Snow Day

For the most part, being a high school teacher is nothing like being a high school student, but there are three notable exceptions.

1)   When you’re sitting on the toilet, taking care of business between classes, and the bell rings.  I remember feeling like that moment was epitomic of adolescence: some nebulous source of adult control invading everything in your life that should be private. 

2)   Waking up in the middle of the night to the announcement of a snow day and turning off your alarm.  “Fuck learning,” say the merciful heavens.  The next morning, when you’re watching the school closures cycle alphabetically through in blue and yellow on the bottom of the news (just to get that rush again every fifteen minutes), and the weatherman acts like this storm is a bad thing, you’re confused.  What kind of bizarre world could he be living in?

3)   The specificity and inflexibility of your day.  Every day, homeroom ends at 7:55, first period starts at 7:59.  You eat at 12:34, pee between 12:56 and 1:06.  This adds to the excitement of snow days – you catch a glance at the clock at exactly 7:59 and the fact that you’re not in first period gives you a sad kind of adrenaline rush, as if when the clock strikes 8:00 and you’re still not there, you’ll automatically become some kind of unhinged maniac.

The moment that I realized I first wanted to teach is precise in retrospect, but I misinterpreted it at the time.  I was volunteering at a community mental health clinic in North Philadelphia, trying to get a taste of a possible career in community mental health services.

Since you can’t exactly “try out” counseling without a license, I ended up doing intakes and meeting with clients who needed supports that were not strictly talk therapy.  Liz was a woman with bipolar disorder who wrote spiral notebooks full of poetry during her manic phases.  She’d always wanted someone to edit them.  Dr. Ruth, a deeply enlightened woman of over three hundred pounds who ran the clinic, thought this would be a perfect project for me, the rogue English major intern. 

After two sessions, Dr. Ruth told me that it offended Liz when I wouldn’t eat the cookies and bananas she offered me during session, like I thought I was too good for them.  Hearing this made me feel like the man I worked with who had pervasive developmental disorder and couldn’t tell the difference between happy and sad faces, but didn’t know that he couldn’t.

There was an impasse between me and patients; maybe it was caused by socioeconomic lines (which I’ve always found make distinctions about the sources of dignity), or by their mental illness, or maybe it was something more basic and universal, worsened by my preoccupation with it: another brand of what I’d felt when I first got to Haverford and everyone was talking about where they summered.   

I showed up for my next session with Liz ready to gorge myself on the Snackwell’s cookie pack she offered me.  She wanted to talk about Dylan Thomas and “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”  She knew it was about death, but as a sufferer of insomnia, it took on a poignant double meaning for her.  Her sleeplessness was her poetic muse, and so sleep began to represent the dying of the light, for her.  We talked about this, and then she wanted my help writing her own villanelle. 

At first, trying to fit her frenetic verse into the strict structure of a villanelle was like trying to cram hips into a girdle, but slowly the foundations began to emerge.  The villanelle has a sturdiness about it, the repeating lines like stacked wooden rafters holding the poem up.  Somehow the solidity of her product managed to occupy the entire space between us.  I was thrilled at this, even as I knew it did not mean I had given her anything she didn’t already have, or that she’d remember me. 

Driving back through West Philly and then to the Main Line, I felt that adrenaline that comes with an acute sense of purpose. 

I wanted to write down this story today because I wanted recall that feeling.  On a snow day, sometimes I feel guilty at how happy I am for the reprieve. For so many miles of slick whitened roads between my classroom and me.  

Eat, Pray, Love: A woman’s daily commute through Saugus and Medford.

It doesn’t have the same ring, does it? 

I’ve picked up a couple new hobbies since returning from my trip.  The first is not blogging. The second is traveling vicariously through one of the better inventions of the nineties: screen-savers.  My roommate has a chrome-cast, which projects internet TV onto the physical TV, and instead of turning it off after we use it, we tend to let it cycle through its apparently endless photos of stormy Irish seascapes and gothic cathedrals at dusk: gray and backlit-bright at the same time.

I watch them as if expecting them to come together in a narrative and I miss traveling viscerally.  It reminds me of homesickness, though logically it is the direct opposite of that feeling.  But the act  and sights of traveling itself aren’t all that I miss. 

My best friend’s online dating profile used to claim “I’m writing a novel.  Isn’t that embarrassing?”  (She had the obligatory self-deprecation down much better than me: I went for the admission that I regularly buy fresh organic vegetables only to let them rot in the fridge while I order buffalo chicken pizza.)   

It’s true: writing is embarrassing.  It’s like speaking for a really long time without letting anyone else get a word in edge-wise. Traveling wasn’t so much an excuse to write as an excuse to make an arrogant assumption – that people might actually want to read what I have to write. 

My failed attempt to get an Albanian pharmacist to understand that I had a sea urchin spine in my foot is interesting, but every failed attempt to get a Massachusetts tenth grader to understand that a book can have more than one theme feels unforgivably quotidian. 

Maybe it’s for partly this reason that when I think about writing, I mostly wonder how to finally write about Auschwitz.  About this bewildering confrontation with human fragility that I traveled to the home country of my forebears just to have.

And every day I travel the same few miles through Medford and Saugus, unremarkably, until last week when the car in front of me hit a man.

His whole body seemed to fold at the knees, like a marionette dropped suddenly.

My phone had just enough charge to call 911.

As he spoke in Portuguese and clutched his back, I thought improbably of the British rom com Love Actually because it’s the last time I’ve heard Portuguese spoken aloud.  You know the scene.  When the guy learns Portuguese to propose to that maid from the summer house, but the whole time she’s been learning English to propose to him! Gets me every time.   Makes it easy to buy Hugh Grant’s trite closing revelation that “love actually is all around us.”   It was strange how much he sounded like Colin Firth proposing, when in fact he was talking about the pain in his lower back, about when the ambulance would be there.    

Duh. Human fragility is quotidian, and close to home.  The distinction between what is and isn’t worth writing about has no more to do with geography than the distinction between what is and isn’t worth thinking about.  If any such dichotomy even exists, it’s imposed by the writer, and in my case, it’s been a cop out.   Yes, writing is embarrassing, but I’ve always been one to embarrass myself.    

How do you feel about reading? Explain your answer.

I posed this question to my new 9th graders as part of their first homework assignment. Here are some of the responses, all verbatim:

How I feel about reading is that I love to read books that I find very interesting and its very smooth all around.

I love to read especially books that have shiny covers.

I like to read, mostly fiction books because of the knowledge I never knew.

When it comes down to reading I am neutral about.

I feel good about reading because it is a good thing where you can occupied the mind and stuff.

I love English but I don't like putting that out there because I feel people will look at me weird as I'm a guy that writes poems about heartbreak and love.

I am starting to get mix feelings of reading because I love stories and books but the reading as tested wise I am not very good at not strong and it is not where I need to be.

I don't like reading because it takes thinking.

I don't like reading that much because it usually makes me tired because when I was younger I use to read so I could fall asleep.

Other reading classes bore me but you seem okay to be around.

I feel relaxed about reading because it makes me think in another world.

When I'm bored I read books and when I read them I could make like a movie in my head.

Until now I still don't like reading, I can say that I have only read one full chapter book in my whole life while others have completed several.

Do you have a boyfriend?

Sarajevo

I cannot begin to describe Sarajevo, except with adjectives that evade specificity (incidentally, those favored by students when they don’t really know what they mean: adjectives like complex, confusing, and unpredictable).  Remember those books for kids that have panels? You start with the bottom half of a flamingo and the top half of a flamingo, but you can turn the top pages so you get a giraffe’s tail under the flamingo’s head, or vice versa. These hybrid animals are the best metaphor I can muster for Sarajevo. 

I was standing at the corner of the Latin Bridge, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was famously assassinated. Looking up, there were rugged peaks, green with some craggy stone bald spots.  A whimsically elegant Austro-Hungarian library sat at the base of the mountain, across the street from the bridge with its white stone-working and arches. 

I looked down to the river, expecting to see the deep green water so characteristic of European towns.  Instead, it was the giraffe's tail: yellow and one foot deep, below ten feet of bullet-peppered and graffitied walls.  An empty bottle of baby oil was stuck bobbing in a dizzyingly circular current, until a dead cat floated by and tapped it with a still paw, releasing it on its way.  They both sailed down the tepid waters together.

Apparently Sarajevo’s the only place in the world besides Jerusalem where you can stand in a central spot, and see the spires of a Mosque, a Synagogue, a Catholic Cathedral, and an Orthodox Church.  I wish we lived in a world where this trivia wasn’t so impressive, where such a skyline didn’t remind me of a fantastical, impossible animal.

A student once told me that she remembers the smell of the United States.  That it was the first thing she noticed when she got off the plane from the Dominican Republic, at eight years old.  Countries have their own smell? I asked, struck by her poeticism.  She looked at me like I was an idiot.  Of course they do. Sarajevo has its own smell.  Rich, enticing at first but then a touch toxic: it seems to be a combination of baking bread and of auto oil. Perhaps this is exactly what it is, or perhaps it’s some other strange dichotomy of welcome and warning.

At ten p.m., I stood in front of a gay club and listened to the thumps of Rihanna mingle with the singing of prayer at a Mosque down the street, like some sort of trendy, politicized mash-up. 

Maybe if I was a better writer, I could have conveyed these contradictions with mere adjectives, the kinds that are easy enough to conjure about most cities. To feel at home in Somerville, for instance, you need to be idealistic, crunchy, and a little self-serious, as these are the characteristics of the place itself.

I think Sarajevo draws me in because it seems anyone could fit in here. After all, there’s no human being who isn’t incongruous, confounding, improbable.

I tell a local my name.  He responds, “we have a Sarajevo Rose.” During the war in the ‘90’s, Serbian grenades would land in the street and create floral patterns in the concrete – the center a crater from the initial impact, and an array of petals carved by pieces of flying shrapnel.  “After the war,” he explains, “we painted some of them red.  That’s a Sarajevo Rose.”

Strangers on a Train

“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

These are not words I live by in the slightest.  Which I guess makes it kind of fake, as my students would say, that I bought a tote bag donning the motto at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris the other day. 

The bookstore was meeting place for Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway, and I owed my teenage self a souvenir. I was the post-World War I ex-pat writers’ biggest fan at age 17, due in small part to my dissent over the Iraq War but mostly because my beautiful AP English teacher thought Hemingway was really cool, and I thought she was really cool.

But I digress.  I’ve been hoping no strangers have read the quote on the side of my tote bag while I was busy being wildly standoffish to them, as I don’t wish to be thought of as unintentionally ironic.

I think I’m quite friendly to servers, baristas, flight attendants: people with whom my interactions follow an understood pattern and have an expected end.  However, I am not as friendly to people sitting next to me on the train or at the bar.  Small talk makes me anxious. If I exchange pleasantries, I think, what if they keep talking to me? What if I don’t know how to make it stop?

People love to quote Blanche’s exclamation at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire:  “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” but sometimes they seem to be forgetting that when she says this, she is in a straight-jacket, being taken away to an insane asylum.  It’s a testament to the lunacy of trust, to the unlikelihood of serendipity.  The kindness of strangers hasn’t served her very well at all. 

I don’t mean to imply that I’m fearful of strangers; rather, I’m doubtful.  I find myself expecting the worst from small talk.  What if I have to hear about someone’s asinine politics? What if, when I say what my job is, they use phrases like “oh, you teach those kinds of kids” or say “oh man, I always hated English class” (you’d be surprised how eager people are to tell me this.  I don’t understand what response they could possibly be expecting).  And of course, when men strike up a conversation, I never give them the benefit of the doubt, but instead go all stereotypical-lesbian and assume the worst of their intentions. 

I found out at the entrance to an old fortress in Nafplio, Greece, that I haven’t been hiding my skepticism of friendly strangers as well as I thought.  A Greek guy struck up a conversation with me.  I kept throwing out my characteristic polite-yet-conclusive comments, but he wasn’t having it.  Not because he couldn’t tell what I was doing, but because he could.  He crossed his arms (oh, to see yourself parodied) and grinned, switching to a falsetto that probably sounded exactly like me. “Hi, how are you? Oh I’m fine, how are you?” I smiled obligingly, you-got-me style. 

He continued. “I know how it is in America, I’ve been, people there, how you say, make walls.”  The impermeable stone fortress of Nafplio stood impressively behind him as if in illustration.  “Here in Greece, we connect.  We are real to each other.  Maybe it’s cultural.  I don’t know why. ”

So in the interest of cultural open-mindedness, if nothing else, I’m trying to live up to the trite yet substantial challenge posed by my tote bag, and give myself over to small talk more often.  The impact is more than what it would be back home, because the interactions with strangers are the only interactions I have here.  The most invigorating conversation I have, the kindest thing I say, and the most profound connection I make in a given day will all inevitably involve strangers. And if, like any traveler, I hope to receive kindness, the kindness of strangers is pretty much the only option.  So let’s hope Blanche wasn’t so crazy after all.

Angels in the Barley

“Well, there’s no sign that says not to make snow angels in the barley.”  I was in the Guiness Brewery, one of Dublin’s kitschier tourist sites, looking at a huge vat of dried barley, when I heard a woman (American) say this jokingly to her boyfriend.  Earlier that morning I had walked by an open cathedral and into the courtyard, where I sat down on a concrete slab only to read on the opposite wall that I was sitting on a nineteenth century crypt. 

Where in America would you be able to sit on anything that’s it noteworthy to say you sat on? America’s a place where there’d definitely be a sign to make it clear that it is prohibited to get within three feet of the crypt, or to make snow angels in the barley. 

I didn’t realize how much these totally reasonable, if self-explanatory, regulatory elements of exhibits in the U.S. were impacting my experience in museums until I began to notice their absence in Dublin. The “do not touch” signs, the burgundy velvet ropes that hang in arcs, the lines of tape that show you how close you shouldn’t get, they’re all dilutions that impact your ability to interface with the object of attention without intervention.  It’s the equivalent of texting with what you’re seeing instead of having an in-person conversation.

My girlfriend told me that in French, there’s a word for the feeling when you get when you are standing at the edge of the sea and you feel an improbable yet intense calling to start walking until you disappear beneath the waves.  Isn’t this feeling, this very real possibility, what makes the ocean so majestic? And don’t you feel it less when you’re looking at the ocean through the protective bars of a fence? And the knowledge that, when sitting on a 300 year old crypt, you could theoretically tag it with your girlfriend’s initials, or even bend over and lick it, that’s part of the experience of authentically interfacing with it; your inherent sense of respect stops you.

Of course, I’ve always thought of these precautions (the “do not touch” signs, the roping off) as necessary – an anonymous curator or historian or someone somewhere whose job it is to protect humanity from itself.  But if it was so inevitable for humans to violate anything sacred, wouldn’t there be evidence of such? Wouldn’t there be snow angels in the barley?

It’s possible that Europeans raise their kids to be more inherently respectful human beings, but I’ll reject that explanation simply because it’s not very hopeful. My other theory comes from (surprise) the classroom, a place where people tend to rise to the standards that you set for them.  Imply to students that you see them as adults, treat them like their frontal lobe is fully developed, and you’re often pleasantly surprised.   

The trust that is extended to the public here in Ireland, the offering of an unadulterated connection with artifacts of the past, does not go unappreciated.  Perhaps the respect received is passed on.   Barley is untouched, and crypts are only sat upon on by accident.

Letter to an Old Professor

In an attempt to kill two birds with one blog post, the following is a letter to my old professor. It's a little overstated, as expressions of gratitude are wont to be. The first few paragraphs are really about a book of poems called Romey's Order, which you can find info about here. I'm guessing, based on the fact that google's first autocomplete when I put the title in the search bar was "Romey's ordering sandwich" rather than the book title, that it hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves.

I discovered the book at Grolier’s, a bookstore in Harvard Square that claims to be the oldest all-poetry bookshop in the state or country (I can’t remember which).  I unearthed it incidentally, while wayward from my jogging route in search of some iced tea.  Supposedly it was frequented by John Ashbery in his time as an undergrad; I can only imagine that he discovered the place in a more admirable and deliberate manner than I did. 

Anyway, I liked that the title, Romey’s Order, makes explicit what all poetry about place (and maybe all poetry, period) aims to do: make the wildness and disorientation of what we see around us into something less wild, more human, by virtue of being expressible.  Yet the modifier, that it’s Romey’s order and no one else’s, prevents pretense, maintains the humility crucial to good writing. 

I did find the perpetual reliance on hyphens a little tiresome.  But I told myself that it’s just Riley’s willingness to capitulate to all the dichotomies of the modern South.  The image of the abandoned ditch-pipe in the grass that opens the book is reminiscent of the wonderfully disruptive idea that drove my final paper for your class, Studies in Environment and Place, in my junior year: the fallacy inherent in the positing of nature as “a place or state of original purity, uncontaminated by human intervention and avarice” (Di Chiro, 302). 

But I digress.  I’ve meant to write you since graduation, but wanted to “do it right,” which for me has been the great excuse: I can’t finish my novel until I feel more certain I’ll “do it right,” and I’m considering leaving teaching due to what it requires to “do it right” in the environment I’ve chosen.  Since leaving Haverford three years ago, I’ve been teaching High School English in Lawrence, MA.  It’s an abandoned mill-town, its people mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants whose forebears got the message of the mill closing a little too late, and picked the right place for a new start, but in the wrong decade.     

The education reform movement is an unexpectedly quantitative one (and prone to buzz-words): every day I take data on who has achieved “mastery” of wildly subjective skills, such as: “TS12: Explain how one specific event creates textual effects and emotional charge.”  There is a little bit of energy left for heart, which I have used at points to incite conversation about place, seeking to learn about Lawrence through their writing and the entry points they find into the texts we read.  I have always thought that Of Mice And Men is about empathy and self-reliance; to them is it about loyalty and betrayal, and the dubiousness of dreams.

My first year I gave a quiz on metaphors.  Nearly everyone who scored high missed a certain question.  “Directions: Label the phrases below as literal or figurative language.  Explain your answer.” The first phrase in question was “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  I read the papers: literal, literal. Literal: when you get jumped if you are walking somewhere, if you don’t die, you become a better fighter.  You get stronger at defending yourself. 

I ended up giving them all credit for the question, in an inadequate act of concession to the relativity of experience, a nod to the cartography of the 18 miles between their neighborhood and my own. 

The best part of the year, undoubtedly, is the memoir project.  I still technically collect mastery data (can you use sensory details? can you use exposition and context?) but I know the students feel the shift away from the centric emphasis on this taxonomy of how to be a writer and reader; they sense an opportunity to be the experts, for once, that they already are.     

I encourage them to ground their memoirs in place, and with varying degrees of cliché and originality they delineate Lawrence’s broken windows or the clear rivers of the Dominican Republic, a juxtaposition that is dismantling.  It’s a reminder of the idea I first read, heard, and uttered in your class: that we live out our geographies, unable to transcend them, and that we shouldn’t want to, as they are our histories. 

Thanks for reading.  I’ve owed you more than a letter, as it was in your class that the notion of backdrops was rendered impotent for me, when I realized that writing about what I see is writing about myself.   More than I hope my students are able to “explain how one specific event create textual effects and emotional charge” (TS12), I hope that they can read and write until their experiences and their expression begin to converge.  And hopefully they’ll realize what I did when I set out to write about the ditch-piped landscape of North Carolina, thanks to an assignment in your class. 

The places that limit you can liberate you, too.