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.