Step Aside HG Wells: Tis the season for...The Time Machine

You can’t argue with math and science—ask any teacher this time of year. Because…yes, (oh, I so want to say “Virginia,” here, but I’m afraid I’m the only one who is old enough to know what that refers to) …it IS THAT time of year! No, I’m not talking about artificial snow and elves. And, no, I’m not referring to that other messy business, worrying about accidentally uttering “Merry Him-whose-name-may-not-be-spoken- in public-education-mas!”

No, I’m talking about THAT time of year all teachers dread……..that week before the end of the semester.  That week when all the slackers finally log on to their online grade accounts and figure out that the little “m” stands for missing, and that a zero averaged in with three 90 percents equals the letter D. (That’s the math part.)

It’s that week in the year when the wire basket on the corner of your desk fills up with old grammar sheets and reading quizzes that were handed back without somehow getting recorded.

Well, okay, if I’m gonna bag on the kids, then it's only fair I bag on myself a little, too. Yeah, I know you parents don’t want to hear it, but sometimes….rarely…once in a while…I “fat finger” it (as my esteemed colleague Dough puts it)  and miss an entry as badly as the next guy.

And it’s true that when you’re a high school English teacher and you carry work back and forth from home to school every night, it’s not shocking to learn that sometimes….rarely…..okay…once in a while…a paper falls into that little crack between the console and the passenger seat and rides around town for a week...or two. And usually it’s that make-up compare/contrast paragraph on Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est and Joyce Kilmer’s Memorial Day, that some kid handed you on his way to after-school tutoring when you were just returning from the teacher’s lounge carrying that pile of junk mail about workshops on “Behavioral Intervention Differentiating for Multiple Intelligence Reluctant Learners in Your Classroom through Motivational Strategies!”, and a full-color, glossy, brochure for “Teachers travel free with thirty-seven paying students!”  Thank God my old dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby was on top, or the whole kit and caboodle would have gone in the trash! That’s all I can say. And yes, White-4, I already apologized for your Huckleberry Finn tests in the back of my daughter’s Pontiac, but I found them, didn’t I? All I can say to that is My bad, dog! (That makes it all okay in the teen world, I’m told.)

And it’s that time of year when, like Christmas carols playing on department store loudspeaker systems, you can hear one of my old familiar favorites called, “What can I do to bring my grade up?”

And it’s that time of year when I adapt a little lesson in cynicism I learned from another esteemed colleague who plays the Ukulele. (feel free to steal it as I did….along with all the other excellent teaching strategies that teachers give away online and interdepartmentally for free on a daily basis because they are just that kind of cool people who give away excellent stuff for free all the time. It’s part of the nature of choosing the profession. People silly enough to spend 60K on an undergraduate degree and another 32K for a master’s when they only get paid 40K a year are NOT sassy enough to charge for their intellectual property…………….c’mon, get real!)

Anyway, here’s what it looks like step-by-step when a student asks, “What can I do to bring up my grade?” (At least this is what it sometimes….rarely…okay, once in a while…looks like in my head.)

 1.  Don your most Madonna-esque smile, with gently parted lips like Curly’s wife dead in John Steinbeck’s barn after letting Lenny touch her hair—please add the beam of 3:30 p.m. sunshine streaming in from the setting sun behind the teacher’s head for the halo effect—and murmur back softly, like Daisy Buchanan, “What can you do?”

2. Pause, for a brief look at the ceiling like Jim Casey trying to piece together a prayer for Grandpa’s funeral.
 

3. Curl lips together in deep thought. Tap upper lip with index finger, shift mouth to bite upper lip corner like Scout Finch trying to figure out what Atticus’s brother is talking about when he tries to explain what a Whorelady is.

4. Let out an audible gasp—like Abigail Williams in the town meeting hall before Judge Hathorne—who yes, is the great-grandfather of Nathaniel, who changed his name from sheer denial about those horrible witch trials—when John Proctor calls her a harlot.

5. Ask again like Daisy, “Do you know quantum physics?”

6. Pause for this to absorb. (And, by the way, for you doubters, the answer is always “no.”)

7. Adopt a nearly Tom-Sawyer-like frankness and kick right into, “Because, (fill in name), you see…at this point, my friend, (I like to add the “my friend,” but it’s absolutely optional—whatever you’re comfortable with) you’re going to need a time machine to go back into the past and turn in all the work you failed to do for the first 17 weeks of school.

Viola! And it’s just as simple as Arthur Miller’s brother-Ben walking into the jungle when he was 18 and walking out a millionaire!

Rejoice, teachers around America! A semester has flown and the large majority of your students have passed! Sure, you’re going to get called into the administrator’s office to explain what happened to that other marginal percent, whose scores are scraping pavement under the chassis of the great piece of machinery called the American Educational System, dangling somewhere between  25-37 percent, whose grades you couldn’t hope to save, because you never received a single sheet of paper from them, let alone saw them in your classroom, whose home and personal lives are so riddled with pain and confusion, and perhaps chemical addictions, that for them to even show up to school in the morning upright is sometimes an applaudable task in and of itself. Rejoice! For your seniors are going to move on to college or other higher education, or jobs, or real life. Rejoice! They, for at least six days, knew the definitions for supercilious, anon, jocularity, inferential, and reciprocal; they could draw a little hill-like plot line and pronounce denouement;  they knew that Huck Finn was up to more than a simple trip down a river, and they understood that Gatsby’s life was as empty in the end as  Pa Joad’s Wallet.

Merry Christmas, American teachers everywhere who will be grading essays over “holiday" break.  And rejoice, rejoice, rejoice that there really isn’t a time machine anywhere for any of us. Because I’m not sure which of us would cheerfully go back and repeat high school again. One time around was challenging enough, wasn’t it?

And this fact, perhaps above all others, is the one that restores us and makes us return again for another semester, hoping that maybe we can make it just a little less hard and just a little more enjoyable for some kids who could really use it. And that, my friends, doesn't take a scientist to figure out.

Trusting One's Own Voice--no thugs need apply

I think you heard the lady!

 Listen! I went to the ENT last week because I realized that when I was reading The Raven out loud to my juniors, I actually sounded like The RAVEN--it was disconcerting. I reminded myself of the old lady named Mrs. Smoke that used to live behind the church on our block. She used to holler at us kids for simple things (like throwing corn cobs into her yard--yeah, Kath, you know who I'm talkin' about), and I could do a pretty swell imitation of her. 

The trouble is....I don't want to sound like Mrs. Smoke. I want to sound like Grace Kelly... well, that's beside the point...no that really is the point I think....so I went to Dr. Gupta to find out what in the world is making my voice break like Katherine Hepburn calling to Henry Fonda about the loons in On Golden Pond. 
 Now Sanjay Gupta is more than a simple ENT. Sanjay is an Otorolaryngologist, which if my bill is anything as imposing as his official title I'll end up owing something just short of the National Deficit after my insurance company pays.

So anyway, after sitting with a string of ether-filled cotton ball up my nose for 45 minutes, Dr. Gupta hoves it out again, and then while crooning, "Just relax, just breathe through your mouth,"  shoves a laser camera through the little rubber flapper in the roof of my mouth to "get a peak" at my vocal chords. Then 7.3 minutes later, Sanjay Gupta whips that flexible tubing out of my nose faster than a garter snake running from an 8-year-old boy and tells me something I didn't want to hear (that is..other than my own gag reflex). He says, all calm and smiling, "Sure enough, you have two nodules on

your vocal chords."

"What?" says I. "What does that mean?"

And then Dr. Gupta points to his computer screen, showing me how my larynx is  engaging every other member in the area to help vocalize.

You're not trusting your own voice," he says. "You're overcompensating by using other muscles to back you up."

It is at this point in the blog that I would like to stop, and for the sake of my own self preservation, simply cease to expose my lifelong shortcomings. But the metaphor is just too good to pass up, don't you think? I mean, I don't want to sound all supernatural or anything, but when your very own body gives you something this ripe, it's hard to let it simply rot on the vine.

Now I'm no Owen Meany, but I can't imagine a life of quiet. A life of channeling Julie Andrews,  speaking into classroom microphone headsets, tipping my head slightly to the left with an ever-so-gentle smile and and saying things like, "Young ladies and gentlemen, would you honor me with your silence, please?" Nope--can't see it. I'm a yeller, a screamer, a bellower. Why....by the age of three my family had nicknamed me "leather lungs" because my mom never had to wonder in which part of the house, the yard or the neighborhood I was; she simply followed the sound.

But I'm avoiding the obvious. Or maybe if you aren't a lover of metaphor, it's the unobvious I'm avoiding--but either way--I simply can't ignore it any longer. Look. Here's the deal. When we have hangups in life.....our bodies find a way, ultimately, of letting us know. There it is. I've said it.

For instance, when I was in my early 20's, I developed a severe eye infection after my divorce that made my eye swell up so badly I couldn't wear contacts. Even after the virus had cleared up, my lid drooped so badly I walked around looking like Rocky Balboa after the 9th round with Apollo Creed. Finally, after nearly half a year, I looked at myself in the mirror and said "eye left" and then began to sob as if I was still sitting in the pew after my father's funeral. It was only at that moment that I started dealing with the severe abandonment issues that I had developed after a horrific divorce that followed hard on the heels of my father's death.

Too corny? I think not. Take this one for instance. When I was in high school I was a ski freak. I went to the mountains every weekend from the time the rocks were barely covered until the last slush melted into the earth. After accidentally stepping on a toothpick the day after Thanksgiving, I refused to admit to being disabled in order to hit the slopes (which were opening uncharacteristically early). Although the toothpick had been driven nearly its full length into the ball of my foot, I simply had my mother yank it out--the quarter inch that did come out, that is--and convinced her it had gone in broken. 
   What I needed to do was tell tell her how much pain I was in--what I ended up doing was catching an edge on that injured foot and severing my ACL. But do you think I told anybody how badly my knee, which was blown up the size of a small child's head, hurt? No, that what I needed to do, but I did not.
  What I needed was an orthopedic specialist--what I did was to wrap it in an Ace bandage and ski the rest of the season. When I finally DID see a doctor the following summer he said, "If you had tended to your knee when it first happened, we could have simply reattached the ligament. But by denying your injury, it caused the ligament to atrophy away." Well, metaphor scoffers, I know this...a lifetime denying one's pain and not tending to one's knee(d)s will make one a liar and ascetic of the worst sort--it will cause the worst kind of atrophy possible......atrophy of VOICE. (See how I, like Owen Meany, feel the need to yell it here?)

So....back to Dr. Gupta. Here I am screeching like Mrs. Smoke, and what I'd really like to be is the kind of strong, assertive, woman who carries off a scene with beauty and grace (ah yes, back to my Grace Kelly allusion).

  When Gupta pulled out this most recent piece of medical advice, I decided to listen...not to the doctor, but to the metaphor my own body had provided. WHEN, I thought to myself, HAVE I ever trusted my own voice? (Dang it, there's Owen Meany again!) And what would it sound like if I DID? I've blistered my vocal chords from hours of "over-compensation," huge attempts to sound big, to command attention to "cover the room" as the jovial doctor put it. (Sounds like a comedy act to me? Anybody else?)

Well, sometimes a metaphor is just too powerful to ignore--and this, it appears, is one of those........sometimes we need to quit blabbing and listen to what our own physical bodies are telling us.

 I am a writer. I write books and stories, and songs, and they are good. I want to produce a play from a novella I wrote called The Friendly Beasts, and next week I'm going to talk to a composer to arrange the songs I've written to go with it. I've developed stories called Elderbooks that are picture books for the elderly who can no longer read. I am finishing a novel about a woman who gives birth to her own sister, and I have short stories I want to publish in magazines and journals around the world.

Oh, and I write this blog. In fact, I realize that I haven't spoken but six-and-a-half words since beginning this entry, and it doesn't take a PhD in literature to realize that when one writes one doesn't use one's vocal chords. 

 I've spent my life as a teacher trying to "cover the room," as Gupta put it--waiting for somebody to give me permission and authority (the muscle part of the metaphor, as it were for those of you who aren't getting it) to speak into this world as an artist and a writer. 
Well, this week, I'm going to make my first attempt at covering the world with my words--to trust my real voice. It's what I want. In fact, it's what I need, (okay....plus just a little bit of grace to do it).  Oh, and P.S. no thugs need apply--I'm doing this one on my own.

11/8/10--an addendum: I just have to add this little bit of life coincidence. Today I listened to a guest speaker who quoted Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers. Here's what he has to say, and I think he said it better than I did: 

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs (1955 -)

Although it's still under construction, feel free to have a closer look at some of my projects, please go to:

Plainsong Publishing

  

Shorty got low, low low, and I've had enough, enough, enough.

Friend, either you are closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are unaware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of ________ in your community.  And thus, with the simple filling in of the offending noun, the old Trouble in River City rap begins.

Okay, I know I run the risk of sounding like Professor Harold Hill, or John Lithgow in “Footloose,” but I think I’ve just witnessed my last high school dance…at  least my last high school dance at which I stand by and condone with my silence the mass sexual molestation of girls 14-18 years old.

There is a line in Their Eyes Were Watching God in which Nanny tells Janie , I can’t bear to stand by and let men make “a spit cup outa you.”  Well, mothers and fathers, we have a raised a generation of spit cups.  Before I continue, let me acknowledge and repent publically of my own culpability in this affair. Every year since I began teaching in 1995, my husband and I have sponsored the annual homecoming dance. I’ve always considered myself a fairly “hip” and understanding teacher, and I have done my share of shoulder tapping or long-distance eye-brow raising to let students know they needed to “cut it out” on the dance floor.  But this last weekend I couldn’t stop it. And I’m tired. And I’m sorry.

There’s a new “move” in town, dirtier than any dirty dancing I’ve ever had to break up, and it began raising its ugly head (not touching that one with a 10-foot pole) about five years ago. It’s a little dance piece known as “grinding” in which a young man grasps a girl by her pelvic bones and then backs her in against his crotch as she rubs her buttocks against his genitals in time to the music. Sorry, I know I’m pushing the obscenity meter with this one. I tried to soften it, but I thought it would be best to just call it straight.

I know Mrs. S____ that you sent your freshman daughter to the dance thinking that there would be adult supervision…but there wasn’t. I mean, there were adults there. Plenty of them—myself included—from principals to vice principals to school counselors. But we didn’t stop your daughter from rubbing herself against her date.

I’m sorry Mr. G____ I know you thought that your girl was going out to dinner in her see-through skin-tight spandex homecoming dress to attend an innocent dance in the gym similar to the ones you and Mrs. G____ went to in high school…But she wasn’t. I mean, she did go to dinner dressed like that, just as you thought. But somewhere in-between she had several drinks and when she arrived at the high school and began clutching her ankles on the dance floor, her judgment had apparently been impaired. Well…we did catch that one.

But the rest of you, Mr. and Mrs. K__ and Ms. H____, we did nothing. The only way I can describe it is………….well, it’s like swatting flies at a livestock sale barn. Which ones do you stop?

And so, on homecoming night, your girls backed their buttockses up against young men and ground (or do we say grinded?) to music………some even tried to do it to the beat. What it looks like to them, I cannot imagine, but to the outside witness it looked something akin to an entire room of young dogs humping a mail man’s leg.

Do I want to ban dancing? Heck, no. I know that in the20’s parents cried out over The Charleston and ragtime (libertine men and scarlet women and ragtime shameless music—Pro. Hill, again there.) In the 30’s it was swing dancing. Parents have cried out over jitterbug, and Elvis the Pelvis, Go Go boots, the Twist, the Monkey and the Pony. John Travolta gave us both lycra body suits and skin-tight Wranglers with Saturday Night Fever and The Urban Cowboy. Not long after, Baby and Patrick Swayze gave us a crotch-leg combo called Dirty Dancing.

Kids will always dance. ALWAYS. It’s part of what we do as a culture. I don’t think anybody wants to take dancing away. It’s a courting ritual; it’s a right of passage; and teen dancing has always pushed the envelope.  In fact, statistics show that slow songs have generated enough dance partner heat and friction throughout the decades to power a city the size of Milwaukee for 17 months.

But there’s something blatantly wrong with a room full of grinding girls, whose short cocktail dresses (and there’s another one) come up as they go down to Shorty Got Low, Low, Low. And there’s something even more wrong with a group of adults who stands back and watches as it goes down (or up as the case may be).

I’ve read a dozen blogs on this topic: People crying for bans and people crying for freedom of expression. What we should be crying for is the loss of innocence. We, as a nation have overtly stripped our young women of any mystique, allure or femininity. And we have stripped our boys down to nothing more than mere gropers and ogglers.  We tell boys not to treat women as objects, and then we create girls who see themselves as nothing more.

We’ve created a generation of overtly sexualized children, whose parents chuckle as Charlie Sheen takes three women to his bed, whose mothers get up and perform their morning pole dance work-outs, who watch blithely by as Degrassi and company get all bent out of shape not over the premarital sex but over the lie about the pregnancy, and we stand back and watch like helpless victims, rather than the perpetrators we are.

It was cute when Kevin Bacon taught Chris Penn how to dance (Let’s hear it for the boy) and the whole town, including the preacher, was rescued from the close-minded prejudice against dancing. We all had to learn the “moves” in our day. But sadly enough the only moves these boys have  to learn is something they can perform with an old t-shirt out of the laundry basket in the privacy of their own closets.

I don’t want to sponsor any more dances.  I can’t bear to see your girls (my students) used as spit cups any more. I have enough five days a week just trying to explain that “Mrs. Jones my computer printer sucks balls” is not appropriate on any level of communication. I’m tired of being the teacher who gets up from my office desk to go in the hall and explain to a group of young men or women that “Fuck” is not an appropriate adjective, noun, or verb anywhere in school. I’m worn out of girls who walk up to the drink counter dressed in their Homecoming finest and cry, “Damn,” when they find the water all gone, then yank up their strapless gowns over their escaping bosoms as they flounce away.

On a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, I monitor and am held accountable for state test scores, failing grades, lack of reading comprehension and lack of student motivation. I have classrooms full of kids with depression, eating disorders, and abusive parents. I have a life full of cutters, bingers, drug addicts, alcoholics and teenage pregnancies that walk through my door every day……I guess I just don’t have the energy to preserve their morality on the dance floor, too.  I know, I took that 400-level pedagogy class called Teachers and the Law, that I am officially in loco parentis. But where are the parents on this one? I’ve got nothing more left to give.

Mr. and Mrs. D----, Perhaps it’s time for you to come sponsor homecoming and see for yourselves what your senior son and freshman daughter are up to. Maybe it’s time for mass-control ski-slope management techniques:  two armbands—cut off the first as a warning; cut the second  and it becomes your choice to call home and leave the dance. Because, mom and dad, surprised as you might be to discover this…students aren’t managing themselves. Especially not when they have been given a full head-nod from administrators and teachers alike.

Even in a lucrative society like the United States, when you dress a girl in a scrap of see-through, low-cut, sequined material, put her in high heels, spread makeup on her face, send her out into the night and ask her to rub her body parts on a man……………uh…………..well.

And maybe that’s the darkness that has overcome my heart this Monday morning. I grieve over child pornography, and prostitution that exists throughout the world—especially in third world countries. But guess what, Mr. and Mrs. W___ Mr. and Mrs. A___, B_____  C____ and D____? Even though I’m certain you kissed them good-bye and said, “Act like a lady. No grinding tonight.”  It’s a little closer to home than you thought. At least those girls in those third-world nations, albeit very small amounts, are getting paid. Your girls are doing it for free and nobody cares, and nobody is stopping it.

Teaching English--Beginning with Vietnamese

Today one of my students asked me--as we were diagramming predicate adjectives and predicate nominatives (which, by the way, they now call predicate nouns)--"Mrs. Jones what in the world made you want to be a teacher?" 

And in less time than it took to crack my yardstick against the white board (no, it isn't corporal punishment...don't tell Henry David Thoreau..it's just such a great power trip, a yardstick and speed grammar in colored chalk on the black board, blazing dry erase markers up front, and 15 kids flying around the room diagramming Tim's uncle has been the town mayor for twelve years, and Your little brown dog is actually a Doberman or Professor Dumbledore seemed angry at Harry for the whole term..if you love this stuff like I do, you understand) I was back in Mr. Jacobson's pink and blue sixth grade classroom, at Wilcox Elementary.

None of us were sure why they painted his classroom pink and baby-blue over the summer, but now that I'm a teacher I'm pretty certain he must have done something to incur the wrath of the maintenance crew (teacher-the/ pissed off-staff,the, custodial). Anyway, I digress.

It was the year they separated me from all my friends, you know, three sixth grade teachers...let's keep that mouthy White kid (and when I say White, that was my name, not my race...although I guess technically it's my race, but I wasn't meaning it that way, and why do I feel like I have to explain that anyway...sheesh--definitely another blog, another day) away from her friends and maybe they'll stand a chance of learning something this year, or coming in from recess without having been verbally badgered for an hour, or making up their own minds about a topic (okay, I admit I may have been a little bit overbearing as a child...but thank God, I/ 've outgrown/ that! ).

Literally, and I mean literally, every morning I woke up hating the idea, the very thought of, getting out of bed to go to school. I detested everything about education and my life. My big brother had gone away to college and rather than living in a state of Nirvana, not having to wonder when he was going to crawl out the bathroom window only to crawl around the house in the dark and scratch on the screens of the TV room to crawl back through the bathroom window and come to our "rescue" after unlocking the door to our screams, I was completely and utterly depressed...because  believe it or not, I really adored him. 

That was the fall of 1975...and if I recall correctly it was also the fall of Saigon.
So that fall we spent the days looking through microscopes at purpled onion skins in Ms. Yancil's class, working algebra problems and learning grammar in Mr. Jacobson's nursery-colored classroom, and then spent the evenings watching dingy green and gray footage of military airlifts, the double propellered army helicopters taking off straight into the sky with  hundreds of South Vietnamese crammed inside, dozens more hanging from the runners as they rose higher and higher into the sky, roters whirling, until the hangers-on finally dropped off or were pushed to the ground.(hangers on-the/ dropped---or were pushed-finally/ to ground-the.)
It was also the fall we learned to diagram sentences. It was like discovering the math of English. Suddenly, words--which  I/ had adored-always, violenty-quite, like-brother,my, big-- fell into comprehendable rank and file, slanting lines of prepositions and sloping adjectives inclining adverbs. I covered my college-lined notebook paper (it was time for the big hitters, we were in sixth-grade after all) with messy pen and graphite lines filled with words--beautiful words. No, they drew themselves, the harder the sentence, the more in love I fell.

But I/ hated-still/ school......

And then Dâm arrived.

The Methodist Church sponsored one of the refugee families--the ones we saw flooding into Laos every night as  the North Vietnamese army marched its way south--and the family they sponsored was Dâm’s.
Her family had escaped with their lives, but they had been separated from her father. I don’t remember much more than that, and I’m not sure I ever truly understood. Maybe they floated on inner tubes, or doors or pieces of rafts—I remember the anchor men called them “boat people,” but most of them never used a boat.  Dâm and her family had somehow gotten to Laos, where they stayed in a refugee camp and learned basic English phrases like “Thank you” and “Please.” And when Dâm came to Castle Rock that’s about all the English she knew. 

The Methodist church found Dâm’s family a little two-bedroom house, scrapped together enough clothing for seven children and their mother, a tiny scrap of a woman who was still nursing Dâm’s baby sister, Hieuh, and then sent them to American public schools.
And that’s the event that changed my life. 

When Holden asked me why I became a teacher, it’s hard to explain that it happened nearly forty years ago in 1975 when Mr. Jacobsen called me to the back of his classroom and asked me if I would like a special project. My job, he said, for the rest of the year, would be to teach Dâm English. No more sheets of diagrams and sitting, waiting for the others to finish, no more grammar for me at all. How, I asked, would I do it? He told me: Just be her friend (you)/ be-just/ friend-her.

She had five brothers: Co, Minh, Trinh, Quang, and little Trang, who was only three years old and looked like a tiny skeleton of a boy. I’m always afraid I’ve forgotten one, now, as I’ve forgotten so many things. Her full name was Nguuyen Thi Dâm, meaning she was the daughter of her father, Van Nguuyen. The boys went by Nguuyen Van Co and on down the line. 

Co was sent to junior high, where the first thing the boys did was to teach him every swear word they could think of. I can't imagine the weight or the anger Co must have carried around on his shoulders as the oldest son--his father lost in war. I was always a little frightened of him. But one day I remember seeing him smile.
I had a friend named Peter and one day Co tried to ask if we were siblings. I tried so hard to understand him (I/ took-seriously/ job-my), repeating, “Peanut butter? Peanut butter?” Finally in exasperation Co started laughing, and I suddenly realized he was asking if Peter was my brother. Dâm, Peter, Co and I laughed until our sides ached. It was one of the few times I saw him let down his guard.
I played at Dâm's house; she came over to mine. We met almost every day in the middle at the Elementary school and played on the swings and teeter totters, and we sat on the monkey bars and exchanged languages. I remember so little of what she taught me, and I wouldn’t know how to spell it if I tried. Dow Di ,Mat , Mui , and Mea…that was head, ears, eyes, nose and mouth. She taught me to make paper gum wrapper chains, and I still have it in a little box on my dresser. She taught me to scoop up one rock at a time as I threw another in the air, like a game of jacks without the rubber ball. Her mother made the best chicken I have ever tasted, and I never realized how very destitute they were. In fact I didn't realize at all until my parents scolded me for eating supper at her house. When they found out she had fed me They were appalled (parents-my/ must have felt\ sorry-for her). Dâm became my best friend. Her smile was as quick and as bright as fox-fire. Her skin was as rich as coffee, her hair as thick and dark as the fall had once felt. She laughed at all my jokes, and with her I never had to fight for my way. She trusted me in everything.
And because I was just a kid, I never thought ahead to what might come of my beautiful Vietnamese friend. 

But that summer I went on vacation with my parents, and when I came home………….. Dâm/ was\ gone. The Methodists moved them to a Vietnamese community in Denver where they could have support, friends--a network. I guess there weren’t too many people like them in Castle Rock, but like most 12 year olds. I guess I had never noticed. I don’t know if I’ve ever cried that hard over a friend since.

Dâm was the best friend a 12-year-old girl could have ever had. Dâm taught me to not be sad angry anymore, and she made me think I was good at something. Dâm saved my life and taught me one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned: When you’re absorbed in yourself and depressed beyond words, try helping out somebody else. When you get your eyes off your own sadness, and you focus on another’s, the sadness suddenly recedes. Dâm came across the ocean, and she washed away my loneliness. And for that, I will always, always love her.I-for, that/ will love-always, always / her
I don’t claim to be an expert on the Vietnam war. It wasn’t even considered history yet when I was in high school. I’ve never been to Vietnam, and I don’t know if I ever will go. 

But, oh, how I would love to see Dâm again. I’d probably chicken out if I ever found her…I doubt she even remembers who I am.
But I try to imagine what she’s like now. I’ll bet she’s married and has grown up kids, just like me. I’ll bet she still smiles like the sun and her hair is still jet black. I’ll bet she can still turn handsprings around me in math, and that her English is impeccable. I wonder if she taught her daughters to make gum wrapper chains and play the rock-tossing game, and I wonder if she still laughs about peanut butter.

I believe God heard me praying every night that fall when I was 11 years old: “God, please, please, please send me a friend.” And just like God, with his enormous sense of humor, he didn’t just send me any old friend….he went to Vietnam to find her. And who could have ever guessed that by the time my birthday came around that spring, and I turned 12, I would have already become the teacher I decided eventually to become.I / became \ teacher.

Death Before Death--Remembering Alzheimer's and my Grandmother Esther

This Saturday morning was a drippy, gray, fall day. Not the kind of day you like to go to the park and walk for charity. But it fit my mood, somehow--remembering Alzheimer's is never a happy day for me. I'd prefer to remember my grandmother the way she was..............before the way she was.

I'd like to think about her teaching me to knit a red scarf, casting on. I'd like to remember her needlepointing, quilting, sewing, painting. I'd like to imagine her when she was a young teacher in a single-room school, and I'd have liked to have known her when she conducted the high school choirs and taught art at all the schools.


Sometimes I think about her singing at a school bonfire before a football game for Rio Blanco County High School in 1926, standing around with the other girls in their heeled Mary Janes and dropped-waist dresses, the boys with their hair greased back, parted down the middle like Jay Gatsby and Nick Caraway, the girls in their Marcel waves looking like Daisy Buchanan. I didn't know her then.


I remember holding her velvet-gloved hand in the backseat of the car, as we rode to dinner--something we could never afford to do until Grandmother and Grandydad came for a visit, stroking her mink coat and breathing in the smell of her perfume. She would lay her hand on top of mine, then the sandwich of hands would pile on her lap as she pulled her hand from beneath to lay on top of mine, then my sister's, then mine, over and over as we giggled all the way to the restaurant.


I remember the summer she took me and my sister to Meeker to spend a week prior to my parent's arrival--the month every summer we spent with them, swim lessons and afternoons at the pool with Herb Albert and the Tiajuana Brass playing over the speakers, piano lessons for every child in town as she somehow managed to get lunch and supper done for us all. The noon whistle which signalled our run down the block to meet Grandydad as he came home for lunch from the courthouse and abstract office, a quick trip to Bernie's Super 8 to pick up ice cream. The pipe smoke that permeated their car, the cold smooth concrete of the garage floor on our barefeet. The sizzling hot asphalt smell the summer they paved the road outside the house.


I remember the smell of varnished wood and the dark comfort of polished church pews and deep red stained-glass windows...touch me not for I have not yet ascended, let the little children come unto me...The preludes and her little black chapel cap and cotta as she watched in the the rear view mirror for Father Johns to appear and begin the service. The worn black organ shoes she couldn't play without, and the way she changed them for proper pumps to go the take her sacraments at the rail, changed them back to play the music for communion.

I remember the dinner parties she would throw and the special code: FHB which meant family hold back when there were unexpected guests. The impromptu concerts on her double pianos and the family singing the old songs as she played. On special nights my dad would sing in his sweet tenor an old high school solo of "O Danny Boy."
I remember the day we baked chowmein noodle chocolate cookies and the way we gathered Nanking cherries so she could teach us how to make jelly--grandydad squeezing the cheesecloth bag as she held the strainer, purple steam rising and scarlet syrup staining our hands.

I remember the matching dresses for Easter and Christmas that arrived as if by magic, trips to Cinderella City and popcorn and balloons--things unheard of for a poor minister's daughter. I remember the phrase she taught me the summer I asked her for the drop-leaf desk, abandoned in the basement..."everything I have is yours, darling."

I remember the green Samsonite luggage and dancing by the pull-out bed in the TV room...knowing it was rude to ask, but also knowing there was Avon lipstick or perfume or bubble bath wrapped in perfection paper, golden bows and invisible tape. One for each of us every time they visited.
There was the colorful straw Ute Creek bag and cabin shoes, the crisp cotton lawn dress and rubber soled espadrilles she wore to the cabin. I never remember seeing her in pants. There was the amazement that she could drive a stick-shift truck, and she could wiggle her ears. There were the scary late night potty runs when she would appear without her perfect teeth after we hammered on the ceiling with our broom handle--the water softener whining like a ghost in the laundry room. There were hanging bags filled with dresses and peplumed suits from the Denver Dry Goods, pill-box hats and chunky-heeled shoes--a 12-year-old runway model's dream.
And there were always the days when she would pay us kids a quarter for the first one to find her keys, or her watch. There was the day she couldn't find the black organ shoes and those times she simply ignored the stop signs on the way to Bernie's Super 8. The way she would blow a stream of air across her upper lip and dab at her brow with the delicate handkerchief she always kept tucked in her blouse, singing "I must be losing my mind."

And the irony is....she was. There was the evening daddy asked her to play O, Danny Boy and she turned, her face puzzled like a little girl, and asked him, "Now how does that one go?"
When her youngest son was found alone, face-down on the floor of his apartment three days after his death, it was the last of her untroubled days. When my dad died shortly after his 50th birthday, it was her undoing. I met my grandad's plane, but the woman who was with him wasn't my grandmother. As we sat and visited in our sorrow, she asked my mother "Who was that nice little girl who picked us up at the airport?" My grandmother would have shamed the woman who struck my grandad with the shower head as he tried to get her ready for the funeral, but she wasn't there. The sweet grandmother with her impeccable manners and good taste would have been appalled at the lady who reached across the table and took food off my plate. And she would have never snuck my father's fishing knife into her luggage as we divided up his things.

Some of the moments were funny, like the time the hospital confiscated her nail file as she checked in for her evaluation, and then produced the fishing knife less than an hour later to cut out a tag from her sweater. I couldn't help but giggle at the scorch marks from the aluminum pans she had heated in the microwave and the way she mixed Mountain Dew with Scotch she kept hidden in the kitchen.

But the day she went to the Alzheimer's wing in Fruita wasn't funny. My grandad went with her so she wouldn't be alone. He took his lazy boy chair and their television, and left behind the glorious double pianos she had played her whole life. He seemed to know neither of them would ever be coming back. He caught pneumonia around Thanksgiving and we thought he would die. But with my grandmother alone, disoriented and frightened, he rallied enough to move back into their room. Fight as he might, though, he couldn't keep this modest refined girl he had married from wandering the halls in the nude, and he couldn't convince her to eat. She died of starvation shortly before Christmas--her body simply forgot to eat. We buried her in the snow overlooking the White River Valley that she adored. Less than two weeks later, we returned to lay my grandad to rest beside her.


I miss her so deeply sometimes it hurts. Her beauty went beyond the Biblical beauty of Esther--it seeped from her every pore. Champion of the underdog, generous to a fault. She was a musician supreme and a lover of art. Her taste in clothing, furnishings housewares and music was Epicurean. She was a small town girl with global knowledge and big city refinement. I sometimes pray for God to bring her back, which I'm pretty certain he won't do.

But I know without a doubt that I will see her again. And when I walk through the gates of heaven, I won't be surprised if she is playing the piano, having become the indispensable concert pianist of heaven's event calendar. And as corny as it sounds, I'm pretty sure the tune she'll be playing will be Danny Boy and my dad will be singing at her side.

Body Image Breaks Through Gender Lines--the cost of the beauty industry on our boys

Click here and watch "Onslaught"

 There is a little game I've always enjoyed playing with my girls called, "Find the 10." I like to play this game with them when we are in public places requiring various stages of undress...places like Water World and Six Flags, Long Beach and rodeo carnivals. You know, places where massive amounts of young women are in sub-massive amounts of clothing.


The goal is to find the young lady who could walk right off the barefoot-burning concrete, sand, or sawdust and onto the glossy front cover of Cosmo, Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Self, Madmoiselle, Marie Claire, or one of the other dozens magazines that bombard us from the grocery check-out line, every month, with another gorgeous body. I’m not unreasonable. There’s an allowance for makeup and hair styling that simply can't be maintained at a water park, a certain give-and-take for acne, or crooked teeth—subtle imperfections that can be covered-up or hidden. What we're after here, I explain, is the thin, well-toned natural beauty with proportional breasts and thighs, a slender waist, no paunch, no muffin-tops, and a dainty derrière—no cellulite.


I know you know where I’m going with this. The point, and you already know it, is there are no 10’s. There is sometimes a smattering of 7’s and 8’s, maybe, maybe, on a real good day a 9 comes along. But I’ve never been let down, not once. At the end of the day, when it’s all been said and done, there are no real 10’s.


I have spent years telling my daughters that the girls they see on the magazine covers are there for a reason. And that reason is that they are the ABnormal, not the norm. They need to understand the truth about classic beauty and its portrayal: The truth is, nobody wants to see somebody normal on the front of a magazine (or a Greek statue or a Reuban painting for that matter.) People see normal every day. The public wants something remarkable, show-stopping if they are going to pay money for it and give it a certain amount of worship or respect.


To ask magazine producers and advertisers to put average girls, the ones with poochy bellies and jiggly thighs, cottage cheese on their butts, and too-big or too-small bustlines, noses and lips, in their photo shoots is like asking car magazines to run pictures of faded Hondas and four-door Chryslers that you see every day on your commute to work. It’s like asking outdoor magazines to eliminate photos of breath-taking mountain peaks and dramatic sunsets over glacier floats and replace them with shots of average hills and run-of-the-mill twighlights.


So if we understand that these human bodies are no different from car bodies, then WHY are young women STILL BELIEVING that they should look like these women? After all this time, aren’t they smart enough to know, or haven’t they had a mother smart enough to tell them that those women are abnormal for a reason? Haven’t they had anybody tell them, “You won’t, can’t and shouldn’t look like that.”


But the truth is, you can tell them and tell them, but they won’t believe. Ask me, I teach high school.


But lately, and here’s the worse part, I’ve seen something even more disturbing. We’ve overlooked the cost of the beauty industry on the American boy. As our girls have been bombarded with these images, so have our boys, and they’ve been paying close attention. Ask a typical high-school boy what is beautiful, and he will spit back the name of whoever is the most recent magazine cover or movie show-stopper. For example, which boy in America didn’t receive the message, the minute Transformers was released, that “hot girls” look and act like Megan Fox, leaning over an engine with her breasts blossoming from a tank top and her backside blooming from beneath her mini skirt or shorts. I mean, wasn’t she abnormally “hot” enough then? But show high schoolers a picture of Megan Fox after plastic surgery and the girls will grimace. The boys, however, say, “she’s hotter.” Look at a photo of Heidi Montag before plastic surgery, and she will garner envy from almost every girl as one of the few, abnormally rare, Barbie-perfect girls. Show her after plastic surgery and girls understand—she’s as miserable about her looks as they are. Show the boys and they say, “better.”

For years boys have been told what is beautiful and how to obtain it, and nobody has bothered to tell them differently. I’m pretty sure we’re due for a “turn around is fair game” scenario for American male teens, but I’m not sure it’s fair at all. To me, it’s comparable to the sexual revolution in the 1970’s that gave women permission to break the double standards held by men for centuries regarding casual sex. Now women can sleep around as much as they want…and skyrocketing Chlamydia infections, Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer are just one of the rewards. (Don’t get me started with the question of why is it that men can “carry” but women are the dadgum walking Petri dishes for sexually transmitted diseases??—that’s obviously another blog.)


Anyway, back to the boys………here’s the deal. Try being one.

I mean it. Back in my day the “bods” to emulate were Bo and Luke Duke, and I don’t remember ever drooling over their abs. Daisy got plenty of exposure, but try as I may, while on the opposite channel Jacqueline Smith climbed up the boat ladder as we looked down, I don’t ever remember seeing the Duke boys with their shirts off. Unbuttoned, yeah. Off, no. The older guys adopted a sort of Burt Reynolds look, but even so, he was a husky guy…no denying it.

Kurt Russel never stripped off his shirt that I remember in “The Professor that Wore Tennis Shoes” and even John Travolta, a bit later, was hot with his leather jacket or skin-tight Wranglers ON, not off. I mean, weren’t we girls titillated when Tom Cruise slid out in his boxers and a white oxford shirt? Where was the competition? Any boy could do it. Even though we girls were blowing out and feathering away our hair, and crash dieting, and repeating “we must, we must, we must increase our bust,” trying to look like Cheryl Ladd or Heather Locklear, guys back then could just get away with either: a) a great smile or b) great hair. If you had both…………oh baby, you were an ultimate fox.

Those days are gone. Try competing with Taylor Lautner. Even Taylor Lautner couldn’t compete with Taylor Lautner. Cute wouldn’t do it………….it had to be “ripped.” Have you seen these Holywood Hunks lately? They could out bench-press Bo and Luke any day. Starsky and Hutch look like a couple of dweebs beside Channing Tatum and Josh Duhamel. Not only can Zach Efron dance, he can shoot hoops, and sport a six-pack. When even Orlando, who got his biggest break playing an elf, has a bod-to-go, what is a 15-year-old boy to do? When Isaiah Mustafa pops up on the TV nowadays, the message is you have to do it all—Old Spice Style—and have the body to match.


And girls aren’t helping. Just as for decades men have held women to the impossible ideals enforced by Hollywood and the media, now girls are expecting the same from their men. I was appalled when my 13-year-old daughter and friend were disappointed when they saw one of the cute high school athletes this summer at the pool and giggled because he didn’t have a six-pack.


How fair is that? Studies are beginning to show that self-image issues are one of the leading concerns for young males now-a-days. We girls, who thought that boys never worried about their weight, are now teasing them when they don’t have pecs that look like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s. For boys it’s not just about staying fit, they have to “bulk up” to measure up. And no matter how often they hit the weight room, they need to be told that they will probably never cut it. It’s going to take anabolic steroids to really get the job done. Not many 17-year-olds have the luxury of a personal trainer and a $4 million contract that makes their job “getting ripped.”

Old guys aren’t helping either. I spent all last night watching George Clooney do pull-ups and push-ups just to prove what………….that he could? I liked him better with a striped prison outfit on. How long are Denzel Washington and Matthew McConaughey going to keep it up? I’m tired of looking at old men’s butts in the movies and giant boys with their pants pulled down past their tenderloins on the walls of Abercrombie and Hollister. (I was just informed that those are called “sex lines” by my 17-year-old daughter. What is a mother to do?)


I guess we finally figured if women could be held to impossible standards of nakedness, then so could men. I wish we as females had enough sympathy to feel sorry for these next generations of males that will grow up with impossible standards, low self-esteems, eating disorders, as well as the baldness, cancer and rage addiction that come with steroid use.


Just as women seem to be coming into a more enlightened age of Dove Young Women’s project, shows like Mad Men that celebrate female curves, studies that help us understand that a runway model from 1972 would have to lose over 12 pounds to make it in the industry today, we are seeing the see-saw tip the other direction. Sure there are girls who will still seek to reach an impossible standard of thinness and plumped parts, but we’ve made a lot of headway. But I’m afraid that we’ll finally, just maybe get used to liking ourselves and gloat while the other side of the table says, “Just a salad, please—I’m on a diet.”


I’m afraid that a generation from now, my daughters will be at the waterparks and beaches with their sons having to tell them, “Here’s a game I like to play. My mom taught it to me. It’s called Find a 10.” And their sons will groan, like my daughters do now.


Or maybe, just maybe, we could just finally learn to love each other just the way we are and quit trying to be something that Hollywood has always been good at—fiction.

Sent to you from someone who loves you--send it on!

Image by Shoes on Wires via Flickr

Spirograph, Fat Shoppers, and Urban Myth--I believe in intelligent design

With the blood-curdling vision of two very fat shoppers careening around a corner of the produce section, I woke up last night, on the hottest night yet of the summer, to a freezing cold breeze blowing through the window. Heart hammering, brow in a cold sweat, I kept repeating over and over, "I believe in intelligent design...I believe in intelligent design."

Last night my daughter dragged me onto the back patio to look at the moon, one side going flat like a car tire in a construction zone, and told me, "They say that tonight Mars will be the size the of the moon when it rises!" And she was adamant. "Tonight is the closest Mars will ever be to the earth in centuries, and if you don't see it, you'll miss it!"

And so I, like all good mothers and well-rounded women of science should do, stayed up waiting to see this phenomenon that would never be witnessed again by even my grandchildren. I pictured them sitting at the foot of my rocking chair as I described the red planet, rising in the east like a giant rubber dodge ball, the god of war riding his majestic chariot beneath the glowing moon, two twin orbs of light and fire...

Am I just stupid? "They say" should have been my first tip-off, as if I wasn't smart enough to pick up on the likelihood of a planet the same size as the moon. And the faint voice ringing in my head, "Didn't somebody say this like...five years ago?" wasn't that enough, or the fact that she got this info from a friend on....email???

Please tell me I wasn't the only one duped again by an urban myth. Please tell me I'm not the only one who still shudders when I think of all the spare change slots I've reached into and narrowly escaped without being infected with AIDS from the hypodermic needle. Reassure me that I'm not alone at Walmart doing shallow chest breathing, looking for the tell-tale bottle of red hair dye in the bathroom trash can when I can't find my daughters in electronics like they said they'd be. Calm me by telling me that the car that just flashed its lights isn't really going to pull out an AKA-some-number and open fire in a drive-by shooting...that the man asking if I lost the $10 bill by the gas pump isn't going to slap duct-tape on my mouth, stuff me in my trunk and drive away...that I haven't contracted breast cancer from all the frozen water bottles I've drunk from, and the ones I've discarded aren't really bombs left in the neighbor's yard.

T

Turns out, according to Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer for Space.com,

 that Mars and the earth are always this close (about 34 million miles close) together about every 26 months. It's just the way the orbits work out. It's like a Spirograph--you know, that cool plastic toy from your childhood that created cosmic looking geographical designs sure to make Sputnik and the Russians sick with envy. It's the off-centeredness of the spinning orbs that makes the converging and diverging lines.

But that's when I realized we are all doomed. DOOMED! Because, I don't know about you...but I remember Spirograph being one of THEEE most frustrating toys I ever owned as a child. (Okay, it was my big brother's..I never got anything cool). My designs, not one, ever turned out like the examples in the little book. Spirograph designs like the one above are as big an urban myth as the bride that cooked to death in a tanning bed. You know it's true. Every single time, just when you thought it was all going so swimmingly, little teeth in little gears humming around the inside of an ellipse, plastic ballpoint working in harmony with God and nature...

BOOM!

The pen would glitch, the gear would jump, the ellipse would slip, and with a noise like grinding teeth, your perfect poly-dex-hedron-lypsy would look like Phyllis Diller's hair.

34 million miles away..................sounds like a lot, huh? Well, think again. Imagine that the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles, or about 8 light minutes) is compressed to the thickness of a typical sheet of paper. The diameter of the Milky Way (100,000 light years) would require a 310 mile high stack of paper, while the distance to the Andromeda galaxy (at 2 million light years one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye) would require a stack of paper more than 6000 miles high! (That's not me talking, that's William P. Blair of Johns Hopkins University)


But that means (this is me talking now) that in Bill's terms...the space between Earth and Mars last night was less than the thickness of a piece of paper.


Get me a paper sack, I think I'm going to faint! The only other time I have ever felt this vagal was when Mr. Wright, my 8th grade science teacher, told us that if the earth ever stopped spinning we would all fly off into outer space at 1,000 miles per hour. I spent months chaining my ankle to the bed leg at night in case the cessation of rotation occurred during my sleep.


34 million miles.....what in the world keeps Earth and Mars from colliding like two fat old ladies wheeling through the produce department with only 30 minutes left before their respective dinner parties? ...................LUCK?


Last night I went to bed, after Mars--the size of a pea to the moon's giant beach ball--finally rose. But I went to bed wondering why people who worry about hair dye and hypodermic needles and drinking bottles are even able to sleep knowing that the earth is revolving around the sun at...oh...approximately 64 THOUSAND miles per hour.


Hmmmmm. Maybe they can't. Maybe like me, when the cold breeze hits on a hot summer night, they too sit bolt upright in bed and realize that in all this cosmic design there has to be a larger hand at work. A creator that can function in terms of light seconds and half-widths of paper.


An exterior designer who chuckles as we chain ourselves to the bed leg even as we hurtle through space, several directions at once, at thousands of miles per hour without a second thought. 

Brain Stem Exhaustion--A Little Thing Called Teacher Inservice

Inservice (see in-service): a hyphenated, compound adjective pertaining to training a group of professionals who are already in said profession: in-service training.


If you, as I am, are in said teaching profession, inservice (and its plural form: inservii) is (are) a noun…a thing...and a severe reality of education. Somewhere back in the 1980's, an administrator named Louie Livermore needed a kitschy word to call the first-of-year mandatory meetings concerning such nail-biting items as proper dress protocol for females (absolutely no more than three pairs of colored slouch socks), and drug enforcement (yes, Mrs. Stucky, that white ring on the boys' back pockets is formed from a chew can) as well as mandatory state assessment (such as the revolutionary do the work or fail theory). But Louie knew that teachers had begun to grumble about having far, far too many meetings, so he created inservice.

Administrators for the last 30 years have followed suit until inservice has become the catch-word for the mandatory yearly adjustment that must be performed on teachers who have been outofservice for over ten weeks on summer vacation, requiring them to return to school a minimum of three days ahead of students.

Unfortunately, Livermore, a star football center who failed sophomore English three times, went on to instruct at the college level, specializing in a pedagogical course called "Training Content Teachers." In this course, Livermore fell victim to another popular theory of the 1980's called euphamasia (a technique attributed to the Regan Administration in which a large word is given an odd ending which creates a new, non-existant word in order to confuse listeners.) To put it simply, Livermore, like most people involved in education at the highest levels, mistook CONTENT the noun for CONTENT the adjective. CONtent teachers deliver a specific classroom curriculum. ConTENT teachers do not drool in meetings.


What a horrible disappointment it has proven to be for graduate after graduate who have succomed to the Livermore pedagogical philosophy: Inservice creates content teachers. Alas, it seems that yet another set-back in the entire educational system could be solved with a simple grammar lesson.