Try This

In books about writing, books about how to write – I’m not entirely certain about this, but I seem to recall that within this genre – we readers are presented with the occasional friendly challenge, a little tip, a shoe horn to forcefully ease us from the state of reading into the state of writing. The authors (or editors, perhaps even the book designers) set these prods off from the main text – rich with anecdote that either does or does not resonate with the reader – by means of a subhead: Try This. Try This, even though you’re not like me and your troubles aren’t like mine. Just TRY trying it, but then don’t give up if it doesn’t work.

For me, writing is itself a ‘try this’ proposition. Try this: try writing and observe whether I then come into existence as a steady place with a shape. Sometimes it works. The tide of everything I have to do and attend to recedes, leaving a clear, lightly reflective expanse. Writing is a lever by which I hope to shift myself, when I can. We have these levers, all of us – means by which we adjust our state of being. Writing is one lever, having a job working with children is another. Writing leaves an enduring residue and I enjoy the concrete yet dispersive nature of words. Working with children is an unpredictable lever, sometimes leading straight into distress, sometimes leading, by winding paths, out again.

If he were able to understand the previous two paragraphs, I think Ryan would relate to the notion of ‘Try This’ and of levers. Ryan tries many, many things to ease his sense of non-existence. Ryan’s sadness and loss of shape is brought on by missing Mommy, and by the crash following the rush following the breakfast of one large donut with pink frosting and sprinkles eaten dazedly in a cab on the way to school and then in the stroller unfolded from the cab – the cab, donut, and stroller all helping to mark the intersection of Ryan’s resistance to waking/dressing/walking/leaving and his mother’s urgent need to get to work on time.

We can start with purple masking tape from the floor of the block area. It was placed there by a grown-up and represents (or ought to) roadways in a city. The tape when freshly laid could easily have been removed. Once burnished under the wheels of about two dozen toy vehicles it sticks unpredictably (here it holds fast, there it is loose.) The cars/trucks/planes are all back in the supply closet now, in the bin to which they are relegated once teachers have gotten good and sick of the repetitive play they engender. The tape, scuffed but tenacious, has been on the floor for weeks. No one pays attention to this tape except Ryan, one day, after clean up time, when everyone else was gathering for meeting. Ryan appeared on the rug with this foot-and-a-half of tape wrapped loosely around his neck, the two ends twisted and sticking as though they were sealing a bag of bananas. Not tight, not constricting air flow in and out of Ryan, just there, a statement. Maybe if he wears a collar of purple tape he will have magic and lose his feeling of squeeze and missing and wanting. I look at the collar and do nothing at first. I say nothing.

Ryan’s speech is a little unclear. His thought processes are subtle, glancing, tangential, reticulated. He lacks vocabulary but gains it easily. His mind is made for memory, but memory requires the support of words if it is to be retrieved and shared. One day I saw what seemed to be a lightening bug, clinging low on a brick wall of the play deck. “Oh, look!” I said, “A fire fly, a lightning bug! Hey!” I called as the lovely small figure trundled down the gap between the wall and the rubber safety decking. “Hey!” Two days later, Ryan furrowed his slow velvet brow, pointed to the last place we’d seen the insect and said, “You saw a lightening bug there. It put its wings out.” I hadn’t noticed, but Ryan had, the firefly’s elytra and flight wings. “That is intimacy,” I thought to myself, “recalling the memory of something sweet and fleetingly shared.” I hadn’t remembered that Ryan had been there. I would not have been able to make this offering of closeness to him.

Ryan’s family suffered an enormous loss, a loss that impended, extending slowly through time, then occurred, and continues to hold sway. He is empty in places, deeply sad. He tries many methods to contend with this feeling at school. At home he tries some of the same methods. As if he were a scientist trying interventions in different settings. What is the control, though?

Were Ryan to write a book about surviving loss with the aid only of a modest vocabulary, and the ability to make drawings of head/eye/leg figures, it might include the following “Try This” suggestions.

1. Peel about 18 inches of purple masking tape from the block area floor. Do this while no one is paying particular attention, just take a break, kneel on one knee, the other pointing to the ceiling as the foot steadies you. Pinch the tape, peel it up and wrap it around your neck. Then wait for a teacher to notice. When a teacher notices and says and does nothing, approach her and ask her to remove the noose. This will work, kind of, even if you don’t know the word knee, or pinch, or noose.

2. Take off one shoe and then the other shoe. Take off your small Converse sneakers with the soft laces. The shoes that collapse and recede when grown-ups try to insert your foot into them. Don’t help the grown up! Just let your foot be solid, small, sloping and warm in its sock. Unless you took off your socks, too. But that’s not my style. I like to keep my socks on and just take off my shoes and just pull the laces out of the eyelets and chew on the tip of the laces. Should this be another item on the list? Try chewing on your shoe laces?

3. Chew on your shoe laces, just pull the laces out of the eyelets and stretch one end up and pull it taught and gnaw on it gently – don’t mess it up! You still want – you want someone to restore your shoes completely and exactly so don’t chew the casing off the tip of the lace. How do they weave these limp laces, what kind of thread, so loosely woven, so inert and yielding?

4. Cry when a grown up demands that you stop chewing on your shoe laces.

5. Fall over to the side, with your back to the grown-up and get scooped up onto a lap. Lay your head against the breast of the grown-up (for this to work you must be scooped up by a woman grown-up, that’s not too hard to maneuver.) Snuffle and rest your forehead, which is maple sugar and like a lamb, against this yielding breast which stands in, of course, for all breasts.

6. Go on hoping that you get what you need, a breast or maybe, better yet, some words to work the fragile levers of your heart. Fleeting. Fugitive. Lightning bug. Firefly.

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.

Hippo Thesis

The course I am taking - Language Acquisition and Learning in a Linguistically Diverse Society – is drawing to a close. My instructor casts assignments at us without cease, they sink to great depths, weighted by their complexity. I dive in after them, struggle down, down to see them clearly. Among the sizeable list of instructions for items to be included in a presentation: “create two different ‘visuals’ or graphic organizers that show the relationship between the course readings and the insights that you learned from the interviewee.” Well. From my interviewee I learned that if you are very bright, likeable, and beautiful, with strong and positive family relationships, strong ties to a tight-knit and stable community, and an optimistic attitude towards school, you may, like her, succeed despite having had to learn English without the benefit of sensitive support from teachers. I don’t know how to create a chart or diagram to illustrate this, and I don’t know why I should. The life story of my interview subject illuminates our readings by revealing the limited usefulness of the many generalities contained therein. I am disappointed when generalities and specifics are opposed, a toggle switch; I want them to reinforce and reflect one another.

I like to think of myself as a good student, but I am not. The tension between the general and the specific is but one source of irritation. I’m also weakened by tasks which demand that I make a ‘text to self’ connection. When asked to find such a link, I often lose the text, so overwhelming is my desire to reveal things about myself - and so tenuous is my hold on the author’s emphases. I sometimes suffer from “poor saliency determination.” http://www.allkindsofminds.org/learningBaseSubSkill.aspx?lbssid=47 Oh, well.

So, I just want to write a paper on a topic. I hate these multi-modal assignments: how long it takes me to even just understand what I am being asked to do, the way they chase precious knowledge from my mind, forcing me to replace it with personal tchotchkes that do not expand or refine me. I want something new, I want what I have not got.

But just then, there came the role play! Students were asked to choose an identity (from among a list of a half dozen) and have a blog-debate about illegal immigration. I chose to be an anti-immigration construction worker in LA. My group members chose various other identities and wrote politely – academically – about the needs and aspirations of immigrants. I wrote posts in the voice (as best I could evoke it) of an angry, bitter man. His basic premise was: the gains of illegal immigrants are his direct losses. I was alarmed, after posting a few replies to my classmates’ careful statements, to find myself sympathizing very much, ferociously even, with ‘his’ perspective that ‘your’ having results in my not having.

Hiroki (have I mentioned that his nostrils are the shape and size of tiny cinnamon heart candies?) would also sympathize with this perspective. He resents the happiness and autonomy – the equanimity – of his peers and seeks to strip, and pick, and peel it away. Rita says she doesn’t like carrots, Hiroki smiles at her in a way that is both malevolent and loving (she is, after all, about to validate his power), and says, “yes you DO, you DO like carrots.” Rita wails to me, “Hiroki said I DO like carrots, but I DON’T like carrots!”

Hiroki’s behavior includes, but extends well beyond, the typical 3-4’s assertions of emotional property rights (“Frederick is MY friend.” “No, he’s not, he’s MY friend.”) and intellectual property rights: (“I’m Spiderman.” “No, you’re not Spiderman, I’m Spiderman.”) Hiroki seeks out any opportunity to abrade. When I turn this about, “No, Hiroki, I don’t think you’re Spiderman, I think you are a hippo,” he collects himself, protesting, politely, that he isn’t a hippo, only a Spiderman. “Do you like it when I say ‘no you’re not,’ Hiroki?” I ask him. “No, I don’t like it,” he sweetly informs me. “Hmm, your friends don’t like it either, when you say ‘no you’re not.’” “But I LIKE saying that, I LIKE to say ‘no you’re not!’” I buy a little time, divert his conflictual urge with exchanges such as this, he seems glad for the respite or the chance to plead his case, but is soon back at his virtuosic practice of discord.

I mention hippos because Hiroki loves them. He spent weeks talking about his Hungry, Hungry Hippos game and is deeply attached to all our James Marshall George & Martha books – partly, I believe, because George and Martha are hippos and partly because they have many fallings out but are always friends in the end. Maybe he likes hippos because they are so, so big – maybe they are too big to feel lonely or jealous.

Early in the year I spoke with Hiroki’s mother and said I thought that his behavior – cruising ceaselessly from one area of the classroom to the next, knocking over children’s projects, resisting transitions, refusing to eat – might be an indication that he was missing her very much during the school day. She did not agree – “well, he acts like that at home, too,” she explained.

Hiroki is a hungry, hungry hippo, hungry for contentment, snatching it away from other children, only to find (like the hungry ghosts described in Buddhist tradition) that his fingers have closed only on unhappiness.

One recent day Hiroki was particularly unhappy – so unhappy that he wasn’t even interested in tormenting his peers. He focused on his own experience which had included a succession of disappointments. As we marched out to the deck to play outside, Hiroki collapsed in despair on the threshold, sobbing: “I want to go home, I want to go home. Tell my mommy I want to go home.” I held him a long, long time as he wailed. My assistant circled. She has, in the past, lifted Hiroki, sobbing, from my arms saying, “Ok, let’s go. I know you feel sad but you can’t scream like that. You’re ok. Let’s go.” This time she said, “What’s going on, Hiroki?” I turned my shoulder, just a little, shielding him, or us. I spoke softly to Hiroki: “You are missing mommy today. You are really missing mommy and feeling sad. That doesn’t feel good. You will see her later today, but it is hard to wait. Do you want to stay here with me for a little bit?” He nodded, still sobbing. I grazed the tears from his face, gently, with first -and second-joint knuckles, that’s how it’s done. “You know, you want to know something about hippos?” He was quieting. “You know, hippos poop IN the water?” He listened, his eyes no longer turned heaven-ward. “You know, what do you think that sounds like, Hiroki?” Attentive silence. “It sounds like: Poop! Bloop! Bloop! Bloop!” A deep smile. “What if you were a hippo, Hiroki, would I call you Hippoki?” “No,” he laughed, HippoROki!” Alive again, his limbs are suddenly lighter in my lap and ready to jostle, hustle, trick and play. I retie his shoelaces, they have come loose and are lonely, emptied of their knots and bows. I restore their charm. Hiroki jumps up and off he goes to Florian – who has been granted ‘most-favored-child’ status for the day. He looks a bit apprehensive as Hiroki approaches but as it unfolds their play is buoyant, sweet, and responsive.

I think of the assignments I have yet to complete for this course, sinking down, deeper into dark water. I feel too tired to dive after them, bring them up to light and air, though I know I will at least try. I want knowledge and I hope it will redefine me, contain but not confine me, distract me from my appetite for comfort. These complicated, strange assignments send me deeper into myself, exposing static-filled spaces where I do not wish to linger. I resent this and consider that only a person who feels happy and secure would conceive of such tasks. Someone with a loving husband, for instance, and perhaps, even, a housekeeper. What you have got reminds me what I have not got. I tie my shoes very tightly, to feel held and whole - secure. Oh sharp and shameful jealousy: perhaps hippos, with their huge heads, have got a wider and a milder view.

The Power of Powers

Hanauta and I visited, last week, my mother in the city of my birth.

In the basement of my childhood home there is a door that leads to a low, dim space that was my late father’s studio. When visiting my mother I walk down the basement stairs, drop clothes into the barrel of the washing machine, or the drum of the dryer. I adjust dials, pull knobs, I measure, I pour, I rinse, I gather, I carry. I look unthinkingly at the door, locked with a sliding bolt and covered with signs and stickers that my father fixed there 40, 30, 20 years ago. I re-ascend the narrow stairs to brighter and more lively rooms.

On Saturday, though, down the stairs I went along side my beautiful nephew, Velo. He is just about done with being three and has powers which flow from his mind through his upraised hand, out into the magnificent air of springtime: he is even more than the motion and strength of his body, he is his stories and ideas, his powers of transcendence. Velo climbs up and jumps down, climbs up and jumps down landing hard on the soles of his bare feet. He has powers and is the master of matter – flying crouched above earth and returning to it only by choice, emphatically but without pain. With my students I say: “Stop, I can’t let you jump here –LOOK, Oh! The ground is very hard, and YOU, you’re very soft, you could get hurt.” When children protest that their mom/dad lets them jump I say, “Yes, they may. But they have just you to play with, I am playing with 10/20/30 children on the play deck, today. I can’t make sure you are safe if you jump from here.” Or sometimes I just give the short version: “That’s not safe.” What I mean, as well, is “It will be a pain in the ass if you get hurt.”

Velo was tired of the lunch table and wanted to see the basement (“What’s down there?”) I needed to check on the laundry, so down we went: he propelled by curiosity, I by the primal urge for clean, dry clothes. Velo asked about the smell, the damp cool smell; the air feels different there, as well. There is not much to see though; a room with a washer, a dryer, five mops (I don’t know why) deep windowsills, some iron rods standing upright (I can’t remember what or why), a bucket (blessedly direct in its purpose) and the door to my father’s studio. Because Velo was with me I read aloud the door’s messages, I pointed out a race car and a skull and cross bones and the sign “NO BARE FEET.” We had put on shoes, Velo and I, just to go down the stairs and we looked down at our sneakers. Velo asked why there is a “NO BARE FEET” sign. “There could be something sharp on the floor,” I said. He wanted to see the room beyond the door. I said, “Ok, but you have to hold my hand the WHOLE TIME we’re in here.” That being agreed, I unlocked the door. “Why’s it have a lock?” He asked. Did he ask “Is there a monster?” In we went.

The room is full of tables on one side, and empty on the other where the press stood, seeming tall between the heavy, long-spoked stars that drove the rollers. The tables are now laden with framed and unframed prints and drawings. “Look over here,” I invited, opening small drawers on a low table … avoiding a pile of mid-century cigarette lighters, assorted pen knives and blackened etching tools. In the drawers were broken metal date stamps, broken watches. I thought he might take interest – objects that have lost their practical powers can more easily accept the range of meanings that any given individual may wish or need to confer. But Velo’s interest found no footing here. He left the room, having let go of my hand, with swift and buoyant gait, listing slightly as he turned to pass through the door, without a backwards glance. That last, familiar task was left to me.

My father forbade us, my sister and me, to enter his studio with bare feet. Such was the ferocity of his warning that even now I only rarely step foot even into the laundry room without shoes. I did that day, after Velo’s departure, and felt the reptilian tenderness of the old concrete floor. But the story my father told, about venturing beyond his studio door unshod, I remember in this way: if we came in with our bare feet and if we walked near a table where he had been working on a copper engraving we might step on a tiny copper bit, this splinter twist, with sharp edges all around, would enter our blood stream, travel to our heart and kill us. I took this very seriously, savoring the lethal aura surrounding my father’s work. The copper filings were only part of the lore, a bottle filled with a fluid of albuminous clarity stood in the refrigerator, perhaps the word “ACID” was inscribed indelibly in black laundry marker, there was certainly a hand-drawn skull and cross bones. My father had powers, they flowed from his mind through his hand: he tamed and controlled difficult and dangerous matter. I wonder if he could just have said, “It would be a pain in the ass if you got a copper splinter in your foot,” the threat of death seemed necessary to him. His version of a flaming sword, turning every way in the air, guarding his privacy – or our safety.

It is increasingly difficult for me to distinguish (for myself) between things that are simply a pain in the ass and things that are seriously problematic, or even dangerous. And this inability to recognize what is large and what is small has, in turn, become difficult for my heart which, late at night, gives itself over to lopsided revolutions, like a creature, tightly confined, turning round, burnishing, in desperation, the cage of my ribs. I worry about what I should worry about most and think of my earliest big worry, at age 3 or so, of a large monster, gray, the size of a house, just out of view and waiting just before dawn when I, alone, awoke.

In my classroom there are many monsters, many roaring, ravenous beasts. I imagine that the more I say, “I cannot let you do that, THAT is not safe,” the louder the monsters grow, the larger they loom as the world fills with dangers made palpable. Our heroes, our super-heros, for their part, become ever more brazen, their powers unstoppable – they silence and flatten me from a distance with leveled gaze and one palm thrust. Destroy the cautioner and you have no more need for caution! The more we learn about danger and what there is to fear the more vast we must imagine the dimensions of our power. I was taught and now teach what there is to fear. We find ways to make the uncertainties of life somehow tolerable. Belief in our own magical powers, or the development of our real ones, these pull us onward.

We return to our city (Hanauta and I) and find that cherry trees, of several varieties, have been planted in amongst the crabbed and failing linden, all along our street. I close my hand gently on the trunk of a purple leaf sand cherry. The satin bark with its granular markings, like fine, raised print, casts out all worry. Its goodness flows up from woven roots and out through me into the late and even light. I am part of its circuitry, for a moment, vast and contented. My power doesn't flow out through me, it flows in, through my senses, through the world. I have the power of being satisfied by beauty, filled and transported by bikes leaning at the curb, asphalt shingles, infants, mothers, strangers, things seen from train cars, birds, tangling phone lines dividing the sky, grasses and other wild things, my students, my daughter, the body I have as it fills with what I borrow and call my breath.

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.