tenth grade going on fourth grade

it's the tenth graders again. we'd done some standardized testing and i told them how they did. on paper they look like fourth graders. i'm not kidding. they're reading the way fourth graders do. how do they have any idea what goes on in the world? this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night, makes me feel genuinely sad. they go through life believing that the way things are now is how they should be. they are planning to be things. to do things. to get jobs. and it's not likely that now, in tenth grade, anything is going to happen to change the way they read, so they're likely to walk out of high school reading the way a nine or ten year old child does and thinking that's okay.

and i do not want to be the one who opens their eyes to all this, but i'd be far more guilty if i kept my mouth shut. and i know you're thinking well, it's their own fault. but nobody gets this far into the world this unarmed for what's out there unless they had help. these are certainly children who have heard the word stupid out loud from adults who should have been trying to figure out how to help. teachers have said things like that to them. you'll never get this. just pay attention. why are you so stupid? parents have threatened and bribed without trying ever to get to the root of the problem. teachers have ignored, have walked away. and now there's this pile of big children in my room, functionally illiterate. i am pissed off. i want them to be pissed off. i want them to feel like they've been robbed because they have and i want them to get riled up enough to want to go out and get what's rightfully theirs- the ability to read and write the language they speak every day. so i tell them all this and they think it's cute. cute. this is going nowhere.

they prefer to think of themselves as lazy. plenty of folks have given them that out. told them they're lazy. and it's easier to think of yourself as lazy than unable. if you're lazy, it's a choice. i could read if i wanted to. i just don't want to. sigh. so we finished reading a bunch of essays about why teens are a mess, written by academic folks and included as part of our curriculum. they don't remember a thing about them. they're good essays, things i liked reading, but the kids don't see them as honest. another teacher suggested we try a book called killing the sky, a series of memiorlike essays by students at horizon academy, a school in riker's island (yes, the prison). now, generally when we read a book, i read it aloud to the class because they can't, but as i looked over the first story, written by someone named phat boi, i noticed that folks sitting in riker's island really aren't likely to write anything at a level much higher than fourth grade. this isn't nastiness i'm spewing here. i think if you're an adult reading and writing at a fourth grade level, you don't have many options these days. many of the options you do have will lead you to riker's. so we all got copies of the story and we did things a little bit differently.

i asked for volunteers. i got them. they like to read aloud, but they mess up a lot. when reading this first story, they found their own language on the page. they also found their own world. we talked for twenty minutes about why someone would call himself "phat boi" when "fat boy" is just as easy. we talked about language and power and how the way you choose to use language has a lot to do with your power. they asked if the way they write when they text is a dialect. technically, dialect refers to speech, but i think they're on the right track with the question. it identifies a community and allows them to communicate with each other a little differently than with the outside world. i love it when they're smart and they know it. i played as dumb as i could and asked them a whole bunch of questions about this child who ended up in prison. they took the questions seriously. if you're twelve and you're poor, selling drugs is really one of the few jobs you can get in the city. you can't exactly mow lawns. it's just the way the world is. when i asked why the author's mom didn't work harder to make her son stop using and selling, the kids were surprisingly sympathetic. what can she do? he's seventeen. she's trying to raise four kids. she's working day and night. the room started to feel heavier the more we talked. they don't hold adults accountable for anything. when i asked about a school and a cluster of teachers who knew this kid came to school high and saw him selling on the streets below, they said most teachers would do that. because what on earth do i expect it to change. i said i want it to change everything. i wanted to cry.

but they kept reading and were excited about the reading. they could read it and they had things to say about it after. when someone stumbled over a word, others said the word. this is a kindness, certainly, but also it feels so good to know a word someone else needs and be able to hand it over like that with grace, publicly. even when you can barely read. or maybe especially when you can barely read. and we came to a part of the story where the author was explaining how he'd been kicked out of school, how he'd been in all this trouble. he said he'd just had a bad day, wasn't feeling well. i'm lazy. but the kids knew and i knew they knew, so i asked them. is he lazy? no, miss. it's how he pretends there's nothing wrong. he's just hiding his problem. why? i asked. because he doesn't want to admit it. if he admits it there's work to do. and then i asked what i really wanted to know. do you think he knows what's really wrong? of course he does, they say. he knows exactly what's wrong.

cornered

now that max is temporarily done practicing for his own death, he's doddering around like a sharp-toothed old man, harrumphing and creaking and unpredictably bleeding from his various volcanic booboos on all sheets, blankets, pillows and other fabric surfaces of the house. we're learning how to enjoy life with an animal who snores louder than anyone else in the house and who sometimes (only sometimes) poops while walking across the floor because the parts of his body aren't all talking to his brain about what they're doing or thinking of doing the way they used to. he just doesn't know he's pooping, sometimes.

to narrow down the chances of the dogs repoisoning themselves (it's somewhere back a bit in the blog if you want to hear about it) and to minimize the places we might find unremembered poop, we keep a dog gate up at the kitchen. because max is getting blinder by the day, it has become increasingly treacherous to step over the gate from the kitchen. max knows the kitchen is where the dog food lives. it is also where the cheese lives, so when he sees someone (today it was me) go into the kitchen, he puts his sweet little nearly blind self right on the nonkitchen side of the gate and when the first foot comes over the gate into the hallway (as my right foot foolishly did today) he snaps his bedraggled mouth closed, resting a few sparse teeth wherever (mostly between my toes, fortunately). max does not bite hard most of the time. still, he looks like a shark leaping out of the water, jaws gaping. it's unsettling.

the snapping continues throughout the day. max and his back feet don't always get along so well these days and as a result, he has to ask for external help to get himself up onto the couch or bed or "his" chair. because he is still as blind as he was a paragraph ago he does not recognize the hands coming toward him as the ones he asked a few seconds ago for help. so he snaps his little jaws down on whichever hands happen to be helping. this has necessitated development of a new form of max transport known as the gator hold and carry. a wise external helper grabs the dangerous striking head of the max animal just below the jaws and then, after immobilizing the striking head, uses the other hand to lift the increasingly lightweight beast. much the way you would carry an alligator, crocodile or snake. by the time you put him down he has forgotten all about the fact that he has any legs at all and he sort of falls into whatever he's put down on until a few minutes later when he notices a pile of feet underneath him.

but the most adorable new development in max's particular form of aging is his absolute inability to recognize which side of a door is the side that will open. what i mean is this- max will consistently walk up to doors he's previously had no trouble with and will nose himself into the hinged side, which is often in a corner anyway. at our front door this mostly just means he stands or sits facing the side of a door for a while until he gets bored and walks away. but doors inside the apartment, doors that separate the bedrooms from the rest of the house, for example, tend to be open most of the time. and old snaggledy max will wander into a room, manage to get himself somehow turned around so that he's lost, then he'll see the door. and he'll walk right up to it all happy to know he's getting out and he'll point his nose under the hinge of the door and peer out from the crack between the door and the wall, entirely at a loss as to how to get himself from where he is to where he sees. he'll stand there stoic as anything until someone comes and gets him. this has been incredibly helpful to me in terms of finding the dustiest, unsweptest, most in need of painting places in the house. now i know you're getting all sad that he's lost and upset in his own home. don't you worry. i would be concerned for his ongoing mental anguish a little more if i hadn't dragged him out from behind the same door three times in under ten minutes. and i don't mean i just scooted him back. i put him out in the middle of the room or at the doorway or, once, out in the hall. i don't think he remembers new stuff very well, like the time five seconds ago when he did exactly the same thing he's doing right now. all that's in there is the old stuff. desire to chase a ball. passion for cheese. so that when i pick him up from whatever door he's found himself trapped behind, using the gator hold and carry to keep all my hands and fingers, i can put my head right down on that skull of his and although he can't see me well enough to know if i'm worth biting, he knows the smell of his people. he buries his cold nose against my neck and suffers the kisses because he remembers them all from before.

tornado season

i was born where the bible belt buckles tight across tornado alley. during tornado season. on decoration day. this explains a great deal. not everything, but certainly enough. i remember spending more than one evening sitting in the bathtub while the entire world outside wrung itself out. for those of you who don't know, this is what those without a basement do when there's a tornado. get in the bathtub. and if you have a mattress or blankets or pillows, pile them on top. really. there were countless hours spent in tornado drills at school. kids in the rows closest to the windows would open them, then we'd all file outside into the hallway and duck and cover. because our own skinny nine or ten or eleven year old arms were considered excellent protection from projectiles moving at hundreds of miles an hour down a straight hallway with doors open at either end. it was always difficult to resist the urge to look up when the wind got close. when you are in a tornado it becomes such a loose thing you don't always see it "hit". but you can't tell children things like that. well, you can, but they're not going to listen to you. we drew pictures of them always as funnels with distinct edges. and we wanted to see those edges slam into the world.

when the youngest child was still a baby all three sisters were eating at mcdonald's with a set of grandparents. the sky turned green and the wind whipped up and a manager rounded everyone up and took us down to the basement. the basement of mcdonald's. that's right. we waited out the sound of a train rumbling through the store above, all of us there in the dark sharing the same fear, and came out like new creatures, wandering over broken plate glass windows to separate cars. it lasted only a few minutes but nothing looked the same. our grandpa drove us home under a sky the color of an old bruise. i could not stop talking in the car. i could not stop talking when we got home. i did not yet understand property damage.

this was at a time when we lived next door to two teenage boys who would bring us hailstones after the sky relaxed. we'd stand on skinny legs there on what seemed like a very sheltered front porch. the air when a tornado passes smells different. before. after. and the hailstones, too. at least to a small child the hailstones seemed to have that smell, so clean you're not sure you should touch them. but we'd pile them up, always sized by tv and radio according to various sports equipment. golf ball size. baseball size. we'd watch the lightning stab down from the sky. i don't think i ever knew enough to feel unsafe.

when i was eleven or twelve i went with a neighbor family to the middle of nowhere kansas. the woman was taking a child to a special doctor and i went along to keep the other three children from biting and clawing each other to death. now, kansas really is as flat as a sheet of paper and we were all staying with this woman's family, sitting in an afternoon kitchen when someone came running in yelling about a wall cloud. we all ran outside,what seemed like maybe thirty adults and kids, to stare at the sky. the sky had fallen. for those of you who don't know, a wall cloud looks like the whole sky just drops down under the weight of the cloud it's carrying. and this massive low cloud just barrels along toward you (if you happen to be in its path, and we did) and it spits out rain and lightning and hail and tornados. someone opened the tornado shelter (they do live in kansas) and we all piled inside. one of the men, a brother of the woman i was there with, probably, brought the kids up to the door to look out. there was nothing to break up the sky, bigger than i'd ever seen it, as it rolled toward us. just fields and fields and fields. the tornados dipped down like fingers testing water, some deciding to stay, some not. the man closed the door just as twigs and leaves began to blow in underground, just as those fingers from the sky seemed like they would reach down and touch us. the sound went over us, solid, heavy. when we came up from the ground it felt like all my senses had been scrubbed clean.

a month or so before my wedding next to a strip mine pit in a wide open corner of kansas, a tornado worked its way though my own hometown in a part of missouri that lives dangerously close to those open plains. although i still did not own property at that point, i was old enough to understand property damage. and so i winced as we drove through town. yards looked like they were storing giant broccolis, whole trees upended and laid down. roofs gone. trailers twisted and torn in half. windows broken.

and i think of my parents living near enough to the town's railroad tracks they might have missed a tornado or two, thinking it the evening freight train rumbling through. they live in a ranch house on a flood plain with a newer bathtub, younger than i am, which will not keep them rooted during the winds but is too small, anyway, to climb into and feel safe in. there is a crawlspace but neither of them have the joints to get into it and it's pretty much above ground anyway. i think of a conversation i had last week with my mom. i called to visit and she said, in this bored way, "oh, we're under a tornado warning. let me call you back when it blows over." and she did. and she complained about how the stupid television warning kept interrupting the show she and dad were watching. "they never do it during the commercials. it's always right during the show." she was seriously disgruntled. i got the impression that sight of a tornado out the window was the only warning she intended to take seriously. and what would she do? what would dad do? nothing, i suppose. watch tv until the wind blows the channels right out of the air. get some dinner. drive into town if the lights stay off. these are people who treat forces of nature, what insurance companies call "acts of god", like they're rude children.

so perhaps it is only fair to amend what i said first. i was born where the bible belt buckles tight across tornado alley. during tornado season. on decoration day. i was born to people who let me stand on the porch in tornado weather. who saw the creek rising up close to the house with a swift current nearly a city block wide and let me wade in it. who let me sled down our backyard hill into a sewage seep and put me right back on the sled. who encouraged me to get married next to a strip mine pit. this explains a great deal.

butter

a few months ago one of the ninth grade classes did something fancy, maybe a string of good grades or a long stretch of nobody showing up late, but whatever it was, i wildly announced that they earned some sort of celebration. a breakfast celebration, maybe, since our class meets most days 8-10am. they are not ones to forget things like food and the possibility of no work and they brought it up from time to time. because i am lazy, i began to try to weasel out of my promise. we were working on writing step by step directions and i suggested they find out how to make butter so we could do that in class. our celebration could be a breakfast featuring homemade butter. i knew they'd never do anything outside of class and went back to pretending i'd never said anything. they kept bringing it up. we set a date and they were supposed to bring in instructions. they didn't and the date came and went. but they brought it up again. finally we wrote it on the calendar and three of them actually brought in different ways to make butter.

we chose today because it is the last day before a very long spring break and we all knew they'd be squirrelly anyway- too squirrelly to sit down at desk for two hours. we settled on a recipe that required only one ingredient (heavy cream) and promised the quickest time for results (10 minutes). the children, suspicious of my ability to provide appropriate beverages ("the tea you drink looks like pee or grass or horrible things and it probably has crickets in it!") opted for b.y.o.b. i planned to supply everything else. because i am selfish i went shopping with my own desires at the front of my brain. nutella. lemon curd. honey. strawberry preserves. blackberry preserves. bananas. fresh bread from the bakery near school.

the kids show up. 8am. they start working on the new laptops, navigating this reading program. we're still deciding whether we like it. one child finishes early and needs something to do. i send him to a pile of twenty pink and white tulips on the desk." why are there tulips?" the kids want to know. "who brought you flowers?" "i brought them," i explain. "why?" "because it's nice when people have flowers at a breakfast table." "you're so weird!" i think it's funny that they don't know they're weird, too. so the boy goes back to the tulips armed with solemnly explained rules about what to do with them. he is silent. the other children sit at laptops. i am not at all used to the silence. the other teacher and i are quietly talking about how to use this new reading program when he looks up and laughs. he nods toward the back of the room. there is the first child, serious, towering over a tiny glass vase with two white tulips and a pink one. he has arranged them well but is not at all happy with how they look. he looks from the side. he turns them, moves one. looks again. frowns. and all this is just too sweet to bear almost but then, there, right next to him is another of the children, a boy who spent some bit of time involved with gang folks and who still thinks of himself as a bit of a badass. he is standing in front of a second vase with two pink tulips and a white one leaning out of it. he is doing exactly what the other child is doing. he looks. arranges. looks again. not a word. no discussion. he just got himself up after finishing his program and silently apprenticed himself to this other child. and the tulips look quite lovely in their vases.

everyone finishes and sits at their tables. one child at each table holds a small glass jar. we pour the jars half full of cream and tell the kids to cap them and start shaking. they can't stop laughing at first, don't quite get the point of shaking until the cream clotts. that point is written on the board but it doesn't make sense to them. finally, they start to notice a change. after about six minutes, one group yells that they have butter. it doesn't seem likely so early and i ask if they're sure. they all nod vigorously. "how do you know?" i ask and they reply, in unison, "we tasted it!" that's trust. even better, they don't have silverware. everyone dipped a finger into the jar. we sit down at tables with warm toast and butter. everyone slaps on their own toppings. i sip my tea. the kids, though, don't have anything to drink. one of the kids remembers the root beer floats the tenth graders made a few weeks ago. "you have two bottles of root beer in the fridge downstairs!" he shouts. i do. he runs down four flights to get them and runs back up with two two-liters or root beer. we eat toast with homemade butter and root beer. we have tulips. we are fancier than anyone else today.

triptych: joy

1. driving south on the thruway we came upon a truck hauling a carousel. it was not the pretty carousels of my own childhood, intricately carved and ornately painted ponies in a variety of galloping poses. the horses were more stylized, black and white with orange saddles. still there were carousel horses barreling down the highway. nothing but good can come of that.

2. today was a crappy day. cold miserable rain, angry clouds, ugly winds. i was walking down the street behind a little girl wearing green galoshes with frog faces on the toes. her raincoat was pink and her umbrella was yellow and black striped with little wings, antennae and a stinger. she is who i thought i was at eight. she is who i think i am now, i suppose. and she stomped wildly in every single puddle on the sidewalk, veering dangerously into the paths of miserable folks just to get the deepest parts of the puddles. i looked at my own feet. no frog faces, but green galoshes nonetheless. my raincoat is green, not pink, but just like hers it makes me impervious to rain. and although i don't have a bee umbrella (i really, really want one), this is because umbrellas and i are nemeses, full of passionate hatred for one another. when put in the same place, one of us always ends up shattered and miserable. so i pulled up the hood on my raincoat. good enough. and i stomped in every puddle i could find.

3. for as long as i've been living in the city there have been trios of spanish-singing men roaming the trains with guitars and accordions, playing and singing. they are always good. they are usually dressed up pretty fancy. sometimes you see them once or twice a week and then other times you may not see them for months. today i sat on the southbound platform for the q train underground, stuffy, blah. and i heard a soft harmonica sound. it got bigger and then bigger somewhere across the platform. from behind a pole i saw an accordion unfurl itself. the sound of guitar slid across the double tracks. three men stood together away from the rest of the crowd, tuning instruments, getting ready. even that was worth listening to.

laptop

we got laptops. 20 of them. just for my classroom. this is nice because i've spent the last two years shoving a large, empty laptop cart into various corners of my classroom, hoping eventually to shove it out a window (except that they don't open) or a door (since it doesn't have a lock anyway). we scored the laptops because my unusual students are participating in a program to improve their reading levels. i won't bore you with the details, but it's actually very cool. however, because there are twenty laptops snuggled up in my classroom, the lockless door needs fixing. now, it's not like i haven't mentioned this to every single human up and down the chain of command from my principal to the guys who walk around with screwdrivers. several times. i've filled out countless forms requesting repair of the lock, citing countless books missing from my library, some of which were seen flying from my window last year (when it still opened) and out onto the street below. my classroom is large and full of places to be unseen. it is also sitting in a corner of the top floor, making the thirty minutes it sits teacher free very precious to children of questionable character. children who might slip a laptop into a backpack.

so the door needs fixing and the other day one of the guys with tools stopped by. now, i've worked in quite a few schools and generally it is wise to befriend the guys with tools. and in most schools, that's easy because the guys with tools are nice guys and they spend their days fixing things. but not in this school. this school has a strange collection of passive aggressive folks who make the teamsters at film shoots look like bees or beavers. the guy with tools stopped by and laid out a pile of tools on the table by the door. the kids and i were talking about projects they're working on, discussing people's topics and how to set up interviews to get information. i should say here that my plain wood door has spent the last five years screwed to a door-sized metal plate. it is important you know it is connected with screws. i'm not sure why the plate is there, but efforts to turn the door into a "security door" evidently require the removal of said plate. the one that's screwed in. and passive aggressive tools guy began pounding on the metal plate with a hammer. which was funny for the first ten or so seconds. and the kids always welcome a distraction, but a man clanging away on a seven foot sheet of metal with a hammer ceaselessly for five or so minutes tests the patience of even a fifteen year old in an english class. we talked about the fact that a few minutes of suffering would secure laptops for us all and were willing to suffer. until the bell rang.

then the next class arrived. they got out their notebooks. they got out their reading packets. they got out pens and pencils. they looked over at tool guy who was still struggling with the metal sheet, clearly unaware that a screwdriver and relative silence would allow him to take the thing off. the kids looked at me. "is he going to keep doing that?" someone asked. i figured he'd stop soon so i asked them to give him a minute or two. when it became horribly clear that he was never going to get that metal plate off the door, i turned to him and said, as politely as i could, "um, we're wondering how long you'll be with that because the kids are getting ready to take a test." now, there was no such test and much to my surprise none of the kids freaked out about my little white lie. they seemed to get it. i was trying to give the guy a good excuse to leave. and he did. but he didn't just leave. he swept up all his tools from the table in a huff and stomped out. the kids' eyes got big. they giggled. they said, variously, can't they do that when there's no class? (of course they can. there are guys with tools in the building from 6am to 6pm) doesn't he know we have class in here? (yes, everyone in the building has access to a classroom schedule, especially guys who work on things in the rooms) wow! that guy was rude! why yes, he certainly was.

the next day i found a note saying my class had a room change. the two hour morning class that meets on the fourth floor would meet in two different rooms on the first floor. that's right. two. one from 8-9 and then another from 9-10. so the kids would go all the way up to the fourth floor, see the note on the door, stomp back down to the first floor without any of their work because the guys with tools would not let them in the classroom and would arrive at the first of the two classrooms we'd occupy in no mood to do work. and it's not like that mood dissipates right away. it's not like things are going to get smoother when i tell them we'll be walking down the hall and around a corner halfway through class. without our books. without our everything. then you have to figure that these kids are educationally fragile. disruptions like this get them all squirrelly. so i snarled into the office and asked two of my administrators what was going on. "the door," they said. "it's getting fixed." i made it as clear as i possibly could that my students and i are convinced that this work could take place between 6 and 8 am or between 2:30 and 6pm just fine so it wouldn't happen during class. i stressed the fact that my students take class seriously because i take class seriously and we don't like senseless disruption. i was assured the folks doing the work were locksmiths and 8-10 was the time they could stop by. fine. fine. we'll manage.

so the kids straggled in, grumbling, huffy. i explained the situation and they were willing to sit in a math classroom on the first floor and later on walk over to another math classroom and for the most part try to get some work done. i sent two kids up to the class to get folders and my book. they came back to report that they were chased out by none other than our own passive aggressive guys with tools. two of them. working on the door. no locksmith. the kids were indignant. they were furious. they do not like being lied to. "do you want me to check it out at nine?" i asked. they certainly did. so while the other teacher herded the kids to the other classroom at nine, i stomped up all sorts of flights of stairs and found myself face to face with a naked wood door. no metal plate. and a new handle and lock. behind me in the stairwell, i heard the voices of two of my boys who were supposed to be downstairs. they wanted to see the yelling and screaming. but the guys with tools were packed up and were leaving. they said over their shoulders as they started down the stairs, "we just need to get you a key." good. fine. finished. so i sent down for the kids to come upstairs. they'd be wild, but at least we'd be in our own place.

we were getting ready to read and one of the kids said, "that lock looks funny." it did. i noticed that when i came up the stairs but just wanted to be rid of angry tool wielders. "it's backward!" another kid said, laughing. it certainly seemed that way. the keyhole is in the part that's on the inside of the door. what i mean is that when the door is closed and you're standing inside the room, you can put a key in a keyhole. when you're standing outside, there's no keyhole to put a key in. so i let my administrators know but they had quite a few other things to deal with friday so it will be monday before we can laugh about this again. the kids think it is hilarious. they do not think the guys with tools who work at our school are hilarious. the kids have offered to fix the lock. they don't know why the people who put it in didn't notice at any point that they had the thing in backward, or that they had the wrong one. whatever. the door is a naked piece of wood. the kids have asked to paint it. i'm looking into that.

lost and found

i was walking down seventh aveune, fresh from resupplying max's pain drugs, threading my way through clumps of high school students spilling out of one school, middle school kids a few blocks down, then finally some wild-haired children of a variety of ages flowing out of an experimental school. i was thinking about a boy who had yelled at me today, screamed really, in front of a whole bunch of people right in the main office. his yelling (and mine, at some point) brought the whole administration out of a closed door meeting and brought a bystander student running after the child who was at that point screaming about smashing my face in. the security guard sat at his station doing nothing. the screaming child himself was no threat, being maybe four feet tall and seventy or so pounds, but still i was grateful for the student, somewhere close to six feet of him, who rounded the corner after that little gnat and grabbed him. so i was thinking how i wanted to put that in a blog entry when i heard behind me a sound like a calf. a scared calf, bellowing. i turned around and saw a boy, maybe eighth grade, walking behind me, crying. it was that tearless sort of crying some children do, moaning a bit and wailing, that's looser than the sound of a baby crying and far more disturbing. the boy was full grown, dumpy, not a pretty child at all and his wailing made him even less so. he continued so after two blocks i turned and asked him if he needed help. he stared straight ahead, not even registering my existence, and continued his cow sounds. we came up to the corner just before the train and an elderly woman was looking our way, puzzled. she reached out a hand and i just assumed she belonged with the weeping boy but her hand rested on my arm.

she was lost. she said the number of her house and the street name and wanted to know if i could see it from where we were. i couldn't. she said thanks and began asking everyone who walked by. nobody stopped. i asked her which cross street. eighth or sixth? she did not know, but again repeated the house number. we walked up the street far enough to find that we were going the wrong way and turned around. we crossed the street and she blessed me. she told god to bless me and mary and jesus. she told me she could never tell her son this, that he wouldn't believe it. she told me her eyes were fine when she left this morning but something happened. i looked at her eyes a bit. they were coated with something white, sticky. maybe allergies or an eye infection. but what i really noticed was how beautiful she was. is. she's the sort of woman you can look at at 80 and tell she must have been nearly unbearably beautiful in her younger years. if i can look like her at 45 i will be grateful. beautiful. she wore a sheath dress, knit and a sort of cream color, with thick wool socks and boots for today's rain. she had a long black puffy coat and even with all that michelin man stuffing she looked sleek and elegant.

so we walked down her street, with her alternately calling on everyone in heaven to get off their butts and bless me and then worrying that this had never happened to her before. we had to stop after two blocks because her eyes were too messy to see out of. i offered her a tissue and was met with a new set of instructions for god and friends to watch and keep me. she told me god sent me to her. she told me again that her son would never believe her and that she would call her doctor in the morning. she continued to talk to god and to me. each house we'd pass, she'd look up. "is that it?" she'd ask and i'd tell her the number and say, "not yet, but we're getting close." "i know," she'd say after each house. "i'm following you. you'll find it."

when we got to her number i realized i'd walked past it countless times. an old four story brownstone split up into floor-through apartments, with the heavy iron railing of the front fence painted the colors of africa. she put her hand on the gate. "we're here," i said. "we made it." and she started to cry. she put out an arm and pulled me to her, hugged me. she smelled like urine, but not the way homeless folks do or even the way nursing home residents do. she smelled like she had been afraid earlier in the day and had an accident she hadn't yet noticed. like a small child. she was crying so hard she couldn't talk for a bit. finally she asked my name. i told her and asked hers. it's a pretty name, hers. she said it over and over, asked me to remember it. she dropped her bag when she hugged me and i picked it up for her, a big plastic bag full of plenty of things but on the top burgundy shoes, the clunky square high heels old ladies won't give up wearing. that's just like her, i found myself thinking. wanting to wear pretty shoes like that but being smart enough to have her boots for the rain.

i walked her up the wide steps to the massive front door. she had a set of keys in her hand, four of them. she tried the first one, one that looked like an outer apartment key, the one i would have tried first. it didn't work and she was overwhelmed. "i just can't see," she whispered, almost entirely to herself. i told her i'd try and the second key fit. the lock turned and the great door opened. she wanted me to come inside for tea. the part of me that wanted to was smacked on the back of the head by the part of me that lives in new york city. i told her i had to get home. she was still crying and i was holding onto her, promising her things would be fine. i told her to make a nice cup of tea and rest a bit. i imagine her sitting in a room with an old but incredibly neat overstuffed sofa. i know there are quilts everywhere. the television set she has is one her son brought over, an old one of his, color, with a remote she can't figure out. there are plants in every window. her bed is made. i know this because we walked three blocks together and she held onto me. next time i walk past, she said, i should stop and ask for her. she would be home and would love to see me again.

i told her thank you. i told her i was glad i met her, that i'd been in a bad mood and was feeling sorry for myself and then i got to spend some time with her and didn't want to feel that way anymore. she started to cry again. i wanted to cry too, but i didn't. not sad crying. not at all. that kind of crying where it feels like everything ugly washes off and leaves just what is supposed to be there.

shakespeare is a filthy, dirty, disgusting pervert freak...

so say the ninth graders. and i know what you're thinking but this is not entirely my fault. when i was in high school my class read canterbury tales. our teacher, mrs. walther, anticipated the whining we might do over a book we knew nothing about and she was ready for us. "this book is so dirty," she said, peering over her glasses with a wicked smile, "i can only give you a few of the tales to read." i have never needed to read anything more than i needed to read canterbury tales right that minute. we looked for seedy, lascivious, lewd lines everywhere. "he walked down the road," would elicit knowing smiles all around the room when read aloud. "you know what that means," someone would whisper and we'd all nod knowingly, wishing we did know. it just meant he walked down the road. still, we read. we'd read any tales she'd give us. pardoner. summoner. wife of bath. that wife of bath was something else indeed.

so as we got ourselves ready for shakespeare, for romeo and juliet, i thought about mrs. walther and her glasses and her smile. and when i said shakespeare out loud and then romeo and juliet right after they groaned. they whined. they feigned sickness and death. they splayed themselves lifeless across desks. and i smiled, hoping my own glasses would slide down dramatically at the right moment like mrs. walther's had. i looked out at the kids, glasses slipping down so my eyes peered out over the tops. i conjured up my most cruel smile and i smiled it slowly. "you know nothing!" i spat at them. "if you knew anything at all about shakespeare you'd be begging me for sonnets and plays. begging. you have no idea. you think he's all stuffy and boring but that's just because you've never read the stuff. you probably just don't get the dirty parts anyway." i smiled again, hoping i was doing it right. they perked right up. dirty?

suddenly there were questions. would we be reading the original text or the stupid version? these are actual student words. i assured them the original (as original as anything that old can be) text would be theirs, along with an updated version for those who would like both. why do we have to read the sonnets first? to help ease folks into the way this guy writes and, more importantly, the way he thinks. and of course the most asked question. how dirty? bodies shifted in seats. throats cleared. i explained that the sonnets were written mostly to a dreamy young man and a mysterious dark lady, neither of which were shakespeare's wife. both of which inflamed the guy's passion. wow, they said. dirty.

now, it should be noted here that dirty to ninth graders really just means anything beyond the current reach of the ninth grader. if the ninth grader has never kissed someone, kissing is dirty. gigglably dirty. i gave them sonnet 18, written for this glorious young man. i'd seen this done in other classes, seen this lesson plan- students get a sonnet and translate it into their own teen culture language. so we start.

shall i compare thee to a summer's day? is the first line and i suggested yo, baby. you hot as summer. this goes over well. they figure out the major secrets of the sonnet, seeing it as a song of praise, more or less, promising this young man immortality in the words of the poem. this is pretty common, i tell them. lots of poets try to score by telling the objects of their desire that they can make them live forever on the written page. they grapple with the fact that the object is a young man, trying to figure out how to read it. they settle on the fact that the poet admires the qualities of the young man. they are delicate about it. they want to understand this sort of relationship.

but then i turn them loose. they assemble into groups of four and each group gets one of two sonnets- 128 or 130, both about the mysterious dark lady. one lascivious and the other just mean, it seems. they put themselves together in single gender groups for the most part. they know there will be something dirty to discuss and they want to be comfortable to really say what they think. they are going to rewrite. i am surprised they struggle more with sonnet 130. they get that he's saying all these awful things about this woman, his woman, and they're shocked by the specific cruelties. "wait, he's saying she has ugly breasts? what is wrong with this guy?" these area children who have very little experience with breasts and they're at that gift horse place. if the woman lets you look at them, you're getting a good deal. shut up and be grateful. "he says her breath stinks!" is followed by shaking of heads in the group reading this line. this is not the way to get a woman to kiss you. and then they say the thing that's not what i expect. i expect them to say why is he with her if he thinks she's ugly, but here's what they say- "why the hell is she still with him?" they assume he's telling her all this stuff and they think she should dump him because he's a jerk. i tell them to keep going. they have not yet reached the final couplet.

other groups work with 128, where the speaker watches his beloved play the concertina and wishes pretty much he could be the keys under her hands. this, to a ninth grader, written on the page, is totally dirty. i have heard them say things out loud in my classroom that have melted the skin of my ears but this language in shakespeare- shakespeare- is way dirtier to them. because he is not a teenager. because he is completely famous and totally dead and grown ups respect him. "miss, do you know what he wants to do?" one group of girls screams. "miss, i can't read this!" there are giggles as they turn themselves right back to the offending words. suddenly, shakespeare is delicious.

they work right up to the bell, loud conversations, fits of giggles and whispers. nobody gets up. nobody walks around. nobody talks to anyone outside their group. they are riveted. they will not finish by the end of class so we gather things up and plan to resume monday. the bell rings and kids slowly file out. a group of girls stays behind. they are wide eyed and animated. they want to keep talking about what they just read. "it's the couplet, miss!" says one of them breathlessly. "something happens to switch everything around." she has been reading about the concertina playing. i tell her about sonnet 130, about how he says all these awful things but in the end says he loves the woman more than any other. jaws drop. amazing. "that's so cool!" yells a ninth grade girl. you heard right. shakespeare and his awful sonnets are cool. and i nod and smile, not the smile mrs. walther had when she told us about canterbury tales, but a whole, unrestrained smile, just like what i'd see all over her when she'd talk to us about whatever wonderful piece of literature she'd drag in to share with us.

Sonnet 128

How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st,
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand!
My lips lack the nerve to kiss your hands
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blest than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.