Prairie Dust*

            It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’m an ocean girl. Indeed, it’s not a secret, very long, to anybody. Each passing year finds me more enamored with the coastlines of my childhood. Never do I feel happier, more contented, or more myself than with my feet buried in the sand, and the sun on my shoulders, and the crashing, rolling, foaming surf at my toes, and the seagulls calling in my ears. There, like nowhere else, I am complete.

            Summer and winter vacations, as a child, were spent in southern Virginia with my grandparents. Though it was only a couple months out of each year that I spent there, half of my childhood memories stem from those visits and, in that way, I feel like I was partly raised there. The life I led and the things I learned on my grandparents’ five beautiful acres were different from anything else in my life, then or now, and so they shaped me in ways that nothing else could. My aunt and uncle were the first people to take me hiking in the mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains were my first mountain love. It wasn’t until late college and, later, my move up to Sacramento, that I fell deeply in love with the steep, craggy, majesty of our California mountains. I feel like all the habitats of my life have nurtured in me an ardent love of mountain wilderness.

            Here in Kansas, we are famous for many things, including our flatness and our honorable position at the center of the United States. The list of awesome things about the great state of Kansas is extensive, including our prairies, our rivers, our bird migrations, our sunflower fields, our jazz music, and our tried and true Midwestern values. Still, we are two thousand miles from the nearest ocean. And the state’s altitude statistics are, to someone like me, both endearing and alarming: 

• The highest point in Kansas is Mount Sunflower, a site whose Wikipedia page leaves one inevitably dubious about the honesty of its title. For one thing, it’s practically in Colorado: “less than half a mile from the Colorado border and close to the lowest point in Colorado.” Wikipedia also tells us that “Mount Sunflower, while the highest point in the state in terms of elevation, is indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.”
• The nearest mountain range to Kansas City is the Ozark Mountains, which “represent the only large area of rugged topography between the Appalachians and the Rockies.” The highest peaks in the Ozarks are just over 2,500 feet.
• In comparison, the highest peak in the Blue Ridge Monutains is Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet, and the highest peak in the Sierra Nevadas is Mount Whitney, at 14,494 feet.  

            It’s hard not to respect Kansas for its stolid flatness. It has provided a landscape for flora and fauna that nowhere else could sustain. It has provided America and many places in the world with the wheat on which we are so reliant. Kansas, for all its landlocked flatness has no shortage of breathtakingly beautiful views and a Kansas sky is as stunning as any I’ve seen.

            Still, you can see how a girl like me, who bases her sense of direction solely on the location of the nearest coastline, might find herself a little disoriented in a state like this. My wild affinity for coastlines and mountain ranges on both sides of the country had no sense of direction when my feet first hit the fly over states, a place I had only read about before.

            But Kansas City certainly took us under its wing. To begin with, there are bits and pieces of this town that are every bit as hipster as our Sacramento home. Our little neighborhood on the outskirts of the city welcomed us with the true Midwestern warmth that you hear about in stories, as did the people in our new jobs. We loved the fountains. We loved the humidity (so long forgotten now in the middle of gloomy winter). We loved the fireflies and the smell in the air and the lush greenness of the trees. We discovered that, despite the lack of confidence that Mount Sunflower instills, northeastern Kansas lays claim to some delightfully rolling hills.

            We came to Kansas City in the middle of baseball season and the Royals – as they have been – were looking fine. There’s a little restaurant down the street from our house and it only took us about two trips there to feel the electricity coming out of the bar area where a half dozen tv screens played every Royals game. We donned Royals baseball hats and made ourselves at home. At first, maybe, that’s all we were trying to do: make ourselves at home in a foreign land. Anytime I came across someone who knew I was new to the area, I got asked the same question: “So, what do you think about them Royals?” At first I’d smile and nod politely, thinking only to myself, well, nothing, really. But the fever caught me quickly. The neighborhoods around town had banners waving on every possible street pole. Royal blue was everywhere. So, one night, because I wanted a martini, I started watching. And suddenly the 95 mile per hour balls and the strike zone didn’t seem so boring anymore…especially when Cain was stealing bases. Boy, oh boy, if Heinz Ward made me a lifelong football fan, Cain has made me believe in baseball. Cain is always up to something and my favorite part of watching the Royals is wondering what he’s going to try next. I started being able to tell a ball from a strike. And when it was going to be an amazing run even before the ball hit the ground. I started knowing when to cheer. And I started feeling proud of our players. I started not wanting to miss a game. And delighting in the fact that anything could happen after the seventh inning stretch. I started appreciating the possibility of a 15 inning game and the shoulder strength of a pitcher. Something – or maybe everything – about watching the Royals made me finally get the game of baseball.

            But the real thing is that somehow the World Series hysteria did make me feel at home here. Maybe I have my Pittsburgh sports roots to thank. I know how to rally behind a sports team. And it’s something I have in common with the Midwesterners who are my new neighbors. It’s probably the reason I got myself stuck in a two hour traffic jam trying to catch a glimpse of history at the victory rally. As blue and white confetti fell from the sky, I made my way through stampedes of blue-clad Royals fans the day of the parade – because work, yes, the entire school day, had been cancelled for the celebration. And here’s what I learned when I finally got home:

            Of an anticipated 250,000 people, 800,000 showed up to the parade, which is twice the number of people who actually live in Kansas City. What’s more, there were many people – who can count how many? – who couldn’t make it in to the city – though they tried – because there just wasn’t enough public transportation available. Of all those 800,000 people, the police made only three arrests. (Not to hate on my old friend San Francisco, but I have heard statistics that say that of the one million people who went to their World Series Victory Parade last year, there were 400 arrests.) The Kansas City Chief of Police described the crowds at the rally as “happy and civil.” Here, it seems to me, is indication that groupthink is merely a bunch of individuals, thinking, and not innately a beast of inexplicable and unavoidable destruction and chaos. If the individuals who make up a mob have “happy and civil” characters, so too, it seems, will the mob. If we are the sum of our parts, then Kansas Citians the Tuesday after the World Series come out about as classy as you can get.

            I have been a citizen of Kansas City for a mere five months and already, I want to call it my own. Already am proud to be a part of it. I have heard it called a big city (don’t laugh New Yorkers; it’s bigger than Topeka) with a small town feel, which by all local accounts, is kind of a Midwest thing. I like how proud people around here are of how “happy and civil” we are. One of my coworkers moved to Kansas City from Southern California expressly because he wanted to raise his children in this kind of environment. Many of my students – from various countries – have said that their parents did the same thing.  They say that God is in the details. And I believe that (perhaps synonymously) goodness is too. The best and truest people that I know are undemonstrative in their goodness, positively exacting change not in any grandiose way – as evil often presents itself – but by building many small, good things on top of each other until they are noticeable and strong. Goodness in a casserole for a sick neighbor. Goodness in a compost pile. Goodness in a child raised in love and strength of character. Goodness in a family farm. In a warm fire on a cold night. In a warm meal for a hungry child or a homeless stranger. In a town rallying behind a baseball team. Pride. Patriotism. Self-worth. Integrity. These qualities seem unaccidently interwoven. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

            I’ve written before about the joys of feeling companionship in aloneness. Watching the World Series at the restaurant down the street, felt, to me, like another side of that same die: feeling companionship in a room full of complete strangers. Feeling safe. Which could sort of describe what it’s like to land in the Midwest for the first time.

            Right now, looking out at the snow, beautifully but icily dusting my neighborhood, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the thing I want most is to be salty, sun-kissed in the icy sea waters of home. And I’m sure, if I could plop myself down on a mountaintop somewhere and look out over the prairies of this middle state, I’d see everything from a much better perspective. Seas and mountains speak my language, there’s no doubt. But I saw a bald eagle for the first time at Kaw Point the other day. And I’m learning, slowly, but surely, about the native plants and where exactly it is that I can tramp around in the Kansas wilderness. And I have my eye out for a 60,000 acre horse property in Louisburg or Eudora. And I love baseball now.

            Kansas City has been genuinely welcoming these past months, as though it cares about making a good impression, and has the substance to back it up. Not because of its baseball team, per se, but because of its soul, and its steadfastness, and its competence, and its people, and their values. Because it’s not in a rush and not self-conscious about being too kind or too proud. Because it loves itself and it loves others. Because it doesn’t make strangers of strangers.

            I am away from home and the places my heart knows best, but in this city, I have found warmth and companionship, nonetheless. This last day of the year finds me enthused about the Kansas year ahead of me. There are secrets here to be learned. Secrets that, though foreign to me right now, must be as delightful as the secrets the Pacific Ocean whispers when you sit bundled on her shore on a spring evening. Secrets Brewster Higley must have known when he wrote, “Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam / … / I love these wild flowers in this bright land of our; / I love, too, the curlew’s wild scream.” I am beginning to get it. Happy New Year, Kansas. Happy New Year home and the many homes I’ve seemed to acquire along the way. Here’s to a new year rich with the secrets of the Heartland and a new home away from home.

-R.E.A.

*“Somehow, the prairie dust gets in your blood, and it flows through your veins until it becomes a part of you. The vast stretches of empty fields, the flat horizons of treeless plains. The simplicity of the people—good, earnest people. The way they talk and the way they live. The lack of occurrence, lack of attention, lack of everything. All that—it’s etched into your soul and it colors the way you see everything and it becomes a part of you. Eventually, Ms. Harper, when you leave, everything you experience outside of Kansas will be measured against all you know here. And none of it will make any sense.”  -P.S. Baber Cassie Draws the Universe

Ode to Autumn

            My feet are numb. I am neither at the summit of Mount Everest, nor dangling my legs off the side of a boat dock in the Great Blue Pacific, but I cannot feel my toes. I am, in fact, perched on my couch with a cup of tea and a blanket, wearing a pair of wool socks and my Woolrich boot slippers (possibly the shoe world’s greatest contribution to mankind, just before or after Rainbow sandals). But when I wiggle them, my toes, there is only a vague tingling of remembrance, blood flow a faint, silver memory that has faded into the lost summer, along with fireflies and late sunsets. This is my next eight months, October through May. Cold toes. And it seems as though, each year, at the onset of fall, it’s the only thing I can remember about them.

            I feel guilty saying it, but I hate fall. You remember that episode of Friends where Chandler doesn’t like dogs? And Joey warns him not to admit it to anyone. It’s socially unacceptable to dislike dogs. Dogs and fall.

            I try to be a grateful person. The fact is, as Zac Brown puts it, that “I’ve got everything I need, and nothing that I don’t.” Still, I can’t help but think this time of year that I could do without October. Fall is like the two weeks leading up to the first day of school as a child. You can’t help but be excited about something new. The world feels different and that’s exhilarating. There are some delightful things about it: new school supplies, for one. Writing implements and endless supplies of paper. And the thought that this time you’ll get the organization down just right. And the wondering about the faceless people whose last names appear on your class schedule, and who will soon become a regular part of your Monday through Friday. But the thing with back to school season, as with fall, is that even while it’s coming on, you know that in just a few short weeks, you will be utterly sick of it. You will be knee deep in work and stress and cold, and summer (oh, sweet summer) will be a distant memory and you will kick yourself for the hours you wasted being excited about something that would lose its flavor so quickly, like a hardened gob of Hubba Bubba whose smell is so much better than its flavor ever turns out to be. Such is fall. Sometime long before winter, I realize that I will not feel like a normal, thawed out person until June comes around again, and that is quite a disheartening truth to face.

            Certainly, the changing leaves of fall are a beautiful thing. But are they really so beautiful as waves lapping on sun-soaked sand, or fireflies dancing under the trees at dusk? (Neither of which leave behind a pile of yard produce that pleasant company considers unattractive trash. I live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association and I don’t know how my neighbors – or my fiancé – will take to my organic [read hippy, hipster, or whatever else you may blame me for being] philosophy of letting leaves lie – to fertilize the ground and delight the young at heart who need piles to jump in.) I have to admit it that, though I love the genuine sentiment of all the good people who say it, I am increasingly nauseated by the comment that, “we get the four seasons,” as though feeling cold all the way through your bones for six months out of the year is something to look forward to, simply because it reflects a necessary cycle of life. For me, imagining a world with fourteen hours of warm sunlight a day is what really makes the universe seem lovely. I’ll take my diversity in land formations instead of weather patterns. I get, of course, that this is a state of mind that others do not share. I’m a libertarian and I respect everyone’s right to enjoy their diversity as they see fit. Everyone knows God is better than I am at everything, anyway. And maybe it’s just my heightened concern with being found dead under a ten foot pile of Kansas snow this winter that’s making me seem so ridiculously bitter. But here are my cases against fall

1. My toes. (I already told you about those. They are shivering as we speak.)
2. Sweaters. I think sweaters are adorable…on other people. But they always make me feel bunchy. I get headaches from them bunching at the nape of my neck. And turtlenecks make me nauseatingly claustrophobic. I’m 5 foot 3, wearing ten pounds of worsted weight yarn. Don’t tell me I don’t look bulky too.
3. The most comfortable outfit known to womankind – shorts and a tank top – are no longer reasonable daily attire.
4.  My hands get clammy. I know it seems contradictory, but when my feet are cold, my palms sweat. True fact.
5. The entire rest of the school year, I’ll have to layer – and get up an hour earlier, even though everything’s an hour darker. (Thank you daylight savings!)
6. Yosemite – and other high tops – are inaccessible. It’s not like I go to Yosemite on a regular basis, but it makes me feel sad and imprisoned just knowing that I couldn’t if I wanted to.
7. The only thing I yearn for is a seat by the fire and a warm drink – but those things all day for nine months out of the year are not conducive to real life as we know it.
8.  I get antsy to be crafty – which I am terrible at. In the summer, I have no need to be crafty. I am running around outside and planning bonfires and taking in the world. But when cool weather hits, and the only warm activities involve hunkering down at home, I get the urge to make stuff. This inevitably leads to frustration and disappointment because I am neither as creative as my mother, nor as artistic as my sister. And while I can stick with Moby Dick for a dozen hours straight, I have neither the patience nor focus to stick to a Pinterest project long enough to get really good at anything. I should just quit trying. But every year, yarn calls to me from the shelves of the craft store like a creepy Wizard of Oz, echoing down the yellow brick road of the season.*
9.  Getting out of bed in the morning is actually physically painful. And the world no longer smells delightfully grassy.
10. People blow at you all day long with heaters that dry out your skin and stuff up your nose and make you dizzy for fresh air, which you cannot enjoy because the only available fresh air gives you an asthma attack.
11. I can’t realistically daydream about pitching a tent and sleeping under the stars in the middle of a random field at a moment’s notice.
12. And to all you crazy boot people, I’m on your side! But do you know how delightfully good a pair of cowboy boots with some denim shorts really feels?

*What if I made at least one random and unnecessary Wizard of Oz reference in every single blog post for the duration of my life in Kansas? At least I’d one up all the people who told me Wizard of Oz jokes when they found out I was moving to Kansas.

            People say you can’t appreciate the sunshine until you’ve seen the rain, but I do not believe that’s true – at least not at a literal level. I mean, maybe once. Once in your life, maybe, you have to see the winter to know how awesome the summer is. But then, you know! I would, at least. “Winter, fine for some, not for me.” That’s what my memory would tell me as I basked each month in the perfection of 80 degree weather. I wouldn’t need to be reminded annually of how good I had it. Once would be just enough.

            I thought this was an ode to fall, you might be thinking, right about now, if you’ve actually made it all the way through my futile rant against something that has come around for each of the 28 years of my life and all the ones before it and to come. She uses that word, ode, you may be thinking, but I do no’ think it means what she thinks it means. But I do. And I’m getting there. Have gotten there, really. Because here’s what I discovered as I sat down to make my case against fall. I don’t quite hate it. It started with pumpkins. I am definitely on board with the whole pumpkin craze. Pumpkin candles, pumpkin lattes, especially, more than anything else, pumpkin pie! I got a recipe the other day for pumpkin granola bars. And another for crockpot pumpkin butter.

            Of course, if I were really in charge of the universe, apples would dominate the autumn world, even higher on the crop totem pole than the plump, orange pumpkin. If Northern California doesn’t turn you on to apples in the fall, I don’t know what will. Between apple cider doughnuts at Apple Hill and the juiciest Pink Ladies I’ve ever crunched into at the Sacramento Farmer’s Market (Lord, I miss my apple guy!), a love affair has sprung up between the apple and me. Have you ever noticed how hardy apples are? How you can carry them around in a lunchbox or hiking pack for days and they are still crisp and juicy and delicious whenever you get to them? Neither heat nor cold bothers them too much in comparison to the other fruits. Have you ever tasted my mother’s apple butter spread over a slice of toast with cottage cheese? Or eaten apple seeds? (They taste – I learned from my parents’ neighbor who eats the core and all, a practice which I have admittedly taken up – like almonds.) In Kansas, there are varieties of apple that I have never met before. One I am particularly infatuated with has a craggy, rough, yellowish, brownish skin and both the most tart and sweet flavor I have ever known in an apple. I love that it is – like so many of the best things in life – plain on the outside, but surprising and beautiful within.

            I like the tingling the air gets in the fall. Things are changing and the whole universe knows it. The squirrels are about to lose it over the busy venture of moving nuts to and fro. I love them more in the fall than in any other time of year, even when they are uprooting my potted plants and replacing them with walnuts.

            Fall brings out a sadness in me. It always makes me miss terribly all the people that I love. And yet, it also signals the beginnings of the holiday season when I will see many of them again; so there is an excitement in it too. Fall is the nostalgia in me and it makes me cry, but I don’t mind. I appreciate paradox – in life and in emotion. It reminds me that I am real.

            Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. Because I get to cook in a crowded kitchen with the people that I love most. And I remember how it feels to be a kid again. And Baba jokes a lot. (If you have never heard English puns spoken delightedly in a Persian accent, you may not have laughed hard enough.) And then we get to eat what has to be the most delicious meal of the year (on account of the stuffing and pickled beets, of course). And I always pick out a Thanksgiving outfit that is all fall-y and cute, and MUCH too warm for my inevitable task of cooking the candied sweet potatoes, and then I get to shed it for something that is much more akin to summer wear and for one, chilly fall day, I am warm. And football. And the Macy’s day parade. And the beginning of Christmas music. And Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas and Charlie Brown.

            Fall is also the time when the tourists become more sparse in my hometown and the beach becomes a place of secrets and solitude. Oh, how I adore the beach on a brisk, uncrowded day, when the sound of the waves, and the seagulls, and the ferry horn consume all other noise and my soul is alone and free!

            The cycling of the seasons is good for putting one’s small, wonderful life into perspective. And it turns out that, even as I hate it, I love it. Because it’s God’s. And mine. And proof that I’m still alive and part of the grand scheme of things, which is an overwhelming, astounding, and awesome truth, no matter how your toes feel. The squirrels are helping, and so are the pumpkin lattes and apple butter. And the fact that my mom and sister adore autumn as much as I do not. I’m happy for all you crazy, wonderful fall people. Who are bubbling over – on Facebook, and Pinterest, and in coffee shops around the world – with your delighted (albeit sometimes excessive) posts about leg warmers and scarves and cinnamon, vanilla, pumpkin, spiced candles. I’m cold, but I am happy for you. Besides, I’ll know exactly how you feel – come June.

-R.E.A.

Guns and Roses - No, not those guys

            I’m cold and tired and withered-like-a-raisin from sitting in an air-conditioned room all day. And I can see my summer break slipping away like, as they say on The Days of Our Lives (Friends reference anyone?), sand through the hourglass. But I’m trying to be patient because so far, despite these things, I have been impressed by my new job and my new state and my new life. Still, I’m withered and summer-less. So if he wants to get my attention – this man talking at the front of the room at my new teacher orientation whose title I cannot remember, so berated have I been by names and acronyms – he does an awful fine job when he says, to all the teachers sitting in the room, in reference to school violence, but in no way, he assures us, trying to alarm us, in a voice full of pride and conviction: “You’re not commissioned, and you don’t carry a weapon and all that stuff, but we need you, we need everybody, to be security.” And I have to patch my brains back together using only my will power because my hands and my face must remain pleasantly deferent.

            Now, I’m a teacher of language, so I know that I have a distasteful habit of accusing people of murder who have only mistaken a grammar rule. As such, I will try not to expostulate for too long on the semantic betrayal this gentleman (who I’m sure is a gentleman, despite my unforgiving attitude toward him) took by lumping weapons in with “stuff,” as though using a weapon in defense is about as necessary as using a pop tart as a floatation device. And the guy’s thesis, when you get right down to it and give him the benefit of the doubt, was that teacher’s should not just be looking out for their students’ academic success, but also their personal well-being. I get that and I agree with it. His thesis also included the idea that people are less likely to be violent and abusive to people who they like and who they know care about them. It’s a sensible and I would agree accurate point (though a little bit obvious.) The obvious question that he did not go on to answer was: What happens to us if our single method of defense – apparently, niceness – fails to work, and we are left standing in front of a lunatic without anything to protect us but our smiles? Because what he has ultimately asked us to do is to defend other innocent people and sacrifice ourselves with absolutely no tools at our disposal. And what he has also said, in essence, is that people whose job it is to physically defend others (actual security guards, police, soldiers) do not, practically speaking, need weapons to do so, just the kindness in their hearts. I wonder, delusional district administrator, why no one has ever tried this kindness model of civilization before. What, I ask, should a security guard do if a criminal’s heart does not, in fact, grow three sizes right before he pulls the trigger? In what alternate universe is it reasonable to tell someone that if she finds herself staring down the barrel of a crazy person’s gun, she should take a moment to reflect on whether she could have been friendlier to the person on the other side and come to the ultimate conclusion to do nothing about her present predicament because, after all, she is a peace-loving teacher, navigator of the mind and soul, who need never resort to physical violence? I’ll tell you what, I am insulted and outraged that my employer should ask me to take on a job of defense without a weapon, as though it were an honor to be the inevitable loser in a righteous cause. And just like that, I am ready to take on this discussion.

            See there are over a dozen reasons, probably, why I am a firm advocate of the second amendment. That topic, for me, is a long, though surprisingly straight forward discussion that should amble patiently over a long series of days or blogs, over coffee, and alcohol, and walks on the beach. But the first argument that I simply cannot understand from those who advocate strict gun control is the effect that it has on innocent people. I am not talking statistics – YET – because statistics on both sides of this argument, as with nearly all arguments, are so manipulated and askew as to retain little integrity for debate. I am talking logic and sense. (Logics and senses people. As rare and valuable as a gold-backed dollar.) Because it seems to me that the answers to the following two questions could be answered as accurately by a child as by an adult and that the answers are innate in the definitions of the words themselves: What does a criminal do when you tell him he may not do something that he wants to do? (He does it anyway.) And what happens to the safety of innocent people when you make them weaker? (Their safety, too, is weakened.)

            Which brings me to my main point today, a topic I have pondered and deliberated over for some time. It has to do with feminists and guns.

            I think that men think about safety on many levels, and probably even more so when they are also looking out for their female friends: what to do, and when, should a certain situation escalate. But I have had several conversations with men of various ages that suggest to me that they are fairly unaware of the level of focused energy that women put into their personal defense against rape, sometimes as frequently as on a daily basis. Now, I live a fairly safe life in a fairly safe place and I always have, so I don’t lose sleep or have debilitating terror over thoughts of being raped (although some women, tragically, do). Still, it is a frequent and consistent fear that I have and, more importantly, something that I (realistically or futilely) am constantly trying to safeguard against. I don’t think I’m alone. I have read articles and talked to other women about this topic. It seems it is something many women – even those who are not as statistically likely to be victims of rape – accommodate for. Why do we walk with a firmer step and a higher chin, and ears constantly tuned to what could be coming up behind us when we’re alone in an unfamiliar place? Why, when we jog alone, is the music on our headphones significantly quieter than when we jog with a buddy (especially if that buddy is a male)? Why do we watch shadows at night, or stay out of unlit, quiet places entirely? Why do we keep our keys and our phones out as we walk to our cars? Why do we carry pepper spray in our purses? I can tell you, if I was only worried about someone stealing my wallet, I wouldn’t be half so diligent or cautious.

            The fact is that, whatever our emotional, psychological, and mental strength, there is no denying that most women are physically weaker than most men. At the very least, the strongest women are weaker than the strongest men. And, yet, we have the same human rights, and the same intrinsic worth, and deserve the same level of social justice as do our equally innocent male equivalents. I think that not only feminists, but most other people, would agree with this assessment in our day and culture. This is why I cannot understand why, even if you are indifferent to all the other reasons that guns should be readily available to private citizens, if you are a defender and advocate of women, you could possibly be unwilling to put guns in the hands of innocent, competent women while simultaneously knowing that they are in the hands of rapists and other criminals. It is illogical that a feminist who demands equality for women in all ways does not fight for what is virtually the only way for women to be equal to men in a battle of physical strength. It seems ironic to me that many of these same people support women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies regarding abortion, but do not support women’s right to make decisions about their own bodies when they are being attached from without. For that, we must merely be victims. Otherwise, it seems, we are setting a bad example for people who illegally possess guns.

            Now, I know some will say that if we had more gun freedom, then more men, as well as more women, would own guns, thus making it more likely that a rapist – as well as the woman he attacks – would be carrying a gun on any given night. And this is true. This would also be true in cases of domestic violence in which, in a strictly gun controlled world, a man may be more likely to punch a woman than to shoot her, the former, of course, being something she could more likely heal from. Furthermore, there are evil women out there too, who would also be empowered by possession of a gun, to the detriment of other, innocent people. So yes, I acknowledge that having more armed citizens does not just save innocent people from abuse without having an effect on other elements of society. But the deciding factor, in my book, is a matter of equality. Innocent people will die from gun abuse – and ignorance – and stupidity – regardless of any gun laws. But taking guns out of citizens’ homes disenfranchises an entire group of people that is already involuntarily weaker and more vulnerable than others.

            To me it seems that the right to bear arms is an essential element to empowering women. And to empowering innocents, and to empowering righteous underdogs, and to destroying the people who try to oppress and overtake those people. If the odds of a woman walking in an alley alone, carrying a gun, are greater in a society than the odds of that same woman and that same alley and no gun, mightn’t I, a criminal, think a moment longer about attacking, even though she looks small and undemonstrative, even though I  know (this being the real world and not a fairy tale) that there are no strapping, muscular, heroic men waiting in the shadows to whisk in and sweep her from danger in the nick of time?

            Mightn’t I think twice about robbing a liquor store if the man behind the counter is as likely to grab a gun from under the counter as a wad of hundred dollar bills? Mightn’t I, even as a disillusioned, tragic, unstable, lost, and pitiable adolescent be more likely to consider the limits of my strength and power if I am not absolutely certain that not a single person on the high school campus (filled with innocent and often just as troubled teenagers) I am about to shoot up could pull a gun on me?  I have never seen the weakening of the weak and innocent as being a part of our culture as Americans, as women, or as rational, peace-loving, and good people. If we know that we cannot eradicate forces of evil and criminal intent (not all at once, not all the time), why are we not all, indignantly and wholeheartedly, advocating for the strengthening and empowerment of the good and the innocent?

-R.E.A. 

A Letter to Teachers Newer Than I - For the new school year

            Before I begin, let me say, that this is merely a letter. It claims to be neither words of advice nor wisdom. I am no master on the topic of teaching. I do not know if I will be in the profession for decades to come. Assuredly, I will not, any time soon, be making the pages of Fred Jones’ next book on America’s most innovative educators. But I am a person who struggled, a lot – much more than I expected – with beginning the profession of teaching. I know that others struggle too, though doubtless some who read this, those for whom teaching comes more naturally and quickly, might find my questionable mental state in this blog post alarming and disconcerting. There is some truth telling that will take place here. Consider this, above all, a letter from a colleague – if you are a teacher. And perhaps a letter from a colleague even if you are not a teacher, because we have, most of us, been new and awkward and overwhelmed by a job or some other important life experience at some point. We are friends now, for the experiences we share. Consider it a letter that is meant to be in part a platform for my own soul to vent, and in other part, one of sympathy and understanding for what you might be going through. All that I really want to say, after all, to both of us, is that things will get better
             I’ll never forget the emotional trauma that used to sweep over me any time someone started in on how much easier teaching gets after a few years. I remember my credential school year when I’d smile bravely and shrug off those types of comments, hoping to maintain my façade of self-assurance, as though it didn’t matter to me if my life got easier in one year or in twenty years. I’d be okay either way, my shrug said,  because my undying passion for the  profession, my selfless adoration of children, and my profound vestment in the future of our society could carry me through anything unscathed. None of it was even bothering me now, I suggested. My deep physical and emotional exhaustion, my perpetual awkwardness, my chronic confusion over acronyms and school procedures and politics and even my colleagues’ names, my feelings of inadequacy in the classroom, my certainty that I was, in fact, making my students dumber, my inability to feel confident even in the one area – academics – that I always had (I was getting my Master’s at the time), the shock of being treated horribly the first few times by an angst-ridden adolescent. None of these – I suggested – were making me at all doubtful of my chosen profession, none of them were burning me out, or making me want to run away to a farm in the countryside and forget children ever existed, none of them were having anything but a positive effect on me because, after all, I was sacrificing myself to the Future of America and happily fulfilling my Societal Duty to my Fellow Man.

But my heart sank every time. Behind my carefully manicured façade, my entire being cringed at the unwitting good intentions of the people who talked to me about teaching. Because unfortunately for their good intentions, they did not know that others had already been where they were going…and had delivered different messages. My first encounter with the impossible numbers game of how-long-do-you-have-to-suck-it-up-before-this-actually-becomes-managable came from a professor I had during my student teaching. Her comment actually did lift my spirits at the time. “It gets better after the first year,” she told me knowingly. And I felt a gentle wave of relief wash over my soul adrift. A year wasn’t forever. I could doggy paddle for a year.

It wasn’t until several weeks later, when one of my master teacher’s got ahold of me that I recognized this numbers game for what it was – a well meant – and completely unrealistic – gesture passed from one person who felt sympathy to another who looked like a drowning cat “After THREE years of teaching,” my master teacher assured me, “you’ll feel like you have finally gotten into a rhythm and you’ll be fine.” Three years?! At that point I didn’t actually care how long three years even was, I only knew that it was three times longer than the original quoted estimate of my sentence.

If only my principal had never tried to help. Now, I absolutely adored the principal at my first school. He was kind and communicative and supportive. His philosophy of teaching aligned – for the most part – with my own. He was easy to talk to and easily accessible. He was beloved by students and teachers and parents. He was warm and funny and likable. And, in a meeting I had with him at the beginning of my first year, he was trying to be helpful. He smiled at me from across the table, “How’s it going?” he asked brightly.

“Great,” I grinned back, though it wasn’t.

“Are you feeling overwhelmed,” he asked?

“Nope,” I lied.

“Are you feeling supported?”

“Very much so,” I reported with relief, because that, at least, was true. What we all know as new teachers is that we (as new teachers) are never going to feel perfect or underwhelmed or put together. But we don’t need to overshare this information every time anyone gives us an opportunity because it’s not a great way to keep friends. And what we also know is that having a good team to work with, though it cannot save us, is such a huge blessing – we’ve heard the horror stories! – and can go a long way in convincing us to convince ourselves to stick it out.

My principal, as if he knew what I was actually feeling (he’d been a new teacher once, too, I suppose), said, “My wife’s a teacher too. She says that after FIVE years you really get a handle on the job and love what you’re doing.”

Five years. It was almost too much. Where had my original 365 days gone? In five years, I’d be ready for my third midlife crisis, or I’d be pregnant, or I’d be whatever’s left of a human being after five years at a job that she doesn’t “have a handle on.” Five years his half a decade. Half a Decade. This is what I wanted to yell at him from across the table. But his face was so earnest – he really was trying to be helpful. And I refused to be the teacher who starts crying in the principal’s office. I refused,  I refused, I refused. So I didn’t stop smiling. I tucked the corners of my mouth up behind my ears and pulled tight to keep them from sliding downward. To stop smiling would be to cry. To stop smiling would be to fail.

“That’s good to hear,” I finally risked opening my mouth a crack to say.

            This year, my fourth year of teaching, just a few days ago, in fact, I sat down with my fellow 9^th grade team member to talk curriculum. She came into teaching late in her career and she is wonderful and I think we’re going to get along great. We spent some time bonding over the struggles of being an introvert in the teaching profession. She told me it took her ten years to be comfortable as a teacher. I thought to myself that I must lack stamina because there is almost nothing in the world that would keep me at a job for nine years without feeling comfortable or competent. But she didn’t scare me. It seems the fourth year, for me, is the golden year. Not that I’m trying to jump the gun. I’m just starting my fourth year and I’m at a new school in a new state, so there’s no doubt that I’m still in way over my head. But I also just spent two weeks at professional development, and a new teacher orientation, and welcoming my new students and I didn’t panic once. Not once. Not even when I realized that summer break is really and truly over. Not even when I realized that I’m in Kansas for goodness sake. Not even when I filled a binder on the first day with names of people and resources that I will never ever remember even if I study them for an hour every night. Not even when I learned I had to turn in lesson plans to my department chair on a weekly basis, or that I have two formal observations this year as a teacher new to the school. And I’m taking this as a good sign. Because last year, and certainly two years ago, I would have been in the fetal position in bed with tears streaming down my face. (Don’t laugh – it happens.)

            I cannot tell you when you will finally get comfortable at teaching. When you will love it. When it will feel like you’re in the right place. When you don’t wake up before the rooster crows kicking yourself for doing it, groping for a cup of extra strength coffee, last night’s late night lesson plans still bouncing painfully around in your brain like a hangover. What I can tell you is that each year gets better. Significantly better. Better enough that, even if it’s not great, you are so grateful that it’s not last year that you can get through it. And enough of those betters will eventually get you to a place where you love your job and where, on some days at least, you feel good at it. Wait, did you think this was going to be a pep talk? I said I was in my fourth year of teaching, not that I’m the Dalai Lama! Teaching is hard. But you can do it. I know this because nobody goes into teaching with their shoes tied on right. Some of us have left on right and right on left. Some have laces criss-crossed. Others one shoe tied to the other. Some haven’t even mastered the art of Velcro yet. Nobody just walks right in on the first day with perfect pumps and the confidence to wear them. We are all a mess. But there are still thousands of amazing teachers roaming around the country, all of whom must have been new at one time. That’s how I know we’re going to make it. If we want to, we’re even going to be amazing.

            And another thing: don’t believe that you have to have a bottomless personal pocketbook to be able to do creative stuff in your classroom. I don’t know if any other new teachers are as alarmed as I was by all that talk of teacher’s paying for their own supplies, but I have to admit, when I first started teaching, it really bothered me to hear how much other teachers spent on their classrooms and students. I felt like I was already giving every last bit of my exhausted self to my profession, to the point where I was having diminishing returns. The one small reward I was afforded was the money I made to pay my rent and buy a beer on Friday night – a beer which I had never even needed before. So it outraged me to hear people say things like, “Oh, I just buy all the stuff I need for my class,” or, “They don’t pay for that. You just have to buy it yourself.” (Which, by the way, is, in my experience, generally untrue. I know some schools are hurting for resources and some schools are pretending to hurt for resources, but, though I know it happens from time to time, I’ve never been unable to acquire the supplies I needed for a class if I had a clear plan and justification for my supply needs and I asked [and was kind to] the right people.)

            This year, I have spent a couple hundred dollars of my own money on my own profession in the first two weeks of work. It’s from my budget – I’m not going bankrupt over it or anything. But the spending doesn’t seem like such a burden to me now, or like so much salt in a wound. I think the more teaching becomes a part of you, the more fulfilling it becomes, the easier and more natural it is to invest back into it – whether that investment involves spending actual money or, probably more significantly, investing more time getting to know your students, or more effort in creativity. Don’t think that being a teacher in this climate means having to spend your pocket money on your kids. It doesn’t and I’m proof. You should only be giving as much of yourself to the job as you feel good about giving – and I’m not just talking about money. Don’t worry that it’s not enough. The more you grow into your role, the more of yourself you’ll be able to give.

            Speaking of investment, here’s the only piece of advice I actually will give you, because I really think it’s true. Invest, first and foremost, in yourself. New teaching is just like any new relationship: you have to work really hard to not lose yourself in the collective “us.” And, as irony will have it, you will likely tend to lose yourself in your efforts to be a better teacher to your students, but will inevitably find that you are unable to be a better teacher – or a better person – when you’re not nurturing the things that make you uniquely you. You cannot spend the entire weekend lesson planning and grading. You will need to. You will be stressed and overworked on Friday afternoon and you will think that you absolutely must finish up your work over the weekend or else Monday will be hell. Here’s the dirty secret: no matter how long the weekend is, you will never finish your work. It doesn’t happen. In the history of teaching, it has never happened. But you will lose yourself. Because, despite your students’ best convictions, there is more to you than lesson planning and grading. There is the athlete and the friend and the reader and the adventurer and the gambler and the movie watcher and the beach goer and the wine taster and the dog walker. And those parts of you need you too. And those parts of you are also never done.

            I’ve come to the disheartening conclusion that to be the best teacher in the world, you must be the most interesting person in the world. That’s, basically, in a nutshell, what the job demands of you. I know with certainty that I am, in fact, not the most interesting person in the world. But I must at least be interesting enough. And there’s nothing that turns a person into a Big Dull Dud faster than grading papers all weekend, every weekend. Trust me. I’ve been there. I have a shirt from that trip. You cannot simultaneously be a Big Dull Dud and an Invested Teacher. You will wear yourself thin until there is nothing left of you to give. Invest in yourself. Papers will wait. Word documents too. Student emails. Even angry parents will wait. And while they wait, your brain will have some time for the creativity that it couldn’t get in during the crowded week. The creativity that will make you breathe easier and do better, both as a person and a teacher. Interestingly, this is the quote that came up on my phone’s daily quote widget just before I posted this blog entry: “It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” (Maria Montessori).

With my sincerest sympathy and sincerest congratulations that you have chosen this profession,

Roya

ETSB (English Teacher Scraping By)                                                                                                                                      

Expatriate

It occurred to me, as I looked over the sad decline of my writing here on this blog over the past years, that my writing – my mindset, really, which would lead to my writing – needs a serious jumpstart. The frightening thing for me, as an expatriate of the writing world, is that it is not merely the writing that has waned, but also the perspective. A writer must look at the world through a storyteller’s lens, whether she is embellishing the truth or sticking to it, and the less one writes, the less one sees the world through that beautiful, exhilarating writer’s lens. And a writer without a lens? That is a sad and miserable misfortune.

            Emily Dickinson was the first poet I ever loved and when I began this blog, my greatest wish, perhaps, was to be that little stone that rambled in the road alone. There remains a part of me that yearns to be that stone – that, indeed, is that stone. That is not Dickinson’s only wisdom for me right now. There is also: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” and “Hope is the thing with feathers- / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - / And never stops – at all,” and, if I really want perspective, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson took my adolescent angst and helped turn it into an identity for me. And so, the name of this blog has always been an ode to her. But it seems to me, now, that for someone who is trying to reenter her homeland after a lonely spell away, only originality of voice will do – that if I am to be a writer in this world, Emily Dickinson must be a part of me, but cannot be all of me, cannot be my voice. Voice is a thing this blog needs most right now. So I am starting with a minor facelift: a new name, inspired by my own life, the same old hope of “fulfilling absolute decree.” This is a short story of how the Catalpa Tree is an ode to my own life and writing.

            It seems to me, sometimes, that I can recall my childhood in snapshot memories of perfect moments. Even those moments that should not have been perfect – could not have been perfect – were made perfect by the people who cared for me and the places we were together. There are perhaps no memories that I recall more vividly than those I spent in Southern Virginia on Pappy and Granny’s five acres off of Rural Route 2. If I were writing about those trees, in Southern Virginia, I would be writing about Sycamores and Maples and Cherries. But I wouldn’t be writing just about those trees – though trees are a worthy and weighty topic – if I were writing about Southern Virginia. Because for me, writing about those days and those people and that place is like trying to capture in a foreign language the taste of sweet tea on a sticky summer day; or the feeling of a firefly’s tiny legs on your palm and that inexpressible feeling in the pit of your stomach when he lights up on your hand that makes you believe in God and magic; or the purple that comes over a mountain at dawn that some people can’t see; or the thrill of car tires on a gravel driveway; or that feeling you get – both inexplicable sadness and overwhelming happiness – when you watch somebody you love across a room, unbeknownst to him. You see, it is thoroughly impossible for me to sum up Southern Virginia in three words – or to sum it up at all, in small or great detail. I have tried. Many times have I tried.

            Western Pennsylvania is to my mother what Southern Virginia is to me. And it is not far behind in my own memory’s list of perfect moments either. Should I grow old and gray and forgetful, I pray I will still remember picking blueberries in Great-Grandma’s yard, and all the tastes, smells, and sounds that accompanied blueberry picking with my cousins and sister. But the Catalpa Tree is from later in my life, well after the Spring of 1998 when my world ended for the first time, after I had begun – just begun – to grow up and learn that happiness is far more complex than it ought to be. It’s from a more realistic time, but perhaps a better time for that very reason. The Catalpa Tree grows outside of my Great Aunt Helen’s home. She is one of my favorite people on earth and I share her middle name – something which has always made me proud. No matter how long gone I am, going to Aunt Helen’s house (and Uncle Fred’s – another part of my growing up that ended something in me) always feels like going home, which is somewhat unusual since I have never spent expansive amounts of time there. Visiting Aunt Helen has given me an awareness of the charm and profound romance and rightness of quiet, beloved, wood-smelling, well-kept places and I hope that my home will someday welcome the people I love as warmly as hers does.

            My mother, I am sure, could write poetry –or a novel – on the Catalpa Tree alone. There is more to the Catalpa Tree story than even I know. But this particular snapshot memory is only a brief, vague remembrance. I didn’t know, at the time, that there was anything extraordinary about that beautiful tree out front – just that everything about Aunt Helen’s home was beautiful. Do you know those moments in your youth when you realize people that you have known and loved for ages actually have a life and identity outside of who they are to you? My mother has always had this gorgeous quality about her where she remembers something, or is tickled by something, and her laughter and her words take on this warm, joyful, secretive tone. In those moments, I always catch a glimpse of what she was like as a child, before my time, and also a secret glimpse of her beautiful soul. For whatever reason, the Catalpa Tree snapshot has always seemed so important to me because of my mother’s tone that day when she pointed to the tree and said, “That’s a Catalpa Tree,” as though she had a story to tell about it…as though it had a story to tell us. “Catalpa” – a lovely and intoxicating word. Mildly exotic, somehow also earthy and familiar. She had one in her own yard as a kid and they called it, she told me, a Cigar Tree because of its long brown late-Summer seed pods. Out of curiosity, I also learned that Catalpas are sometimes used in the making of guitars and are found both here at home and on the Caribbean coasts, so I was right about its exotic and familiarness.

            Aunty and the girls and Mom and we girls were there to visit Aunt Helen that time. Maybe it was just a malleable moment in my development. Perhaps I realized, then, that life didn’t need to be perfect to be perfect, that change did not mean you lost all the things you loved. Maybe it was a salve for the growing pains of knowing that people and places get old, and responsibility sucks, and paving your own road is a lot harder, and sometimes less gratifying than it looks. Whatever it was, that Catalpa Tree stuck in my mind as a symbol of both every good past moment I loved so dearly, and also as a threshold to embracing the creation of my future and the role I have in its unfolding. We decided to take some pictures under the Catalpa Tree. Family picture time, it seems, gets sadder the older I get, because it always feels like we are trying to capture a togetherness that none of us are sure will ever come again. But also, it was Summer on the east coast and I wore shorts and a tank top and my hair stood out like a frizzy mane from my scalp and I was road-tripping with some of my favorite people. Both nostalgia and a hearty enthusiasm for the moment had control of me. And there we were – snapshots on a camera – and in my mind. I still have the pictures. In them, I look young and awkward and adolescent. We all look thoroughly steeped in the Pennsylvania-summer humidity. We were not the same family we once were. Granny and Uncle Fred were gone. Sira and Miya had joined us. And yet there we are, all just the samely interconnected as we have always been – as we will always be. Though we come and go, we are indivisibly family, intertwined undebatably, in the picture, beneath that tree – a few of us representing the all of us.

            And that is reality. Which I think is my point, here. Because along with all the awful things we wish we never knew – about Santa, and death, and politics, and the like – there is something else that reality gives us that beautiful childhood illusion cannot – and that is a recognition of, appreciation for, all of the unflappable, immortal rights in our lives. The rightness of family and nature and stories and scuffed knees. The rightness of counting our blessings, of roots and of wings. It is, to me, reality, more than anything else, that tells me that there are universal truths – they have been and they are and they always will be. It tells me that goodness exists and cannot be suppressed for long – love and gratitude are ways of life and should be embraced. And so this snapshot in my mind, of the eight of us under the Catalpa Tree – so many of us missing – each of us missed – seems symbolic, somehow, in my mind, of the bittersweetness of adulthood – of experience (which may be all that adulthood is after all). I love it because, once things lost the glow of childhood, everything also took on more meaning. Stories became more powerful. Life, though more painful, also became more adventurous, which, after all, may essentially be what writing is to me: my heart and my head grappling with experience, wanting and not wanting to go back to childhood, trying to understand how the ancient ties that bind me and the every-day-new world ahead of me coexist, balance out, affect each other. It seems to me, sometimes, that if I just go back, sit under that Catalpa Tree, alone, for a good few hours, that some things would come to me that would not come on their own. I can see, almost, a faint dust of magic shimmering beneath those lush leaves. And maybe it would. Or maybe it would not. It’s difficult to say with those things. In adulthood magic is more ephemeral than it is in childhood.

            And so that’s how the snapshot with the Catalpa Tree is the story of me, and yet, still a story to me, because I’m not sure why it, out of all the snapshots in my mind, feels so profoundly old and new, then and now, familiar and enigmatic. Like a good story – to read or to write – I understand it in my soul, and yet know there is still much more to understand. So it is that tree, that seems a fitting place to end one era of writing – which has lasted my entire  life thus far, which is the beginning of my passion and my love for the field, which is rooted in a family and life so full of love and happiness that it often overwhelms me and a restlessness that continues to overcome me – and to begin a new era of writing – which begins in Kansas, of all places, and hopefully never ends, but instead feeds into another writing era for another person or another time, and whose direction I have not entirely decided upon yet, but that offers me the same adventure of familiarity and mystery that I cherish so dearly.

            Children have so many restrictions that adults do not remember about: where they are going and what they do when they get there and when – and how – they are to get home. And to an adventurous heart, one of the joys of growing up is to not have to tell anyone anything about all of that anymore and to be able to just go where the wind blows. My soul, for example, yearns constantly to climb mountains, and to sail in the winds, and to ford brooks and to lay on grassy hilltops and watch horses roam. It has always yearned for these things and perhaps the first thing that writing was for me was a way to adventure without being able to adventure. And so now, if my heart yearns, constantly, to climb a mountain, to seek adventure, so also does it yearn to write – and to read – about these things, a pastime for a rainy day, a responsibility day, an entire adventure to be had somewhere as simple as sitting beneath a Catalpa.

-R.E.A.