At the center of our classroom is a tissue box. Not dead center, though, and its position is not absolute. It shifts to a high shelf, settles on a lower shelf, withdraws under a stack of books: I Love You A Bushel and Peck, Everyone Poops, Nicky and the Big Bad Wolves, and the loose-spined, much-mended, tall, red juggernaut: Busy, Busy Town.) Of course it is not a tissue box but a succession of boxes, of varying colors, always low in profile (slim line) and holding a modest number of softly massed, gently interleaved tissues. The flimsy membrane covering the mouth of the box, slit to yield but one tissue at a time, serves a second purpose in our classroom where children stuff their used tissues back in the box, tucking them comfortably under the filmy, transparent shield until it bulges (and catches my eye.) I don’t know who does this, but dimly understand why they do. I pull out the rounded nearly weightless wads. They are crumpled but not sodden, only vaguely snotty because in nose-blowing, as in much else that we value, three year olds are only nominally effective. I pull them out and toss them in the trash, wondering whether they represent some child’s early, magical notions of what will eventually be a firm grasp of reversibility.
But back to the tissue box. It was borrowed by someone, on Wednesday afternoon, and returned to us promptly. Today, all day, I found, pressing up against the plastic shield, a little clutch of googly eyes. Which I call google eyes no matter how often I may be corrected. Large eyes, and small, several at a time, they kept appearing as tissues were pulled from the box. I scooped them up and scooped them up and thought I had skimmed off the last of them. Late this afternoon, returning to my own classroom after full-day outdoor time, I found still another eye. A large, albino eye, glassy, the iris a matte pink disk. It was the coda of a poem, rhyming with Man Ray’s un-absorbable glass tears (and maybe Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, but no!) Thinking of Man Ray’s image (look at her empty nostrils, the real proof of artifice) I wondered why weeping brings snot when snot does not give rise to tears. Generally speaking. In our classroom snot gives rise to words, a gently merciless narrative of encouragement and admonition from teachers: “Get a tissue, go get a tissue, blow your nose. Really blow, blow out, push air through your nose. Now you have to PINCH. That’s wiping, that is wiping, PINCH! Oh, YUCKY! I’ll get another tissue for you. Blow! Blow! Blow! Blow the balloon! PINCH! Like this. Ok, here. Throw it away, in the trash can. You throw it, here. Here is the trash can, see the trash can, by the bathroom door? And now you are done! You threw it away! Go wash hands, please. With soap. With soapy bubbles.” Bubbles, though, like reversibility, and tears, and snot, are topics for another day.
