group work

today was a day when it felt like class wasn't a total failure. you might have noticed the absence of student-focused writing lately. mostly this is for lack of a way to express how much at sea i feel when thinking about them.

last week was parent/teacher conferences and to be honest i rarely respect the parents i deal with. i know that's not fair. i know it's tough to raise a kid today. i know. i know. but, still. there have to be some things you just know are right as a parent. i find it difficult to talk to most of the parents, especially on the phone, because they simply don't represent what i say accurately to their kids. they lie. now, the kids to the same thing, but they're kids. that's really to be expected, at least a little. but at parent/teacher conference time i tell the kids i'll give them an extra ten points if they show up with parents to meet with me. i just want everyone in the same place at the same time. it works surprisingly well. kids who are already successful bring parents because it's in their nature to do what's right and so i get to say all sorts of pretty things about them. this feels good for the kid, the parents and for me. the kids who are struggling but want to do well drag in with their parents, too to get that ten points. this gives me a chance to say really specific things to both parents and child about what sort of changes might make things better. perhaps the little angel might go to bed before 2am so he's awake for my class in the morning. maybe forcing the child to come home right after school because her parents don't trust her is keeping her from afterschool tutoring, an opportunity she really shouldn't miss.

but then there are the others. the freakout parents. the ones who are never at home when i call, never return a call when i leave a message or have disconnected numbers but leave me urgent messages to call them anyway. they are parents who have raised children who arrive 45 minutes into a 55 minute class, children who scream across a room at other children, children who do not know the meaning of "sit down", "stop talking", "please get out your book" or "stop hitting that child, children who scream, "i wasn't DOING ANYTHING!" when i say their names. and so this year for the very first time, i reprimanded a child in front of a parent during a meeting. okay, this happened more than once. several times. i actually turned to a boy and said, "the way you talk to your mother is inappropriate." one mother, trailing at least five clamoring children, screamed at the oldest as they followed me down the stairs ten minutes after the meetings were scheduled to be over at almost 9pm, "if you don't do better in her class, i won't buy you an i-phone." indeed. this is the second year he's failed my class and as far as i can tell, his tenth grade self has exactly one credit to his name. one class he's passed in two years. an i-phone for that.

so i wasn't exactly expecting to have fun today, the first day back after all that. i was thinking cruel thoughts about short-sighted people bringing up bland children on screaming and technology. and today we're supposed to talk about writing dialog. at 8am. yay. when the bell rang at 8 there were exactly three children in the class. there are 20 children on the roster but four or five do not show up at all, so they read until about 12 showed up. and we started talking. nothing fancy, but they sort of got into it. i told them secrets. they devoured them like magic tricks. i wasn't expecting that. then we put them in groups. this is where all hell usually breaks loose. most schools emphasize group work because it teaches cooperation skills. generally, i find it teaches fighting skills, isolation skills, bullying skills, laziness skills and a host of other horrible, misery-enhancing skills. still, i know that when done right it can work. it is simply that for the past fifteen or so years i've rarely seen it done right and almost never accomplished it myself. but that's the key. turning a classroom over to fifteen children whose mothers still wipe things off their faces with a spit-moistened finger is tough to do. but on the monday morning after the most annoying parent/teacher conferences ever, inviting chaos into the room doesn't really seem all that terrifying.

groups of three. this is the best way to group kids, i think. maybe you've got something better, but three somehow cuts down on all that makes kids mean. there are three girls in the room and i offered them the opportunity to choose their groups, to determine their fates, more or less. they stared in horror. so i chose for them. everyone in a group. the assignment is as follows:

1. select a scenario from the five on the board.
2. determine the details of your two (or three) characters, such as age, relationship, personality.
3. write a page of dialog that represents the scenario.

i gave them scenarios that would encourage conversation- a teenager coming home past curfew to find an angry parent waiting up. a person asking another person out on a date. a woman telling someone she's pregnant. a parent teacher conference. you get the idea. and they started to discuss. they talked quietly, leaning in. i had never seen anything like that so i wandered around, peering over desks and shoulders, reading bits of writing and hearing bits of discussion.

and here's what happened. choosing a single scenario meant discussing the situation and once they began thinking of characters, they got involved in what was happening. they got involved in the lives of people they didn't even know a few minutes earlier, people who didn't exist at all until just then. one group chose the date scene and they couldn't stop giggling. i don't think you'd be able to find three more unlike children anywhere but they laughed the whole time they wrote. and they looked at each other, cracked each other up with cheesy come on lines and possible opportunities for hitting on someone.

the boys tended to like the pregnancy one. but they got so caught up in writing for their characters they didn't even realize they'd begun writing the intro to a very long story about a thirteen year old girl who was overwhelmed by the burden of starting a new family even as her old family abandoned her. when i asked them questions about her, they answered together, in unison, like they knew her. they really did know her. and they were angry for her, on her behalf.

at the end of the hour, not a single group had produced a page of dialog. i had done what everyone says you have to do. it's like breathing underwater. going against everything your brain is screaming for you to do. i let them control everything. and they did. instead of a page of dialog they created stories, rich and full and detailed, heavy with dialog and anger and hilarity. they created scenes and motives. they created people. and it was good.

witches at the pizza hut

pizza hut was hopping. now, for those of you who have been reading along from the early days, we've all been to the pizza hut in delhi before. but it's october right now and pizza hut is all sorts of fancied up for the season. at the back of the place, tables were cleared away for a ghoulish display featuring an inflated green faced witch and frankenstein monster. pumpkins, ghosts and other haunted things in the form of those trash bags most folks fill with leaves were strewn all over. the cobwebs strung all across the ceiling rival our own here at the house and the plastic spiders sprinkled through the cobwebs were the perfect touch. halloweenolicious. but it's not the decorations that caught our attention.

there were witches. live ones. small ones. the harry potter kind with cloaks and elegant hats and stripey scarves. little girls. they sat together on one side of the booth and the parents sat opposite. we were seated at the booth just past them, me sitting with my back to the little witches. they weren't loud, but as their heads were about two inches back from mine, it was easy to hear them. the girls were friends and the parents belonged to one of them. the child whose parents were there was saying, "well, i'd be a democrat." i'm not sure what the question was but it was an interesting answer for a child young enough to wear a witch costume out to a pizza hut a week before halloween. "and then i'd be president," she continued. this seemed to be causal for her. first, you're a democrat, then you're president. that's how it happens. she's too young to have seen that happen in her lifetime so i'm not sure where she gets her information but she seemed very sure about it. there is more conversation along presidential lines and the mother asks a question. i wonder if they have some sort of presidential place mat or something. maybe one of those books of questions like the other pizza hut children had. because they are focused on presidents and things presidential.

there is discussion of presidential pets. the sweetie asks me what pets i'd have in the white house. dachshunds, i say, worried that he'd even have to ask. "what if we are at war with germany?" he asks. "you can't have dachshunds then," he smiles, sure he's won some point i didn't even know was up for grabs. "our dogs were born here," i explain, taking this very seriously, "they're not german dogs." "yeah, but they're german dogs, german ancestry," he insists. sometimes he just refuses to see the point. "i think it would work out fine," i tell him, not willing to spend any more time explaining a plan i'm not going to implement since i have no intentions of running for president anyway. besides, i'm not really concerned right now about germany so much. there are plenty of others in line to go to war with us. not me and the sweetie. we are not at war with much. maybe the weeds in the back yard. maybe squirrels. i am more worried about squirrels than i am about germany right now. germany is not trying to eat the walls of my house. besides, i'm not running the country. not at all.

but the children are still discussing their own presidential aspirations. the other girl has expressed interest in running for office as well. the mother asks a question i can't hear and the child is worried about her qualifications for office. she is not sure she is a citizen, it seems. the mother (not her mother, but the other child's) assures her that her parents are citizens and she is, too. she can run. the other child giggles, saying she could also run if she lived in this country at least 15 years, which she hasn't, because she hasn't even lived fifteen years. this cracks them up. there is some discussion on how old one must be to run for president. it is 35, they decide. they both have some time before they're qualified. me, i could run, i guess. i'm old enough.

mr. stewart

today is cool enough that the constant drizzly rain makes it feel like one of those stay indoors days. the leaves are gone up here in the little mountains and everything is gray. so we put on jackets and warm hats and braved it all to drive all the way to delhi. why? who knows why anyone goes to delhi. it's a tiny town with a s.u.n.y. school, a diner, a gas station and a few small shops of the hardware, book and antique variety. and then there's stewart's. i'd been eying stewart's most sundays we'd drive to delhi. since our own local hardware store burned down in the spring, we've been spending quality time at the ace hardware there in delhi, even got ourselves ace rewards cards. we're that kind of people. we bought a lawn mower there, grass seed, dowel rods, paint. they have the farm implements spray paint there that we used on the metal lawn chairs. it's that sort of place.

so today we went and, being saturday, stewart's was open. it's one of those old fashioned department stores that hasn't changed much in the last 100+ years since it first started. there are two front doors, each leading down a long aisle. there's a set of glass and wood counters between the two aisles, one facing out toward each of them and at the back of the store and the front, a short aisle runs across, joining the two. a rectangle. the store's fixtures have been there since before electricity, i'm pretty sure. the place has more flannel shirts than you can imagine. when you walk in you know what sort of place you're in. the lighting is different, higher up, maybe, or a wattage that isn't made anymore. there's a faint smell of wool and light bulbs and boxes.

when you find a place and look in from the outside, you have ideas in your head about how it will be when you go in. and if that place looks like something maybe out of the earliest parts of your childhood, something that could have stretched back even to your own grandma's childhood maybe, you might even be a little bit afraid that going in will do some damage. you worry your idea of the place will be smashed by your interaction with it. you worry that your own foolish imagination has created a place that never existed in your memory even though you pretend it did.

and so i walked in with more than a little trepidation. i'd built it up so much in my mind. an old fashioned place with absolutely nothing i really wanted but everything i wanted to be around. and it was all that. it was everything. there were socks everywhere. and flannel pajama pants. sewing notions. baby clothes. suits. but the best part was mr. stewart. we walked in on the right side and a woman was working in the window. she said hello, asked if we needed anything, then left us to marvel at the place. we walked down the aisle, turned, walked along the back, then turned to walk the long aisle up to the front. and there he was behind one of those wood and glass counters. mr. stewart. he asked if we needed any help and we assured him we were just looking, so he started visiting. first of all, you should know that mr. stewart is not as old as the store, but they've certainly seen plenty of the same things. he's this side of ninety, but gaining on it. he offered to show us something we wouldn't expect. now, i was ready to expect just about anything in this place, but we followed him back to the end of the counter where he hunted around in the ancient boxes lined up on shelves behind the counter and finally produced some of the softest wool long underwear i'd ever snuggled up against. black, although he mentioned white as another option. folks prefer the black, he marveled. now, i am familiar with the concept of wool long underwear but shopping online you can't really touch the fabric so i didn't really know what i'd been missing. while i dug my hands into the wool he told us pretty much the history of wool long underwear and how he'd got a large order of the long pants and been selling them, only to find they didn't have a fly. evidently quite a problem for menfolk in this part of the country. so he called up the company and chatted with a nice customer service person and finally got someone a little higher up. he explained the fly issue and i guess now they're making the men's pants with a fly.

it's certainly a better story when you hear him tell it because he cracks himself up a few times and he has a wonderful laugh. he points to the boxes behind him on the shelves and tells us how a woman on a film crew offered to buy some from him for some movie. he offered her some he had upstairs in storage, free. they were making some sort of movie and wanted a set that looked like his store and i was at a loss as to why they hadn't asked to film in the store. it was already a set. it was everything they wanted, i'm betting. but he never heard anything more about the film and i wonder whatever happened to all those extra boxes.

so there's this magnificent storyteller running this tiny store in the middle of the mountains when every other retail business in this country is cowering and breathing shallow and he doesn't seem a bit ruffled. and he calls up these companies to place his orders on the phone. a real phone. land line. he talks to the folks who make the stuff he sells, puts his voice right in their ears. he knows the stuff he sells. he knows everything he has in the store and thinks we might like these long underwear even though he's still partial to the brand he carries that these soft wool things compete with. just how he is, he says. but he is right. i need wool long underwear just like these and will get a pair when we're back in a few weeks. the long sleeved ones. he wants to know if the sweetie needs a suit. guesses pretty close to the sweetie's size. i am absolutely sure that when the sweetie next needs a suit we should come here. we have to.

mr. stewart says he wishes he could find a way to charge for entertainment and i am hoping he doesn't because i am sure i will go broke if he does. i promise we will be back and although people always say that in stores i really mean it. there are things in there i need. mostly i need to listen to his stories. he tells about going to the mercantile next door as a child, how there were four stewarts and because stores sort of ran tabs there was always some confusion at the end of the month. he'd go and get fleischmann's yeast for his mom and they lady who worked there knew the right kind to send back with him but her brother, the other owner, never did. his stories turn to ash when i put them here on the page because i'm remembering them from one telling and he's remembering them from real life and a thousand tellings. he'd throw out names like my grandma used to, like we were supposed to know all these folks who were probably long dead before either of us were born and i found myself trying to map out the whole bunch. who knows who. who fits where. in a few weeks, i will go back. i will get my long underwear and a few more stories. try to wedge them in with the ones i heard today, see where they fit. i'm going to ask him about allen ginsberg. i understand he shopped there.

first frost

max woke up early. always always always he's up early but today was different. sure, it was still dark and sure he was whining, but today it was cold. not just chilly, but frost cold. the outside was hovering at thirty and the inside of the house, at least upstairs in the bedroom, was just about sixty. sixty is perfect for sleeping. it's a good snuggling temperature, especially if you have a down blanket or a wool blanket or a few dogs to scatter across the bed. perfect. so i put the covers over max's head and convinced him that snuggling down into the warmth was better than putting feet on what would likely be a pretty cold wood floor. especially since he is so low to the ground and his belly is pretty close to his feet. cold belly is awful. snuggle down, dog, snuggle down. and he did for a while. but by eight when the sun was fully up and crashing through the windows i had to admit that getting up was probably a good idea. the wood stove would be mostly ash and coals and the coals wouldn't keep things warm much longer.

we got up, me and the two small dogs, and walking down the stairs i recalled that during one of max's earlier whining sessions the sweetie miraculously awoke and went down to add logs to the fire. this would mean less work for me and that's always fine. so we went outside. the whole world was crisp, frosted, leafless. the small dogs were quick in their bathrooming and we hurried back inside to what appeared to be an almost empty stove, a stove with a thermometer that read just under 350 degrees. what had the sweetie done, i wondered. i worried there might be logs somewhere else, somewhere he, in his nearly asleep state, confused with the stove. no logs on the couch. no logs on the dog bed. no logs under the library table. but still, not much beyond a coal or two in the stove. i loaded the stove with new logs and went to feed the leaping hounds and open the downstairs shades, let in a little light. ten minutes later i was pretty proud of myself. there was a roaring fire and the thermometer read 450. not bad for just tossing in a few logs. not bad at all. i peeked into the iron kettle on top of the stove. bone dry. i filled it with water and a little eucalyptus and put it back on a stove that by now had hit 500 degrees. perfect, and in no time at all. i was starting to feel like some sort of fire queen. fierce. i sat in the rocker, reading, watching the flames get wilder and wilder, reflected in the glass of a bookcase.

that's about when i heard something that sounded like bacon sizzling and popcorn popping out of control right behind my left ear, right on the stove. i looked up to see a column of steam shooting out from the kettle spout and a bubbling fountain of boiling water spewing out at the same time. it was pretty in the way lots of scary things are pretty- fire, avalanches, tornadoes. i got up and saw tiny beads of water like clear ball bearings bouncing and rolling all across the top of the stove, a stove that was now reading just over 600 degrees. there are two hundred more degrees on the thermometer, so i wasn't worried, but the flames were different, a yellow that was almost white. very close to the color i'd like to paint the kitchen or the color the bible says jesus will be on his return, but not a color i'd seen inside the stove before. i managed to pour out some of the water in the kettle and settle that whole thing down and then i attempted to put another log on. i was on a roll. i opened the door and used the poker to wedge a log in. the blast of heat that hit me was much more physical than i'd expected. evidently it scared the log as well because the log leapt out of my hand and away from the poker and rolled its slightly singed self back out onto the hearth pad. this, i finally realize, is why we have a hearth pad. stupid log. whatever. my fire was still roaring. then i called the sweetie down from upstairs. i wanted him to see my magnificent fire skills.

the sweetie did not react quite the way i thought he should. he is not a worrier. he is not a panicker. he stood in front of the stove and watched the golden white flames very suddenly turn the glass window black. in a matter of real live seconds. and the flames kept getting wilder. and the sweetie was worried. he was not yet worried to the point of panic, but he was more worried than i recall him being when a plane we were in lost an engine and had to shift everything to manual power and make only left turns until we landed. he kept talking. that's how you know the sweetie is worried. he attempts to work out a situation entirely out loud, checking and rechecking everything over and over.

it wasn't the logs. every log we put on burned like the fires of hell. it wasn't the damper. we could turn it completely closed and the flames licked the glass and snarled out like monster claws if we opened the door. wait a minute. how would the stove have so much draw with the damper closed? how how how? recall a few entries back when the sweetie determined that he was powerful enough to open the stove's ashpan to help create draft? well, if you don't, he did. he did this against the advice of the nice men who installed the stove. against my advice. with the imagined blessing of my own father, the sweetie decided that this would be his signature fire starting move. even in his sleep, even at six in the morning, the sweetie was his james dean self, restarting a cold fire with the help of the open ashpan. however, when attempting this sort of thing, most folks keep the pan open a second or two. most people are awake when they attempt something like this. the sweetie, in his near-sleep state, wasn't able to get the latch completely fastened. the ashpan reopened.

so between six am and about eight thirty, we burned the equivalent of a day's worth of wood. we learned a little bit. the sweetie will never again get up at six am and be expected to do things. i will be in charge of all morning fire duties. the real truth, though, the clean, honest thing we now know for sure although i guess we always sort of knew it somewhere really, is that max sets the agenda. we do what we're told. we will never again upset max because evidently upsetting max upsets the natural balance of the world and draws us nearer armageddon. max is definitely opposed to this.

the great spangenhelm

a few weeks ago it was the original supernatural nephew's birthday. i called to see how things were going. he tells me he is eight and when i ask if he is sure he takes me very seriously and assures me he knows for a fact that he is eight. this night is to be the family party and because i will not be there, being halfway across the country on an edge while he is near the geographical middle, he tells me about the cake. because the cake is the centerpiece of any good birthday. his will be made by his grandmother, my own mother, who has already told me it is cooling and nearly ready. it is pineapple upside down cake. this is not what you'd expect an eight year old boy to request, and yet he has. this isn't so surprisng really, considering nobody in his family requests anything nearing a normal cake on their own special day. i generally choose blackberry cobbler.

because he is the original nephew we have spent the last eight years trying to come up with toys that are traumatic to his parents, completely age inappropriate and generally too fragile or too dangerous for a child. this is our job. we live very far away. we plot and plan and there are virtually no repercussions for our actions. we are more freewheeling than bob dylan. we spent several years supplying him with instruments from other countries. there was an exploration/survival kit we put together from an army navy store and strange websites. there was something once i think involving science and exploding. and, of course, extreme chocolatification. it is not because we are fancy. it is partly because we envision the child playing with these things and being delighted, but there is a good part of it, an ugly, unkind part, that involves images of my sister and brother in law suffering as a small child attempts to learn an instrument taller than he is. there is an evil streak in us both.

but once a child gets to be eight, things get tough for a scheming aunt and uncle. there are video games. there are movies. there are action figures, computers, ipods, things to plug the child into. and a person who gets one or two sightings a year of a child can be overwhelmed. but his local aunt mentioned knights and dragons. he seems to like them. so the sweetie and i sat at separate computers, poring over suits of armor and chain mail. you would be surprised how expensive those things are. and because really good chain mail sized for a child comes primarily from great britain, the shipping is nearly the price again of the mail. we were discouraged but we pressed on. there had to be something out there we could find besides a single gauntlet that wasn't five million dollars.

and then, as i was just about to throw in the towel, it blazed across my screen. the great spangenhelm. a medieval closed face helmet. it is terrifying. rivets all across the head and evil looking slices where the eyes will, no doubt, peer out ruthlessly. over the nose and mouth are little t shaped cuts for ventilation, i suppose. so he'll be able to breathe. it is awful. it is fifteen inches tall from crown to chin. he will need a pillow on top of his head so he can wear it. he will need two or maybe three pillows. it is the most perfect thing i've seen. i would like to buy ten or twelve to have on hand, the way my mom does with cards, for when we're caught unawares and in need of a gift. who wouldn't be able to use a great spangenhelm? but we order just the one for now, although i do bookmark the website for future use.

it arrived at the grandparents' a few days ago and tonight he will stop by and get the monstrous thing. i wanted him to have it the minute we decided to get it, but the world does not yet bend entirely to my will. while waiting, i imagined how it would look on him. the helmet will be big- big enough around to slide down over his shoulders so that the lower edge will likely rest somewhere against his chest, hopefully just above his elbows so he can wave his arms and look even more menacing. until he gets his pillows, he will probably be breathing out of one of those terrifying eye holes. he will not be able to see a thing. i am almost completely sure this will not seem like a drawback to any of the eight year olds he knows, but i have asked his grandmother to whip up a head extending pillow to lift the helmet a bit so he will not slam into a wall or moat or ride his trusty steed off a cliff of some sort. i cannot wait to see him in all his knightly glory. truly, he is the rightful wearer of the great spangenhelm.

towel rack

yeah, that's right. this is a whole blog entry on a towel rack and there's nothing you can do about it and don't think you need to share any opinion on how bare the walls are in the photos. getting things framed isn't as easy as it used to be. you don't think it's such a good idea, a whole entry on a towel rack, but that's because the towel rack in your house is boring. you probably didn't choose it yourself and if you did, you chose from three or four different racks in home depot or something and your choice was more about what would match something else in the room or what was the right size. you didn't choose any sort of gloriousness. you wish you could. this sort of choice is rare in the realm of towel racks. there's no plastic.

we have a bathroom on the second floor of an old bungalow and it lives up under the eave of the house, so that half of the room is really just for show, not usable, because the roof slopes down and there's no standing in that part. floor space, sure, but not for walking around on. because the people who made choices about the large fixtures (bath tub, sink, toilet) in the bathroom put them up against the taller walls so folks wouldn't have to hunch over while taking a shower or bump their heads every time they need to pee, there's not much space for hanging towels. not much at all. in fact, the folks who put all that other stuff in just left a crappy towel rack in plastic under the sink. they didn't know where to put it, either.

this got me thinking. i remember those metal swing arm towel racks for dishtowels in kitchens. i liked those things as a kid and wouldn't mind having one in my kitchen now but they're hard to come by. paper towels and all. still, a person can dream. so i imagined kitchens with cheerfully draped dish towels near sunny kitchen sinks. i did. and one day the sweetie and i were wandering around an antique store after a very sassy lunch at brooks' bbq and he said, "there's that thing you keep talking about!" i married him for his articulateness, his skill with language. so i stared right at where he was pointing and saw nothing that looked like i'd been talking about it. ribs. some sort of horribly misshapen wooden umbrella. i had no idea what he was trying to point out. "the towel thing," he said and reached out to touch it. and he was right. but it wasn't the little metal swing arm towel rack i'd dreamed of sharing my sunny kitchen with. it was an ancient thing. a dinosaur of towel drying. all wooden except for the seven hooks and seven eyes. a towel rack, indeed, but for bath towels. not like any other towel rack i'd ever seen in anyone's house. not at all. i wanted it. i wanted it more than anyone should want an implement of bath towel drying. i really did. but we left the shop without it. there was a bit of mold on the backing and i am not about to bring mold into a house on purpose. besides, i felt like my overwhelming desire to have the thing might be clouding my judgment.

then, this weekend, we were back up that way mostly because i couldn't stop talking about the towel rack. do you think i could fix it? could i clean the mold off? maybe i could sand it down and then use it. the sweetie got sick of this i suppose and simply drove the thirty or so miles up to the shop and we bought it, along with a workbook on space. we got it home and the sweetie suggested sanding. i got a sanding block and started. goodbye mold. goodbye paint. underneath the old white paint there was something that looked like pepto bismol. pinky pink. i kept sanding until all the mold was gone. i wasn't sure. we bought paint. yellow. number 2 pencil is the exact color. a good color for a teacher. and i was ready to paint and the sweetie came out and said, "that looks nice." what? no paint? no. he thought it looked perfect. just right. those shabby chic folks should hire me. i can make something look ancient in ten minutes.

so we got everything smoothed and ready and put it in the bathroom. it's simple, really. a flat bit of wood with another bit of wood perpendicular. seven little hooks hang from the underside of the second bit of wood like tiny bats. a rod sits just below with seven long slats, the smoothest wood in the world, each with an eye at the top. and you pull up one of the slats and loop the eye over the hook and you have a place to dry your towel. you can do this six more times. and it looks like a carnival or a church or something. which is why this is a whole entry on one towel rack. and why, although i rarely brag about things i own, i am pleased to say that my towel rack is the best in the world and you are currently at least slightly jealous, even if you don't yet feel it.

root words, latin and greek

if you went to high school in carl junction, missouri in the eighties, you sat in a classroom with mike lawson. you probably would have stumbled upon him first as a tenth grader in a biology class. then, you'd see him again the next year for the spectacularly creatively named biology 2. and if you played your cards right, your senior year would include an anatomy and physiology class with the very longsuffering man.

now, here's the thing. even to the untrained eye of a tenth grader, this guy was not really a high school teacher. he would let you know early that your course textbook was the same one colleges use. you'd feel smarter immediately. you'd learn an incredible amount about biology and an even greater amount about the way the world is organized and the way your brain, and good notes, should be organized. you would learn to think and if you were already doing a bit of this, you'd begin to think with an eye toward a larger picture of things. you would begin to see connections. that seemed to be a big issue with this guy, getting students to put things together. sure there were things to memorize, but if you weren't thinking, you'd certainly have an ugly time in those classes. the memorizing wasn't the first thing he pushed.

except for root words. latin root words. mike lawson would tell you you couldn't even think about biology if you didn't know a little something about the language used to set it all down in the first place. so he'd give you a big pile of these latin root words, and maybe a bit of greek, explain a few at a time, and expect you to know them somewhere later on a test. and you probably moaned and groaned about it, about memorization in a class where you really weren't used to using your time for that. but the thing is, if you started looking at these words, you'd see them right there in the biology like he said. and all over the anatomy and physiology. and if you could figure out that hepat meant liver, you'd know forever where the hepatic artery was going. forever, i tell you.

so twenty five years after shoving those first root words in my head, i'm playing a vocabulary game with a fellow teacher and an artist. yes, this really is how i spend my time. the teacher sends us words via email and we're supposed to know them or feel incredible shame. and i know a great deal of them, but the artist, who is of a peculiar artistic temperament, shrugs them off, says they're too easy. i suspect he doesn't exactly live by a code of honor. he looks them up, pretends to know them all. so the teacher, a math teacher, has come up with a new source for words. something to challenge this whining artist. science words. biology words. here are a few for you to swoon over.

haematothermal was his first choice. a nice first choice. like seeing two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and knowing they're going to fit together. haem (or hem) is going to be blood or something dealing with it. like hematoma. and thermal is just warm. thermal underwear. warm blooded. i suggested hot blooded as well because i thought it was funny. math teachers do not always get word humor. evidently artists don't get any humor at all.

dactylitis was the next word to come along. another perfect word. dactyl. fingers. like pterodactyl. wing fingers. and itis. swelling. inflammation. an inflammation of the fingers. how do you know? he says, this math teacher who snarls about the words i'm always dragging around. how, indeed? mike lawson, i tell him. how else?

and then yesterday the sweetie was reading an article about little brown bats because the poor things have been having a hard time around here, dying from some odd disease when they live in mines. it is beginning to look like something we might have done, humans, and folks are writing about it from time to time. and he's reading the name of the bats. myotis lucifugus. he wants to name something that. a dog. a child if someone should accidentally leave one on the doorstep. and i say it's a great name for a bat, a really fine name. i'm not sure about myotis, although otis may have to do with ears, and looking it up i find it means "mouse ear". but it's lucifugus that crawls easily from right in the middle of my brain. i know it the same way i know family i see once in a while. not often enough, but often enough to recall with my whole self. those bits of words have been in my head for a long time. one who flees from light. lux or lucis is all light and gives us lucifer, the morning star, bringer of light. from fugus we get fugue and fugitive. to flee. a little mouse eared critter who flees from the light. absolutely. and the sweetie is astonished about the whole lucifugus thing. he has shared a life with me for a long time. more than ten years. and still he asks, how do you know? and i tell him what i told the math teacher. mike lawson. root words. latin and greek.

so if you grew up in carl junction in the eighties and you went to high school in that same place, you probably drag these things around with you every day and they slip out, escape into the world, not all at once, not all the time, but once in a while, a penny falling from your pocket, a flower in a field of grain. and people marvel at all those words of yours. you will try to explain it once in a while that you are one of many, not a lone accident, about mike lawson and those words, latin and greek, and how you looked at them on the page over and over and then one day they came out of you like water from a fountain. but folks will just look at you funny. and that's just fine. they are simply sick with desire for those words. not even that. for the ability to think of them without even trying, to keep them. they don't even really want to use them. they just want to be able to use them if they wanted. but they can't if they didn't grow up where you grew up when you grew up there and it makes them a little meaner. you can, though, have those words any time you want because they are yours. and you should probably tell mike lawson thanks for that.

reading

http://blog.syracuse.com/shelflife/2008/09/in_memoriam_16.html

a friend emailed me a few days ago with some kind words about something i'd written, something about an author who died recently. in his email he sent me a link to a small story about a writer i think of as maybe the finest poet our country has, about how he has finished writing. i didn't plan to write so much about folks dying, but i can't control the fact that they do. the women in my family would tell you it happens in threes. clusters. i suppose that's just how our minds work, clumping things together to make meaning, but still, it feels painfully unfair for two people like these to leave so close together. and i want to write a little something here because although mostly i've said my piece about this poet, i suppose i want to say a little more.

hayden carruth was 87 when he died this week. that's a pretty good age, i think, and i'm pretty sure he thought so, too, although most folks wouldn't say no to a little more time. the paper said he'd been having strokes for a while and although none of that is really my business, i read it and wondered how he felt. a mind like his having little fits, smashing bits of itself out of spite or fear or whatever it is that causes a brain to go that way. for most folks strokes cause a flaking off of things. memories. abilities. ways to connect one part of the world to another. some can read but not write. think but not speak. and for someone who spent a good part of his life crammed full of words, i would imagine that might feel like dissolving. i would be petulant. i would whine. i would give in and up.

but there in the paper- the online version of it anyway which is at the top of this post- was a little video of hayden reading one of those poems i love so much. "ray". it is a long time since i'd heard him read and according to the paper it was his last reading. there he was on a stage. wheelchair. something helping him sip at the air, turning him to darth vader. someone finding and turning pages for him, putting the book under a contraption that allowed him to read the words, his words. and he read those words just the way it sounds in my head. you can hear how much one person can love another person right there in all those words. you can really hear it like a thick hum going through the whole thing. and then at the end he tells this little story. it's just some funniness about ray, about how clumsy he always was and it just about broke my heart to hear it because i can't imagine many things better than hearing ray tell hayden almost anything and hearing hayden answer back. anything. really.

but what i like about the story he tells is this. i wanted to meet ray carver a long time ago. i wanted to tell him how his own words had done more to shape how i think about writing than anyone else i could think of, but he was gone before i could get my courage up. and i always imagined him a certain way. i wanted him to be a good man. it wouldn't matter, really, because his writing is good no matter what, and it's not fair for me to want something like that or expect it, but i did. and then there's hayden carruth telling everyone who can hear him that ray carver was exactly this kind of man. just exactly. and if you can't tell from hayden carruth's poems what kind of man he himself was, you sure can tell from this little video. you know exactly who he is.