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

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

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

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

love letters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. for homework, deliver the letter.

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

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

angry ninth grade boy

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

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

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

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

gaslight

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

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

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

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

wet dog smell

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

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

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

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

walking home

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

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

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

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

thursday afternoon

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

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

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

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

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

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