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.