Ex Post Facto

These brief writings of 2009-2010 were a place to record and reflect on what was to be my last year of teaching. A brief note about confidentiality: the children who appear in these stories – including my own daughter – have been given pseudonyms. I too, writing then as caprac, remained an anonymous source. It is my hope that my vague and idiosyncratic descriptions of place, along with the invented names, will protect the privacy of the people, young and old, on whose stories I have here reflected. It was my hope to describe my days, parts of my days: to hold them steady a little while in the stream of time. I leave these stories here, these days stacked like stones in a cairn, heaped together they are as true, whole, and small as I could manage.

Home Again, Home

At the end of December I traveled with Hanauta to my childhood home. There I slept long and heavily under dense strata of down and wool. I ate wonderful meals of roasted salty richness. Mid-mornings I ran a slow course over streets whose names I can never recall, down and up hills under gray, descending skies. And I sorted through things my father had saved and which my mother had recently retrieved from the long prismatic space under the attic’s eaves. My visit seemed to lack a proper story arc but had something of a fairy tale’s simplicity and weight – the reward, as soon became clear, had preceded the trial.

I returned to my present city alone, the day after a hard snowfall, walking first from my mother’s house to the commuter train station looking for signs of service on the route. Sighting a train traveling northwest, and wishing to head southeast, I returned home stepping carefully on paths of stamped snow, walking as though on the concave bowl of a large spoon, each cautious footfall angling slightly. Then, with burdens strapped to shoulder and back, and the bulk of my suitcase clutched high against my chest (not possible to roll it along the spoony paths) I hurried back to the station, a sulky Hanauta and cheerful mother and niece accompanying me though we barely walked together. Hanauta was an angry block ahead, my mother came carefully a block behind (having stayed to lock the door.) My niece sprang along brightly by my side.

I do not like goodbyes. I usually say “thank you” and “I love you,” and “I’ll see you,” and I usually do not admit “goodbye.” The train arrived, I boarded, marking the aisle with a regular trail of boot sole puddles. I knelt on a seat by a window near the back of the car, and from there, well above my farewell-bidders, I waved. They squinted and waved blindly back. The train’s windows offer a view only from the inside out. They are high and scumbled with the many mineral traces of weather.

There were a lot of legs to my journey, and many delays. More than a few times, during the eight hours I spent making a three hour trip, I gave myself over to thinking about other choices I might have made. I disliked myself for choosing the wrong course of action. I should have traveled back the day before, should have stayed one more day, should have taken the national railroad service and not the commuter train. I should have offered my crust of bread to the wizened crone who appeared from nowhere to clutch at my sleeve and who disappeared like smoke when I refused her. It is irrational and unhelpful but it sometimes appears to me that perfection exists, that disappointments and failures come to me because I am flawed – because I am, in fact, the foolish and expendable seeker who (in fairy tale calculus) does not make it through to the end of the story. I can’t find my way to the places of perfection…but OTHER people can and do.

As I sat in a train held outside of Newark Penn Station, twilight stealing down the snow-sealed roads below, the wind raised a tumult. Grains of ice swung together, swarming and plunging, forming barchanoid ridges and cutting contours along banks so that the trestle’s empty, rail-side expanses sparkled in the lowest beam of sun like the topographic map of a pure and empty land. My thoughts swung together, swarming up, tearing down. I anticipated, with terrible longing, the return to my empty apartment where I would devise a master to-do list for this my first real vacation in a year. (Note to readers: the word vacation is here defined as a calendrical unit of at least five consecutive days in which I am able to putter at home – following, to a certain degree, the suggestions of an ambitious and detailed to-do list of my own making, but allowing latitude so that apparent distractions can reveal themselves to be part of a larger – a strange and majestic – plan. How else can all the notes and scraps, references and sketches ever be sorted out? Mere “days off” do not a vacation make.) Hundreds of people, thousands of people, hundreds of thousands were stalled and stranded on roads, trains, and planes but I felt singularly frantic, robbed of opportunity and strangely ashamed by my circumstances. I felt (deeply but without rational belief) that for everyone else being stuck was just something that happened, by chance. For me it was the inevitable product of my diffuse and slouching mind (a/k/a my stupidity.)

But then, having gotten to the hard cord of this idea, and wrestling with it for some dozen agitated minutes, I somehow began to slip its loop. I stirred in my seat, heard stories and rumors, I eavesdropped on conversations and made unsolicited conjectures about subway service in my city. I urged one family to get off the train and have supper at a Portuguese restaurant in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, a few blocks southeast of the station – they had missed the curtain for a Broadway show.

I got off one train, waited in a long static line for a bus ticket, quit that and got on another train, got off again, stood on a cold, empty platform as New Jersey’s winter air filled my lungs and accepted my exhalations without demur. I spoke with train personnel; they took me (somewhat) into their confidence. The departure monitors glowed yellow: DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED. The station seemed to be shedding streams of ambitious, focused people, outward bound; having planned their singular escapes they flowed into the night (towards places of perfection?) As I gradually stopped feeling stupid and personally culpable for being stuck in Newark I reflected dispassionately on the example of those motivated travelers who were proving me to have been right. I was (now) stuck due to lack of personal initiative.

Sometimes, a lot of times, but especially on “days off”, I accomplish nothing (my story arc, on such days, is nearly as flat as the horizon.) On the evening of this journey, after trains and waits and subways and a grateful walk through snowbound silent streets, as I opened the door at last to warm silence of my waiting apartment, I glanced back at my day with its tedious, desperate, and empty stretches without regret. My good feeling may have emerged from the knowledge that my vacation still lay before me, full of promise. Or it may have been that the past extended behind me, full of disappointments and treasures and still I had come home.

Among the things my father had kept and stored in the attic were two great packets labeled: GIRLS’ DRAWINGS. Days before the snowy journey I set to work on these with interest and dread. There were dozens and dozens of drawings made by my sister, Bina, from age 18 months upward. Some with captions dictated by Bina and transcribed by my father (in small block letters, along the margins, just as I annotate the drawings of children.) There were primordial schema labeled “Daddy,” “Daddy’s glasses,” “Mommy,” “Bina,” “Bellybuttons”, there were snowmen and snowmen’s mothers (going to a meeting and a party), there were princesses, cartoon mice Pixie and Dixie, crocodiles, witches, the Beatles, trees, houses, castles. Countless figures and schemes, ‘detailed, inventive, and well-controlled’ (as I used to write in parent teacher conferences) but more than that: beautiful, energetic, focused, and assured. “Oh look!” I said in the empty room where I squatted at my task, sorting, sorting. “Look!” My own drawings were few and far between and none had the sort of narrated captions that would give a sense of the attitude with which I might have approached my representational efforts. Halfway through the packets I said to my mother, “Bina’s drawings are wonderful – there are no good drawings of mine. I didn’t make good drawings.” She scoffed – who could be patient with my lament! Absurd! And yet, Bina’s thick and my slender stack of drawings gave some credence to my notion. My drawings included two ‘dragons’, a ‘crab’, and later on several somewhat more definitive girls. They all seem a little hasty, emerging only partly and hesitantly from a cloud of looped lines. They seem distracted – as though the drawing was not, as I drew, the actual locus of my attention. I recognize the look of them from drawings made by some of my former students (especially those with good draw-ers in the home whether older siblings close in age, artist parents, or both…as was my case.) The schema hold a quality that borders on mild despair: “I will make any old line and any old scrawl – the mysteries of representation have been divined (perhaps even codified!) by my sister/brother/parent. For some reason I cannot do what they can do and I no longer wish to try.” My drawings are not terrible but they are wan, slightly despondent much as I recall that I myself typically felt.

I think, looking at my childhood drawings, that I believed there was a right way to do them and that I did not know what it was. Today, anticipating new tasks I shrink back: I do not want to do something which should be done a certain way if I don’t know the way it should be done. So many things should be done a certain way! Housekeeping, record keeping, counsel keeping, keeping clean, using money, making demands. The cost of failing to do what is right and best is not only disappointment and humiliation but the loss love. In fairy tales the hero/ine wins love through making proper (even when improbable) choices and using proper (even when impossible) methods.

Stepping backwards to a night months before this story begins: in cold rain I am walking alone toward my childhood home over uneven paving, the drops of water step down beside me like a stranger approaching. Anxious and chilled, I turn to see. A row of heavy plane trees blocks the streetlight, forming a corridor of blackness, at my back. I shift to the left, and the trees appear to part, like uneven, looming tines and light glows through and rain strikes white in the lamp beam. As I lean back the wall is sealed again. I ‘open’ and ‘close’ the magic palisade several times. There is no one approaching, just the rain dropping. Leaning one way makes a formidable limit where there is none, leaning the other way makes this barrier obey my wish. Then, on that November night, I go back home – because that’s the sort of story this is.

Things that happened

DRAFT

First of all, the word deliquesce. Everyone seems to be throwing it around these days, and for good reason.

del•i•quesce
intr.v. del•i•quesced, del•i•quesc•ing, del•i•quesc•es
1.
a. To melt away.
b. To disappear as if by melting.
2. Chemistry To dissolve and become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air.
3. Botany
a. To branch out into numerous subdivisions that lack a main axis, as the stem of an elm.
b. To become fluid or soft on maturing, as certain fungi.

Too many things have happened, before, during, and after which I sat for hours and hours and weeks, at one of several desks. Along side me: boxes that I moved from place to place, full of files, sheaves of paper fastened with staples or alligator clips. Lost among the files and the papers: pens, rubber bands, clip boards, photographs, an eraser shaped like a white frosted layer cake garnished by robust strawberries. I worked on things that needed doing, and things that really didn’t need doing (trying to figure out by feel, by keystrokes, the difference between the two.) There were things to do, things to not do, and lots of messes I should address, then messes I should just let lie. I have gradually grown diffuse: mixed in among my molecules are shaking, trembling, wondering molecules of so many troubles and messes and matters of interest - little tear drops make gaps in my being. I may soon be completely transformed, I may deliquesce. You might find that I come to look like one of these other substances:

Mischief: One bright and humid August day I looked from the window of the office in which I had been working and saw the doors of our grizzled plastic shed sagging open. The chain which should have tied them closed hung in uneven parallels, uncrossed and lockless. Toys were heaved and tossed. Much was intact, some things crushed or gone. I climbed over fences and along the edges of stepped planter beds, in my skirt, and bitterly retrieved deflated balls, foam flying disks, hoops. An intern helped me pull, carry, roll everything indoors. Daddy long legs, dead leaves, and the scent of stagnant plastic vectored from a stack of stubby and unfun traffic cones - these were unharmed as they have few uses in genuine play? I left the chain, the doors, the failing roof, and several deflated balls and returned to the particular desk at which, on that day, I had been working. I noted the losses and calculated the cost of replacements.

Tree Limbs: Another August day I looked from an office window and saw on the play deck limbs of the callery pear trees canted over railings and, on standing I could see, lying right down on the ground. The wind still rowed the leaves, but they waved like grasses, all anchored to a horizon, not swaying and shifting levels as trees’ leaves would, I think, rather do. They had been cut by a crew of men. Later, with deck cleared again, once branches had been sectioned, stacked then hauled away, the trees themselves, shorn of their reaching lower limbs, looked exceptionally vertical, self-contained, and noble.

A 13th Anniversary: The date of my father’s death came and went. It was quite hot. I forgot to think of him at the time of his dying, just after 5:00 pm. I forgot to think of this for a full hour and then I admitted there was no real reason to be vigilant about remembering that narrow little time.

Betta Fish: Coming home not too late on a Tuesday, I asked Hanauta if she had fed our blue fish, Asmani. She looked up from a sewing project, with a quarter glance, watching me as I held the cylindrical box of betta fish food, swiveled the cap inexpertly to establish the proper aperture, and counted out four tiny pellets. “Mani Mani Asmani” I softly called. Sometimes he sleeps, rather close to the surface, his chin resting on the spindly leaves of his water weed. I dropped a rough sphere of strong smelling food into the water but he did not stir, his forehead grazed the air, he floated too high. I dropped the rest of the pellets, three more, stupidly, into the water. “Oh no, oh no, Hanauta!” She started crying before I could say it.

I recited things, lay him on a snip of blue floral cloth, lit incense, we chanted a mantra. He was graceful, as though still swimming, full of presence. We had only just discovered, such a short while ago, maybe only a week, that we could, with careful attention at feeding times, hear him crunching his bits of food. He had an underbite and in places his scales were almost silvery. I miss him. His food, the little pellets, swelled in the water, I think, swelled and expanded until they let go and mixed in with everything. They deliquesced. He would have too, had I not found him, preserved him for a while from his own decay.

Hanauta is puzzled that I give even a fish a pseudonym here. But I do. I’ll give one to all sentient beings who come in to these paragraphs.

Intensive Care: My friend Haystacks was in the hospital. One day I rode a long time on the subway and found him after trying four different hulking buildings. He looked well but drowsy, a rosy child. He wasn’t well. His friends recounted their stories of hospitals and trauma but I did not share mine, though I usually, easily, extravagantly do, starting with my father’s heart surgery and ending, about 15 years later, with Hanauta’s birth by caesarian delivery. Hospitals are lonely, because the patients cannot come out, they have to stay, and visitors have to go. On the way home I thought of my father in the ICU, his last time in the ICU, with heavy hands, cold and fatigued, all bone and chill. I held his hands, my friend’s, against my face. He won’t remember that, or that I kissed his brow and laid my palms gently on his head for a long while because there was nothing to say.

Pacifier: On the train home from a visit to Haystacks, on the second leg of my journey, I sat beside a young woman whose dimpled, star-eyed toddler girl sat in a tiny folding stroller, set perpendicular to her mother’s legs so she could twist in her seat and beseech through words and gestures. “Bibi?” “No bibi,” her mother replied, “ ‘cause you threw it down and you didn’t tell me. It’s all gone. No more.” “Bibi?” “No more, you threw it. Se cayó.” “Ca?” The girl wanted bibi, her pacifier. She opened her mouth, lay the tips of fingers on her lips, with a sidewards glance at mama, she tucked the fingers in and sucked. “No!” her mother pushed the hand away. “Get your hand out your mouth!” The girl snarled, leaning forward with shoulders squared, she turned away, tilting her head and smiling, she glared, she slapped her mother. They traded stances: placating, teasing, threatening, flirting, admonishing, demanding. The mother tickled, the girl resisted. The mother relaxed and fell silent, the girl raised her arm, daring her mother to tickle again. Their telegraphic conversation resumed and turned to the subject of cookies. “Cookie?” wondered the girl. “Cookie!” she demanded. There were no cookies, the mom demonstrated as much by opening and removing the contents of her purse. There was nearly nothing in there, in the black lined, shifting spaces of her bag (“la cartera”.) The cookies were wanted, urgently desired. It was late in the evening, past 9:00 PM. “You want milk? Want your milk?” The girl toyed with her bottle, removing the cap and posing her hand as if to let the cap and bottle fall to the subway car floor. “No! You drop it you’ll have to use your sippy cup.” The tease ended there. The bottle was wedged back into the stroller back mesh. Around craned the girl, her dimpled limbs, the gold bracelet on her right wrist, her necklace, her earrings all adding to her gorgeous sweetness. She yawned. “You tired. You want to watch the story of the fishies when we get home?” The girl shook her head, she rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. “You don’t want to watch the fishies?” Head shake, fingers haltingly to mouth…MUST…SUCK! The mother slaps away her hand again and the baby cries, she hits her mother. “You gonna hit me now? When we get home, ‘pow pow,’ I’m telling daddy! You gonna cry? Well, go ahead and cry it out because you threw away bibi. I don’t have anything for you. You gonna cry, I’ll GIVE you something to cry about.” Mother crushes her fist slowly against baby’s nose, the cartilage gently gives way to the side. “Give you something to cry about…” The baby laughs and when I leave she waves goodbye to me.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis: In August a nurse injected 0.1 mL of purified protein derivative tuberculin between layers of skin on my left inner forearm – this raises a blister. The nurse wasn’t wearing barrier gloves – which was so strange, after all these years. I remember having TB tine tests as a child, and the pleasant, astringent smell of alcohol that the nurse swept briskly over my skin, as if to reassure it. I have a ppd test most years, for my job, part of the physical teachers undergo annually. As hours passed the test site swelled, it itched, it swelled a great deal more, was red and raised. From 10 feet away the nurse saw, 72 hours later, that it was positive. I was sent for a chest x-ray. I called my boss, “I’m going to be late today. I may have TB.” The chest x-ray was fast, but hearing about it took days and days. My doctor called at the end of the week, seven days after the ppd. “It’s fine, your x-ray is CLEAR! You’ll just take an antibiotic for nine months and see me once a month. Nothing to worry about.”

Now I wake before dawn and place the dusty pill, an oval prism, comfortingly bitter, directly on my tongue. I let it weigh on me briefly, savoring its dryness, then wash it down with water. Let it deliquesce and do its work. I could, after the nine months is done, get infected with TB again, randomly, without knowing. There may be no good reason for taking this course of medication except it is what’s done. Just in case, just in case. I let it rest on my tongue so I will remember I have taken it for the day. Because it’s hard to pay attention and remember things: the bitter flavor is a wonderful mnemonic. My boss forbids me to tell my colleagues. The ppd site is still dark and raised. It seems ugly to me, in its persistence, but no one has noticed or asked. I watch it and watch it astride my forearm, a new landmark, as I hold steady on the steel rail of a subway car.

Light: One morning, one weekend morning, Hanauta lay down beside me in bed. “I wouldn’t like to be light.” “Why not?” “Because it’s always moving. Is it always moving?” “I don’t know, I guess it does travel on and on, sometimes.” I wonder whether it diminishes, if it grows diffuse with distance. I don’t think light does diminish - or get lonely on long journeys. “Hey, but light stops moving when it lands on something, don’t you think?” I ask. “It might travel a long way from the sun but it lands on us." I touch my forearm with one finger. "It reaches our skin, reaches into trees." I try to remember whether light releases water from the air with its heat. Is light something other than heat? Does it travel to end its path on us? It makes us possible, that much is clear.

Hanauta says maybe she wouldn’t mind being light. I resist saying: 'you are my light, sweet heart.' Maybe I can deliquesce in good ways, take on some bright molecules, some Hanauta molecules, little interstitial wobbles of contentment.

The Story That Had No Arc

At the end of the day in an unfamiliar classroom Cary is telling a story about something that went wrong. His voice sweetly purls, its cheerful note at gentle odds with the unmet hazel stasis of his gaze. Young children, as they tell their stories, can only sometimes spare attention for their audience: exclusion of the present circumstance helps sustain immersion in the recent past. This immersion is essential to the very formulation of the story which sometimes comes to light all a-scatter, like coins in the pool of a fountain. How discomfiting when the truest moments cannot be reached and meaning remains uncollected. In such cases there is little to do but re-count the pieces at hand, hoping they will add up.

Cary is in an unfamiliar room because my boss, late in June, extended our school calendar by four days – through the end of July, creating uncertainties and low-grade mayhem for teachers. Half the children in our classrooms had places in the extended week, half did not. Not everyone wanted a spot but demand exceeded supply. Teachers and children sorted through many questions. Is it good to stay or good to go? Who will stay and who will go? And how many more days of school DO we have? The countdown to school’s end, normally demonstrated with a ritual of subtraction (using paper chain links, for instance) lost its clear simplicity. Yes, we had nine more, eight more, seven more days in THIS classroom. But then Luke, Ken, Aisha, Lesley, Hiroki, and Rita would go upstairs…for four more days. And then comes ‘summer’ and then back to school in new classrooms…except for Luke, Ken, Aisha, Lesley, Hiroki, and Rita who would go to new classrooms NOW and then return to not-exactly-new classrooms later, in the fall. I was glad to be out of the picture, not officially a teacher any longer, and thus exempted from struggling through the clutter of meaning and doubt. Though surely I minded the confusion more than anyone. Maybe the year’s ragged end made it easier to bear. Maybe children do NOT need all the careful staging and framing and language we provide to illuminate the significance of transitions. Maybe they don’t need us to plot an arc for their experience. This is the first year in my career as a teacher that I didn’t say goodbye to my students formally. I just faded in and out. It was also the first year I didn’t cry and didn’t feel their loss. Maybe ignoring feelings is a better practice, over all, than acknowledging them.

Cary was talking about two big girls, two five-year-old girls, Marina and Belle: the girls made a drawing, with writing, with really nice writing. Marina made a drawing and Marina and Belle were talking. Cary tried to explain what happened. He stood shoulder to hip with his teacher, Manuela, facing the way she faced, unspooling his tale as she spoke with a parent. She put her hand gently on his shoulder and said, “Hold on Cary, I’m talking to Karim’s mommy.” Cary could not hold on, nor did he seem deeply bothered that Manuela wasn’t attending to his tale. He stared at the half empty cubbies several feet away and explained, “Marina and Belle were making a drawing. And they were talking, they were using, they were talking CRUNCHY. And I didn’t like that. And I said I didn’t like that. And the drawing, they were drawing.” I crouched beside him and he glanced at me then focused on something, possibly the photos of Marina and Belle on their cubby bins, and began again, “They were drawing and they were talking CRACK CRUNCHY,” he contracts his face, seems discontent with the words he can reach. My face responds in sympathy, it feels good to rumple my brow. I wonder if he enjoys, as I do, the gentle pressure of muscle on bone as the forehead furrows. Does this action stir our brain?

Crunchy. The girls are talking crunchy. Was there a word Cary sought, a target somewhere, an adjective that was truly right, or did he need a new word, a new usage for ‘crunchy’ meaning: withholding, superior, dismissive, reluctant. When biting into something crunchy, our faces take on a look of aggression? Maybe he meant bitchy but hadn’t heard it enough to remember where the /ch/ digraph falls.

“They were talking crunchy and you didn’t like that?” “No! and I didn’t like that. And they were drawing.” Here he turns to face the table where the two girls are still seated, knees on chairs, leaning elbows on the table, shoulders by their ears, maybe they look at Cary. He turns back, “And they were talking and Marina and Belle were talking and I didn’t like that.” He cannot find the root of the problem, he weaves through each remembered element of the event without finding a name for the insult he feels. He liked the drawing, he wanted it, they crumpled it, they didn’t acknowledge him directly with their speech, he didn’t exist. I thought we had come to a satisfying conclusion as I checked for meaning: you wanted the drawing, the girls didn’t give it to you, they threw it away, you were mad. “Yeah.” I accepted Cary’s “yeah” as a token of his satisfaction, of his having felt known and heard, but he showed no signs of stopping, the story looped. He told on and on.

I couldn’t stay, I had to try to get things done, my to-do list is disfigured with addenda, with clumsy, generalized items requiring their own sub-plans and ancillary lists: I’m as filled as Cary is with an uneasiness I cannot name. An intern sat nearby and I asked Cary if he wanted to tell her the story of what happened. She could write it down and he could make a drawing if he wanted to. “Would you like Lisa to write your story, Cary, do you want to tell her what happened?” “Yeah,” said Cary, his back to Lisa, leaning on a shelf full of puzzles and lego, and quantities of ‘sorting’ sets consisting of small objects in primary and secondary colors. He raised his eyebrows, inhaled steadily, started the story again. Lisa sat in her chair, looking expectantly at him. She may not have felt he was telling a Story - because he was talking but not necessarily to her. I did not see her begin to record his words. I left the room, imagining him telling the story again and again until his mother arrived. I wasn’t sure whether she was his intended audience, though. He may have been trying to work out what the girls had done that bothered him so much. They crunched up a drawing, they made a drawing and wrote on it and Cary said he would like to have it and they crunched it up. And he still wanted it, but they threw it away. They crushed his affinity, his desire and his optimism. That’s what seems to have happened, but maybe not, I may be supplying too much – we all have a deep craving for meaning's arc, the covenant by which we are blessed with significance.

Like Cary, I tell myself parts of stories over and over again, trying to figure them out. That is the purpose of complaint. And of ritual, too. There is a wonderful, inviting emptiness in ritual (and complaint) which allows for meaning to emerge from within. It is the repetition that makes a space for noticing to occur. Ritual is the womb of meaning, or the fountain pool catching and collecting the fleet action as water arcs. Maybe. Maybe you have to want to understand something, repetition may not, in itself, be enough.

At the end of the school year much is thrown away and things long hidden sometimes come to light. Puzzle pieces ‘mailed’ down the HVAC grates, two brace of dead flies behind the failing heap of an aloe, the book of classroom stories I have kept through several years. Here are some tales, as told by children, the story arc, in most cases, really just hinting at a possible trajectory.

A story by Magnus just before his fourth birthday:

Dinosaur. A big, big rainbow came to bump a dinosaur's head and eye. A sun came out and the sun came over an animal, a dog. He went on a choo choo train. A bus came. An airplane.

A story by Rita entitled, The Little Princess:

Once up on a time there was a little princess. And then she saw a big dragon and the dragon put fire on her dress. And then she goed to her house and then she saw a big giant button. And then she saw the big, big, book. She saw bars. She saw a people. And then she saw a big, big, big drawing. The End.

Aisha, Olenka, and Ken collaborated on this ecstatic progression of rootless and unresolved conflicts:

There was a bear and a cat. They got hurt. And then they were fighting. And then they were like wild things. A spider man and a cat, a bird were fighting with the green goblin. The End.

Three boys, years ago and late one day, joined forces to create a story called: Click Clack Turtle No

This is a story about a turtle locked in a treasure chest. His name was Jerran Corey Dev. He was trapped and he got locked. And he stayed in there FOREVER. In the treasure chest there was a really big shark – it was a really BIG treasure chest – and it ate us…it ate us, too. It ate everyone in the whole city. Dev fought the shark. Jerran fought the shark. Corey fought the shark. Corey found a sword with a blue stone. Dev found everything and RINGS. Jerran found a seal. The End.

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.

The Magic Nothing Pot

We read The Magic Porridge Pot each year, usually in late winter, but this year my copy was missing and was not restored until mid-May when it finally materialized, as things do, as if by magic, out of nothingness and colleagues’ guarded claims of ignorance and innocence. There are many things to like about this story, and the book by Paul Galdone. First: there is magic. Second: there is an incantation. Third: there is the notion that an object can be responsive to our words. Surely if an iron pot can do this for us, we can do this for one another. Fourth: the magic of the pot is very circumscribed, very stable, very matter of fact. Words are said, porridge bubbles up, different words are said, porridge stops. Fifth: the story’s tension arises from the failings of the mother who is not able to remember the simple incantation: “Stop Little Pot, Stop,” but who, instead, uses every synonym for stop that she can recall. This mother reminds me of myself – under duress I can only remember the most complicated, polysyllabic, and obscure vocabulary. Sixth: I feel at home with the predicament of disconnection from simple truth. I feel familiar, too, with the related problem of profusion, the uncontrolled flow of EVERYTHING that can only be tempered, tamed, contained by a return to this distant, longed-for, small and simple, truth. Perhaps it is wrong to say I like this story – more than like it I identify with it.

Every year, twice each year, I write parent teacher conferences. I say I write the conferences, but that seems strange and wrong. The conference is the conversation, not just my report. The report I write is many things, including a means by which I control the terms of that conversation. But my job may actually be to limit and set boundaries for these conversations, writing the conference and reading it aloud to parents and steering the conversation in a direction of my choosing – this may be my rightful role. Before we begin I ask parents to stop me with any questions, comments, concerns. I’m glad when someone does, but I’m also glad when they don’t. I do have the urge to barrel through – conference days are long and require me to sit in a chair built for 3 year olds, reading aloud, imagining how much better my reports could be, but feeling glad too, knowing they will soon be done. I encounter, immobilized at the classroom table, a succession of parents seated opposite, a mingled sense of defeat and relief. In addition, I get very, very hungry.

While I may be successful in barreling through the reading of a conference report, I am never able to barrel through its writing. The smart thing to do, the efficient thing, would be to reflect on and seek a simple truth about each child, and to then write the conferences from this clearing, this place of basic understanding. Instead, I wander widely, poring over my written observations, hoping to proceed from a set of discrete, subjective and somewhat random anecdotes towards a complex, integrated truth about each child. Whether or not this is good practice, it is my way; I fall under the spell of significance each year, reading – in the children’s language samples, habits of play, fleeting gestures – auspices of strengths and weaknesses. Even knowing that I fictionalize aspects of my students’ experience as I fix and confine it within my interpreting text, I imagine, still, as the conference reports begin to take shape, that I am glimpsing some part of each child’s destiny, inscribed in delicate miniature, within her young being.

Writing the conferences is hard, stressful; they must be written within a two week period, give or take, or the material doesn’t seem accurate or fresh. I try writing one each night. I try writing five throughout the course of one weekend day. I try cutting material from the observations I have already typed and pasting this into the conference report document, adding a modest interpretative frame – connecting practice to theory. I use words that are too large, too obscure, and syntactical structures that are somewhat challenging (ungenerous!) In one conference I felt compelled to use: “notwithstanding.”

Writing the conferences can be rewarding, too – the process can lead (as it is surely should) to new understandings or new ways of articulating what I believe I do understand. Writing about Florian’s non-representational drawings (they seem lost and tangled – even lonely) I wrote: “For now, at school, Florian typically makes marks relating to his ideas (as though he is recording the rhythm of his thoughts more than representing visual phenomena.)” I wanted to distinguish Florian’s work from the type of drawing that seems purely about motoric pleasure (exuberant scribbling). Florian draws with controlled intensity, frames his effort with sub-vocalized commentaries about the action he depicts. Symbols, images would emerge, it almost seems, if he could be properly calibrated, something within him realigned like the heads on an ink jet printer. But is any of this important, after all, to Florian as he prepares for a journey through a succession of many classrooms? Our room, this year, will dissolve and be reabsorbed in his memory; well before he’s done with school altogether, Florian will have no recall of the rhythms, pleasures, fears and struggles of this year. Will I remember this year for Florian, his unvoiced stories of rocketry and space exploration, like a stream or dream, bearing him along as he draws?

Late at night, or even in the first hours of the day, when I work on the conferences I dissolve into a semi-conscious state. From this liminal place strange images arise to rouse me to my task. Writing Rita’s conference report I find my eyes closed and a dream emerging of Rita with a pet pig, and the pig’s eight teats and eight piglets. Recording this image I typed "piglings", asleep even as I thought I awoke from a doze.

Another night, working on Frederick’s report, the words seemed to melt away leaving the burning image of a doorway which led into dreaming. The dream was frightening and I didn’t want to scare anyone. In the body of the conference I later found I had typed: “I’m so sorry falling asleep. I could move out?” Children in the dream were practicing voodoo, whooping incantatory spells – but the magic didn’t work!

Dorothea’s conference conjured forth the image of a woman CEO. Hiroki’s conference was interrupted by the bright image – flashing and rearing in my mind - of the upper jaw of a horse whose head, tilted back, revealed a narrow, yellowed loge of teeth. Olenka’s conference presented me with this message: “I tell you the same thing at the same time: I’m not here, I’m not here I’m not here.”

I fall out of my consciousness like seeds from a dried pod, then stretch up both arms, pulling with them my shoulder girdle, anchoring my ischial tuberosities in the chair cushion, opening my spine. I shift my spine, my ribs, side to side and wake up briefly. I rise and walk the warm floor, eat snacks, drink tea. I wonder whether I would write the conferences with more confidence and rigor had I not been born into a family of people who make things, make something from nothing. What if I were, instead, the child of an early childhood educator - trained to make something (a glad, lively student) from something (a child, not otherwise specified)? I have met such women, young women who have seemingly never experienced a frisson of doubt as they approach their work in the classroom. They are born and raised in this world of developmental milestones and fair limits, firmly set. Perhaps Hanauta will become one of them, matter of fact in her knowledge, not too often troubled with doubt (nor given to spells of narcissistic bravura.) She may be the sort of woman who can remember, even in the midst of a crisis, to say, “Stop Little Pot, Stop.”

After a certain number of readings, and ample exploitation of this imperative phrase: “S.L.P.S.!” (an effective means of quieting the busy classroom as each child pauses to join in the chant,) we talk about ‘what if.’ What if you had a magic pot, what would it magically make? What would you like to have plenty of? Only a few children name foods. Aisha says cheeseburgers and pop tarts. Luke and Ken say french fries. Eoghan says chicken. Dorothea says, “Crowns, crowns would come out of my magic porridge pot.” “Diamonds,” says Florian. Everyone else names a small plastic toy, a sphere that unfolds into the shape of a creature…from another dimension! What do they want from the magic pot? Magic, imported from Japan – not something to eat, something to imagine with. I expect my students to answer this question readily but I can’t decide what I would want from my magic pot – clarity, insight, pom-pom socks? After the intensity of preparation and the actual conference conversations are done, I find that our apartment is particularly well-strewn: debris layered on sedimental piles of older detritus. Perhaps I would like a magic pot that would just make things disappear; melting them gently, as if they were no more real than a dream.