growth chart

we stayed the four days of our surprise christmas visit in the home of the original supernatural nephew. he is nine and we have watched him grow up in intervals- measured in months and years. he leaps forward six months at a time on skinny legs like the ones that carried me through my own rickety small years. his interior life is a mystery, but it is clear his mind is constantly packed with the suffering in the world around him. he is what some might call a worrier, but not the anxious, helpless sort. he thinks about the awfulness in the world, big and small, and then begins to roll things over in his mind, looking for places to claw his way in and fix something. this is part of what it means to some to be supernatural. he has a constant urge to rescue, to save, to take on burdens never meant for such small shoulders.

i see this fresh when he and i wait in the car for his mother- my sister- to get snow melt from the store. we are on this errand because of his sharply focused concern for his renegade grandfather. this particular grandfather, father to the child's mother, our baby sister and to me, is prone to fits of lawnmowing at noon on the hottest day of the year without water. his snow shoveling techniques require similar levels of danger and excess. the supernatural child has been mulling over the possibilities of grandfather + icy driveway + recently discussed eye problems in said grandfather + nine year old's inability to lift a crumpled grandfather after fall on ice. the other side of this equation always contains at least one grandfather unconscious and possibly freezing to death on the driveway. and so the snow melt and barely concealed threats to the grandfather from his daughters about what will happen if he attempts his own driveway maintenance.

but when the child and i sit outside in the car waiting for his mother he expresses concern over a friend who might be in court soon. his classroom had a mock trial recently and he was, by all available accounts, a spectacular lawyer. by the time his mother returns to the car, he has convinced himself he could be a real lawyer, rescue this innocent victim of circumstances. he says as much to his mother and this is when i see what it takes to raise a child with the shadow of the supernatural hovering over him. she does not mince words.

"you are not a lawyer," she says flatly. she has had to talk him down from other things. "i know," he counters, "but i think..." she does not let him think long. it is not that she thinks he can't someday be a lawyer. it's that she has to convince him he can't be one by next month. because he thinks he can. "have you finished high school? have you finished college? then there's law school. and the bar. that's a really complicated test. have you passed the missouri bar?" he concedes that he has not, but is surprisingly undaunted by her suggestion that he's not going to be a lawyer in time for this case. he answers everything with "not yet". he is not deterred. not a bit. his mother ends the discussion by telling him the discussion is finished, that they have said all that needs to be said on the subject. his mother is not one to be taken lightly. he is quiet a while. "i still think i could do it," he says quietly, more to himself than anyone else. and although i know about the years yet ahead of school, of college, law school, the bar, i am not at all sure i would be able to say anything to dissuade him.

the night before we return to new york he says he has a gift for me. i am half asleep in the bedroom downstairs. the sweetie is brushing his teeth. the child has been down to tell us goodnight and goodbye because we will leave early, before he is awake. i know he has gone back upstairs but i hear voices outside the door and the sweetie opens the door to let the child in. he walks quietly to the side of the bed. he is rumpled and he holds something white in his hand. he has made something for me. i take it, hug him, then watch him walk out the door quietly. what he has given me was once a sheet of typing paper. he has folded it in half and stapled it along two edges to form a pocket. there is a paper clip across the open edge standing in for a clasp. on the front he has drawn two knitting needles in soft pencil. for keeping my knitting supplies.

in his whole life he has seen me on maybe twenty occasions. i live halfway across the country in a place he has visited two or three times. but because he is of the supernatural sort he knows differently than others. i know when we drive back to new york there will be a post office full of packages waiting for us, christmas presents from the family we snuck up on. but here is this paper pocket i have laid out on the table, spread with all my knitting things- scissors, stitch markers, yarn, needles. the supernatural children these days tend to drag along a sackful of loosely developed skills. some haphazard flying. a little bit of mind reading. maybe a lazily developed communication with a few animals, most of them domesticated anyway. dilettantes. dabblers. but this child has focused his abilities. he studies. he learns those he loves like some folks learn poetry. and even though he's still a small child, can't possibly know just yet what it is he wants to save us all from, it's clear he knows how to begin.

fear not, for behold, i bring you good tidings of great joy... and a small brown dog

we left brooklyn in the cold and the dark. christmas eve. 5am. the sort of dark that hurts to look into. we showed up at bethlehem with the sun, kept driving, the sun always just a little bit behind. we crossed the mississipi in a rainstorm that glowed in the beams of light sliding back and forth over the face of the arch. there was a burrito microwaved in the only gas station open at ten pm christmas eve and a wad of ham wrapped in some sort of sponge and a little cheese spread. and then another dark morning, more night than is reasonable. tiny flecks of snow getting fatter and angrier and faster. 6:30 was a strip of white road and then nothing beyond it at all.

we arrived a little before 10 and the nephew who opened the door opened his eyes so wide i thought they'd roll right out of his head. he was not expecting us. the sweetie had spent the better part of this twentysomething hour drive planning different ways to surprise the family. most of them centered aroudn this sleepy child opening the door. watching a small child with a secret is a pretty good reward for driving halfway across the country. his mom had managed to keep the secret for three days but time is a much more complicated thing for younger folks and the two or so minutes he waited for his mom to get back downstairs so he could go and be dramatic and share his new secret were very long minutes. but his mom went downstairs to the tree and the family and the sparkling lights and packages. the child went down next, announced that he had a surprise, opened the door to let us walk in. we said surprise and merry christmas and a whole bunch of people's eyes went wide and soft. it was a beautiful moment. exactly what we'd planned. we'd driven halfway across the country to see family, surprised them with this christmas morning visit right in the middle of the wrapping paper and bows and they were happy to see us, just like we'd hoped. and when the small brown dog, whose legs were too short to let him walk through the snow to the house, was finally set down on the carpet he squatted, right there in front of the tree, in the midst of all this reunioning and hugging and wet eyes. and he delivered a package he'd been carrying since 5am. tidings indeed.

more holiday news and photos soon. right now we're cramming a whole year of visiting into three or four days.

love letters

the ninth graders are still working on memoirs. their stories have been unusual, far more emotionally focused than in other years. they know a good story when they see one and even though most of them are not quite able to write a good story, they're able to write something that tells you a good story is crammed in there somewhere. so i have been throwing out random memoir topics and having them write. the uproar is impressive. they fling themselves facedown onto desks, make sounds like small animals witnessing atrocities. they take seven minutes to tear off the spiral edges from their pages. they stare blankly at blank sheets of paper. laboriously write names on top corners. ask me again what the topic is (a time you were kind to someone. the meanest thing you've ever done. a time you knew someone loved you. etc.) write down the date. ask loudly about what day it is. erase date. write down new date with extreme care.

but then, in spite of themselves, they end up, almost every one of them, writing these lovely descriptive snapshots of tiny moments. they struggle to show the story because they know if they tell it instead i will not read it. they describe and describe until they don't have any words left. they stand up. throw out gum. slap someone on the head as they walk back. cough. get up to get a tissue off my desk. kick someone's backpack as they walk to their own desk. sit down. rearrange the single page on the desk. look at it. shake out the last few words they know. hold it up and yell across the room to me, "is this long enough?" i always say no. huffing. stomping. slamming of paper onto desk. i'm always surprised how loud they can slam paper. "you didn't even read it!" the truth is i dont' even have to look at it to know i want more than what's there. glareglareglare. one more slam of paper onto desk. rearrange paper. sharpen pencil. sharpen some more. accidentally break off pointy sharp lead while walking back to desk. return to sharpener for a very successful third time. hunch over paper. glare around the room. write. writewritewritewrite.

but today is the last day of school before an eleven day holiday. most of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade kids didn't bother showing up. but ninth grade is different. at least twenty kids showed up to each class, all asking questions about movies and games and parties. these are not things i do. i have mentioned before that this is not so much about being a good teacher as it is about not knowing how to handle chaos or downtime. it unsettles me in my personal life and unsettles me even more when i'm in a room with twenty or thirty shrieking teenagers. and although they ask if we're seeing a movie, it's clear they know we're not. the grumbling when i point to the assignment on the board is minimal. at this point, they're just hoping i don't give them homework. they are fully expecting homework. i worry for a small but loud second if maybe i'm a horrible person. the moment passes and i point to the board again.

they know it will be another of those horrible memoir stories. they read quietly the instructions.

1. think about something small a family member taught you when you were little. how to tie your shoes. how to ride a bike. how to make toast. that's the obvious thing.

2. now think about the subtle things you learned from that same event. that your dad really thinks you can do something brave. that your grandma loves you. that your mom wants you to be proud of yourself.

3. write a letter to that person. describe your memory of the event in detail. thank them for what they gave you. thank them for the obvious stuff and the more subtle stuff.

4. roll it up like a scroll and tie it with pretty yarn.

5. for homework, deliver the letter.

and they write. about the sorts of things ninth graders always write. about grandpas and moms and brothers who gave them small but magnificent gifts. faith in themselves. a desire to succeed. they cannot believe i am serious about the homework. one girl shoves a page in my face and insists i read it. she watches me to see if i will cry. i do not, but this is because i have had years of practice not crying when kids write stuff so honest it makes time stop. but she is happy enough watching my face tense up as i read. another girl yells, "it will make him cry if he reads this!" she is talking about her dad and she is right. i tell them they don't have to present them publicly, that they can give them in secret. those who celebrate christmas are already thinking about where under the tree to put these scrolls. they do not want private weeping and love. they want it big and in front of everyone. it may be unfair that i'm helping them learn to manipulate others, but come on, isn't that what writing is about?

but one clever boy says, "how will you know if we do it? how will you know what grade to give?" and i go with what has always worked before. "i just will. i'm like that. magic. i'm like santa." from the back of the room someone yells, "santa isn't real!" now, teenagers are faithless and you just can't argue them into sense so instead i say with a smile, "i'm like santa only real!" and some part of their brains is absolutely sure i am lying. they know they can walk out and toss those scrolls in the garbage. but i look at them packing up to go, carefully wrapping yarn around small tubes of paper, gently tucking those letters into backpacks. because although they know i am lying, they just can't be sure.

angry ninth grade boy

angry ninth grade boy strikes again! actually, he has struck pretty much daily since he showed up a few posts ago, insisting on stupidity where i was pretty sure i could see some distant light suggesting intelligence. our communications the last few days generally follow a pretty predictable path. i tell him to stop talking because he is, in fact, talking, usually fairly loudly. he snaps back with the accusation that i am boring. i am a forty one year old woman from the middle of the country standing in a roomful of children born in more than a dozen places you can't get to by car in the largest, fastest city we've made in this country. the children arrive armed with soda and candy and very expensive cellphones and ipods and such. and then there's the fact that they're fourteen. or fifteen. or sixteen. of course i am boring. how can any human being compete with all that for a whole hour- for two hours? but for angry ninth grade boy, boring is the word he uses when he's tired, confused or just plain not getting what's going on. it is what he uses when he is mad at me.

because he has spent the last two weeks mad at me (read: struggling to figure out what is going on) i have been particularly boring and he has deemed it necessary to let me know several times a day in case, in my life-obliterating boringness, i might have forgotten. today we have just an hour together and when the children pile into the room i am expecting ugliness. the room settles down quickly, ninth grade bodies, half of them still strapped into bookbags and giant coats, lean over open books. quietquietquiet. except him. he is talking. in all the quiet his voice is like a rasp on metal, splintery, rough. i have been using my angry teacher glare since before he was born and i consider it, but i know it won't work on him. he doesn't care. he hates reading, hates me, hates school. so i put on my best teacher smile, the one that makes the hearts of children hesitate before beating again, sends them into fits of silent terror because they don't know quite what is happening. i scribble absences on my attendance sheet and say, in the most offhand manner i can scrounge up, "when i'm done here we'll go out and call your dad. i just want to see if it's okay with him if we switch you to a less boring class." smilesmile. he nods. "that sounds great!" he yells back, a little too loud in the quiet. and then mysteriously he finds the book he's been unable to find the last few days. he starts to read.

we finish reading and the kids are writing a small bit of memoir. some tiny memory from their life that's only crammed up in their brains because of the wonderful person the memory sits around. we have not stepped out to make the phone call because we have been too busy. he has been too busy. he writes about a girl. he writes about cold weather and the warmth of knowing someone wants to be right next to you. he calls me over- raises his hand and calls me over- several times. he writes the better part of two very sweet and passionate pages. he smiles when he talks about this girl, smiles when he writes. it is a good story but i have made claims that if you can't come up with two full pages about an event it wasn't very memorable and if you can't say more than two pages about someone you love, you don't love them nearly as much as you've been thinking. he hands me the story and says he'll finish it after school. i do not expect to see him.

when the bell rings at the end of the day and my tenth graders trudge out into the hallway, a stream of ninth graders flows in. they settle into the luxury of sitting in any seat, of having a whole table to themselves. he is right there with them, in the middle of the little swarm, holding out a hand for his paper. he sits quietly in his own regular seat, scrunches himself around the paper and writes. he turns in the story, hands it over with a flourish, smiles, insists i read it. it is good. it is not at all what it should be but it is so far from where he was a month ago i want to cry. i tell him it's good, ask him if he knows why. "sure," he says, chin jutting out, head thrown back. "i'm cool like that." and he is a child the other children want to be like. he is cool like that. but i tell him no. "it's because you're smart like that," i insist, knowing full well what will come next. and it does. hands fly up into the air and a terrifying crumpling of face and body. "STOP SAYING THAT! I AM NOT SMART!" other children are gathered around my desk. it feels strange since my desk is in the back of the room and i almost never sit there, am only sitting there now to get a folder out of a drawer. and this is not like it was a few weeks ago in the hallway when he was screaming at me, red-faced, nearly suffocating himself with rage. he knows what i'm getting ready to say back and he wants this audience to hear it. "you are smart and there's nothing you can do about it. nothing! ha! just deal with it. just be smart." when i look at him he is wearing that new face, the one he wore earlier in the day when he talked about a girl who smelled good and walked down the street with him. it is a horrible secret and i will not tell. but from time to time i will remind him i know. he is in love. madly in love. the writing, the power of storytelling, the audience, the drama, he loves it all. he is a writer.

gaslight

the sky is getting darker earlier. i leave work in 3:30's miserable grayness and come up out of the ground to the last few minutes of wild color in the sky. guthrie and i walk now in twilight and the real dark of night, even though our walks tend to be at the same time as always, around 4:30. the air is getting colder but not yet cold enough for all the knitted wool nonsense i drape around myself. the current promise is for nights that will fall below freezing but it is december and i have not yet been impressed.

i bundle guthrie up in a sweater on these nightdark walks. it is one i knit and it is stripey and the stripes roll back and forth with the movement of his small legs. he is a crazy caterpillar. he stalks on with his newspaper as always, uninterested in the world except that magical spot always three feet in front of him where his wild eyes focus. but the night world is new and i cannot stop my own eyes from sprawling out all over everything. it is not, of course, the real night world- lights out and streets empty. it is that other night world, dark, but full of people hurrying home in the new cold from work, waiting for buses with phones pressed to ears, coming up from tunnels, surprised at the nightness of an hour that was afternoonish in recent memory.

and in my neighborhood there are lights on in windows and curtains are pulled open so it feels like being in a movie where everything is perfect and people open the door with mugs of hot chocolate in their hands. the unimaginable warmth of the lights inside the rooms, the richness of the paint on the walls and the art hung in front of them is steady, constant, all the time.

but it is not the deep prettiness of the buildings and the things inside them that draws my eye most. it is the gaslight. i am pretty sure when these places were built, all was gaslight. the streetlights, porchlights, lights in the house. a whole world flickering after dark. and although the lamps in the front yards of most buildings still sit right where they were put back when this country was still split in two, most of them have little light bulbs perched inside the glass, steady, bright, safe. once in a while one will have an almost blue fluorescence, that glowing white of a gas mantle. these are the tiny burning nets your parents wouldn't let you touch in those old coleman lanterns, burning more slowly and brightly than is reasonable. but on every street here and there are the first old lights, metal spigot at the bottom whispering out propane or butane or whatever gas it is. and there on top of that spigot is fire the color of candleflame, flickering the way real light does, breathing. when you're very lucky you turn down a block and ten or fifteen flames giggle away in their glass homes, shedding less light than the bulb or the mantle, but more lively light. and you can try all you want to tell yourself where you are- new york city and when you are- 2009, almost 10. and you can look at all the folks around you with cellphones and i-things and those horrible stupid scooters darting in and out of cars but your brain is flickering with the gaslight and you can hear the horses stomping on cobblestones as men in top hats and ladies in bonnets brush past you on their way home.

wet dog smell

for those concerned about animal cruelty, guthrie can:
a. swim very well and does not swim unattended
b. jump into and out of the bathtub on his own, empty or full

guthrie likes the bathtub. now, to be fair, he's never really had a problem with baths so this should be no surprise. when we toss him in the tub, we toss in a toy right along with him and he splashes around while we scrub his furry self but here in this new apartment and this new bathroom with its new bathtub (which is actually a fairly old, heavy and reasonably deep monster) guthrie swoons. he runs to snuggle up next to the cold enamel, tail tucked under the radiator, any time he hears water running for a bath. and he will wait. he loves the taste of soap and will wait there by the side of the tub while i soak in the warm water. he will wait until i pull the plug and water starts its spinning down the drain. he will be there still in the dark on the bathmat after i've gone, listening for slurping sound the water makes when there's not much of it left.

in the other end of the apartment, down a very long hall, the sweetie and i sit with books or laptops or television until there is a thump and a soft clicking of claws, then the quiet nothing that makes any reasonable person feel cold inside. the silence of a dog busy doing something. and when i go in to find him, flip on the light and nearly blind his big, intense eyes, he is there in the middle of the tub, licking the sides, devouring any trace of soap or bath salts or oils he can find.

but there are days he smells like dust and his own horrible breath and we fill up the tub just for him. he swims like those tiny turtles in the buckets on chinatown streetcorners, floaty, without much direction, wide paddle feet moving slowly on stubby legs, one at a time. but he is suspicious of deep water and mostly he is like those small children you see at the pool, bobbing near the edge, clutching the lip of the overflow drain, tippytoeing toward the deep end in fits of bravery, then scurrying back to the safety of feet firmly planted on rough pool bottom and head well above lapping water. but for all his concern about deep-sea monsters or rip tides or whatever might be the dogbrain version of those terrors, he shoves them aside for a bright pink bit of rubber, a small toy always floating away from him as he splashes after it.

walking home

45 minutes on the train then up out of the ground and a block to the bakery. this is the sort of bakery where you get bread, rolls, savory things. the woman behind the counter laughs in spanish with a woman who has stopped by to visit. in the window are three onion rolls and a handful of sesame seed ones. i get all the onion and one sesame seed just in case. this is about enjoying what you find.

across the street and down two or three blocks is a deli. the horseradish i want isn't anywhere but i see two tall bricks of swiss cheese in the glass case. i ask the man behind the counter for a pound. he shoves the brick against the blade of the machine and comes back with one slice. he holds it up for me to see, flat face full of big and little holes, then knife-edge thin as paper. i nod. he goes back to work. as he slices it occurs to me i have no idea how much swiss cheese there is in a pound but when he weighs a mountain and goes back to the brick for more i realize there is a great deal. he wraps the cheese in two parcels, first in waxed paper, then in butcher paper, then slides both to the guy at the register. the guy at the register asks if i need a bag and i say no, holding up the reusable bag i drag everywhere these days. "you trying to save the earth?" he asks. i nod. when i walk out with my two packets of cheese tucked into my bag i feel like i should be wearing a special hat.

a few blocks further is the market where the chocolate bacon lives. i pick up an avocado and a bag of chips that promises me three cheeses. tuscan. but i am here for the bacon chocolate because i owe someone. three blocks from home i stop at another bakery. this is the sort of bakery where you get cookies and cakes and hot chocolate that helps you redefine the words hot chocolate. the boy behind the counter reminds me of a baby rabbit in a book from my childhood, all shiny-eyed and eager. he puts two fat brownies called blackout into a box and i walk out into the end of the day, long shadows and the first noticeable change in light.

on the corner of my block is a pharmacy that has been a pharmacy for a very long while. the building has been sitting there since some time near the civil war and the pharmacy's old fashioned shelves and cabinets seem to have been there just as long. apothecary is the word in my head as i open the door. there are only a few kinds of toothpaste in the whole place and just two actual aisles, but the pharmacist here is helpful in a way most are not. he asks questions, offers suggestions. and the skinny guy behind the counter greets me the way southern preachers have in my childhood- open face, strong voice, easy laugh that forces him to lean back a bit as it escapes him. there are postcards of chickens on the wall behind him and i notice them while he writes my prescription number on a notepad, then draws a line next to it. i sign on the notepad, an admission that i know the small pink pills in the bottle he shoves across the counter are dangerous and controlled and of a special class. i ask him about the chickens and he laughs again, a laugh so full i think he must secretly be one of those old lady blues singers and not a skinny brooklyn boy. he tries to explain it but is not very clear. it doesn't matter. i walk the half block to home with the yellow light hitting the brownstones and the limestones, looking like someone spillled whiskey and honey and lemon all over the part of the world where i am.

thursday afternoon

we stayed in town because we intended to go to coney island. this is because ten years ago, our first thanksgiving together as sweeties, we hopped a train and rode until it came to a stop above coney island. home of the cyclone. the wonder wheel. the parachute drop. dollar fudge. we walked on the beach and i dragged shell after shell out of gritty cold sand and shoved them into a plastic bag. near dark we found ourselves right in front of nathan’s coney island and were surprised to see the place lit up and ready for us. my own sand-crusted fingers were stiff from the cold and the warmth inside the building was plenty but there was food on top of that. now the sweetie got a few hot dogs, i’m sure, but i was avoiding that sort of animal at the time and filled myself up on an ear of corn, a basket of fries and most likely a bowl of clam chowder. we sat in the center of the room and around us were drunks scattered singly and a few other unsavory sorts in clumps. and it felt good to be there.

so we planned to go there today and i was pretty happy about it. then somewhere along the way the sweetie and i both faced up to the fact that coney island, once quite breathtaking in its degenerate wildness, has recently fallen upon a new sort of hard times. developers in snits. plans for fancy hotels gone awry. snootifying and the destruction that comes just before snootifying. we risked shattering our recollection of the place by going back even on a day like today. so we puttered around the apartment a bit and then walked the whole half block over to the finest city park in the entire country. we’d managed to get ourselves a pretty swell day. breeze floating through air edging up toward sixty. high, fat clouds leaking sunlight in streams. plenty of trees still clinging to leaves in bright yellows and vivid reds. the kind of day you take pictures of. and we did.

we leashed up the small dog and dragged out a camera and this place carved out of the stink of city eased up around us until the smells and sounds of brooklyn ebbed. the tall buildings began to duck down behind trees. and i would like to tell old calvert and vaux that all the work they did rearranging this small space to look like it isn’t where it is worked out just like they’d hoped, has been working for a very long time. thanks, boys. job well done.

now we forgot to get a turkey and didn’t even eat any of anyone else’s. there was dinner at a rest stop on the thruway when we decided a good walk in the park ought to be followed by our escape from the city entirely. i was sitting in a horrible plastic booth eating food that went from a freezer to a microwave and was still, somehow, fried and every other food vendor in the place was shutting down, pulling down and locking huge rattling gates until we were sitting in the middle of a small island of bright booths, surrounded by silent gray plastic and metal. ugliness and loudness and plastic and food people shouldn’t eat. and the sweetie smiling across from me eating food i won’t touch and drinking soda just like he did ten years ago in that warm room at the edge of the cold, dark ocean in a place i still didn’t really know.

and this is a gift so large and unearned i should be ashamed to have it but i just let it simmer around me instead happy in the knowledge that no matter what santa says, gifts are not at all about what we deserve. belly full of food. tall man walking back to the car with me who thinks some of my jokes are worth laughing at, who will occasionally wear a hat i’ve knit. small dog curled up in the dark of the backseat whose eyes shine at me when i open the door. it seems that if we’re going to be all sorts of thankful, we ought to do that all the time, probably ought to be out there looking around for things to appreciate, to be glad we got to be in the middle of. so that’s what we did.

i have given up on trying to put text and photos together when there's more photo than text. make up your own story. look for the milk crate.

rat

the coney island bound f train stop by our house is a pretty desolate place around 6:30am. even the manhattan bound platform across a pair of unused tracks only has a handful of folks at a time. the platform, the undergroundness of it, the brokendownness, feels heavier than it should on dark mornings. the man at the far end of the platform who moves his arms in slow, complex symbols every morning while staring into the tunnel does not add anything useful.

so this morning i walk through london-jack-the-the-ripper predawn fog with hissing needle rain, down a flight of steps to the first level which smells homeless, through the turnstile. a good morning is a morning when there's no angry man standing alone on this level by the turnstile, glaring at you. nobody lying on the pavement at the bottom of the stairs. i shove myself through the turnstile and down a second set of stairs to the platform. good morning so far.

the platform is long, the length of seven or eight subway cars. i tend to walk myself halfway down, past one set of stairs and then another, to the middle. this is what people do. they have their spots to stand, their cars to wait for. so this morning i step down off the last step onto the cement of the platform and a small something, a leaf, a scrap of candy bar wrapper, hurries across the cement thirty feet down the platform. and it stops. i stop. it looks at me. i look at it.

it is not paper or a leaf. and my brain says the cute word. the sweet, little word. mouse. but my eyes are seeing something quite a bit larger. rat. ratratrat. showdown. we are alone on the early morning platform facing each other. now, the funny thing is i'm not at all afraid of rats. rats in their proper place -for instance the environs of the new york city subway- are where they're supposed to be. and i am bigger. i am faster. i am tactically more sophisticated. so i walk toward my part of the platform the way all new yorkers walk anywhere, purposefully, determined, obliterating all other things.

but the very large soft brown rat has been spending some serious time watching new yorkers go about their business because he sets his cowboy hat (metaphorically speaking, of course) low over his eyes, points his tail out, rudderlike, and uses all four cowboy booted feet to stomp himself right in my direction. showdown, indeed. and i have taken only a few steps when he is right up there beside me, a few feet away. shiny eyes. beady eyes looking at mine.

he turns that soft brown rat body toward me. i think about my shoes and how they are sturdy enough to kick him if he tries to climb up my leg but he doesn't even try. he keeps turning all the way around. i take a step down the platform and his pointy nose moves the same direction. i watch him. he watches me, nose full of whiskers twitching. i take another step. he takes fifteen or twenty. it turns out i am not what you'd call faster than a rat. and we walk down the platform, one car length, two car lengths, three car lengths, together. side by side. we are halfway down the platform and i stop. this is my spot. and he stops, pretends to be looking for something he dropped on the ground. he does not look at me at all. he noses around the last staircase, the one ten feet away. a man walks past me from the other end of the platform, walks past the rat. he stops, smiles at the furry thing, smiles at me, walks on.

mad

the ninth graders fascinate me. i like to tell their stories because they are so strange and usually humbling for me and mostly funny. and when i write about the group they’re all there, the whole pile, but i’ve noticed a bit lately that when i write about a single child or maybe a small group i focus on the boys in my class. there are a few reasons for that and i figure it might help you to know why before we visit about this next child. maybe it won’t help at all. it’s here if you’d like.

1. i did not really understand girls when i was in high school and i haven’t made much progress in the last 25 years. high school girls are a bit of a mystery to me.
2. the girls who do connect with me tend to be girls whose stories i simply wouldn’t share with others in specific detail. they tend to be of two types. i am somehow a magnet for broken little girls, especially those whose fathers or uncles or neighbors have done unspeakable things to scar them for life. they communicate with me through notes scribbled in pencil on irregularly folded wads of paper. they speak to me in private. they feel adrift in their own bodies. and because i am vocal in class about civil rights, including those for the gay community, i am often a confidante for girls who are struggling to find a way to say out loud that they like other girls. i will not tell them there is something wrong with them, nor will i tell them god will hate them.
3. boys in ninth grade are, very simply, the funniest things i have ever seen.

so we will get on now to the story, to the child, a ninth grade boy. he has wandered through at least another story or two and will likely leap into things i write in the future. he is my nemesis. he is my favorite for now. he talks in class and fidgets and touches others and is generally one of those children who takes on the same role in life as allergies or a cough that never quite goes away. never acute, never completely overwhelming, but always exasperating. and when i ask him (three or four or nine times a day) to stop talking, he is always indignant, must always respond with some long-winded explanation of how i misunderstood the fact that he was turned entirely around in his seat emitting a sound that was strikingly like his own voice but clearly wasn’t because he himself was certainly not talking when i accused him of it. and when i tire of this particular conversation and invite him to “step into my office”- the hall outside our classroom- he slams his books, shoves his chair back with all the dramatic flair he can muster and stomps toward the door muttering about how i am always accusing him of things he doesn’t do because i am not at all fair. he sprinkles this monologue with all the bad words he knows in two different languages.

because there is another teacher in the room, i am able to spend quality time in my office with struggling students. i should be charging this child rent, he’s there so often. today i move his seat after four suggestions that he control his situation so i won’t have to. he does not like his new seat and determines that acting like he’s lost his mind in that new seat just might get him rearranged to another, more desirable, seat. this does not work out quite as he plans and he finds himself in the hallway, glaring at the wall above my head, arms crossed. i say plenty. i say all the words i usually say in these situations. i say the honest things about how he needs to work all the time because he’s reading several years behind his peers, how it’s not because he’s stupid, how trying just a little might surprise him with impressive results. because i think those things are true. while i roll out this string of words he zips his coat up to the neck and shoves his face down inside. spiky hair. glasses. coat. and as those words float by him he gets madder and madder and madder until he whips his head up, pulls his coat down and yells I DON’T WANT TO BE SMART. STOP SAYING THAT! and the part of me that will someday get me punched square in the face yells right back that what he wants is of no interest to me, that he’s smart whether he likes it or not and that there’s nothing at all he can do about it. children do not like being told there’s nothing they can do about something. he wants me to feel helpless now too, so he tells me when he finishes high school he wants to “hang out”. he likes watching my face when he says it because he knows i want him to say something about college and what lies beyond college. “i hate school!” he growls. “i don’t want to be smart and i hate all my classes. i hate this class.” he pauses for effect. i am thinking about how he must know he’s smart if he’s saying he doesn’t want to be smart and he delivers what he intends to be the final blow. he says it through clenched teeth in this low voice that is somehow yelling while being horrifyingly quiet. “i hate you!”

but i heard those words my very first day of school way back in 1993 when a little boy named ronald threatened to slit my throat. the wind whipping through an open window at the end of the hall blows them right off me and they fall onto the dirty tile floor. “those are sad little lies!” i laugh. “i know you and i know this is your favorite class.” i pause just like he did but i’m older and far more accustomed to getting this right. “and you can say what you want but i know i’m your favorite teacher. so there.” so there. i am fighting like a child, now. and i think his face will split open right then and there. he is seething. now, i have no idea how he really feels about almost anything and i do not think for a minute i am actually his favorite teacher at all but i do know he’s a little bit scared about the responsibility hovering over a smart child. he returns to his litany of complaints. i single him out. i am unfair. i am mean. he does not correct my wrong assumptions.

i do expect more from him because i know as long as i do, he will work toward whatever i insist on. i consider trying to explain this but he is enjoying being mad, i think. i can see him struggling to stay in character. i try to offer him an option that allows us to return to class but before i can say what it might be he waves his hands at me dismissively and says, “no deals.” “fine,” i say. “i’m going back inside. you can come in when you’re ready to be smart.” he walks toward the door. “you ready to be smart?” he huffs and flaps his arms in exasperation. “NO!” he stomps to the other side of the hall, arms crossed. this is a temper tantrum. he is two. “fine. i’m still going back inside. you’re not.” i open the door. he walks to the door and glares at me. “promise,” i say. he shakes his head. he wants to come in, wants to be smart, but does not want to concede just to get those things. ordinarily i make it easy for a child to obtain grace but with this kid i’m not able to. “then you can’t come in.” “whatever. fine,. okay.” he snarls as he walks in and stomps to his seat. okay is as close as i’m going to get to “you were right. i’m smart.” i’ll take it.

the rest of the class is getting ready to talk about editing and for the first few minutes he is glowing with hatred. he puffs like a bellows. it takes him a very long time to slam himself back into his seat, slam his notebook open, slam his pencil on the notebook and then slam his hand on the desk for good measure. i ask a question and he is chattering away to the child next to him. “that’s what i mean,” i say quietly, looking at him, and he gets it. we continue. a few questions later i ask them something and nobody has a clue what i mean. silence. eyes on desks. a child near the board taps his pen on his desk with an impressive lack of rhythm. feet shuffle. angry child raises his hand. he still looks angry but he can’t help himself. he knows something nobody else knows and that feels better than any amount of fury he’s been able to muster up. and when he says the right answer i quickly say, “and that is also what i mean.” and he gets that, too. and the thing about boys this age is that you can watch all the ugliness drain out of their faces in seconds. sometimes you can watch them trying to catch it and shove it all back in, keep it there, but it slips away from them too quickly. and the part of this child he’d scrunched down all day comes crashing up into the face of him and he goes beyond happy right on over to smug. that quick. for that little. for exactly what i’d offered him in the hall that he’d tossed aside.

the last part of class is his. he shares ideas when he can, which is pretty often. if his hand is up and i call on someone else, he becomes incensed. insulted. and there are days, plenty of them, where i think no amount of pay, no amount of summers off and going home at 3pm is enough to offset the ugliness of walking into a classroom. but there are days, enough of them, where i think i would not survive if i couldn’t walk into this room and be part of this strangeness, where i think i would do this job for free.

crackle

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

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

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

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

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

fig

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

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

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

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

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

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

eraser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bacon chocolate is no joke, my friend

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

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

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

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

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

negotiations

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

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

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

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

my boat, your boat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

breakfast, ducks, heron

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

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

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

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

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

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