the garden level of eden

7:13 a.m. in the Basement O’ Learning. Bliss abounds. The smell of thawing cigarette butts, extra thick on a rainy morning, mingles with the inexplicable but distinct essence of cat pee. The homeless shelter upstairs is bustling. A woman, whose room is directly above my classroom, is trying to calm her screaming baby. Her method is questionable. She screams “fuck you” “fuck you” “fuck you” over and over and over again. The child screams and shrieks. A neighbor steps in, helpfully shouting “shut the fuck up.” I recognize the neighbor’s voice. She’ll be in my second period class. Funny what the classroom can do. If I couldn’t hear her down here in the mornings, I could not picture her yelling. As a student, she is a mouse.

This blogging business is procrastinative. Papers need grading. Quizzes need photocopying. Lessons need planning. The cursor blinks at me. I am staring off to the left, at my Periodic Table of Elements. The painting crew over winter break decided to touch up my room. This touch up, it seems, required no removal of wall art. So there is a big swipe of off-white paint over the bottom corner. Who needs Mendelevium anyway.

Languages II

My separateness becomes obvious, noisy

sends my face seeking

asylum in armpits or elbow crooks

eyelids pressed right up against that infinite

distance, fumbling the translation

of ever expanding languages

I’ve put my alphabet all over this new skin

but we’re illiterate in the dark, here

fingers blinking like cursors

between my shoulder blades

they speak in code to freckled galaxies

under the warm soup of night noises:

heat pipes, traffic two blocks down, a radio

turned really low

This stillness doesn’t calm me, I want

to claw through the roof just for

an examination of all those dots,

patternless harborers of endless wishing

Languages I

Way in the back

cigarette clouds

the after hours Portuguese

talk around pitchers of

dollar drafts stabbing

out smoke after

smoke

they call me

mama

mama, from under

baseball caps

from cities none

of us

have been to

Carlito he’s twelve

or maybe

fourteen

they are pretending

to shave

his chin, smooth

as glass

he says, in English,

I’m old enough for you

mama

the window’s gone white

from drifting

snow

nos somos furados aqui

I say back

Songs Water Can Make

Blooming Technicolor in otherwise dull gray North American meadows. Snow, hard New England ground, wind ravaged Midwestern plain, its roots seemed to notice nothing.

In 1997 he expresses regret that it has come to this. The proverbial This being the town’s decision to condemn the old eyesore. He expresses also his thanks for the landscaping work three years back. Never seen so many colors out there. So much purple, more purple every year.

The Harts lived on Babbling Street, which invited all sorts of obvious quips. The street’s namesakes are two south bound streams. Running from the reservoir atop Cobble Mountain, flanking Babbling Street for eleven heavily wooded miles, they meet only twice before, at the edge of town, funneling into Arnold’s Pond, depositing a season’s worth of catchable trout every year. Two miles up stream, they cut under the road immediately North and immediately South of the Hart’s house, making their 2 acres the only yard in town to host both streams.

In 1989 Mona is in the dirt. She is shaking dark, clumped soil loose from a plant’s roots. A man’s shadow has spilled down the long sloping lawn. His head is thrown in elongated gray scale onto her forearm. She is detangling the roots like hair, smoothing them over her thigh. The pond is invisible to both of them. The water reflects no light, shrouded by cattails and tall purple flowers that look like explosions, patchworked with lilypads. The man’s hands keep finding things in his pockets but never extract anything. Mona’s daughter is seven and hides on the bank of the stream. A car pulls in the driveway and all three of them stop breathing.

Unlike most other species of plant, it is known by and sold under its botanical name. This until sale is made illegal. It quickly develops common names, varying according to region.

The man sits on the couch and fills the air with himself. He plucks at denim fringe on his shorts, which are splattered with paint. Blue, white, yellow, brown. Vestiges of house exteriors, a kaleidoscoped work history.

Sixteen days she spent with her fingers in their dirt. Mrs. Arnold on a reclining plastic chair covered with a puffy pad. They had someone else come and till the quarter acre behind the pool so when Mona got there the soil was supple, ready. She worked to the rhythm of the water. It was impossible not to hear it.

Nearly perfect circles, the leaves.

Andy lives with her mother in a giant garden. The house is unfit to be built, but is already built. They kneel in the dirt and trade hearsay, going nightly back through a sinking doorway. Mona tells her someday the house will sink into the ground, the roof will bow and give. Andy picks at dirt under her nails at night, eyes on the ceiling.

By 1993 Babbling Street is quiet. It’s like when hair grows. The streams had gotten quiet by degrees until one day a reclined Mrs. Arnold paused mid magazine page-flip, her arm hair suddenly poised.

Mona arranges the tiny pots in rows on top of newspapers, columns run up and down the kitchen table, little soil mouths open for seeds. She pokes a pencil into the packed soil, a quick stab and retract, until she has moved from one side of the table to the other. Andy follows behind, dropping a seed into each tiny plastic tub.

Endlessly they are seeding. Spring after spring the bank recedes; the cattail patches thin. Flying on the breeze or rolling ever slower on the surface of a stream, the seeds find a place to make roots. Roadside on Babbling Street, the fringes of ponds and yards, the banks of the reservoir, even in the soft grass underneath the stretching arthritic apple tree branches, they grow.

They all sit down to dinner; Andy doesn’t eat. Or breathe. He asks about things like her favorite color.

In 1989 the Environmental Safety Commission for Marshlands is digging up truckloads of purple flowers. Their green logo swipes across white pick up trucks that manage to stay clean even on trips up dirt roads in the rain. White truck beds cradle the uprooted mounds, the contraband purple so bright it makes noise.

The woman’s trunk is lined with heavy plastic. She lays the plants in sideways; they are too tall to keep upright. She pays Mona while Mona watches East, the woman West. It is dusk.

Men are driven distracted at the way Mona walks up stairs.

In summer Mona balances the speakers in the living room window facing out. Budweisers poke from foam holders and pass Andy on the swing set at eye level. The grill balanced over the fire periodically hisses at uncooked meat.

Andy’s science teacher is building a tide pool out of colored paper and foam. She is saying, “Delicate ecosystems suffer at the introduction of dominant foreign species.”

The shiny white truck is in the driveway. Mona kneels on the bank of a silent stream. Men force shovels into the dirt, pushing them through resistant roots with tightly laced boots. There is a sound like biting celery.

Mona is on the floor, laughing up at her daughter who begs her to please go to bed. Her skirt is somewhere outside. The space above the fire looks oily or underwater. The faces across it change but are always familiar.

In 1993 men float silently, rods poised, and catch nothing.

The men watch her kneel there, and tell her quietly that warnings will be informal, but warnings there must be. She sinks into the mud by imperceptible degrees, staying like that until the white truck backs from the driveway, a fraction of garden in the bed.

It’s a shame, she is telling Mona, closing her trunk, to treat something so lovely in this way.

In 1995 it is a cold winter. The top of Cobble Mountain is a tundra. The reservoir’s surface is lily padded with ice. A man and Andy are packed like frozen steaks in the back seat, the nose of the car pointed out over the water, the sun dipping under and making morning some place else. Andy’s mouth is too cold to move. After, they sit there and breathe, thaw.

The woman pays Mona, who has to bend to reach the lawn chair. The woman carefully keeps her hands from touching Mona’s still-muddied fingers.

The wood seemed to give in before impact. It just crumbled, eliciting expressions of disbelief that it survived a strong wind.

Andy is a teenager when she says to Mona (whose forehead rests on the table, her shoulders pointed toward her daughter) while smoking one of her cigarettes, “You’re going to get caught.” But Mona doesn’t hear her.

In a breeze, the tiny circular leaves fall like confetti. It spreads, slows waterways, extinguishes certain species of cattail. It quiets Babbling Street to a whisper where there had been a rush. Andy sits on the bank of what used to be a stream, holding ice to her face. The shades of purple vary by climate, but in New England they are a deep indigo.

She brings her head forward, as if on tracks, and up and back. The ceiling is sponge painted and the texture shifts like water at this moment, always, for both of them. The taste like metal, or like cold. Mona is braced against his weight in the bedroom upstairs; Andy is watching the ceiling melt and laughing, inaudibly, to herself.

They don’t speak about it but somehow it is there, replaced, no matter who goes after it, no matter when.

He is holding the cat up above the fire. He is saying to the cat that its last request must come quickly. Mona and Andy both put a palm on their stomachs; they laugh this same way. The cat leaps, pushing off from what looks like air, leaving the man with a deep mean scratch.

Its stem is rigid, almost a square. Like a child drew it, square stem, circles for leaves.

She puts two fingers in the soft divot just beneath her nose but her shirt caught the first drop. He throws his hands in the air and says look who’s had enough. There is one deep red drop on her white shirt, the contrast distinct. Pans catch rain in three rooms, punctuating any passing moment of silence.

She resists at first, but the town is resolute. They express their hatred of even the thought of possibly speaking to the men who run the organization that sends around the white trucks. They absolutely loathe that idea. And so the old eyesore’s eyes are covered in two by fours, nailed in willy nilly, leaving space to peek in. In the ten years between the boards and the bulldozer it hosts twelve adolescent gatherings, all but one featuring a Ouji board and candles. The foundation, that was the thing. Marshland isn’t good for building; it can’t support a foundation, and eventually, everything will sink.

I Don't [Expletive] Think So

Of course you realize, fair sister, that this means war.

There are days...

There are days when I am grateful for sunshine. There are days when I am grateful for the people I know, the music on my radio, the way the sky looks at dawn. There are also days when I am grateful to the English language for phrases like “insufferable cunt.”

Today is one of those days.

Without that phrase I’m not sure I’d ever be satisfied with my description of a certain coworker. The words “lazy hag” and “idea stealer” just aren’t quite enough.

First, let me paint a picture. I work in a basement. The Basement O’ Learning (BOL), as it has been affectionately dubbed. We have to earn masters degrees to get here, then they stick us in the basement. Highly qualified but undervalued. Ah, the paradoxes of my beautiful profession. Anyway, our little school is underground. Airless. Lightless. Institutional white walls to which nothing sticks, thus the continual flopping over of posters and student work. Dust. Vestiges of an old pink and green pastel paint job in the hallway, 98% painted over. The doors are painted purple to make it look cheery. The kind of place that you have to paint to look cheery only looks sad when you paint it to look cheery. Alas, this place is characterized by an obsessive clinging to procedures long outdated in the world above our BOL.

Within this den of enlightenment we find three educators. One, for now, I will spare. One is me. Ambitious, energetic, abrasive and argumentative. Hated by the administration, who secretly call me the “pita” for pain in the ass. (Love that!) The third is this mind bogglingly backwards lump of a religious wacko who expects criminally little from her students due to some combination of pity and racism and whose deportment, not that it matters, finds its best comparator in one Jabba the Hut.

For my first two semesters, I fought the administration and the staff to institute a few fresh new education ideas backed up by fresh new educational research. Research?! Ideas?! Immediately, everyone froze up and resisted. Which I, of course, received with grace, patience, and understanding…

Anyway, the point is these “innovations” that I tried to get people to buy into were the equivalent of…say…telling a hospital that, based on new research, it’s a really good idea to screen blood donations before giving the blood to patients. For example, this school still has a designated smoking area for students. Break is called smoke break. I am not kidding.

One particular battle I remember quite well. I wanted to take the students on a field trip to Shakespeare in the Park. It’s free, we could take the T, they could read the play in English class. At the staff meeting, where I had come to expect arguments against whatever I said, they did what they are amazingly good at doing. I prepared as well as I could, but they can come up with arguments that defy a defense or counterpoint. They are so unbelievably ridiculous that you can’t possibly anticipate them. Besides the one I had expected, which is that Shakespeare is too advanced for “these kids,” I received this:
“Kelly, you can’t bring them to an outdoor play, there might be bugs.”

Just let that sink in.

Is it in yet?

THERE MIGHT BE BUGS.

I still can’t entirely wrap my head around why going to see Shakespeare was something from which they felt they must protect our students. And I still can’t see how I was the only one on the staff who thought field trips were a good idea. But they did. And I was. They passionately, adamantly believed that I was harming them by introducing Shakespeare to the curriculum. One lady actually cried, because she thought I was trying to push them to learn things “they just couldn’t learn.” This is one amid too many examples to type.

So Jabba the Insufferable heads up the Resistance campaign. The battle is dirty. The entire department quits, except we three teachers. We hire a mediator to facilitate “Play Nice Time.” We play nice.

Fast forward to now. This woman has, in her classroom, implemented an idea I suggested last year. An idea that was rejected as ridiculous, impossible, a disservice to “students like ours” (a phrase this place uses often.) She presents this idea to the administration as a new, exciting thing she’s doing in her classroom. They love it. It is just the sort of fresh, brilliant kind of stuff they’d expect out of her classroom.

I am taking in and releasing breath very slowly. It’s helping, sort of.

beacon street, just before six a.m.

This morning, very early, I drove through my old neighborhood. Brownstones and wrought iron fences. Plowed-in cars cocooned until spring. Graveyards of the revolution, uneven streets barely wide enough for a city bus. My first life in Boston. It has been followed by other lives, all part of one story but, also, distinctly separate. College student, girlfriend, runner, fiancée, mistress, grad student, teacher, friend, activist. Sometimes I can’t find a string to grip that runs through all of those people, even though they are all me. Other days I think my eight year old self and my current self are too similar for comfort. There are times I am blindsided by shock in a world I thought I had a handle on; other days I lose hope that I will ever feel anything new. Then there are these paradoxical moments – both constant and new, permanently. Driving through Beacon Hill this morning I was struck by the way the public garden looks after a snowfall, before anyone is up. I’ve seen it a million times. White lights on white snow. Bent, arthritic tree branches, snow laden, poking toward the sky. The black of the branches and the white of the snow frozen in stark contrast, neither in rows nor appearing chaotic or wild. It will always be both new and old to me. The roll of emotion is part nostalgia, making me ache for one of those old lives. I remember long, cold walks, pauses under lightly falling snow, gloved hands soft on my face. The breathless shock of loving someone. I long for the sense of newcomerness in my city, being awed by it, scared of it, lost in it. This all seems so completely part of the past, out of reach. On the exact same roll of emotion is the surprise at how much I love to look at trees covered in snow. It has been falling every winter now for as long as I’ve been alive. I know what it will look like. But the magic of that snowy hush, the noiselessness of an untouched city park just after dawn, will never be old to me. I could turn that corner onto Beacon Street every day for eternity. And if the snow had stopped falling but the walkway wasn’t cleared yet, the white lights were shining in a haze through bright white snow on wet black branches, and the city’s morning hadn’t started, I would stop. As if for the first time, I would leave my car illegally parked, breath caught in my throat for reasons quite unclear to me, and let my ungloved hands freeze to the fence, leaning there feeling full and new, staring at the snow.

Snow Days: 1988 vs. 2007

Snow Day 1988:

I woke up most winter mornings in the eighties already wearing many layers of clothing. On a normal day, the thirty seconds between the hot shower and taking off all those pajama layers was horrific. On a potential snow day, the pajamas stayed on, and we headed downstairs in bed gear.

First of all, going down our stairs in feet-on-pjs was dangerous. I imagine the guy who built our house, at some point in the late 19th century, understood the basic idea of stairs. But I understand the basic idea of converting matter into energy, yet I’m definitely not qualified to put that into practice. Pretty much, with the thin-plastic-covered feet, little tufts of pj material sticking out between the cracks, pajama clad children rushing down those narrow, a thousand times painted over, death trap stairs was a mini-chernobyl waiting to happen every snowy morning.

The kitchen housed an electric stove. This is important. In the spirit of progress, the mid 1980s found my house abandoning the ancient wood stove system in the basement and adopting oil heat. The little thermostat thinger on the wall that I had seen at friends’ houses appeared on our living room wall. No more waiting for the dank basement’s wood piles to dry enough to burn! No more smoky eyes! Control over how warm it was in the house! Not so much. If you EVER even entertained the idea that you might think about potentially in the distant future possibly touching that thing, my mother would sense it and say, “If that thing is above fifty-five…” And this was all we needed in the way of a threat. We had no other rules. We could come home tattooed, pregnant, smoking cigarettes in a stolen car and she’d just sigh and ask us to do the dishes. But you did not fuck with the thermostat.

I digress. The eight-floor-tile-wide space in front of the kitchen stove was the only place in the house that ever went above tundra temperatures. Between November and March that spot was the nexus of the house. So we would wedge ourselves into the hallway between the wall and the stove, our plastic feet pressed against the grate. We’d use our toes to scrape remnants of dinners past, blackening on the once white stove side. The morning news went on in the living room, the TV just visible from our spot by the stove. We’d watch that scrolling cancellation ticker, inhaling the somehow comforting smell of singed plastic. Mother standing behind the stove with coffee, both hands around her cup. Her glasses get steamed, so she periodically raises her head, then lowers it again, all very slowly, so she looks like a turtle. It seemed we always just missed our school in the rotation, so we’d wait through the whole alphabet, squirming. Then there it was. Granville. Closed.

My sister and I are jubilant. Our mother’s eyes roll.

Leaving the stove front was a challenge. But eventually we braved the Alaskan living room. The couch was covered with a perpetual layer of laundry waiting to be folded and extra blankets. We burrow into a knot of blanket and mismatched socks, pulling the dog onto the couch for warmth. We burrowed for only a moment, because no amount of cold air could keep us from The Greatest Luxury of my Childhood for very long. Figuring prominently in every snow day was that fiercely addictive 8 bits of pure joy, the Nintendo. Stacked on top of the television, which was stacked on a broken television, that little gray box brought way more delight to our childhood than could be considered healthy. Even the ritual of banging on it just right, blowing in the game cartridge, blowing in the console, taking it out, doing it again, screaming with fury when the screen went blue mid-game – all a labor of love, people!

Eventually, though, one must go outside and play in the snow. Snow is great for kids who have an acute and absurd resistance to potential physical harm. To qualify this, I was great at BEING hurt. Once I got hurt, I was super tough guy. But if I wasn’t yet hurt, I would avoid getting hurt so carefully that my caution often impeded certain instances of fun. The snow meant invincibility! All my best uninhibited feats of derring-do occurred in the snow. And, of course, there was the temptation to tie the sled to the dog and yell “mush!” Then watch her look around. Lick a paw. Lie down. Roll around.

…in the interest of retaining the attention of my three dedicated readers, fast forward through:

Mittens, hats, socks, snow pants, drying in rows over the heating vent. Hot cocoa powder from the giant box of brown paper packets. The little balls of ice stuck between the pads of doggie feet. All reporting back, by dark, to the warm part of the kitchen.


Snow Day 2007:

This is me reporting live from an adult snow day, December Fourteenth Two Thousand and Seven, the year of our lord. I am at my desk. There is no Nintendo here. Or back to back episodes of The Price is Right. What I wouldn’t give for even one glimpse of that tiiiiny little microphone…

This particular snow day started yesterday. A snow two-day. A couplet of bliss! In its usual staunch resistance to common sense, Boston Public Schools ignored the doings of EVERY OTHER school district in the area and kept students in school all day. At the last minute, we got a call that buses were leaving the bus yard thirty minutes early. (Again, a classic BPS move, which is a good old fashioned “oh shit.”) After a few Sisyphean attempts, the bus opted to wait at the bottom of the ridiculous hill our school sits atop. It was only twenty minutes late at this point. So we tell our students, who are cooperative angels and accept unexpected schedule changes with grace and patience, to bundle up – we’re walking down the hill. You would think we told them we were going to tie our wrists together, form a line, and swim the English Channel dressed in giant lizard outfits. Eventually, one teacher (ahem, me) and all of our students waddle out the door. The boys are fine, sliding to the beat of whatever’s on their iPods. The girls are pregnant and walking very very very slowly. We make it to the bus. They get on, I wave through the blizzard at them.

My car is a cocoon of danger, parked at the bottom of the hill so as to avoid (another) sliding accident. I turn it on, and whatever radio station I had on that morning blasts John Mellencamp’s (sans Cougar) “Hurt so Good.” Bad omen? Perhaps.

I’m still cheerful. I got to leave work a few hours early. It’s almost Friday. Singing along, I wipe the blizzard from my little car. The snow is light and fluffy and flies into the air with flourish! Within minutes, the heat is working and the windshield is becoming less and less opaque. Things are progressing. I will make it home.

The snow is really coming down. Every window I clean is covered by the time I clean the next one. It becomes clear that my insistence upon ONE HUNDRED PERCENT visibility is going to have to be compromised. I feel a little bit of the nervies coming on.

I drive at about four miles per hour out of my parking spot and into the street. I. Am. Going. Very. Slowly. It. Is. Tedious. But. Also. Frightening.

The cars behind me are more concerned with the tedious part and less moved by the frightening. Honking happens. Who the fuck honks in a blizzard?! Then, out of nowhere, traffic stops. It just stops. We aren’t moving. No one is moving.

From the same Boston drivers who brought you honking I give to you “The Impatient Ass Hole Gridlock.” This is a phenomenon found only among the most impatient and inconsiderate cultures of the world. It occurs when people REFUSE to sit still on a green light and drive into the center of an intersection, thus blocking traffic moving in all directions, and leaving everyone else waiting through several lights. So we all end up in this white-washed clusterfuck of biblical proportions. I call some people. I eat a banana. I listen to five or six cds. I listen to NPR tell me important stuff. I get out of the car and pretend to do something to the windshield wipers, just to get some air. I get back in. I feel the need for air.

Hal the Hyundai was so named for alliterative purposes but also for Space Odyssey jokes. After the first forty-five minutes on the Eliot Bridge I started feeling trapped. Akin, I’m sure, to being stuck in a pod. In space. Dark, indifferent, cold, scary...space. I considered abandoning Hal. Hal says, “Without your snow helmet, Kelly, you’re going to find that very difficult.”

This portion of my commute is directed by Stanley Kubrick. In short, I start to FREAK OUT. All those stories of the storm of ’78 come back to me. People freezing to death on the highway. Pipes bursting, pools of water up to the waist. Abandoned cars stolen after the melt. (Rationality check in: I am, at this point, about ¼ mile from my house and in exactly 0% real danger.)

Hal says, “It’s cold, Kelly.”

I try to engage the driver trapped beside me in non-verbal communication. She’s on the phone. I feel a rush of hatred for her.

Hal says, “I’m almost out of gas, Kelly.”

This time, Hal wasn’t fucking with me. He really was below “E.” My face looks like one of the twins at the Overlook Hotel. I start mixing up my Kubrick movie references. Things are getting wacky. Snow is covering signs. The world looks unrecognizable.

Time check: 1.5 hours in the car.

Miles traveled: .8

Just when I start to resign myself to getting stranded on Memorial Drive, we start to move. The next turn is a slight incline. I have been less than impressed with Hal’s snow ability thus far, and figure I can only make it if I get a little bit of a head start to propel him up the slope. This means I have to allow the car in front of me to advance without following directly on his bumper. This is something so insufferable to other drivers that I fear for my safety. I turn up my music and block out the horns. Finally, I have enough space. Hal fishtails his way up the incline and onto Mt. Auburn without incident. I’d like to say this all happened without me rolling down a window and informing the other drivers near me how they could use certain parts of their bodies to do certain things to other parts of their bodies. I would like to say that very much.

Time check: 2.7 hours in the car.

Miles traveled: 1.3

The evening consists of red wine, sweaters, early retreats to bedrooms. (Not before shoveling the sidewalk.) I change my alarm so I’ll have extra time in the morning to dig myself out, and go to sleep.

By morning all evidence of the night’s shoveling is gone. Unless you count the ache in my lower back as evidence. I start negotiating what I think is a good balance between “warming Hal up enough” and “not running out of gas.” I am sweeping the snow off the top of the car when a neighbor walks by toward the hospital. He’s wearing scrubs.

He says, “Woah. You got a long way to go.”

I smile a smile that I hope conveys the message “No shit ass hole” with plenty of sweetness and grace.

I did have a long way to go. And when I thought I was done, and tried to back out of the driveway, Hal the Hyundai informed me that no, I in fact was not done. By the time the little guy got his wheels onto the street that young man in scrubs had already read three charts, given advice for somebody to ignore, and flirted with like six nurses. Traveling at about six miles per hour, my little four door accident box swished its way to the nearest gas station, a chorus of unsafe drivers honking in a union of impatience alllll the way. When I got there I realized that the gas tank was covered by a protective shield made of ice. Chipping away with my key, a fellow driver felt that I was not using my time at the pump wisely and said so. With his horn. So I killed him.

Noooo. I didn’t. In real life. In my mind, however, mister “long way to go” in the scrubs wept over how totally impossible it was to extract my keys, complete with the thingy that gets me sale prices at Shaw’s and a Kentucky Derby 2006 Collectible Key-Ring Jersey, from his unbelievably tight little bottom.

When I get to school I realize that I had left out one very important part of the potential snow day ritual. I had forgotten to CHECK TO MAKE SURE SCHOOL WAS NOT CANCELED. Since many BPS students had suffered 4-8 hour commutes home the night before, the district had decided to give them the day off. Thus the following Extreme Rarity in my life:: 1988 beats 2007 (in this one, ultra specific category.) Needless to say, I spent the day in my classroom, alone, writing blogs and spinning in my spinny office chair. No stoves. No couch. No Nintendo. Bollocks!

geography

One of my students skipped a class and wandered into my room earlier this year. I should’ve sent him back to “career exploration” but I didn’t. They were searching for jobs on monster.com and I got the wonderful sense that you get with some students that he knew, as much as I knew, that the whole class was a bunch of bullshit. I folded my glasses, put them down, and asked what I could do for him. He said, “Teach me something.” (I imagine this creates a feeling similar to the one a comedian gets when asked to ‘say something funny.’)

In this situation, I am comforted by maps. I happen to have a set of fantastic pull-down full color shiny brand new maps that are the jewel of my classroom. So I pull down the map of the world. The whole globe in pinks blues and oranges is pressed flat right in front of us. His hat is pulled down to his eyelids and little braids poke out toward his face and covering it all is this gigantic hood with that gold faux-Louis Vuitton print. But he can see the map.

I say, “So what’s going on out there?”

He looks at it.

He points to the Middle East and says, “Well this is all fucked up.”

And I say, “Okay…why?”

And so begins an impromptu lesson that meanders between American foreign policy, destruction of the rainforest, Israel vs. Palestine, the Holocaust, Shiites, Sunnis, evolution, the Prophet Mohammed, war, and, everyone’s favorite, the value of a human life. For everything I say he has another question. He exhausts my knowledge of Islamic culture, which doesn’t take long. He wants to know exact dates that I don't remember. He jumps from country to country, wanting to know how each one is involved with the next now and in ancient history, know each country’s stake in the current war, know how each one picks its leaders, treats its women, worships its god. Had I tried, I could never have created such a lesson. It was disjointed and at points, I’m sure, less than perfectly accurate. There were a thousand stumblings and much struggling to remember names and ideas. It was entirely driven by this kid’s whim, his finger, shaking from nicotine withdrawal and too much coffee, bouncing all over the world.

Then it shifts.

“You ever been anywhere?”

I say that I have. And he asks where. I point to Portugal. I point to Spain. I point to the Netherlands, which draws a bit of needling and forces me to remind him that, ahem, Amsterdam has more museums per capita than anywhere else in the world. I point to Ireland, Mexico, France.

I say, “Where would you like to go most, if you could go anywhere?”

And we start randomly pointing at the map. Taking turns. I’d like to see South Africa. He’d like to see London. I’d like to see Moscow. He’d like to see Egypt. What would this be like. What’s this place like. What’s this place. What’s here. Over and over. The image of these two pointer fingers, one black, one white, poking whimsical destination points all over the globe is one that will stick with me my entire life. The realization is crystal: I have about one four-thousandth of the knowledge I’d need to be the teacher he deserves. Or the teacher that could totally satisfy that curiosity, which emerged and then buried itself again by third period. Or the teacher that has even the slightest clue what it is like to be this kid.

eastern standard time

Some cold morning very, very early after a whole three days of sunless rain the neighborhood stuck with post it note leaves which are just that, small yellow adhesive reminders plastered to the sidewalk and windshield peeking in at wrists bent over the steering wheel looking pale and bony just waiting for the glass to warm up enough to see the sun, freezing but getting up anyway because the river sends it up to catch some piece of partnerless silver jewelry barely winking through the tarnish up from the back seat nestled safe in unsharpened pencils and unposted photocopied flyers for things cared about so deeply they were never posted near the tapes abandoned for the radio is too loud for this time of day when blinkers clicking jog chilled reflexes just in time to take lefts all the way to the river who is paying the sun back fourfold for the favor and split in half by a single kayaker no doubt she sees her breath and, maybe, marvels that somewhere inside she is warmer than this air while cutting in half a river that will just keep on being one river like it has since way before her first ever breath all of it silent and uninterrupted but still offered punctuation by traffic horns and ten thousand clicking blinkers and sips of coffee and international news updates reporting live from the kitchen where the trash waits in vain for the Thursday evening somebody remembers to take it to the sidewalk with all the yellow post it leaves all full of letters addressed to a person who looks so different, just right this second, you are shocked. Shocked to look at her.

The Power of Horses

You might think this is a blog about my girlhood obsession with collecting model horses. Breyer horses. The finest model horses in the world. You’re expecting, perhaps, a long whimsical recreation of the hours I spent dusting Secretariat’s perfectly miniaturized face with a Q-tip.

Or maybe you’re geared up for a discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s work. The American west, aching lonesome souls in a world of disorder and disappearing civilizations, the mysterious, untamed, violent beauty of a horse. Blah blah blah.

Lest we forget the possibility that I feel like talking about Robert Redford and his uncanny ability, circa 1998, to really pick up what a horse is putting down.

But no! I am talking about the power of several horses encased in one fine piece of machinery! Yes, horsepower. Or, in the case of my recently purchased Hyundai Accent, the power of a small donkey with Leukemia. But this donkey beats the hell out of the T. AND it’s good for increasing the chances that we’ll all be under water in, say, 50 years. And there are plenty of poor people in Kansas who could use a good bit of beachfront property. Just doing my part, people.

Here are just a few of the spectacular perks I’ve recently discovered as the proud owner of a motor vehicle:

A place to put stuff. There is a drawer in the kitchen filled with the manuals for appliances I can’t find, batteries that don’t work, the glove that matches a glove somewhere so I can’t throw it out. That drawer is full. So now I get to put stuff in the TRUNK! It’s a traveling misc. drawer. That way if I’m ever trapped on the highway with a VCR, I can program it correctly while waiting for AAA.

Sing-a-longs. The only thing better than singing along with Disney Classics Volume One is singing along with Disney Classics Volume One at a red light and watching people’s reactions. Don’t judge me. Elton John and Time Rice get together and that shit is pure magic my friends.

A quick getaway after glaring at pedestrians. When you’re five feet two inches tall with a foot that tends to break, you don’t walk very fast. Or at least not fast enough to get a comfortable distance from people immediately after you leer at them. Not any more! I can now stare down those stuffy-ass popped collar brats crossing JFK in a hurry to get to a squash game, make eye contact, and then speed away. Sometimes I stick out my tongue. Because I am mature.

Bumper stickers. I am always looking for new ways to make people angry. And as if my sub-par driving skills and tendency to stare at boys running along the Charles instead of driving through the green lights on Memorial Drive weren’t annoying enough, now I get to piss people off with my IDEAS! I’m going to cover the whole damn car! Besides the requisite “Got Democracy?” and “Think, it’s not illegal yet” type stickers I’m thinking of getting some of my own design. Like, “This abortion is really sucking the life out of me.”

Oh man that was wrong.

Kelly vs. Mt. Washington

Kelly: 1
Mt. Washington: Zero


I am tired. But, before bed, this favorite moment: I'm on my way down and I pass a guy headed up. He stares up the ravine I am about to descend. It's steep and requires hands. He's carrying poles and has to hook them onto his bag and start the all-fours climb. He leans against a tree and sighs, "You have got to be kidding me."

This makes me happy. Because that's basically what I was thinking on the way up. I'm glad someone else was willing to actually sigh at the mountain and question its decision to stack these damn rocks in such a challenging manner.

after hiking in the rain

There is a singular, lonely feeling that comes with speaking words that have some value to you, out loud, to a person who, as it turns out, wasn’t listening. They turn and smile and say, innocently, “What?” And you’re there, trying to recover from the realization that you can’t identify what another person’s attention looks like. I woke up that way this morning. Feeling like I had to muster up the courage to repeat something. Or not say something at all, even though I had intended to say it. I was up early enough to warrant headlights. And my tank was full of gas.

Speeding over highway while the sun rises, the city shrinking in the rearview, I am singing my loudest to a song I would never admit liking had I a passenger. The windows are down and my hair is crazy crazy crazy.

The lanes get fewer and narrower. I chase the sun through windy roads; it ducks behind pine trees that are impossibly tall. When I get out, my legs take their time remembering how to walk. I just stare at the trees. A little girl in my memory had a yard dotted with birch trees. She tore scrolls from the trunks and wrote crayon stories. She put the scrolls back around the trees afterwards, letting them hang there, or sent them floating like boats down a stream. In the time between those birches and womanhood, she had come to place value only on words heard by others. Asking, always, “Listen. Listen. Hear me.” How to exhume a person who thinks trees and streams a fine audience?

I’m staring at the trail map, turning it and turning it. I can never establish which way I’m facing. I start walking without destination. When faced with a fork, I consult the map and head, I think, toward water. My breath and footfalls sound foreign, I feel like a secret guest. The mountain tops are both close and distant, indifferent to me. If they had faces they’d always look away. I stop, periodically, to appreciate my smallness.

That’s it, then. It’s the being wrong that hurts. When a little girl sends a story woven from some now untouchable imagination off to the stream, she expects no answer. She is giving her story away, and that intention protects the words’ value. When we mutter our thoughts to the woods it is so that we can hear them, unobstructed by sirens and televisions and all the metronomic ticking and clicking of city life. We so rarely get to listen to ourselves. But when we give words to someone else it is risky. Stuttering mumbling under the breath shy attempts at talking, all defenses against speaking to someone who doesn’t hear. Someone who looks you right in the eye for the duration of a sentence and then has to say, “What?”

The lake arrives, spreads herself out for me, completely silent and beachless. A patch of sand large enough for my feet sends me into the water. I float, and the water swallows me. My ears take it in and the trees’ susurrations are replaced with the muffled underwater silence that is not quiet but not loud. The sky is white, and rains a little. I stare at my things piled on the bank. Plastic and nylon and leather. It’s funny how one day can continually redefine the word necessary. I kick myself in circles, a small white naked little boat. I am the object of zero attention. The rain and the trees and the patch of sand cannot listen or speak, and cannot know that I am lost. And I can’t tell the difference between raindrops and tears, but I am crying.

A Clandestine Affair with the Alphabet

The vowels were having a cocktail party in a New York City loft. U was smoking a cigar on the balcony, staring into a well-lit apartment across the street. He leaned on the railing and let his hands flop over the edge, ash falling onto Central Park West. By the time it reached the street, it was just part of the air.
“Y is here,” said A, walking toward him in the way only A could walk.
“Showed up, did he?”
U turned, resting his elbows on the railing, and faced her. He crossed his legs easily in front of him. His shoes caught the light of the red Chinese lanterns that framed the balcony.
He reached inside his jacket, extracted a slim silver case. He popped it open, held it at arms length.
A’s long fingers plucked a slim cigarette from the case and put it between her lips. She waited while U replaced the case and put flame before her. She raised an eyebrow at him, took the first drag slow. She crossed an arm over her narrow waist, jutted a hip to the left, and smiled at him through smoke.
“Jealous?”
“Really, darling. We both know A and U make gold,” he let the lighter fall into the pocket of his jacket.
She didn’t laugh but let out a smiling, “Mmmhmmm.” U had been making that joke for longer than A cared to remember.
O poked his head between the French doors, which A had left slightly ajar. “Are your glasses full out here?”
“Everything’s grand, just grand, O,” U rolled the ice around in his glass.
“Lovely, O, thank you,” A spoke in her low voice.
“Join us by the piano later, A?”
“Sooner rather than later, darling,” she winked and moved her eyes to U.
“Coming inside, dear?”
“In a moment,” said U, and he nodded his head in the direction of the piano, “go on in.”
She watched his face in the warm light, and turned.
Inside the party was gay. O was at the piano, banging out raucous harmonies. The whole room seemed to vibrate. While A walked to the piano, all fell to hush.
“Sing something for us, will ya,” called I, raising his glass to her.
“Yes, do,” echoed E.
She smiled at no one in particular, and put her hand on O’s shoulder. He looked up and back at her, eyebrows poised.
She nodded at him and sipped her drink.
Her husky voice filled the room. U stood halfway in from the balcony, barely visible behind the door. Y stood parallel to U, at the entrance to the apartment. They looked at one another briefly, but then watched only A.
She didn’t look at anyone’s face when she sang, yet every man assumed she was singing to him.
Later, on the balcony, U raised a hand and pushed the wave of hair obscuring A’s right eye back from her face. She let him look at her for a long moment, and then put the cigarette back to her lips. U stepped back to the railing and looked down at a line of limousines. The drivers leaned on doors, talked, and smoked.
U spoke with his back to her, “You’re glad Y is here?”
A finished her cigarette before she spoke. Her hands dropped to her sides and hung there. She took a long breath, went to U, reached to touch the shoulder of his jacket, and let her arm drop again.
She said, “Sometimes.”

the ants are my friends; they're blowing in the wind

That misheard Dylan lyric gets repeated over and over in Lorrie Moore's novel Anagrams via the protagonist's imaginary daughter. Like all of Moore's work, the book is funny and sad, and has forever etched this whimsical line onto my brain, leaving me picturing ants every time I hear the song and thinking about the song every time I see an ant.

This is all background information to help me explain what is happening RIGHT NOW in real time at my desk. I am sitting at my desk because zero students showed up for school today. Zero! For years on Monday evenings as a waitress, I would lean on empty tables in an empty bar, just wanting to escape the whole thing, and wonder, "Will absolutely zero people come in tonight?" Inevitably, people would trickle in. There is something horribly wrong when people will always always ALWAYS show up at a bar, but there are days when zero students show up to school.

So my chin is heavy in my hand and I'm prepping for Fantasy Football 2007 when I notice this little ant climbing the wall directly to the right of my desk. The radio in my head immediately starts humming, "The answer my friends, is blowin in the wind." I watch him walk up the wall in the determined manner of a good little ant. And he falls. I've never seen this before. He gets back up. Walks halfway up the wall, toward the corkboard, and falls again. He just keeps doing it. Either the wall is slippery at that spot or his sticky ant feet aren't sticky enough for my concrete wall. Again, up from the desk, past the light switch, and he falls. The same exact path, halfway up, and falls.

And so I just sit there, humming that song, without any students, and start to cry, getting my list of top ten running backs all wet.

On my recent trip to DC I was quite surprised to note that before he even leaves office they have erected a statue in George Bush's honor.

Fireworks

Gee, thank Christ we got out from underneath the UK’s tyrannical rule, otherwise we might all have health care.

Here I am in Cambridge, land of the free range eggs, where the neighbors’ litter of blond haired private school kids are waving sprinklers in celebration of their avoidance of the public school system that fucks over every child who can’t afford such escape. They trot past me in Harvard Square and they say, “Happy Independence Day.”

You know what, oh handsome family of four, you can say that when we are independent from foreign oil. You can say that when all schools are created equal and our highest courts don’t disable the only mechanism in place to correct the injustices perpetrated by a racist system designed by and for white people. You can tell me to enjoy my independence when my vote counts. You can tell me to celebrate independence day when this country stops acting as if it is independent of the planet on which we all live and joins the rest of the civilized world in doing something about human’s rape of the earth. Oh, dear family whose car runs on soy, you are totally saving the world in between tennis matches, and I WILL have a jaunt around the Charles with you. Yes, I will celebrate a victory for Democracy when Democratic nations stop behaving like tyrants under the guise of peacekeeping. I will look fondly upon big explosions in the sky when they don’t immediately remind me of friends coming home in boxes. I will enjoy a brewsky on the lawn when I am independent of NSA wire taps. I will lather a chicken leg with BBQ sauce when those rights our creator endowed us with are offered to somebody other than your average white male.

That’s right, I’m not freaking celebrating independence day because I am not, as a member of these united states, independent from anything except morality. And I’m damn grouchy about it, too.

With all these bombs bursting in air I thought for a second I was in Iraq. Thank God, and it’s all about God, that I am here, able to enjoy a wine spritzer and a government of by and for the people.

For fun, let’s just revisit a few of the ole colonies’ issues with the Brits:

He {that would be George III, for those of you who went to public school and your history class was replaced by test prep}has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

…it would seem that George was holding secret meetings and making decisions without consulting the appropriate information. Sounds like another George I know.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

…Boy that must have sucked. Good thing our court today transcends current political climates and adheres only to the principles of Justice. And they stay out of elections and stuff, because that’s important.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

…So it was possible for the military to engage in actions unsupported by the public? Thank Christ we escaped these wackos!

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.

…That’s madness. We, these independent united states, would never, ever, consent to depriving a human being of a trial. We would never, say, suspend someone’s right to a trial by jury because we thought they were involved in some kind of…I don’t know…terrorism?

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments…He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us…He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

…Man, we must have really learned from this experience because now we would NEVER do this kind of thing to somebody else’s country.

Screw you guys. I’m drinking tea tonight.

There's nary an animal alive that can outrun a greased Scotsman

“Rapid motion through space elates one.”

Well that’s according to James Joyce. After running the annual “James Joyce Ramble” (a 10K) this morning, I can assure you that even leisurely dawdling through space elates one when one receives free beer all afternoon. My second year running the race, I managed to beat my time from last year by just a hair. And, due to colder weather, it seems the more serious runners were hell bent on stretching for longer periods afterwards, so I wasn’t last in the beer line either.

The race takes place in Dedham, Mass. Since getting all that hate mail from angry Worcester residents regarding a recent blog, I won’t go into a lengthy description of Dedham. Let me just say that getting to Dedham via public transportation is impossible. That is, if you ask the MBTA. (Out-of-town readers unable to discern meaning through context, that would be the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which I believe may be operated by FEMA.) The MBTA website has a handy little trip-planner device into which you type two locations and it offers viable bus/subway/rail combinations along with timetables and estimated walking distance. Kiss my grits, how convenient. So at five forty five (5:45) am (in the fucking morning) I type in my home address and my destination and the MBTA, the AUTHORITY on the subject literally tells me, “You can’t get there from here.” I was in my slippers drinking mint tea and reading a book at 9:30 on a Saturday night because I was going to wake up early and go run a race the next day and now I can’t get there?! Okay that’s pretty much what I do every Saturday. But STILL.

Fortunately, the folks organizing the race anticipated car-phobics like myself and provided directions on their website. I leave my door at quarter to seven and arrive in Dedham promptly at 9:13. Maybe the MBTA knew it would take that long and was embarrassed to even put in on the trip planner.

Dedham Square contains several quaint little buildings and businesses, my personal favorite is the Greek restaurant. They actually named it “It’s all Greek to Me.” I’m not sure when they opened, but I’m sure that name stopped being funny about two days after whenever that was.

I walk the half mile to Endicott Estate where Subaru is inflating a blimp. Hood and Dunkin’ Donuts offer all comers the classic pre-race favorites: coolattas and chocolate milk.

I am immediately reminded of why I love races. It is not just the love of running. Running and races are two different animals, and loving one does not guarantee enjoyment of the other. Running, like writing, is a solitary activity. There aren’t any plays to make, balls to catch, etc. No team. There is an I in running. So it’s conceivable that someone who loved the solitude of running might hate races. But as any city-dweller knows, it is completely possible to be amid thousands of people and be pretty much alone. There is something immensely comforting in surrounding oneself with strangers who, simply by virtue of being in a given space, share a great passion. Now combine the passion for running with a love of literature and free beer and I’ve pretty much got a cozy crowd to hang in.

Besides, runners are weird. Most summer evenings for several years Bostonians watched Nomar Garciaparra do that weird pre-batting thing with his gloves and his hands flip flapped all over, you either know what I’m saying or you don’t. But it was weird. All runners of the world, however, found this totally normal. Before every race, about fifteen minutes before we start to line up, you can scan the crowd and it’s as if you are in the waiting room at McLean. Hopping on one foot. Rubbing hands together rapidly for one minute then placing them on the calf muscle. Pressing one another’s legs back and to the side. Taking off, shaking out, and putting back on socks. Walking around in gaits formerly reserved for Monty Python sketches. Push ups. Murmuring “one foot then the other” “put em down” “go go go” “win” or whatever.

Every single day I pop in my headphones and wish for the freedom to just sing along. But I don’t. I don’t want to be judged, I admit it. EXCEPT on race day. I walk around, hopping and skipping whenever I feel the need, and sing my heart out. NO ONE THINKS ANYTHING OF IT. Right before the gun fires I am running in place Flashdance style, singing Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. Next to me is an AARP-aged runner who is swinging his hands around himself and clapping them once in front, once in back, and swinging them faster and faster. I think of Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold about to jump in the pool with Christie Brinkley. Christie Brinkley was married to Billy Joel. That’s so WEIRD. With that totally stupid thought process fresh on my synapses the gun fires and we’re off.

The race itself is a different experience for each entrant, another interesting element of this sport. For me, it’s a combination of many emotions that exist in my mind as a conglomerate and are probably akin to what others have referred to as runner’s high. During this race, it’s heightened by the fact that people in costume line the course and shout lines of Joyce toward the road.

During the last two miles of the race it becomes clear that I am going to beat last year’s time. Yet another reason to love running. I’m sure for some runners, it is about beating the guy on your tail. We average runners are in competition with only ourselves. It’s incredibly convenient for those of us whose competitiveness is second only to our athletic ineptitude. When I see, upon crossing the finish line, that my AARP starting line mate already has a beer in his hand, I try to remind myself of this. I switch my iPod to the “cool down” playlist, take my complimentary bottled water, and head for the beer line.

A rare foray into the world of poetry...no title

She says, strength that can’t lift things is called grace
and knows that it takes balls to just admit
when even your taste buds are full of shit
for the price, dessert is bland in this place.

Tea lights in glass houses cheaply attempt
ambiance, flickering epileptically
while she’s snickering condescendingly
at some small grammatical misprint

in a letter I wrote. Eyes at half mast
she says, at last, it’s good, almost great
substantive pause, looks at her plate
while I provide lame conversational ballast.

In the manner brilliant Boston sunshine
guilt trips those indoors, her complimentary
commentary woos by sheer rarity,
things scarce become delicacies, in time

I do find her barricades disarming,
the old “because it’s there” mentality
moths me to the light of her brutality,
her soft, female cruelty, rather charming.

We find recourse - political discourse
obviates her admitting inability
to write loving letters for anybody
since impulse lost its original source,

now she only changes the addressee.
Despite her swift, careless unkindnesses
Her voice holds not a trace of mindlessness
and her hands, her hands know some secret me.

By midnight, our mouths are red with wine
cannibals both, we fuck with the rhyme,
throwing the form from before on the ground,
swearing like a sailor, lighting her incense
her ocean is cold, but I like to be drowned
we find rhythm in rhythm’s absence.

Adventures in Day Jobbing

My continuing adventures into the day jobbing world have yielded yet another new, exciting experience. Yesterday I got to explore the previously mysterious and vaguely attractive (dramatic pause) all day conference. For those of you who, like me, thought a day off from the grind might be both useful and kinda fun, enjoy the following peek into the conference experience.

I don’t drive, so my boss offered to give me a ride to Worcester for the event. The day before it began, however, he said that he “realized where Worcester was located” and couldn’t pass up the convenient route from his place to the conference. This route, of course, came nowhere near my house or our place of business.

The MBTA website is actually pretty user friendly, I will admit that. The commuter rail runs between Boston and Worcester at times that are convenient for the people operating the commuter rail. Anyone else has to either arrive absurdly early or slightly late. Given my boss’s willingness to totally dick me over on the ride, I dicked over the conference and showed up 1.5 hours late. The conference waits for no man. Workshops happened. People networked. I awkwardly sipped coffee in South Station amongst suited people waiting for the trains they take every day, nursing feelings of guilt and anxiety about my lateness…

So I arrive in Worcester. A place, as far as I can tell, notable only for its complete lack of an aesthetically pleasing view in any direction at any time of day. There are probably many crappy events happening at any one time in Worcester that few people really want to attend but attend out of a lack of other things to do. Normally this would be confusing, all of these events happening at various places across the city. Luckily every crappy event in Worcester is conveniently held at the DCU center. This conference is no exception.

I am welcomed by a piece of 8.5x11 paper with something else printed on the back of it which is itself taped to a sign that looks like it should say “Please wait to be seated.” The arrow points up an escalator at the top of which a replica of the first welcome implores me to go up another escalator. At the top of this there is a long folded table draped with the conference’s hosting organization’s logo and mission statement. Several dot org types mill about in business suits and hiking shoes. Everyone has crazy earrings.

I find my name in the A-H collection of laminated nametag lanyards. A smiling woman checks my name off of two lists, highlights something, and points to a stack of folders filled with helpful information and a survey. I am asked to please take the survey before leaving that afternoon. Instinctively, I find the coffee. I pace around, looking for a bathroom that I don’t need to use.

The first round of workshops lets out and my boss appears behind me like a Ninja. I have no idea how long he has been there when he says, “May I join you for coffee, ma’am?” We put stale croissants on delicate tea saucers. A powerhouse of a woman approaches us and looks at our lanyards before addressing us by name. She spits a piece of croissant at me in the middle of some emphatic statement about the previous workshop and doesn’t even pause while I wipe it off. I can’t hear a word she’s saying because I can’t stop thinking about how I would lose sleep for days if I spit croissant at someone I just met at a conference in the middle of a sentence. She and my boss exchange cards and I mentally note how networking works, minus the spitting. She asks for my card and I glare at my boss, who whispers a promise to order them.

Let me tell you that it is damn hard to shake someone’s hand while holding a cup full of coffee balanced on a saucer. So practice that now, if you have a conference coming up.

The next set of workshops starts and I am the last one in. I take a seat in the front row, my back toward the presenter, facing a table of people I don’t know. I turn my chair and sit in that kind of casual entirely uncomfortable “turn the chair half way around and crane your neck” position, the one where you grip the back of the chair for leverage and keep saying to yourself, “just turn the chair all the way around” but never do. A man two tables over is looking at my cleavage, which is showing because a button has come undone. This pleases me immeasurably.

The presenter is a regional manager for a wholesale grocery company. The workshop is about CORI’s from the employer’s perspective. As practitioners, we are meant to glean best practices in securing employment for convicted offenders. As an educator of court-involved youth, this indirectly involves me. What the regional manager seems to think we are there to learn about is the history, practices, and importance of regional managers of wholesale grocery companies. He hands out candy and explains that candy is just one of the hundreds of food items that have to go through him before hitting the grocery stores we shop at “each and every day.” The subsequent three minute oration consists only of food items, and rivals the Forest Gump litany of shrimp recipes both in length and in the cognitive wherewithal of the speaker. But while Bubba dies before the end of the movie, the regional manager is the protagonist and lasts the whole fucking time.

I now know how to get my ex-offenders employed at a grocery warehouse. Which is, it would seem, the highest degree of success for which they ought to hope if this workshop has anything to say about it.

Being mature and patient, I sat with my chin on my hand and doodled on my legal pad. I tried to engage one of my table partners in a non-verbal griping session but she wouldn’t bite. So I just rolled my eyes to no one and waited for lunch.

Finding my coworkers disappeared by 12:30 I sit with strangers at lunch. The two women who know each other at the table make no effort to stop talking or engage any one else in their conversation. A woman across from me stares at her food and seems to be mumbling to herself and is, in my expert opinion, batshit. Flanked by the self-sequestered chatters and batshit lady is Earl. I can’t call him by any other name, though I ought to change it, because he is so perfectly Earl. Funny that Earl – a name associated with nobility, elites of monarchies, and really nice tea – calls to my mind a middle aged American guy whose Saturdays consist of yard work and bad food in a kitchen with peeling linoleum that no one ever fixes…

I digress. Earl and I strike up a conversation and I immediately get the sense that I am being sold a car. Unluckily for Earl, I don’t drive. So he goes on about his great program that moves “these kids” toward “success” (see grocery manager paragraph). Earl does not take kindly to questions and gentle inquiries as to the point of assigning work if nobody provides feedback and tries to engage batshit lady in a conversation. Batshit lady watches her food while Earl expounds on the merits of his program which has, and I quote, “everything you could want*.” I begin, as usual, to relate only to the waitstaff, who are so grateful to be noticed and thanked I get more coffee than anyone else.

*Everything you want = new carpet, high speed internet, and big, new windows. No mention of, say, high quality teachers or engaging, challenging curriculum. No mention, ever, of the students.

The keynote speaker is mildly inspiring and moderately interesting and I mean it when I clap. This is nice. In the questions from the audience segment batshit lady approaches the microphone, which is placed terrifyingly close to my seat, and talks for nearly three minutes. Since she asked no discernable question and maybe made a great point somewhere in her own wacky thought process a few scattered hands start clapping and the keynote speaker deftly chooses a line from her monologue on which to comment and directs us back to our desserts.

I begin to recognize that I’ve had too much coffee. The chatting ladies are watching me drum my fingers crazily on the table top. Earl leaves, offering me his card. I take it while intently balancing a bite of apple crisp on my fork.

The third and final workshop of the afternoon begins. Again, I am at the first table in the room but this time by choice. I feel participation in my future; I feel ready, caffeinated. The powerpoint’s title is Integrated Curriculum.

One and one half hours, three small group discussions, and one long explanation of “homogenous vs. heterogeneous” (for real, like what the words mean) later I have an “annoyed & superior” attitude that is neither flattering nor helpful. I begin making a list of movies I’d like to see in the margins of the powerpoint hand out. I have an epiphany in the last three minutes, and vow to never, ever bore my students this terribly. (Of course, if they’re “successful” they’ll be bagging groceries soon so I guess boredom is something I should make familiar.)

I begin to feel a deep sense of longing for my classroom and a hatred for everything outside of it. I feel like Dorothy. I don’t want to see the wizard, I don’t like Emerald City, I just want to go home. Plus I want to crush Earl with a house. Riding into a pink-orange sky, the sun throwing a sunset onto construction sites and concrete buildings without any windows, I settle into my commuter rail bench and fall asleep, the laminated nametag lanyard letting fellow passengers know who I am.