water

i read about the little lake in one of those guidebooks. i look for an easy trip because the sweetie is willing to kayak class 5 rapids (class 6 rapids offer a constant threat of death and extreme danger) and i want to avoid this while offering him something fancy enough to be worth the bother. the book promises a little lake and a river flowing into it and then out of it down a mile and a half to a waterfall (class 5 rapids are full of waterfalls!). it promises an easy time with something to look at. so we put the kayaks on the car and squeeze ourselves into our fake-seal pants and we go.

we walk the kayaks down to the dock, which is a floating platform alongside a three foot wide channel in the weeds and muck. the water is too low for the dock to be useful, but the way it leans suggests maybe we wouldn't want to use it even in higher water. we put the kayaks at the edge of the water and move, one after the other, down the narrow channel with the funhouse dock looming over us.

it is a small lake, more pond, really, but if you want to know the truth it's just an open space in the wetlands. because that's what it is all around us. swamp. marsh. pine barrens without the pines. tall, stick-straight trunks of trees stretch upward with not a leaf or branch to them. desert. waste land. we paddle left toward the river outlet and pass an old camp's dock. it is bedraggled, with unrecognizable watercraft tied to it. pogo sticks on floats. there are broken shacks up the land a bit, then the camp itself, low and ugly and empty. ghost town. abandoned summer camp. yes. of course. i look across the lake the other way. to the razor wire. to a tall building that looks like something from an old strip mining venture in my own hometown. a concrete rectangle reaching up several stories past the other buildings, with two or three windows to break the flat surface. the blades of the wire glitter out there in the sun like sparkles on the water. it is a saturday around noon and nobody is outside.

so this is where things stand. we are floating on the surface of a small lake/large pond/space between cattails. to the one side is an abandoned summer camp, complete with broken down docks. to the other is an equally abandoned, though likely very full, prison for children ages 12 to 18. babies taken away from their own families with the idea that raising them here, all together, might work better than what is happening at home. i am waiting for the monster that most certainly lives in the bottom of this murky lake to leap up and swallow me, kayak and all. there has to be one, right? water so cloudy you can't see a bright yellow paddle once you dip it under the surface.

i want to be clear of the buildings on either side of us. the camp. the other camp. we paddle toward the river and a great blue heron flaps big, slow wings up and lifts itself out of the marshgrass where the book said there is a rookery. it flies down the river, away from the buildings, flap. flap. too slow to stay up in the air, if you ask me. it goes low along the water at first, then rises up over the spindle trees and cattails and beaver dams. it flies a long time with sticklegs hanging down below it and i watch until i can't see it.

there are beaver dams everywhere. tall mounds of sticks, five, six feet up and big enough around to let a substantial group of friends sit down to dinner inside. the sweetie rows over to one and sniffs. he has read somewhere that there is an oil the animals leave all around their homes to let others know who lives where. he says it is supposed to smell wonderful, that it is used as a flavoring in foods. i doubt this and say as much. i know that all mammals using scent glands keep those glands tucked neatly up as near as possible to where the tail lives. that is not a good place.  i paddle on by him.

we thread our way around sunken logs and shallows and the terrifying withered roots of dead water lilies, floating like mummies here and there. there are more broken down docks along the way, some nearly indistinguishable from the cattails and quiet tree stalks around them. they jut out into the water from nowhere, from more water. but i have spent enough time with a man who wears a gila monster on his arm to know the desert isn't as ugly as it looks first glance. i look up quick enough to see another of those herons floating overhead and figure maybe that's a start.

the water doesn't seem to be moving the way a river would. the wind pushes us upstream fast enough we have to put some effort into our paddling to get downstream. but we do. and pretty soon there are little jewels everywhere. we round a curve in the water and there are trees shaped like trees now, rather than sticks. the land grows a little more solid and rises up out of the water a little more real than it had in all that murk.

we don't talk much. there's not much to say and the wind grabs every word and strangles it anyway. we paddle on into the very real world. the sweetie finds the waterfall first. we are upstream of it and i have imagined more than once this trip that we will roll over it without warning and will plunge to our untimely deaths.   turns out it's not that sort of waterfall at all. it is a series of short, wide drops that finally let that lazy marshwater go wild. there are remnants of stone walls all along the falls and there's a big, flat rock ledge where we pull the kayaks up and step out.

 we walk carefully over the mossy rocks on downstream a bit. we stand a while and watch the water tear over the rocks with a small, quiet frog who does not seem entirely committed to his color choice. spring is confusingly early this year and he is not quite sure what to do with so much early april at his disposal. we walk on past and he keeps his eyes on the water. when we head back to the kayaks i keep my eyes on the shifting rocks under my feet. this turns out to be a very good idea because there are trilliums stretching themselves out from the rock crevices and into that same sun the frog has been using.

we paddle back upstream, away from the waterfall and the living trees and the high banks. we make our way back through the cattails and beaver dams and the great blue heron rookery. the sweetie startles a beaver surfacing near the shore and the animal warns his kin with a sharp slap of the tail that sends water spraying high into the air and sounds like lightning striking a tree. the sweetie, undeterred by the lack of desire animals in nature have to spend time with him, paddles over to get a closer look.

the bedraggled docks slide into view and then the low, ugly buildings. the cement tower. the glittering razor wire. there are more boats on the lake now, fishermen mostly sitting still near the shore, but also a group of five or six folks kayaking together, heading out to where we have already been. they cut across the middle of the lake like a flock of geese. we wish them a good trip. beautiful day, says one of them as their boats pass ours. we nod, both of us, back at him. it is a beautiful day. all of it.

revolution

this week we started reading ray bradbury. last week was midwinter break. the week before, we wrote a little:

fifteen years ago mr. gil scott heron broke my heart and shook my hand all in one evening. he promised me the revolution would not be televised. he was right about that. 


but that may be partly because there's not a working television in any public school in brooklyn. the revolution will put you in the driver's seat, he said. the revolution, he insisted, will be live. and it was. it will be. it is. i had the good fortune to see the first glittering sparks of revolution today and can tell you all you've heard and all you've thought about the shiftlessness of teenagers, all you've heard about how they don't know how to work together or think or act is probably about as far from what i saw today as possible.


it turns out when you give kids some time to think and ask them a tough question or give them a deep statement, they'll ask you what it means first, but when you tell them you don't know,  they'll try pretty hard to figure it out for themselves. and even if they're not sure, even if they don't get it quite right, they'll get pretty riled up if they think someone is listening. and i will tell you, right here and right now, that if you are a grown up person and you say to them i am listening they will say something. and even if it isn't what you want to hear, even if it sounds silly to your own grown up ears and even if it isn't as articulate as you think your fancy self could be in the same situation, you will hear something impressive if you listen.

we give the kids a slice of a poet's brain: if they give you ruled paper, write the other way. the poet is a man named juan and we ask what they think he means. we ask the tenth grade. the whole tenth grade. five classes of thirty. and we say it like this: what do you think? they do not like this because they think it is disingenuous. they believe that when someone asks them, tenth graders, teenagers, what they think, what those people really mean is what do i want you to say? and i suppose most of the time that is true. but we press on. no, really. what do you think? and they think maybe it means a person should be a little more rebellious. they think it means a person probably doesn't have to let other people determine his or her limits. they think. it is a struggle, but they do it.

and we talk some more. about the occupy wall street protests, which they see as a colossal flop. why, they want to know, with all the world watching, didn't those people say something? as people who are adept at being ignored and discounted and dismissed by those in power, they know a missed opportunity. they know exactly what they would do with an audience. they know what they would do if someone shoved microphones in front of their faces.

and we figure, a handful of teachers who are always looking around for a way to get a kid to read or write or think, we don't exactly have a microphone but we know they know how to get attention. so we scheme. and each class schemes a little differently but everyone has the same message. we're going to write the other way. and they write it down. on post-its and posters. it should not be missed here that every time they write their message they write it the right way. every time. they arm themselves with paper, with words. they are ready to go out into the world with a message. but we've got more than paper in mind. we know how they communicate.

in each class, all five, we ask them to take out those precious phones. it is against the rules. it is so against the rules. they begin to glow, the children. one child says he is confused. a girl giggles nervously. slowly, agonizingly slowly, they type the quote about the paper into their little phones. and then, in each class, thirty kids and two teachers, more or less, send out a text to at least five, and in many cases all, of the people they have listed in their phones. if they give you lined paper, write the other way. hundreds of texts like electronic confetti flying through the air. they cheer. they change their facebook statuses. i do not even know what this looks like, but they do it. status: writing the other way. status: disturbing the universe. status: participating in the revolution. they step out into the halls with their fists full of words, their stomachs fluttering wild butterflies. we could get in trouble for this. all of us. this is real. this is the revolution. they stick the words onto doors and walls. they put them on the time clock in the office. they fold words and cram them into grates and wrap them around door handles. they cover the school with their demand. if they give you lined paper, write the other way. do it, the little papers insist. look at things differently. do not let anyone ever limit you.

and nobody is really sure what to do. students are whispering in the halls. some teachers glare out doors as swarms of thirty tenth graders blankets the halls with a call to action they are still not quite sure they understand. but some teachers open their doors, stand there in the doorway with smiles that reach way back into their eyes. some teachers encourage their students to look at us. one teacher has tears in her eyes, good tears, she says. she is proud of what she sees.

late in the day, the very last period before the bell rings and the doors open and the wildness pours into the streets, the last class of the day steps out into the hall, walking three or four abreast, carrying the words on big slabs of poster paper. they chant, they say the words loud, all together, insistent. their voices echo through four floors of the old building and just like with each class before, with every step they take, a little of the fear and nervousness dissipates. they are surrounded by each other and they feel the strength of their numbers. i see them on the last leg of their journey. they are marching toward an administrator who steps out into the hall at the corner where they will turn. he watches them. he is a good man and he understands what they are doing but it is his job to keep the peace. he stares at them. they do not waver. they march right up to him, chanting, and turn the corner. he nods at them. they understand what he has done. they understand the impression they have made. they are down the stairs and gone.

it is not clear, however, that all of them understand what they are doing. it is not clear that all of them will be able to explain what has happened. but it has happened. it is happening. and they are planning what to say next. because they know something. they know people hear their voices. they know people in this school know they have something to say. they are starting to believe it, too.

field survey

some days after breakfast the sweetie and i walk down the steps of the caboose and we head up the railroad tracks a little, walk the right-of-way through the trees and around the curve, past the field with that one cow on the east side of the rails and the wrung out land where the river came up to the west. but today i am restless and want to walk the other way, over the two lane road we call highway 28 and down behind the post office, toward the depot at the edge of town.

i know what is there, know there are trains on those tracks, art deco passenger cars, boarded up cabooses, steam engines and coal engines and all sorts of monstrous beasts smelling of oil and metal. we walk down the tracks past the bbq and the auction. we  cross over the highway and find ourselves very quickly among little yellow rail repair vehicles. there's an old handcart sitting low and still. behind the post office are the first big cars, covered over with dark strapped-down tarps.

we roam around. i tightrope walk along a rail while the sweetie tries to pace himself with the ties. they do not match his stride and he kicks around the outside of track closest to the water, right where the bush kill crept up during the flood.

the sweetie finds a few bones along the track, shining white ribs and slices of spine, an animal dissolving into the dirt. we look at them a while, but they are nothing big. small pieces of a deer, probably hit by a car at night there on the dark curve just above the rails. the sweetie abandons the bones, slides down the bank a little more recklessly than a man with so far to fall really ought to and is out at the edge of the water, skipping fat rocks across the ice.

i am not the sweetie, barreling headlong down a steep slope like a madman. i pick my way through the piles of leaves and loose stones to where the ground levels out and small trees huddle in clumps. i watch where i put my feet, try to avoid thorny vines that snag at my legs anyway. generally this cautiousness simply leaves me behind the sweetie on hikes, trailing him, being always not the first to see anything.

but today because i look down to be sure my shoe doesn't slide into the soft, sandy mud near the water there is a gift. because of the storm, because of the flood and the meanness of water, there are things strewn all along the valley up nearly as high as the banked tracks some places. propane tanks. a mug handle. the sole of one shoe. and because we walk along the water from time to time i'm learning to ignore the bits of bright things caught around the bottoms of trees. there is a layer of the unnatural over the rocks, the plants, the broken branches that will be there a while.

but this is different. a white triangle bigger than all the smashed pieces of things and brighter than any twisted, tree-snagged plastic bag. i lean down and think back to when i was pining for a deer skeleton we saw by the side of the road. it stayed where it was on the side of the road but this new skull is there, loosed from the rest of its bones, waiting for me to pick it up and take it home. waiting for a place with the rest of the ridiculousness we drag in.

uncle jay

this entry is for folks still here wondering what we'll do now and who will tell about it. 

if you know my uncle jay you don't need me to tell you what sort of man he has always been. after all, he worked for the gas company, wore that gray uniform more often than he didn't, as far as i could tell. when there was some sort of emergency- a tornado, a flood, an ice storm, men like my dad and my uncle jay would go to work in the dark and the cold and the wildness. i didn't know all my childhood that not every family had themselves a telephone company man, a bank man, a gas company man. i didn't know then that not every family had all their bases covered and that not every family had a man like my uncle jay.

he was the narrator of my childhood, the chronicler of my whole family's wild history. he kept every story he ever lived and ever heard all stacked up in his head and weekend afternoons he'd hand those stories over to the whole ridiculous lot of us, sitting in chairs and on my great-grandmother's low couch and on laps and on the floor, all of us piled in that one small front room of hers, listening to anything he'd feel like saying.

that room was never quiet. there were other voices all the time, his own brothers and sisters, voices echoing his in their raspiness and twang. and all the children and the grandchildren of those voices crowded in there, talking and laughing in little groups, eating sugar cookies and bread and butter pickles on crackers. but uncle jay would say well, the other day i run into this old boy, you remember him from the bowling alley... and all that other sound would dissolve into nothing. because even if we didn't remember him from the bowling alley, even if we didn't know the man at all, we could tell by the way uncle jay was laughing at where he was taking us that the old boy he was telling us about was in for a wild time. and so were we.

winters we'd be there with the woodstove puffing away in the kitchen and summers we'd be there, too. i'd lie in the floor with my cheek pressed against the cool back of a fat cement frog and my belly full of blackberries, listening to my own mother's childhood and before, to the time all those old folks were too young and living piled up in that little house where what they had was almost nothing or when they were striking out on their own looking for something different than life surrounded by lead mines. but somehow the way he'd tell it i'd wish i lived in a tiny house situated right up next to the tailing piles of a strip mine pit that didn't even have an indoor toilet. a house where black snakes managed to slither up kitchen sink pipes.

 it took me a long while to understand exactly how much grown folks suffer at funerals because even there my uncle jay was telling stories. and although we all knew it was unkind to speak ill of the dead, we knew jay would remember something for us, a story the person not there would blush to hear but had no way to prevent, being gone from us. he could bring that person a little closer, make the goneness seem not so far and make the hurt just almost bearable, by telling a little bit of someone's foolishness.

in a day or so all the people i love most will stand together without his stories to hold them up and i will be here where they are not. but i can tell you right now that he is in my head every time i open my mouth. every day i stand in front of a ridiculous pile of teenagers and talk, trusting i'll be able to say something important while pretending to tell just a funny little story. so, the other day i run into this old boy, you remember him from the bowling alley... and they do remember him. or at least they want to. they listen because they hear in me an imperfect version of his own gift. i learned enough to trick them, to get by. i am grateful for this. grateful to them for their patience and grateful to him for every story i heard him tell.

and i know when all the people i love most are standing there together it might feel for a little minute like he's gone too much. someone will need to speak up, talk about that gas company uniform of his and how he must have had five million of them or my aunt annalee would have been washing gray twill until all hours. if that's too scary at first, they can start with a story about something else they all have in common. every last one of us in that wild family of his, of mine, is related to a little girl who gave her cousin ex-lax pretending it was chocolate, knowing all he had to spend his suffering time in was an outhouse. we are all related to a boy who ate the tops of chicken shits. only the white parts, momma! he'd yell when he'd get caught. they're his stories but he's given them to us because they are our stories, too. we won't be as good at telling them. we won't be him. but we are his and we should keep that in mind.

economy drumsticks

for the first day of the new year, an old secret

the smell of old books and a woodstove is about all we need, the sweetie and me, to lure us in. if there is snow outside and an old dog inside and the guy behind the counter talks to us about the books we're holding like they are men he knew and lost during the war, we will stay forever, sniffing the smells of stories and maps and photos of people dead fifty years. we buy little pieces of all that other time and as a result we live surrounded by shelves and stacks of a past that's always whispering to us. little bits of phrases will fall from a page and drag whole wars or explorations or sufferings right up into our hands.

a dollar buys me a ten cent magazine from january of 1941 called the cook's digest. subtitled "of all that is good". and indeed, this is exactly what is inside. there are too many wonderful things to look at all at once, but i will tell you there are recipes, two to a page, set up so you can cut them out and keep them, index card size, in your recipe box. in the middle of all this, on two facing pages, sit menus for a week's worth of luncheons and dinners.

the sweetie sits on the couch this first day of the year, reading over the menus, looking for something worth trying. it is saturday's dinner menu he comes back to in the end. the one that starts with pineapple juice. the sides are tomato spanish rice and baked bananas with marshmallows. i am on board for this right away. dessert is an orange chiffon pie, made up of jello and eggs and misery, but i will count my bananas as dessert if i must. there is coffee to be served with the pie but it is the entree that the sweetie can't quite figure out. economy drumsticks. recipe 58. at first we figure they're drumsticks you'd buy in an economy bag, hundreds of bumpy legs, but folks didn't buy and sell chicken in parts back before the war. it is the tail end of the great depression and just a year before pearl harbor so we know economy drumsticks will be curious. the sweetie turns to recipe 58.

economy drumsticks 

this recipe serves 4

                       8 strips american cheese (2 oz.)               1 1/2 tsp. grated onion

                       1/2 lb. twice-ground beef                         1 1/4 tsp. salt

                       1/2 lb. twice-ground pork                         few grains pepper

                       1/2 cup pet milk                                       1/3 cup pet milk

                       2 1/2 tbsp. fine cornflake crumbs             uncooked macaroni

cut american cheese into strips 1/4 x 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches long. mix together beef, pork, pet milk, corn flake crumbs, grated onion, salt and pepper. when thoroughly mixed, divide into 8 portions. with wet fingers shape into oblongs the shape of a drumstick, placing a stick of cheese in the center of each and taking care to cover the cheese with meat. dip, one at a time, in pet milk. as each "drumstick" is dipped in milk roll it at once in fine corn flake crumbs. brown slowly on all sides in 1/4 inch hot fat. drain on unglazed paper. insert in ends of "drumsticks" pieces of uncooked macaroni, 3 inches long. garnish the ends of the macaroni with paper frills, if desired.
                                                                                          courtesy of the pet milk company

there is a recipe for chipped beef on toast. souffles of chicken and turkey calling for piles and piles of stale bread crumbs. canned lunch meat with a can of cranberry sauce and corn syrup. casseroles full of crackers and canned cream soups. there is cabbage everywhere, recipes designed around stale breads and crackers. this is the food of poverty. the food of rationing and saving and using everything, passed down to those in less dire straits as comfort food. the food of family.

this morning we have bear sausage for breakfast and i know how much a mocha costs. there is saffron cheese in the fridge and the bourbon on the shelf ferments in cypress tanks and grows up in charred oak barrels. but i know who i am and where i came from, a home with chipped beef on toast. the sweetie knows who he is, too. we are looking for gluten-free corn flakes. the gluten-free macaroni is already in the cupboard.

triptych: gifts

sometimes i write and then forget to slap the words up on the screen. these three seem to be comfortable being on the same page so here they sit, original dates right next to them so you'll know what's what- unexpected little things people gave me. i think maybe they're upside down, time-wise. you'll figure it out.

spiderman, dated 11-01-11
i first realize he is spiderman when he puts a hand on my shoulder. or maybe it's just after that when his chest muscles brush against me. this is not something i am used to from strangers but i am kneeling on the sidewalk, holding the small brown dog still so a group of children can pet him. it is always strange to watch children pet this dog on the street because he stands very still until his whole self disappears. he is a shell, silent and empty, clenching an eel in his teeth.

children do not care about this. they are used to dogs that leap and lick and nuzzle and all that evidently interferes with what the children want to do, which is pet the soft dog fur uninterrupted by the actual dog. children will pile around him and put small, sticky hands on his back, his head. he endures. they will run small hands down the length of him until parents drag them away. they will compare the textures of his different colors, will put their faces up against the softness of his ears. they will start at the bony top of his head and will walk sideways along him, dragging their fingers to his tail. some of them will pet just the tail, which refuses to move while he stands there. they will pet right over the bald spot where his fur fell out and never grew back years ago. they are grateful for his stillness.

but spiderman is the smallest in his family, the only one wearing noncivilian clothing. his mother tries to lead the children away before spiderman has squirmed his way up next to the dog. he reaches out as his mother moves forward. she hesitates, pulls her other children back. spiderman pets the dog slowly, leans against me to steady himself. this is the first time, i tell him, the dog has ever been petted by a superhero. i say it is a special occasion. the child's mother agrees. usually, she says, smiling, spiderman does not like to go near dogs. i like this one, he says,staring into the brown fur. he is so still.

light, dated 9-11-11
he asks me how we are and i tell him we're fine. we have gone from the mainland to one island and then another over two of the bridges the whole world has been watching this weekend. always potential targets, i suppose, but more likely so, according to some at least, this weekend. i have tried very hard, just like him,  this week before to avoid the papers, avoid the news on t.v., scroll quickly past webpages plastered with panic or sorrow or images i've seen a thousand times before. gratuitous suffering. fear porn.

days like these armed people paw through backpacks on public transportation with the blessing of our mayor and someone is always threatening to blow up something i will travel in, on, over or through. we are encouraged to say something if we see something, to be just afraid enough, but to go about our business like everything is normal.

but the child's other aunt has dragged her family onto a plane and flown them to washington d.c. this weekend and the realization that he cannot yet control the entire world and keep those he loves always safe is beginning to itch in the back of his head. it is unfair to hand this to him, that he should worry about so many he loves walking around in both of the cities where dark holes were left after. he is a child but he has spent the day remembering the dead and fretting over the living. he has spent his day in nebraska with a new hat he would not wear. out of respect, he tells me. because he is so far away from where he thinks things happened, so far away from where he worries something might happen again, it is what he knows he can do to put order into the chaos.

he asks if i have seen two lights in sky and i tell him i have. in fact i have seen them before. the first year i recall railing against them, not knowing how they could possibly help anyone at all. they seemed gaudy, horrible, mean. they did not restore things. they did not bring anyone back and i could not look at the loneliness of them. but this night we are driving over the manhattan bridge and there are those two lights shining up through soft rain and hissing fog. the brooklyn bridge weaves itself across the space between the lights and where we are. the city glitters in the dark, so pretty you cannot imagine anyone wishing it harm. i take one picture and then another, grainy from the night and blurry from the speed of the car. i tell him we just saw the lights, that i took a picture of them i can send him. i say they are beautiful. he knows this but lets me say it anyway. well, he says, sounding far away, i love you.

after school, dated 03-17-2011
 i do not deserve the kindness my children show me but i devour it voraciously.

some days after classes we have tutoring. my tutoring sessions are fairly informal and i have a small group that shows up every day. one child works on math, swearing under his breath the whole time. about the math. about my own evil self. another works on spelling, consistently figuring out twelve and fourteen letter words more easily than four or five letter ones. one child buzzes about the room menacing others into quizzing him on s.a.t. vocabulary words none of them can decipher the sound of. already today he is furious with me because when he asked me if he was my favorite i told him i couldn't imagine a single favorite child but that he is certainly in the pile of favorites. this is not enough. he would share the limelight with speller, probably. they are oddly protective of each other. but he is pretty sure there's no room for a third among my pile of favorites and is considering elbowing them out as soon as he figures out who they are.

they begin to wander in. one child is having trouble understanding the plot of a book he's reading. one has a question about a project due some time ago. one wants to talk about how much the book he's reading is upsetting him. the plot, the suffering and the darkness of it. this is a child who does not like to speak around other students and who likes to mumble his words so low i have to lean forward to hear. the math child is here with a poetry question. he is giddy with the knowledge he passed every class this marking period and is willing to put for a little effort in a class or two to keep that good feeling. he is even willing to write a poem.

so there is chaos. s.a.t. child is trying to explain to spelling child some sort of information about a circle and a tangent. they are at the board in front of a giant red circle, conferring in hushed voices. mumbling child is trapped in a desk whispering into the desktop while i try to figure out what is making him so upset. and math child is insisting that he has written a stanza of a poem and needs immediate assessment of said poetry with suggestions for what to do with stanza two. immediate. nobody in this group is able to be much aware of the needs of others. mostly. i turn to math child and mumbling child bristles. he works hard at not liking anyone but math child is pretty regularly oblivious to attempts to stop him from talking. so he ambles over to me and hovers, preventing mumbler from confessing some deep, dark, terrifying secret about his suffering connection to the book.

about this time spitfire comes in. she is about nothing, tallwise, but is full volume in terms of personality. she checks out the goings on of the two small clusters and situates herself between so she can chime in to either group without having to raise her voice. math child is exasperating mumbler to the point he finally snaps and spits out a brilliant suggestion to math boy who stares, open mouthed. this is the first time another student has ever suggested math child try anything except something that is physically impossible. he smiles and wanders back to pack up his things.

mumbler is confused by what just happened. he opened his mouth to say something horribly cruel and ended up saying possibly the kindest, most helpful thing he's ever said to this child he doesn't know and, as a result, absolutely despises. he smiles a little bit, too, but checks first to be sure nobody is watching, then he heads out, trusting my promises that he is strong enough to keep the book from getting loose inside his head.

this leaves s.a.t. child, spelling child and spitfire. they are crowded together at a clump of desks now, plotting something. i have been trying to convince spitfire for more than a year that she needs help with her academic work. she interprets this as an assessment of her intelligence instead of her tools. generally she gets mad, yells at me, then tells me she's not stupid. then she stomps off. i sometimes yell after her down the hall that i know she's not stupid even though sometimes she surely acts like she is. because i am graceful and dignified and always, always mature. she would be worried if i didn't yell something.

but today she brings it up. because she likes fighting with me. or maybe she wants to be sure i really care about her. or maybe she likes hearing me yell at her that i know she's not stupid. and today i have backup. so we have the argument out here in the open where s.a.t. child and speller can hear. and they weigh in. we are talking about a program i want her to be part of and s.a.t. child steps up and says, "what is wrong with you?" he tells her she'll have everything she needs to learn anything she wants, everything she needs to be smart. speller gets up, leans forward and says with a sassiness i know it is hard for her to gather up, "if you're part of the program you have connections." they both move in toward spitfire like predatory animals smelling blood. they insist half her friends are in the program and she would be a fool to keep standing there on the outside. this is all she needs. a year and a half i have been begging, pleading, whining and yelling. a year and a half. i bring this up and she smiles, says it's different coming from them.

baby daddy

the first time i saw him he was putting his fist through one of those glass panels embedded with chicken wire, the kind school stairwells had in the fifties. he shattered the glass pretty impressively but the chickenwire kept it from spilling all over the place. he cut his hand and bruised it a bit. he was mad, i heard later, at his girlfriend. i saw her in class a day or so after, tiny, eyes cast down, and she told me he has an anger problem. she smiled when she said it, shyly, like she was in awe of such power, like she was glad he'd expressed his feelings for her so well. high school girls like boys who will hit things for them.

so when i see him a few days later in the same stairwell he starts yelling at me, saying i ratted him out. evidently he got himself suspended for this impressive bit of drama in the stairwell. i tell him i don't even know his name and he continues to yell a little more, maybe to prove to me he has this anger problem i've been hearing more and more about over the weeks. but i was raised by wolves, or at least by people with a stubborn streak, so i let him yell himself out and tell him maybe he ought to go to class instead of wasting so much time standing in a stairwell that smells like broccoli farts. it really does, by the way. he is mad that he thinks this is even the tiniest bit funny and he stomps off so i will not see him smiling.  i see him.

i hear the tiny girl who smiles when she thinks about him is pregnant. she sits in one of the classes i share with another teacher. she never raises her hand. she never talks. she sits quietly and hands in papers and reads short stories and might be focused enough to get into a college if she didn't have any other challenges staring at her. she stares down at her belly a lot lately.

when i walk through the halls and stairwells between classes i sometimes encounter clumps of children, most often boys, huddled together. usually they are doing nothing more than cutting class and when i walk up, especially in the stairwells, they look sheepish and scatter. there are seven in the group i see today, sitting all together in a stairwell, reeking of something that smells like cherry cough syrup. there is much shuffling and muttering and then a few of them shoot up the stairs. one or two just stand there, smiling the sort of dumb-faced grin i hope nobody ever has to see outside a school. and then there is mr. anger management. he stands up and starts to walk away.

i motion for him to stop and mention i hear he's going to be a dad. he looks at me funny because he doesn't have the skills with inferencing to know where i might be going with this. he nods, glares. tries very hard with his glaring to remind me he has anger problems. this is what you're doing? i ask him. this is what you're doing to get ready to be a father? i can see the confusion. i'm not fighting fair. the other boys are gone and i say softly your baby deserves a good dad. this is mean. every baby deserves a good dad and not many get one and it hardly seems fair of me to expect something from a fifteen year old boy most people don't expect of thirty year old men. but it's his baby. his choice. he yells back that he's going to be a good dad. i shake my head, tell him that if the best he can do is sit in a stairwell with a bunch of losers while he ought to be learning something, he will not be a good dad. your baby deserves a better dad than this, i say.

he looks less angry, more tired. he doesn't have even a tiny idea what is happening inside this small girl he might love. he has no way to know what a baby is all about or what it will need from him. he does not know he will need to teach it things. he does not know he can easily kill a baby when he is mad and not even see it happen. but i am not really worried about that. i know his anger is an excuse. it's a way to turn his back on responsibility for things. but it won't work here. he shoves open the stairwell door and stomps through, yelling over his shoulder that he will be a good dad. he will. he knows it.

i think about what i can tell him. what he might listen to. i have to plan ahead because i only see him times like this, when i am on my way somewhere else and he is where he isn't supposed to be. he must be a little scared, even if he doesn't really know how scared to be yet. he isn't the monster he pretends to be, but he tries so hard. maybe i should be asking instead of telling. is the baby a boy or a girl? what will you name it? what color sweater do you want me to knit?