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.

My Life In Exercise

* I started swimming lessons when I was 5.  I loved swimming. My parents took us wonderful places for long swimming picnic days and when it was time to leave I would hide underwater and hope that my mom would give up looking for me and leave me there to live.

* Dance classes began when I was 7. Tap, jazz and ballet, culminating in snazzy satiny recitals in June. I begged my mom to move the car out of the garage so I could spend hours in the stink and dust practicing my steps and choreographing my own dances.

*  Swim team from 9 until I aged out at 14, which included getting to practice at 7 in the mornings all summer long. I never missed a practice but I was still the slowest girl at all the meets. I had endurance. I killed the mile swim fundraisers because people didn't believe someone as short and slow as me could do it so they always pledged per lap. 

* Throughout college: swimming, hiking, going to the gym, biking along the sea cliff road, running, dancing.

* Early twenties: Triathlons. Road races.  I was always came in second to the last but I did not care. I felt invincible.

* Pregnancies: Gyms. Long walks.  Afterwards, lots of jump roping, cross-country skiing, Nordic track, African dance.

* Gyms: Muscle gyms, family gyms, neighborhood gyms, co-ed gyms, women-only gyms.

Then, for nearly three years. . . almost nothing. Once a week dance classes, a few walks here and there.  A neglected gym membership. Or two.

I never thought I could be someone who goes a whole month without exercising. It used to be not even a rainstorm kept me from my morning run. Lately I've skipped it more days a week than not. Work took over because I let it.  I stopped fighting for time for my health and so the rest of my life flooded in like a rogue wave. I got too stressed out so all I wanted to do was sleep and rest which made me stressed out. I burst the seams of my clothes and had to buy new ones but that wasn't what bothered me.  What bothered me was how not alive I felt. 

This summer I'm really back for the first time in about three years. It astonishes me that my body waited for me that long, but it faithfully did.  I began a yoga practice a year and a half ago, and the more I did that, the more I remembered what it felt like to be alive again.

Today I ran for an hour and then did an hour and a half yoga class. Tomorrow morning, the gym. 

Always, the neighborhood pool with my little girl where we swim until the pool closes.

When the lifeguards blow the whistle and call out closing time, I'm tempted to hide underwater in hopes that they will leave me there to live. Because for the first time in the longest, that's what it feels like I'm finally doing.

Me in the middle with some of my favorite hiking pals.

Mistaken Identity

Today in the middle of a five mile walk I stopped in at the Rite Aid to take a break and look at make up.  I didn't want to buy anything.  I just felt like looking at the little pans of powdered hope before I hit the road again.

I was feeling pretty cute if you want to know the truth. I’ve been exercising all summer and I’m tan from swimming with my kid. I was wearing a tank top that in my mind showed off my glorious biceps, and a ball cap through which my swishy ponytail swished. 

Then this man I don’t know came up to me and said, “Is that Phyllis?”

“No,” I said. As soon as I turned he jumped back a little and looked sheepish.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I thought you were Phyllis.”

“I hope she’s a nice person,” I said.

“She is.  She’s—my neighbor,” the man said. And looked even more sheepish before he hustled away.

That’s when I realized that his neighbor Phyllis is an old woman. He had mistaken me for an old-aged woman and once he saw I was a medium-aged woman he became embarrassed.  How do I know this?  Because it’s happened before.  I never get mistaken for women named, say, Brandy or Kesha.  People come up when they can only see my hair and behind and call me names like Elsie and Phyllis. There I was feeling saucy and awesome, and this guy was thinking, oh look there goes my little old neighbor.  I should go up and say hello.  Maybe see if she needs some help crossing the street.

I'm never going back to dying my hair.  I'm not even tempted.  I love my hair long and grey. It's thicker than it was when I dyed it.  Regular dye jobs were not working out for me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that every box of hair color was an environmental nightmare. I'm not reconsidering the decision I made three and a half years ago to let my hair grow out in its natural white and grey.

My kid is brushing my hair as I write this.  She's applying oils and unctions and it smells great.  She just looked over my shoulder at what I'm writing. "I love your hair," she says.  "I don't think you look like an old lady."

Okay.  But still. Phyllis?  Damn.  

A former student and me.