crackle

because we're living in a place where there are folks living right down under our floor, we've been trying to rethink our whole approach to dog toys. dogs need toys. well, domesticated ones do. regular wild dogs don't so much because they're out in the world earning a living and all. but tame dogs get slow witted and fat if they lie around all day. their coats get dull and they begin to smell like dust, like the inside of a vacuum cleaner. unfortunately, any toy strong enough to survive five minutes with a dachshund is also heavy enough to sound like the end of the world if it hits a floor or wall. still, we went to the dog store and rooted around among all the beautiful squeaking and mooing and howling toys, pawed through bouncy rubber toys dense enough to go right through a wall if thrown even a little bit hard. and there was nothing. nothing that wouldn't bring our neighbors screaming to our door howling about noise. nothing for guthrie.

then, on our way out, we walked past a basket on the floor and saw a stuffed toy that looked a lot like a rolled up newspaper. when i picked it up, it crackled. guthrie's whole brain nearly exploded. he sat back low on his tail and his ears crawled right up to the top of his head. years ago he had a crackle skunk, a stuffed toy with the very same crackliness inside it, a soft sound like someone rustling through leaves or in a pile of newspaper. a sound that somehow short circuits all a dog's natural instincts except the one to carry the crackly thing around. and so we took it home.

guthrie and i walk every day after school for half an hour or so. he carries his crackle paper in his mouth the whole walk and this seriously limits his interest in barking or snarling at other dogs. and although i know that guthrie walking down the street is cute cute cute, i have learned that guthrie walking down the street carrying his crackle paper is so overwhelming some people simply squeal or point or, in the case of small children, fling themselves on guthrie. and i don't mean just dog lovers. i mean somewhere near 95% of all people we walk past. i have seen cyclists and skateboarders nearly run into poles because they turn and watch him as they walk past. people on cellphones try to explain him to someone somewhere else. teenage girls in clumps squeal and point and clutch at each other because the sight of guthrie renders them unable to stand up on their own. mothers strolling along with children point him out and encourage lengthy discussions with their toddlers on how much responsibility guthrie has taken on, how he does his chores and is still adorable. old guys with golf hats and canes speak directly to guthrie, ask him loud, gravelly questions about the paper, what the news of they day is. small children lose absolute control of their limbs and blow like mad tumbleweeds straight toward guthrie, absolutely unable to do anything but beg to pet his speckled fur. but the oddest by far are the teenage boys who roam the sidewalk outside the park in the afterschool sunlight. like the girls they travel in clusters, usually three or four, all dressed similarly, all trying very much to look whatever sort of nonchalant and fierce they can manage. and they look at guthrie from a distance, narrow their eyes suspiciously, set their mouths straight all at the same time. then one of them will drawl low, "man, check out that dog!" and the others, who were already looking anyway, will pretend to notice for the first time and all those slack faces twist up into little boy smiles.

and i have been telling the sweetie this for weeks, telling him how guthrie with the crackle paper seems to transform people so it feels like we're walking in a little bubble of happy. each time he'd mutter something about knowing, about walking guthrie in the morning, about how people stop and say he's cute. "you have no idea," i kept saying. he was thinking snowflake and i was thinking blizzard. but today, our first sunday in the neighborhood, we took ourselves a little family walk. we took a right out our front door and guthrie, crackle paper clutched firmly in fierce jaws, led the way. for nearly four miles of sunny, warm, late fall sunday afternoon the sweetie and i wandered through old neighborhoods and waded through adoring coos and squeals.

and while we were looking at all the prettiness and oldness and ramshackleness of the dreamiest borough in all new york, everyone else in the dreamiest borough was looking at our small dog trotting along. and as we walked in the middle of all the swooning the sweetie looked over at me. i nodded. see. but what amazed him most, i think, wasn't how vocal total strangers were about the preciousness of a little dog carrying a fake newspaper. it was the inability of surly new yorkers to maintain their new yorkerly facade. guthrie plowed through people and left them changed, a rippling wake of fools grinning without even thinking about it, without even meaning to.

fig

apartment saturday. brooklyn saturday. the sweetie has to work today but we are close enough to the rest of the world we can walk to our favorite diner before he leaves by going one block down and one block over. it is early and the booths are mostly empty. our waitress has not seen us since labor day and asks about the house, the yard. she is a gardener. the diner always has little pots of freshly rooting plants- avocado trees and figs. her handiwork. we visit a bit and then eat. as we get ready to leave, she brings us a tiny tree, maybe a foot or so tall, with four soft green teddybearish leaves on it. the rest of the plant is twiggy, barky, with small roots snaking off near the top of the soil. she offers us the tree, which turns out to be a fig, with the hope we have a place to plant it upstate.

now, i know the sweetie and i know me. we love to garden but our recent attempts to understand the rocky, acidic, shady and often frozen upstate land we own have not been what you'd call consistently good. but there is a fig tree on our table sitting right next to a fork and my teacup and already i love it so much i can't even think straight. i will raise it in the apartment, in the pot, where it will be safe. i tell our waitress about walking home from school through bensonhurst neighborhoods thick with fig trees, wanting to sneak away with a fig or with a cutting. but most trees don't just root from cuttings like violets do and i imagined horrifying beauty and the beastish scenes where some crazed bensonhurst fig tree owner would come barreling out of his house to capture me and how guthrie would somehow end up taking my place, watching me suffer at home through the lens of a magic crystal ball. and i could never quite get up the nerve. she hears my plan and laughs because that's exactly where my little fig came from. she snipped a cutting from a tree while walking through bensonhurst and rooted the thing.

after breakfast the sweetie heads off toward the train and manhattan and work. i walk through not quite awake streets, past gated stores with my fig tree clutched against my chest, its leaves fluttering against my cheek. later today guthrie and i will go to the garden store and get some soil and a new clay pot for the tree but for now, i'm thinking about names.

it seems to me that some plants, just like animals and babies, tend to be more robust if you give them names. i doubt what the name is matters to the plant any more than it does to animals or babies. it is having the name that seems to make a difference. it suggests care and concern. for quite a few years i had an avocado tree named andre and when i had to move and couldn't cram him (her?) into the tiny rental car along with every other object i considered mine, a friend offered to keep him. he moved the plant from apartment to apartment (i am convinced because the plant had a name) until a fire in his building late at night claimed the poor avocado tree. when i spoke to him next he cried, "andre was killed in a fire!"

i am not so good with plant names. i once had a violet named violet. i am pretty sure our ancient rose bush is rosie. there was code orange the orange tree (an already hilariously named gift) and the most recent, a tragic lime tree named limon. the current lemon tree is nameless because of its whimsical attitude toward living. i am trying to avoid attachment until it commits to being consistently alive but am reconsidering. it may be that the attitude comes from the lack of name. maybe lemony, after lemony snickett and his horrible, funny books. see what i mean.

but this fig tree wants a name. and i know what will happen. i will name it fig newton. or figgy pudding. or fig fig sputnik. figgy stardust. but it deserves better. i could go with one of the names my sister and brother-in-law rejected for their child. nascar astronaut. obadiah. perhaps simply adam, with a nod to the pictures in my childhood sunday school papers of the scantily clad namer of all animals. but i would welcome suggestions. any sort of help. a name you wanted to name your boy child until you had a series of girls. a name you thought would be great for your next dog until you found out you're not just allergic to flowers. the name of the car you drove in high school. suggest them here. you don't want to spend the rest of your life with the guilt of knowing you could have prevented a name like fig newton. you really don't.

eraser

or... the children are still learning that things should not be just what they are.

it is not my goal every morning to go into the classroom and "freak out the squares". i was raised funny and it comes out a lot in class.

a large chalkboard stretches across the front wall of my classroom. the half of it nearest the window is covered over by a dryerase board. you know the kind. a shiny white board you can write on with markers. special markers. if you use regular markers the entire world will stop and people will scream, "no!!!!!! that's regular!!!!" there is nothing good about the dryerase board but because i write too much anyway i use it. i need the space. as with the markers, there is a special eraser for this board. well, not really special. but it turns out if you use the same one you've been using on your chalkboard, results will be disastrous, at the very least. because disastrousness in a ninth grade class can only lead to further disastrousness in the form of lamenting children who do not quickly recover, it is necessary to maintain a two-eraser system. this means not only that you must have two separate erasers but also that you must remember which is which and use each accordingly. and because supplies are always in short supply at a public school, it is also important to hide your erasers. because they will, like your markers, walk away when you're not looking. teachers borrow lots of things. pens. pencils. markers. erasers. scissors. staplers. desks. it is a dangerous world out there and a teacher who can't keep track of her erasers is no teacher at all.

now, i managed to keep my erasers through an entire school year but the thrill of my accomplishment made me careless. i did not lock them away over the summer and when we returned there was nary an eraser to be seen. i went to set out my array of twelve beautiful, new dryerase markers (only three visible to the eye of a ninth grader) and my chalk. the chalk was missing as well. i waited a few days, thinking chalk and erasers would turn up. nope. i began making mental notes to purchase new erasers and to forage for chalk (there is always chalk. you just have to know where to look.)

a week or so in, i needed to erase something on the dryerase board and opened a file cabinet to look for a paper towel or napkin or maybe some of the green tissue paper i'd seen somewhere. my hand rested on an old felt puppet one of the speech teachers used with her students. a simple thing, a pink-faced boy. eraser pink. and i erased the board to the gasps and howls of horrified ninth graders. you'd have thought i was erasing the board with an actual child. "what is wrong with you?" howled a child. "what? it's just a puppet."

but children can adapt to anything and these children did. the eraserhead puppet worked better, was more thorough, protected my delicate skin from the dangerous sprinkles of erased marker better than any cruddy standard eraser ever could. and i erased every day with the head of that small child puppet until the children began to express concern about his sorry state. "miss, you need to wash him. he's filthy!" "miss, his face is completely gone. he's disgusting!" and i began to feel guilty about it. this fresh-faced, pinky cheeked boy was now a dingy mingling of all the marker colors i owned, all twelve. i stalled a few days but really i had no intention of washing him. i loved his hideousness. no other teacher would ever take him.

a few days into the concerns/complaints, i opened a drawer in that wonderful filing cabinet again and found two things i had been living without too long. far too long. first, i found the shell-pink head of the eraser boy's sister. clean and fresh and ready for erasing. and when i lifted her gently from her resting place in the drawer, i found under her skirt a box of giant, glowing sidewalk chalk. the fat kind little kids can grip but in colors you're pretty sure will glow if you put them under a blacklight. and i know the children. i know what change does to them, how shock of any kind just knocks them out of their own skins. so i waited until they left, until the bell herded them off to some other room with some other dryerase board, and i chucked eraserhead boy in the garbage. i hung his little sister on the hook at the edge of my dryerase board. and then i got out a stub of chalk. with my fragile little angels in mind i selected white. regular chalk white. and i wrote some things on the board.

although there is some concern over the possible death (the highly suspected death-maybe murder) of eraserhead boy, there is general rejoicing at the newness of eraserhead girl. the children are proud of me. but while i am writing on one board, their eyes shift quietly, soundlessly, to the other board where there's a list of information written in -gasp- white chalk. on a chalkboard. but they are sharp and they know more is happening than that and they scan for the chalk they know i didn't have yesterday. their eyes settle on the fat white stub of chalk sitting so heavy in the chalk tray it might pry the tray off. so pudgy its back side rests against the board itself while its front side looms precariously close to the edge of the tray. and they do not say a word but several of them are writing notes on the insides of their brains. new eraser. new chalk. too much. too too much. and in the interval between classes i am busy with a student and i do not see how it happens but someone writes "this is the coolest chalk ever" in round, neat handwriting in the middle of the chalk board.

it strikes me as odd that they acclimated so quickly to the doomed family of puppets(i know there are more and i will find them) i've begun parading across the dryerase board. especially when the chalk is so clearly overwhelming. but this is not the end. in my classroom there are plenty of things just waiting around for a good idea. mostly there's lots of yarn. in fact, piled on the windowsill under the air conditioner that does not work but does allow a great deal of rain, snow and wind to enter the room and fall on the children is a pile of yarn. four or five or maybe six skeins of white yarn and one small ball of pale pink. it is there mostly because it is close at hand and because children often have emergencies that can be pretty well managed with a little yarn. i have the dryerase board all written up and the chalkboard all written up and i want to erase the chalkboard and write a little bit on it for a group at work sitting right up under it. i tell them to get out paper and be ready and i walk over to the ledge of white yarn. i bring it back, talking to the group as i erase what is written and drop the yarn in the chalk tray. i pick up the sidewalk chalk and begin to write and a voice from the middle of the room calls out, "why are you using yarn as an eraser?" there are a few giggles and several rolling eyes. the suggestion is that yarn is not the strangest eraser she's seen in the room. everyone returns to their work.

at the end of class, a boy from the small group i'd worked with asks if he can erase the chalkboard. i nod. he grabs the yarn and brushes it slowly over the surface of the board. "cool!" he whispers while a few others gathered around him look on.

bacon chocolate is no joke, my friend

for those of you who don't know why we're eating bacon chocolate in class, read back a post. for those of you who read regularly, you already know we eat strange things in class (and smell strange things and look at strange things) as often as we can. i do not like to be bored. and the kids have already passed judgment on almost everything as either bad or good and i like to mess them up a bit.

so it was time for the bacon chocolate and not everyone got some. only those who brought permission slips. quite a few got them, took them home, lost them. not my problem. one of the things we work on in class is taking responsibility. because when we don't, all i hear is, "miss, i didn't realize we had homework last night so i didn't do it. " "miss, it's friday and i didn't think we'd be doing work so i didn't bring my notebook." "miss, last night was my sister's birthday and everybody got really drunk so i didn't read my assignment." and that last one sticks a bit with you, doesn't it. because it's not fair for me to expect a child to read in a houseful of drunk adults. but the truth is that if i keep expecting it the child will find a way- will go to a neighbor's house or a cousin's, or will read on the bus or train. because there's always a really good reason, a good excuse, that involves someone else keeping us from where we should be. and if i let the kid think other people can really do that, take that much from them, i'd be an awful person. so, no permission slip = no bacon chocolate. and some kids look sad about that, but nobody complains.

everyone is working on their superhero stories, storyboarding a bit, drawing their characters leaping, rescuing, losing control of awesome power. and i invite the seven or eight or nine from each class back to the library. of course we have our own library. and folks gather there like a little cocktail party, clutching permission slips. one boy does not eat bacon and has opted for a wasabi ginger chocolate bar. a girl who does not eat bacon asked for a chiles and cinnamon bar. i could find only a plain chiles one, but she's game. the rest get bacon. we break the bars up. they are expensive enough we will be sharing. they always ask what stuff costs and i tell them. they seem to judge their worth on the cost or strangeness of what i bring in. everyone stands close, in a huddle now, holding fat squares of a chocolate they've never even thought of. they wait. i tell them they can eat and it's like communion. solemn. brows begin to furrow. they chew slowly. no child in the history of the world has eaten chocolate so slowly, done so much to savor it, to experience it the way grown folks experience wine or swanky cheese or good bourbon. these children will love the soiree, i think.

i ask what they think because i'm pretty sure i know but they're still quiet, still chewing slowly, still wrinkled about the face. "that is some very good chocolate," says one. "it's so strange," says a girl. "strange but i really like it." the boy with the wasabi is surprised by how delicate the flavor is. he looks at the box. "i don't like dark chocolate!" he says, his eyes big. i tell him he doesn't have to finish it. "i like this just fine," he says, smiling, reaching for another square.

and it goes like this in all three classes. they are unsettled by the taste. it is not what they expect, and yet it tastes exactly like what it says. it tastes like bacon. it tastes like chocolate. but it tastes like something well past either of those things. because for these kids, they had to earn it, but also, they had to be willing to take a step away from what they know as good and bad, right and wrong. they had to be willing to take a risk that the world is not what they've always thought, not what everyone tells them. how scary that must have been. how brave they are.

negotiations

this is the promise my students make to me:
1. i will put my name on my assignments. usually. more or less.
2. i will add a date that has some numbers in common with the current date. it’s hard for me to remember exactly what day it is but you know what i mean.
3. i will write a string of words across the top of the page (more or less) that usually can be deciphered as the title you wrote clearly, in large letters, on the board. that’s right. the one you then said out loud to us once, then again a second time a few minutes later, just to be sure. come on. you know it. you wrote it on the board yourself.
4. if you have numbered questions for this assignment (like when we take a quiz) i will put numbers left of some clumps of my answer. if not, my answer will be one very spectacular sentence. three lines. thirteen lines. one sentence. i really like to use the words “and then”. i think they enhance my storytelling.
5. although i know i’m not so good at spelling (reading, organizing my thoughts), i do not want to share this news with others. even though you might have something to help me, you are in that category of others. if people know i can’t read, they will think i am stupid. and then i will have to act like i want to be stupid on purpose. that’s a lot of work. i would rather just not talk about it.
6. when you give back an assignment, i will not look at the grade (or any other marks you made) on it. i already know who i am. i already know what you think of me.

this is the promise i make to my students:
1. if there’s no name on your paper and it’s a quiz, regular homework assignment or short response, it goes in the trash. i don’t grade it and you don’t get it back. who are you anyway?
2. if there’s no name on it and it’s part of a major project, i will describe some clear feature of the work (who is writing about a superhero named stanley flash?) . one time. if you raise your hand, i will give it to you. if you write your name on it and give it back i will grade it. if you keep it, i can’t. if you don’t claim it, it goes in the trash.
3. i am very good at deciphering creative spelling. generally, i only have to ask two or three times a year about a word i can’t figure out. however, i am less talented when it comes to handwriting. if it looks like a chicken danced across your page, it will come back to you with no grade. you will be expected to fix it.
4. if the words on your page are identical to those of someone else in the class, i will not grade either assignment. ever. a big, heavy zero will go in my gradebook next to your name and that other person’s name for that assignment. those zeros will weigh you down. you will learn that using your own ideas, even if not quite right, is smarter than using someone else’s ideas that you don’t understand well enough to modify just a little.
5. if i’m reading something of yours and it sounds distinctly un-you or distinctly un-ninth gradery, i will visit the internet to see if what you’re writing has already been written before. if it has, you will learn a new word, plagiarize. it is difficult to spell. i will write “do not” in front of it when i write it on your paper. it comes with one of those leaden zeros in the gradebook. it also comes with a conference and a call home.
6. if your name is on an assignment and you have made any attempt at all to understand it and address the issue at the center of the work, i will take your work very seriously. i will write in the margins smart things you’ve done and questions i have. i will point out places where there is confusion or where i think you simply didn’t understand the point of the work. and if i think you tried but are confused, i will not put a number grade at the top. i will put the letter R. which means “revise”. and because we’ve discussed this in class, i will expect you to come to class during tutoring time (yes, it’s that not quite an hour from 2:20 to 3:10 when any child in our school can visit any teacher and ask for help). and if you ask me, we will sit down and discuss the assignment until you understand it and you can revise it as many times as you want. for you, this means eventually you will get the grade you want. for me, this means eventually you will understand the concept i’ve been trying to share with you.

negotiating is tough. we are all stubborn. the children. me. we have different goals. but they begin to dovetail right about parent-teacher conference time. i require my students to attend the conferences with their parents. well, i bribe them. i offer every child who attends with parents an opportunity to try bacon chocolate. it’s just what it says. chocolate with bacon. or, for those who don’t eat bacon, chocolate with chiles and cinnamon. or wasabi. and of the 39 families i met this week at conference time, 37 arrived with a ninth grader. having child and parent in the same room is the only way to be successful. everyone hears the same information. it is not that i worry about my students being dishonest or unclear. my experience is that the parents who come without children do not represent our conversations accurately when they get home. there is great deal more grounding and hitting. ugly.

so we sit down and a child says, angrily, “why did i get a 70? i turned everything in!” the parent looks at me accusingly, says, “i know she’s done lots of work for you.” and i look in my gradebook. out of fourteen assignments, there are quite a few of those R things. at the end of marking period those average in the same way a zero would because i do not have a complete assignment. and i explain to both child (who has heard this every day for two months) and parent about the revising and about how it is impossible to do poorly in my class unless it is willfully done. and each time the parent turns the same incredulous look toward his or her child, stares at the child like it has three heads, realizes for the first time that this is an alien creature. and then, it is always the same. very slowly, the parent grinds out these words. are…you…kidding…me? because to an adult it is absolutely unimaginable that anyone would ignore unlimited opportunity to fix an error, to gain reward. but children are so much more imaginative than adults. they can see themselves doing exactly the same thing next marking period.

my boat, your boat

one of the more surprising gifts i’ve been given in my current school is the opportunity to work with an extremely culturally diverse population. all major (and plenty of less than major) religions, most inhabited continents and just about every language family sit in a desk somewhere in the building, most often in my classroom. generally, this makes for a kinder, smarter, more interesting community. generally. but sometimes there are problems. sometimes there is ugliness.

quite a few of our students come here, come to this country, from countries too poor for living in, war-torn countries, places where genocide has destroyed everything but memory, places where children are still fighting wars. they come to this country believing it is made of gold and candy and new lives for everyone. and sometimes it is, but for most of the kids who come here it’s not quite like that. everything exists inside a different language and for those children, the first small pile of words they learn consists mostly of words to keep them always aware of their status as other, alien, foreign. but uglier than that is what they learn next. words to keep all the other children who are not from here off kilter. i am an alien but not as alien as you. and although in my mind every day is the small world ride at Disneyland, more often than not, it goes like this:

loud noise from the back of the classroom while students are supposed to be reading silently. i look up. silence. angry looks across the aisle. we all go back to our reading. rustling and then hostile whispers. louder, even more hostile whispers. i see one boy turned around, gesturing wildly at a group of four boys. he is albanian. they are all part of what the children here would call the spanish community. not a single child among them is spanish. the word, here, suggests a common language, not a common culture or history. and yes, i know that between them they represent three expressions of the language, but i am telling you how children see things, how they represent difference and sameness. one of the not really spanish boys is angry, calling the albanian boy stupid, his anger compressing his words into one long stream of word, rising steadily in pitch as he goes. this delights the albanian boy, cracks him up. he is watching this child slowly become less and less his new home and more and more his old as pronunciation of the words shifts more and more toward spanish. he whispers something again to the not really spanish boy and the three others nearby try very quietly to tell him to shut up.

by now, other children are glaring. some small part of me notes this and is pleased they are annoyed by an interruption to their reading. the rest of me calls the first not really spanish boy out into the hall. he is angry. i ask what’s happening. the albanian, it seems, is calling him a name. a name that he and the other children, at least these children, have determined is appropriate to use as a slur against mexicans. the child is incensed, not because the albanian has used the word, but because he has used it incorrectly. “i’m not even mexican, miss!” he wails. i ask him what he is. “ecuadorian.” and what i want to tell him is that the word isn’t appropriate, even to use when folks are mexican, but the strangeness of the situation gets me a little and i have to look up and pretend to be mad so i can hide the fact that i’m about to laugh out loud.

so i pull the albanian out into the hall, too. i ask if he’s been using this word. he denies it, looks confused. “i’m not even mexican, you idiot!” hisses the ecuadorian child standing behind me. "i'm ecuadorian!" “oh,” says the albanian, genuinely fascinated. i am not sure what to do here but they seem reconciled after this so we go back in. there is reading to do and neither one is particularly strong in this area.

a day or two later, there is some sort of ruckus between the albanian and the ecuadorian yet again. i pull the ecuadorian outside first, ask what’s happening. i do this because he is the more rational of the two children, more likely to understand diplomacy and all. but not today. he is so angry he is taking up about twice his normal space. it seems that although both boys established that this word is really for use to degrade mexicans, the albanian doesn’t know the word to use to make ecuadorians feel bad about being ecuadorians and besides, he likes hearing the ecuadorian yell. because he likes the way the ecuadorian says the word. but the ecuadorian knows this is a subtle attack on the way he says all words, on his pronunciation of words he wasn’t born hearing.

i move the ecuadorian’s seat and although he is fuming about that, too, he is sitting next to a very pretty, very smart, very nice girl who touches his arm when she speaks to him during group work time and i am more or less forgiven by the end of the period.

but i spend more time outside with the albanian, who looks, both behaviorally and academically, like a fourth grader. i intend to call his mom and talk about his behavior. i have the phone number and ask about a good time to catch her. in spite of his generally annoying behavior in class, he truly is a sweet child who means well and he suggests several times that would be good because his brother will be home then. because his mom doesn’t understand English. neither does his dad. and i start to laugh, which confuses him but he smiles a little, too although he’s not really sure why. i am not laughing at his parents. i'm in the same place i was when the ecuadorian child explained why he was mad.

“does your mom work?” i ask. she does. she works where she has to deal with other people. now, i do not know which words the children have settled on as being offensive and hurtful to albanians, but i know what the word stupid does to people and i ask him this: “how many times a day do you think your mom hears someone say stupid albanian or stupid foreigner or why don’t you learn to speak english?” and his face focuses for a minute in a way i have never seen. because he loves his mom and because he doesn’t want anyone ever to call her stupid or make her feel like an alien while he has been fitting in so well making by others stand out. his head drops a minute and i hear his voice, surprisingly quiet, say, “ a lot, maybe.” and this is the ugly part. it’s not just in schools that people use the words the children have settled on. it is on the street and the train and the bus. it is in stores and at work and when you have to fill out forms and see doctors. his mom hears, every day, some version of the word he uses to hurt the ecuadorian.

i do not know how long it will take the rest of the world to make these things less ugly or what exactly it will take to get to that place, but in my classroom we only have until june.

breakfast, ducks, heron

in brooklyn we have just finished reading the dobyns poem. you know the one. these are the first days of fall. the wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled… but here, on the top side of the catskills, that whole season came and went in a few short weeks. a burst of color, a few gusts of wind. today we expect snow. the days are too short to plan now. you just have to see what you feel like when you wake up and hope there’s daylight enough after breakfast to get going.

we spend at least one breakfast a week sitting at a window table at a restaurant on route 28, smack in the middle of the space between margaretville and arkville. there are three tables by the window and the window hovers above the east branch delaware river which was a little ferocious this spring and summer but which sits generally in a shallow bed strewn with smooth rocks and an occasional log. opposite the restaurant, across the river, is a field, maybe full of hay, and then there’s the line of trees at the bank with root knuckles curled, clutching the dirt at the edge.

it is a good thing to have a window table all year, but starting right about now you can watch the ducks stop and rest and snack on the coldwater snacks floating by. there is a quick place in the river where ducks shoot by like on some carnival ride, always spinning around to sit sideways as the water leaps up. they seem to be laughing as they go over, beaks wide, heads back. and today i am ready to see the ducks. we head over to the only open table by the window and see a cluster of mallards, three pair, swirling around on the water but before we can even get to our seats a gray cloud drops from the sky and we watch- all of us sitting at the window- the blue tipped wings of a monstrously large heron flap as it lowers itself down into the water. the great blue heron is a pretty large bird, but when it sets down next to a pile of ducks, you really get an idea of scale. it stands near the bank, where a couple of dead trees have fallen, their brushy tops drooping over into the river. the heron wades into the middle of all that brush and disappears, becomes a few more branches in an already tangled mess.

we sit down. i get my tea and the sweetie gets his coffee and we watch. the couple sitting at the middle window table is watching, too. they are talking about the bird and i feel a little bit bad for the ducks shooting over the rapids now, clamoring for attention, getting nothing. they float and bob one at a time on down to the end of the dead tree and begin their snacking again, paddling slowly back upstream behind the trees and the heron, looking very much like teenagers when they find themselves behind a live newscast. they are looking at the heron, floating by, making faces, most likely, waving to their friends, mom, the entire duck world. i open the sugar packets. the heron hunches down. i empty them and stir my tea. the heron’s beak moves just slightly. i reach for the cold metal pitcher with milk and the heron darts into the water. it comes up with a fish, flapping and winking, wedged in its beak. It eats slowly. at least, it eats more slowly than you’d expect a bird to eat when it’s standing in freezing water with a live fish trying really hard to get out of that beak.

one of the men at the far table says they look so prehistoric and for a minute i don’t see it, but the heron seems to want to prove the point and walks, as dinosaurlike as ever anything has, around in front of the dead trees, lifting its unreal legs and moving its ridiculous neck the way dinosaurs in movies do, head wagging slowly, a little frighteningly, from side to side. predatory. impressive.

and then our favorite waitress comes to the table and sets down plates. for the sweetie some sort of hideous conglomeration called hash that he slathers with tabasco. for me, two eggs scrambled (there were at least three today) home fries, bacon, a pancake and two triangles of french toast. the french toast will go to the sweetie. as i shake pepper onto my eggs, the body of the heron seems to grow and grow. the great wings unfurl and you can almost see the gusts of wind they must create. the blue tips flap and, wavelike, the rest of the wing flaps, slowly. the bird is in no hurry. everything about it is liquid. there is no way something that shape should fly but the body moves with the wings and the legs are ribbons trailing below. it is gone before i take my first bite.