some lessons i learned during hurricane gustav

.
1. There is a limit to the number of household repairs that can be made with candle wax and bandannas.

2. It is best to let fighting dogs figure things out for themselves.

3. A laptop battery runs out at the climax of any given film.

4. The desire for free ice and water is a metaphysical desire; FEMA is the unattainable Other.

5. There is such a thing as battery-powered fans. Elsewhere.

6. The kindness-and-togetherness-during-trying-times thing runs out after 3 hot days without power.*

7. Everybody loves Boggle.

8. Canola oil works great as starter fluid.**

9. Curfew is for real.

10. Generators are much louder than the people who use them (sitting inside with the TV blaring) probably realize.

*this rule, fortunately, does not apply in Spanish Town, where kindness and togetherness are virtually bottomless.
**thanks to DeWitt Brinson for this lesson.

for matt and sara's wedding

It's rare that I genuinely enjoy a wedding. But it's rare that I enjoy people as much as I do these two. You should look at Sara's impressive wedding blog.

Beyond What
Alice Walker

We reach for destinies beyond
what we have come to know
and in the romantic hush
of promises
perceive each
the other's life
as known mystery.
Shared. But inviolate.
No melting. No squeezing
into One.
We swing our eyes around
as well as side to side
to see the world.

To choose, renounce,
this, or that --
call it a council between equals
call it love.

I love this poem for the way it departs from one convention of weddings. There is a moment in most ceremonies that leaves me a little mournful: the one when it's pronounced that two amazing individuals, each of whom I love separately, have become One. It makes it seem as if love's ultimate effect is to reduce by half the number of wonderful people in the world, and I'm pretty sure that we can't spare them. I prefer to think of it as a pooling of resources; a collaboration that will allow each of you to better reach for destinies beyond what we have come to know.

Today, in my mind, rather than melting, rather than squeezing into one, your vow is to forever amplify one another's unique capacity to live well, to engender beauty, to nurture justice, to generate love. Thinking of it this way allows me to celebrate without reserve this most inspiring and joyful council between equals. My wish is that the destinies for which you together reach will enrich your own lives and spirits and immensely as they already do ours, you beautiful two.

big bang

or: between the lines of text messages.

u r nowhere close 2 Forgiven

unfolding your message
like the map it is not,
i translate:
u r hopelessly lost.

unforgiven and aimless,
i'll buck against the straps of
your grudge.

as i chafe, you'll bruise;
i'll be
sorrier.

rampantly
sorrier.

i'll stomp
every wrong i've done
into the shit and mud and straw.

i'll snap and bound and
vault like a brahma;
u r still just a jackass.

i'll rage
against this stasis.

bellowing
my humanity,
i'll absolve
my own damn self.

here:
is my guilt,
cast off, undigested, shining
pearl of
you-were-right.

forgive me
or don't--
your anger is tiny
against stars.

it is a firefly
in a universe
born of mistakes.

you
are right

and i
am infinite.

uncapped

maybe a little too syrupy-sweet & sentimental...if you have a sensitive gag reflex that is triggered by Precious Moments figurines and the like, proceed with caution.

Amongst the faded school portraits, off-center snapshots and blurred Polaroids in our family album is a series of noticeably sharper photos of me, my brother, and my uncle Randy in the forest. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but just as the pictures are more vivid, so are my memories of the moments they captured. Evidence, perhaps, against the belief that snapping a picture steals a bit of the moment or the subject; maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe it enhances the moment and the subject’s memory of it, but the memory is only as sharp as the picture. That would explain why my memories of my teen years are so fuzzy. And why celebrities don’t seem to get Alzheimer’s.

Randy was by far my youngest uncle, and I adored him. At some point, he and his girlfriend were amateur photographers—as everyone is required to be at some point in their young lives—and they asked my brother and me to be their subjects. They envisioned some sort of heartwarming children-in-nature photo shoot, I suppose, fall colors being very much in sync with the palette of late-‘70s fashion. I knew nothing of fashion or hackneyed themes, but the proposition of a walk in the forest with Randy was worth jumping at. He let us go as slow as we wanted, never seeming to mind when we’d squat over a patch of clover to look for one with four leaves, or become otherwise fascinated and still. He never forced us to talk, and when he did speak, it was in a soft voice, using words that I could understand. Too, he talked to me and my brother separately. Most adults treated us as a unit, asking us questions that seemed to require a single answer from the both of us. On our walks, I could count on Randy walking beside me for a ways, saying one or two things, not minding when I only nodded in response.

I wore my poofy orange coat, my beloved orange coat. Ryan and Randy were in navy blue—baseball- and poofy- style, respectively. We walked along the train tracks, my favorite route. I couldn’t tell you what the trees looked like, or the sunlight filtering through them, or the sky: I kept my eyes on the ground. That’s where the magic is, especially in a Rhode Island autumn, and especially when you’re five. It’s a particularly enthralling kind of beauty that you see in a bright yellow leaf at precisely the same moment that you stomp on it.

At some point, Randy stopped our wanderings and sat us down under an oak tree. He posed us, backs against the tree, next to each other, closer than we normally cared to be. My eyes were on the ground, still; my fingers raked through the dry grass and oak-tree debris. I picked up an acorn, cupped it in my palm, and looked at the acorn cap in my other hand. Here's the epiphany: I realized that they were supposed to be together; that they used to be together; that each acorn had one, single cap that would fit it perfectly. The cap in my fingers didn’t fit the acorn in my palm. I tried another, and another, and, unfazed, others. I knew, somewhere in my mind, that I would try every cap on every acorn in Rhode Island until I found the one that fit. I kept my back against the tree and my shoulder touching Ryan’s--as we had been posed--but I had sunken into fascination.

At some point, my brother craned his neck to see what I was doing. He watched for a moment before twisting back around (his back still against the tree, his shoulder touching mine), picking up an acorn and some caps. He put them in his lap to be examined and sorted; I continued my piles on the ground.

All the while, there was a faint noise in the background, one that barely entered my consciousness. “Laurie, would you look up for just a minute? Into the camera?—Okay, um, Ryan? You too, buddy. Look over there!” Randy’s voice remained gentle as he repeated the request thousands of times and I remained hunched over, oblivious. Eventually tuning in, I might have been a little annoyed with this distraction; I don’t remember. I looked up, but my hands continued to feel the ground for another cap, to try it on the acorn, to add it to the misfit pile. It must not have been long before my gaze was pulled back to the ground, and I’d hear Randy’s voice again. It was like being at the dentist—you can never open your mouth wide enough, long enough, for him. You want to, and you feel bad that he has to constantly remind you, but somehow you’ve lost a little bit of control over your mouth, which keeps involuntarily closing. So did my head keep drifting down, my eyes insisting on getting a better view of the task at hand.

The pictures are beautiful—rich colors, sharp details—much more professional than anything else in our photo album. Our small figures at the base of the tree are vivid orange and deep blue, and it’s nice to be able to see that sunlight-filtered-by-branches thing that I had overlooked. They look kind of like the picture that comes in a frame when you buy it. It’s pretty, but the people are anonymous. The fact that these photos, these records of my first realization about the world, don’t contain my face is my own fault, of course. Personally, I think it’s perfect: this image of the tops of our little heads, as uncapped as acorns.

burning buildings

Been trying to write this for years...finally got a first draft. Sure it needs lots of revision, and equally sure my memory has embellished some details and glossed over others.

You covered my mouth and forced me to listen. The crackling sounds from the other room defied explanation: crackling so loud that we could hear it through the thick, century-old walls. You and I crouched by the door to listen more closely. We crouched the way my brother and I used to, at the top of the stairs, listening to our parents argue. I can’t imagine what you and I were thinking in the moment between hearing the sound and realizing what it was, but I don’t think we realized that we were each going to lose the resolve that had brought us to this impasse.

Sitting in the back room with you, I was exasperated. It was your roommate’s bedroom; an odd place for us to be, I guess. I had probably refused to go into yours; to be fair, maybe you refused to invite me. I’d grown used to your opacity and wasn’t trying to figure out what you might have been thinking. I knew that this was going to be our last conversation. I knew that you weren’t going to let it happen any easier than you’d let anything else happen. You were being deliberately obtuse (so I called it. I believe you termed it “inquisitive”): changing the subject, twisting words, and generally trying to stretch things out by denying me any possibility of closure. Closure. Another word that made me realize what a psychobabbling American I was. Still, that’s what I wanted, and that’s what, among other things, you withheld. When you asked me to listen for a strange sound in the next room, I thought it was another ruse.

“Seriously. Do you hear that crackling sound?”

“Shut up. Please just shut up a minute, for fuck’s sake, and let me do this.” Or something over-dramatic like that.

“Jesus, Laura! Just listen!”

I don’t know how long we listened, crouching at that door, before opening it to see the fire. We must have exclaimed something, probably obscene, upon seeing it, but I remember only the sight of it: the couch on fire looked unreal. The division between couch and flame was so clear, so well-defined, it was like a kid’s drawing. It looked exactly like you would expect a couch on fire to look. You don’t think things like that will look ordinary. You’d think the actual sight of them would be so dramatic, so new, that your preconceived mental pictures of them would be blown away. Mine weren’t. The couch was on fire, and I saw no visions in the flames. Just flames.

I don’t remember getting past the fire and out the door. Standing there in the dark, you talked like a maniac about the fire brigade. Even at that point, I was detached enough to note the amusing difference between your English and mine. I’d never said the word “brigade” in all my life, probably never heard it spoken, either. You hated it when I called attention to your way of saying things, yet you felt entitled to compare my speech patterns, repeatedly, to those of the characters on Beverly Hills 90210.

“Listen! Say that again, Laura. She sounds just like Brenda! Say it again!” All Americans sounded alike to you, you loved to say, as you asked me to repeat my pronunciation of “neither” or of “shut the hell up.” You didn’t intend to make me feel like a trained monkey, of course. Besides, I’ve never been one to turn down a bit of attention. But it seemed to happen most frequently whenever I tried to say anything remotely serious, and so it was one of the reasons that you were getting dumped that evening.

All of this was, of course, beside the point as you said “fire brigade” repeatedly. Even that--your infuriating way of derailing serious conversations, a defense so impenetrable that I couldn’t even call attention to it without getting mocked--was burning away.

“Okay. Fuck. Fire brigade. Jaysis. Got to call fire brigade. Fire. Brigade…fuck…fuck! Alex passed out! Fire bri—fuckin’ hell! I’ll go call. You get her. Ah, fuck!

What happened at this point is the part I can’t figure out how to tell. It makes me miss you, because you told it well. You found a way to tell it that didn’t leave me feeling ridiculous. My version makes me ridiculous in two ways: first, for being such a complete lackey that I didn’t even question your absurd division of labor: “I’ll go dial a phone number, you go into a burning house and drag a drunk person out of it.” Are you kidding? I like to think that I would have gone in without orders from your highness, but I’ll never know. So I just feel stupid for being so obedient. Ridiculous, also, because really, who has the gall to tell a story about themselves running into a burning building? It’s like saying, “Throw me a parade! I’m a fuckin’ hero!” And that breaks the hero’s rules of recognition somehow. This idea of heroism, the one that we’ve been groomed to crave since Odysseus sneaks into the telling of every story in some way, I think. I don’t know what to do with it in this one, because while I, like most of us, have always dreamt of doing something like pushing a toddler out of the way of a bus, or taking a bullet for a president we respect, or running into a burning building to pull out a drunk girl, I also know that one of the rules is that people don’t tell their own stories. Those tales are supposed to be picked up by a blind bard or something, sung through the ages, sung in the third person. So it’s you who ought to be telling this story, really. Maybe you are. You’ve been out of earshot for over a decade now, so I wouldn't know. Still, if you were, I don't think the story would be bursting out of my memory so insistently and with such disregard for the rules of its telling. Maybe you’ve forgotten all about it. Or maybe I’m the victor, here, and my prize is writing its history to suit me: a non-transferable prize from a dubious victory. Lovely. A story that insists upon being told by a teller whose fate is to come off ridiculous. Sing in me, muse.

Here’s how you told it: “So I come back from the neighbor’s and there’s Laura, black with soot, coughing like a bollocks. Next to her is Alex, stark naked, lying in the road, legs spread, pissed out of her mind. No idea what was happening. Nearly died and the eejit kept telling Laura to go back in for her coat. Jaysis, Alex.”

At this point, if Alex was in the room, you’d hit her, and she’d look sheepish. Still, you couldn’t describe what it was like inside the house (you gallant dialer of telephones, you), and I never told you. So that's what's left to be done.

In the moments during which you were saying and I was thinking about the word “brigade,” the fire spread to the curtains and, I really think, the walls. It truly looked like the walls were on fire, and I guess that’s not unreasonable, but it’s hard to imagine it being true. It’s not like a couch on fire; I had never thought to form a mental picture of what walls on fire might look like. The stairs were not yet burning as I climbed them, or I very well might not have gone up. There were no flames upstairs, but the smoke was unbelievable—another thing I had never thought to imagine. People describe smoke as “acrid.” It’s more than that. I mean, breathing this smoke was like breathing maple syrup. It was thick and so sweet I gagged. It had texture in my nose and mouth, like something I could grab hold of. I remember being shocked mostly by the sweetness of it.

As a little kid, I used to dip my finger in cocoa powder while I waited for my hot chocolate to heat up. Once, I put a spoonful of the powder in my mouth. It choked me as I involuntarily inhaled some of it; it was so overly sweet it burned. I panicked and spit what wasn’t already stuck to my teeth and tongue into the garbage. Breathing the smoke was surprisingly similar to that, except there was no spitting out to be done.

At the top of the stairs I half-lunged towards the bed and ended up crawling the rest of the way. I couldn’t see anything up there. I hit the bed where I thought Alex would be. I couldn’t form any words—I kept trying to say her name and only managed the first syllable and some coughing. When my hand found her, I pulled at her arms and tried to roll her over, onto the floor. She didn’t stir at first, and when she did, she shook me off like I was her mother waking her up for the first day of school. She was incredibly stubborn and oblivious, which doesn’t surprise you, I’m sure. I tried a few more times until, exhausted from coughing up sweet smoke and bile, I stopped, fell back to the ground, and tried to think. This is one moment that I can remember with total clarity: I felt sure that I had no more than a few seconds left before I would pass out. Then maybe the fire brigade would get both of us out, but maybe not. I decided I had enough time to try to get Alex once more, and if she still wouldn’t budge, I would have to leave without her. I never told either of you that part; that I had made up my mind to leave her in there and save myself. How would a thing like that sound?

This is where the adrenalin kicks in, and memory fails. I remember Alex groping for the window, through which a toddler could maybe have squeezed, and both of us ultimately getting out: me with clothes and face stained by smoke; her with nakedness not very well disguised by the thin layer of dark gray that coated her entire body. Stumbling out of the house, I remember thinking that I was probably burned, that my skin was probably peeling off in horrible ways. I was terrified by the idea of spending the rest of my life scarred and disfigured. Then I thought for a minute that I still might die—only now it would be in a hospital, half my body covered in gauze stuck to bloody tissue where skin used to be, taking insane amounts of morphine intravenously. I tried to steel myself for the pain that would wash over me once the shock wore off, and I looked for reaction in the faces of the gathered onlookers. I think I asked someone for a mirror, which must have sounded bizarre.

When people ask me whether I believe in God, the view in that mirror—intact, unscathed—is one of the moments that come to mind.

We stood there and watched the house burn: it collapsed in on itself. Did you write something on Alex’s stomach with your finger, wiping away the soot to spell out “pissed” or “whore”? I might have imagined that. She asked a fireman for a light, giggling with a fag dangling from her lips. I thought it was kind of pitiful, but I laughed—probably just for the sake of laughing. I remember looking at the stars and laughing hard, standing next to the truck on the slant of the road.

The firemen—brigade—had arrived before the adjoining houses were badly damaged, but yours was a ruin. The outer walls were intact up to the first story, but the second story was gone. The stairs were mostly still there, but they led to nothing but dark sky. Everything inside was black, crackled-looking, like it had been given a very bad faux finish by a creatively stifled housewife. I found my glasses. Only one lens was shattered and I considered wearing them for the remaining good lens. You talked me out of it and I learned to get by without seeing very well.

How could I, after all that, go through with dumping you? You were homeless, and your only money had been in the cupboard (which you called the press), protected by nothing but a rubber band. You called yourself lots of unkind names for not having kept it in a safer place, and I wondered if you had ever heard of a bank—and if you had, what charming name you might have for such a place.

When I told you, a few days later, that I had been trying to break up with you that night, you said this: clearly, the fairies had intervened. They burned the house in order to keep us together. You nearly convinced me. You also nearly convinced me that we should not only get married, but have a cowboy-themed wedding. I guess I was exhausted, too tired to argue or resist, and so went along with it for a while. This is the part I can’t tell, the part where fatigue seemed to lead to something real. Something that still won’t entirely leave me alone, that makes me feel like I lost my bard, like I’m doomed to shout my own pointless story into empty space for all time. Maybe it was the fucking fairies. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it was no match for the expired visa that sent me home. After that, it wasn’t long before I dumped you over the phone.

.:.

If there is an opposite to “running into a burning building” it must be “breaking up over the phone.” These acts would work well as prototypes for heroism and cowardice, respectively, the two extremes of a spectrum. You pointed that out, in fact, during our last conversation. Not in so many words, but however you said it, you were right.

See, here’s the thing: it's not a matter of being a hero or not. To call a person that, to expect oneself to be that, is a fallacy. Odysseus wins the war and defeats monsters only to come home and slaughter the unarmed suitors in an unfair fight. Heroism isn't a personality trait like being outgoing or thoughtful; it’s not something that you consistently are. Maybe you feel like it for an instant, a moment, an occasion that you happen to rise to, followed by another occasion to rise to or not, then another, then another. Nobody is heroic at every opportunity, and anybody can get lucky by choosing the right moment in a million, the one that people might notice and remember. I guess I didn’t realize that in my old dreams of parades and keys to the city. I would have been thrilled to know that, one day, I would run into a burning building. I would feel vindicated, in a way, like in a single deed I held undeniable proof of a simple fact that I wanted people to recognize: that I was a decent person. It’s clear to me now, though, that this version of heroism is kind of a sham—or at least that it’s the easier of the two options. The harder option, the one at which I regularly fail, is to rise to the occasion of each day, to live it with kindness and integrity and patience. And to let go of the desire to be recognized for it. I know people who do that, and they astound me. You and I really ought to find ourselves some people like that, love.

dialect poem

the language of my fathers
wouldn't cover your toes in the bed,

wool shrunken
in numbing northatlantic saltwater,

fibers condensed into platitudes,
stiffened into the shapes
of my slumbering missionary ancestors.

this puritan tongue
knows Better,
chastens with euphemism,
distills to etiquette,
absolves itself of filth and fluid,
thanking Death when he kindly stops.

this language is no quilt.
it's a veil.
it's lipless:
wrap your mouth around
its
brittle as eggshell
words;
hold them there.

this language
enacts
the limits of vocabulary,
leaves depths
unuttered.
my people can
stretch silence across oceans.

my father's language
is no quilt,
no comfort--
merely a foil
for the universal
quiet.

some lusty haikus and tankas

I have not yet seen
your living room--and I
know it is dirty.
In my mind, you arch your back
into sunlight and dust motes.

Listening to you
explain imaginary
numbers like sweet, rich
gossip: write an equation
for my cells that call your name.

Your lower lip begs,
without pout, to be bitten.
I will grant its wish.

Quick: hand me a lamp.
I'll rub. Tonight I feel like
I could conjure you.

Your buckled elbows
relinquish your body to
gravity; you're pulled
into me, and I exhale--
at last, I am close enough.

this house

A kind of miracle. I may never pay it off; But as long as I can scrape to make the note, we’ll never drift: never be at someone else’s mercy. A single mom is expected to raise her kids without a yard, sharing bedrooms. Mine will not suffer for their parent’s mistakes. I promised myself that when he left. They have new clothes, a fridge that's almost always full; we go out to dinner sometimes. They take piano lessons. They'll never want for anything. I will keep this promise. The hours are long; but I can work at home. They don’t have to be alone, wear keys around their necks, wake themselves up. I can still be here when they really need me. I put band-aids on their cuts, hold them when they cry, take care of them.

A filthy cage. She works all day for the money to keep it, worries all night that it won't be enough. The filth builds. These walls will fall in on us one day. Her glassy eyes, her slack jaw. Hunched over the keyboard, she sends me outside, or to my room. I want to talk to her, So I sit on this patch of carpet Under her desk, listening to her type. Wearing cheap clothes and eating cereal with the black and white label: it's embarrassing. She wasted money on that old piano, when I just want nice clothes; I want brand name food. All she does is work. I think she suffers from being alone all the time. Mornings, she screams up the stairs, like she’s too weak to climb them. I sit under her desk. Her knees press my shoulder. I listen to the keys click overhead. Once, I cut myself on purpose so she would bend down to me.

scary poem (i'm no killer)

August 10, 2007--A 28-year old man and a 15-year old boy have been arrested in the execution-style killings of three students and the shooting of another in Newark, a crime so shocking that it has galvanized a city long plagued by violence.

Execution-style killings:
shocking, yet common enough
to be named.
A style:
distinct, familiar.

Homestyle
Country style
Family style
Execution style.
We know these killings.

The shock is layered:
Incomprehension covers
recognition.

No foreign war,
no act of God, corrupt government
or brilliant sociopath--
a simple act
of someone made in his image.

No lesson beneath the horror,
no benefit to hindsight--
only the act.
Only an urge, unchecked.
A choice.

Today
I choose differently.
There are many days ahead.

It's a heavy weight
I lift with a story:
galvanized community,
surviving angel,
wake up call,
turning point.

I can shoulder narrative.

The act, encased in tales
of angels, morals, scholarships:
We process.
We distill knowing's burden.

How else could I face you,
knowing we share the same dark impulse?

A naked urge to destroy
comes to us
bundled with empathy,
hunger,
loneliness;
inhaled with our first breath of world.

Were they born for this act?
Or did they bend to impulse,
momentarily weak?
It could happen to anyone.

I'm not afraid of dying this way.
It's killing I dread.

"I want justice. They took three angels away from their families but one angel survived so the story could get told."

teaching, killing words, and castrating tongues

Virigina Woolf delivered this gorgeous "Eulogy to Words" in 1937. Part of the reason that words are dead (or at least are lacking the power they once had), she claimed, was that "we refuse to allow words their liberty, we pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning...the meaning which makes us pass examinations."

Anna West describes the same problem in our age of state standards and standardized tests in a poem that speaks for itself, beginning with the title: "Battle for the Board of Ed (who thinks language arts is commas, clauses, correctness and the castration of the tongue before it ever emerges)." Oh, how I wish the Board of Ed would click on that link.

So this issue isn't new; perhaps it's one of the rare things about English that hasn't changed from Woolf's world to ours? The accents and diction and even punctuation have changed, but through it all, education remains at odds with powerful, artful language. That's pretty remarkable, really. Tests are often blamed, but we all know that the problem is more complex than that. It's a truism in anthropology that the act of observing a thing changes it. Perhaps it's become a truism in education that the teaching of language dries it up and hollows it out. It's frustrating to imagine that we've known about this problem for nearly a century but haven't made a dent in it.As a teacher, it's downright painful to think that I'm harming what I love most (students and language). Perhaps we're asking kids to write expressively and powerfully even as we're undermining their ability to do just that. No wonder so many of them are fed up, frustrated and totally resistant to school.

Not much that we've done since 1937 seems to have altered this, so what do we do next as we try to build a system that lives up to its promises? Can it be done by individual teachers in the current system (and if so, how do we enable more teachers to do it) or is it impossible without a radical overhaul? How do we educate in a way that enlivens and empowers? I don't want to kill words, and I'd like to have nothing to do with castrating tongues.

mildly amusing roadtrip adventures

terrorist fist jab

I've always had a hell of time trying to write about teaching and kids. It's easy to slip into sentimental schmaltz, and equally possible to feel like I'm exploiting or belittling kids or portraying them unfairly or sending damaging messages about them...there are just a lot of pitfalls, I find. With that said...

The Teen Center is what I’ve talked about all summer when people ask questions that make me feel idle. I phrase it as if I had more ownership in the process than I really do—emotionally, I own it, but logistically, I’ve been an enthusiastic spectator at best. “What are you doing with all your free time?” “We’re opening a teen center—we’re going to paint it when I get back.” As if I were part of any meaningful “we” in the process. I wasn’t.

For the first three days of the painting, I stayed home. I had decent excuses—I hadn’t been formally informed of the location or the work hours, and I had left messages, I told myself. Truth is, I knew where the place was—I’d driven past it to check it out in my early enthusiasm—and it’s easy enough to drop by, wearing grubby clothes, and pick up a paintbrush. I was nervous, when it came down to it. Here’s a very close-knit group of 15 or so kids and their 2 or 3 mentors, and though I’ve been on the periphery of their work for a couple of years—in the audience at their open mics, teaching at a school that one of them attends, only that single kid, Kareem, even knew who I was. I hate being on the periphery of something so good—wondering if they see me, if they wonder who I am and why I’m so interested in what they’re doing, fearing that they’ll see me as some creepy adult who skulks about their projects. So I stayed home for the first three days, waiting to be held accountable for my promise to help by somebody other than my conscience.

On Thursday, I forced myself to go in around noon. I knew Natalie, the adult mentor who was working with them, and was relieved to have her show me around. The place looked great: they’d painted a couple of rooms and had 4 or 5 left to tackle, and they were into it: painting, dancing, laughing, looking like a postcard of student investment. It would’ve been a dream come true if I hadn’t been so self-conscious. I knew most of these kids by face—I could tell you about their poetry after a year of monthly open mics—but they clearly had no idea who I was. Most of them didn’t make eye contact at all, being too busy with the painting (or dancing), and those who did were polite in the way I’ve learned kids are when they’re casing an adult—not sure whether I was trustworthy, whether I had power over them and whether I would use it to hold them back, whether they would ever see me again. I might’ve been a supervisor, a senator’s aide, a local reporter, a safety inspector, a well-meaning but clueless small time philanthropist. I knew more than I probably should have known about their foibles and their personal dramas from their poetry and irrationally, it hurt that they were so coolly cordial and formal when I tried to break the ice. It hurt, even though it was exactly right, exactly what they should do, exactly what anybody would do.

Being socially awkward to begin with, this awkward situation would have terrified me if I hadn’t had a job to pour myself into. After a few hours of work, the adults began to crack the jokes that I’ve become accustomed to: “Shoot! Take a break, wouldya? This woman’s working like she wants a promotion” and the well-meaning but humiliating compliments: “Boy, this girl’s a hard worker. Kids, you need to take a lesson from her.” I try to make jokes with the kids, who respond by saying, “huh?” This always happens, and I can never figure out whether it’s my northern accent, my tendency to mumble when I’m being sarcastic, or the fact that my sense of humor is totally at odds with theirs (aka I'm old). I tell Erica that she should paint a pole with a candy-cane stripe and get “huh?” I tell James that his paint-spattered face is a good look for him, and he says, “huh?” There’s nothing worse than being forced to repeat a lame joke, nothing that can make a person want more to curl up and disappear. Worst-case scenario, I’ll just paint my ass off for a few days and then forget about the whole thing. But I want to know these kids. I want to be involved in this thing, I want to be a part of it, I want to help them make this happen, I believe in this, and in them, so strongly that it would make them uncomfortable if they knew.

I cracked lame jokes with Kareem, hoping he wouldn’t be embarrassed to be talked to by the weird adult in the room. Being as gracious and big-hearted as he is, that probably never occurred to him. On the second day, Sarah started asking me impertinent questions, much to my relief. Having taught hhigh school for five years, I had become really good at giving evasive answers that were always good for a laugh. At least I could show her that I wasn’t uncomfortable with her—well, I was uncomfortable, but not for the reasons I was expected to be. We talked about the color of my prom dress if I were still allowed to go to prom and she said I was crazy. I think one of the things that has me hooked on working with kids this age is the feeling of first getting a smile out of them. You have to work your butt off and be incredibly patient with most kids in order to get them to set aside their cool veneer and crack a smile, but when it finally happens, you feel a momentary triumph that’s incomparable. The beginning of the school year has always been my best time of year for that very reason: I’m on top of my game as I navigate the thin line between laying down the law and coaxing out a genuine, non-sarcastic or mocking, smile.

Before teaching, I wanted to be involved with kids somehow. I tried volunteering a couple of times, but after one awkward day of being left out on the periphery with barely any eye contact from the kids I was working with, I’d quit. I didn’t realize that it was a process that took time and effort, or that this is as it should be. I also didn’t realize that the kids that make you work hardest for it are the ones that will rock your world and make strained weeks seem like small change for such a phenomenal reward.

On the third day, Diana shows up. She’s clearly an old soul, a wise and soft spoken and immensely powerful young woman whom the other kids, whether overtly or not, look to a lot. To be cliché about it: a quiet leader. She’s incredibly polite, and very reserved, and very charismatic. She says, “Excuse me” a lot, in the place where most kids would just yell out your name to get your attention. She doesn’t call people by their name, something I can identify with—for a long time, and still with people who are older than me, it sometimes feels like I’m being overly familiar to call people by their name. More accurately, it would feel overly familiar to call them by their first name, and overly formal to call them by their last, so I resort to things like “excuse me.” She’s also the girl that seems to know exactly how much playing is okay: she’ll mess with her friends and then stop at the exact moment when an adult might think about reprimanding her. She’s the girl that hangs out towards the back of the room, and when I ask for someone to paint the bathrooms or collect paintbrushes that need to be cleaned, gives other people a chance to volunteer. After a pause long enough to determine that no one wants to do it, she steps up and quietly volunteers—I don’t know if she realizes that this will prompt the rest of the group to volunteer more willingly to do whatever I ask them to do next, but it does. They don’t do what I ask them to do—I still have to stay for an extra half an hour rinsing out paintbrushes—but they do volunteer to do it. That’s a step. Sarah decides to paint a little; this is the first time I’ve seen her do much in the way of work, and Kat points it out to me. “No way. Sarah, I love you!” pops out of my mouth, which I would normally never say for fear of making a kid feel awkward (or, being honest, embarrassing myself). “I love you too, Ms. Laura. Now get over here and help me.”

Also on the third day, Aisha, a girl who writes incredible poems, was upset. I knew very well that she didn’t want to talk to me (the weird adult) about it, but I couldn’t let her stand there without saying something. We went through the routine of me asking if she was okay and her being as polite as it’s possible to be when you’re pissed off and the wrong person is trying to comfort you, and I left it alone. I feel like the outcome of this kind of interaction could go one of two ways: either she’ll make a mental note that I care and will warm up to me later, or she’ll tell her friends that I’m trying to get in her business and that I’m creepy. Much as I dread the latter, I know that I’d never forgive an adult who knew I was upset and didn’t try to help me out when I was her age, so I have to take the risk.

Fourth day: The adult who's supposed to be in charge is MIA, again. She hasn’t come back, in fact, since leaving minutes after I showed up on my first day. I realize I’m supposed to be supervising but am totally ineffective at it. I let the kids know, sort of, what needs to be done and then let them do what they choose to do. Some work, some don't. It irritates me more each day that this happens, and that Natalie isn’t here to be the bad cop, but I know that taskmaster/teacher mode would be totally contrary to the spirit of this place, so my only tool is the occasional sarcastic cracks. Besides, the fact is that, in between long breaks to argue about whose school is best and fight over the last bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, the work is somehow getting done. Erica, in whom I’d confided on day two that I didn’t have a clue about painting, seems to be following me around. She works next to me all morning and has started laughing at my stupid jokes; she’s even countering my pointless anecdotes about my childhood with pointless anecdotes about her own. Nice. She and Trina are jokingly pole-dancing on the pole they’d painted a couple of days ago. As I walk by, genuinely embarrassed, I shield my eyes and they laugh. I let slip that I finished the Harry Potter book the day before and Trina tells me to shut up. “Oh—I’m so sorry—I didn’t meant to say that—I just meant—don’t tell me what happens!” It feels good to laugh at her; she’s embarrassed. It feels good not to be the only one who’s embarrassed. She goes on to tell me the three parts that have made her cry so far. I feel relief when I find myself wishing that she’d stop talking to me so much so we could get back to work. I hold up a paintbrush in the direction of a few kids eating chips. Sarah leaps up and says, “I got it. For you, Ms. Laura. You’re my girl. She’s my girl. I got it.”

No way.

The bus comes and takes most of the kids home at 4:30. I’m annoyed at having to wash the brushes, yet again. I’m even more annoyed when a group of five more kids emerge from their upstairs slacking-off room at 5:00, just as I’m ready to leave. Now I have to wait until they all get picked up. James is taking Diana and Sarah, but Aisha is still waiting for her mom, and I’m pissed off that she didn’t get on the bus. Instead, she’s calling her mom, her sister, her little brother, her uncle, her mom again, her sister again, trying to arrange to be picked up. I’m mad that she doesn’t get that I can’t go home after my long day until she gets off safely. “You can go,” she says.

“No, I can’t.” I counter. “Tomorrow, you need to get on the bus, got it?”

I know she just rolled her eyes. I can feel it through the back of my head.

We wait; James and the girls keep Aisha company so she won’t be left alone and awkward with an adult.

“You know, I can give you a ride, Aisha.” I say. She demures. She doesn’t want me to go out of my way. I can tell she wants to just get home and wouldn’t mind riding with me, and this emboldens me. I feel stupid that it took me half an hour to figure out that she just needed me to offer, that her mom wasn’t really “on her way.” “Come on. Call your mom and tell her you’ve got a ride. Let’s get out of here. I’m tired.”

I think—but I could be wrong—that she’s immensely relieved. We’ve solved the problem and we’re gone. As I walk out the door, Diana adjusts her bags to free up a hand. I can tell she’s going to shake my hand goodbye. She gets the wrong hand free, and after a moment of indecision, she puts her fist out to me. I tap it with mine.

other people's kids

I don't mind waiting in long lines, because it allows me to engage in one of my favorite hobbies. Eavesdropping isn't as simple as listening in to any nearby private conversation, any more than hunting is shooting whatever organism your gun is pointed at. Applying the skills of aural voyeurism to the average conversation is the equivalent of shooting a tree. A true sportsman is more discriminating than that, setting out with a particular type of prey in mind. For my part, the conversations I relish are between a young kid and an adult who is not his or her parent. I savor the lopsidedness in which such conversations are steeped: the more comfortable one party is (say, the overbearing, booming-voiced auntie using sentences far too complex for her 5-year old companion), the more uncomfortable the other one becomes (5-year-old watching the floor in case an escape hatch opens while executing subtle but complex slow-motion dance moves).

It takes close listening and sharp deductive reasoning skills to figure out when you have such a situation in the checkout line with you. The most common clues include a woman saying something to the child about "your mother." This alone isn't a dead giveaway, as plenty of children have two mommies, and even more have crazy mommies who speak of themselves in third person.

After just moments in line at the bookstore the other day, my skills were rewarded with conclusive evidence that the adult and child behind me were not related. It seemed that mom was somewhere else in the store (self-help? fantasy?); this lady must have, seeing a gleam in her friend's eye that signalled a desperate need to be alone for a few moments, volunteered to take the little girl to pay for her picture book. The kid was happily chattering; she was clearly the comfortable one in this situation. She pointed to the lady's bracelets and said, "pretty."

"Thank you! Can you count them?"
"One...two...three..." and so on, carefully and deliberately, but flawlessly, to nine.
"That's a lot of bracelets on my wrist, huh?"

The girl pointed to a display of drinking games near the checkout: Beer-opoly, etc.
"A game! Oooh. I want that game! Please? Please?"

I don't know if the rest of the line was listening as closely as I was, or if they were, whether they, too, smiled to think of the mother's mortification upon hearing her daughter beg this lady to buy her something, much less a drinking game.

"No, honey. That's a...an adult...well, that's a beer game."
The child was squirming, maybe even hopping a little bit. "But I like beer games! I love beer games! Please!"

It was pretty funny in the moment. It made me think of how irrational we humans get in the face of strong desire; how in a moment of want, nothing matters outside of the thing that you covet. Logic, truth, and dignity fade away. I wondered whether we outgrow that urge or just refine our methods, replacing hopping up and down with more artful strategems such as pick-up lines and blackmail.

Maybe the chance to return to that childhood impulse is part of the pleasure of Mardi Gras bead-whoring: that single-minded desire for beads that causes people to shed clothing for strangers. While I've never personally uncovered any important parts of my body, I have pleaded, kissed strangers, called people "gorgeous" who weren't, and I've certainly jumped up and down and screamed until the bead-thrower couldn't ignore me any more. It's fun for a couple of hours. Still, it must get exhausting for kids to spend years that way, constantly in the grips of such a powerfully desperate longing for every shiny object onto which their gaze happens to fall.

The lady had to stifle a laugh and then backtrack, re-explain. Still failing to change the kid's mind, I watched her think up and halfheartedly articulate ten different reasons why that particular game was not an appropriate object of desire for someone too young to count nine bracelets without effort. Her logic was flailing for a foothold in this totally illogical argument, all because she was afraid, or unable, to give that firm and definite "no" that mothers have mastered. She just couldn't produce the kind of "no" that rules out any further need for explanation (some moms might add, "Because I said so;" mine usually finished with "Period. End of report"). If I were this lady, I'd be praying that there would be a sudden rush for the Beer-opoly games, frenzied customers snatching them from the shelf. That way, I'd be able to use the only phrase I'd ever used to successfully deny a child something: the inarguably terminal "all gone."

For my lack of ability to deliver that powerful "no," I've dragged a two-year old on a giant stuffed orca through her house for what seemed like hours, past the point at which my knees were buckling and my vertebrae fusing, stifling cries of agony as she didn't supress squeals of glee that seemed to mock my pain. I couldn't formulate a sound argument for "again!" despite employing every rhetorical strategy I could summon. "One more time," I gasped between back spasms. The child echoed, signalling agreement with my terms. "One more time! One more time!" Lulled into a false sense of impending relief, and wanting to make the last orca-ride a memorable one, I'd pull with extra vigor, or take a new route around the coffee table. In doing so, I sealed my fate: the gleeful cry of "again!" lacked any recognition that it was clearly in violation of our agreement.

"But...but..."
"Again! Again!"
"Okay, ONE more time?"
"One more time!"

I knew that, somehow, I had to get the orca out from under the kid and out of her sight, but the sleight of hand to pull that off was way beyond my grasp. It might come down to this: I would have to destroy the orca, all at once, rendering it unrideable before the inevitable screams of protest could stop me. Somehow, though, I had to unsheath my only rhetorical weapon. But "all gone" wouldn't work until this cursed stuffed animal was actually all gone, and it was made of quality materials: it could last for thousands of trips. It was likely to outlast my back by a long shot, and it had already left my belief in free will in its cuddly wake. Mastery of my fate? All gone.

the adventures of a nerd in the wild west

how I discovered the life of the mind through cowboy boots

There are moments in each of our histories that are, by all appearances, unremarkable. Inexplicably, we remember them for decades with the same perfect clarity we usually reserve for births, deaths, and epiphanies. These are the stories that I start to tell at parties—they must be funny or profound; why else would I have remembered them all these years?—and realize, as my narrative approaches the gaping hole where the climax ought to be, that the stories are, in fact, pointless. I leave a confused and awkwardly pitying audience in my wake as I head to the liquor cabinet to regroup.

These memories make lousy anecdotes. Their value lies beneath the surface, deeper than a punchline. We are right to have kept stored them so carefully in our memory; they are profound. Our work is to unlock them, to excavate them. The story of my first day of school in Colorado is one of these memories. It stays with me, but in the telling, offers only an underwhelming window into a typical, if slightly pathetic, 7-year-old world. Hidden in its shallows, though, are the seeds of much of what I have since come to value. I was wearing cowboy boots on the day that the possibility of a rich inner life was revealed to me.


Coming from New England, and being seven, I envisioned Colorado as The Wild West. I felt that I would need to ride a horse and learn to walk with my feet far apart, hands at my hips. Perhaps I would get to wear a holster on weekends; probably not to school. Those details would be worked out eventually. In the meantime, I needed to make some wardrobe adjustments. The Docksiders and fair isle sweaters would need to be replaced before the move if I were to fit in among the cowpokes of Colorado. My grandmother took me to the store and I picked out plaid western shirts with mother-of-pearl snaps and big collars. I endured two weeks of blistered toes to break in my Dingo-brand cowboy boots, and I traded my Garanimals for Wranglers. Mercifully, my grandmother refused to shell out for a ten-gallon hat or—god forbid—chaps.


“Class, let’s welcome our new student, Laurie. She just moved here from Rhode Island, the smallest state.” While Mrs. Beatty pointed to Rhode Island on the map with one hand and made the universal gesture for “teeny” with the other, I stood next to her in my finest western apparel. I surveyed the sea of my new, decidedly non-wild-west-looking classmates: rugby shirts, popped collars, Velcro sneakers; not the cowpoke couture I had anticipated. My miscalculation earned me the dreaded NERD label, one which, in the unforgiving social strata of suburban education, had remarkable staying power. I was to be a Nerd, in the eyes of my classmates, for eternity.

It was painful, yes, to move from a world of birthday parties, bike rides in large posses, and daily kickball on the playground into one of social ostracism. It forced me to find entertainment, affirmation, and even conversation in solitude. This was when the books that had languished on a shelf at home suddenly seemed worth my attention. It wasn’t like I had sleepovers to gussy up for; I might as well look inside one of them. I didn’t have anyone to whisper to in class, or to write notes with, so I paid attention by default. Lacking a confidante, I embarked upon horrendous poetry and embarrassing diary entries—stumbling, in time, on the possibility of word play and purposeful writing.

By the time I did manage to scrape together a few friends to ride bikes with, I had lost my fear of solitude, and had formed new habits. I had plunged into the life of the mind and had grown used to learning, to reading, to writing—things that have dominated my life ever since. I stopped wearing the cowboy boots, though my inner life turned out to be a wilder frontier than Colorado ever was.

a chunk of mount olympus

in pale imitation of Charles Simics' "Stone"

Ranch-style haunt of tiny carbon gods,
Slate-roofed shelter from Hera’s wrath and sandal-slap,
Inside this jagged polygon, dense walls impose on tiny rooms.
Molecules, packed shoulder to shoulder, still wriggle.

Inside this solid I would be safe,
Locked inside a stout-walled vault,
Spartan, dim, impenetrable.
I’ll claim my corner and crouch, among huddled molecules, satisfied,
protected from the tricks of fickle earth;
walled in from tremor, from storm, from tidal wave.

Inside, I trace a path, pace to pass time,
I wander the labyrinth.
Each footfall stirs the trapped air,
grinds stone into dust.
Lonesome for the world,
With fingertips I'll trace names on the stone wall,
the shapes of trees, of wooden houses and the sun.

Worn by relentless single steps,
riven by the rub of soft flesh,
chiseled, slowly, by a trickle of exhaled air,
the stout walls erode to threadbare.

These claustrophobic molecules
break away in slow single file
as pebble, or mote, or grain of sand,
patiently dismantling this stone shelter,
dispersing my Olympus.

Time erodes what elements cannot crack;
My breath will unravel what gods can’t break apart.

migration

playing with sound and thinking about the move from Colorado to Louisiana

Eggshell and sickly salmon walls enclose enclaves of promised repose
Broken with a fifth of vodka and NoDoz;
Brass accents match
cold glowing bulbs, locked hollow doors,
Lifeless as catalogs.

Flailing to escape,
Punching holes in the drywall to prove
it can't contain you,
you escape, callow little thing:
Vaulted
past sturdy ceiling beams,
though airborne, you seem
weighted, laden, fraught.
Catapulted, launched flipless, arrow-straight,
Southbound, seeking Haunted.

These soggy grounds, musty as wet wool, absorbed you;
mists blur lines and colors bleed
through wallpaper's sediment, curling back from crumbling brick,
no promises here, you earn what rest you find.

Faded and smoke-stained,
this south lacks order, lacks tact, it is
thumped, punched, staid: true.

hubris

an experiment with compressed rhyme inspired by a pompous hostess

Pure ego, unbowed, leaves you dumbstruck and cowed,
and I
own this crowd;
and it
is avowed
that I'm smart 'cause I'm loud.

My powers come from a rare mutation--a chronic need for your adoration
I'm the leader, you are grateful nation; I'm Toussaint and you are a Haitian;
Drape my statues with decoration: lace and laurel, cause that's your station
(and
spare me the indignation--
this is no two-way conversation,
it's a clandestine operation
where I locate your lacerations
and
drink
your
blood).

My esteem needs to propagate, I'm alive when I dominate
See, I'm trying to compensate for my cranial empty plate.
Though I binge, I can never sate;
All I see is a self-portrait.

That's why I'm garrulous.
I think I'm clever but I'm querulous.
I always talk but I don't discuss; I bang on but I don't percuss.
This self-love's so lascivious, when you speak I'm oblivious.

When I state what is obvious, you're expected to make a fuss:
Treat my words like a grand opus
Thus
Make my breathing less frivolous.
If you are envious you may call me imperious, you could point to my arrogance,
but your words are transient
and mine
go
on.

This room is my circus tent.
Main event: verbal flatulence
endless tales of my youth misspent will distract from my indolence.
I say nothing so adamant you can't see that it makes no sense.
Gentlemen call me "radiant" as I spew out contaminants--
virulent strains of ignorance,
anecdotes flow inordinate
I see weakness in reticence
and
I
pounce.

I enthrall with the gall of my words' urban sprawl
and you're caught in the squall of my rapid recall
and
fire.

Though you pall when I bawl like to crack the drywall
I still need to hold all of your rolling eyeballs
on
me.

why I choose ficton

If you've read the novel The Kite Runner, you know about the beauty, tradition, and incredible danger of kite-fighting in Afghanistan. If you've read or watched American news, on the other hand, you've only heard half of it.

My friend Melissa sent me this article from the South African newspaper The Star: "'Innocent' kite festival marred by 11 deaths." See, the kite strings are often coated in glass shards, or are replaced altogether with sharp wire; victory is marked by celebratory gunshots. It turns out that the strings are sharp enough to cut throats, and randomly fired guns...well, we Americans know all about that one.

Khaled Hosseini presents kite-fighting in all of its complexity in his novel. He waxes nostalgic without denying the darker side of things. He trusts his readers enough to present one person's ambivalent experience of the event, letting us draw our own conclusions. The kite festivals are background to the relationships, here; still, as is so often true in a good novel, the background is captured with the honest realism we can no longer expect from the news. Maybe there's freedom in writing in a genre that is explicitly subjective; lord knows the objective journalists seem to have completely lost track of the truth amidst all of the confirmed facts and double-checked sources.

In painting the Taliban regime as one of pure, irrational evil, the media flaunted the kite-flying ban as exhibit A. They neglected to mention any possible reason for the ban (i.e. preventing needless deaths), leaving us imagining the innocent kites of our childhoods, snatched from our hands by insane fundamentalists. The reports came with a built-in reaction for us to voice, as if we were reading from a script:

JOURNALIST: Under this regime, the centuries old tradition of kite-flying has been banned.
AUDIENCE (murmuring animatedly): That's crazy! What else do they do? They probably kill kittens and outlaw picnics! I'm so glad we liberated those poor people!

Nobody seemed interested of disabusing Americans of the notion that kite-flying was the most innocent of all entertainments and that the ban was pure and random meanness. Here's a great article from 2001 that studiously preserves that notion. A few choice quotes:

For the five years the Taliban were in power, Boba Abdul Shukor had to sell his wares in secret. His contraband was not drugs or pornography or alcohol, but one of the oldest symbols of freedom, the modest kite. In the joyless world of the Taliban, scratching the heavens with the soaring paper fantasies was an offense to God.

...Families rushed to restore a favorite holiday pastime in which boys and young men throng a broad dusty field on the city's outskirts for 'kite fighting.' When two kite strings collide, one tends to break, bestowing victory on the contestant still flying.

Tends to break?
Here's a headline from The Christian Science Monitor:

Paper-string symbols of freedom fill Afghan skies: Kite-flying, a decades-old tradition for Afghans, makes a comeback. Like most entertainment, it was banned by the Taliban.

Thanks for doing my thinking for me, guys. Normally I like to figure out symbolism on my own. How fun would it be if Steinbeck wrote, "Petting the mouse with his thumb, Lenny crushed it, a symbol of the latent danger of his naive strength"? Fortunately, fiction writers don't treat their readers like idiots.

Diane Sawyer calls kite-fighting "poetic and artistic," "a delicate and beautiful piece of the past" practiced by "olympic-quality kite athletes." Sure, all that's probably true, but the omission is glaring. For this simpering, self-congratulatory kind of journalism to run rampant accomplishes three things that I can see: 1) it insults Americans' intelligence 2) it patronizes and infantilizes the Afghani people ("all they want to do is fly their pretty kites.") and 3) it makes me wonder what else is being conveniently omitted from the news.

If the tables were turned, which American laws could, with a pinch of omission, be spun as equally unfair and cruel restrictions on innocent fun? Cockfighting (also a 'decades-old tradition' where I live)? Drag racing? The French could easily spin our drinking age as puritanical madness (they probably have, come to think of it).

How about Jarts, for crying out loud? Lawn darts were among my family's favorite holiday pastimes back in the '70s, but they were banned in 1998 after four kids were killed. Where's Diane Sawyer? She could come to my grandmother's house, learn how to make opaque jello salad, and sit with me on the porch as I remember the days when we were free to play Jarts...eventually I'll segue into fond memories of cherry bombs and roman candles (also banned). Her teaser:

In the joyless world of the American West, aiming colorful projectiles at circles on the ground and illuminating the heavens with brilliant lights were an offense to the state.

She'll conveniently leave out the part about the folks killed by stray jarts and the missing fingers on the neighbor kid's left hand. That would compromise the tone of the piece.

Didn't we all, in one U.S. history course or another, study the anti-Japanese propaganda of WWII as if it were an egregious excess our country had outgrown? Didn't we feel foolish as we looked back on the public discourse regarding the color of Manuel Noriega's underpants? Maybe I just need to go back to U.S. history class and accept the fact that, as this ABC news article puts it, "Demonizing the Enemy [is] a Hallmark of War."

I guess we have evolved a bit: I should be glad that the target of negative propaganda nowadays is the country's leaders rather that its entire populace, though the intense and patronizing romanticization of the "folk" and their traditions seems no more honest, only more benign. We used to portray Germans, Japanese, and Italians as dangerous animals. Now we show Afghanis as harmless and quaint kite-flying children. Is one less insulting than the other? Is one less dehumanizing and radically simplistic?

Governments will use propaganda; fair enough. Still, this stuff isn't coming from the government. This is our free, fair, objective media talking. It strikes me as unforgivably shoddy journalism. It leaves me wondering where I can go for a picture of the world that doesn't try to reduce its complexities or shove pre-formed conclusions down my throat. Ironic (but satisfying) that once again, in search of complex truths, I turn to fiction.

notes from the quiet kid

It’s been nice how, since college, people have equated my quietness with deep thinking. They haven’t always been so generous. I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s better than the alternatives, this latest in a series of other people’s comments about my quietness. Anyone who has been called "quiet" or "shy" knows what I’m talking about:

“How’d you get so shy?”

“She's just stuck-up.”

“Why don’t you speak up?”

“Why don’t you like anyone?”

“Can’t you say anything? Say something for us.”

Why quiet folks are singled out for this interrogation is beyond me, given that we probably constitute a near-majority. Maybe it’s just to give more garrulous folks something to talk about when they run out of anecdotes. I’m regularly awe-struck by how much people can talk. We build walls with our talk, and whenever there is the slightest chink to be filled in the wall—a speaker’s pause for breath, the few seconds between songs on a CD—we spackle it with talk. We spackle over places that don’t need it, where there is really no room for extra conversation at all: movies, classes, concerts, crowded & noisy hallways. It’s as if silence is a thing to be feared and avoided at all costs—and silent people pose a problem to be solved. I’ve always wondered why being talkative was so highly rated. I’ve also wondered what my answer to people’s intrusive questions would be. So here goes.

***

Maybe people unconsciously think of talk as a campfire built with the last match—you can’t let it go out, because you could never get it started again. Maybe, thousands of years ago, a group of our ancestors developed their grunts into words and began a conversation. They liked it. Being able to confirm their observations was comforting( “is the sky what you would call ‘blue?’ Or is it closer to ‘azure?’”). Being able to speak a thought helped alleviate uncomfortable and dull rumination (“I’m anxious about our dwindling supply of boar’s meat.”). Their fear of losing the conversation soon transformed it into a curse. It became an obligation, a thing to be constantly tended to. They could no longer go for solitary walks without being accused of dodging their duty to keep the conversational flame burning. They couldn’t follow their own train of thought for too long without periodically forcing it into words. Thus their thoughts became less profound, less unique, less interesting. They had to endure each other’s talk and its increasingly limited originality (“Look at that blue sky.” “You like boar’s meat? So do I!”).

Maybe we inherit this burden when we are born. Our parents rush us towards our first word and then announce it with pride to anyone who will listen. We are inured to the drone of the human voice by hordes of relatives gooing in our faces, we are trained to blather by the T.V. Though we’ve forgotten the original intentions or the value of this never-ending talk, it’s become instinctual in most of us. Children who are slow to talk, or who prefer sounds other than their own voice, inherit the plight of Neanderthal kids who didn’t like to hunt, of Spartan children with delicate constitutions—threatening to become burdens, selfish solitary walkers living on the welfare of talker’s hard work, they are exiled. Questions like, “Why are you so shy?” “Why won’t you talk?” are well-intentioned, but anyone who has heard these questions has felt and probably retreated from their inherent aggression and accusation. In school, it's not long before a quiet kid loses his or her name and becomes known only as “the quiet kid,” one to be subtly shunned. She’s pretty easy to ignore—it’s not like you’re going to miss out on a great joke or anything.

Maybe not.

***

Here’s where it’s worth really thinking about why we quiet kids don’t talk much. Here’s also where I get personal. I’m not quiet because I’m too busy philosophizing to speak. It’s not that I’m stupid, and it’s not that I’m smart. It’s not because I don’t find people interesting, or because I don’t want to know them or be known by them. The best explanation I can think of is sheer exhaustion. The amount of mental editing I have to do in order to feel safe in a conversation is grueling. Maintaining these conversations is exactly like laboring over an essay in school—and even if you do like to write, you couldn’t do it all day, every day.

This editing that dries up the conversation—this must be something that many of us who live on the margins do. There are places where a conversation must not go for us, because we fear that it is the territory in which our difference will be revealed, or spotlighted. This, we fear, will make people uncomfortable, exceedingly polite, and ultimately cut off from us. Camaraderie is ruled out, real connections are closed down, and courtesy takes the place of sincerity. In order to avoid this, we have to be careful in a casual conversation. And conversation being what it is—winding roads of free-association—it’s a minefield. Editing your way through it is a rigorous mental exercise: Anticipate the possible paths of every possible topic of conversation. Home in on the ones that have little chance of triggering a question that might lead to scary territory, then speak. It takes too long, and it leaves us with pretty boring, or pretty obscure, topics.

When we first discover the feeling of a crush, our little hearts give us volumes to talk about. This might be the moment that I began editing—finding myself in the awkward position of having that first, terrible crush on someone who was out of bounds, I silenced myself in those conversations. Perhaps I could have been very brave; perhaps other children are very brave, talking and enduring the playground consequences, but I was not brave. I became quiet. I thought about my crushes as much as anyone, but I never spoke the feelings, and therefore I was not a player in the most frequent conversations among friends. The thing is, it’s got to be nearly impossible for pre-teen girls to talk for more than thirty seconds without the conversation veering inevitably towards boys:


“Did you watch The Dukes of Hazzard last night?”

“Of course. Who do you think is cuter: Bo or Luke?”


“Let’s lip sync ‘Islands in the Stream’ again.”

“Okay. I’m going to dedicate it to Chris Bonino this time. Who are you dedicating it to?”


“Can we watch a movie on your Betamax player?”

“Oooh—yeah. I want to watch Tom Cruise dance in his underwear some more. Isn't he gorgeous?”


Figuring this out, eventually, I began to manufacture crushes on the athletic and good-looking boys, pinning my feelings for the athletic and good-looking girls onto Kevins and Christophers and Shanes. This gave me things to talk about, and people to dedicate lip sync performances to. For a while. As my friends grew out of the all-talk, no action phase, they increasingly gathered deeds to back up their talk—first kisses, tacky but symbolic jewelry, visits to each metaphorical base—and my fountain of talk quickly ran dry. I had no experiences to describe, I didn’t particularly wish for those experiences, and I did my best editing in hopes of preventing the conversation from going to the place where I admitted either fact.

By ninth grade, I had edited myself into virtual silence. It became too much trouble to participate in most conversations. Not wanting to talk to anyone, I took refuge in another identity: the nerd. Being naturally shy and dorky, not to mention having a string of profoundly bad haircuts, I played the role masterfully. I was helped by Molly Ringwald, of course, who added a bit of glamour to the condition of nerdy datelessness. I had found a well-trodden, socially acceptable, she’ll-grow-out-of-it territory. I wasn’t asked to explain myself or my silence, and as long as I was scribbling popular boys’ initials in hearts on my notebooks, I avoided being asked about it. Inevitably, friends grew out of their phases and gathered their deeds. For my part, I maintained the bad haircuts, but they turned out to be thin armor, really.

Throughout high school, I actively avoided talking outside of the classroom. I’d seen what was done to kids who didn’t edit themselves, and I much preferred being called “the quiet girl” to becoming a victim of my conformity-enforcing peers. Besides, a touch of black lipstick and a Morrissey t-shirt made my silence look like an accessory to a fashion statement. It made me look outspoken. Out spoken. True enough: if talk was a race, I had been out spoken, fair and square.

Eventually, I was filtered out as something more than just nerdy, not quite abject enough to be gothic. Coming out, I was shocked to find myself in good company—not the creepy gym teachers or girls with rat tails I’d imagined would be my only friends. It felt good—it felt unbelievable—to speak, unabashedly, without fear. I could talk, and talk freely, and stop editing—and I did, for a while. I did my best to fill any space I walked into with my words.

***

Now, I am a school teacher. And I am back, full circle, to painstaking editing of myself, to retreating from personal conversations in the lounge, to being the quiet kid on the faculty. My personal life doesn’t belong in the classroom, of course, and I’m more than happy to keep the two well apart. Yet I’m exhausted, again, by the editing I do, talking to colleagues, fearing gossip mills, parents' anger, the ugliness that might follow if I let anything slip. I’m afraid, again, of well-intentioned questions:

“When are you going to have children of your own?”

“Don’t you have a husband yet?”

“Just haven’t found the right man, huh?”

I tell myself that this is a necessary part of doing what I’ve chosen to do, that this is not the battle I am here to fight. I am a good teacher, and that is my armor now. I have answers to the questions, even if I don’t say them aloud. Still, I’m surprised to find myself quiet again.

querencia

Jo's Coffee, South Congress Street, Austin

Meeting a town is like meeting a person; sometimes you just click. Small, serendipitous things that happen when you click with a town, as if the place and its population have conspired to make you feel content there, welcome.

Austin has a talent for offering this kind of ethereal warm welcome. Sometimes the gesture is elaborate—as it was last spring, when Jo’s Easter Pet Parade welcomed us to town as if it were specially designed to amuse the hell out of us. A drum major and a sousaphone player in musty thrift-store uniforms led a proud line of two dozen costumed pets. Their inordinately proud and unselfconscious owners marched, smiling, and I couldn't tell how much they were serious, how much tongue-in-cheek. They stalled four lanes of traffic, a testament to the power of silliness in this place.

More often, as this morning, the welcome is nothing more than a very friendly and instantly warm conversation with a stranger—where he parks his baby right next to you and walks to the counter to get napkins (this makes you feel awfully good—it tells you that in this place, you’re not suspect or freakish, but kind and decent; the world at large and you agree about your character, here—it’s the ultimate gesture of a stranger’s trust in your goodness). This, after your eyes met and you gave your standard smile—you imagine that it’s shy-but-sufficiently-friendly, but you’ve never seen what it actually looks like—and he replies with a beam and a “how’s it going?” that is actually, astonishingly, followed by a pause indicating that he hopes for a real answer. You remind yourself that you have to get out of the habit of replacing “hey” with a “how’s it going,” that lacks this pause and eye contact. So he parks the baby, asking your indulgence, which you gladly give and feel very friendly and gracious for doing. You make lame-but-nice comments about the baby, he asks you what you’re reading; just as he’s spooning applesauce into the baby’s mouth, his order is called out and set on the counter; you offer to get it for him. He refuses, but does a double take and introduces himself, offering a hand to shake.

This is a gesture that I love and that I need to master: not the double-take, the warm and authentic introduction. The gesture that tells a person she has moved beyond small talk and into the possibility of genuine fondness, that she is the kind of person you’d like to know. Giving your name like a gift to some stranger, pulling them a little bit closer to you, sticking out your hand to be shaken. It’s powerful, perhaps because it is the first risk in polite conversation between strangers: the hand could be refused, one’s name withheld. Maybe your offer to get the latte was the first risk, maybe that’s why it struck him and prompted the introduction. Either way, after that point, you feel comfortable going back to reading instead of chatting, knowing that you no longer need to be polite, only real—speaking when you have something worth saying, or asking questions that stem from genuine curiosity. Soon, with applesauce finished, latte fetched, stroller packed, Tobin & son were gone. Nothing terribly profound, just Austin saying, “I’m glad you’re here—” which is profound enough, really.

Thanks, Freetaco, for the photo of the exact spot I'm talking about (it was at www.flickr.com)! What're the chances?

LEAP into oblivion

I'm trying to type quietly so I don't distract the five students who are hunched in too-small desks over test booklets. Those bubble-in answer sheets must look like Magic Eye optical illusions to them at this point, three days into this I-LEAP test. My 9th graders with learning disabilities and mild mental disabilities are giving everything they've got to this test. All week I have been fighting off the bleak knowledge that it won't be good enough. All week I have been searching for ways to protect them from realizing the same. I preach reality and the real world all the time to my students; now, suddenly, I have my fingers in the dam, trying to prevent reality from leaking into this room.

These five students have worked very, very hard this year. Between them, they have fewer than 5 absences. That's including the young lady who has lived in six different towns since the hurricane. Four of them have done their homework faithfully since August. All of them are active participants in their classes. Several of them have gone from being nearly expelled last year to having a clean discipline record this year. The others have never been suspended. The point I'm making is that these are five good students, five kids who have held up their end of the education bargain.The other side of this reality is that none of these students are going to pass this test, nor will they pass it in 10th grade or 11th grade. They will not get a high school diploma at the end of their 12 years of good faith and hard work. They may or may not get a "certificate of achievement" instead--a piece of paper not recognized by colleges or most employers--depending on a state decision in the coming months. Their parents have signed papers acknowledging this, and the students have been told about it, coated in plenty of sugar so that the abject injustice of it doesn't fully sink in. If it did, they would probably stop coming to school--and how could we persuade them otherwise? As much effort as it takes for them to do what they struggle to do--read and write--every single day, what is the incentive, the reward, the carrot at the end of the stick? When it comes to students in special education, we only have the stick. We believe that they will fail, so we don't even have a meaningful reward for those who make it. We prod and we preach, we teach the same standards and we give the same tests, but we expect failure, and it's hardly surprising when we get it.

You probably think I'm pessimistic and cynical, and that I have given up on my students. I believe--and desperately hope--that this is not true. I have not given up on their ability to excel, to grow by giant steps, to build fulfilling lives, to be leaders in their communities, to leave their mark on the world. That's what we work toward every day. These students have pulled themselves from a 1st or 2nd grade reading level up to a 4th or 5th in the past 8 months; that is remarkable growth that results from remarkable effort. A test on a high school level, however, is just not within their reach, yet.

I'm not blaming the test, and I'm not saying that students with special needs shouldn't be held to high expectations or tested. The problems are farther- and deeper-reaching than that: The problem is that they are promoted to 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade without their 2nd grade reading level ever changing. The problem is that they do the same worksheets from the same textbook for all 4 years of high school science, that neither they nor their teachers have access to a reading or math program that meets their needs, that their "Individual Education Plans" all look the same, that they are bored or confused in most of their classes, and have been for the past 10 years, that they have never been asked to read a novel or write an essay, never been taught algebra, never used the scientific method to investigate a real question. The problem is that I'm sitting here writing on a blog with a circulation of 4, instead of raising my voice and fighting. The problem is that nobody knows what to do about it.

The kids are still hunched over their test booklets. They have brand-new, neatly sharpened pencils lined up next to them. They have packed granola bars and little bottles of water in their booksacks for sustenance, as if they are on a long and demanding hike. They are, I suppose, and I'm their guide--and I have no idea where this trail leads or whether we are anywhere near the right path. Every year during testing week, I can't help but feel like we've been here before. We've spent the year walking in a very long circle, and we are lost in these woods.