night, and it's one of those roads not taken that will always stay in my mind. Lovely, and totally unspoiled by reality!
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