field survey

some days after breakfast the sweetie and i walk down the steps of the caboose and we head up the railroad tracks a little, walk the right-of-way through the trees and around the curve, past the field with that one cow on the east side of the rails and the wrung out land where the river came up to the west. but today i am restless and want to walk the other way, over the two lane road we call highway 28 and down behind the post office, toward the depot at the edge of town.

i know what is there, know there are trains on those tracks, art deco passenger cars, boarded up cabooses, steam engines and coal engines and all sorts of monstrous beasts smelling of oil and metal. we walk down the tracks past the bbq and the auction. we  cross over the highway and find ourselves very quickly among little yellow rail repair vehicles. there's an old handcart sitting low and still. behind the post office are the first big cars, covered over with dark strapped-down tarps.

we roam around. i tightrope walk along a rail while the sweetie tries to pace himself with the ties. they do not match his stride and he kicks around the outside of track closest to the water, right where the bush kill crept up during the flood.

the sweetie finds a few bones along the track, shining white ribs and slices of spine, an animal dissolving into the dirt. we look at them a while, but they are nothing big. small pieces of a deer, probably hit by a car at night there on the dark curve just above the rails. the sweetie abandons the bones, slides down the bank a little more recklessly than a man with so far to fall really ought to and is out at the edge of the water, skipping fat rocks across the ice.

i am not the sweetie, barreling headlong down a steep slope like a madman. i pick my way through the piles of leaves and loose stones to where the ground levels out and small trees huddle in clumps. i watch where i put my feet, try to avoid thorny vines that snag at my legs anyway. generally this cautiousness simply leaves me behind the sweetie on hikes, trailing him, being always not the first to see anything.

but today because i look down to be sure my shoe doesn't slide into the soft, sandy mud near the water there is a gift. because of the storm, because of the flood and the meanness of water, there are things strewn all along the valley up nearly as high as the banked tracks some places. propane tanks. a mug handle. the sole of one shoe. and because we walk along the water from time to time i'm learning to ignore the bits of bright things caught around the bottoms of trees. there is a layer of the unnatural over the rocks, the plants, the broken branches that will be there a while.

but this is different. a white triangle bigger than all the smashed pieces of things and brighter than any twisted, tree-snagged plastic bag. i lean down and think back to when i was pining for a deer skeleton we saw by the side of the road. it stayed where it was on the side of the road but this new skull is there, loosed from the rest of its bones, waiting for me to pick it up and take it home. waiting for a place with the rest of the ridiculousness we drag in.

uncle jay

this entry is for folks still here wondering what we'll do now and who will tell about it. 

if you know my uncle jay you don't need me to tell you what sort of man he has always been. after all, he worked for the gas company, wore that gray uniform more often than he didn't, as far as i could tell. when there was some sort of emergency- a tornado, a flood, an ice storm, men like my dad and my uncle jay would go to work in the dark and the cold and the wildness. i didn't know all my childhood that not every family had themselves a telephone company man, a bank man, a gas company man. i didn't know then that not every family had all their bases covered and that not every family had a man like my uncle jay.

he was the narrator of my childhood, the chronicler of my whole family's wild history. he kept every story he ever lived and ever heard all stacked up in his head and weekend afternoons he'd hand those stories over to the whole ridiculous lot of us, sitting in chairs and on my great-grandmother's low couch and on laps and on the floor, all of us piled in that one small front room of hers, listening to anything he'd feel like saying.

that room was never quiet. there were other voices all the time, his own brothers and sisters, voices echoing his in their raspiness and twang. and all the children and the grandchildren of those voices crowded in there, talking and laughing in little groups, eating sugar cookies and bread and butter pickles on crackers. but uncle jay would say well, the other day i run into this old boy, you remember him from the bowling alley... and all that other sound would dissolve into nothing. because even if we didn't remember him from the bowling alley, even if we didn't know the man at all, we could tell by the way uncle jay was laughing at where he was taking us that the old boy he was telling us about was in for a wild time. and so were we.

winters we'd be there with the woodstove puffing away in the kitchen and summers we'd be there, too. i'd lie in the floor with my cheek pressed against the cool back of a fat cement frog and my belly full of blackberries, listening to my own mother's childhood and before, to the time all those old folks were too young and living piled up in that little house where what they had was almost nothing or when they were striking out on their own looking for something different than life surrounded by lead mines. but somehow the way he'd tell it i'd wish i lived in a tiny house situated right up next to the tailing piles of a strip mine pit that didn't even have an indoor toilet. a house where black snakes managed to slither up kitchen sink pipes.

 it took me a long while to understand exactly how much grown folks suffer at funerals because even there my uncle jay was telling stories. and although we all knew it was unkind to speak ill of the dead, we knew jay would remember something for us, a story the person not there would blush to hear but had no way to prevent, being gone from us. he could bring that person a little closer, make the goneness seem not so far and make the hurt just almost bearable, by telling a little bit of someone's foolishness.

in a day or so all the people i love most will stand together without his stories to hold them up and i will be here where they are not. but i can tell you right now that he is in my head every time i open my mouth. every day i stand in front of a ridiculous pile of teenagers and talk, trusting i'll be able to say something important while pretending to tell just a funny little story. so, the other day i run into this old boy, you remember him from the bowling alley... and they do remember him. or at least they want to. they listen because they hear in me an imperfect version of his own gift. i learned enough to trick them, to get by. i am grateful for this. grateful to them for their patience and grateful to him for every story i heard him tell.

and i know when all the people i love most are standing there together it might feel for a little minute like he's gone too much. someone will need to speak up, talk about that gas company uniform of his and how he must have had five million of them or my aunt annalee would have been washing gray twill until all hours. if that's too scary at first, they can start with a story about something else they all have in common. every last one of us in that wild family of his, of mine, is related to a little girl who gave her cousin ex-lax pretending it was chocolate, knowing all he had to spend his suffering time in was an outhouse. we are all related to a boy who ate the tops of chicken shits. only the white parts, momma! he'd yell when he'd get caught. they're his stories but he's given them to us because they are our stories, too. we won't be as good at telling them. we won't be him. but we are his and we should keep that in mind.

economy drumsticks

for the first day of the new year, an old secret

the smell of old books and a woodstove is about all we need, the sweetie and me, to lure us in. if there is snow outside and an old dog inside and the guy behind the counter talks to us about the books we're holding like they are men he knew and lost during the war, we will stay forever, sniffing the smells of stories and maps and photos of people dead fifty years. we buy little pieces of all that other time and as a result we live surrounded by shelves and stacks of a past that's always whispering to us. little bits of phrases will fall from a page and drag whole wars or explorations or sufferings right up into our hands.

a dollar buys me a ten cent magazine from january of 1941 called the cook's digest. subtitled "of all that is good". and indeed, this is exactly what is inside. there are too many wonderful things to look at all at once, but i will tell you there are recipes, two to a page, set up so you can cut them out and keep them, index card size, in your recipe box. in the middle of all this, on two facing pages, sit menus for a week's worth of luncheons and dinners.

the sweetie sits on the couch this first day of the year, reading over the menus, looking for something worth trying. it is saturday's dinner menu he comes back to in the end. the one that starts with pineapple juice. the sides are tomato spanish rice and baked bananas with marshmallows. i am on board for this right away. dessert is an orange chiffon pie, made up of jello and eggs and misery, but i will count my bananas as dessert if i must. there is coffee to be served with the pie but it is the entree that the sweetie can't quite figure out. economy drumsticks. recipe 58. at first we figure they're drumsticks you'd buy in an economy bag, hundreds of bumpy legs, but folks didn't buy and sell chicken in parts back before the war. it is the tail end of the great depression and just a year before pearl harbor so we know economy drumsticks will be curious. the sweetie turns to recipe 58.

economy drumsticks 

this recipe serves 4

                       8 strips american cheese (2 oz.)               1 1/2 tsp. grated onion

                       1/2 lb. twice-ground beef                         1 1/4 tsp. salt

                       1/2 lb. twice-ground pork                         few grains pepper

                       1/2 cup pet milk                                       1/3 cup pet milk

                       2 1/2 tbsp. fine cornflake crumbs             uncooked macaroni

cut american cheese into strips 1/4 x 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches long. mix together beef, pork, pet milk, corn flake crumbs, grated onion, salt and pepper. when thoroughly mixed, divide into 8 portions. with wet fingers shape into oblongs the shape of a drumstick, placing a stick of cheese in the center of each and taking care to cover the cheese with meat. dip, one at a time, in pet milk. as each "drumstick" is dipped in milk roll it at once in fine corn flake crumbs. brown slowly on all sides in 1/4 inch hot fat. drain on unglazed paper. insert in ends of "drumsticks" pieces of uncooked macaroni, 3 inches long. garnish the ends of the macaroni with paper frills, if desired.
                                                                                          courtesy of the pet milk company

there is a recipe for chipped beef on toast. souffles of chicken and turkey calling for piles and piles of stale bread crumbs. canned lunch meat with a can of cranberry sauce and corn syrup. casseroles full of crackers and canned cream soups. there is cabbage everywhere, recipes designed around stale breads and crackers. this is the food of poverty. the food of rationing and saving and using everything, passed down to those in less dire straits as comfort food. the food of family.

this morning we have bear sausage for breakfast and i know how much a mocha costs. there is saffron cheese in the fridge and the bourbon on the shelf ferments in cypress tanks and grows up in charred oak barrels. but i know who i am and where i came from, a home with chipped beef on toast. the sweetie knows who he is, too. we are looking for gluten-free corn flakes. the gluten-free macaroni is already in the cupboard.

triptych: gifts

sometimes i write and then forget to slap the words up on the screen. these three seem to be comfortable being on the same page so here they sit, original dates right next to them so you'll know what's what- unexpected little things people gave me. i think maybe they're upside down, time-wise. you'll figure it out.

spiderman, dated 11-01-11
i first realize he is spiderman when he puts a hand on my shoulder. or maybe it's just after that when his chest muscles brush against me. this is not something i am used to from strangers but i am kneeling on the sidewalk, holding the small brown dog still so a group of children can pet him. it is always strange to watch children pet this dog on the street because he stands very still until his whole self disappears. he is a shell, silent and empty, clenching an eel in his teeth.

children do not care about this. they are used to dogs that leap and lick and nuzzle and all that evidently interferes with what the children want to do, which is pet the soft dog fur uninterrupted by the actual dog. children will pile around him and put small, sticky hands on his back, his head. he endures. they will run small hands down the length of him until parents drag them away. they will compare the textures of his different colors, will put their faces up against the softness of his ears. they will start at the bony top of his head and will walk sideways along him, dragging their fingers to his tail. some of them will pet just the tail, which refuses to move while he stands there. they will pet right over the bald spot where his fur fell out and never grew back years ago. they are grateful for his stillness.

but spiderman is the smallest in his family, the only one wearing noncivilian clothing. his mother tries to lead the children away before spiderman has squirmed his way up next to the dog. he reaches out as his mother moves forward. she hesitates, pulls her other children back. spiderman pets the dog slowly, leans against me to steady himself. this is the first time, i tell him, the dog has ever been petted by a superhero. i say it is a special occasion. the child's mother agrees. usually, she says, smiling, spiderman does not like to go near dogs. i like this one, he says,staring into the brown fur. he is so still.

light, dated 9-11-11
he asks me how we are and i tell him we're fine. we have gone from the mainland to one island and then another over two of the bridges the whole world has been watching this weekend. always potential targets, i suppose, but more likely so, according to some at least, this weekend. i have tried very hard, just like him,  this week before to avoid the papers, avoid the news on t.v., scroll quickly past webpages plastered with panic or sorrow or images i've seen a thousand times before. gratuitous suffering. fear porn.

days like these armed people paw through backpacks on public transportation with the blessing of our mayor and someone is always threatening to blow up something i will travel in, on, over or through. we are encouraged to say something if we see something, to be just afraid enough, but to go about our business like everything is normal.

but the child's other aunt has dragged her family onto a plane and flown them to washington d.c. this weekend and the realization that he cannot yet control the entire world and keep those he loves always safe is beginning to itch in the back of his head. it is unfair to hand this to him, that he should worry about so many he loves walking around in both of the cities where dark holes were left after. he is a child but he has spent the day remembering the dead and fretting over the living. he has spent his day in nebraska with a new hat he would not wear. out of respect, he tells me. because he is so far away from where he thinks things happened, so far away from where he worries something might happen again, it is what he knows he can do to put order into the chaos.

he asks if i have seen two lights in sky and i tell him i have. in fact i have seen them before. the first year i recall railing against them, not knowing how they could possibly help anyone at all. they seemed gaudy, horrible, mean. they did not restore things. they did not bring anyone back and i could not look at the loneliness of them. but this night we are driving over the manhattan bridge and there are those two lights shining up through soft rain and hissing fog. the brooklyn bridge weaves itself across the space between the lights and where we are. the city glitters in the dark, so pretty you cannot imagine anyone wishing it harm. i take one picture and then another, grainy from the night and blurry from the speed of the car. i tell him we just saw the lights, that i took a picture of them i can send him. i say they are beautiful. he knows this but lets me say it anyway. well, he says, sounding far away, i love you.

after school, dated 03-17-2011
 i do not deserve the kindness my children show me but i devour it voraciously.

some days after classes we have tutoring. my tutoring sessions are fairly informal and i have a small group that shows up every day. one child works on math, swearing under his breath the whole time. about the math. about my own evil self. another works on spelling, consistently figuring out twelve and fourteen letter words more easily than four or five letter ones. one child buzzes about the room menacing others into quizzing him on s.a.t. vocabulary words none of them can decipher the sound of. already today he is furious with me because when he asked me if he was my favorite i told him i couldn't imagine a single favorite child but that he is certainly in the pile of favorites. this is not enough. he would share the limelight with speller, probably. they are oddly protective of each other. but he is pretty sure there's no room for a third among my pile of favorites and is considering elbowing them out as soon as he figures out who they are.

they begin to wander in. one child is having trouble understanding the plot of a book he's reading. one has a question about a project due some time ago. one wants to talk about how much the book he's reading is upsetting him. the plot, the suffering and the darkness of it. this is a child who does not like to speak around other students and who likes to mumble his words so low i have to lean forward to hear. the math child is here with a poetry question. he is giddy with the knowledge he passed every class this marking period and is willing to put for a little effort in a class or two to keep that good feeling. he is even willing to write a poem.

so there is chaos. s.a.t. child is trying to explain to spelling child some sort of information about a circle and a tangent. they are at the board in front of a giant red circle, conferring in hushed voices. mumbling child is trapped in a desk whispering into the desktop while i try to figure out what is making him so upset. and math child is insisting that he has written a stanza of a poem and needs immediate assessment of said poetry with suggestions for what to do with stanza two. immediate. nobody in this group is able to be much aware of the needs of others. mostly. i turn to math child and mumbling child bristles. he works hard at not liking anyone but math child is pretty regularly oblivious to attempts to stop him from talking. so he ambles over to me and hovers, preventing mumbler from confessing some deep, dark, terrifying secret about his suffering connection to the book.

about this time spitfire comes in. she is about nothing, tallwise, but is full volume in terms of personality. she checks out the goings on of the two small clusters and situates herself between so she can chime in to either group without having to raise her voice. math child is exasperating mumbler to the point he finally snaps and spits out a brilliant suggestion to math boy who stares, open mouthed. this is the first time another student has ever suggested math child try anything except something that is physically impossible. he smiles and wanders back to pack up his things.

mumbler is confused by what just happened. he opened his mouth to say something horribly cruel and ended up saying possibly the kindest, most helpful thing he's ever said to this child he doesn't know and, as a result, absolutely despises. he smiles a little bit, too, but checks first to be sure nobody is watching, then he heads out, trusting my promises that he is strong enough to keep the book from getting loose inside his head.

this leaves s.a.t. child, spelling child and spitfire. they are crowded together at a clump of desks now, plotting something. i have been trying to convince spitfire for more than a year that she needs help with her academic work. she interprets this as an assessment of her intelligence instead of her tools. generally she gets mad, yells at me, then tells me she's not stupid. then she stomps off. i sometimes yell after her down the hall that i know she's not stupid even though sometimes she surely acts like she is. because i am graceful and dignified and always, always mature. she would be worried if i didn't yell something.

but today she brings it up. because she likes fighting with me. or maybe she wants to be sure i really care about her. or maybe she likes hearing me yell at her that i know she's not stupid. and today i have backup. so we have the argument out here in the open where s.a.t. child and speller can hear. and they weigh in. we are talking about a program i want her to be part of and s.a.t. child steps up and says, "what is wrong with you?" he tells her she'll have everything she needs to learn anything she wants, everything she needs to be smart. speller gets up, leans forward and says with a sassiness i know it is hard for her to gather up, "if you're part of the program you have connections." they both move in toward spitfire like predatory animals smelling blood. they insist half her friends are in the program and she would be a fool to keep standing there on the outside. this is all she needs. a year and a half i have been begging, pleading, whining and yelling. a year and a half. i bring this up and she smiles, says it's different coming from them.

baby daddy

the first time i saw him he was putting his fist through one of those glass panels embedded with chicken wire, the kind school stairwells had in the fifties. he shattered the glass pretty impressively but the chickenwire kept it from spilling all over the place. he cut his hand and bruised it a bit. he was mad, i heard later, at his girlfriend. i saw her in class a day or so after, tiny, eyes cast down, and she told me he has an anger problem. she smiled when she said it, shyly, like she was in awe of such power, like she was glad he'd expressed his feelings for her so well. high school girls like boys who will hit things for them.

so when i see him a few days later in the same stairwell he starts yelling at me, saying i ratted him out. evidently he got himself suspended for this impressive bit of drama in the stairwell. i tell him i don't even know his name and he continues to yell a little more, maybe to prove to me he has this anger problem i've been hearing more and more about over the weeks. but i was raised by wolves, or at least by people with a stubborn streak, so i let him yell himself out and tell him maybe he ought to go to class instead of wasting so much time standing in a stairwell that smells like broccoli farts. it really does, by the way. he is mad that he thinks this is even the tiniest bit funny and he stomps off so i will not see him smiling.  i see him.

i hear the tiny girl who smiles when she thinks about him is pregnant. she sits in one of the classes i share with another teacher. she never raises her hand. she never talks. she sits quietly and hands in papers and reads short stories and might be focused enough to get into a college if she didn't have any other challenges staring at her. she stares down at her belly a lot lately.

when i walk through the halls and stairwells between classes i sometimes encounter clumps of children, most often boys, huddled together. usually they are doing nothing more than cutting class and when i walk up, especially in the stairwells, they look sheepish and scatter. there are seven in the group i see today, sitting all together in a stairwell, reeking of something that smells like cherry cough syrup. there is much shuffling and muttering and then a few of them shoot up the stairs. one or two just stand there, smiling the sort of dumb-faced grin i hope nobody ever has to see outside a school. and then there is mr. anger management. he stands up and starts to walk away.

i motion for him to stop and mention i hear he's going to be a dad. he looks at me funny because he doesn't have the skills with inferencing to know where i might be going with this. he nods, glares. tries very hard with his glaring to remind me he has anger problems. this is what you're doing? i ask him. this is what you're doing to get ready to be a father? i can see the confusion. i'm not fighting fair. the other boys are gone and i say softly your baby deserves a good dad. this is mean. every baby deserves a good dad and not many get one and it hardly seems fair of me to expect something from a fifteen year old boy most people don't expect of thirty year old men. but it's his baby. his choice. he yells back that he's going to be a good dad. i shake my head, tell him that if the best he can do is sit in a stairwell with a bunch of losers while he ought to be learning something, he will not be a good dad. your baby deserves a better dad than this, i say.

he looks less angry, more tired. he doesn't have even a tiny idea what is happening inside this small girl he might love. he has no way to know what a baby is all about or what it will need from him. he does not know he will need to teach it things. he does not know he can easily kill a baby when he is mad and not even see it happen. but i am not really worried about that. i know his anger is an excuse. it's a way to turn his back on responsibility for things. but it won't work here. he shoves open the stairwell door and stomps through, yelling over his shoulder that he will be a good dad. he will. he knows it.

i think about what i can tell him. what he might listen to. i have to plan ahead because i only see him times like this, when i am on my way somewhere else and he is where he isn't supposed to be. he must be a little scared, even if he doesn't really know how scared to be yet. he isn't the monster he pretends to be, but he tries so hard. maybe i should be asking instead of telling. is the baby a boy or a girl? what will you name it? what color sweater do you want me to knit?

wasting time

in 8th grade he walked up to a group of older boys in the street and said something very bad in spanish. he waited for the fight to start but the boys, who were not the gang members he'd hoped they were, simply looked at him the way you'd look at a yappy puppy behind a fence. this frustrated him, as you can imagine, so he threw rocks at them. handfuls of gravel, really. they walked on down the street, talking and laughing. he was not pleased. one of the older boys came to me the next day and asked me to do something about him. they didn't want to hit the child, he said, but eventually they would have to try to teach him what nobody else had been able to. 

he was not in my class in ninth grade but i would see him regularly roaming the halls in the colors of a latino gang that had no idea he existed. he was, in ninth grade, the sort of child whose name would bring shudders of boredom from teachers. he was bad but he was not very good at it.

so this year when i see his name on my class list i feel tired. i see him more often on the back sides of empty stairwells than in his desk. he is always wearing pegged jeans three sizes too small for his stubby self. he has no idea how unpleasant this is for those who have to walk behind him up stairs. his jacket is still always that same color, the way middle aged guys will sometimes wear the colors of a sports team that never considered them.

he smiles when he sees me lately, a slow smile that tells me he won't hold a grudge if i drag him to whatever class class he should be in. i have chased him up three flights of stairs, through silent hallways and back down again. i am quick for a fortysomething knitter and he is wearing his too-tight pants belted at the knees so i smile always when i drop him of at class and he smiles right back.

but when he is in my class some days i am fed up watching him trudge into the room fifteen or twenty minutes late, hat perched cockeyed on his head, earphones blasting something awful and so loud i can hear it. he drags his hand across desks. and i am through watching him slam three or four desks aside to settle himself into his own. it is to much to watch him take ten more minutes to root around in his backpack so loudly i have to raise my voice to be heard over his rustling. because inevitably after he has done all this he will say, loudly, i don't have a pen-paper-book-handout or i need to go to the bathroom. his smile is only getting him so far.

this time of year we have the conferences, the ones where parents come around scared or angry and wait in lines for us to tell them what is wrong with their children. that's the fear, that there is something genuinely wrong, that it is their fault. it is in the evening, after the parents are home from work. they dress up, speak in overly formal, tortured sentences. i try to make myself seem less scary but it never works. the boy is here, sitting at one of the desks outside my classroom. he is here, he tells me, to help. i try not to look overly shocked in front of the parents. i do not want to seem mean. he moves from door to door, this child, checking to see if anyone needs a translator. he helps parents find the right rooms and sign in with the right teachers. he chats with them a little and puts them at ease. he is here to help.

i do not recognize this behavior, do not recognize him. when he saunters into my classroom about five minutes before it is time to go home, i ask if he's here for a conference. i am joking. he does not quite get the joke. he motions the girl standing next to him toward one of the chairs and the three of us sit down. and we have a meeting. a real one. he says he didn't realize how much of his time he'd wasted. he looks shyly over at the girl and says he can't afford to keep wasting time. the girl thinks he is magnificent sitting there in those ridiculous pants and that tedious jacket. he is serious. i tell him what i've known for a while, that he's pretty smart, that i suspect he can read a little and when he says things in class they actually make sense. he shocks me by nodding, by saying he knows. he says he likes thinking about what we read. i turn to the girl, tell her she better keep an eye on him, say she ought to expect him to be smart if she's going to be seen with him. she nods very solemnly. she smiles over at him. he failed every class he took this marking period. every single one. but he has been in every single class for a week. he's never done that before.

lightsaber, rock cycle, seventh grade

i do not know the whole story behind why there are lightsabers in the desk, but there are two. they belong to the teacher who is in this classroom most of the day and we sometimes use them as swords when we are acting out macbeth. we have been acting out macbeth the last week or so.

our floor, the english floor, is a quiet haven in the midst of wildness. except for the seventh graders. they come up once a day, on a schedule skewed 30 minutes from our own, so that they barrel through the stairwell door and come howling into the hall en masse. because they are seventh graders they have been taught to wait outside a room until their teacher arrives. there is no telling what mayhem they might accidentally get themselves into if they enter a room without supervision. so every day, midway through macbeth, this slithering mass of chaos swirls around outside the space between their door and our door. and every day i try to think of a new way to scare them into quietness without completely ruining them. annoying as they are, they're more fragile than eleventh graders. they take everything to heart. they believe me when i say things.

a few days back we are in class and the lightsabers are leaned against a wall. the seventh grade horde comes up, giggling and shoving and howling. the other teacher is in the middle of macbeth so i do what i can. i leap out into the hallway brandishing a lightsaber. this is not what i have planned. it is just what happens. there is a great squealing among the children, not enough of it from fear. mostly they think it is fantastic that a teacher is threatening to destroy them with a lightsaber. they love it enough to find it in their still-beating hearts to be quieter so that i do not have to slay them. as though this is a gift to me. although one little boy comes dangerously close to begging to be slain. begging, i tell you.

so today when i show up at a seventh grade science class to read a test about rocks for a group of students, there is some buzz and chatter. i have forgotten my adventures on the english floor, forgotten my attempts to slay an entire class of seventh graders. but they have not. in particular, one little boy has not.

oh, no! he howls, his grin crawling to the edges of his round face. are you going to chase me with a lightsaber? i look over at him, confused a little, as we walk down the hall, ten or so of them and me, headed for the library. it takes me a second to remember waving the blue lightsaber around wildly while he stood in the door to the stairwell, laughing. his eyes are the same now as then, bright puppy eyes, sparkling with hope of a lightsaber appearing during a test on rocks.

i tell them i love rocks, love tests about rocks. i tell them i absolutely love to read tests about rocks more than most things. some of these things are true and some are not. it does not always matter with seventh graders whether everything you say is true. all that matters is that you say it passionately. so i read the test passionately, questions about sedimentary, ingeous, metamorphic rocks. questions about luster, about fracturing. they do not work all at the same rate and as they finish, they head, one by one, back to their science class. but the child who recognized me earlier sits, test situated neatly under his folded hands. he is finished. i'm waiting, he says, in case something happens. and he is serious. he knows very little about me but that i'm unpredictable and my unpredictability runs to what is, to him, a magnificent scale. i have weapons from the future and i have spared his life at least once when i didn't have to. i might do it again.

diagram from the kern river courier, because it's pretty

we turn to a page with a diagram of the rock cycle on it. i think of the shower curtains we've had, the sweetie and me. the frog life cycle. the new york city transit map. the water cycle. i think of how right now i'm dying for a periodic table shower curtain, how i'd like to have a shower curtain with this rock cycle on it. but i know better than to say so. i am not stupid. what i say instead is, man, i think i'm going to have to get me a tattoo of this rock cycle. it's soooooo cool. because a tattoo is far more fierce than a shower curtain. and there are giggles. wide eyes. one girl shakes her head. the waiting child's eyes get so big i worry they will leap out of his skull. the grown up in me worries he may go home and try to make his own rock cycle tattoo with a sharpie. the teacher in me realizes this would demonstrate clear knowledge of the rock cycle, not to mention impressive spatial organization.

when it is time to go back, he says it again. you're not going to chase me with a lightsaber, are you? he says it the way little kids you've just tossed into the swimming pool ask if you're going to toss them in again as they run up to you, panting and reeking of chlorine, arms outstretched for easy throwing. maybe, i say, smiling. because who can tell with seventh graders?