I sat in the back of the auditorium.  I knew the material being presented.  I was not there to hear the information, but to show support and solidarity.  I listened as our union president unraveled the proposed contract for the next three years.

Reasonable salary increase.  Balanced, of course, by a prescription plan increase and a premium contribution increase.  (Finally), vision coverage.  An interesting incentive to take fewer sick days–although this one is naggingly gendered, as a friend pointed out, since our maternity leave comes out of our sick days.  Compensation for covering colleagues’ classes. Mentoring stipend.  All in all, a good, solid contract.  The work of a dedicated negotiating team in a strong local union, in a very pro-union state.

It has been an exhausting process…beginning weeks ago when I sat and  listened to the district administration present their initial proposed package.  I listened to my former principal, now our superintendent, explain that 20% of the budget was going to health care, which was “unsustainable.”  I listened to him talk about the numbers of retirees and the cost of doing business versus the local tax cap.  Fast forward to this week, the negotiating team brought us the proposed agreement and we, in turn, brought it to our members.  There were questions, but the answers were satisfying, so eventually the questions stopped.

It is disheartening to recognize that, at the end of the day, it is all about the money.  It’s not about the kids.  It’s not about the buildings or the materials or even the food in the cafeteria.  And it certainly is not about the teachers.  Not really.  It’s about getting the 20% of the budget lower by asking teachers to pay more.  To pay more from a salary that is already stretched thin by mortgages and car payments and living.

Thankfully, the proposed contract is for three years.  Just enough time to forget this bottom line and focus on teaching.

I have a Best Friend, and a Best Friend, 2.0.  Neither of these two is my husband, who found me 20 years ago, married me two years after that and still seems to like me, despite the past few years of my peri-menopause hell.  He is my partner in this life.  My person who walks beside me through the ugly and the beautiful, the fire and the ice.  He is the hardest one to write about because words always seem to fail.  There are no words strong enough or complete enough to define us, or at least I haven’t found them just yet.  But this isn’t about us…or him.  This is about friendship, which is different, for so many, many reasons.  This is about the miracle of coincidence and luck that conspired to allow me to make a Best Friend.  Actually… two.  

BF #1:  We were both seeking refuge in the strange semi-freedom of the Barnes & Noble Thomas the Tank Engine train table area.  Of course, we had limited talking time due to the toddlers who were running our lives.  Fast forward a few weeks and we found ourselves together again, this time on either side of a toddler slide at my synagogue.  You followed me out to the parking lot (thank god!) to exchange numbers.  (You were only slightly appalled that I didn’t have a cell phone.)  You were on a spiritual quest and you found me.

BF 2.0: We inhabited the same space for a few years, and, whenever we did interact over a shared student, we found, time and again, common ground and a strangely synced shared vision.  A few years passed and our paths criss-crossed as they are apt to do in a middle school, me in my space and you in yours.  Our orbits became more coordinated, sometimes by design, but often by fluke.  Now I’m quite certain that your gravitational force is perhaps the only thing that keeps me on track.

BF #1:  You know me better than I know me.  I tell you things and as I watch the words fall through the air, I realize that you already knew whatever it was I was in the process of saying.  You see me completely, warts and all.  And you still like me.

BF 2.0: Somehow, despite our obvious differences, we have the same observations/thoughts/reactions to most things in this life, especially when it comes to (literally) anything pertaining to our school life.  It has only been in recent years that we have been able to acknowledge this with a simple look and a barely noticeable smile.

BF #1:  All we need is your couch, some tea and extended, uninterrupted time.

BF 2.0:  All we need is a fire, good music and extended, uninterrupted time.

 

Restless sleep, lots of early movement…bathroom door opens and closes, sending light into the room like a lightening bolt.  Eldest ambles down the hallway.  Youngest is asleep next to me. Husband is just on the other side.

Just before 4am, looking at the clock, which is my phone, trying to decide what time it really is given Daylight Saving (with or without the “s”??).

4:15 alarm.  Snooze.

4:20…decidedly not asleep, so might as well get on with it. I am already planning backwards from 6:30, when I will have to leave the house.

Yesterday’s coffee is still in the pot, so it will suffice for the first cup.  The next will be freshly ground and patiently brewed, I vow.  Unfortunately for my husband, the next pot will have to wait until tomorrow.

Coffee on the couch, next to the dog, to check in on the headlines.

Coronavirus…I read the article in the Times and try to read between the lines.  Is it time to worry?  Is it time to buy extra toilet paper and refill prescriptions?  Can you get the virus if you have groceries delivered?  Would quarantine really be all that bad?

Politics…how did we get here and where are we going?  I check, again, to verify that I have the New York primary date entered into my calendar.  I do not.  I thought I did?  What else will I not be reminded to do?

5:00 alarm.  My reminder that if I am going to go out with the dog or to the basement’s treadmill, now is the time.  I weigh the options and try to see the ramifications of each choice.

Treadmill. 3 miles while being annoyed with the most recent Saturday Night Live.  I watch the current cast and think fondly of Jane Curtin, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi…I know you! You’re that shark!

Showering on autopilot, trying to figure out the pace and sequence of my first class.  I know I’ll have some time between my first and second classes to organize materials, but I definitely need a plan, despite the fact that my plan is, in fact, already set.  Second guessing is second nature, I suppose.

6:30 and I am almost out the door…but I remember that I want to bring a friend a small plant.  Her father is ill and she just put down her dog and life is piling up on her and there’s nothing I can do except bring her a plant so that she knows I was trying.  So that she knows that she is loved.

6:40 and I park somewhere between the beautiful full moon and the almost sunrise.

Walking around the grocery store is a lot like being in a casino for me.  Time stops.  But it doesn’t because when I walk out, with the plant and a cup of coffee, it is almost 7:10.

7:15am.  Arrive at school, leave the plant with a note on a very (very!) clean desk, and walk to my classroom.  I wonder if my desk is really as cluttered as I think or if it only appears that way in contrast to the one I just left.

Lights on, one by one (lamps, no overhead fluorescents for me!), and adjust the chairs just a bit to find a little more space between them.

Return the computer cart (recall that coronavirus can live up to 14 days on a surface…or was it 14 hours?) and start the faculty room coffee pot brewing.

Back in my class, I check the daily slides that I use put together Sunday and that I will use as a backdrop to my teaching.  I have embraced the technology ever since someone decided to abduct my white board (following the kidnapping of my chalk board), leaving me with a giant screen that I now use, adeptly, every day.

7:40am Five minutes until the students arrive and I wonder about my next cup of coffee.

I sat with my mother today, held tight to her hand, and listened to the words swirling around me, creating the funeral for one of her close friends of almost 50 years.  So complicated, this life.  Perhaps that should be capitalized. Life.

My mother has recently turned 80.  She is healthy and independent and remains fierce in her incredible quest to always be positive.  There are, to be sure, chinks in that armor.  I have seen them all of my life, the cracks that show her humanity.  But just as quickly as they are exposed, she deftly swipes a hand and you would be a fool to argue that they were ever there.

She has always taken pictures, my mother.  I can’t remember her not having a camera somewhere nearby.  The boxes of pictures and shelves of albums are a testament to her determination to freeze time, over and over again.  At some point, when I was a teen, my father declared that a portion of the basement was going to become her darkroom.  The handy-man came, knocked down walls or put them up (I was a teen, so this is all quite hazy) and somehow a small space was created for my mom to turn the rolls of film into the pictures of our life.  Life.

My father’s failures were exposed when his body failed, leaving my mother alone in that house, with a darkroom that was no longer necessary due to the digital revolution.  It was probably no coincidence that when she no longer needed the darkroom the darkroom was no longer a viable option.  The house sold, she relocated & her pictures now evolve in a light filled room, overlooking a lovely golf course, using technology that includes powerful computers, complicated software and printers that necessitate extremely expensive paper and ink.

There is a lot to be said, about all of this.  Life.  My mother is a vibrant force and I wept today not just for her friend but for the inevitabilities.  For the inevitable.  Life.

I think we all have our secrets.  My dog, who is a fairly large labradoodle beast, can perch on the smallest of spaces just to look out the window and languish in whatever sliver of sunshine central New York permits to slide through the dense, persistent clouds.  He is, perhaps, the most anxious dog on the planet, going from sound asleep to high alert for no discernible reason.   So, while I am not now, nor have I ever been, a cat owner, he strikes me as a feline in disguise, with all of the stereotypical characteristics associated with the breed that is supposed to be his arch nemesis.

Now, I would assume that if he were to go to the dog park and hang out with his dog park pals (of which he has none because he hates other dogs and has no instinct whatsoever to be a member of a pack), he would posture for them, fetching and barking and being all sorts of dog-ish.  He looks like a dog, often smells like a dog, and betrays his feline nature with his incessant barking (a lovely trademark of this mutt breed), sounding like a dog.  But, when he thinks that no one is looking–or, at least, no one is yelling at him to get off the furniture–he perches and watches.  He harnesses his inner cat.

I think that there is a lesson to be learned in all of this–something about embodying the traits of your enemy or living your true nature–but I don’t know exactly what that is today.  For now, I am happy to watch him watch the birds & squirrels.  I am happy allowing him to perch on the forbidden furniture and steal the afternoon sunshine that is coming through the window.  I am happy believing that living one’s truth may be found in becoming what no one thought you would ever be.

My desk is a mess.  My students are a mess.  My plans for next week are a mess.  It all looks like my backyard…springtime.  The snow has melted and the rain has saturated everything, leaving behind the soft, spongy beginnings of new life.  But it hasn’t emerged yet, this new life, and all that is there is mud, just like my classroom at 3pm on a Friday.

Spring is not a new or creative metaphor for life, and soggy, messy mud pits hold such promise for imagery…but I am not even approaching metaphorical contemplation.  I am, literally, just trying to figure out how to 1) give (quality) feedback on all this student writing and 2) find the time to sift through the bins of past years’ material to find the Just Right poem for Monday morning.

But I’m not really doing either of those things, because I am writing.  I am searching for direction and searching for the words and just searching in general.  (Which I seem to do a lot, lately.)  The problem is that I don’t know where to take my writing and I don’t know which words will fit together comfortably on the line…and I don’t know how to write about my Big Search because I don’t even really know what that is.

I met with a student today about his reading and he confessed to me that he had not been finishing anything that he read.  This was a shock to me, as he is a voracious reader.  He said he started a few different novels, but abandoned them all.  Then he switched to non-fiction, but found himself just reading a few chapters here and there before moving on to another book altogether.  He didn’t know why he was leaving this trail of rejected books in his wake, but he said he was looking for something and just wasn’t finding it.  Aren’t we all?  I told him that this was all okay, that this was all part of being an independent reader, and sent him to the library to browse some more.  He did not return with a book, but only gave me a weak shrug when he walked back into the room empty handed.  I returned his shrug, hoping that my mirroring gesture would convey that he was not alone on his quest.

In a few minutes, I’ll close up my room, knowing that the messes will get straightened out just as the grass will grow in my yard.  My student will find his way back into a story and the mud pits will dry out.  I have witnessed many, many springs and they each, predictably, bring renewal and hope.  As I watch the days lengthen and feel the temperatures warm, I doubt I’ll end my Big Search, but I am hopeful that I will find a way to name it.

It dawned on me today, in a moment of rare calm and reflection, that big change only seems to happen in the wake of some kind of crisis or great disruption.   This is true not just for personal growth, but for institutional change, too.  Inertia or adherence to the status quo is such an incredibly strong force that it becomes an immovable mountain.   Political systems, school systems, metabolic systems…all of them strain to hold on to whatever form they have ultimately taken, slowly, over time.  And to alter the course, expand the walls, redefine the rules, or (god forbid) become something radically new, can feel virtually impossible and is, frankly, something that does not happen often.

But change can happen and usually, in order for that change to occur, the impetus for it comes out of the destruction wrought by some external force.  War, natural disaster, any number of headlines declaring that the sky is, indeed, falling, or even the sudden death of a seemingly healthy person–all have the potential to spur significant change.  But is the big fallacy that this disruption has to come from the outside?  Can it, in fact, come from within?  And, if so, how do we become brave enough to not just allow for but to actually cause our own internal disruption?  It feels somehow wrong to look for that which would disrupt and destabilize?  To seek out discomfort??

When the Ghostbusters (well, really, it’s just Dan Aykroyd in all of his awesomeness) accidentally chooses their own Destructor, their impending doom seems to be softened just a bit by the familiarity of the beloved Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.  It was not premeditated; it came out of a single moment of nostalgia.  A moment when Ray was terrified of what was happening and his mind reflexively gave him a place of tranquility and safety. And it was this innocent, harmless icon that brought the threat of potential death–total destruction–to the one who had sought comfort there.

Perhaps if we pay attention to the details, the innocent moments, we can become surprised by the catalyst that begins the destruction of our status quo, creating the freedom to find a new path to continue our journey.  It is about more than just holding two opposing ideas side by side: growth and destruction; safety and danger; status quo and change…it is about recognizing how they are intricately connected.

What are the images that I would share, showing a slice of my life?  Would it be the picture I posted in the early morning hours to Facebook of my kids from 9 years ago?  A picture that instantly transports me to a different land, with its own sounds and smells and language?  A land that I have left behind and will, in all likelihood, never return to in this lifetime?  Would it be a picture of my students, engaged in their 12 & 13 year old way in Black Panther (probably forgetting everything we focused on in the weeks leading up to this…the hero’s journey, the importance of culture, the necessity of story), replete with whispered conversations and snacks surreptitiously hidden in sweatshirt pockets? Would it be of me, stone faced in an administrative meeting, biting my tongue so that I don’t say the words that pound against my head, threatening to bring back the headache I left with yesterday afternoon?

What are the images that I have taken in throughout the course of this day? What if I could download them with a simple cord connected directly to my mind? Would the picture, once printed, capture what had actually happened or is that reserved only for the very few who share the experience? And this invites me to wonder, do we ever share experiences or are they all uniquely ours?

It is inevitable that I ultimately came to that last one, pondering my very existence.  I think I am, frankly, over-caffeinated, underfed & in need of some fresh, non-school, air.

Your name is a flower, but you are more thorny than fragrant.  You wear your defiance proudly, creating a space around you that few will brave.  I thought I knew you before I met you; I knew your older sibling, both of your parents and, of course, I knew the very public story that was splashed across the local papers several years ago.   And then you came into my classroom.

For months we have sparred.  I approach, you block and turn.  Duck, dodge, parry, thrust…elegant sword play, but with less emphasis on the elegant.  Emails and phone calls to home reaffirm that I am doing my best, that your parents care and that the problem is all you.  One hundred percent you.  Even the counselor and the other teachers agree, it is all you.

I have watched you move further and further away during class, sinking into the biggest chair that is as far away from me as possible.  This physical distance is so symbolic of your emotional state that it is cliche (but 7th graders always seem to walk the fine line between reality and caricature).  You will occasionally come to ask a question, cautiously sitting beside my desk in the Conference Chair…but you almost never have a question, just a statement of defeat.  “I don’t know what I am supposed to be doing.”

You were so happy during Spirit Week because you could wear your hat, pulled down low, hiding even more of you from the world.  I joked with you that Friday, asking what you were going to do when you couldn’t wear your hat anymore.  You answered, “Oh, I’ll still wear it,” and we laughed, but I knew you weren’t really joking.

Since then it has become your test:  you put it on, wait for an adult to attempt to enforce the archaic dress code, and, when the they do, you take it off, wait a bit, and then do it all over again.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Ad nauseum.  I saw it happening and watched with bemused detachment.  I rarely engage with the dress code enforcement, and students seem to know that I am a safe space, generally speaking.

And then, suddenly, I found myself the unwilling participant in this battle.  I don’t really know how it started, but somehow I have to believe that you conjured this up on purpose.  Did you put on the hat and walk directly in front of me while I was talking to the Assistant Principal? Yes.  Did you put on the hat and walk across the crowded cafeteria not once or twice but three or four times, daring me to say something or risk giving you tacit approval in front of 250 students?  Yes.  Did you collapse into that giant chair in the corner today, hat pulled down with your binder in front of your face, pretending to hide? Yes.  And with each infraction, I said, “Take off your hat” or just “Hat” and you pulled it off, audibly somehow, just to reattach it to your head once the moment had passed.

So, finally, I pulled on my big-teacher pants and called you into the hall.  I told you I had to write you up.  This was the mother of all teacher cards and I had pulled it.  You grunted, said you “get it” and asked to put your hat in your locker.  I watched you reenter the class, hatless, and the battle was over.  I had done my job and you had done yours.  You slept through the rest of class, eyes wide open.

Where are the lines

             the phrases 

  the 
   jagged 
     stanzas 

that succinctly capture the entirety of an emotion 
in a way that prose cannot quite do?  

Where is the figurative language I demand of my students?
         the metaphors that smash ideas together in choreographed dances?
         the worlds built out of personified, hyperbolic static objects?

I have spent my day searching for the poetry
Naomi Shihab Nye promised was hiding

I checked my shoes and even the eyes of the crows outside my window
(the skunks were sleeping, apparently)

and--I swear--
I am living in such a way that will let them find me
      or am I supposed to find them?

I listened to the wisdom of Joseph Campbell
reimagined through disciples who encourage me 
"follow my bliss"
but never tell me how

I allow the lyrics of Joni and Graham and Jerry and Bruce
to float around my soul because my head is still full of Joe

and then
I stop my searching
and realize I've been teaching it all wrong...
                          the poem doesn't capture the emotion;
                          the poem sets it free.