hayden carruth

hayden carruth puts a man in a poem who curses his father "in words i wouldn't whisper into a pit". he draped those words at the end of a poem about being in what he called "the hatch". it is not his best poem, but, oh, that phrase. i can't get over it. i just want to hear it over and over. "words i wouldn't whisper into a pit". mercy!

poetry hits harder than other combinations of words. i'd like to say plenty about a bunch of poems and then slap them up here all smug but i don't even know where to begin. i am lovesick for them. i have the sorts of crushes thirteen year olds have on these strands of sense. i am horrified when i think of how many people won't get to read some of the poems i have wedged in my head. it's not fair. i'm being serious. carruth is one of my biggest crushes. he's 87 and continues to write in plain, wonderful language. i took a class with him when he was still teaching in syracuse and he'd bring in old jazz records and a turntable. he'd talk about words and what they do when you hear them a certain way, how bad jazz and poor wording are the same and how that rare jazz tune worth listening to will get in your head and stir everything you know around the way words put together right will. i will keep my own blatherings to a minimum. i want you to swoon over his words without me shuffling around in the background. there are three poems. two long, one short.

Ray
(a poem written on the death of his friend, ray carver, a brilliant fiction writer and a poet. another of my crushes. "our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock".there is nothing better than this, except maybe chocolate pie.)

How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.

Regarding Chainsaws
(i force 9th graders to think about this. read it out loud in your grandpa's voice. the 9th graders do.)

The first chainsaw I owned was years ago,
an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn't start.
Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,
though I've had enemies couldn't of done
no worse. I took it to Ward's over to Morrisville,
and no doubt they tinkered it as best they could,
but it still wouldn't start. One time later
I took it down to the last bolt and gasket
and put it together again, hoping somehow
I'd do something accidental-like that would
make it go, and then I yanked on it
450 times, as I figured afterwards,
and give myself a bursitis in the elbow
that went five years even after
Doc Arrowsmith shot it full of cortisone
and near killed me when he hit a nerve
dead on. Old Stan wanted that saw, wanted it bad.
Figured I was a greenhorn that didn't know
nothing and he could fix it. Well, I was,
you could say, being only forty at the time,
but a fair hand at tinkering. "Stan," I said,
"you're a neighbor. I like you. I wouldn't
sell that thing to nobody, except maybe
Vice-President Nixon." But Stan persisted.
He always did. One time we was loafing and
gabbing in his front dooryard, and he spied
that saw in the back of my pickup. He run
quick inside, then come out and stuck a double
sawbuck in my shirt pocket, and he grabbed
that saw and lugged it off. Next day, when I
drove past, I seen he had it snugged down tight
with a tow-chain on the bed of his old Dodge
Powerwagon, and he was yanking on it
with both hands. Two or three days after,
I asked him, "How you getting along with that
McCulloch, Stan?" "Well," he says, "I tooken
it down to scrap, and I buried it in three
separate places yonder on the upper side
of the potato piece. You can't be too careful,"
he says, "when you're disposing of a hex."
The next saw I had was a godawful ancient
Homelite that I give Dry Dryden thirty bucks for,
temperamental as a ram too, but I liked it.
It used to remind me of Dry and how he'd
clap that saw a couple times with the flat
of his double-blade axe to make it go
and how he honed the chain with a worn-down
file stuck in an old baseball. I worked
that saw for years. I put up forty-five
run them days each summer and fall to keep
my stoves het through the winter. I couldn't now.
It'd kill me. Of course they got these here
modern Swedish saws now that can take
all the worry out of it. What's the good
of that? Takes all the fun out too, don't it?
Why, I reckon. I mind when Gilles Boivin snagged
an old sap spout buried in a chunk of maple
and it tore up his mouth so bad he couldn't play
"Tea for Two" on his cornet in the town band
no more, and then when Toby Fox was holding
a beech limb that Rob Bowen was bucking up
and the saw skidded crossways and nipped off
one of Toby's fingers. Ain't that more like it?
Makes you know you're living. But mostly they wan't
dangerous, and the only thing they broke was your
back. Old Stan, he was a buller and a jammer
in his time, no two ways about that, but he
never sawed himself. Stan had the sugar
all his life, and he wan't always too careful
about his diet and the injections. He lost
all the feeling in his legs from the knees down.
One time he started up his Powerwagon
out in the barn, and his foot slipped off the clutch,
and she jumped forwards right through the wall
and into the manure pit. He just set there,
swearing like you could of heard it in St.
Johnsbury, till his wife come out and said,
"Stan, what's got into you?" "Missus," he says
"ain't nothing got into me. Can't you see?
It's me that's got into this here pile of shit."
Not much later they took away one of his
legs, and six months after that they took
the other and left him setting in his old chair
with a tank of oxygen to sip at whenever
he felt himself sinking. I remember that chair.
Stan reupholstered it with an old bearskin
that must of come down from his great-great-
grandfather and had grit in it left over
from the Civil War and a bullet-hole as big
as a yawning cat. Stan latched the pieces together
with rawhide, cross fashion, but the stitches was
always breaking and coming undone. About then
I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I
don't feel so good about that neither. But my mother
was having her strokes then. I figured
one person coming apart was as much
as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away
to the nursing home, and then he died. I always
remember how he planted them pieces of spooked
McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time
I went up and dug, and I took the old
sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it
on the windowsill right there next to the
butter mold. But I'm damned if I know why.

i could take (this is a love poem that isn't full of stupid, sappy, sentimental trash.)

i could take
two leaves
and give you one.
would that not be a kind of perfection?

but i prefer
one leaf

torn to give you half
showing

(after all these years, simply)
love's complexity in an act,

the tearing and
the unique edges ---

one leaf (one word) from the two
imperfections that match.

police

today the police came to put handcuffs on one of my 9th grade boys and took him away. i did not see this but a heard a variety of versions of this and the events that led up to it. i will tell you what i know, but it's pretty sketchy. you see, my school administration believes that no news is good news and the less we know about dangers in the building, the safer we are. children are prone to exaggeration when violence is involved. so are adults. they're no help, either.

remember back when i said that generally when 9th grade boys get in trouble, it's' not for stabbing or something big? well, sometimes it is. here's what i know. one of my 9th grade boys (in fact, one you've met in previous posts) and another boy brought something to school. it might have been a slingshot but was more likely a bb gun. at some point the boys and their weapon interacted with the face of a third boy. this all happened before 10am because my student didn't arrive to class at all and everyone was pretty quiet about why. they were scared. good. they should be. the third boy may have been hit near the eye or may have lost an eye completely depending on who you believe. he was taken away in an ambulance most likely. i am sure this is not how the boys expected things to turn out. none of them is very coordinated. my 9th grader's handwriting looks like a drunk first grader's. he could not hit someone in the eye with a bb if he held the gun against someone's closed eyelid. this just makes the whole thing that much more stupid and annoying.

i don't think anyone is going to address any of the issues here. my school's administration has not yet discussed the situation with the staff or students in an attempt to foster healthy communication. the child's parents will not discuss what happened with him, just like they refused to talk with him about the fact that he steals from other children and plagiarizes all his written work. i worry that all this lack of focus will allow the child to be hurt next time he does something stupid. i do not worry about him becoming a career criminal. that would require his parents sitting down with him and talking with him about how he needs to improve his motor skills. and that just isn't going to happen.

hundred thousand dollars

we are working on historical fiction and the kids are having a tough time using historical events and items to situate their stories. for instance, did you know that ak-47s were used during the civil war, which was a time when black people moved north because they weren't being paid enough in the south? did you know that jews moved from italy to germany during the forties, just to find nice, new jobs? sometimes their confusion make sense. they think the underground railroad was a real railroad underground because they take the subway to school every day. they do not know anything at all about money, then or now.

we struggled with the idea of slavery and work and value and finally i asked how many would take a job paying $100,000 if offered one. only one child raised his hand. i was confused. they were laughing. a boy said he'd make more than that at his current job this year so i asked what he makes. minimum wage. i might have mentioned my students have an unusual approach to the academic world. i tried to make it easy. we rounded minimum wage up to ten bucks an hour and allowed a 9th grader to work 80 hours a week on top of school and socializing, just for kicks. that doesn't get a 9th grader much past $40,000. they were flabbergasted. most of them have not been planning on using the high school-college-job route. they were planning on starring in the nba, nfl, whatever league will take them in baseball or maybe making it big on american idol.

then a clever child who insists that he is a drug dealer claimed that drug dealers and prostitutes make big cash. i have lived in neighborhoods where drug dealers and prostitutes live and work. i can tell you that if they're making half as much as a public school teacher, they're hiding it well. the prostitution argument was easy. do the children know any prostitutes? no. of course they do, i say. do they know any crackheads? yes. i ask them how pretty the crackheads are. i ask about their teeth and hair. not pretty at all. i explain that many crackheads feed their addiction through prostitution. i ask if they think the crackheads are rich. no.

they are willing to fight for the drug dealers, though. this particular class has a soft spot for weed, although i suspect not more than two or three of them actually smoke. but they like to pretend they do because it is cool. i use the argument from freakonomics about how drug dealing is a very highly organized business and it's run much like mcdonald's- lots of poorly paid, inexperienced folks up front dealing with the customer and a smaller number of folks in each of the successive tiers of power and pay. they are devastated. i throw out a tidbit from the book. "where do drug dealers live?" a girl in the back giggles. "at home!" right. with their mamas. not a single one of them knows a drug dealer with his or her own apartment, vehicle, furniture. the drug dealers they know make lunch money.

but the child who wants to be a drug dealer is not yet stymied. what about growing your own weed he wants to know. in the bathtub. just so you know, most teenagers think all weed comes from the bathtub. seriously. the entire country is sustained by guys growing 3 or 4 plants with gro-lites in their bathrooms. because children in the city know very little about plant growth and cultivation. so it is time for math. how many plants can you fit in a bathtub without your parents noticing. for some reason they come up with three or four. i'm pretty sure my parents would have noticed one, but we go with four. how many buds on a plant? they think marijuana is like an apple tree, with hundreds of buds on it, giant. i suggest they imagine something they can fit four of in their bath tubs without their parents noticing. suddenly, they don't have so many buds on these imaginary plants. we go through the figuring, assuming they can tell the difference between male and female buds (they don't know the difference between weed and a maple leaf), can read all the instructions for growing and properly interpret them (they have difficulty with "get out a pen and a sheet of paper," so i don't hold out much hope for this part), and can afford to buy all the equipment required for cultivation. when all is said and done, they make lunch money. again. on top of that, they've had to do work. more than they would at a minimum wage job.

i'm not saying i've found a way to prevent children from becoming small-time, entrepreneurial drug dealers. i'm just saying it's been a long time since i laughed as hard as i did today.

trio

where i grew up there was a catholic kid and a black kid. everyone else was "regular". there wasn't much diversity. no jews. no muslims. i work in a school where kids come from everywhere and worship every way possible. it never stops being interesting to hear the languages and the ideas that come with them.

today i found two boys wandering the halls. 9th grade boys, one of mine and one i know because he's always in trouble. you should know that generally when 9th grade boys at my school get in trouble, it's not for stabbing someone or using drugs or anything horrible. it's for being too ridiculous to be in a classroom or for cutting a class when a sub is there. here's the cute part. when these 9th grade boys cut class, they don't go anywhere. they just roam the halls. more often than not, they stop and talk to..... teachers. i'm not kidding.

9th grade boys are a needy bunch and they don't get enough attention when they have to share a teacher with 30+ other kids. they are babies. they are babies who are annoying the security guard to death. she is more sick of them than she is of anyone else today. she has told them fifteen million times to go back to class. this last period of the day is my prep. this is when i have meetings, plan my classes, grade or wander the halls. today i am wandering. already today i took these same two boys to the dean's office for some issue that started earlier in the day and spilled over into a class where i work as a support teacher. one of them is victim from an earlier entry titled, i think, "fight". these boys don't mean any harm but always seem to cause a little chaos.

i am annoyed and round them up. in my most threatening voice (which a child explained earlier today is not at all threatening) i tell them to follow me if they want to live until the end of the day. they follow. they want to live and they want to know where i am taking them. i haven't decided but we walk to the library, which is a room slightly larger than my own classroom full of books available when i was in high school. these books cannot be checked out. the library is out of service. there are six computers available for students but most don't work and they rarely print. the library seems like a good idea. there is a teacher behind the old library desk on a computer. another teacher is working at a computer in the student workstation. there are two students in the room. one is a companion to the two i've dragged in. another 9th grade boy.

these three boys happen to be muslim, but not all the same sort. one is from the sudan. one is egyptian and one is from a country that happened when that whole soviet union thing went bust. i do not know that they hang together because they are muslim. it is more likely that they share a similar goofiness borne out of being at a stage in their lives where they consider punching a form of affectionate communication. they are incredibly goofy. they never shut up. never ever. these are children who do not get upset when i yell at them. i put the two i brought with me at separate tables and tell them to read quietly and avoid my nerves. i tell them i'm going to knit because it's my time off and they better not interrupt me. one boy grabs the harry potter in his bag and another browses the atlases and almanacs. i knit. the boy who was already there is playing a video game that looks like it was designed for teaching third graders something. it is hideous.

harry potter book looks over at my knitting, wanting to know what i'm making. it's a dress for a baby and it's peach silk. he is impressed. they are all impressed. for some reason high school boys are impressed with knitting. especially baby clothes. they use words like precious and adorable and beautiful as though they keep words like that in their mouths all the time. i want to check something about slavery for their projects so i sit at the computer next to crappy video game kid. pretty soon the other two are on the other side of me pretending they know how to hack into the computer and change the password. they don't. i point this out as sarcastically as possible.

they have a yearbook from when they were in 8th grade. the photos are just over a year old but they look like little babies in their posed photos. they flip through, comment on who used to be fat and who never did homework. they flip to a page with two muslim girls. there may be more but one is wearing a head scarf so she's obvious. they point to the girl below her and say, "what a shame." she isn't wearing a head scarf. most muslim girls at our school, especially egyptian and albanian ones, don't cover their heads. most girls wear jeans and t-shirts but a few wear head scarves. it is common enough that it is no different from barrettes. i look at the girl. she looks very shy and scared. she is beautiful. the boys look sad. one of them explains to me that muslim girls are supposed to cover their heads. i know this already but i say, "oh." he wants to explain further. SHE covers her head, he tells me. the others nod. very serious. but not that day.

the boys know she has pressure from her parents to cover her head and pressure from her friends to remove her scarf and they weren't judging her. they looked at her photo like she was a bird fallen out of a nest. i don't know where they found it in themselves to be so serious about a girl who couldn't possibly know what they were saying. in my class they call each other "homo" and "fat" and "retard".

unicorn

the new nephew was in the hospital a bit recently. just like the famous folks, he has to have a cover story so the public won't be wise to what's really going on. the cover story is the little guy had a virus, sent his insides to the outside as many ways as he could, and ended up a little on the dehydrated side. this required a hookup to an i.v. for rehydration and an overnight stay so the i.v. could drip long enough.

whatever. first of all, whoever heard of sticking an i.v. in the head of a baby? right. that's just ridiculous. you've probably guessed by now that most supernatural folks (like superman) are from other planets. well, this one isn't really from another planet, but he's being tended by higher beings from a few galaxies away. they could tell from way over there that he had a gift so they hopped on over here to check it out. they knew the way already. as i've said before, the older nephew is unusual as well. they're tending him, too.

i'd like to try to explain this i.v. thing because it's very upsetting to anyone who loves babies and doesn't love seeing babies punctured in the head with needles (which is most of us). anyone who has visited the "regular" blog on the small child has seen photos of him with his older cousin. look at their hair. look at their heads. it's like they've got crop circles up there, directions right to the fronts of their foreheads. great whorls of hair spin around the temples and funnel all the hair at the front to a point. the baby doesn't have his hair so thick yet, but you can see it. the point. you can see it from a mile away.

i told you the older one is smart. really smart. mostly that comes from his mom and dad, from his grandparents. he comes from smart folks. that's what these aliens look for. they find smart kids and sort of make them turbo. it's easier than you'd think. everyone knows we only use some ridiculously small amount of our brains. ten percent. maybe eleven. when these aliens find a kid who knows how to use his or her brain, they soup it up a little, kick things up to 20 or 25%. years ago they were revving brains up to 40 or 50% efficiency, but they found that humans weren't ready for that much knowledge. there were meltdowns. miles davis managed it pretty well, but most of the others had a hard time. so they generally go with 20%.

it's easy. because parents are contacted when the aliens recognize a supernatural child, they simply wait until a time when the child has a bit of a bug, or maybe when the child is teething, and they check into the hospital. this is where the i.v. comes in. the aliens have developed a fluid that can switch on parts of the brain we never use, giving a person plenty of extra space for remembering things, learning things and enjoying the world. it has to be administered slowly so the child doesn't get confused about all that extra storage. they place a needle very close to a vein on the head, but really they're sending it just past, so it can take that fluid right on into the brain. they use that crop circle of hair as a guide to put the needle in just the right spot.

i know what you're thinking. if these aliens can do all this, why don't they just give everyone this fluid and flip the switch on every brain? don't be silly. first of all, you have to work with babies. adults have already done so much damage to their brains it would be a waste of time to try to expand them. you have a brain that's geared toward tv, grocery shopping and taking out the garbage. who wants more of that? babies have the capacity for all sorts of stuff we weed out as we get older. so that's where a smart alien uses the fluid. why not all babies? i don't know. they seem willing to use it on any baby with a gift of some sort. maybe they have a limited amount of fluid. maybe they know something about the gifts we don't know. they're aliens. they're not the most predictable folks out there.

the important thing is the new nephew is settling in with his expanded brain capacity and this will be challenging for his parents. he will be hungry for knowledge. he will be voracious. they will be exhausted. he is fortunate because they are willing to take on the responsibility. i suspect the aliens checked this out beforehand.

fight

disclaimer: i do not advocate attempting to break up fights between high school children. i have known the aggressor in this story three years and assessed my situation before interacting. i do not intervene in fights between girls, children i don't know or emotionally disturbed children. my school has very few fights but i have broken up two this year. both were between sets of ninth grade boys. in the one not mentioned here, both boys were just at five feet tall and i was able to pull them apart using only the strength of an out of shape, 39 year old teacher lady's body. in other words, i don't put myself at risk.

today there was a fight in class. now, i am no stranger to fights. the very first day i walked into a public school classroom there were eleven little boys and the last teacher had escaped and we had five fights. and a hurricane. all in one day. i've always worked in unusual schools with "challenging" populations. challenging is often code for "bad". i like bad kids. they keep me busy. however, when you choose to work with kids who come with their own labels, you get the bonus of dealing with more fights than you'd expect. i learned early on that with high school boys who are not "disturbed" (this label is something you get a feel for, but it's vague) i could walk in between whatever chaos was happening in a room and shove one boy away from the other without fear of injury. this is because i am female and that is just fine with me. so, as i said, i'm not a stranger to fights. i've broken up plenty, but i am annoyed every time.

the thing about high school boy fights is i never see them coming. i can be staring at the two kids for five minutes and i never anticipate an actual blow. they all start out the same. today's fight started several days ago. a boy did something incredibly dishonest and really tacky and then portrayed himself as a victim of another child in my class. this resulted in a terrible lecture from me, the dean and a security guard and with the other child being hauled off to the dean's office where it was quickly evident what had really happened. the fake victim has been a problem in my class all year, plagiarizing every paper he has handed in, talking incessantly through all two hours of every day he's in my class and randomly accusing people of ugly things for no good reason. he also takes things from other people- things he doesn't want or need. he later destroys them or throws them out.

the fake victim sits in the back of my class. the accused child, a disaster of a student in his own special way, sits behind him, in the library, because he can't function as a part of the regular class. he does no work, which is frustrating because he, like the fake victim, is really a smart kid. both are failing my class. so today while i was trying very hard to explain conflict to my students who are writing 20 page historical fiction pieces for their final marking period, the accused stood up and hovered over the fake vicim's desk. i saw him get up. i heard conversation in hostile tones. i saw fake victim lean back and look up. that's when accused slapped him on the back of the head. and i was surprised. mostly because i really never see the first hit coming, but partly because if i had been accused i would have thrown a closed-fist punch. an open hand slap was an odd choice. fake victim, now more or less a real victim, stood. another slap. by this time i had stomped my way back to the two and they were doing what high school boys do. this is a thing that fascinates me because it is not what girls do. i will not step in to a girl fight. they pull hair and kick. this is not for me. but high school boys stand chest to chest and butt each other like all those antlered animals. this is when i usually jump in.

and today i did at just that point. i shoved my way between the puffed up chests and faced victim, yelling for him to get into the hallway. i began walking toward him so that he walked backward up between the rows and toward the door. i yelled at one of the girls in my class to go next door and have someone call security. i yell during fights because i am mad and the yelling makes me feel better. so as i stomped up the rows with victim retreating in front of me, accused was right behind me, trying to slap around me but not connecting at all. i managed to get victim out the door into the hallway and tried to keep accused inside. a boy from class tried to help, but accused slid past both of us and on his way out the door managed to reach around me and slap victim one more time. that kid has a reach. security came up and took victim away. i went back to class. we talked about conflict.

get on the bus

it's always the public transportation. always. today is thursday. this is when my metrocard expires and i need to buy a new one. i don't know that because i remember. i know that because every thursday at 6am when i swipe my card at the turnstile it tells me my card is no good, so i go to the card machine in the train station to get a new one. every week. today i was feeling wild and thought i might see if ski mask man was around again, so i walked down toward him and toward the bus. this morning was warm, even so early, and everything smelled quiet and like rain. no ski mask man, but i got to the bus stop just in time to hop on a nearly empty bus so i was pretty happy nonetheless. i dipped my card in the reader next to the bus driver and pranced on back to a seat. he probably called to me several times but i finally heard him halfway back. my card was expired. see, the train won't let me get on without a current card so this doesn't happen often.

i turned around. oh, i said. i didn't have anything better that early. i expected him to look different. there is a face that goes with many of the people who work in new york, especially if they work for agencies with uniforms and small amounts of authority. it is common on the faces of transit workers and the police and security guards. it is the face of authority-that-goes-with-blue-pants. and it is terrible to behold. this is the face i expected to see. a face that looks like it is hovering atop hemorrhoids. but i saw the face of a man from missouri. i know that sounds strange. i know there's no such thing. but he looked like the sort of man i'd seen a million times in my childhood. he looked gentle. he looked like a guy who managed to add up grocery sums to exactly whatever small change a child happened to have sweating in grubby palms, even if someone else might have seen several dollars worth of stuff there. he looked like he smelled like a lawn mower. grass and gasoline and oil. he looked like someone who could make my dad laugh. the bus was already moving when i told him i could leave. i said i'd hop off at the next stop. he smiled a little and said, "you didn't hear it from me. have a seat."

on the way home i walked past a covered bus stop. you may not know them, but here in brooklyn we have these nice little shelters at some of the stops. glass on top and three sides. many with benches in them. this one, on union near fifth avenue, didn't have benches, but someone fixed that. there were four mismatched chairs sitting inside the glass shelter, safe from the afternoon rain. one was a wooden kitchen chair with a fabric cushion. there was a green wooden armchair of some sort, maybe a patio chair, low and missing some paint. there was a dining room chair with arms that seemed like it might be related to the kitchen chair. same wood. same cushion. but the most wonderful chair was a red high stool with a back, like a bar stool, but with those two awesome steps that fold out from inside. my great grandma had one of those when i was a kid. it is where i sat to eat sugar cookies and sandwiches made of bread and butter pickles and cheese.

a young mother was hurrying through the rain to the bus stop. her boy, four or so, ran ahead and scrambled up onto the red chair. she plopped down onto the dining room chair next to him and they smiled at each other like they'd discovered a new world.

ski mask 2

yesterday i wrote about ski mask man, a strange guy i saw on my walk to work. he stuck in my mind and i mentioned him in class yesterday. the kids are working on historical fiction pieces and they're struggling with creating characters. we've come up with historical events to center the stories and now they're fixing a main character to lead everyone else through the stories they're writing. it is tough because they don't like to think and they come up with elaborate ways to avoid it. so yesterday i tossed out the story of ski mask guy because i wanted them to get that he was strange. a ski mask in may is different from a ski mask in january. i wanted them to understand detail and how to create something interesting and believable. they got it. they were also fascinated. ski mask man is the sort of person they'd see if they weren't on phones/ipods/whatever every second of the day. he's out there all over the place.

then today i was telling them about backstory. about flashbacks. i was hoping they'd get that they can't just create a character and make only the part they're writing exist. they need to get an idea in their heads of a whole person. what's his favorite food? what sort of soap does she use? what's his biggest secret? we do exercises like these all the time so today i asked them to write a memory for their characters- a scary memory from when the character was five. it seemed pretty straightforward but i started smelling smoke and i could see them beginning to melt.

you should probably know that i've been teaching more than 15 years and am a bit of a control freak in the classroom. i hate chatter when people should be writing and i hate people asking to go to the bathroom when i'm talking. i have issues. when i give an assignment that requires people to have done a prior assignment (say, one that was due two days ago), i find it difficult to be interested when students say things like, "uh, i don't have a character yet," because we've been working IN CLASS AS A GROUP on these stinking characters for more than a week. sometimes when something like that happens i just stare blankly for a bit, trying to take in what i'm hearing, that people would deliberately screw themselves over and annoy me.

however, as i'm getting older, i'm slowly learning to turn situations like that into something that can make me happy. at that point, when i'm annoyed and all, i'm not so interested in their happiness, but mine is still pretty important. so out of tiredness and frustration and boredom i said, "hey, you guys remember ski mask man from yesterday?" everyone did. there were murmurs and comments about his oddness. they are afraid of him. they hate him. they love him. and all they know is that he wore a ski mask yesterday. good sign. so i pushed a bit. "think about him. write a memory for him. what happened to him when he was nine? something scary. what was it?" and they went. no confusion. no problem. they KNEW about ski mask man. they knew. as they wrote frantically i asked why this was so much easier. it just is, they said. i asked why this memory would be important to ski mask man's story if he has one (he does now) and one child raised his hand. "this memory tells why he wears the mask!" of course. that's what flashbacks are all about. revealing the secret motivation behind whatever is going on today. or yesterday in our case.

so here's what i learned about ski mask man. something terrible happened when he was nine. maybe there was a fire or maybe there was a knife, but his face didn't survive intact. or maybe an abusive father told him he was ugly so many times he believed it. or maybe his father robbed a store with the child in tow and something happened. whatever the specifics, ski mask man's mom was m.i.a. and more often than not, dad contributed to his suffering. dad actively worked on whatever it was that got this guy in a mask. you think i am reading too much into this. there were twenty separate stories and not a single one veered away from this formula. they were proud of their stories. they love to write and they have a better sense of the way dramatic narrative works than you'd think. i thought about ski mask man all day. i found myself hoping for the fire.

when i got home i had to go to the check cashing place. for those of you who have never been to a check cashing place, it is where class is established. it is where people do their banking when banks don't care for them. we go there because our landlord insists on being paid in money orders and there's no other place in the neighborhood to buy money orders. there are three places advertising that they sell money orders, but i made the mistake of asking in those places and was told no. so i go to the check cashing store. it is, oddly enough, just past the place where i saw ski mask man yesterday. right next door.

as i walked i noticed a ruckus across the street. my neighborhood is quiet and i hadn't seen anything like this since i lived in syracuse. there were lots of crackheads where i used to live and the cops were always stopping by, doing nothing, "dispersing" crowds. but not here. this neighborhood is quiet and peaceful and normal with the exception of ski mask man, so i got distracted watching across the street from where i was, a block from the check cashing place, as a woman screamed and pointed at a man standing on the stoop of a bodega. it reminded me of all sorts of summer evenings in syracuse when a loud woman with a knife or bat or stick or bottle would be standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by people trying to calm her down or egg her on. when things got really loud i started walking again. thirty seconds to the check cashing place. a minute or two at the counter while the man printed the money order. back out onto the sidewalk.

and there, a block away, sat three police cars with lights on and an ambulance. the crowd had grown and most of the people there now hadn't been there to witness whatever called the ambulance. they were just there to witness the current spectacle of cops, hands over holsters, milling through the crowd trying to figure out what happened, what the woman had done. the woman's children were with her, a girl about 8 and a boy much younger, 4 or 5. everyone was talking and nobody was saying anything.

tomorrow i will tell my class about this and they will write stories telling me what happened. then i'll know.

ski mask

6am i am late late late for the train. i arrive in time to watch it roll out from under my feet south into the cut and then it's gone. there is a bus not far away. down the street six or seven blocks is the southbound coney island bus which will take me to the bus my train would normally meet up with. i walk. i am dizzy this morning and the world seems to be lurching at me, dropping away. it is a beautiful spring morning, everything blooming and chirping and buzzing, but the lurching world and the 6am lack of people make everything a little more sinister.

i am just over a block from coney island avenue and look up to see a man. he is standing on the patio of a cafe. the cafe is closed and shuttered but the benches and tables are scattered around. he stands at the edge of them all, just in front of a human-size statue of liberty. she is on her pedestal and towers over him by two feet or so, but they look like choir singers on risers. he is all in black. black shoes and pants. a black jacket that is short and belted at the waist with a tightly knotted fabric belt. he is thin and pale. his arms fall away from his body and his hands are where they would be if he had them in his front pockets, but they are not in his pockets. they are just in front of them, not touching his hips. just hovering there. none of this is why he caught my eye. he takes a cigarette and puts it in his mouth. he is wearing a ski mask. a black wool one with two eye holes and a teardrop for a mouth. he puts the cigarette through the teardrop and lights it.

when i walk past him the whole world pitches and rolls, lurches one way, then another. i am only a few feet away and can see that his skin is horribly white behind the mask. his eyes are awful without his face to help them express. his eyes widen and i realize that i have been attempting to compensate for the fact that the world keeps moving unpredictably. i have been staggering down the street and in my own confusion or fear or whatever it is he's brought up in me i didn't notice lunging toward his masked face. i want to apologize for frightening him but i don't know that many folks who wear black wool ski masks on warm mornings in may and somehow i figure an apology might be the wrong thing. as i turn the corner i see the man who was walking behind me. when he sees mr. ski mask he lunges, too. away.