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.

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?”