A meditation on the world’s end, at solstice

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.

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?

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.

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.