A Day

I usually don’t do this kind of a post, but something is pushing me this way.

Today is Friday, January 15, and I am officially halfway through the school year here. For the record, this is not some kind of reflection essay on my time there so far. It is a list of things to remember about the day. And it begins last night:
After a frantic and stressful afternoon of trying to get my students’ grades organized, I sat down at the computer and checked on the penguins game. It had just started (a late night game in edmonton) and I wouldn’t get to see all of it. My bedtime this winter has hovered around 9:30. Honestly. I remember falling asleep at 8 once or twice.
Anyway, the real point of this all is that, for the first time in a long time, I broke the rules. It was a slow persuasion that did it, but I was eventually completely invested in this hockey game, streamed through pixelated graphics, stuttering and quitting every so often. I was enthralled.
The short story is I got to bed finally at around 1AM, which wasn’t so bad I guess, but I knew I had an early morning the next day, which brings me to

TODAY

After a rushed wake up and shuffle out the door, I was at school, at a before school meeting and then finally at the sign-in desk having my schedule altered with extra coverages that would have me subbing in for teachers who had called in sick. This is the excitement of teaching. Even before the kids arrive the school is electric.

I made it to my room after head nodding and “mornin’”ing my way through three corridors, and with only 5 minutes until the morning bell. One student had even beat me to my room, although I’m sure he had to sneak up some secret staircase to do it.

Despite the frantic start, I was resolved to try some new things today. I had been having a load of trouble with my kids–mainly insubordination–and I was desperate for some kind of resolution. I made a pact. To stay positive (entirely positive) all day, and to stay lighthearted too. When the kids didn’t do the work, I joked with them. When they complained, I gently mimicked them. It was all trial and error, but what I was seeing was an incredible transformation. Kids who had been pains all year long were engaged. They were laughing–sometimes at me or what I was doing or saying about the class or the kid in the front row who was sleeping and whose hat I stole and put up on a hook in the front wall–and that laughter told me they were with me. It was a show I was putting on, and I never felt more like an actor.

Of course, some kids weren’t so different today. Some of them were their usual peaceful, do-nothing selves. But my class is so ridden with clowns that calming even 5 of them is a blessing. I do not expect that our next day of classes will go so well, but I do believe these students capable of using their brains, despite their typical behavior and reputation.

Maybe all it takes is pretending to slam a book onto a sleeping student’s head, and then brandishing the book like a sword, making slicing sounds and gutting up the groggy victim. That’s all it took 5th period today.

Summer Secrets

A year ago today I was concerned with distance, afraid of growing apart, hoping that the purple martin inside of me could still be seen. Today a year of distance is between us, and I’m done with second person for a while.

The distance was not a gorge or a raging river to be crossed; it was just the foggy sea of space that we had put between ourselves. Things had been hazy for a long time.

Now I’m finding clarity in cemetery walks and ice cream shops. The future is full of plans, of bright shining plans. We are all drawing blueprints, all of the time. We are all speaking softly at night, whispering almost, because these plans are secrets, and we are hushed and dying to share them.

Walking through the cemetery, you may stumble across one of mine. I forgot it there last night, left it somewhere in the matted, dewy grasses of the hillside in the dark. I won’t go back for it, though. Had you not been there, I would have never known I had it in the first place.

2 misses, 1 hit

It hasn’t been a month since I’ve seen you, and already I’m imagining your swelling belly, your glowing cheeks, and the reddening bottoms of your feet.  Ammons says “it was once weddings that came so thick and / fast, and then, first babies” and really, those weddings are just now starting to come, with your baby already on the way.  We are aging–at least some of us are–as fast as ever.

In spite of everything, I left college with one drink to my name: a nervous sip of alcohol that left my tongue wondering if it was permanently damaged.  Among a nation of red plastic cups and kegstands, I walked quietly, eyes focused on each step, all the way up and across the commencement stage.  Here, in the city, things are different.   It’s been a year since I’ve seen a red cup, and all of a sudden breweries are traded like poets: you have to try a Bell’s while you’re in Michigan). When did this happen?

There is a tree in the backyard–I rarely notice it–8 or 10 feet tall.  And for years it has been there, so stagnant.  But 18 years ago that tree was a seed.  In those days the backyard was still shaded by the twintrunked silver maple, and my afternoons were spent digging holes in the yard and practicing my mini-golf technique with the only club we had: the sand wedge.  In any case, the grass was so long that it usually worked best to chip the ball up and over toward the hole.  Those days, I imagined worlds full of games and mazes. 
Mini-golf was only the beginning.  The way the clock’s pendulum would swing in front of the 7th hole–it was a puzzle to unravel.  Then the maze of ancient Egypt took hold of me.  A cut-away model of Khufu’s pyramid showed my interpretation of the inner chambers and air ducts.  I practiced my archaeology in the backyard with a garden spade and a hammer.  The mysteries inside of the pyramids lost their grip, but soon I was investigating the arrangement of the pyramids and of Stonehenge and the celestial significance of it all.  But the maze in the stars was too much for me.  It wasn’t until I lived in the mountains that I really saw anything up there.
And I see more everyday.  While the ancient celestial calendars led me to clocks, some part of me believes that I learned from a young age to internalize the ticking I heard at night.  These puzzle boxes have so much going on inside of them that, really, it’s a marvel we rely on them for anything.  I guess it’s becoming rarer and rarer that we do, but as an homage to the past, I have vowed to carry on in that tradition.  The puzzle is still unsolved, after all, and so few people are around to help.  Someday all the clockmakers will be dead, but somewhere in a dark basement is a man who can help me.  He is one who deals only in the most elaborate puzzles, but most likely got his start in something like family.  You see, puzzles were never his hobby.  His life was spent locating the path to an elusive father, and then trying to mesh with the gears of his wife and kid.  It’s not that he never wanted anything else–just that there was never another option.  This man could teach me some things, I think.  He has some things to say.

The Way Things Are Heading

There were nights, years ago, that I had woken and walked out into the middle of the Cascade mountains. The sky is closer there–the stars more easily read against the black satin sheet–and I could see the texture of it. The only sounds were from my feet and the distant stream. I headed for the stream some nights, where I would find a rock in the middle of it all and wait for my eyes to adjust. Other nights, though, I roamed.
Those nights, the sky would disappear altogether. The Ponderosas walled me in, and the underbrush collaborated on a blanket of bent branches to drape above. I followed tunnels down the ravine, listening as my footsteps dampened out the distant stream. There were times I closed my eyes. For how long, I couldn’t say. It wasn’t important to have open eyes. It was only important to notice what was happening.
I started into some tunnels thinking I knew where they might lead. In the middle of the darkness, though–deep into these tunnels–I thought of nothing but the sound of that stream. I knew nothing of what was on the other side, and nothing of how close I was to emerging. I was focused only on the sounds that I recognized: the things I was leaving behind.
And then, the one night, a star poked through the shroud. And then another, and more, until a constellation would slip into view, and then its neighbors. And there, getting my bearings after so long in the dark, I saw a house, a tiny thing. Nearing, a pale light grew fuller. Late as it was, this figure was still awake, and the upstairs window held the steady silhouette–a girl reading, I guessed–and I wondered at how quickly I had been delivered into that moment. To the side of the house was a road, and suddenly I had direction, I was in control again, and I was in a new place.
The thing about these tunnels is you don’t always know you’re in one until it’s too late, and there’s really no way of knowing how long one is. When you have left it you will know it, but not a minute before.
In Pittsburgh today, I am somewhere in the middle of a tunnel. I’m not exactly sure which turn led me into this, but I’m listening as the life that I have known grows quieter and more distant. Things like jobs and cars and homes and friends all swirl around in the blackness, and with luck I’ll grab a couple of the desirables. But some tunnels are long, and like I said, you never know when you’ll finally emerge. You can only listen as the stream fades away.

This is all to say that I could use some light.

Ode to the Guide

I saw a groundhog.

It was maybe 5 months ago, and a warm light lingered in the evening hours. Its brown scramble into the street led the thing directly in front of me–a backpacked wanderer tucked neatly into this suburb, which is itself folded squarely into the hills south of the city. The two of us, we watched our shadows stretching, watched cars blur silently by, and still, we stood.

Seconds later it was gone. Through a cleft in the hedge, or under a bent branch, I suppose. It never mattered where the thing was headed.

My other groundhog memories will envy this one, because not one of the dozens of hogs I chased away from our garden last summer was memorable. There is not one of them for whom I can say, “If you had only seen the look in its eyes…” or “What a creature….”

That Autumn afternoon, though, I was looking for something. Searching hard for it, and having no luck. I needed the answer to this unaskable question, and finally, dust settling, it was you: a brown mass I half-expected to speak strictly in portmanteau.

Here, so many months later, I expect you have met your maker, or are shivering these harsh weeks away underground. Really, I don’t care. It never mattered where you were going. Only that you found me first.

The thaw

It was an uneven gray topography that edged the roads; what was an even white sheet this morning has slowly parted–the way all things do–to opposite curbs.

The free hours these days are all given to fewer and fewer goals. Letters, if written at all, are written on weekends. Friends, if seen at all, are seen at night. My fingers are ink-tained by hundreds of pages of autotraders and automalls. My datebook is dusted off, filled with trips to the city, to a school (a school!), back into this place where my life could be different, where I could really be doing it, doing it all, all of it. Making a difference.

This next month is important. This next month is a haircut and a shave. It is an ironing board and brown shoes. It is meals, not snacks. Folders and notebooks. This next month is a shower after some exercise.

It has probably been too long.

(is anyone selling a car?)

2009, Just in Time

At first there was the high pitch of a 400-mile surprise. There was Dick Clark and his robotic voice, and the American Idolator poised to step in. There was even an added surprise–a recently jobless teacher to play games with.

Then there was a full-speed hug, bottles of wine with birds on the labels, foosball, things broken by exercise balls, things broken by spirits, 12-person roundtable, couples catchphrase and Big League Chew. At night there was talk of marriage, the three of us sharing the bed.

Next there were young friends–a second family. There was cheese-testing, decorative nut avoiding, Flexicon games, Wii games, and a hug from mom. There was also Jared, who knows Arabic.

Nearing the end, there was a ride to Reading and two large pizzas. There was the giving of gifts and freshly baked bread. There was expectation and the arrival of a newly married friend. Then there was Shiro, who could not, for the life of him, do any of his tricks, but who still was a fun dog to have around, what with his Japanese tail and all. There was too much to laugh about, and too much say in a hushed voice on that late night walk with you, my friend. There was always too much, there was never a way to say any of it.

Finally, at the end of it all, there was my dad and my sister, parked on the side of the toll plaza where we made the switch. All in all, four wonderful visits, and all of those miles covered by friends headed in the same direction.

Sometimes the lattice is so visible to me.

Two Hour Delay

In this weather, we watch exhaust fumes fly straight up to the clouds. This is no magic act; the assembly line of minivans idling in the elementary school drop-off zone chugging out wisps of white that swirl first, then rise and rise. The temperature isn’t so bad—four above—but the wind chill is what delayed school this morning. This 30mph wind is what sends the tiny minivan clouds not straight up, but hurtling through my face, and then through those trees, slipping in between powerlines and slapping the flag, then finally mixing with a larger exhaust cloud rising from the school roof, slowly rising, making it, making it all the way up there. The smoke from my chimney joins them higher still, I imagine, merging across some celestial superhighway until the traffic is bumper to bumper—a mirror of this road right here, the crosswalks, the parents, the string of cars waiting to pull in front of the school on this late winter morning when the wind has sent it fourteen below. The superhighway is an unfortunate disappointment to all those fumes, though, running them straight into the glass dome of the snowglobe, and all before they even made it—so close to the weightless heavens, so close to eternity.

The Toreador

Sometimes an evening can be as simple as a folded piece of paper. Other times, that evening’s paper can be the inflated bulb of a tulip, petals peeled back and delicately suspended.

Some friends’ Christmas party started as a simple get together–a lot of people talking and enjoying a meal–but turned quickly into something more complex. Half of the party left early, leaving me in a suddenly smaller crowd, where your story is in demand and everyone wants to hear it. Luckily, as an elementary-age activity planner, I have learned to bring something intriguing with me wherever I go. I always carry something that defers attention away from me.

That night, walking into the already-formed semi-circle of guests, I unpacked my origami supplies, intent on diverting any personal questions and hoping to be remembered more for the things I carried than any personality trait some guest claimed to have gleaned from me that night. Nights are too short, after all. I was already out the door before they were done with their paper owls.

It’s the way it had to go–me, with so much to say to them and no way to say it well–we were destined for failure from the beginning. The origami was only the flash of a red cape, my sword was still in its sheath. Not even my flags were out.

Look to the Stars

Today we’re back to October–back to the colors of sunrise, the stab of morning through the parallel blinds–this is October with a curfew.
Three days ago when my sister was still around we played some night-hockey, and looking down at us were two lights, two stars, two heavenly things. Turns out our asphalt rink was lit by Venus and Jupiter that night. Those siblings reunited briefly, for only a couple of days.
The next night we were due to see some small sliver of the moon join them, a memorable event, but my sister was on her way back to college by then. No matter, we were already thick in early December clouds.
Today I can see the sky again, and tonight I’ll watch for any other signs and night omens, but through these brief windows all news seems important, and rarely is.