the rest

it is important to start by saying we arrived on time. this is important because by the end you won't think it was possible. but it was. at least, as far as i can tell. we left early tuesday morning. the road was clear and the pennsylvania part of the trip and most of the ohio part flew by, just tunnels and bridges blurring into one another. kittatinny. tuscarora. allegheny. muskingum. mountains shrouded in fog. rest stops with tall trees. and then we got to dayton. dayton is an ohio town maybe 25 or so miles from the border with indiana. dayton evidently has no police force, no support from highway patrol, no foul weather plan and no sense at all, collectively speaking. dayton also has ice. or at least on 23rd december there was ice to be had all over the dayton sections of highway 70. our trip through dayton took about three hours. here's what we think may have happened.

a. a semi spun out of control on the treacherous ice, flipped over, skidded across all three lanes, burst into flames and also spilled its entire contents (probably lima beans or kale) all over the highway.

b. traffic was slowed by a flock of crossing ducks. the unmoving tires slowly froze to the accumulating ice on the highway. everyone ended up frozen in place.

c. every semi ever made was on the road attempting to deliver whatever wherever before the holiday. tired drivers simply pulled over on the side of the road to sleep. the process of pulling a vehicle that large to the side of the road and parking can seriously delay traffic. multiply the single truck by hundreds and you have a two lane parking lot stretching about a hundred miles.

in the end, we're pretty sure it was c.

we continued unimpeded until we hit the the western outskirts of indianapolis where the rain/sleet/ice began to get serious. it started gentle and stayed gentle, but ice is ice and even a tiny little whisper of it can send a whole bunch of people spinning and skidding through the late afternoon, so think drama. think off in a ditch the day before christmas eve. i get nervous in this sort of weather, which means i abandon my navigating duties for the great responsibility of pointing out in the most unhelpful way any small motion i think might cause us harm. it turns out i am wrong about most of them but the sweetie takes them all as seriously as he can, considering he's already driving very slowly among very large vehicles on a smooth sheet of ice.

only a few minutes into the drama of the western indiana ice debacle, just south of plainfield, i panic about a giant milk tanker in our lane, two cars ahead of us. it is swerving. no, it is trying to get from the left to the middle of three lanes. the cab does exactly what the driver wants. traffic crawls along at about fifteen and the driver edges over into a space just larger than his truck. but the tanker part keeps going. it swings out like a pendulum into the miraculously empty right lane and as quickly as it does this, it swings neatly back into place behind the cab in the middle lane. it is so impressive i have to stop worrying and work on being awed. we now know exactly how slick the roads are, but i am not thinking about this. i am thinking about the driver of the milk truck and how it must have felt to see that tanker slip neatly into place in his rearview mirror.

several hours later we are about four or five miles from the site of the milk truck show and it is dark. i know i exaggerate from time to time, but this time i'm not. we left indianapolis around five and at nine, we were about twenty five miles down the road near a tiny place called joppa. the ice continued. trucks began pulling over. people got out of cars and stood on the icy road. others shut off engines and lights, conserving fuel. at around 12:30 or one, we managed to creep up to the cloverdale exit and highway 231. we convince ourselves there must be an accident of some sort and if we could just take a local road around it, we could get as far as terre haute. this is a small town nowhere near our st. louis destination, but large enough to have a hotel or two. so we drove slowly up the few miles of icy local road to the intersection with 40, a road that parallels the highway for quite some time. we stopped at the gas station where the sweetie bought a moldy breakfast burrito and we found out our beloved only hope was closed. shut down. iced up. so we drove back down to the cloverleaf and headed toward the cluster of hotels and motels on the other side. we couldn't get up to two of them because semis were parked in the entrance several deep, blocking everything. logjam. we decided to stop at mcdonald's for coffee and it took us some time to realize that mcdonald's was closed. all the cars and trucks in the lot were full of people sleeping, blanketless, shivering. we drove to the other hotels. there was a woman in a santa hat outside one hotel waving people on. no room at the inn. she cheerfully promised that terre haute, only 40 miles away, would be brimming with sleeping opportunities.

back to the cloverleaf and then toward the highway and this is when we saw them. the trucks. parked all along the on and off ramps, all along both sides of the westbound highway. sleeping. stopped. none of this looked very safe, especially those on the slick and curving ramps, and my worrying kicked in. they were mostly trucks, but people in cars, too, sat perched on the edges of embankments. we kept driving. we couldn't have pulled over if we'd wanted. there wasn't any room so we drove down a corridor of darkened hulks. fedex. midwest express. j.b. hunt. england. knight. but as we continued west the traffic thinned. all trucks seemed to be off the road. the ice turned to something slushy and the sweetie pushed the car up to 30mph, then 40. we'd set ourselves on the road sometime around 5am and as we saw our first signs for terre haute, i looked at the clock. nearing 2am.

we pulled into terre haute just before three and found a hotel in the parking lot of the local mall. that's right. my first sight later that morning as i drew back the curtain was sears, then toys r us. i sat in the car with the dogs while the sweetie negotiated with the night clerk. only a few rooms left. smoking. fine. we hauled shivering dogs and a bag or two through cold rainish stuff up to a room that was not just inhabited by a smoker, but a chainsmoker with cheap taste in cigarettes and a shaky hand. there was something black splashed in the sink and smeared, fingerprinty, on the white bathroom door. there were burn holes in everything. the blankets were the texture of old shower curtains. still, we slept. from three to just about dawn, which is in the neighborhood of seven am. we did not shower because there were no towels and because we didn't want to be barefoot anywhere in the room. the dogs weren't allowed off the bed. on the way out i recognized the black goo in the sink. hair dye. curious. unsettling. mysterious. the room of a criminal.

but we were back out on the road with the sun which we promptly lost in a very aggressive fog. because ice by itself isn't enough. as we continued west through illinois shapes materialized in the mist. broken cars scattered all along the roadside and median. a truck or two folded in, hordes of tiny cars with huge trailers, one or the other upturned but never both. soggy clothes and torn luggage whizzed past us on the ground. people's holidays smeared all over the half-frozen filth on the roadside. the further we went, the more there were of all these. farm after farm passed us. barns and silos and blond fields behind barbed wire.

the fog softened enough that we could see the top of the arch long before st. louis rolled into view. we crossed the biggest river in the whole country and followed a highway that snaked past old brick factories and stout brick houses, out into the hills of missouri. christmas eve. nearly lunchtime. billboards promising fireworks, adult books, the wrath of god.

storm

word problem: if a northbound subaru leaves bensonhurst, brooklyn at 12:30pm driving 20 mph and an eastbound snowstorm leaves pennsylvania at 8am at an undetermined speed, where will the inhabitants of the subaru spend the night?

a. snuggled up by the fire with the small dogs in their very own home in arkville.
b. eating burger king food that was accidentally doused with an entire coke in a motel six just off the highway in new paltz, ny.
c. sitting backward along the side of the snowy road with a few dozen other folks who don't understand that antilock brakes don't make a person impervious to ice.

the answer is b.

we headed up to be sure the pipes weren't frozen (they weren't) and to pick up a christmas gift for someone we'd had shipped to our p.o. box. the nearly five hours it took us to get 88 miles, max cried even more loudly than usual. the only thing he hates more than a car speeding down the highway is a car inching down the highway. you can imagine what his piercing wail added to the icy roads, blinding snow and drivers who seemed unaware of the limits of their precious vehicles. the further north we got, the more we saw folks off in the ditches, stranded on medians, spun around. we never saw it happen once, but the conditions of the cars and of the occupants inside suggested that the slowness of the traffic and deepness of the snow around the highways made for a very bumper car like experience, a soft, slow spinning so that the car would come to rest with a slight tap against snow. we saw nobody slammed into trees or guardrails. just nestled into the piles of snow their cars plowed up as they ran off.

we stopped when it got dark, which on the next to shortest day of the year is some time after four and some time before five. turns out new paltz is hosting some sort of college graduation and there's not much room at the inn. the sweetie managed to snag the last nonsmoking room in the place. for those of you who don't know, nonsmoking in a chain hotel means nobody has smoked there this week except mabye the staff. in addition to nonsmoking, the room turned out to be nondog. fortunately, other patrons, stranded folks like ourselves or the happy parents of graduating college students, found our two small beasts charming.

we hit the road again early saturday morning, expecting it to be clear. expecting often brings disappointment. the 40 mile trip from the highway to the house is a scenic "highway" of two lanes that skirts the northern edge of the ashokan reservoir and then meanders through a valley carved by the esopus creek and then, near big indian, the highway follows birch creek northish through places like giggle hollow and cathedral glen. it climbs up over a mountain and then catches the trail of emory brook and bush kill. you only have to follow it as far as where dry brook, binnekill and the east branch delaware all snarl around together and carve out a little spot for the tiny towns of arkville and margaretville. and this is all a very pretty trip when the roads are clear, but on saturday morning after a friday afternoon snow hurricane, the roads look just like the surrounding countryside. silent. lovely. impassible. we did stop briefly at the beginning of this leg of the trip to get gas and fluid for the wipers. in the just before light part of the morning two guys in a truck pulled up next to us. they had hunter-type stickers affixed to the vehicle and when the driver, a man in his late fifties, got out, some sort of vampire keyboard opera seeped out behind him. i could see the other guy inside, poring over images on his laptop, rocking out to this stuff. the driver began to pump gas but opened the door again to talk to laptop guy. this time we were hit with strains of innagaddadavida. but live and not by iron butterfly. this, i think, is how deerslayers get themselves ready for the contest, at least up here. we get our gas and head back to the road.

we are encouraged by the snow plow we see in front of us and we trudge on. turns out we saw maybe fifty or so snow plows on 28 during our 40 miles, but only in the last ten or so of those miles did we see any of them plowing. the others tooled along cheerfully enough. some seemed to be spilling cinders or sand or salt, whatever folks use up here. but the plows seemed purely ornamental. this had us worried. we have a fairly long driveway with a bit of an uphill slope and everyone was imagining different versions of us getting stuck at the foot of the driveway, the hatchback end of the car jutting out into traffic, visible but unavoidable in this sort of weather. but as we neared the house we could see the driveway was the clearest part of our trip. sometime before our own arrival at 7am, someone had plowed it for us. and we drove right up to the garage uneventfully.

our time here yesterday and today has consisted mostly of lying around, reading, knitting, drinking hot chocolate and being snuggled by dogs. so you can only begin to imagine our horror when we woke up this morning to even more snow. that's right. trapped. not trapped in the house. every vehicle larger than ours has a plow on the front of it and town is accessible. town being the mile of highway 28 that holds two pizza places, an antiques place, a grocery store, three liquor stores, two laundromats and a fitness center. so we've got all that. but we're cut off from the larger world. blowing snow. drifting snow. travel advisories.

what to do? we'll try leaving monday. but today i am making myself a new hat with ear flaps. the sweetie is reading and napping with max. guthrie spends much of his time on the hearth, right in front of the fire, gently licking the logs waiting to go in. we will have hot chocolate in many forms. sometimes there will be cinnamon. sometimes there will be peeps floating on top. maybe there will even be a little bourbon in the chocolate. there are hot foods of all sorts in the pantry. soups. chili. oatmeal. twenty opportunities for tea. coffee in decaf and not. we stopped by to see the parrot in the auto parts store and didn't even mind that they didn't have our windshield wipers. i have sent off lesson plans for my classes tomorrow. nobody will use them, but as long as i send them, nobody will yell at me, either. we will listen to johnny cash. the sweetie will work on some top secret project that involves tools i never use. the snow will snow some more tomorrow but it will be clear in brookln and we will head back to where snow is gray and brown and has sharp things in it. i will wear my new hat. the roads will be clear. but for now we are in the middle of a snowstorm and there are few things more satisfying than being warm and dry and near to good food and company when the weather outside is warning-worthy.

hard boiled egg

the first time i had a real bagel was in new orleans. i was 23 or so and my housemate at the time ordered them from h&h bagels in nyc because, well, bagels in new orleans in 1992 were sort of questionable and she was a bagel snob. i learned, over time, to be snobby about a few things myself. beer. chocolate. wool. bagels. there's no point in eating bagels that taste like paste or look like english muffins. so i am fortunate that right now here in brooklyn, in bensonhurst, under the rumbling elevated d train, there is a tiny bagel place barely large enough for a line of four people where the folks there not only make spectacular bagels, but also remember my sporadic visits well enough to know what i order. cinnamon raisin bagel with honey walnut cream cheese. and these folks do not have a light hand with the cream cheese. it is the sort of place where if you ask them to scoop out the inside of the bagel (people i work with do things like this. grow up!) you would be greeted with a snort and would take home a mangled bagel. what? i eat them once a month at most, so don't you worry about it. a good bagel is insulted if you don't put a fat slab of cream cheese on it. who am i to insult a good bagel?

it's one of those places where in the winter the windows are all steamed up because they actually make the bagels right there and when i go in my glasses fog up to match. it is lit with reds and has plenty of hand written signs promising things like "home made soup for lunch" and "yes, we have flagels" (they're flat bagels, if you'e wondering). but today, a friday in the middle of december, when i arrived at 7am to give myself this little gift i find for the first time in five years that i'm the only person in the store. the guy remembered my order and while he made my tea i looked at the counter in front of me. it's a small space, just barely wider than my own shoulders. when i face it, to my left is the cash register and to the right, the bakery case full of muffins and little tiny baby bagels. but today there was something new on the counter. a stainless steel bowl, just like the largest of a nested set i have at home, sat snuggled up next to the cash register. in it were eggs. hard boiled eggs, according to the sign. more than a dozen hard boiled eggs for sale. at 7am.

now generally that many hard boiled eggs go right to deviled eggs or egg salad. i've never seen a bowl of them, shells on and intact, sitting around. they seemed somehow magical. i wanted to buy one or two but the guy had already totaled my order and put the bagel on top of the tea in the little brown bag. i took the bag in my mittened hand and looked one more time at the eggs. there has to be a reason. some holiday secret like black eyed peas that someone neglected to tell me. i know there are hard boiled eggs all over hanukkah celebrations but they've always seemed to be part of something else, an ingredient. they're not candy bars sitting on a coutner for a last minute impulse buy. a bowl of plain, naked hard boiled eggs in a bagel shop doesn't seem like part of that. not like gelt. not like latkes. but they are beautiful sitting there and although i don't really care much for them, i find myself thinking about how one would taste right now.

sleeping dogs and jim

sometimes the world gets ridiculous. knife wielding children, murderous garbage trucks, drug dealing maniacs, students without homework, blustery weather. dog candy won't fix any of that, but look at it anyway.








max stands guard while jim naps. max has a loose interpretation of "stand".













extreme napping after a long day asleep in the car













max dreams of flying.














max and guthrie fall asleep while watching tv.











plaid, stripes, more stripes, cat, dog. harmony.














max snores with his eyes open.


















dogpile with cat

precious baby

during second period the classroom phone rang. the dean's office had one of my precious babies and planned to keep him for a two day suspension. could i send down some work the phone voice asks. now, earlier, yesterday, i saw kids peering out a window in the stairwell, muttering about an arrest and as i tried to get past them i yelled, "let that poor man get arrested in peace!" a few hours later a teacher pulled me aside to let me know the arrested man was actually one of my precious babies, a past one, one i dearly love, one who has been all but lost for a very, very long time. according to what i could decipher, my old precious baby was in the process of handing one of my new precious babies something. a sharp thing, pointy. not likely to be confused with any other things. not easily confused with gum or money or even a cheeseburger. so my old baby is, as far as i know, locked up somewhere and the new one stews in the dean's office.

when my second class shows up with the two other adults who attempt to wrangle them with me, i gather up a notebook, pen and all my snarling anger and head to the dean's office. it is just after 10 am on friday. one of the deans is standing in the doorway. a girl is sitting at a desk. my own precious baby looks tiny in his desk sitting centered at the back of the room. i am tired. i want to adopt him, take him home, feed him food that isn't primarily dorito-based. i want to yell at him until he cries and says he'll never do anything this stupid again, but i know i don't even know where to start. what i do know is he has a parole officer and that holding this sharp, shiny object for someone is stupid because it violates his parole. it is stupid because he knows this.

i ask why he is sitting in the dean's room and he tells his version of the story, a version that ends with the phrase "i didn't do nothing wrong." i surprise both of us by saying a very long string of words he's never heard me say, ending with "that is absolute bullshit!" he is mad. maybe he is hurt. but he knows i am right. "i don't want to talk about it!" he yells at me, pulling his hood over his head and slamming himself face down onto the desk. turtle in a shell. all pulled in. i want to shake him. i want to scream. what i do instead is reach up to the top of his head and pull his hood back as gently as i can. i tell him to quit being so ridiculous but i can feel my eyes getting liquid and i think he must be able to hear it in my voice because he looks up, wary but curious. he is a child who had done grown up things, cruel and stupid and selfish things. destructive things. but when he looks up he is trying to keep his angry face together and the fact that he's trying so hard makes him look even more like a small, small child.

i ask what he was thinking. he says he didn't know. i spend at least five minutes making fun of this because i don't know what else to do. i tell him i need to hear him say he knew what he was doing, knew that it was stupid. because if he didn't, i worry he'll do it again. he does not want to say that he knew what he was doing. "i'm retarded!" he says, instead, by way of explanation. he says it without all the letters- "retaaaaatad". i realize he's never read the word, only heard adults say it and this is why so many of the kids in my school can't spell. they're spelling words that only exist in their own homes. i insist that he's not retarded, try to explain retardation, but he persists. it's better to be stupid than guilty. i tell him i'll prove it. i go to the office and get his file. i read to him what teachers say. he's bright but angry. he's really good at math. he smiles. he knows he's good at math. this is why i am here. this child who had this sharp, pointy object that he brought right here into my school is really the little boy i know he is. he's proud of the fact that he's good at math. i keep reading because he asks me to. he wants to know. he's not retarded.

i make him get out two sheets of paper. at the top of one he writes "i am not retarded because..." we start making a list. he is good at math. he does all his work in my class. he has excellent social skills. and so on. the second sheet is where i ask him to write something for me. something that will help me not worry about this precious little baby of mine getting stabbed or shot or otherwise demolished. i do not know what he will write, but i will read it monday. i tell him as i get ready to leave that if this page is good it will make up for everything he'll miss the two days he's out. he nods. i tell him if he gets stabbed or shot, he gets no credit. he smiles. i mean it, i tell him. you think i will feel bad and will give you the credit if something happens to you and although it is true that i will feel bad and i will cry, i won't give you anything. he knows this is true just like i know this isn't the last fight we'll have over sharp things and criminal behavior.

travel

yesterday i was walking down bay parkway the way i usually go, along the cemetery toward the f train. you have heard about this walk before, how this stretch along the cemetery is lined with impounded vehicles and resting long-haul trucks, how i see the truck drivers too often using the sidewalk as a toilet, how there are old buses sitting there too long to be impounds. one of these buses is an old charter, the kind with seats that look like the carpet in cheap atlantic city casinos, a blue that exists only in polyester and is flecked with reds and yellows and purples. a pattern probably listed as "skyburst" in a catalog in 1983. i have walked past it plenty of times, just like i've walked past an odd truck offering palm readings sitting in front of it.

but i wasn't paying any special sort of attention to the bus as i walked home. i was far more focused on the sky, storm-colored and low and the air, warm and rain smelling the way spring sometimes lets the air smell. not winter at all. not even fall. i was taking off my hat, unwrapping my scarf. 51 degrees. i noticed it without really registering it. there are things we take into our heads all the time without stopping to hold them up and look at them and only when something irritates our brain like sand in an oyster do we actually use our whole selves to look. and something was sand in my brain. sharp. jagged. one, two, three, four roundish holes in the windshield denting in the glass and the spiderwebs spreading around each hole ran into one another, overlapping rings, sharp ripples. gunshots. i do not know enough about gunshots to say for sure what sort of bullets were here earlier in the day, but i do know enough about glass to think that a bb gun or something only slightly more angry had been involved. the sort of guns my students insist they could use today are not as plentiful as they think and certainly weren't used to mutilate this poor bus. or put it out of its misery.

as i came abreast of the bus, i could see the passenger entry door had been shot up, too. the windows along the side were in various stages of destruction. the glass, clear every other day i've walked by it, was the color of a robin's egg. this color change happens to the sort of glass that crumbles when broken only, not to the kind that makes angry shards. two windows had been shot up and then, maybe, kicked in. the rubber seals around the windows were hanging partly off the metal and sticking to clumps of glass which had cracked like ice and scattered that pretty blue and concentrated it all at the same time. soft blue.

some days are like that, full of quiet all day and then a pile of bulletholes just sneaks right up on you. this morning, not much past 6:30 i walked to the train station and there was the guy who sells papers. this station is not my regular one so maybe he's the regular guy and maybe he isn't. what's important is that he had this huge case. like a suitcase sort of but rounded and squarish, a yellow that promised it came from 1972. you could put something larger than a french horn in there if you needed to but he had the thing filled with candy bars. the little bite size ones. it was sitting on a rack of some sort or maybe a chair, like luggage on one of those stands in hotel rooms. he raked his hands over the candy bars, smoothing out the shiny surface, like moving is hands through rubies or sapphires.

just a bit later i was waiting for the q train. the promise of rain was keeping the sky dark, still night, keeping platform lights on. the train rolled up and the doors opened. everything inside bright and orangy and warm and dry. orange seats. metal poles. bright, bright. and there in one of the short corner seats sat a tiny person. i'm going to say she was a woman because of her size and because of the sheet. a cream colored sheet, soft flannel with clusters of roses scattered over it. rosebuds mostly, but a few open blooms. the sheet was draped over her, over all of her. it was a sheet like one i remember from childhood. it was tucked in all around her, at her sides, under her feet, behind her head. like a gift, a package with a surprise in it, human, live. the assumption here is that this tiny woman was alive, asleep, had covered her own self up. nobody would cover the dead like that, tucked in tightly all around.

a kid on the train yelled, "who is learning chinese in a spanish class?" people got on the train. people got off. there were conversations and phone calls. people read books. i took out my knitting. yarn the color of rosebuds.

pork chop

union square park is a small but active park in the middle of the lower part of manhattan. it sits on top of a collection of most of the trains in the city and is surrounded by tall buildings from a variety of eras and architectural passions. within the park, abraham lincoln stands near the northern end near a restaurant of confusing hours and focus. gandhi with his walking stick strides through the southern end of the park, often draped with flowers. the southern end of this park, near gandhi, facing whole foods market and filene's basement and dsw is where demonstrations and protests of all kinds flower. in warm weather folks sit along wide steps and drum circles appear out of nowhere. union square park is the home, north of lincoln and the restaurant, of a vast (for manhattan) paved expanse where the farm market lives. under the feet of market patrons someone has painted two huge vines, separate from one another, curling in large snailing circles. they are for running around, according to the instructions. i don't really know.

but right now the vines are ruptured and the farm market scooted toward the side of the park while construction is going on. nobody seems to know what on earth might be happening on a stretch of flat, paved ground the size of a small parking lot, but the fences are up and large machines are living inside. it will probably take all winter to find out. the farm market doesn't seem to mind being squeezed over. the strawberry vendors and flower vendors and tomato folks are all gone back to their farms anyway leaving only honey people and wine people and cheese people and the guys selling fir trees and wreaths.

the sweetie and i were in the park last week, wandering aimlessly through the holiday market, a seasonal open air market made up of aisles of red and white striped tents full of arts and crafts and other mysterious necessities. you can find handmade soaps, candles and bags. there are stalls where any item in the world can be plastered with the empire state building or the brooklyn bridge. lots of folks sell handmade jewelry and there are hats and scarves of every imaginable shape and kind. unusual toys are sprinkled in there- chirping frogs. marionettes. boxing nuns. it is a bit like going to a mall for hippies. hippies with trust funds. but the things are pretty and unusual so we try to stop by once a year and smile at the vendors and ask questions about items made entirely from recycled soda bottles or bamboo.

the sweetie and i finally staggered from the brightly lit circus into the dingy streetlight at evening grayness of the rest of the park. out of the shadows stepped a man in a hooded jacket with one outstretched hand waving toward passers-by. he was not begging or mugging or any of the other things folks leaping out of the darkness with waving arms are generally planning. he was offering samples. he stood near a sign promising some mighty fine bacon and his bare hand was draped with a white paper towel. sitting on top of the paper towel were small squares completely indecipherable in the dark. "pork chop?" he said as he held out his hand. nobody took any. my own belly was feeling a little off so i declined as well. later, though, i regretted it. because it is a good idea to collect stories like that. when else will i get the chance to say "some stranger in a park gave me a piece of pork chop he was carrying around in his hand and i ate it. it was good"? that sort of thing only comes along every so often. i will have to go back this week and see if i can find him. a good pork chop in new york city is a rare sort of gift.

shelley

today is my sister shelley's birthday. much of her life has been a blur to me. in fact, much of my own life has been a blur. there are things i don't remember about my childhood, about her childhood, that i probably should just as there are things about last week my brain has already confused with other things. but i remember the first time i held her. she was tiny and i wasn't all that much bigger, just two and a half more years on the planet. when our parents brought her home they said she was mine. my very own. i had been hoping for a dog but she was easier to carry so i sat in a big chair and held her. mine mine mine. later, when i still wanted a dog, i convinced her to crawl around after me and bark. i was the princess. it was a very good life.

i remember our mom dressing us in matching garanimals outfits. i have no idea why but it lasted an entire summer- striped tank tops with solid shorts, the kind with vertical seams down the front. we certainly weren't twins but had matching blue dresses and matching raggedy ann jumpers. we shared a room for a while and had bunk beds. i know we listened to a 45 of chantilly lace on a portable turntable over and over while arguing about lite brite pegs. for reasons i can't explain, i'm sure the back side of the 45 was purple people eater. this was when i tried to convince her that the devil lived in our closet. i learned later he lives in a pine barren in jersey but at the time our closet seemed more likely.

we played with lincoln logs, ring-a-ma-jigs, toads, shovels, caterpillars, poker chips, turtles, animal bones, magnifying glasses. we rode bikes everywhere and participated in a variety of shoddy clubhouse building ventures. we spent a good deal of time on a construction site in our neighborhood one year, a house with a floorplan identical to ours but without bothersome things like doors and windows to keep us out. we spent summers at the pool alternately baking and pruning ourselves and trudged home with red-rimmed eyes and chlorine-scented hair when we had to, when we remembered we had a family and there might be dinner for us.

but my sister had a love that made all those other things seem pale and ugly. she loved hot wheels. because we lived on a dead end street, our parents let her play in the gravel road in front of our house where she could spend hours paving roads for her beloved cars. only three houses existed past our own and when dinnertime would roll around, shelley would start to get wary. she'd look for dads coming home and more than once she'd fling herself down in the road, spread little child arms and legs as far to every edge as she could make her small self go, and bellow, "GO AROUND!" to the few grown men coming home who needed to pass. like some sort of bridge troll gone mad, she's stay there staring them down and they'd do what she said. they'd drive off the road a little, into the grass on the side, and maneuver around her oblivious cars on their own important adventures.

i do not know where she learned her fierceness, although spending the first few years of her life as a dog might have contributed. i do know that i learned very early on to do what the men in our neighborhood did. i do as i'm told when shelley is the teller. after that early and brief reign as the princess, i have settled into my life as the dog. it is a very good life, one i would not trade for any other.

stink bomb

it all started yesterday when my metrocard expired and i tried to get the machine to renew it. after six or seven tries i finally gave up and asked the attendant in the train station to make me a new card. she did, tossing it out, letting me know it's not generally her job to do things. then some guy on the bus was freaking out so i got out and walked a while. i walked under the f train and thought about what i always thought about. one of these days something will fly off that stupid train and crack open my skull. and to my surprise, something actually did fly off the stupid train and it slapped me right on the face, leaving a faint scratch on my cheek. certainly not a cracked skull, but as unexpected as something can be when you're expecting it to happen.

when i finally got to school the day went pretty well, but on the way home i realized the metro card i'd spent $25 on early in the morning had somehow escaped. no metrocard. perhaps the trains are conspiring to get me. stupid trains.

but then this morning i was feeling good. my first class was mellow and focused. good kids. my second class appears to have been possessed by a clump of incredibly lazy demons lacking in creativity. two hours of one child sleeping, one child hooting (no, really, i mean actual hooting like an owl would do if an owl wanted to fail my class), one child interrupting (every sentence. every single sentence), thirty two children talking when they should have been listening so that they had to ask a million questions when they should have been working. one child had to be removed by the dean. another had to leave and come back twice. and then there was the stink bomb. some goofball sent a sulfurous smell into the hallway outside our classroom. vile. toxic. eggy. the children whined. i considered reminding them they've all created stinks far worse than what we were suffering, but i know memory isn't reliable. they would never believe me. finally, i went back to my desk, grabbed a bag of yarn (what? you don't have a random bag of yarn at your desk?) and began to shove skeins into the crack under the door to block the stink. it was about this time our principal opened the door, stepping over the scattered yarn with a curious look on his face as one of the precious angels was being escorted toward the door. "what's going on?" he asked. i have no idea. none at all. madness, probably.

but that's not the best part. i was standing in the doorway on the second floor, waiting for those diabolical tenth graders to show up. one came running up yelling, "ms. white, there's a stink bomb!" and a cluster of kids parted to show a tiny, brightly colored pillow of mylar swirling about on the floor. now, there are things i know and things i don't. i know that when i was in high school, several boys stuffed a dead opossum behind a radiator over the winter holiday and the school took quite some time to recover. but i don't know stink bombs. so i asked a child nearby to hand it to me. he picked it up with a look on his face i can't even begin to explain but i'll try anyway. he looked like he knew he was going to get to see someone die. hmmmm. one of my own kids yelled, "no!" and i took it into the classroom, explaining (wrongly, i might add) that the little puff was clearly pressure sensitive, something that would explode when stepped on. the kids were freaking out. screaming. howling. "throw it out the window! please!!!!! it's gonna explode!!!!" i walked toward the window, starting to think i should take them seriously. their faces were more serious than anything i'd ever seen. i held my hand out the window and just before i was able to let go, i felt the concussion from the explosion. it was incredible. no, i mean that. it was fascinating to have something explode in my hand without removing the hand right off my body. i pulled my hand in as the stink began to waft back in. someone closed the window. this was the third or fourth stink bomb today. most days don't have any.

on my way back up to the fourth floor for my last class, i could smell the stink of yet another bomb suffocating the stairwell so when i finally got to four, i walked to the window at the end of the hall. these hallway and stairwell windows have grates over them, steel lattice to keep the kids in i guess or keep them from throwing things or maybe each other out. this particular window works just like storm windows in my house with little sliding levers a person can operate with a thumb. or two. so i slipped my thumbs under the grate and slid the levers to the side. and it turns out this window is somehow springloaded because without any force at all of my own the window flew up behind the grate and my thumbs went up with it. unfortunately, they were still attached to me and i was on the other side of the immovable steel grate. it took what seemed like a very long time for my brain to realize it would have to tell my body to pull both hands down and drag my trapped thumbs out from between the window and the grate, from a space much smaller than the fatness of my thumbs. finally, though, my brain did this and my body did as it was told and my thumbs scraped themselves down the grate and out into freedom. as i type they are bruised and throbbing. two mangled thumbs is rare and awful.

and then i began to hear the stories. they were magnificent. there were versions of my stink bomb explosion that had me mangled, deformed, a veritable phantom of the opera (or school). i am thinking about getting a cape. wearing a mask. sporting a cane. and possibly thumb casts or slings. but really, truly, what i want is to learn to make stink bombs. because i know i could do a better job than a high school kid. and wouldn't that sort of knowledge come in handy next time someone is asleep in my class?