41

http://www.illbejohnbrown.com/

i eased into the early hours of my forty-first year in a basement bar on great jones street, standing in a dark rectangle listening to loud hillbilly music and a voice i've known the better part of my time in this city. this was luck. it was also luck that a plywood bar looking like something built by 19 year olds in off campus housing actually had a bottle of maker's mark sitting quietly on something pretending to be a shelf. as is the case in many basement music venues in new york city, glassware for neat bourbon came in the form of clear plastic juice glasses.

toward the end of the evening, i stood in my band t-shirt, sipping good bourbon from cheap plastic there with the sweetie while folks i know, some better than others, sang "i saw the light", a song hank williams wrote when my parents were children, not too far after the second world war. now, i rarely find myself in a church other than when i'm tricked into going to a wedding, but i grew up with gospel music around me plenty. and i know what it's for. i understand how it works. there is clapping. there is foot stomping. good gospel music, real gospel music, makes you feel like your insides are laughing. and when you hear people you know singing a song you have always known and when that song is a very good gospel song, when you have this good bourbon sitting there in plastic and the sweetie there singing along, just like other people are singing along, people clapping time like fools, some you know well, some strangers and plenty in between, you think maybe 41 isn't that old at all.

window

in my classroom there are four very tall windows facing northeastish. there is a top windowpane and bottom windowpane in each window, for a total of eight panes, all capable of opening separately. each of the windowpanes is fitted with a tic-tac-toe grid of metal on the outside to make it look like nine smaller panes of glass. a decorative touch. due to eight mysterious and separate circumstances (according to the folks who fix things in our building), not a single window opens. because there are two window unit air conditioners in my classroom, this is more a moral issue than a comfort issue. it bothers me to run the a/c in january because nobody knows how to regulate the heat and we can't get a window open and the children are melting. for kicks, every week or so i send down a memo asking for help, asking for just one window that opens. if i pass by an administrator in the hallway, i try to work it into friendly conversation. you can imagine how my popularity has soared in the office as a result of that. lately, i have given up. only two more weeks in that room, four more weeks in the building, then nothing i can do until september.

but today a group of middle school kids put together "day without electricity" as a way to bring awareness about electricity use and eco issues to the school. teachers could sign a pledge saying their class would forgo electricity for the whole day and i can't stand to miss an opportunity to sign my name to stuff like this. so i signed up. then i thought about what it would mean. then i told the kids. they were not so pleased about the whole no air conditioner thing, considering we're in there with no openable windows. so today when i showed up i asked the sponsoring teacher about having the a/c on fan because of the windows and she thought that was fair, and in keeping with the spirit of the day. when i got up to class, though, the cold and rainy outside had somehow seeped into the classroom. it was almost comfy. i left the machine off and instead opened the window shades to let in the few puny streaks of light shoving through a mess of clouds.

the kids came in. they sat. they took a quiz, then read. we talked about the characters in the story we're reading, the characters in the stories we're writing and characters in general. at one point, nearly two hours into the first class, i was listening to a child tell what he thought about a character's choice and i was gazing mindlessly at the window behind him as i listened. there was something strange about the window. something new. so i walked over there after we finished talking about this choice, how it was a painful choice, but one the character made because she loved her children. i pointed to the window and asked if the children noticed what i'd noticed. they noticed quickly. the tic-tac-toe of metal molding on the outside had come loose in places and someone had attempted to fix it. with scotch tape. on the outside. rather poorly. and i asked the children about the likelihood of someone scaling the four stories outside to do this bang up job with the scotch tape versus the likelihood of someone opening the window to do it. the kids were pretty sure someone with brainpower to use scotch tape to affix metal to glass on the outside of a four story building did not likely have the skill to climb up the outside of said building, even if he or she found a four story ladder nearby.

we all smiled at once. i tried the window myself. now, i'm actually pretty strong but these windows are a two person job, so the other teacher in the room lifted on one side and one of the children, frantically excited at the possibility of fresh air for the first time in a year, lifted on the other. the window went up. the rush of air from the outside had a texture that's indescribable. the smell and taste of it hit all the children at once. they began to get giddy. the window opening duo went to the second window and easily lifted it. the windows at either end were crammed full of air conditioners on the lower half, rendering the top halves useless, as well. but those two windows in the middle, the ones that were open there on the bottom panes, might just be openable on top as well. i grabbed the window pole, a ten foot wooden staff with a brass hook on the end i've mostly used for jousting with students this year, and hooked it into the first top latch. the new air swirled and danced around the room. when we had the second top window open, we didn't know what to do. we were so satisfied with ourselves we just sat back.

but the other teacher found one of the metal molding pieces on the ledge outside, waiting to fall and impale the skull of some random child the sidewalk. one end was daggerlike and the other was still wrapped in a piece of the shockingly ineffective scotch tape that was struggling to hold up other pieces. and our joy found a dark edge. how long had these windows been like this? not more than a week, but why had nobody said anything? i'd asked as recently as two days ago about the possibility of fixing them, only to be met with a laugh. and the kids know because regularly the ask about the windows. so they got mean looks. angry looks. because what you don't want to do to teenagers is corral a bunch of them in one place and lie to them about something, even somethings small. and although this was small, the ugliness of the behavior of others, an ugliness that has now stretched over ten months, actually disgusted them. we grumbled a bit about how people treated us, about what we would say or should say to which administrator. the kids are, as you might remember from previous posts, rather unimpressed with the men who maintain the building here. there is a sense that we might be at war with them. the sense is that we might be winning this hazy, ill-defined war if they weren't somehow cheating.

but then this incredible breeze blew in, new to us because it's a fourth floor breeze, clean and free of car exhaust and food smells, a breeze full of rain and greenness, smelling just like sky, so we all just sat back in our seats and let it fall all around us.

max and guthrie are clean

not all of max's waking moments are spent staring at the bottom of a chair under a blanket. recently, after baths, max goes wild. now, guthrie has always loved bath time and has always gone wild after, running through the house, slamming into furniture and walls in an attempt to get dry, i suppose. but max has always cried the whole way through, then slunk off after, angry. until recently. until he got sick. this new after bath max is a joy to behold. for those of you unfamiliar or for those who have trouble distinguishing in the poor light, max is the one who leaps from the wood floor onto the tile floor like he's going off a diving board. he is also the one who slams head first into the parked dog.

the mysterious world of headless max pants

good old max is still motoring around, using his rubbery legs as recklessly as ever. we've adapted to the changes in his abilities as much as possible. because his body shows only minimal interest in healing, he often wears a vest-like bandage wrap with gauze underneath to keep his various little skin eruptions from exploding/getting infected/falling prey to guthrie's predatory snacking (i know. horrifying.). he has a chair of his own in the house, an old recliner, a place he feels safe and comfy. because he can't get up on his own, we put him up there in the morning before we leave. because he is almost always cold, we wrap him up in his own stripey fleece blanket. generally, guthrie hops up there and keeps him warm, or sometimes jim.

because he can't get down on his own, but does not seem to be aware of this, we have a pillow below the chair with his very thick plaid dog blanket draped over it. this way, when he ejects himself from the chair (i don't know how else to describe it. i think he closes his eyes and leaps.), he lands gently on the blanket-covered pillow below. or sometimes on jim. then, if he doesn't get lost going to get a drink, he wanders back and spends the afternoon on the pillow/blanket combo until i come home to take the dogs outside a bit.

but once we're home max is not content to sit on the pillow when he knows quite well one of the people he owns could put him right back up on his soft cushy chair with the back he slides into and the sides that keep him from rolling off and out and away into nothing. but he does not always remember that he needs to tell us. this happens often with max these days and although there is some sort of sadness in it, i suppose, it's also fascinating to watch his brain trying to explain to his body that everything is cool and they should both just act normal. this can be particularly difficult when you're a 17 year old dog whose brain may or may not be harboring two different, but equally sarcastic, sorts of tumors. these things are taking turns grabbing the steering wheel of max's brain and driving him into the ditch pretty regularly, or taking him on scenic excursions he doesn't have maps for. to his credit, he seems to take these trips in stride, finding nice things to do along the way, as long as they eventually bring him back to a soft lap or a warm bed.

so today after a little visit to the outdoors, too cool for late may, miserably gray and with the kind of misty rain that lurks all across the top the little towns flanking niagara falls, max wandered around a while, got a drink, walked around some more, got another drink, meandered into the bathroom where he got stuck behind the toilet, then, after i redirected him, stomped his ever shrinking self as directly as he's ever been able to move over toward his chair. purposeful is not a word used often with max. excessive, yes. persistent, yes, but purposeful, which tends to go with the other two, is just not max. except today. and he got himself all the way across the floor to the blanket/pillow. then he stood himself directly in front of his chair. he fiddled around a bit with the stripey blanket he'd dragged halfway off the chair during an earlier airborne moment. he likes to be covered, and like many young children, believes he is covered if he can't see out of the blanket.

then he stood there. he stood a while. i know because i looked, but did't really pay attention at first. i thought he was settling into the blanket on the floor. but after a few minutes his butt legs decided to rest and he sat. he fell asleep. i know he fell asleep because it took me about ten minutes to get the camera out of its new and not quite right case. he never moved. and the kind thing would have been to have picked up my aged dog, given him a little kiss on the head, then put him up on his chair. but i didn't. because although i know he's where he is because he's falling apart, it's still funny. and sweet. and that's just fine, i think. so i took the photos first. then i picked up his crazy skeleton, gave him a kiss, and put his blanket-wrapped self into his chair.

yard

feel free to click on these photos to see the skill of our new camera. i just stood in front of the flowers. the camera did everything else.

my apologies for the formatting. nothing looks the same on the blog as it does in preview and adjustments don't seem to make things any better.

we have been doing a bit of digging in the yard, planting some things and pulling up others. it's really pretty arbitrary what folks decide to call a weed, but usually it has something to do with how aggressively something can take over a space and how pretty it looks to us. for example, periwinkle is a noxious invasive monster of a creeping plant laying waste to vast tracts of land according to some folks and others will swear it's a godsend, saving an eroding slope by spreading itself out and holding the very ground in place. at our house, we're learning we like a little bit from each category.

when we moved in we inherited a flowerbed full of granny flowers. after a year of secrecy from a stand of irises, things started exploding this weekend. i had been hoping for some super old fashioned bearded blue irises but was surprised how much i couldn't stop looking at the yellow ones that bloomed instead. that is about the most delicate color yellow you'll ever see.

last year was a pretty sad year for the lily of the valley, foolishly planted by someone years ago in the one spot in the yard with direct sun all day in every season. a little mulch and help from the shade of a now-robust rosebush have produced an incredible amount of foliage and a respectable bunch of tiny white bells. quite an improvement over last year's three puny stalks of brown-edged flowers struggling to hide beneath two wilting clumps of leaves.

there are more to come. the rosebush is hefty and the peonies are fattening up a pile of buds. the day lilies are preparing for a summer-long assault of glorious orange. but we're noticing that along the edges of the yard, near the trees in back, the forest, cleared in this part of the valley at least a hundred years ago, is creeping slowly back. the flowers we see on trails huddled under ferns or towering over mosses are underfoot in the yard, as well. and at first we mowed them down, chopped them up, composted the little things because we didn't even notice them. but we're letting a few of them stick around a bit. we certainly haven't had much luck with grass in the shady, spruce needle covered parts. but these flowering wild things weave in and out of one another and seem to be laughing in the face of all those spruce needles. since we share a common border with an abandoned factory and a family who keeps their garbage in the back of a boat, we do not worry too much about experimenting with a more wild version of lawn.

here are a few of our more helpful new flowers. my apologies to those who might actually be able to identify them. my own knowledge comes mostly from a canadian wildflower book i found for two bucks at a bookstore. feel free to correct my mistakes. the little blue ones to the left grow in the lawn. i mow them down without seeing them most of the time, but after our two week absence from the house allowed a complete jungle to establish itself, these things popped up everywhere. they are so tiny i'm not sure how bees could even find them.

these white flowers grow in the shadiest, rockiest part of the yard, the part that was most likely the official dump site for past residents. of course, as you know if you read occasionally or check out the right column, the non-official dump site is the entire yard. these flowers top tall plants that are neither completely viny nor completely stalky. they tend to be companions to some low-growing ground cover with geraniumish leaves.

we found tons of this yellow cinquefoil (at least i think that's what it is according to canada. it does, after all, have five ruffly little petals) all along the roadside near dry brook and then we went back home to find some right in the middle of the yard. the sweetie, quickly becoming an expert in the field of old lady flowers and weedish wildflowers, spotted the first ones growing low to the ground. only a few, but they sure are pretty.

we noticed the forget me nots right away last spring and the sweetie's first response was to insist they be mowed down in an attempt to eradicate all non blade grass from the lawn. these things grow all over the front yard and this year i managed to convince the sweetie to leave a few clumps up next to the trees. i'm not sure what's softened him, but he seems more tolerant of interesting and less desirous of manicured. nothing else manages to shove its way up through the thick mat of needles in the front yard under the two big spruce trees (yes, we've raked. a lot. the trees keep making more.) so they're welcome to stay.

this wood poppy grows in fairly large stands in both sun and shade, all around the edges of the yard. the clumps are thick enough in places it looks almost like a shrub. it has come over from the neighbor's yard where it's the nicest part of what's there. it grows tall enough to hide the broken pieces of house that have fallen off and into their yard. thank you, wood poppy.

we will never have the sort of lawn you see on golf courses, but i think i would be depressed looking out the window or gazing off the porch at such unending sameness. i like coming up each weekend to discover new opportunities sprouting in the yard.

bird

yesterday, like quite a few days, i got home and took the dogs out into the back yard for a bit of prancing around. now, guthrie, bred as a hunting animal, cruised straight over to a corner of the tiny backyard and found something trapped between a garbage can and the screen fence. that something was flapping to beat all, smacking guthrie as hard across his open mouth as it could. by the time i got there a small bird and guthrie were face to face. i managed to shoo guthrie and max back into the house and went over to check on the little bird. i know what you're thinking and yes, i know not to pick up a baby bird fallen from a nest. i know the mother bird won't love a baby all stank up with human scent. i know. but that's not entirely true, firstly, and then this little guy, mostly real bird feathers and only a little bit down, was hopping furiously on his left leg, dragging a broken, bleeding right leg behind him. that particular leg had the look of something completely unrelated to this bird, facing a different way than any reasonable leg would. and i knew that the right thing to do was go back in the house. let nature be nature. mind my own, as the kids would say. but then this little guy, who was already reminding me of a spaniel we kept as a kid- a victim of some sort of car accident, brought to us with a front leg unrecognizable as something belonging to an animal- this bird i didn't even know at all, wedged himself face first into a corner and just stood there. stupid bird. not even trying to be fair. not even trying to let nature take its course. jerk. he sat there just like max, clueless, stuck.

so i called my dad. because my dad knows what to do. when i was little my dad helped us nurse flocks of baby birds, a family of orphaned bunnies and whatever dogs came our way. i left a message for him and ran to the store to get eggs. sure, i know better. any baby bird more than a few days old isn't eating the white of an egg. it's eating whatever the mom is barfing up. but i wasn't thinking and besides, the co-op doesn't have puree of pre-eaten worms. i hurried back, built a nest of leaves in an old flower pot and ransacked the house for a dropper of some sort. i know. i know. you know better. i know better. what did you expect me to do? he was stuck in a corner and defenseless. so i picked him up. and he did exactly what max would have done. he nosed himself right back into the corner, looking completely surprised to end up in the same predicament. and no matter what you and i both know about birds, you can't expect me to ignore a feathered version of max.

the only dropper i found was a huge turkey baster, something about a foot long and nearly as large around as the bird. i filled it with water and held the little guy under it. i shot about a gallon of water across the top of his head, not even near his beak. if you've never seen an angry bird, let me tell you, it's more intimidating than you'd think. much more. i told him i was sorry, resisted the urge to pet the top of his head, held the baster up again and dropped a few small drops onto his beak. i have to admit i was surprised when he opened his beak wide. if you've never stared down the inside of a baby bird, it's pretty. the inside of a starling's beak is blinding yellow. it's what the word yellow means, i think. yellow. but i couldn't get it to eat any worms. i actually went out and dug up an earthworm. they're sad things to look at this time of year. lean, small. i diced up the worm and did my best to look motherly and avian. no dice. so now i'm in deep. i've killed for this guy.

i ended up looking up info on how to raise a baby starling. you'd be surprised what you can find out there in the internet if you ask the right questions. turns out baby birds of this sort can eat dog food. i'm not kidding. the good kind. fortunately we know some dogs with fancy palates and had the right kind. so i left him this morning, out on the back porch, chirpy in his nest, a bit of dog food in his belly. i fully expected to come home and find him the same, only maybe a little hungrier. what i found instead was a bird that looked smaller than i'd ever seen him look in my whole day of knowing him, flattened out in the nest, a wing partly extended. just still. no wildly waving beak. no blinking creepy bird eyes. just the part that i would bury sitting there. and at first i was mad, mostly at me. not because i killed a bird. i don't think i did. i likely prolonged the inevitable. but i was mad because now i'd spend some time missing a stupid animal i didn't even know. mad at the bird for falling out of the nest and for being something i wanted so much. but in the end, there's really nothing to think except that i held a wild animal, which is like nothing else in the world, and i gave that animal a little food, looked right down the bright yellow tunnel of beak and on into him. there's a chance that somewhere in the realistic part of my brain i knew already he'd probably die before i even picked him up. that doesn't change anything.

dish washing machine: technology runs amok

back two octobers ago when we bought our house we noticed the newly and cheaply redone kitchen included a dishwasher. now, i recall the dishwasher that howled in my parents' kitchen in the eighties, a beast that required its victims to wash all dishes before loading them, carefully -CAREFULLY- into the racks. it seems to me there was a dishwasher in ann arbor, in a split-level house where i lived with three folks i'd met and begun to adore in syracuse. i do not have clear memories of it- the possible dishwasher- probably because if it was there i didn't have a passion for using it, not like the passion i had for the washer and dryer living in the basement under a ceiling that would eventually fall on us. i have no passion for dishwashers. i have lived most of my life without them and have found them to be cumbersome, slow, wasteful.

so when we moved on into the house and found that neither water nor electricity had yet found its way to the steel thing huddled under the cabinet, i didn't really care. it seemed more trouble than it was worth to hook up something that created its own monsoons just for the dishes of two people. but recently the house needed help with its awful plumbing and a few weeks later with its still-hooked-up-to-a-fuse-box electrical world. the sweetie thought, since folks were already doing work, it would be just swell if we hooked up an object that would require massive amounts of both water and electricity at the same time. why not?

when we arrived friday night the final bit of work was done and we found a few mugs on the top rack of dishwaser, things we'd put in there two octobers ago. don't worry. they weren't really dirty, just fresh from being unpacked and newspapery. they'd been waiting all this time there in the dark. by sunday, we'd managed to dirty enough dishes to load up the machine and give it a spin. we tossed everything right in there without washing first. ha! but when the sweetie put a bowl on the bottom rack, the part of my brain that was etched some time around 1981 kicked in and i screamed, "NO! YOU CAN'T PUT BOWLS ON THE BOTTOM! THE TOP STUFF WON'T GET CLEAN!" with only moderate mockery, the sweetie pointed to two very separate fanlike sprayers. one for each rack, top and bottom. and i marveled at such brilliant technology. it took us a few tries to open the little tray for the soap but we're intelligent folks and eventually i accidentally hit the completely invisible latch on the side of the soap bucket. bingo. we filled the bucket with soap. we closed the door.

there were quite a few choices on the dial, so we chose the "standard wash" one. the machine started. with so many other advances in technology i suppose i sort of expected the thing to be quiet. quieter. it was not. it sounded like a truck running over a stile. like a helicopter taking off. it washed. it rinsed. and then it washed again. at least it sounded like a second wash. wash is one sort of noisy and rinse is another kind of noisy and we heard both at least twice. i got worried. perhaps all those movies about technology coming to life and taking over were actually beginning with our own little dishwasher. "you shouldn't meddle in things you don't understand." like dishwashers. i cannot even begin to explain how likely it would be for our own dishwasher to come to life and also have o.c.d. wash. rinse. repeat. perseveration. we searched for the manual. another cycle started. after more than an hour of cycling, the sweetie produced a manual that promised us 84 minutes of washing, rinsing and drying, with a total of two washes, three rinses and a dry. 84 minutes. and the short cycle is 75 minutes. only two rinses. wash. rinse. repeat.

i said as many unkind things as i could about the machine, its maker and the whole idea of dishwashers. wasteful. ugly. loud. stupid. steam started coming out the little vent at the top. the drying part of the cycle. that awful steam dishwashers make that smells like plastic. tan plastic, in my opinion, the most tedious of plastics. and i determined right then and there that i'd never use that monstrous thing again. but a little later i decided to open up the shiny metal front and i stared at something i'd never seen. dishes clean as if angels brought them down new from heaven. the saucepan i'd used the night before for making hot chocolate is one of those brown pyrex things i've had since 1990. it has spent most of the last ten years with a halo of scratches (the years before, i wasn't what you'd call "cooking food" and it mostly rested) and burnt spots like bruises along the bottom. until today. there were pint glasses so clean i would have missed seeing them but for their edges cutting into the light. silverware gleamed. it's the way the world looks after an evening thunderstorm, clearer than you've ever seen it. i closed the door quickly.

later i showed the sweetie, who marveled at the beauty just as i had. we put the dishes away. i felt a little sorry for the dishes already in the cabinets, shabby through no fault of their own. they will get their turn.

new

last week the early literacy class (the ones who think they are my favorites, the ones who made butter and always have very funny and clever things to say even though they are all late and even though only twelve of them show up each day) decided to be fools. on friday. some days they say things like, "but it's friday, miss." like that means i should sit there for two hours and stare at them while they sleep or text instead of teaching. not likely. and although they aren't generally like that they were on friday, and they were right in the middle of the time when i read out loud to them. we're reading from the first chapter of a book called roll of thunder, hear my cry. as far as books for teens go, as far as historical fiction goes, i think it's pretty swell. i take it personally for the book when kids don't listen. so i'm up there reading this really dramatic book about klansmen on night rides and there's sleeping and texting and talking going on all around me. and what i wanted to say is, "you guys are being such jerks that i'm not going to read to you. try to figure it out for your own selves." this is mean because the book, although written for middle school kids, is well beyond the reading abilities of most of them. so what i said instead was, "you guys are being such jerks that i'm not going to read to you. try ti figure it out for your own selves." sometimes all that fancy college training just flies right out the window and a person accidentally says exactly what she thinks.

their eyes got big. "nineteen pages," i said. "there will be a quiz monday and it will be miserable." i glared at them. i'm getting rather good at glaring this year. and they knew they were being jerks because they didn't outright refuse, but they attempted all sorts of bargaining. i glared until the bell rang. it helps me keep from bargaining. on monday, we had a guest speaker in class so i reminded them that they'd read this nineteen pages over the weekend and could expect the miserable quiz on tuesday or wednesday. tuesday we were loaded down with work, but toward the end of class, i mentioned the quiz again. "what's it over?" someone asked. "all nineteen pages." "how long do we get?" "an hour and a half." eyes got big. quizzes are usually over in five or ten minutes. an hour and a half is a final exam. "how many questions?" i smiled. "one." the children were silent, doing the math. nineteen pages plus an hour and a half plus one question equals disaster. they couldn't think of a single question that could possibly take up so much of their lives. and they were sore afraid.

but don't think, even for a minute, that any of those sweet little children went home and read any of the nineteen pages on tuesday night they were supposed to have read over the weekend before. because they didn't. well, two or three did. but mostly they didn't. i know, i know. they can't. but they ought to be able to solve that problem somehow over the course of a week. they didn't even have enough sense to go home on tuesday night and call someone who read it. so they came in wednesday and we did a bit of work we needed to do first and then i split them into groups of four. the quiz: create a mural depicting the events in the first chapter of the book. now, i won't bore you with the details of the rules they had to follow and the requirements they needed to meet. they had to make a mural. they set to work with butcher paper. one group scooted tables together and spread out their mural canvas. another rolled their paper out onto the floor. the third group put their paper on the chalk board, held fast with fifteen or so foam letter magnets left over from a past teacher. they used colored pencils and crayons and craypas but i had one box of giant, vivid poster chalks, like sidewalk chalk for artists. if you've never used these, you want to protect your hands, clothing and anything else nearby. i'd planned to get latex or plastic gloves but hadn't been able to find any near school. one of the adults in the room offered to get some from the nurse. four children donned latex gloves and began work. i don't even know how to begin describing the scene. there aren't words. they didn't even look like people i knew. and that's when i looked around the room. not a single person was looking at me. not a single person was looking up. every head in the room was turned toward its own project. i do not remember ever having seen this before but it was so beautiful i thought i would fall down. there was no yelling. no screaming. look, there is always yelling during group work. always. but not today. one boy came in late, more than an hour late. he asked what he should do and i put him in a group and told him to do what they asked. he put on gloves and began yellowing up a school bus. i showed him how to use the chalk and his finger to make dust clouds around the bus. four children stood around a single sheet of butcher paper, each one working, nobody shoving, making dust clouds and schools and books.

i wanted to help but they really didn't need my help. one of the rules of the quiz was ask when you need help and for the first time all year, they came to me with requests for supplies. scissors (these are usually children who run with scissors). black pencils. glue. glitter (do you have any idea how many glitter "accidents" i've witnessed?). and that's it. they needed things. not me. which is the best and scariest thing i've seen. they did not finish but this is because they were taking their time, working at specific jobs. the reader from each group was responsible for pulling out passages vivid enough to include in the mural. the drafter was responsible for creating the outline of all images in pencil. two illustrators colored in the images as the drafter finished them. they will finish tomorrow. i taught my first class in september of 1990. the last few days, i feel like i'm maybe starting to get the hang of this teaching thing.

some days the children baffle me to the point i'm just speechless. i don't think any teacher always knows what to do for every kid. those who tell you they do are liars, or worse, idiots who don't know that kids are different from one another. i'll figure it out one day for one kid, then lose it the next, be unable to reach across the chasm that developed between the last time we read a book together and now, when they're tired because it's morning and that's when teenagers are tired. and the last few days i've been lost with the same kid day after day. he doesn't want anything. he's put all that gandhi, dr. king and bartleby show by example into the same pot, stirred it up, and poured out his own version of civil disobedience. "i prefer not to because i don't see why i should, although it's also likely i maybe can't, but i'm not about to admit that to you because you already have too much power and i don't like that, either, so no." this is a child who rolls through the days with a 20% average. that's out of 100. he turns in just about nothing. but i know he's smart. i can hear it sometimes when i ask questions where someone might get to talk about cars in an answer. he knows strange bits of information about military things and about history. but he won't share them unless he wants to. he almost never wants to.

so today, after three or four days of belligerence i would secretly admire if it weren't directed toward me and toward reading, he said something mean or ugly in class and i just had it. in my head i was already having a hissy fit. a conniption. snarling and roaring, my fangs dripping venom. the other children were hunched over their books, reading silently. i stomped back to the empty seat next to my nemesis and sat down. and he smiled. not a big ugly smile, but a little mona lisa hint of smile that says a person is pleased to have accomplished something and can't really hide it but isn't quite ready to admit full on to being happy. but he was happy. i don't think people ask him many questions at home. not nice ones, anyway.

i sit down and turn my angriest face to him and ask what exactly he wants. he doesn't know. i don't know either, but i ask him to write. he puts his name and the date on the page, laughs and insists he's not writing. i have learned to ignore comments like this from children who smile or laugh. they will talk a big game but if you can get paper in front of them and put a pen in a hand, you'll get somewhere. i put the pen in his hand three times. yes. three. the other children are still reading. we have fifteen minutes before reading time is over. i ask him what he hates and he begins to tell me. i point to the page. he writes. he writes about getting up in the morning and coming to school, about sleeping on the bus. then he writes about his teachers. he spares no one. this teacher is an idiot. that one hates him. another is boring. he goes through the whole day. our class is in the middle. he mentions trudging up to the top of the building and says he likes the class. this is not flattery. he has used all the bad words he knows right up in my face and is not being gentle. there are three women in this class who are after him daily to be someone. he likes this. he thinks his own mother doesn't care. i don't know that his thinking is true, but he feels it and he feels like the three women who yell at him here, every day, care. some days caring is exhausting. he says he likes the class but he does nothing. he says he doesn't know why.

i think he knows. i want him to know. if he knows, we can change things. but maybe he doesn't. i don't know. when people admit to something they've done that's not what they should be doing and then they say they don't know why they're doing it that just never seems quite right. how can a person be so halfassed in self-awareness? while he writes i get my own sheet of paper. i sit next to him at his table and we both write. he writes about school, which is what upsets him and i write about him, which is what upsets me. and i am honest because i'd asked him to be honest. i write about how i know he's smarter than he pretends to be and how i worry he'll go out in the world and starve or die because he'll have no skills at all. i use words like sad and scared and then, at the end, i write the word proud in the last sentence. i look over. he's beginning his fourth page. quite a bit of writing for someone who insists he's illiterate. time is nearly up. the kids sitting nearest us are looking over and want to read what i've written, what he's written. he never looks up the whole time he is writing. he doesn't ask now to see what i've written. he hands me his pages.

i'd like to think he wrote for me because i asked him to, or because i finally got through to him, finally convinced him of something. that's probably not true, though. just before we started writing, i told him a secret. i told him i was mad at him, that we'd just recieved a set of scores from some reading tests in this new program, that his scores were highest. not just highest. perfect. 100%. that's out of 100. perfect perfect perfect. i told him it hurt my feelings that he was so selfish with his knowledge and i told him i knew he could read and i wasn't going to help him keep that secret. that's what i wrote about in my paper, that i guessed maybe i might be a little bit proud of him. and he didn't write because he wants me to be happy or feel better. he didn't even write because he wants people to know he's smart. i think he did it because he likes how much power it gives him. even more power than choosing not to. i think he has very little control of his life and he likes that he can control me entirely by writing a few sentences. i think he's power mad. i suppose i ought to be proud of that, too.

friday

today is the sort of day small shops keep their street doors open. breeze. sun. all that is good. today, walking down a street with the sort of shops that keep their doors open on days like this i passed a barber shop. the real kind. pole and everything. old guys with glasses you see in yearbooks from 1953. those same hairstyles, too, but thinning. dyed coal black. i don't know what i expected to hear when i walked by but it certainly wasn't lynyrd skynyrd yelling "gimme three steps". not even a little. now, let's spend a minute on the song first, then go on about the story. skynyrd is one of those bands you can't always talk about in mixed company. you know, hillbilly folks and the rest of the world. long before hip hop and the battles between the coasts, skynyrd and neil young duked it out in song, with skynyrd proudly defending some embarrassing positions the south might want to let rest. but this song turns its back on all that and focuses on a rather spectacular story about a man who is caught spending his time where he shouldn't, dancing with another man's woman. this other man, you ought to know, arrives on the scene with a gun. and this is where i like the song. no bravado. no chest puffing or talk of winning the woman. none of the crap ninth graders believe about how they're invincible and will survive a gunshot by force of will or take down a gun wielding maniac with their bare hands. just a lowdown weasel begging for a few seconds head start running from a man thinking about shooting him. in fact, said weasel gets his moment when the gun toting man turns and yells at his woman. weasel splits. i have always found the honesty of this particular song refreshing. i know every word of plenty of skynyrd songs because i lived where i lived when i lived there. so i sang along, the only person in park slope, brooklyn, most likely, strolling down the street on a friday afternoon belting out a tone deaf version of poor linda lou's least fine hour.

i kept walking, leaving writhing folks clutching damaged ears in my wake, my cruel singing growing softer as my distance from the music stretched, until another song intruded. i don't know what it is called. i've never heard it before, at least not that i know. across the street and old guy sat on a stool playing an ivory accordion. years ago a friend gave me a busted old accordion and although i never learned to play it, i liked looking at it, pressing the buttons and hearing geese fly out. there is a smaller accordion here now, on the bottom of a stack that includes an ancient manual typewriter and a dented mellophone from a now defunct nyc school band. i like accordion players. i like them when they're accompanying spanish singing on the train, when they're playing wild polkas or when they're playing cajun music, which is like a polka wrapped up in a square dance. i want accordion players, who are mostly old guys wearing fedoras, to like me, to think i'm nice. it seems very important that they know i appreciate the glory of the accordion. i would never fail to smile at an accordion player. it would be like forgetting to hold your breath going past a cemetery. sure, it's not something you have to do, but what kind of idiot doesn't? i was across the street from this particular guy but i smiled over at him anyway. just in case.

i wasn't paying attention from all the listening and smiling and almost ran into a man standing right in the middle of the sidewalk. i looked at him, saw that he was in some sort of line, then looked up and rested my eyes on an ice cream truck. but not a normal one. a butter yellow one. it was parked in front of the bank and wasn't even playing music. it wasn't garish and there weren't any screaming children shoving each other out of the way. now, the sweetie likes the occasional ice cream truck treat but there are few things that depress me more than fake ice cream, plasticky, in colors i've never seen. but this truck didn't have giant multicolor clowns on the side. it had a pale vanilla flower and bean. then there was a ginger flower and root. lovely pistachios on a leafy stem. coffee beans on a flowering stem. soft, fuzzy hazelnut leaves so pretty i could smell them shading hazelnuts. there were words printed on the buttery side of the truck promising root beer floats and hot fudge sundaes. i wanted to cry. someone had clearly crawled right inside my head and designed a special ice cream truck just for me. just for me. a scruffy guy, the kind i spent my time with in college, wearing a hat my grandpa would wear, asked what i'd like. he seemed as happy to be handing out pretty ice cream as i was about getting pretty ice cream. i got a small ginger cone. i know. i was afraid i'd get out of control and i've already learned my lesson about walking around town with a hot fudge sundae, several bags and no napkins. it was perfect. it was the ice cream we made in a wooden crank ice cream bucket when i was a child. it didn't taste like it had ever been in a store. it didn't taste like ice cream that had been waiting around for a while. it tasted like they started making it when i started thinking about it. like ginger and cream and summer and no paved streets and maybe even a late afternoon storm. all right there in that small cone. i'm not kidding even a little bit.

my grandma (and plenty of other folks of her generation and before) would have you believe that bad things happen in threes. plane crashes. deaths. fires. this comes, maybe, from a time when folks didn't know so much about the world and wanted to reassure themselves that awfulness wouldn't go on forever, that it was finite. when two terrifying things come close together, the promise of one more is the promise of only one more, instead of the possibility of endless awfulness. and three is a manageable number. a brain can remember three of anything. we don't need this sort of thinking so much anymore because we tend to know so much more about why. but when three things happen all in the space of a few minutes and each thing makes you feel like you've been given a small gift you didn't even know you needed, you want to make them be connected. you want to think you've been singled out for something special. you can't ask for days like this. it would be rude. but you have to take them when they come along.

may day

some of you may not know what may day is. those of you raised in heathen parts of the world like new york city or chicago. but i was raised by wholesome folks in the lovely midwest and i know. i dont know whether it started as a craft project at school or at home, but when we were small, each may first my sisters and i filled little construction paper baskets with flowers and ran to hang them from the doors of our neighbors' houses. our own house sat between two stone bungalows as neat as anything from a fairy tale. one one side lived the longsuffering parents of the boys who brought us hailstones, a skinny woman named joy who grew strawberries in her backyard and let us sit with her in a swing on her front porch far longer than i'd have patience for and her easygoing husband john. the other house was home to two elderly sisters who, in my mind, thought we were adorable children. i'm not saying we were. i'm saying they were old ladies, always scented with powder, always perfectly made up. the point is, you put these flowers in this basket and hang it from a door. you ring the bell or knock and then tear off the porch and hide. it's an anonymous gift. flowers. the goal is to do something small and nice without taking credit for it. this is a difficult concept for ninth graders. anonymity is strange to them and the idea of putting forth effort without any hope of reward seems pretty stupid.

so this may day i carried forty tulips (tulips are super cheap in brooklyn this time of year for those of you interested in spiffing up a place with flowers), light and dark green tissue paper, yellow tissue paper, plastic cups and light green striped small gift bags. the first class of the day is forced to participate in this ritual for no good reason i can think of but that it's early and it's easier to sneak up on people early. because we are on the fourth floor, a small floor, we only have four neighbor classrooms and we start there. three of these teachers have been victims of may day before and are kind enough to play along, to be surprised, to not see children sneaking around outside their classrooms.

the baskets are made up. the children are reading. i call a child to the door, the child who asks to run every errand because he can't sit still more than two seconds in a row, the child who uses at least a box of tissues a week for a variety of upper respiratory ailments his mother doesn't appear to be interested in addressing. i explain his task and walk with him to the door. he crouches low and slinks along the wall to just outside a neighbor teacher's door where he cranes his neck to peer inside the classroom. he runs back, basket still clutched in his fingers. "i think she saw me!" this poor kid is already in deeper than he knows. he is committed to the mission. it does not take much to get children committed to the right mission. he prepares to go out again, inches along the wall, scrunches down next to the teacher's door then quickly scoots the basket into the open doorway. as the basket slides toward the door the child shoots back and hides in the stairwell across from our own classroom door. he stands there, back pressed to the wall spy-style, breathing hard. he peeks around the corner and runs into our classroom before the teacher ever makes it over to the basket.

some of the kids are scared of the sneakiness and some are just shy, but several children want to roam the hallway and be involved in all the subterfuge of a prank, knowing that if they get caught, the only suffering they'll have will be at the hands of classmates who will mock them for being less than stealthy. the next child chooses to go down our stairwell a floor and sneak back up another stairwell near his intended recipient's classroom so he won't have to walk in front of an open door on our floor and give away the secret to any of the other classrooms. we have several baskets left and children choose other teachers on other floors, leaving one at a time to sneak up and deliver baskets.

one boy insists he wants to take the last basket. he is a child who sings constantly under his breath, songs about me or songs about a student in the room he fixates on. when he isn't singing, he's having a constant conversation with himself, always low, not intended for public hearing. because of his singing and conversations, he is often lost in class. this is not the right task for him. i ask him if he is sure he's stealthy enough. he promises he is (he isn't). i ask him if he knows the teacher he's to deliver to. he says yes, says he has her for a class (he doesn't). he takes the basket downstairs and comes back quite some time later, claiming victory. i ask if he delivered the basket and kept himself secret. he insists he has and grins broadly. he is thrilled with himself. he genuinely believes he has accomplished the task set for him. later that day, the teacher he delivered to thanked me for the flowers and asked about the strange child who delivered them. she had seen him wandering the hall with the basket, looking confused. he told her he was delivering flowers, said her name and asked if she knew that teacher. recognizing her own name, she said yes, and told him she was the person he was looking for. he had no idea who she was. he handed her the flowers, told her they were from me and ran off, giggling, completely negating every claim he made before he left and every claim he made on his return. telling the story, the teacher couldn't stop laughing either. i have no idea what made this child insist all these things were true when they weren't, but the teacher got her flowers and the child had what seemed to be a very good time delivering them, so i think we're all fine.

the women who got flowers seemed pretty happy about it. they said thanks (the goal is to remain anonymous, but since i'm the only one goofy enough to do this every year most folks have figured it out by the end of the day) and carried their baskets with them. the men, on the other hand, didn't say a word. the men who got flowers aren't men i chose. the children chose and delivered. and although i've been doing this long enough that the men i work with should know it's not personal, they seem uncomfortable every year if flowers show up. they never take them home. i hope they at least give them to children who might want them. and you'd think that since i know this, i'd direct the kids away from delivering to male teachers. but i think men should get flowers and not feel funny about it. especially on may day and especially if they're gifts from children. it's a good sign the kids want to give flowers to men. it shows that with all the awful things we say about their miserable generation, they spread things around a little more fairly. but mostly the reason i don't discourage the kids from giving flowers to the men in their lives is that i really, truly enjoy knowing those men feel uncomfortable picking up a basket of flowers in front of a class full of children. they think it makes them less manly. that's not at all what makes them less manly. what makes them less manly is that when children give them flowers, they don't know how to accept that gift with simple grace.