Or I Could Have Watched A War Movie For Him

Today is my father’s birthday. He would have been 90. I made a lunch-time drawing of a bicycle, curbside, with a milk crate to the left and a trashcan behind it. The milk crate is a twin for the bicycle’s basket. The mouth of the trashcan rhymes with the bike’s front wheel. 7/12/10, I write in the corner, inside the two lines which mean a stone curb, draped down the page’s left margin. I stood in the shade and, having finished my work, realized it was an ok drawing. Then, it was for my father. Crossing the street against the light a car coming slowly on, I said, out loud but softly, in the glare and profusion of mid-day, "I love you, Dad. I love you, love you, love you. Happy birthday, here you are, with me." He didn't like to talk on the phone, and I don't like to talk on the phone, so I just squeezed my phone, smooth and cool as stone, and didn't feel sad that I couldn't call him. I entered a mass of dappled shade, and was glad.

This morning I was in the classroom: despite my concerns, I’m in the classroom every day, but only briefly, glancingly. This morning there was a long phone message from Frederick’s mom, explaining that he would be late – they would be late because there was a GIANT water bug in their apartment last night. “We were up late,” she said, chasing it, presumably. The place was all in disarray, she went on, “It’s hard to maneuver.” I imagine couch and table overturned, the microwave and television lying prone and smoking on the floor. Frederick doesn’t seem worse for the wear. “Why are you wearing a red shirt?” he asks me. “It was clean,” I say, “why are YOU wearing a red shirt?” “It was clean,” he admits. In a few days he will fly to another place and visit his father. “I love my Daddy,” he sometimes says when asked about his weekend – even though he hasn’t seen his father for months. One day children respond to Frederick’s mention of his father - they talk about their own fathers (which they do anyway, including discussions of their fathers’ penis size – but that’s only when the context calls for it, in the bathroom, for instance.) They talk about their fathers’ attributes: tall, very tall, not very tall. For no good reason, one day, I join in the conversation: “I had a dad, he was kind of tall, he was taller than I am. You know what? He was bald, he was very bald with NO hair. That is the kind of dad I had.” The children stop, their arms, hands, heads, feet all still – imagining my bald dad, I thought. Rita asked, “You had a dad?” “Yes,” I said, “sure I did.” Ryan, whose father died a year ago, is drowsy all day, he looks at me, his brow gently wrinkled, fatigue and interest kindling a faint smile. “Why did you have a dad?” Ken asks. “Every person does,” I say, “you cannot be born without a dad – everyone has a dad somewhere, whether you can see him or not.”

My father abides in sketchbooks, in the potent empty pages. He dwells in the ink of lines I draw. He is the arc between derision and determined stoicism which defines my relationship to the indirect and arbitrary nature of institutions. My arms remember his ribs, my face remembers his heart beating. On his birthday, for many years, Hanauta and I would eat an ice cream for him, so she could know he was once alive and he would want her to eat ice cream. When we do, we are his tongue for tasting, we are his mind for finding summer again. We love each other as he would have - deeply and without sentimentality. But he is somewhere else, I cannot fly to him; I try, sometimes, instead, to be his rhyme.

My Last This And My Last That

Last week was my last real week as a teacher. It was the last week in which I entered the classroom as its author/master/presiding celebrant, half-conscious of my pleasure, or pleasurable annoyance, with the order and disorder of the space. I did not dwell on finality (eschatology!) as I enjoyed familiar tasks: pulling and turning inverted chairs from the tops of tables, flushing residue of milky-yellow cleanser from the toilets’ low bowls, righting the books on shelves and in bins, throwing away unlabeled children’s work, lining the cracked gray slop bucket with a flimsy trash bag. All of this performed in the dim window light, quietly, preparing for the real work to come: training my mind on this one place, with its abundant stuff, and the many people – with their ideas, actions, conversations – that would enter and later leave it.

A small office is now my true domain - one in which people train their minds on me, assign me tasks, ask me questions, fail to answer my questions. My office day proceeds on a thousand little legs, a strait and steady march along a continuum of numbered lists. I have to generate reasons to get up from my desk and move around. Within the classroom there is motion, improvisation and flow, within the office, fixity. Is it artifice to make sense of experience through conceptual tools? The very tools we seek to offer children through books like Tana Hoban’s Exactly the Opposite which requires that the reader ask questions (not included in the text-less book) to help listeners notice and describe the nature of the oppositions depicted. For myself, artifice or not, I enjoy framing things in terms of oppositions (motion and fixity), binary choices (teacher or administrator). Doing this helps me to render from busy, imperfect hours, something like a story. The story of my last lunch as a teacher, for instance. Or an improvisation with my students that was memorable if not, in fact, my last. I can no longer say that I am a teacher; I cannot invoke my students. From now on, until I can find a way to change this fact, I will have to call myself an administrator – a celebrant of phone calls and letters and lists.

The Last Lunch: Only six children had come to school. We cut free play short and walked to a nearby public playground (somewhat avant garde, recently mentioned in The New Yorker) where our six mixed with dozens more children and the sun’s glare. I hung in narrow pools of shade, squinting and peering and noticing that my two classroom allies (my assistant and an intern) were not squinting and peering towards me, nor taking note of my own whereabouts and changing roster of satellite children. I was mesmerized by a sprinkler fountain that stopped and started (like the huge one at the Brooklyn Museum which I adore for its sound and spectacle) and the efforts of a boy to catch sparkling clumps and clusters of water in a narrow-necked bottle. I failed to notice that Aisha and Olenka were getting soaked. We left the playground, bought a pint of blueberries but no donuts, cheese, bread, or apricots, despite entreaties from children. Waiting at a traffic light I saw a young man being arrested and noted his beautiful, gentle posture as he walked to the waiting police car, hands cuffed against his sacrum, trailed by a cop as traffic flowed on. I hung my head. For lunch, though, we had pizza, almost real pizza, on a large round crust (not English muffin pizza which is always soggy). The crust was not of a yielding, chewy nature, but the pizza was good. Wads of swiss chard rumpled a blanket of melted cheese. Everyone but Hiroki ate and enjoyed it. We had five good, steady eaters. I ate one half a slice, dazed, like the children, by my relief to be out of the sun. I can’t remember what we spoke about, but I was content. What are the oppositions here? Sun / shade? Attending / ignoring? Blueberries / donuts? Free / fettered? Chewy / crunchy? Or no opposition – just contentment.

The Last Scatological Improvisation: One day, recently, after one story and two finger play/chants, several children refused to leave the meeting rug to wash hands for lunch. They flopped by my side. I turned to Olenka, who lay snuffling two fingers and leaning heavily on my left ribs and thigh. I held out my right hand, pinching my index and middle fingers to my thumb. “Hey, do me a favor? Go throw away this poopy diaper?” Olenka smiled, drew her brows together, made the universal gesture for ‘this smells bad’ (hand pushing air past wrinkled nose, mouth faintly compressed with corners gathered down) and sprang up…to drop the invisible diaper in the trash can. Hiroki wanted one, too. Florian wanted one (because Hiroki did?) And Eoghan wanted one. Several days later Eoghan prepared one of his own, a real one, which he and I discussed as we waited for his mother to arrive for pickup (late, as usual.) I said, “Eoghan, why don’t you poop in the toilet anymore?” “I don’t know HOW!” he protested. “But you do, remember you did one day, you said you made chicken nuggets with your poop?” “Yeah…..at Christmas my brother made a CANDY CANE poop!” “See how cool…YOU could poop in the toilet, Eoghan, I know you can do it.” It was nearly his last day at school – his mother was withdrawing him to vacation with his school-age siblings. He had withdrawn his faith in my authority, but we were still friends. “I know you CAN do it, Eoghan.” I repeated. What are the binary terms here: imaginary poopy diaper / real poopy diaper? Poop in diaper / poop in toilet? Stay in school / leave school? Embrace the past with tenacity / venture forth? Can’t / can?

The Last Weekend Working in the Classroom: Not really, I’m going to have more weekends working in the classroom. Packing the children’s work, sorting, filing, cleaning, dismantling. But yesterday was kind of my last weekend working in the classroom – in my role as teacher who spends her days with students. I watered our sprouting carrots and stunted lima stalks, pried staples from the walls, releasing artwork which I then stacked, sorted, and stored. I uploaded photographs (a process which takes 45-60 minutes on our faltering old Mac) including two dozen documenting ‘whack a jug’ a very satisfying outdoor activity. I filed and made lists of things. Hung a new bulletin board featuring collages of butterflies with captions describing ‘what is important about butterflies?’ We had read Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book and it was with relief that I started a conversation with ‘what is important about…” instead of “what do we know about ….” We know, evidently, that butterflies are nice and pretty, they come from chrysalides which come from caterpillars which come from eggs, which come from butterflies. But what is important about butterflies is “they like to get on my hand” (Aisha), “they lay their eggs,” (Ryan), “they sip” (Frederick).

It was a paradigmatic weekend day in the classroom. Shenaya, the security guard who is least likely to return my greeting, saw me walk past her station about an hour after I’d arrived. She called out, “You sign in?” “Yeah, I did,” I replied, “you weren’t here.” She had been busy with the elevator alarm and a small crowd waiting to use the untrusty conveyance. Shenaya leafed through the clipboard of sign-in sheets. She gave me a hard look…”I didn’t start a sign-in sheet for today.” I took the clip board apologetically, apologetically found my signature, apologized outright, slunk away, knowing there is something showy and unpleasant about coming to work when I don’t have to. I left notes for teachers, taping them to their above-sink cupboards. I looked at art work in other classrooms. I prowled and steeped in the warm quiet smell of the empty school. Somehow the paired opposites here are simply: active / contemplative. My time in the weekend classroom is both. I have loved that.

I will miss the element of husbandry in tending to the classroom. I think of this as I remark at the never-ending, never-showy care which my landlords take of this place were we live. My landlady cleans with serene focus, mopping the floors and walls, the staircase, foyer, and stoop. A stream of water issues from our house pools and travels along the sidewalk, reflecting the black and green of the linden’s canopy. My landlord, late, late at night, tends his cucuzza squash vines, in an undershirt and trousers, or sometimes just trousers. He delicately pulls a blossom with its long, long stem, freeing it from the top of the trellised vine. I lose sight of him as he moves under the bower of broad green leaves. I think he is pollinating the night blooming flowers – in Sicily there may well be moths that perform this task, but I do not know, I do not know about our local nocturnal pollinators, either. The squash are beautiful when they do happen, vegetal comets, slowly impending. They are sold at the local greengrocer “backyard cucuzza, $1.95 /lb.” The leaves are called tinniruma, or tenerumi, they are sold from a bushel basket in the local greengrocer – no price per pound posted, no label of any kind, just leaves and curling tendrils, furzy, drowsing in a basket, turned away from us. The flowers are white trumpets, poised at the nether end of slender stems, like parisons at the end of a glassblower's pipe.

My landlords bring to mind Voltaire’s Candide and the pleasurable prospect of “tending one’s own garden” – something I have mostly only managed to do in my classrooms. Ah, well. I dreamt last night that my maternal grandmother, on whose birthday Hanauta was born, was still living, at age 112, in the house where I lived as a young child. She was golden and rose, her hair to her shoulders, casually wearing a bra and slip, wonderfully pretty and content – not at all as she is in my memory, but somehow truly her own self. I was happy and stunned to find her alive twenty five years after her death. It was summer, she was repairing the house, the walls had been cut back to lath all along the baseboards – the lath pine was still golden. Framed prints and drawings were propped against the open walls, the images facing away from us, shielded from the light. The dream was sweet and good – it is never too late to take good care of a place, an idea, a person. Even if they are gone, even if I saw her for the last time a long, long while ago. What I have touched and seen and found to be important, all this resides in me – ready to pollinate something new, one evening or day. The binary terms: Dead / alive. Dreaming / waking. End / beginning.