Where Would I Go If I Left

Spring, I find again, is hard, beautiful, and distressingly full. We went to a Seder last night, Hanauta and I. Traveling by train north along the Hudson River’s eastern bank, we were absorbed by the fog’s low tabernacles, gently pitched and sustained in all stillness on the luminous leaden plane of water. Is there a word, I wonder, for the irregular patches of river, where the surface flow is finer-grained and catches more light? Hanauta skirts the question of lexicon and says: “Maybe there are sandbars there.” I am fastened by my gaze to broken basalt at the water’s edge, the wet of red leaves among oak trunks, ruddy stubs of reed in silted inlets.

The story of the going out from Egypt, I find again, is good, beautiful and invitingly full. For many years I have been the child who does not know to ask. I find many things to ask now, of myself at least, but I don’t know if they are good ones or right ones. I ask myself, back home and dismayed by the accumulated weight of tasks and obligations (the burden I leaven for reasons I cannot understand, let alone control), I ask myself how happy should I be? Shall I rejoice in my freedom or reflect on the features of my enduring slavery?

We have a week away from the classroom. I miss the rituals of care-taking that prop me up, the little burdens that are manageable, the timely execution of which reassure me of my competence. Surely the Israelites, before their flight, considered that they might, among their other losses, regret the end of their servitude. The loss of an identity that, while limited and painful, not to be cherished, cannot easily or readily be replaced.

Here are four self portraits. Mine, above, with a sudsy sponge, cleaning off a table for the 200th time. Below is Rita full of contentment. She rolled this drawing up and tucked it in her cubby then came back to make a second drawing, announcing it would be “scary,” though she later described it to me, simply, as “a mail box.”


And here are Aisha’s two drawings. The first she worked on deliberately, head on. Even with just two eyes it reads accurately as her: intense and lively. She abandoned it, though, for the second.


This she laid out quickly, at an angle, thinking about her hair, her ornaments, her whole self and its periphery. She was happy with the result.


Can I go out from myself, inhabit the edges, enjoy the periphery, the seam of the seasons, the river in flight between its basalt banks?

Spring and Cleaning (Part 1)

[DRAFT FORM]

This morning I vacuumed. Some weeks I do, some weeks I do not. On the continuum of household cleaning tasks ranging from NEVER DO (“ND” – example: washing windows) to ALWAYS DO (“AD” – example: washing dishes) vacuuming lies about three-quarters of the way towards AD. Vacuuming must be done from time to time. I want and hope to do other things, but it is so familiar and relatively easy to put them off. I have been saying to myself: “I will dust during spring break. I will scrub the shower curtain and bathroom tiles. I will get rid of the things that have been set aside in get-rid piles.” But that last task isn’t cleaning so much as getting things organized, getting things done - or, more ominously, being done with things. I have always placed a great deal of importance on GETTING THINGS DONE. My success in this arena is variable. Being done with things? That, too, is elusive.

Today I had a very long list of things to do: reading and writing for the course I am taking, typing observations, writing this week’s curriculum and parent letter, typing up notes from a recent ‘home visit’ (it took place in a car situated in a no-parking zone…with the radio on, perhaps a story for another time.) Instead I pulled the vacuum cleaner from the little berth it occupies beneath the linen shelves and I began to clear the floor of its accidental, transitory details. Everything looks quite singular and significant just before it disappears into the wide, low nozzle of the vacuum hose: one dozen triangular blue scraps from the most recent of Hanauta’s continual sewing projects, one popcorn kernel from last week’s soup + popcorn supper, one hard golden grain of rice – provenance unknown, one tiny brown wooden bead – ditto, one sliver of cellophane from a packet of chewing gum, one cirrocumulus hair cloud. Sometimes I inadvertently suck up something of actual significance (to me, to this household): miniature things that belong to the armamentarium of Hanauta’s play. During my last bout of vacuuming I heard a suspicious clatter as I vacuumed in the dimness of Hanauta’s windowless room but I didn’t check. Today I saw, just a moment too late, a toy spatula – it was drawn to the nozzle, raced up the firm slope of the tube and then plunged down the flexible hose into the heap of oblivion within the canister. It is silver and black, the sort of spatula used for flipping pancakes (as opposed to the kind needed to urge the last of the pancake batter from the bowl.)

“Hanauta,” I said, apologetically, “I vacuumed up the little spatula.” “WHY didn’t you ask me to pick up my toys before you vacuumed?” she yowled. Why indeed. Why don’t I ask people to take care of their things - or of me. I might have just kept silent, let her be done with the toy - as she will soon be whether she knows it or not. Instead I promise, “I will find it. I will get it." The words, rising on my breath, set my heart rate increasing as I visualized the long and detailed, two-column, bullet-point to-do list that awaited me.

Unlocking the canister door I lifted the small, heavy, rather uterine bag from the vacuum and brought it to the kitchen floor. I chose a cake pan to catch the dust and crouched, examining the contents of the bag as if it were a peek-inside Easter egg. I couldn’t see the spatula, nor feel it as I crooked my index finger down, over, up, around. The resistance of the material within the bag, as I began to pull it free, surprised me. There were no longer any number of discrete, significant items, just one sinewy, gray, cord-like mass, flecked with paper scraps but made mostly of hair and skin, I would suppose. Silvery, powdery, cakey dust fell coolly into the pan as I dragged this strange rope from its matrix. The strain as this large thing emerged from a small aperture was more suggestive of birth than excretion. I kept wondering: “What is this like? What is this about?” Inside the heavy ply I found two precious things – surely the objects I had heard rattle in the tube last time. They are a brunette laundry lady – her legs broken off at the knees – and a tall, svelte blonde in a blue suit, tiny figures for architectural models that a former boyfriend gave to Hanauta several years ago. Important to me both because I still mourn the loss of that man, and as they fit so well into my personal mythology – I am the laundry lady, hands and arms immobilized as they grip the heavy basket, and legs broken off at the knees by my desire to GET THINGS DONE and my failure to be done with things. The blonde woman is – well, she is the person who doesn’t need to hold onto a basket full of linens, she is intrinsically good whether she gets things done or not. The spatula is just a spatula. I despaired of finding it, gently shaking the shaggy, shedding mass and probing it with my fingers to dislodge the tiny object. I didn’t find it there and threw the main load into the trash can. I was about to empty the cake pan when I saw, glinting quietly under the ashen dust, the little spatula. Hanauta was delighted and I was, too. Cleaning is joyous containting elements of preserving what would otherwise have been lost or wasted, suggesting that what once was lost can now be found, offering an intimation of resurrection (a reprieve from oblivion if not immortality outright.) Cleaning is joyous, too, as it sets a boundary defining a sort of freedom: 'we are well rid of all that is rightly washed, shaken, thrown away.'

Outside, the trees have arrived at their most perfect moment, when what seemed lost within them – their very life – begins to emerge. The buds are spear heads, mace heads, sistrums, and tassles, singular, significant; their silhouettes, burred or satiny, please me infinitely; I crane back to see them plotted easily on the length of dark branches above me and the dense stasis of trunk. I want to stay poised at this point of equinox, with everything at its newest, emergent. (Even, recently the moon seemed to linger in its early sliver.) I have a desire to preserve small things, least of things, first of and last of things, to honor and know them. Evidently. Oh, getting done, getting rid. Even faced with my laundry basket full of heavy-stranded obligation, there are tiny, real glints of a gracious, beautiful enormity. Thank God, thank everything for March, and trees and daughters and the vacuum cleaner.

Comparative History of Lunch

[DRAFT FORM]

When I first began teaching, I viewed children’s snack and mid-day meal as prime opportunities for students to express their autonomy with minimal intrusion from adults. I set some basic priorities: justice, (“Take TWO crackers, ONE-TWO crackers”); health, (“Let me help you peel the egg, the shell is not good to eat”); and sanitation (“Clear your place. Your cup, your cup, put it in the sink.”) Apart from that, I was reserved, allowing children to express their own interests and follow their inclinations. Children who wanted to eat, ate. Children who wanted to talk, talked. Children who wanted to take apart their sandwiches, lick the butter off the bread, and tear pieces of ham into clingy pink scraps, did that. I sometimes sat alongside diners who were especially young, sad, and/or combative, but I moved freely throughout the meal. When conversation seemed to be leaning in troubling directions (for example: poop – as discussed in a previous posting) the variety of foods and dishes that children brought from home served as immediate, high-interest diversions.

Tina brought a tiny cellophane envelope half-filled with weightless dried fish. Sweeping up after lunch I would find these scattered, like feather down. It was not possible to ignore their leathery eye sockets, arresting though infinitesimal, in the dust pan. Kaspar often brought soy yogurt and raw foods. Every day, he opened his BPA-, lead-, and phthalate-free lunch containers and closed them again on the spears of organic carrots and red peppers. He ate pretzels, sometimes, but mostly waited to wolf the fresh, out of season fruit his mother brought for him at the end of each day. My memory is that he ate out of her small, cupped hand, right at the classroom door, like a fawn, but this cannot be true. Kaspar was jealous of the meat and dairy enjoyed by his peers. He cried at lunch time – in a despair concocted of hunger, anger, and loneliness. “I don’t like this,” he wailed. We said, “Well, let’s tell Mommy what you would like to have for lunch.” His voice resonant with mucus and burred, I thought, by a kind of malevolence (toward whom or what?), Kaspar immediately replied that he wanted to eat CHICKEN and yogurt made from COW MILK. “Every mommy thinks about what food is best for her kids,” I would say, “and different mommies have different ideas.” Each year there was a child whose mother sent a thermos container of hot noodle soup, or hot hot dogs. The vacuum that formed as the hot food cooled presented daily challenges for teaching staff – but no child ever went hungry because we couldn’t get the better of a lid.

There were children who brought one single item (mammoth croissant in a grease-speckled brown paper bag straight from the bakery.) And children who brought five or six things – like Albert in Bread and Jam for Francis (edamame, Veggie Booty, kiwi slices, cheese stick, cherry tomatoes, fruit leather.) Some children brought a range of savory and sweet foods. Some brought only sweet. One child subsisted on large, hard sausages, goldfish crackers, and assorted juice boxes. The sausages were rustily assertive, with their jaunty studs of pearly fat. They caused me to reflect, repeatedly, on a piece of Joseph Beuys’ work that I saw in 1983 – a glass case containing several shriveled cylinders – sausages under their pelt of blue mold.

In all cases it must be assumed that parents sought to provide their child with favored food/s in hopes s/he would actually eat. Children ate only what they wanted and selected items in whatever order pleased them. It was a sort of paradise - except in the case of children who missed mommies too much to eat – or who did not like what mommies had sent. Ok, or daddies. My first year of teaching one father insisted on sending his child to school with a ceramic ramekin containing various preparations including mini quiche. This despite our ‘no breakables in school lunches, please’ policy and despite the fact that his child rarely ate anything while on the premises. Of course it was the mini-quiche and not the breakable ramekin that rankled me. This father, towards the end of the year, called me a Stalinist because I declined to plan for or encourage children to make some sort of mother’s day gift project. We had an ongoing clash of expectations, generally, he and I. Yet we were cordial enough. But back to meals.

In my publicly funded school, meals are cooked on the premises and served “family style.” Not in the style of the Papa Mini-Quiche family, of course; in the style described with soul-crushing detail by the city-agency-under-whose-regulatory-oversight-we-operate-family. Our family style meals mean that everyone shares items that no one is especially comfortable with. We are instructed to "model" what it is to eat these sometimes uncomfortable dishes and encourage children to try them...and talk about them. But before all that, it means that children set the table (more or less) and a teacher then arranges the food while children sit at the rug where a story is read. There is a feeling of the Easter Bunny bringing treats in stealth. Just without the treats, generally.

Today I placed dishes of quinoa on the table, lentil stew, roasted beets from our farm share, and orange wedges, along with pitchers of milk and water. Children who like oranges ate oranges (you can tell how many by counting the slender, grinning rinds the children are too young to think of hiding.) Some children served themselves a small mound of quinoa and pushed it around their plates. Only a few tried the lentils which were soothing, earthy and floury – a texture and flavor that takes some getting used to, perhaps. I tried to bully children into taking a taste, from my low vantage, seated on a small chair alongside them mid-way between our two large tables. “L-L-L-LENTILS! I said – it’s another kind of soupy bean” (most children DO like the soupy beans that are frequently served.) “They look like Little Money! They are L-L-L-Lentils like L-L-L-Lollipops!” These encouragements did not work. I moved on to the beets (tough, irregular slices and chunks, lightly slicked with oil.) “WHO will try a beet? Who will try a bite? They are pink purple, they are dark pink! Who likes purple? Try a beet?”

The children were starving after rest time. I fed them everything we had – the snack itself plus apples spared from breakfast and cheese sticks we had hoarded in the fridge. Cups and cups of milk. Our family style means I admonish children “STOP, that is the serving spoon. That does NOT go in your mouth!” Our family style means, “Oh, a spill, go get paper towels, get some paper towels and put them on the puddle. Now! The puddle is creeping and spreading over to Eoghan and Rita, they don’t want to get wet.” Our family style means children sneaking extra fruit after I have said, “Please take two oranges to start. Just two. We can have extras after everyone has had their TWO slices.” Our family style means children can waste or avoid food without enormous censure. They have the power to devour or reject. They don't have the power to ask for and get a reprieve. Lunch is one lunch: you don't eat it, you don't eat. But usually they do eat. They squabble over chicken thighs. They direct me to find out if the kitchen has more jasmine rice, more soupy beans, more noodles for the soup, more BIG pieces of potato for the stew. They follow the fashion of liking broccoli – everyone does – and filling their cup only half way – it’s so grown-up! It has taken me 2.5 years to enjoy all this – to see how good it is, even when it is bad (chaotic, full of strife.) What is the same in the private and public pre-school classroom is the clean-up following lunch. A topic involving brooms, sponges, and muscles: for another day.

On Having A Job

About midway through my first year at the school where I now teach, I drew a set of job assignment cards for my students. I love doing this - drawing the light switches for lights on/lights off, a row of generic children in silhouette for line leader and line ender. Hanauta was hanging out with me as I laminated the cards and stuck tabs of hook and loop tape on the backs to hang them. She began thinking of other possible tasks that could be assigned to children. She made a set of cards representing alternate, and terrible, classroom jobs - things that either teachers or children (or both) would not gladly have happen. They made me laugh out loud and I still do love them.

Sometimes teachers, myself included, say to a child: THAT is not your job (to chide a friend, struggle their cot dangerously through a crowded sleeping/waking classroom, open a heavy, finger-hungry door, turn off bathroom lights while a peer sits hapless on the toilet.) But what IF, what if all these things are their jobs? Serving a centrally important purpose and providing tangible rewards. Precisely. What if it is my job, expressly my job, to lose my patience, turn my back on the busy classroom and wash paint brushes, resent parents and colleagues, curse under my breath when alone in the supply closet. That might be nice: to think that these behaviors have a positive, indispensible function. Nice to think that I am being paid for THAT!

But not this:

Pantograph

I have been announcing, recently, mostly to myself: “I am unmotivated. I am really unmotivated.” I attend to a few things and not to many others. I cannot feel what it is that governs my choices – what standard or principle; it may just be fatigue, or disorientation as I anticipate the loosening of winter’s clarifying lock. In the course I am taking, Language Acquisition and Learning in a Linguistically Diverse Society, we are repeatedly cautioned: have high expectations of your (English language learning, non-dominant culture, low socio-economic-status) students. This always depresses me for some reason – probably because I am not sure which high expectations to have, for myself or my students. High expectations are a powerful motivating force, until I feel I have failed to meet them – then I feel unpleasantly scaled down and small.



Last week we spent part of a morning working on our monthly self-portrait drawings. Some children very much enjoy sitting at a table with a mirror and drawing themselves – large faces, stems of hair standing straight up, deliberate, tightly wound circles representing cheeks, barrettes, pirate eye patches, and other important landmarks of identity. Some children hate making these drawings. They try to sit it out, refusing, but I do not let up. I say:

“Oh! Look in the mirror, I can see you. What shape is your face, what do you see?”

I trace the air, emphatically, all along the edge of my own face, reflected there beside my student’s.

“A circle.”

“Ok, will you make a big circle or a little circle? There! What’s next?”

“My eyes.”

“Will you draw very small dot eyes or bigger eyes that can see a lot?”

Very occasionally a worried and resistant child is won over with just that much support. Often it takes more. There’s always a lot going on during the 30 or so minutes during which self-portraits are made. A lively activity is in progress nearby to engage most of the children while a few work on their drawings. Children who draw contentedly make occasional demands for approval of their work. The protests of the rejectionists cannot be ignored. I find the process stressful but worthwhile; I am irrationally attached to it.

Some children enjoy making the drawings but are not inclined or yet able to find a means of representing their appearance. I feel unkind as I gently suggest: “We’re making self portrait drawings today, would you like a new piece of paper and you can draw yourself?” It cannot be said with certainty whether the drawing I am (essentially) rejecting is already themselves – it often appears to be the restless track of a thought – and what can we know of ourselves apart from these, our thoughts. My invitation to begin again (with “and do it RIGHT this time” implied) can startle some children, dismay others.



Ryan made three drawings last week. Weeping through two of them. His first drawing is all mobile impetus. It is a lively drawing; I think that in making it he was absorbed in his own motion, spinning a silken lining through which my expectation could not penetrate. I know he is interested in representation – he tells me about the robots he paints (vast fields of red with some daubs for ‘buttons.’) But today making an image of himself worries him – probably because I am asking him to meet a demand. He may also be worried about the inherent demands of representation (as opposed to purer drawing.) Robots are not part of his day to day existence, they might look any of a number of ways and he feels affirmed by his efforts. I want him to feel affirmed by his efforts to draw his own face, so simply - the rudiments, but he knows his own face very well. Perhaps the rudiments will not do for him.

Ryan goes slack. His shoulders, as they sink, pull his head forward. “I can’t,” he cries, “I can’t. YOU do it. YOU!” I am not automatic in my response. I am unmotivated - not apathetic, rather I am overwhelmed with empathy. I cannot whisk him briskly through. I sit near him, near enough for warmth. “I’ll help you, Ryan. You can do it.” I never have done what I now do: place my hand, red and rough with winter and incessant washings, lightly on his small golden one and barely steer its movement in a trembling circle. It is as if his hand, holding the barrel of a black pen, is a device which translates the blind assurance that would be my drawn line into something vastly vulnerable – as if he were a pantograph producing a shift in open-ness not scale. I scarcely breath, so gently, lightly advancing his hand, yet I feel something aggressive in my pursuit of these self-portrait drawings: the few children who dread them really dread them.

He makes two faces in this second drawing and I cheer him on, with genunine enthusiasm. Ryan is not pleased, though; it may be that the struggle of effort remind him of his frailty – how far he lags below my high expectation? Or maybe he just misses his mother so awfully today, right now. His wobbling circle represents vulnerability, he can only collapse in on the feeling of emptiness. He cannot radiate just now, he cannot feel or plot himself on paper.

We are ready for eyes. “Come, a circle, go down and ALL around,” I say. He makes one. "You need another eye, now." Instead he inscribes a line, intently, north, south, north, south, making a very dark spike. He cries, open mouthed and silent, tears gliding down in lines gently bowed by his cheeks. No sound. What he draws, when he tries, does not (by his own reckoning) represent him adequately. What he draws when he does not try (that first drawing) – that will satisfy him very much. It is hard for me to say when his satisfaction should be given precedence over mine. I want him to begin to filter out the noise of line and find the forms through which his ideas can be shared. But he is a fragile boy, for now, an easy wilter. He and his hand and his mind may not be ready; he doesn’t have to be. For now he can tell me the story of his drawing instead of showing me. But for a few minutes, one morning, each month he will try. Because I say so. He makes another, lovely, eye. The dark spike will be a nose, but he doesn't like this.



Ryan cries, but given the choice to stop he wails, "No!" I rub his back and he reaches round and he rubs mine. Is he used to having a grown up cry when he does? Or is he simply empathic? Later I tell Hanauta this last bit, about him comforting me, in essence, as I comforted him. She asks, “What if he wasn’t cute [he really is] but he was still sweet?” “That would be ok,” I say, “he is so cheerful, and cheering.” She goes on: “What if he was cute and sad but NOT sweet.” I have to think about this. I am easily swayed by beauty. “That would be hard,” I say, “it would be hard to have someone so sad who is not sweet.” By sweet I must mean: responds to and emanates gentleness (as opposed to high expectations?)

We focus together, I tilt his hand's path, a narrow black line unspools, leaving a large circle on the paper. Two eyes are summoned forth (a rising sun, an almond) and a small mango of a nose. I ask, “Ryan, what about your mouth, will you make a happy mouth or a sad one?” Sad,” he sighs, sadly. He sits straighter then, “No, happy,” he says. He makes a bowed line down, up, down, that looks more rueful than joyous – it is wry. Ryan is pleased, there he is, he has done it. Has he been buoyed by my expectation or simply survived it?



I linger, in my thinking, on the pantograph. So often I see my own experience reflected in that of my students – worrying, wondering seeking reassurance, hungry for the refuge of confirmation, struggling to represent and share what interests me. Am I, by means of uncontrollable empathy, a scaled up illustration of their struggles and concerns, or is it the other way round? And what hand guides the line that marks and shapes, that confines our time?