She's On To Us (for my Sophomore English students)

“She’s on to us.”

            The classroom of tenth graders shifted uneasily in their seats.  Not enough so you would notice, or anyone would notice just casually walking by the open classroom door.  In fact, anyone walking by would think Miss Salt was a teacher who knew her stuff better than most.  She wasn’t exciting exactly, but she didn’t put you to sleep instantly.  The students were amused by her daily attempts to make learning fun.  It wasn’t always fun but the attempts were amusing.  This was a teacher who read stories aloud in funny accents and who wasn’t afraid to tell a joke or two in the middle of a grammar exercise. The jokes weren't funny but at least they were something to break the monotony.

            Jaret’s wings shook under his wrestling jacket, fluttering against the fabric with a light rustle. 

            Miss Salt was the kind of teacher who told parents on Back to School Night that she was so grateful to the parents for having such wonderful children.  This was the kind of teacher who let you turn your work in a day or two late if you were up past midnight texting your boyfriend or playing video games.  This was the kind of teacher who didn’t write up dress code violations for your black striped hoodie.  This was the kind of teacher who didn’t give you detention for listening to your headphones in class.

            A spark flew out of Maddie’s finger.  She put her hand in her pocket to snub it out.  Today something was up. 

            “I tell you, she knows,” Elijah said.  Morgan shook her head. 

            “Impossible,” she said.

            “She knows something,” Brayden whispered.  He mixed his breakfast potion into his faery water and stirred it with his mind like he always did but then he stopped. Looked up.  There she was, watching him.  He took up the bottle and shook it, smiling like an innocent human boy.

            Kat arranged her hair over her pointy ears.  Jack lifted his hoodie over his. 

            The room went silent.

            “You know, I was going to talk about grammar today,” Miss Salt said.  “But I have changed my mind.  Today we are going to talk about something real. Something that you should all be aware of.  I mean, I know you think I don’t know, but I do know.  I know what you all are.”

            “No human can know about us,” Roman said under his breath to Robert.  “We’re going to have to take her out right here.”

            “No, not Miss Salt!” Robert said, though he knew Roman spoke the truth. 

            “No mercy,” said Terise.  “We have to think of our own safety.”

            The plan to mainstream into human society usually worked, but once in a while there would be one human who messed up the plan.  One who knew too much.  Maybe there was a little bit of Faery Tale Creature in Miss Salt too, who knew?  Maybe there was a great grandmother who was a witch or a great uncle werewolf.  Perhaps she had a bit of the faerie dust herself through her veins.  Whatever, it wasn’t enough to save her.  She was human enough to put them at risk.

            The students were not old enough to remember the great faery massacres of the late sixties when groups of faery tale creatures made the mistake of thinking the hippies and flower children would be trustworthy friends.  They were certainly not old enough to have personal experience with the horrible faery smushing that occurred all over England and America in the early twentieth century when little girls all over took up the hobby of pressing faeries into the pages of books like dried flowers.  But their parents and grandparents and great grandparents knew.  The students had been brought up with the warnings since their infancy.  Do not let the humans know what you are.  And if one does see you and realize, kill her immediately.

            “I know what you are,” Miss Salt says.  “I see you.  You think I don’t see you?  You think I don’t see the dust you leave on the floor, glittering like moonlight?  The ways your jackets bulk up behind you to hide your wings?  You think I don’t see that you are made of magic? You're a bunch of Faery Tale Creatures, every last one of you.”

            The class sighed collectively in regret and a tinge of sadness.  They were sorry about what they had to do.  They were so very sorry.

            Hunter stood up.  Megan and Megan blocked the door.  Darien cracked his knuckles.  They would make it quick.  She would not have to suffer.

            Miss Salt took a step back towards the cupboard.  “What’s going on?” she asked.

            “Just be still,” said Von.

            “It won’t hurt a bit,” said Eric.
            "No," Miss Salt said.  "But this will."

            Miss Salt reached into the cupboard and whipped out a giant, shimmering sack.  She snapped it out and it billowed, smelling of bad children and the terror of a thousand captured faery tale creatures.  It fell over the heads of the students and their wings and pointed ears and fire fingers and magical powers all crashed into one another.  Everything went dark as Miss Salt cinched the sack closed on the wails of protest from her tenth grade class.

            Krampus came to the door then, his saucy hooves tick tacking against the floor.  She passed the bag along to him.

            “Thanks Babe,” he said.  “You know they taste better when they’re FTCs.”

            “Spare me the details” Miss Salt said.  “Just pick me up at 8 and take me somewhere nice for dinner.”

            Miss Salt watched him go and then sat at her desk.  She had some papers to correct and she hated to get behind in her work.  

Waiting

This is what I said at the prayer service at Christian Brothers High School:

When my youngest daughter was small, I taught her not to interrupt.  If she had something to say to me while I was talking to an adult, she had to put a patient hand on my arm and wait in silence until I could give her the full light of my attention.  This is a really hard thing for a kid to do, and she wasn’t always patient, but she did it with full faith that her needs would be met.  She only had to wait.

Waiting isn’t easy for little kids.  Frankly it isn’t easy for any of us. Nobody likes being told to wait, especially in this time in human history when we don’t have to wait for much.  When I was your age, now brace yourselves, I had to go to an actual library to look something up if I wanted to do research.  What a wonderful time this is to be a student!  Now when you want to know something, you have millions of texts available at your fingertips. The whole world is available to you and who needs a patient hand when you can access it immediately whenever you want?  This is a powerful tool for knowledge and connection and the world is already a better place for it.

Yet waiting still has an important place in the human condition. One of the things I love most about our faith is the tradition of seasons, holidays, and special time out to reflect and pray.  Advent is awesome and I’m telling you this because in very few other places in life are you going to hear that it’s okay to be still a minute and wait.

Learning to wait is very important.

For example, if you look out at a field in winter with an untrained eye, you might think it’s just a bunch of dead and muddy dirt.  There is nothing growing above the surface. It’s all chaos and immaturity.  But the gardener who loves the land looks at that field and knows that fallow times are necessary for the growth of healthy crops.  The gardener who loves the land looks at that field and knows that just below the surface, seeds are germinating, bulbs are resting, the soil itself is waiting and rejuvenating for the time when the days grow longer and it will sprout green again.  Without the resting and waiting time, the rows become exhausted and will refuse to grow anything but weeds.

If you look back in our own American history, we’ve experienced times of waiting that on the surface looked bleak.  We are often taught in school that the Civil Rights Movement in this country began with Rosa Parks not giving up her seat on a bus, and the young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leading a boycott that resulted in a chain of events leading to freedom and equity for all.  These events did occur and these famous names are great heroes in our American narrative, but did you know that when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a very young man younger than you, he was riding a bus with his teacher on the way home from a speech and elocution contest where he won first prize?  And did you know that on that long bus ride, even after he had achieved so much through study and hard work and integrity, he and his teacher were forced to stand in order to give able bodied white passengers their seats?  It would be many years to wait before young Martin would take an even greater seat as Reverend of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and lead that boycott and make that famous speech at Washington Monument.

And did you know that all during those years when Martin was a child, the pastor who preceded him at that church, a man by the name of Dr. Vernon Johns, the grandson of slaves, was pushing for social change, giving galvanizing sermons from the pulpit, selling fresh produce outside the church after services to nourish his community? Vernon Johns was waiting, preparing his people to fight for the bright at the end of the long unlit tunnel of oppression.  When Dr. Vernon Johns stepped down to make way for the young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the seeds were already planted.  The wait for civil rights for all Americans was too long by an eternity, but during that wait, whole communities full of people like Dr. Vernon Johns and many others were preparing, waiting, acting, praying and having faith that their work would burst into full bloom and chase away the night.

Joseph and Mary faced an oppressive government in their own time.  Just think of that young couple, poor, roaming the land on a donkey, looking for a place to stay.  Moms out there, you know how uncomfortable that must have been, nine months pregnant on the back of a donkey. They did not give up, but set about the quiet work of preparation, in the fullness of their expectation of the light that was about to come. They knew the whole time that they were deeply loved as the whole world waited in quiet preparation for the birth of the Baby that would be our Lord and Brother, and Who would teach us all how to live and love in the light for eternity.

If we want to know more about it, we don’t need to charge up anything but Scripture. According to the Gospel of Luke, Chapter Three, Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

So we wait.

Maybe you are thinking, that’s nice Wanket.  What does that have to do with me?

We your teachers look at you, our beautiful, wonderful students. And what to some might look like chaos and immaturity looks to us like process and preparation.  So much of what we are engaged in here at CB is one big long advent, a waiting period, a process of learning and preparation and deep and quiet study while you become who you are, and while you decide what kind of man or woman you are going to be in the light of our God. 

What can you do to honor this season of Advent? 

You can do your reading and your homework.  Actual reading and homework. Education, in the words of my colleague Mr. Delgado, is not the point.  It is the process. Allow yourself the dignity of quiet, contemplative and deep study of the material of your education.

You can work for social justice.  Actual work. Allow yourself to be a part of the sacred preparation for the light of a family who needs food, a child who needs a book, a community that needs healing. 

You can pray.  Actually pray.  Allow yourself the joy of a deep friendship with a God who loves you and wants to be allowed into your heart more than anything.

You can listen.  Actually listen.  Allow yourself to read the Scriptures, to sit in meditation, to listen for the voice of God in your life.

You can wait with a patient hand, waiting through the long night for the light that is surely coming, waiting in the knowledge that you are deeply, and truly loved.

Ten Deep Thoughts on Labor Day

• I got my first job when I was eleven years old.  I taught swim lessons at the local public pool for two dollars an hour.  I have worked almost every summer of my life since then. 

• Only teachers think working over the summer is a thing to write about in a blog.

• Jobs I’ve had: swimming instructor, babysitter, hardware store cashier, telemarketer, telephone operator, substitute teacher, elementary school teacher, high school teacher, adult school teacher, food service worker, warehouse inventory taker, laundry and dry cleaning worker, lifeguard, publicity writer.

• I was almost killed at work at the Ace Hardware in Santa Cruz during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Though a big oak desk saved me, the people working next door at the coffee roasters were struck by falling beams and died.  All they were trying to do that day was make a living. They were kind and friendly and I think about them every day as a reminder for just about everything.

• The best job: teaching.

• The worst job: dry-cleaning but mostly because the boss who ran the operation was a weirdo who made racist comments about the non-English speaking fellow who did the steam pressing.

•  Any job can be hell if the people in charge are corrupt. The luxury of work that is fulfilling is just that, a luxury.  Most people in the world aren't so lucky. Dignity and fairness in the workplace are human rights integral to a true democracy.

• I took two yoga classes this Labor Day weekend with Sukhbir Kaur, Nirinjan Kaur and Gina Garcia, teachers who expressed that there was nowhere else they would rather be in that moment than sharing their knowledge with their students.  They were enthusiastic, generous, patient and funny. I will be blessed by their challenge to be better and more loving for the rest of my week.

• Good teachers remind me that labor is a creative gift.  My work with students, stories, my own teachers, children and home is where Holy Spirit flows through my life.  Good teachers remind me to express my joy to my students so that they know that teaching them is my privilege.  In the same way, having a home to tend, children to look after and stories to write are all evidence of Spirit at work and I am so, so grateful.

• Nonetheless, three-day weekends off work are nice.

I don't know who took this picture but this is where I used to work.

My Cast of Characters

In Carolyn See's marvelous book Making a Literary Life, she talks about a cast of characters that has inspired her throughout her writing career.  This was a brief list of people who stuck in her head and demanded to be figured out in her work.

As I enter the dreaded middle of my current novel, I think of my own cast.  Some are people I never even met personally.  Some aren't people.  Here goes:

1. My indifferent education.  Was anyone educated properly in the seventies and eighties?  My writing group friends and I discussed the question last time we met and the consensus around the kitchen table was probably not.  Twelve years spent under the radar meant twelve years of observation and writing practice and the kind of grinding boredom that forces you to cannibalize your own brain for some kind of nourishment. The sense of rattling around in a machine that doesn't know I'm there recurs in almost everything I write.

2.  Dani. There were a group of hippies at my college who weren't students.  They were vagabonds who slept in actual students' rooms and ate their food.  At the center was Dani.  This girl was skinny and had surfer blond hair and tan skin.  She wore long skirts and a satin robe with a dragon embroidered on the back.  She was the polar opposite of me in every particular and though I barely noticed her for the few weeks she hung around my dorm, I've been obsessed with her in the twenty-five years hence.

3. The street musician playing the Chapman stick and the girl with the blue hair.  When I was 15 my family took my New Yorker cousins sightseeing around San Francisco.  Near Ghirardelli Square I broke from the group to follow music echoing off the bricks.  Down a stairwell a dude sat alone on a stool playing this long-necked guitar thing and it sounded like everything I wanted in life. I'd seen a girl earlier that day just a few years older than me who had perfectly dyed blue hair.  It was an ombre effect, starting with navy at the roots and lightening to firecracker popsicle light blue at the ends. I bought a cassette from the man and have played it nonstop for the past twenty-eight years grasping at that perfect blue even though it always pops before I can touch it.

4. My husband.  The notion of a truly good, strong man.  The notion of a person with bottomless integrity.  The notion of the redemption that is possible with romantic love.

5. Randy.  The worst kid I ever taught.  He was nine years old and the whole school was terrified of him.  I've never met a more violent human being.  He was unbelievably fast. He could lay a kid flat and bleeding on the ground while you stood there.  Other teachers avoided him in the halls.  The entire class begged to be allowed to stay inside during recess to avoid being on the schoolyard with him.  He threatened to kill me every day. His last words to me were "I ain't trippin'."  I never taught him how to read.

6. Vietnam Veterans my friend's dad knew. In sixth grade, my friend's ex-military dad took us to a meeting of other Vietnam Veterans. These men suffered PTSD that prevented them from simple things such as enjoying the fair with their kids to being able to hold down a job.  Listening to grown men weep as they mourned fallen friends and their own broken lives stuck with me forever.

These people and situations keep coming up in different forms in most of my stories.  There are more than I've listed here, but this is a start. If you are a writer or artist, what are your characters that keep coming up in your work?  What human puzzles are you figuring out in your stories? 

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I love Back-To-School everything.  I love the sales on erasers, decorations with apples on them, new notebooks.  My God, new notebooks.

I love the smell of sharpened pencils. My classroom is all set up with paper on the bulletin boards, brand new maps on the walls, everything clean and ready. The desks wait empty in their hopeful rows.

This year at my school we are setting up an ipad system.  All of the students will have one, as well as a special Facebook-like media site where we will all communicate.  It will be an organizational hoopla.  There won’t be need for much paper, or many pencils.

I like ipads and even if I didn’t, this is all happening. Whatever, I’m down. At one point pencils were a new technology, and they were far better than etching out sums on the back of shovels with pieces of coal.

Screens don’t smell like anything, however, and that’s a drawback no one talks about.  I love the smell of books and the feel of paper stacked thick in a binder. It’s so cool and smooth. I love doodles in margins and the notebook covers of students who love to draw and I love the sounds of pages turning.

Mr. Sketch markers, Sharpies, new backpacks, fresh uniforms, clean shoes, haircuts.

I love the August issue of Seventeen and the September issue of Vogue.  I love corduroys even though I hate to wear them and I love wool and sweaters even though it will be six months before it isn’t ninety-nine degrees outside.  For Back-To-School you iron your shirts and wear stockings and skirts and wine colored lipstick and rust colored nail polish.  You shuffle through red and orange leaves and wave pennants at football games and swear to yourself that you are making a fresh start.   

And you might make a fresh start. It’s all possible during Back-To-School, the witching season when you find out how much you’ve grown over the summer. When you find out if you’ve changed as much as you think you have.

Maybe you have.  Maybe everything is possible now.  This is my twentieth Back-To-School time.  I know the magic of a fresh pencil.  I know the promises made between the students in the rows and the teacher in the front. We say so many things we think we mean. We are so pure, so grandiose, so full of hot air.  But Back-To-School says that this year the dreams of students and their teachers will all be manifested. Back-To-School says that education equals freedom and this year we will be freer than we've ever been.

Palomino Blackwings, the best pencils ever.