poet at lunch

today is a holiday and teachers across the city had the day off, so i had lunch with a teacher friend of mine. we were sitting in a little veggie cafe when a woman came in and sat down at the table next to us, on the same side as my friend. before she was even in her seat, i recognized her. mary karr. i spent a semester in a class she taught years ago, when she wore only shades of purple and some black, with knee boots and dramatic scarves. now, maybe it wasn't her. what would she be doing in brooklyn at lunch time, but nobody else really looks like mary karr. she's more than fifty but still has something about her that makes you want to look at her. she's compelling. equipped with limited words i'd say she's pretty, but there's something about her that most woman who are "pretty" don't have. i'll probably never figure it out, but that's okay because mary karr isn't important because she's pretty. she's a very good poet. a wrangler of words and sounds and images.

she never got the right recognition as a poet i think, but that doesn't matter, either, because in the mid nineties she wrote this book, liar's club, which is a memoir from her little girl times, and folks went mad for it. now, i like memoirs but i'm not very patient with what mary would call "bullshit", which is what oozes in and out of so many memoirs these days, but i like her book very much. she has two other memoirs, cherry, which i read and liked just fine, and lit, which i haven't read and may not. but the thing about mary karr is that she's had the sort of life people write memoirs about but she's also had a good ear and a sense of the rhythm of language and the way words create snapshots.

mary karr always presented herself in class as this poor dumb cracker girl from texas who didn't know a thing about much. a self-deprecating badass. one of those small dogs who will go after anything. a rabbit. a deer. another dog. an escaped tiger. crazed for the fight. i used to think this was a front, something she did for the class, for the public. but she has not stopped being in the middle of fights. it's not for show. folks who don't like her writing get upset maybe by her approach to it. flowery silliness gets in the way and she doesn't find room for it. and maybe you think that means things will be stripped down and awful. poetry that's functional is just a list. but not her poetry. here's a little sample of what folks miss when they think her words will be too plain.

Etching of the Plague Years
by Mary Karr

In the valley of your art history book,
the corpses stack in the back of a cart
drawn by an ox whose rolling shoulder muscles
show its considerable weight.

He does this often. His velvet nostrils
flare to indicate the stench.

It’s the smell you catch after class
while descending a urine-soaked
subway stair on a summer night
in a neighborhood where cabs won’t drive:
the odor of dead flowers, fear
multiplied a thousand times.

The train door’s hiss
seals you inside with a frail boy
swaying from a silver hoop.
He coughs in your direction, his eyes
are burn holes in his face.

Back in the fourteenth-century print
lying in your lap, a hand
white as an orchid has sprouted
from the pyramid of flesh.
It claws the smoky air.

Were it not for that,
the cart might carry green cordwood
(the human body knobby and unplaned).

Wrap your fingers around your neck
and feel the stony glands.
Count the holes in your belt loop
for lost weight.

In the black unfurling glass,
study the hard planes of your face.

Compare it to the prom picture
in your wallet, the orchid
pinned to your chest like a spider.

Think of the flames
at your high school bonfire
licking the black sky, ashes rising,
innumerable stars. The fingers that wove
with your fingers
have somehow turned to bone.

The subway shudders between dark and light.
The ox plods across the page.

Think of everyone
you ever loved: the boy
who gets off at your stop
is a faint ideogram for each.

Offer him your hand.
Help him climb the stair.

All This and More
by Mary Karr

The Devil’s tour of hell did not include
a factory line where molten lead
spilled into mouths held wide,

no electric drill spiraling screws
into hands and feet, nor giant pliers
to lower you into simmering vats.

Instead, a circle of light
opened on your stuffed armchair,
whose chintz orchids did not boil and change,

and the Devil adjusted
your new spiked antennae
almost delicately, with claws curled

and lacquered black, before he spread
his leather wings to leap
into the acid-green sky.

So your head became a tv hull,
a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger
sloppy at the mouth

and swollen at the joints
enacted your days in sinuous
slow motion, your lines delivered

with a mocking sneer. Sometimes
the frame froze, reversed, began
again: the red eyes of a friend

you cursed, your girl child cowered
behind the drapes, parents alive again
and puzzled by this new form. That’s why

you clawed your way back to this life.

zip tie

warning: all dog eyes have been left red in photos to help establish the terrifying nature of this story.

we bought a headboard for our bed. not generally the sort of stuff a person finds important enough to dedicate a blog entry to, but this is the first time ever in my life i've purchased an actual headboard. and footboard. most beds have been futons on the floor or on wood shipping pallets that i've dragged from one student apartment to the next. but we are grown ups now, people who own a car that nobody else has owned and a house. a real house with a basement and two chimneys that work and storm windows. so it's only right we should have a bed with a headboard. civilization demands it. so we did what we did the first time we bought a car together. we visited ebay. and on wednesday evening we drove to new jersey and crammed an iron bed frame into our car and then drove back with our seats scooted all the way forward and a rattling that sounded like a thousand ghosts clanking chains in the back.

bringing this precious pile of metal upstate started the worrying part of my brain. we couldn't put the dogs in the car with the frame in there, so the frame would have to travel on top. now, our sassy little car has rails on it for attaching a luggage rack or pod but they say right there on them that trying to attach something else directly to the rails will result in tragedy. i believe this because the folks at subaru told me right there in sticker on the rail, but the sweetie just laughs. he has a plan. "if this doesn't work, it's your dad's fault," he says. he has not called my dad to run this plan by him. he just knows my dad would approve. his plan involves zip ties. they are to film school geeks what duct tape is to the rest of mankind. he brings home thirty or so zip ties and on friday afternoon we get to work attaching the headboard to our car with what looks like plastic twist ties. when i say "we" what i mean is i help the sweetie put the headboard on the rails and then i stand there, looking horrified, as neighbors glance out and nobody says a word.

i know these things will fall apart on the road, sending pieces of metal that look suspiciously like ancient cemetery gates from childhood nightmares spiraling into the windshield of the car behind us. we will be murderers. i tell the sweetie this. he looks concerned, but his concern is more for my mental state than for these would be murder victims. he knows i am a paranoid person and he's worrying it's getting of hand. he shrugs and we get the footboard. if there are victims i will be as guilty as the sweetie because i have figured out a way to put the curved footboard on the car without having it prevent the doors from opening. this is the sort of stuff i scored well on in those tests in 8th grade. spatial relations. and now there will be blood on my hands.

i tell myself i've seen cops use zip ties to secure criminals on occasion when handcuffs were in short supply. this helps a little, but the day had been ugly at work and my mind was set to wallow in ugliness. i begin hoping our victims will be few and the type who deserve to have metal crash into their car on a dark highway at night. you know, like maybe serial killers would tailgate us. hopefully not a bus full of orphans. because it was shaping up to be the sort of day where we would wipe out a bus full of orphans. orphans with some special disease someone had just found a cure for.

we crammed the rest of the frame, the long bits the bed itself sits on, into the car and up between the two front seats. i won't mention how many times i hit my head on the headboard getting into the car or how many times i cracked my elbow on the stupid bits of frame jutting into the front seat but it was too many. the dogs in their dog bucket came next and then our bags. now, max hates to ride in the car and although i had already given him his car riding medicine, he began his whale song as soon as the car started rolling. and the headboard, which has hollow openings at the feet, began a lower, more ghostly wail. great, i thought. at least it's not as loud as the jet engine sound that hovered outside my classroom for four hours earlier in the day while i tried to teach over it. road work. maybe it will drown out the ringing in my ears. but it was not so bad. it was like having a little fleet of ghosts hovering around us as we drove, like guardian angels only creepier.

the rain at first was soft, more like a fog that required occasional wiper blade use. in the brooklyn battery tunnel max's whale song turned to a more high pitched whine. it could be he hates those orange lights in there. but the little collection of ghosts changed their tune in the tunnel as well. shoving a tunnel through another tunnel does something bad to the world swirling around them and the cheerful little "wooo" coming off our headboard became the hissing of a monster. it is a long tunnel. i watched in the rearview mirror, knowing if the stupid headboard chose now to fly off, we would be trapped in an already crowded tunnel with broken cars and probably somehow the rain outside would pick up just enough to flood everything. the odd thing about the rearview mirror was that i could see the headboard and its ridiculous companion, the footboard, weren't moving at all. not even to jangle against one another. they were pretty firmly attached to the car. i did not mention this to the sweetie. we weren't yet on the highway.

but the highway didn't change things either. the cheerful flock of ghosts came wooooing back and max showcased a variety of dog distress signals, weaving them smartly in and out of the constant tune of the headboard. we arrived at the house just before eleven at night in the dark and in the rain. we brought in dogs and bags and jackets. then, we brought in bits of frame. the sweetie snipped the zip ties off of the headboard and footboard and we dragged everything through the house and up the stairs. max, disgruntled by almost everything at this time of night, did a lot of glaring and looking blankly around. guthrie stood his little stovepipe body right where we wanted to put whatever we happened to be putting down. still, the bed took very little time to assemble and when we tossed box spring and then the mattress onto the frame i was surprised how grown up i felt. "wow. we really do need more pillows," muttered the sweetie.

bar

our neighborhood is a place "in transition". it has been in transition the entire ten years we've been living here and the nearest "shop" street, half block down from us, has changed from chinese take out with bulletproof glass, dollar stores and countless corner bodegas into boutique shopping- a wine store, outrageously priced children's clothing, a kitschy/vintage place with a name referencing a trailer park, which interests me because i'm just about a million percent sure the owners and patrons have never set foot in a trailer or the glorious parks in which they reside. there are charming new food and drink places with ten dollar burgers and ambiance saturating the place the way teenage girls spray on perfume. and now we have our first fusion bar.

this bar is a combo watering hole and flower shop. cute. adorable. charming. it looked nice when i walked by. it looked exactly like what you'd think a flower shop/bar would look like. but it made me wistful for the most brilliantly considered bar i ever spent most of a year in. crazy igor's.

when i moved to new orleans, it was en masse with a group of people i'd met in los angeles. people who had been tossed together and who had lived and eaten and learned together and prepared to be teachers without really knowing what we were doing. and we all flew to new orleans and got jobs and apartments, many of us for the first time. and although $18,000 sounds like a lot of money when you're fresh out of school in your first teaching job, it just isn't. but if you're doing all that in new orleans, locals will set you up with the schedule. the free food schedule. bars then had specials and you could eat free most nights of the week if you could afford a bottle of beer and knew the schedule. and crazy igor's was this ramshackle bar that offered free red beans and rice on mondays. or maybe tuesdays. but it was once every week and i made it my business to be there. for two or three bucks i could get an abita turbodog or a dixie blackened voodoo and all the beans and rice my newly employed belly could hold.

this would be enough, surely. but you know there's more. igor's, which has since changed its name to igor's lounge and become a little fancier, has bar and seating right as you walk in. but keep walking. you have a heavy load and you need a place to put it. walk on back. past the tables. past the end of the bar. to the washing machine. that's right. the washing machine. machines. i can't tell you know how many there were, but i'm guessing six. that heavy load you've been carrying can rest right here. put the laundry in. put the few quarters you've scraped together into the machine. don't bother separating the whites and colors. just wash everything on warm with lots of soap. go up to the bar. get your abita. if you've got plenty of cash, get a bourbon. get something good. it's a sin to drink unfortunate bourbon. get quarters at the bar. go right back up by the door. grab your styrofoam bowl and fill it up with red beans and rice. on some days, with jambalaya. arrange yourself. styrofoam bowl in one hand with plastic fork and spoon tucked into fingers. drink in the other. your pockets bulging with change. get yourself back to the washers to see how much time you have. walk up the old metal stairs to the loft like area above the washers.

this is where the dryers are. and the pool table. if you are a teacher, you know that on days with free food the place will be crawling with other teachers. if you haven't found yours, wait five minutes. they will find their way up to the pool table smelling like laundry soap and beans. lay out your quarters, some for drying, some for pool. halfway through your game you will need to get your wet laundry and bring it up to the dryers. check your bowl. it will be empty. persuade one of your teacher friends to refill your bowl when he refills his so you will not have to make two trips. if you have money, offer to go get beers for everyone when your friend's laundry is ready to dry fifteen minutes later. if you don't, nobody will think less of you. someone will notice and buy you a beer. play as many games of pool as you can, breathing the smell of clothes drying and cigarettes smoking and beans simmering. you are standing with a cue, waiting your turn. when you take drink, notice the smell of your beer or bourbon is so pretty you don't even have the right words for it.

when your laundry is done, let another friend take your place at the pool table. fold your warm laundry to the sound of the cue and balls clacking on the table a few feet away. you will leave with a handful of friends. a cluster of your live nearby, some in one house, a few in another. and although you have never smoked a cigarette except that one drag years ago when you learned that you are not a smoker, you will bury your face in the laundry you're carrying up the steps and inhale the smell of the bar, the smoke, and you will be glad to be able to have such things.

surprise tomato

two weeks is a very long time. it is a long time to be without one's beloved. and then to arrive at night, to be unable to see the world properly is even more strange. we're back in the mountains, home at the house, after two solid weeks in brooklyn. it feels like a year. years. it was good to spend a weekend in brooklyn, to go places we used to go when we were only city folk. but it is better to be in the mountains with the dogs draped all over everything and the house warm from wood stove and the yard all full of new things.

when we got in, it was after eleven, dark, cold. we hurried everything in, built a fire and fell into bed. this morning, max began his bathroom whine around six, later than he does in brooklyn. so we went downstairs, bundled up and went out to face our first foggy, forty degree morning this season. we'd noticed last night that a section of the logs had fallen into the driveway. my first thought was meddling teenagers, then bears. but i remembered watching the drunken path of that awful gustav and the small and medium limbs strewn across the foggy yard support my hunch that we were attacked by a horrible but not very impressive inland hurricane and that in this one instance, it focused its power to be as surgical as a tornado and it tumbled logs everywhere.

but right next to the carnage (okay, really it was fifteen logs or so, but play along) the dogs discovered a patch of lush grass where a miserable, scabby patch of bare ground used to live. in fact, the whole back yard had transformed. two weeks ago, the sweetie had scattered grass seed right on top of the miserable, bare dirt behind the house, assuming that he'd be greeted with nothing much when he came back. but at six thirty, the whole back yard was glowing that green color of new grass, luminous and breathing. on the way back by the garage i checked my bee house. generally, i peer into the bamboo holes and see the legs of daddy longlegs sticking our all over the place. but this time, there were no legs. there were plugs. the plugs of baby bees snuggled into their new homes for the winter. three. four. five. later, the sweetie, who is taller and can see in much better, counted six. that's more bees than i've ever had.

the two small dogs and i kept traveling. we walked around the house a few times like we needed the trip to get ourselves really there. on the second pass around the porch i noticed something pink against the lattice. when i looked closer there was another pink flower dripping off a vine twined around a rusting peony. morning glories. not the blue ones i remember from my childhood, but still, morning glories. i'd been pining for them just a week ago, hoping my four o'clock seeds would be morning glories instead. and they just popped up out of nowhere. just for me. but not really. i've spent an entire summer weeding the little patch of dirt around my inherited roses and peonies. i've ripped up probably hundreds of morning glories, not knowing what they were. but being gone let them get themselves established and now that i know who they are, they're welcome to stay.

like the creeping thyme. when we finally got around to weeding the slope at the front of the yard, we found tiny clumps of ground cover that smelled like food. we pulled everything back from it and now we have large masses of green with tiny purple flowers scattered all over, holding back the ever-eroding slope of our front yard. the sumac tree in the corner of the yard has started a million tiny sumac trees and we're trying to discourage this behavior. as we were pulling the sumac sapplings i lamented that we never see anything good like spruce saplings. the sweetie laughed. we have five giant spruce trees and didn't really need a baby one. but i realized as i said it that i really wanted one. felt like my life wouldn't be complete without a baby spruce tree to love and worry over.

i went back to weeding near the roses, careful of the morning glory vines. the sweetie found his way to the wood chipper and was lost in the roar of the chipper engine and the spray of plant matter. i was pulling a dandelion from the base of my rose bush when i saw it. it was tiny. and not just tiny, but growing up out of the bits of cement that fell off the chimney when the mason was here to repair things. it was the tiniest, babiest spruce tree ever to shoot up out of the ground (click on it and look bottom, center). just for me. it was about this time i began to suspect something was up. the house, maybe, is haunted. except it doesn't seem to be. no ghostliness and the only unnatural sounds are those of squirrels in the walls. no clanking of chains. but the yard. the yard is haunted. perhaps. not so much haunted as unusual. like a fairy godmother. a fairy godyard? i sit out there in the dirt and weeds thinking wistfully of some ridiculous old lady plant and then find it later in my wanderings.

when we bought the place, i envisioned a yard like my grandma's, like my great-grandma's. and there was the apple tree. lily of the valley surprised us in may and the peonies and roses we saw remnants of in fall bloomed like mad. the lilies were relentless this summer and the sumac, though berryless, sits smugly in its clump by the road. there is chicory along the sidewalk and although they're no longer here, lilac and creeping phlox once sat along the front edge of the lawn matching each other, sending the grandma vibe right over the top. throw in some honeysuckle and a few pinks and i would worry we'd gone back in time to when i was ten. and when i wanted moss around my apple tree roots, the rains came and there was moss. when the sweetie was threatening some sort of ground cover assault on the front slope, i showed him creeping thyme in a catalog. a few weeks later i showed him right there on the front slope, right where we'd never even noticed it before. i am tempted to ask for a pony. or a hazelnut bush. perhaps every plastic bag we dig out of the ground is a wish. maybe every bit of glass we toss out and every clump of wire we remove is a bit of green we'd always hoped for. a wheelbarrow full of mulch will bring down a shower of periwinkles.

and i haven't even mentioned the accidental tomato.

birthday

yesterday one of the sweet babies was absent. actually, a few were, but this particular sweet baby has a probation officer so i'm more aware of his absence than i might be of others. he showed up today. he's a good student. currently getting something between an A and B in class. he arrived with a strange looking mark on his cheek. not a cut really and not really a scrape. the mark was darker than the child's skin, grayer, almost like a burn or a smudge. he seemed happy enough, got his book, showed up on time.

so i asked. "some kind of animal attack you?" if a kid shows signs of violence on the body, the best way to start the conversation you have to have is to blame a house pet. for some reason, if given an out, kids will feel more like telling the truth. because they're not being forced to, maybe. but this kid didn't get hit at home. "no, miss. i got in a fight." fantastic. he's fourteen, has a street name and a relationship with the court system of the city of new york and scored poorly on his eighth grade english test. and he was not attacked by an animal.

the way one child looks after a fight is no indicator of how the other child looks. teenage boys are notoriously poor fighters so it's always best in these situations to assume the child you're with is the victor, no matter what the damage. he certainly does. so this particular angel, a child i already wish i could protect from almost everything he loves, holds up his hand, which looks like someone has inserted a tire pump at the wrist and inflated the meaty part between wrist and fingers. i know that to him and every other child with a hideously swollen hand, this represents the strength of the blow he dealt. it means he destroyed his victim. but he holds it up and i see the colors it's changing to and how his fingers look lost at the end of his balloon hand, like they will just break off and float away. i suspect this much damage represents the wildness of his punch, the inaccuracy of the way his fist landed, the weakness of his wrist because he is not disciplined in his fighting. he is a child. i do not want to suggest this because it will hurt his feelings and because i do not want him to be a better fighter. i do not want him to hit anyone else. what i want is to make him be always the child he is on the pages of his notebook. gentle. curious. insightful. a worrier on behalf of others. and although i know i can't make him be anything and i see that he's not much better at making anything of himself right now, i will continue to pretend we are both working toward the same goal. he wants to get ice for his hand. i ask if the fight, the hand, the mark on his face kept him home yesterday. "no, miss," he says, laughing. "yesterday was my birthday."

can o justice

http://www.superherosupplies.com/
http://www.826nyc.org/

i was out of justice the other day so i went to superhero supplies. i'm not kidding. it's at 372 5th avenue, brooklyn. you can go there. or you can go to the website. but it's as real as you are and i got myself a pretty good sized bottle, 16 ounces or so. aardvark brothers manufacturing supplies much of what you can get at the superhero supplies and they make mighty fine products. excellent justice. i've purchased from them before. bought a little tin of chaos. you never need a whole bunch of that. and i like superhero supplies as a store because you get a pretty good deal on most things. sure, the real hip stuff like anti-gravity boots will always be pricey, but the good old fashioned stuff- justice, mind control, x-ray vision- that's always reasonable. and always in stock.

the particular justice i purchased is pulp free, the finest for superheros. proper use of it promotes egoism, self worth, mild manners, puncuality, weight gain, hair growth and shiney teeth. i like that they use the superhero spelling for the word "shiny". superheros use a lot of extra "e"s. i also got a book published by a secret society living in the back of the superhero supply place. it's called 826 but you didn't hear that from me.

and i took the can of justice to school. i just can't help myself. i tell the kids about the place and they're pretty sure i'm making it up (check the website. it's real) so they can't quite get it that i've got a can of justice. but i play it pretty straight so they end up giving in. they can't help it. ninth graders are just like the rest of us. they really do want to believe i can bring a can of justice into class for them. so they ask. how does it work? (i don't know yet.) how does it taste? what does it smell like? someone accuses me of bringing in an empty can. i put it in the child's hand. he feels the liquid justice inside (did i mention the justice is pulp free?) shift as he moves the can and his eyes get wide, even though he doesn't want them to. it is the end of class and they all gather around squishing me up against the chalk board with questions. they want to see in the can.

i haven't opened it and have no idea what canned justice looks like, so i carefully unscrew the cap. it's water, one screams. the disappointment in her voice is thick. i remind them water and sprite and rubbing alcohol all look pretty similar in a can. each one has to peer in. there is a ring of rust around the neck of the can and there are flecks of orange in the water. justice looks pretty funny when it's all contained like that. because i have eaten crickets in class, they want me to try the justice. i am careful. i would never ingest anything without knowing how it works. i am not even sure justice should be taken internally. so i promise to check on it at home.

this morning i see a boy who spends much of his time in my class challenging me. his first words are," did you read the book? can you drink the justice?" i tell him i was surprised to find very little on the internet about how to used canned justice, but that i did find out i shouldn't ingest it. we tell the others. they are incredulous. how on earth can you use justice if you can't slurp it down? my research suggests it's an ingredient you mix in with several others and then sprinkle on a large area. like a school or town. they nod knowingly. we read a while.

dfw- a small thanks for large work

generally, i don't like to write about folks who are self destructive. here's the thing, over time i've certainly learned that most self-destructive folks aren't out there having a fantastic time doing damage. they're just trying to breathe. and if that doesn't work, trying to stop. there's a great deal of struggle behind that behavior. and being a person with a diagnosis and a medication makes me acutely aware of the fact that about one in four of the folks who share my own diagnosis lose their battle with trying to breathe.

it doesn't make me any less angry when the battle is lost. but i understand the fight. still, the anger made me take a little time before writing. i'm not ever going to say that losing the battle is good choice and i had to step back a bit before writing because the focus of my anger is the only one i can't really yell at. but i think it would be nice for you to meet him anyway.

david foster wallace has been writing and being published since i started college. and i suppose that for the most part that's all done now, which is a shame, because i'm pretty sure he had plenty more to say. it is tough to say useful things about someone i don't know, but feel quite comfortable having around. i met him when a friend suggested i check out infinite jest, a fat slab of book which, in my edition, has 1079 pages. and i liked many of them. most of them, probably. the last few years he'd been doing essays, and i have liked seeing him this way as well. he's been writing the sorts of things you wish you could have written your own self, but won't or can't. so lots of folks liked his work and because he was young, only six years older than i am, he had, and i suppose will continue to have, a sort of cult following. this means that plenty of folks hated him as well. and all this is fine, because it will keep him out there in the world, folks reading his pages and having their eyes pop or throwing the book across the room. i know and i'm sure he also knew that either way, he's getting you.

but his death is harder than it should be. i'm not weeping and flinging myself to the floor. i don't think anyone should be but maybe his close friends and his family, and i'm almost sure they're not. and dying because he chose to is one of those things folks have plenty to say about. but i guess all i want to say about it here is it doesn't feel like i can't go on with my own life. but yesterday and today and for a while when i hear about his life or see one of his books on my shelf, i will be mad and then embarrassed by my anger and a little lost at the same time. it will feel like a friend has forgotten who i am.

showdown in room 209

it finally happened. i crumbled. it was quieter than i expected and came on a day when everything else was good. the first little ninth grade class was captivated by our book. they raised hands and asked questions and took notes. and two of them come in early every day and take down all the chairs in the room. adorable. then the second class was going well but got a little confused so i gave them their first quiz. "absolutely aggravating a.m." i like to give the quizzes non-quiz names just for fun. and i learn a lot about spelling that way. so i gave them three questions and they spent twenty minutes hunched over desks, silent, scribbling answers. adorable.

then i walked into the tenth grade room. the sky outside was purple, pouring rain. a good sign. cooler weather. smooth sailing and all that. but the immediate talking and sleeping and hovering over the air conditioner was just too much today and i honestly had no idea where to go with these kids. i knew i didn't want to be there and neither did they. so i wrote on the board:

goal- to identify what sort of classroom environment facilitates tenth grade success.
to begin- 1. where does everything begin to fall apart? 2. what do you want from me?
product- we will create personal contracts for success. seriously. this was the focus for the whole class. nothing else. because it takes them so shockingly long to arrive (perhaps supernatural forces are sending them through periods of shifted time or are moving the classrooms around on them) and even longer to get out the supplies they're so consistently surprised to find they need (a pen, a sheet of paper), the class, which starts at noon, generally really begins about 12:25. the twenty five minutes from noon to when i get signs of human life tend to be spent with me insisting to hoodie child to sit in a chair. really. because he won't. he is fifteen.

and i looked out. the wall had headphones on. super jesus, fifteen minutes late, was putting his headphones away. hug child was "sick" which means he showed up fifteen minutes late with bloodshot eyes and proceeded to sleep through class. hoodie child was alternately sleeping and chatting away to a child who doesn't seem to know where he is. and in came two of the girls. one sat down and proceeded to scowl and the boy behind her. the other strolled in with a flourish and held out her arms. i nodded toward a desk. "what? can't i have a hug?" this is because she showed up today. for the first time. she can't believe it's not the best thing that ever happened to me. i told her i had no hugs for people who show up twenty minutes into class. so she stomped to her desk and bemoaned her sorry state. hugless.

so i pointed to the board and told them to get started. near the back of the room is the ghost, a boy who attended my class all of three times last year and who managed to get his feelings hurt all three days. poor darling. but i mentioned being glad to see him for the first time this year and he got out his notebook. he started writing. i have known this child more than three years and i have never seen this. so i talk it up. people will tell you that teens will not buy this sort of thing but they are wrong. you just have to be sincere. so several times i asked the ghost questions or commented again on how nice it was to see him, how i hoped he'd be back tomorrow. and he smiled. i have never seen this, either.

and then i told them. i was honest. i have no idea how to teach this class. i'm out of ideas. i am failing. we are failing. i am sad. too sad to do anything else. i give up. help me. what do i do? and i don't know why it happened. maybe they felt sorry for me. maybe i scared them. maybe the thought of sitting in that room doing nothing for a whole year was more terrifying than sitting in that room working. but they had suggestions. real ones. what would you do to teach this class? what do you want? group work. field trips. more non-fiction. history. real stuff. and they were serious. i asked for someone to write it all down and one boy said he already had it. what? really? and so i pushed it. "you guys complain about this being a special ed. class. it looks like one. that's because nobody shows up. you have sixteen people on the roll. get them here. it feels like a self contained class because only a few of you show up." and they looked around. i went over the list. who knows this child? get him to class. what about her? make sure she shows up tomorrow. this is your problem and it's easy to fix. do i think they'll drag classmates in tomorrow? i don't know. one of my former ninth graders comes in regularly to check on a current ninth grader. she comes in when the ninth grader is out, during break, so we can talk honestly. when i say the ninth grader is a leader in the class, her tenth grade friend beams and wanders back to class. so maybe.

we divide paper into three sections and label them. one section is for the student's name. one is for mine. the third is labeled "the class". everyone makes their own contract, what we should be able to expect from each. they can expect that i will be fair, that i will bring in things on their reading level that will still challenge their minds. for themselves they have personal issues. one says we can expect him to show up on time. another says we can expect him to stay awake. but it is the class section that surprises me. because what it means is what can one child in the room expect every day from the rest? listening. support. fairness. i didn't know they knew about these words.

brooklyn breakfast

this weekend we stayed in brooklyn and when we stay in brooklyn we have breakfast at our favorite diner. we haven't been there much lately and our regular waitress asked us about it a few weeks back. we told her about buying a house and becoming complete house geeks, spending every spare moment trying to fix the place up and she had lots of nice things to say about us having a place of our own. so today when we dragged ourselves in, she came by with two little plastic cups, the kind you get at fast food places for sauce or pickles to go. the first one had tiny seeds that looked like pickling spices and on a piece of register tape was written "cleome". it's a spider flower. a tall annual. the other had fat, black seeds and a corner of a restaurant check with "4 o'clock" written on it. they bloom in the afternoons. if they're not confused, sometime around 4 o'clock.

i have never planted cleome, but my grandma had four o'clocks. i remember them being blue, which means they were probably morning glories and my mind has somehow turned two clockwatching flowers into one. i am hoping they will be blue anyway although it doesn't really matter. a waitress at our diner collected seeds from her garden to help us out. we will plant them and whatever comes up will be fine.

as we ate we noticed a commotion at a table a bit over from us. a man in his forties was being seated with a boy small enough to be in a high chair and a little girl about three. and she was magnificent. she was wearing an emerald green tank top and a red plaid kilt but what had all the waitresses clustered around her was her wig. it was bright pink. shocking pink. and absolutely perfect. she grinned as she sat in the booth and took in all the attention with a surprising amount of grace for a child her age.

on the way home we picked up a 16mm home movie from 1931 called robin hood of the plains and several bottle/can openers . the kind you puncture the top of the can with. rheingold extra dry, schaefer- "america's oldest lager beer" and two pabst blue ribbons. one made right here in nyc at handy walden. brooklyn is a good place to have breakfast.

obligation

warning: images of teenagers attempting to deal with horrifying events they have almost no memory of.

every september the memo appears in my mailbox encouraging me to make use of the events of september eleventh on the actual day. teach something about it in class. it's a little like black history month. "let's talk about nice black folks this month because we don't have time for that sort of thing the rest of the year." and every year i toss the memo in the recycling bin and that's the end of it. september eleventh is just like september tenth in my class. we read. we write. i attempt to keep shenanigans to a minimum. this is because i know how teenagers deal with tragic things. they put themselves smack in the middle of an event they weren't anywhere near and tell everyone they can corner. i learned this september 13, 2001 when we returned to classes. adults came in looking bruised. the kids arrived looking like amped up squirrels, full of unbelievable stories of how they'd escaped death in one of the towers. these were all children who had been in class two days earlier and had been nowhere near either tower. these were children who had never been south of 110th street and couldn't transfer trains without help. at first i couldn't listen. i cringed when they started talking. but then it seemed important to unravel what was happening. a typical conversation went like this:

miss, i was almost killed.
what do you mean?
i mean, that could have been me! (now, this is true for almost anyone, but i recall being patient then)
why? were you there? do you live down that way?
no. i been shopping there. three years ago. my mom took me to the mall there to get shoes once. i could have died!

and the part of me that's a teacher said, "i'm so glad you're okay," because that's why that story existed, but the part of me that is plain old human wanted to say,"you live in a high rise housing project in new york city. it's almost you every day."

so this is how i started class today. all four classes. with this story of my kids from quite a long time back needing to tell these stories. and then we looked at some books. hiroshima no pika, in the shadow of no towers and fireboat. and i asked the question i want to ask all the time. what makes us need to tell stories about tragic events and what makes us need to scoot ourselves closer to the epicenter than we really were? they came up with good answers. attention. admiration. power that comes with special first hand knowledge. to help folks deal with a situation. and that's what we looked at. telling a story that helps folks deal with something that doesn't really make sense. showing that there are tiny bright moments in what seems like endless dark. and we talked about the sort of events people talk and write about that way. war. hurricanes. tsunamis. the blackout. death. illness. they had to write their own stories about one of those topics. and one little boy raised his hand. he wanted to know if it could be a funny story. several others wanted to know, too. and we looked over the list. yes. it can be a funny story. and they leaned over pages and started writing. about being in the dark. about people who were no longer here. about being trapped. about fear. they put themselves at the center of stories that were sad and funny and very, very brave and they actually seemed to belong there in the center, admitting they didn't know how to feel when they looked around.

artful dodger

few things land as heavily as going home the first friday of a new school year. you feel like you've lived a year since 8am. and since today was yet another humidity filled heatsink of a day, i opted, for the third horrible time this week, to take the bus. shudder. i marvel at how, no matter when i arrive at a bus stop, i have just missed the bus that leaves me in a cloud of exhaust. and although the little schedule at the stop tells me the bus will swing by every seven minutes, it is usually at least fifteen. today it was twenty. no matter. public transportation has a/c. except for this bus. i stepped aboard some sort of horrible sauna with standing room only. the woman behind me jabbed her notebook into my spine every time the tires on the bus completed a revolution. every time. when there was finally a seat, i found myself planted next to a man who smelled as if he had dead squirrels tucked away somewhere. not a breath of air because the windows wouldn't open. so when the bus pulled up next to a middle school and 47 screaming 7th graders flooded the bus, i leapt for the back door. which was locked. so i yelled to the driver who was so busy dealing with squealing 7th graders he had no idea i was there. eventually, a kind man who was louder than i could manage (is that possible?) got the attention of the driver and i spilled out the back door yelling my thanks to the guy, who waved in return.

so i walked down bay parkway in a swarm of 7th graders. the girls swirled around giggling in little huddles, but the boys moved in swearing packs. they are new to using the words out loud so they practice by putting all the swearing they know into one sentence. it's so funny to hear. they don't know parts of speech so they can't really shift the words around, add endings and such. at least, not very well. my urge to teach at this point was strong enough i crossed the street. it wouldn't help them to know crap is a noun and crappy is an adjective that can modify any noun. they'll figure it out. they really like the word crap.

the walk was longer than it is in cool weather and the two or three story trudge up the stairs to the f train had me struggling to get to the platform. i heard the train above me and as my head came up even with the floor i saw the doors close. i took another step anyway, mostly just from the inability to do anything to resist momentum. the doors opened. it was like finding the end of a rainbow. the train car was so super refrigerated i could feel the blast of air while i was still on the platform. i jumped into the car and slumped into a seat. a man facing me said, "i was gonna yell for the conductor to hold the door if he didn't." he had a voice that was real old southern, slow and with a twang. i told him thanks and we chatted a minute about the train doors and the heat and the gloriousness of air conditioning. he looked maybe sixty but probably wasn't much older than me. his eyes were sunken way back into his head and his teeth were going everywhere. a few seemed to have escaped. but you could tell he'd been a handsome man once, before whatever happened to him came along. i settled into my knitting. "you got some pretty feet," he said eventually. now, this will seem unusual to you and it did to me, too, the first time i heard it. a strange place to focus. but i am used to it now. my students in harlem were obsessed with my feet. i smiled and said thanks to the guy and he said, "yep. i sure do love me a woman with some pretty feet."

when i got off the train i stepped out into the swampiness about ten blocks from home. this route takes me past several schools, but by the time i'm near home, most of them are empty, with only a few stragglers left hanging around. when i was about four blocks from home i saw a group of teenage boys, five or six, strolling along coming toward me, dressed like all teenage boys, like my own little angels. denim shorts nine sizes too big belted just below the butt, exaggerating what are always already little skinny chicken legs. hats in reds and blues perched precariously on top of sleek braids, white t shirts so long they actually cover what the shorts are too low to cover, shiny boxer shorts nobody really wants to see. but this one shirt caught my eye. it was on a kid at the edge of the group, tall, skinny. the shirt had silk screens of factory buildings on it and across the chest it said "artful dodger" and then on the stomach there was a red flag with "we will not die" burned into the red. i was trying to figure it out because it seemed to be partly from his world and partly from mine and i didn't know what it meant but i was pretty sure he didn't either and i kept staring. and as he passed me, he held out his hand, like to slap me five. low. and i held out my hand but instead of slapping me five he took my hand in his and put his other hand on my elbow. and when he said my name i looked at his face and he was one of my little angels. he was one of those awful tenth graders, hug child, who breaks my heart every single day. so i asked about his shirt and he didn't know what it meant but he knew he was in trouble for that so as he let go of my hand he yelled, "i want to know what it means. tell me about it monday. i'll be in class." and as much as i want to strangle him for cutting my class yesterday and for being late the day before and for not turning any of the three assignments so far and for the fact that i know he won't really show up monday, i know none of that will do any good. and the truth is none of those things he does will make him any less my child. he knows this as well as i do. so i say, "okay. i will."

horrible

tenth grade is horrible. awful. miserable. full of nothingness. an abyss of stink. there. i said it. and i know what i said yesterday. about the love. about the freedom. about wanting something magnificent. but that was then and this is now. and they want nothing magnificent. they want nothing. this should not be a surprise. i have been teaching a very long time. and every year there's one class that makes me long for the time when children were burned at the stake.

today was hot. nearly 90. tenth grade is the only class i have in that awful furnace of a room on the second floor. there are sixteen children exactly on the roster. i bought eighteen bottles of water, stored them in the freezer so they'd be good and cold, and handed them out at the door when the miserable creatures slunk in, one by one, five minutes late. ten. fifteen minutes. all six of the ones who showed up. that's right. six. super jesus was off wandering the halls with his sidekick hug child, who thinks that if he saunters in half an hour late and hugs me he will be just fine. the girls had escaped leaving me in a very small sea of angry teenage boys. the few who showed up seemed genuinely confused and touched by the small gesture of the water. they weren't sure about my angle. i just wanted them to spend an hour not whining or trying to weasel out of work. i thought cold water in a hot classroom would be useful.

but, as i said, tenth grade is horrible and tenth graders have horribly short memories. only one child had homework. the others were completely baffled about what the assignment might have been and why on earth i would give homework in the first place. the homework was "choose a topic for your essay".
any topic?
yes. any topic.
really?
anything! this should be easy. what do you feel strongly about? what would you like to change?
gangs.
what do you want to happen with gangs?
they should stop.
how will you accomplish this? this will be your thesis. think about it.
we can arrest them all and put them in jail.
all of them? how? how will we know which ones to arrest?
they wear colors.
and what will happen then? will that get rid of gangs? there is a pause. the child thinks.
no. i have just ruined his life. i watch his face crumple as he comes to this realization. i wish i could shove time back a little.

we spend an hour trying to come up with six topics. two decide on the eradication of gangs, even after our discussion. this is hopeful. precious angel settles on legalizing marijuana (which is the same topic he didn't do any work on last year), a child known to both students and teachers as "the wall" for his impenetrable silence wants to talk about global warming although he has no idea what causes it or how to stop it and one child who two years ago wrote every journal entry for the whole year on one book wants to talk about "the election". when asked what, specifically, he wanted to talk about, he says he doesn't know. just that we're having one. the other teacher, who has held in his frustration so far says, "how do you feel about the election?" and the child says he doesn't know. "you don't have any opinion about this election? you don't think this is an unusual election?" the child shakes his head. no. nothing. THERE'S A BLACK MAN RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!!!! ISN'T THAT A LITTLE UNUSUAL? it doesn't seem to be, according to this child. the dry erase marker i was using fades to nothing and i get a flip chart marker and continue taking notes on chart paper. it is nine thousand degrees. i can feel my bones sweating. hoodie boy is sleeping. i worry that he might be dead. election boy is staring off into space. i want to scream. this is a swamp of misery. but i look off to the side where the wall, a child who says almost nothing and slept through most of my class two years ago, is sitting with his pen scratching across the page for absolutely the first time ever and i look behind him to precious angel, similarly hunched and writing.

i am not a fool. they weren't working on my assignment. the assignment i gave, to come up with a topic you can persuade someone something about, has not yet sunk in. there is not a single child among the sixteen on the roster or six in the class who has a workable idea. and those who are writing and those who shared their ideas in class are no closer when the bell rings than they were when they dragged in five or ten or fifteen minutes late. and although i want them to feel bad, to suffer, to wrestle with guilt, they will not. but it is so hot and the six horrible tenth graders start to look like six tired little boys. and then one child, the wall, puts his cold water bottle to his cheek, then to the back of his neck to cool down. i taught him that.

welcome back

i am back. they are back. we are back. and it is very, very good. one of the most reassuring things about coming back to school in the fall is the newness. the old ninth graders tear through the halls, hovering at my door to say hi and scream on over to their other classes. they are no longer my responsibility and i am no longer the cross they bear so we are easier with one another. they go away professing great love for me and my class, glaring at the new babies, warning them to be good or else. but the new ninth graders show up and are on time and goofy and timid and very literal. they believe every word i say, so i say as much as i can. two classes meet 8 hours a week each. one class meets 4 hours.

and then there's tenth grade. four hours a week. i agreed to teach a tenth grade class only because i was tricked. there are fifteen of them, which sounds easy. they are fifteen i already know which is even easier. but they are fifteen i know because last year when they were in various literacy classes of mine they did very little. this means some of them passed and some of them did not but none if them is really all that ready for tenth grade. so they got shoveled in together. and the most hideous part? we do not meet in my lavishly appointed room on the fourth floor with two air conditioners, a full library, all my supplies and clean, ungraffitied desks. we meet on the second floor in a horrible room with no air conditioner, no library, none of my supplies except what i carry in a bucket down there and, because of the lack of air conditioning, a stink that can only come from high school kids melting. it is horrific. it makes the eyes water. kids themselves do not smell this stench or if they do it isn't something they register as unpleasant, so i have to tell them.

you guys smell. it is mostly guys. there are two girls. one is very quiet and during the year she was in my class last year, i never heard more than three or four words from her. the other is more vocal, more like me. aware of the stink in the room. she's a writer. she's also a complete pain in the butt, but we tolerate each other as co-sufferers in this swamp of teenage boy stink. one of them comes in today wearing a black hoodie. seriously. he stands in front of the broken a/c which, when on, functions like a very small, warm fan. he leans against the trickle of air. i yell for him to take off the hoodie and get off the small supply of fresh air we're all sharing. suddenly, it feels like we're trapped in a sinking sub. he looks at me like i'm out of my mind. it is at this point i'm remembering him wearing a black hoodie every single day last spring. the 95 degree days in june. all of them. i assumed the a/c was too much for him. but no. he's cut the sleeves off this one so his skinny bare arms stick out and there's fleece on his torso and his head, because, of course, he's got the hood on. he is out of his own mind. after several exchanges during which he realizes i'm totally unreasonable and he'll never win, he slinks off to a desk, drapes himself across it, hood over his eyes, and sighs.

we are trying to recall how to do a five paragraph essay. i know, i know. i've already told them that in college they'll have to shed all this information in exchange for something better, but for now, this completely disorganized community needs the structure. so we're talking about persuasive essays. and there's this one dear child, super jesus, who truly sees himself as the embodiment of all the suffering ever heaped on young black men everywhere. there is certainly plenty of suffering, but very little of it is really his. his middle class self is always narrowly escaping some supagangsta something, but only in his mind. he has just enough knowledge to be angry but not enough to do anything useful so that others will not have to be angry. the other teacher in the room and i have spent most of a year trying to share more information with him, showing him how to be an example, an advocate, an activist. but he prefers to talk about how many of his boys got shot this summer. so his persuasive essay topic is "being a black man". i ask if he intends to persuade folks to become black men. he knows i am funny but pretends he does not think so. this is dangerous territory. i am a white woman and although i have spent my entire adult life being an advocate for those whose rights are often overlooked, folks with weak minds often misunderstand or misinterpret. but this child knows me and he knows i don't play. he knows "being a black man" isn't a persuasive essay topic and i'm going to pester him until he comes up with something useful. with a direction. because what he wants to write is "how to be a strong black man when the media provides so many ridiculous role models" or "how to raise young children to respect themselves" and it is in him, somewhere, to write this. if he's going to act like he's got strength, he better stand up and be real. he better know what he's talking about because he knows we'll call him out. so he shuts up for five minutes to think.

which is when my precious angel comes in. the precious angel is a child i've known all four years at this school. he's been in my class in one form or another three years. since he never shows up, it doesn't feel like it's been that long. precious angel, who last year slapped a child (look around, the story is in some previous entry) and advocated drug dealing as a lucrative long-term career(another entry), strolled in halfway through class. i loaded him up with presents (class contract, daily planner, current lesson sheet) and he went to the back of the room where he promptly realized he'd left a book in the dean's room. now, believing that he'd been in the dean's room was not a stretch, but that he'd been there with a book certainly was. so i told him to sit down. which, of course, is why he got up and left. when the dean brought him back i made a big production out of missing the sweet baby angel and being thrilled she'd brought him back. i promised him a new notebook with kitties on it, which is what he said he'd left behind. he is a sarcastic, miserable child, but he's beginning to grow on me. i think maybe i'm beginning to grow on him, too, because he stayed.

it was agony getting through topics. they hate to do anything. and i stood there in the front of the room looking at them, at the ten who actually showed up. two were asleep. one sat entirely alone in the back of the room. the girls sat together near the door. precious angel sat in the middle, also alone. the rest sat all bunched up under the broken a/c. i wanted to be sick of them, and probably i will be plenty of days, but i looked out at a room of separate disasters and started laughing. i couldn't get the word out of my head. sweathogs. seriously. welcome back kotter. a class segregated from the rest of the school, small enough they know why they're all in there together. misfits. and i got that freedom in my head i got the first year i taught a bunch of similar kids, only younger, and the principal said, "i don't care what you teach them. i just don't want to see them." so back then i read bits of autobiography of malcolm x to twelve or thirteen fifth grade boys. because that's what they asked for. and amelia earhart. they asked. and now, sixteen years later my head is buzzing with possibility when i look at the room. i can do anything i want. we can do anything we want. those sweathogs better want something magnificent.