Wobbly

The goal of so many passionate fitness gurus is to strengthen the core. The core – that intricately designed conglomeration of essential anatomy, so taken for granted, so necessary to life-as-most-of-us-know-it. Strengthen your core and the rest will come: balance, muscle, endurance, posture, speed, even grace. Joseph Pilates, my favorite-in-particular fitness guru once said, “A man is as young as his spinal cord.” And while fitness pop culture, dietary fads, those eighteen billion best-butt-busting workouts published in every chick magazine known to woman, and all else (including pinterest pins) short of mountain climbing, usually make my cynical (do not read fat) self scoff with arrogant boredom, there is something about this core idea into which I am completely sold. Somehow it makes sense in a way that surpasses me, that feels ancient and honest. I’ve also seen it work – on myself in particular, which helps with the buy in. But this is not my testimonial to the Pilates method or the practice of working out your core – at least note in the anatomical sense. What I’ve been contemplating lately is my figurative core, which resides, I believe, in roughly the same region as my literal core, but plays a different, if related role in my life. And while both my cores have been sorely neglected of late, it is this other core – less definable, less distinguishable, that has really been troubling my soul.

As I watch my ninth graders stumble through the pitfalls of being – well – themselves, I often think about, and in all honesty, pass judgment on, their parents. There are a handful of students with parents who I know care because I have interacted with them myself, even if they sometimes care in ways that confuse me. There’s an even greater handful whose parents I know not the least bit about and so all the evidence I have is the student himself. (Do not ask me about the small, but infuriating, minority of parents who I have interacted with and know do not care; that is for another blog post that is likely to someday get me in a lot of trouble). Though, of course, I know it’s unfair to assume that the child is the mirror image of his parents’ parenting abilities, what I do know is that the child is a close reflection. This is not the first time I will admit that my own upbringing has left me very little room to fail and that any credit I take for any successes, great or small, in my own life, should be given back tenfold to my parents and my sister, without whom I would be a wretched semblance of myself or nothing at all.

Which is why I have been thinking lately about my core. You may already know that I was 22 when I had my first midlife crisis. But what I am only coming to find out this year is that I had this crisis some four years premature of actually growing up, which is quote phenomenal, but has led to no end of trouble. 

Because this year, the great, wide world, through the key hole of little Sacramento, has come knocking on my door – which has only very recently become only very partially my own actual door – and informed me that I have been welcomed (to use the term loosely) into the land of the adult, where employment (and unemployment), responsibility (particularly financially speaking), bills, and taking care of my own damn self are now very much my personal concern. I read a sign on Pinterest that said, “My friend told me I was delusional. I almost fell right off my unicorn.” My core, this past two years, but particularly these past few months, has been severely shaken, and I can tell you – as an avid unicorn rider -  that it certainly does feel like falling off.

Now, if I’m being really honest, I blame my parents. You could say for giving me the unicorn to begin with. There’s a line in an Alabama song that goes, “leaving home was the hardest thing we ever faced.” That has certainly been my experience. Because as I sit, even here, even now, in this dear apartment, surrounded by things I cherish, given to or instilled in me by people I cherish still more, I still find, amidst all this bounty and blessing, that I am struggling horribly with extricating my own core from the beautiful, sustaining, joyful tapestry of family and home that I have left behind. And lately, as my core finally begins to acknowledge that I am here and not there, and all that here and there implies, it finds itself (I find myself) bare and fragile and a little (and sometimes a lot) wobbly. Very, very wobbly.

So I’m working on strengthening my core. (Lord knows one of them needs some attention!) On figuring out how to reweave myself into the tapestry in a way that fits right now, today, here. So that I feel warm again, without feeling as though I am constantly grieving for the past. So that I feel me again, even when I can’t be surrounded by all the things that fit me best.

-R.E.A.

Dreaming, again, of becoming a writer

Last week, two days after finishing the credential program and the busiest, most insane ten months of my life, I cleaned off my desktop. The reason I failed to clean off my desktop my first day of freedom was because I was busy cleaning out the piles (and piles, and piles) of papers in my living room that threatened to either collapse this old house entirely, or at least start a really amazing bonfire. The papers gone…mostly…I tackled my computer. And woven in amidst the unused lesson plan ideas, and forgotten clipart, and endless teaching reflections, and recipes-I-never-had-time-to-try, I came across the other remnants of my past ten months: the bits of thoughts an anxiously eager girl in a new place had about her whirlwind life and the world at large.

Here is what I found:

• Commentary on the Hunger Games series minutes after I finished reading it…and on sadness
• Commentary on magic and McKinley Park
• Thoughts about geese
• Thoughts about bums
• Revelations about dirt
• Revelations after a day of sickness

My days this year, much like my 86 students, have been inconsistent, unpredictable, simultaneously exhausting and invigorating, changing, …thoroughly wonderful. The thematic randomness of these forgotten posts is only a smattering of the randomness of my year. I’m posting them here because, besides my teaching, they are the best I have to show for my year. The only proof, really, that a writer still exists somewhere inside of me. And because they remind me of myself. And of the blessed, bountiful, beauty of the year I just had in all its shining, terrible, exhilarating newness.

The Hunger Games and sadness – January

I finished The Hunger Games today and now my heart lies in pieces in the pit of my stomach. I haven’t been this sad since the dog died in Misty and Me. I remember sitting upstairs at the Ironwood house, leaning against that old lacquer dresser of my parents. I had just gotten out of the shower and my hair was all wrapped up in a towel (because even then it was perpetually unmanageable) and I was about midway through the book. Everyone else was downstairs, but I couldn’t imagine company…I just wanted to read the book with the sweet Beagle on the cover (because I lived and breathed dogs). And I sat up there as an hour passed and then another, as the impending doom filled me from the tips of my toes to my overflowing eyes. I admit I was an imaginative kid, emotional, maybe even internally melodramatic in a quiet way…and I took stories much too seriously, even then. But I’ll never forget the kind of sadness I felt when that book ended. And for the the first time since I was ten, today, all grown up, I felt that same impending doom, and the tortuous, unstoppable breaking of my heart that I thought belonged only to childhood. I’m so torn up, my mind is only making feeble attempts at evaluating the quality of the book, my usual pastime for the first three hours after finishing.

When I was young, I didn’t like sad endings, but I also didn’t believe them. I knew that stories don’t really have an end…and I was quite adept at turning sadness into happiness just around the corner, around the last turning of the last page. It’s sad now I could tell myself, but it will get better. And there’s still a weird part of me that believes those stories did get better…because I believed they would. Misty and Me hit me like a ton of bricks because I couldn’t finish the story. She was dead. I knew that dogs die. I knew what it felt like to lose a pet. And to my overworked heart, there was no single happiness that came of it. If the author said the dog was dead, there could be no happiness on the other side of the ending.

And now I don’t like sad endings because, too often, I do believe them. My brain and my heart have accepted complexity, indeed banished simplicity, in a way my ten year old self would never have been able, or wanted, to do. Black and white have shrunk and grey expanded. Conviction remains, but no longer in straightforward self-righteousness; it exists instead with a reluctant acceptance of unclarity and an unsettling suspicion that hypocrisy is inevitable. And Mockingjay, too, surpasses the simplicity of the grave sadness in Misty and Me. A convoluted twisting of plot and character development. Strikingly realistic commentary on war and government and love. And much too close to home for my comfort. And I am sad and angry and not even entirely convinced that it was great, which makes me only more sad and more angry. And I feel, somehow, tired for the whole darn world...

Magic and McKinley Park – September

In the first brief hours of early afternoon I’ve had since I moved here, I decided to take a walk down to McKinley Park, a few blocks from my house, and take a moment to read by the pond and perhaps, if I was very lucky, to catch my breath. The tiny McKinley library was open and because I can’t resist open libraries and also had the mildest hope of finding something to write about myself in there, I went in and climbed the tiny flight of stairs to the loft, which is probably the most romantic, charming place I’ve found in Sacramento thus far.

Last time I was in McKinley Library, I stumbled across a book by famed fantasy writer Terry Brooks – a book he had written about writing. The book had utterly drawn me in and since then, in my mind, the indelible magic of that book and the charm of the library loft had been one and the same. Memory served me well and by one of the narrow windows, in a narrow aisle of the loft, I found the book: Sometimes the Magic Works. Magic. I thought then – and still think now – is exactly what I need most right now. I grabbed, also, a book of collected writings of California – oh what ahold this state has on me – and checked out  - at the desk, with the librarian – not at those new-fangled self check-outs they have at this little old library. Call me Grandma if you will, but some things in this world are just out of place. (Whether in this case that thing is self check-outs, or me, I’ll leave to your discretion. Please do not email me your opinion. I’m sure I don’t want to know.)

When I went to check out my books, Magic was not in the system. Magic again. It was starting. I took it as a good sign. The librarian let me check it out anyway, even though I was really just taking it. On the honor system. Magic, in this day and age, I think. Another reason I love libraries.

I took a walk around the pond to find a spot to rest my curious soul. A small boy and his young friend stood at the water’s edge, spying turtles. He saw me pass and waved. His friend turned and waved too. When do kids lose that unprejudiced friendliness? Where, oh where, can I find it in my high school students – remind them that it’s there and draw it out? Is the world at large or parents in particular to blame for its loss? These are only a few of my questions.

I chose a bench under the low hanging branches of a tree. They swept down toward the water like a Weeping Willow and created a little hollow in the air, shading half of the bench and draping over the shallow water where a few Mallard ladies floated lazily. It was like my own little niche. Carved out for me by a kind world. It smelled like duck poop...

Geese – September

I am afraid of geese. I pretend it’s not true, but every time I pass one without a barricade of some sort between us, I have this quickening of the heart – a reaction of my amygdala, I learned yesterday – that sparks inside me an urge to run. I never run. Because geese will chase. The fear stems from a memory which I do not actually think I have, but which is vivid in my mind from the many times I have heard it. I was about two feet tall and a goose bit me on the finger. That is all. It is the only reason I can think of for my fear. I don’t even remember the pain. But I give geese a wide birth.

Up until today, I did not think Canadian geese counted in my amygdalar reaction (The scientists tell me amygdalar is not a word, but really what do they know?). There is something profound and other-worldly about Canadian geese that has something to do, I think, with the stark whiteness of their cheeks against black necks and also the way I have seen them migrate East and West coast, wise and confident world travelers. I suspect it also has something to do with the geese in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone – that chapter has always left me slightly in awe.

In the mornings at the high school where I am student teaching, when I pull into the parking lot next to the football field, Canadian geese blanket the grass, dewy and peaceful; you can hear their gentle clucks coming across the field and it always makes me still, reminds me of the bigger picture. So I did not think Canadian geese counted in my irrational fear. Lacking both bumpy orange beaks and any kind of crazy gaggle, they always seemed a step apart. Today my amygdala informed me that they really are not.

I took the long way around the cluster of Canadian geese by the water’s edge on my way to a bench. Still, the one in the path waggled his beak at me. Innocent fellow was probably merely saying hello, or asking for food. I have solidarity with that. But my childhood memory that I do not actually remember got the better of me. He was big. All these Canadian geese asking for food were big; and I know my fingers and toes look just like a tasty morsel...

Bums - September

There are a lot of bums in Sacramento. I’m not complaining. They were here long before I was. And they know the city in ways that most of us current non-bums probably never will. Maybe cities everywhere really belong to the vagabonds and wanderers on the street corners and curled up under bridges with their shopping carts parked nearby. They see the things we don’t even know exist – and probably don’t want to.

           

I don’t know what the politically correct word for bum is. I don’t know if you’re supposed to differentiate between the ones who want to be there, living a bohemian life, and the ones with mental illness, and the freeloaders who really live in a fab forties house in East Sac. I have no ill will toward them so I suppose it doesn’t matter what I’m “supposed” to call them. Anyway, the only way to know would be to ask and I’m not that brave yet.

           

I have always wondered what makes a city a good place for a bum. New York City in January was teaming with them and I couldn’t help but keep thinking that if I had the difficult lot of becoming a bum in New York, I would save up every quarter I got and go south quickly. If I got no quarters, I’d start walking. Every step farther south would mean one step farther from NYC in the winter. But the subways and terminals were full of them. Maybe the spirit of New York was in their hearts and they couldn’t bear to leave it. I once heard that in Hawaii, you’re allowed to sleep on all public beaches. Just pitch a tent and sink your toes in. That’s where I’d go if I became a bum. Crossing the Pacific might prove tricky on a bum’s income, but at least one thing I wouldn’t be short on would be time to figure it out. Maybe they don’t tolerate bums in Hawaii. Maybe I’d get all the way there after twenty five years of careful bum planning and I’d arrive on the shores of Hawaii fatigued and chilly with visions of tender sleep on a warm sandy beach only to learn that I am not welcome. There I’d be with the full knowledge that it would take me another 25 years to figure out how to re-cross the Pacific. That would be a real low. I suppose sometimes we stick with what we know because no matter how crappy it may seem, it’s a crappy we know. We have the luxury of thinking, “it could be worse.” The alternative, the unknown, well, it could be Hawaii at sunset, but then again, it could be 25 years wasted and a shattered dream. It could be the worst. Hence bums in New York in January? I suspect my reasoning is flawed somewhere, but I can’t yet say where...

Dirt - May

When I grow up, I want to be a farmer. Today I planted one forlorn onion chive and six forlorn onion plants. It was the triumph of my week. I never feel closer to my God or myself than when I am touching dirt. Literally. With my fingers or my hands…laying straight in it works too...

Sickness - December

I spent today laying on the couch. Actually, I spent the day twisting and turning and tossing and rolling and mostly sitting upright on the couch to counter the post-nasal drippage occurring somewhere in the annals of my throat or sinuses or chest. It was miserable and though I told myself a dozen times to knock it off, I was wallowing in self-pity. How dry and inflamed and sore my throat felt, how fiery and fluidy my chest, how pressured and exhausted my head and eyes and sinuses. I was a train wreck and I couldn’t stop thinking about how exuberant I have been for this day to come for the entire past week.

           

This was to be my first weekend since moving to Sacramento that I have had entirely to relax up here, in my little apartment, in this new city, I was going to bask in my front window and explore my world and not have a single thing on my plate except maybe laundry which was not pressing or concerning. With the quarter nearly done and next week a relative snail’s pace compared to what is behind and ahead of me, I was to sleep in this morning and wake up with two whole days to rediscover my own life. It was good that I at least got the anticipation of it because the day was nothing like I’d dreamed.

           

I knew I would be getting sick more often when I began working with students, but I didn’t realize the germs they were going to so casually pass me would be some kind of mega, evil, Decepticon germs that would knock me flat with levels of tenacious and unyielding discomforts I have never experienced before. These are not colds that I am getting, these are C-O-L-D-S!!! Hence today, laying on the couch in varying degrees of hazy-eyed, muddled pain and the constantly renewing disappointment in this day, of all days, so thoroughly lost to me. Which is where the pity came in. I know I am alive and that is a blessing. I know that I have a roof over my head, food, and the greatest family that ever lived. I know that happiness is mine. I know that tragic things happen to people who don’t deserve it on a daily basis and that a really bad cold is no tragedy. But laying uncomfortably on a couch amidst mounds of tissues is not the greatest place for acquiring – or maintaining – perspective. And let’s face it, by the time the sun went down, I was sick of myself and this day, and feeling very poor indeed.

           

Running through my head all day were bits and pieces of the chick flick I watched this morning to try to get my mind off my misery, and thoughts of what I had wanted this day to be like. I’m thankful for the chick flick because it was those thoughts that kept me going until Jason got here to take me out for pho, which required me to get up, put on something less amoebic, brush my hair, and look like a semblance of a human being so that the restaurant would let us in the door. Then the broth and that crazy Sriracha sauce cleared my head, along with good conversation replacing my own incessant and exhausting thoughts. And now I’m home, my C-O-L-D still with me, the day gone, back in my jammies and my own thoughts, and yet I find that that wise and beautiful emotion Gratitude is mine again and I know new things about this day.

           

These are the good things a girl all caught up in being sick can miss:

• the joy of watching chick flicks, time, after time, after time.
• the beauty of getting a half a dozen texts from people worried about how you’re feeling
• knowing that there are pockets all over the world made up of people who love you
• the healing powers of pho and the even greater healing power of realizing how good the guy you love is at taking care of you
• blankets, and Bartholomew Cozy, the great brown heating machine
• Christmas lights twinkling through the cold
• magazines and good books
• endless boxes of tissues
• lemon juice in water
• the blessing of being mostly healthy most of the time
• memories of the good time you had last night with new friends
• knowing that you’re in a really wonderful place in your life

Okay, so the G-E-R-M-S are still kicking my butt! But heaven knows it could be so much worse. I find myself strangely comforted by this thought on a semi-regular basis in recent years. It’s depressing, when I think about it, to find that I gain inspiration from thinking of how much worse things could be. But it’s not a case of misery loves company. It doesn’t comfort me to think that other people have bigger problems than I do. It doesn’t make me think of how lucky I am in comparison to those people. It only somehow makes me see my own life in a different light. A clearer light. The kind that makes my eyes open round from my sometimes narrow-gazed view of this moment and realize the vastness that is my own life, for all that we’re always telling ourselves we’re just very small in the grand scheme of things. Life, even just one small girl’s life, is powerful and vibrant and thorough and great, and it’s not unreasonable, I don’t think, to mourn the loss of even a single day spent living it. So I’m not going to be colossally hard on myself, for my overbearing frustration at this day passing in a fit of feeling thoroughly lousy. Still, there are a good many things a girl should think about, before she writes off a day entirely. And just because this day was no great deal, doesn’t mean there was nothing in it to cherish...

Which brings me to the end

And the beginning. I christened my newfound freedom today with a visit to R.E.I. and it was afterward, as I tossed my new tent into my trunk in Sacramento’s 100 degree weather, that I knew Summer had really begun. Four days after graduation and finally growing accustomed to the fact that I have nothing to do (barring checking EdJoin for new job postings twenty five times a day). And dreaming, again, of becoming a writer.

-R.E.A.

Chaos theory - and what I really want to tell them

At school, during an off moment, - the beginning of class, maybe, while the teacher is taking roll, or waiting for a group to make their way to the front of the room - there is a functional chatter that comes over the classroom. I love this chatter, one, because it means my students are alive – which, in the middle of a compelling lecture on Chaos Theory, I am not always sure is true – and two because it shows that they are caring about something – which is my dream for them. But the chatter carries with it, also, for the teacher (at least the new teacher) a hint of anxiety. What you don’t realize when you are a student that you do realize as a teacher (I could definitely write an entire book on this topic) is that any nervousness you might have over the teacher overhearing the things you are trying to tell your friends, is only possibly one one hundredth of the nervousness the teacher feels over possibly overhearing you. If all my students were polite, they would keep their inappropriate comments, gestures, and noises to a dull roar, so that I, in turn, could politely pretend I didn’t notice them. But there are always a handful of future politicians among the bunch who are already in the habit of using their brains only subsequent to using their mouths (loudly and without attention to who is nearby), and ignoring these students would make me a terrible teacher. So when the functional chatter picks up, I must begin a careful tight rope walk of both hearing and not hearing everything taking place in the classroom. (Hence the hint of anxiety.) This is all the more true in a middle school classroom where you never want to hear anything they say, but almost always must address it. Because while high school students say inappropriate things that are also entertaining and interesting, middle schoolers say inappropriate things that are merely inappropriate and often downright mean.

So there is something special and almost relaxing about being in an EL classroom, where the functional chatter is still there, but consists of languages that are mostly not English. Do I know you’re talking about me behind my back? Yes. Do I have to pretend to care? No. Diminished anxiety. I currently have a class of 36 EL students who come from 13 different countries. 13! This simply fascinates me, especially because I haven’t heard of at least two of the countries and couldn’t immediately place a handful of them on a map. It’s a class of students who all know each other, and only a small minority take the class seriously. I won’t even get into my many opinionated hypotheses about why this might be true. Whatever the reason – or reasons – it means that I spend a disproportionate amount of time on behavior management. I admit I have become fairly cynical about the maturity level of most of these students, which means that I focus – perhaps two heavily – on sticking closely to my (brilliant) lesson plans – instead of telling them what I really want to tell them.

What I really want to tell them is that their native languages are potentially one of the greatest natural assets they have in America.

What I really want to tell them is that if they learn to communicate well in English – combined with their native languages – they can get themselves into any job or school they want in the country.

What I really want to tell them is that they should spread the beauty of their own cultures all around them, and take in the beauty of the new culture all around them, any chance they get.

What I really want to tell them is that it is this combination of cultures that is shaping who they are right this moment, and that is reason enough to love it.

I do not – have not – told them any of these things. I am busy, day in and day out, with the ordinary teacher struggles of a rowdy class: getting them quiet and print-equipped for SSR; monitoring their excessive use of hand sanitizer; repeating the day’s page number – or pointing to where it is written on the board – a hundred times in the hour; trying to avoid overhearing commentary I am loath to address…

But the fact is that all my reflection is only any good if I can apply it to practice. And I hope that a time will come in my teaching career when I will have the class organized, and managed, well enough that it becomes a place for all of these things to be said, and discussed. A place conducive to the real point of my lessons, the real value of an English class, and all those small truths about life that you can only really understand from thinking about them yourself. That will give them something to talk about!

-R.E.A.