Scarcity

The notes I made - first ideas, pleasingly compact, promisingly polyvalent - the notes for this very thing I am now setting out to write, are gone. Not lost, really, but dispersed in the way that ashes are scattered. It happened in this way: first, a computer file; then, user error (intemperate cutting/pasting/saving.) Less regrettable than losing handwritten notes with the attendant painful musing: “Perhaps if I look here? Oh, maybe it is…? Could it be [preposition] this?” The thought of what is lost clings gently as though regret were wet. Making an error is a positive action (I created a mistake) with clear borders of finality. Though admittedly no reason to celebrate, erring is more tolerable than losing (something). “What if I hadn’t? How could I have?”

I woke early on Sunday, for my birthday, then lay narrowly on my wide bed trying work out the puzzle of how to feel glad and expansive. Let us say that this year is, for me, about my power in the world. I ask myself to be direct and less effortful, clear and unconfused, at peace and not resentful should the need arise to yield. I have been thinking, intermittently, about the third chakra (at the solar plexus) called Manipura: Jeweled City. City of Jewels. As I understand it, this is our fire element place, where identity and striving for accomplishment arise. I feel weak here: I set stones together with effort, hoping to house myself. Down they come again, though, these stones badly laid by me or sent scattering by forces I cannot control. My power in the world emerges as resentment. I resent what I have lost, even, as it shrouds me, a transparent palpable mantle.

Manipura. On a small piece of paper I drew a city, a city schema. Along three faces of a hexagonal wall, three tall doors. Within the walls three trees and three narrow towers, many-windowed triangular prisms. Symbolic representation - can it bring forth what is not? Young children, and I, along with them, are nourished by the belief that YES, in a way, our pretending and imaginging and artful doing DOES nourish and bring something forth. One night I traveled by subway with a kit of candles, matches, incense. Arriving at the empty home of a friend I entered with the key that was given me, climbed stairs, next a ladder, then through a hatch above me, straight out onto the roof. Then, crouching and struggling with matches and strong air currents I lit and burnt my drawing under a new moon against whose face our planet's shadow was a great, dimming vesica: tender, contingent, a transparent and palpable mantle not of loss but of presence. All shadows speak of presence, after all. The moon sank, down into the glowing, humming evening of the city we share here, away from steady Venus. The drawing burned, a sheaf of flame flowing backwards towards my hand but not harming me. The drawing flared, blackened and contracted then grew soft and pale again. When the fire had gained from the paper what it most wanted, there remained an inch-square scrap. On that scrap was spared one tiny door, drawn by me and skirted by the fire. I cannot say why burning the drawing of this notional city has rendered it more powerful or real for me, extending its presence far into three and four dimensions. But I feel it has - and I have one small doorway in.

For this past month it seemed that I was a scarce and precious commodity for my children. Taking on the status, nearly, of our two classroom cats: much abused stuffed animals with well wrung necks and drooping whiskers, one gray (and large and quite ugly), one black (and smaller, velvety and quite comforting.) The cats are much in demand at rest time. Aisha was the first to confer upon them their status as objects of desire. Because she wanted and needed the gray cat at rest time, observant, competitive children (Olenka and Lesley at first) could produce emotional pyrotechnics by slipping the gray cat from the basket before Aisha had the chance to retrieve it for herself. Sometime mid-March we began a running list of “Who Gets The Cat/s At Rest Time.” Children begin asking about this list about one hour before rest time begins. As the months go by, the number of children requesting a spot on the list grows. Early adopters, late adopters, no one really loves the cats, I think. They covet the status of ownership. Maybe Aisha was the only one who ever loved the cats – that ugly gray cat, at least.

Particularly aggressive children generate novel terrain for competition out of thin, thin air, without the aid of props. [NOTE: no urine was actually released during the game described herein.] Olenka and Lesley call to me from the rusty iron platform of the tall climber. Both are angry and close to tears. Their shins are at my eye level and I look up at them. “Lesley hit me,” Olenka pouts. “What happened, Lesley…Olenka? What happened first?” “She peed before me,” Lesley whines. “What, what did you say?” “She peed.” I look at Olenka, who is now smiling in spite of herself. “We were playing a peeing game. A standing up peeing game. I peed first.” She pretended to pee…pssshh. “And then you got mad, Lesley?” “Yeah,” he admits. “And you hit Olenka?” “Yah,” he drawls, recollecting this with satisfaction. “Is it ok to hit…when you’re really mad?” I ask. “No,” they both answer. “What else could you do, Lesley, if you’re so MAD at Olenka because she PEED, before you, when you were playing a PEEING game?” “I could tell her I don’t like that.” They grin at one another. They like everything, for now.

But of course liking everything will never do. Selected things within the classroom enjoy brief periods of popularity and then fade back into the noisy abundance. Months ago the three blue wooden people in the block area were fiercely contested. Then it was the fashion to have one red and one blue guy. Injuries were narrowly avoided during the red/blue fad skirmishes. Leopards were less popular than tigers but are now seen as having slightly more cachet. Rhinoceroses are NEVER in style. Panda bears (we haven’t got any, but I used to in another classroom and school) can elevate levels of aggression with impressive rapidity – but even they, at some point, lose their painfully urgent charms. It is easy to restore their appeal, of course, or the appeal of any reasonably attractive material: remove it from circulation for some time and then reintroduce it with even a modest flourish.

And that is precisely what I have done with myself. Inadvertently, unavoidably. I leave my classroom for my office at 12:30 and return at 2:40 or so to a chorus of greetings – and my substitute teacher so often looking somewhat haunted and fatigued. We gather on the rug and I demonstrate how little time I am away from them. I set a large unit block down to represent our classroom, and a small unit block nearby to represent my office. I use a small toy garbage truck to represent me (it was handy.) “Here’s me, coming to work in the morning. I go right to the classroom and here’s what we do,” I begin laying down the schedule cards to show the parts of the day I share with the class, “Good Morning, Breakfast, Free Play, Clean Up, Meeting, Bathroom, Outside Play, Small Groups, Story, Lunch…” I pause. “Then I go to my office for a little while…” I drive the truck to the small block, “while you Brush Teeth, Rest, and have Snack.” I lay the cards down crisply. “Then,” I drive the truck BACK to the big block, “I come back, we play and talk, and we say…Goodbye.” I lay the last schedule card down emphatically it makes a little ‘toc’ as I place it. “Look,” I say, “I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ELEVEN, parts of our day that I spend with you. There are only THREE parts I don’t spend with you.” I am pleased that everyone seems satisfied with this demonstration. I put the truck away and the cards and the blocks.

It occurs to me, quite recently, that I have only the appearance of being a commodity in demand. I am in fact the consumer driving up the value of my students. I miss and need them, I long for their company and for the longueurs and rhythms of my whole classroom day. I want to go on and on discovering the same things about these children over and over again – because it takes me so long to learn. They make intricate bids for my attention, present me with drawings, have troubles and seek my help, command me ‘sit here, sit here’ for lunch, call my name scores of times each day. They are my adornment. Perhaps even the jewels of the city of my self, or even the very door. “What if I had not? How will I now?”

Cadence

A significant number of days have passed since last I wrote. In the meantime I write constantly. My fingers depress and release the keyboard’s own knucklebones. I am writing to and for various people and, having written, I forget what I have said. Muscles that might fight the forward drift of my shoulders, spine, and ribs forget themselves. I do nothing I can remember, nothing that is quite true. I feel myself waiting for this to be written and feel, too, my failure at not having already written it. Even as I begin, time falls thick and indivisible, folding on itself as honey does, and weighs like the long silence which precedes news that I am no longer loved. But I am the silent one. And I am the one who is waiting.

It is hard to begin. Many things have happened. Here we will see them as slowly they fall (or rise) into view.

1. I’m leaving my classroom at the end of June. I’m going back to working at a desk. Here at the school, near children but not with them. I’m doing this for the money, really. And other reasons too acrid for this space.

2. I leave my classroom at 12:30 every day, just after lunch. I go to my office which is hot and where I am visible across distances through panes of glass. My office is filled with boxes of things indiscriminately packed. I am replacing someone who left mid-stride several months ago. I am displaced by someone who wanted my predecessor’s office and now has it. I am in the small, small office where people tap at the door all afternoon, they see me sitting with my back to the boxes, sweating through my email, pressing the phone to my ear, adding to and subtracting from my to-do list. By close of day I do not remember what I have done.

3. Hanauta spends hours after school in that office with me now. Somewhat miserably. What have I done? I will not have a classroom anymore. No more weeks of freedom in the summer, either.

4. The course I took is over, that is good. I don’t know when I will organize the materials and pack them up or cull the things I might use in my work. Everything (articles, books, notes, folders) lies along the window wall behind me as I type this, everything (I forget what I have learned) lies askew like badly sheaved heaps of wheat – or grass clippings, raked clumsily to the side.

5. It seemed imperative to remove my long, lonely hair. I had 12 inches cut in an act that was not really tonsuring, but was something more than a hair cut. The severed braid lies in an envelope on top of the course work crap heap, waiting to be mailed to Locks of Love.
The thought of ever again entering the post office and waiting in that line of slow and needful people. That thought tires me.

5. a. I wait in line, not on line. There is no line to wait (ON) except the one we agree to make by standing (IN IT.) This is a matter of regional dialect (and free will), matters about which I have strong feelings.

6. Aisha was out for a week. I was scared she would not come back. Her mother is hard to read, but I heard rumors. Aisha whom I love too much. Somewhere along the ribbon of our time this year, as it falls and folds in on itself, she learned something about appearances, or trust, or the discontinuous seam of truth that we seek but can never uncover from root to tip. She used, earlier in the year, to say, “There’s my ‘I’ for Aisha.” But now she writes “A” on her drawings. She says, “There’s my ‘A’…”

7. Nereida was out for a month. I despaired of ever seeing her again. Now she is back. Shouting, speaking in the voices of the adults in her life, leaping up to dance on tables and, when excited, confusedly shaking her head back and forth or swinging it in circles as if to induce a trance.

8. I cross the street holding Hanauta’s hand. In the western glare of the afternoon, about 10 feet above us in the air, are brightly shifting motes of dust. I wonder if they are casting the most fleeting and merest of shadows on the blackened roadway below. I wonder if they wish to fall and rest, or wish to go on winding through that space just above us, or whether they aspire to higher spheres. I cross the street.

9. A white enamel sauce pan we have had for many years has recently, irrevocably, been marked with a black shadow, where one burn, two burns, have formed over the stove’s blue rings (the burners!) I scrape away parts of the sticky carbon plaque, but a network of dark static remains and burn begets burn. Anything, however gently cooked in this pot, now blackens – as inevitably as my face appears when I step before a mirror.

10. Hiroki’s father’s father died. I express my sympathy. H’s father wears his skateboard strapped to his back so that we can read the stickers on the underside of the deck including: “PRACTICE SAFE SEX: GO FUCK YOURSELF.” Hiroki’s mother drops him off and there is trouble. Hiroki is wrung with paroxysms of grief on parting from her. He wants to go to work with her and make money, he says. “I want to GO, I want to GO!” I cannot comfort or fully calm him. He tells me he wants his friends to step on his body and give him boo-boos. My head hurts. The security guard comes from the lobby to smile at him and offer unctuous and uneasy platitudes. My assistant manages him and later explains to me what I have done wrong. With such easy authority. I have been reading a book about play therapy for children. He is a child in need of this – space and time to symbolize and then conceptualize what it is that troubles him so profoundly.

11. One night Hanauta performs Auld Lang Syne at her recorder recital. I weep at her steadiness – her deeply sober air. Her father, Hanapappa, is there. He gives us a ride home which we love. It is as though we are a family, really. Really safe together, mobile, easy. We listen to Hanapapa lie to his wife on the phone, he does not say he is with us, he says he is still on the bridge, he says he will be right home. I remember so much, having long since symbolized and conceptualized my truth. I wonder whether Hanauta is listening, is thinking about the lie.

12. The switching track in our train set confuses all the children and me, you can't connect tracks to it, it's just a beautiful delta leading to a notchless void. I hide it, sometimes, when we are laying the meander of our routes. Sometimes it bothers me that we cannot make accommodations for trains which want to strike off into a new direction. But we may all be too afraid to do that. Anyway.

13. At a certain point it’s just time to be done. I turn off the computer. I have a feeling of burning, like having snorted water, that raw distress. Yes, burns magnetize burns. What helps, I think, is the coolness of time, quietly falling.

14. Yesterday a slender linden limb fell into the roadway and lay brightly in the sun, the leaves turning up their silver sides as the wind drove east. I approached with awe or caution and lifted the long branch, high to clear the bodies of cars at curbside. The limb was very light and wieldy. I did not want it to be crushed by the buses which drone past our house, I did not want anyone else to have the feel of lifting it. I left it propped against its own old trunk. It rested, dappled by the leaves which had at one time surged beneath it. Yellow and white, with fugitive delicacy, its blossoms were revealed between long-eaved bracts.