Five weeks into the school year and my freshman class is already providing me with plenty of fodder for poking fun at them. Here are just two of this week’s shining jewels…
1) This first one is my fault really—word to the wise, never feed chocolate to freshmen students, especially not before nine in the morning. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I did on Tuesday as part of an exercise in writing using sensory detail. The object: brainstorm words to describe how the chocolate stimulated all five of the senses, then write descriptive paragraphs using vivid sensory detail. The chocolate, though, only served to wind the students up to the point that when I asked for descriptive words for the sight of the chocolate, shouts of “Poo!” and “I can’t say it because it’s too rude!” were accompanied by wild laughter. Things got out of hand, and as a consequence I threatened to take away the class’ break. This greatly upset poor Ashley. Just as my department chair poked her head into my classroom to ask me a question, Ashley slammed down her hands, rose abruptly from her seat and screamed at the entire class, “Shut the fuck up! We’re gonna lose our damn break!” Needless to say, I had to send her packing, but she of course worked hard to maintain her tough image by stomping her feet and muttering curses at me under her breath as she left. So much for impressing my department chair with my classroom management skills. (Side note, same student is now suspended for three days due to some other unknown incident outside my classroom.)
2) Frank and Carlo are shrimpy freshmen boys, best friends both suffering serious cases of ADHD. Have you ever experienced a moment when there’s a lull in the conversation, just at the moment you say something dumb? So that the entire dinner table hears your remark loud and clear? This is just what happened to Frank and Carlo today. As the whole class poured out of the classroom, I turned my head to urge Frank and Carlo on just in time to witness their chorus of “I like to eat- eat- eat- pussies and vaginas!” sung to the tune of “I like to eat- eat- eat- apples and bananas.” Charming. Although I put on a show of disgust and lectured them about appropriate classroom language, really it is ridiculous moments like these that make teaching worthwhile. What goofballs :D
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Teaching
A lone student’s shifty eyes
follow my ramble through
the rows of desks, hunched shoulders,
slouched shoulders, and
perilous backpacks askew on the floor.
How did I,
who know so little,
become “master” of this domain?
Sometimes, sun nudges fog away,
the squeak of chairs, tap of feet, turn of pages
slows as concentration settles the room;
my moment to ease into a desk and
join together in the labor of writing.
follow my ramble through
the rows of desks, hunched shoulders,
slouched shoulders, and
perilous backpacks askew on the floor.
How did I,
who know so little,
become “master” of this domain?
Sometimes, sun nudges fog away,
the squeak of chairs, tap of feet, turn of pages
slows as concentration settles the room;
my moment to ease into a desk and
join together in the labor of writing.
Monday, August 9, 2010
The Most Spirited School in the Bay
I have the privilege of working at the “Most Spirited School in the Bay.” That’s right, for two years running, my high school has won Wild 94.9’s radio contest to have such innovative new hip hop performers as Flo Rida and New Boyz serenade our students in assemblies in the school gym. We blew all other schools out of the water in terms of votes online. South City pride y’all!
For those whose ears didn’t immediately perk up at the mention of Flo Rida’s name, you’d probably recognize his song/laundry list of sexy items of female apparel: “Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, you know the whole club was looking at her… them baggy sweatpants and them reeboks with the straps, she turned around and gave that big booty a slap. She hit the floor, next thing you know, shorty got low low low low low low low.” In case you didn’t know, it’s a major hit. If you didn’t recognize that one, perhaps you’d know the catchy, “Oh hot damn, this is my jam. Keep ya partyin’ till the am. Y’all don’t understand. Make me throw my hands up in the ayer, ay, ay, ayer, ayer.” That was two years ago Flo Rida rocked our gym. Obnoxious, materialistic, objectifying women, but innocuous for the most part.
Last year, though, brought us a surprise performance by New Boyz, a group who will, I predict, only be known while they are actually still new—my guess: this two-hit-wonder group has the shelf-life of its current fans’ pubescent hormones. New Boyz is made up of two super-fine seventeen year old boys known as Legacy and Ben-J. You cannot imagine the thrill in Ashley’s voice as she excitedly told me about getting to touch Legacy’s abs during the concert in the gym. The music video for “Tie Me Down” is actually pretty charming, featuring Legacy and Ben-J clad in fresh baseball caps, cardigans, and kicks. With backpacks strapped on, they look just like any of my students. They wear skinny jeans hanging off their narrow butts, and they look pretty darn cute, as in I could imagine them seated in desks in front of me stumbling through lines of Shakespeare and groaning about the homework posted on the board.
The title of New Boyz’ big hit, “Tie Me Down,” is actually somewhat misleading, since really the boys sing in the chorus about how, “She ain’t gon’ tie me down.” Alright, fair enough. It seems like a good thing for teenagers to hang out with lots of friends and keep their options open. But, curious to know more, I looked up the lyrics, and what I found horrified me. The rap portion of the song, which must have been incomprehensible auditorily to my principal, contains such choice lines as,
“Yea you cute. So what?/ But lets get it through your head,/Yea we make love, sex, weed all in the bed,/…/ Now you stuck like a stain and I cant believe that,/…/ There’s too much girls and I ain’t lettin go,/ Cause my life is great,/ And you ain’t nothing but a ho,/…/ Ay yea you know I’m a man,/ And I have no feelings.”
Is this some kind of joke? It almost seemed too bad to be true.
Now call me an old fogey if you will, but I don’t think I am. Well, only partially anyway. I would say that I am not a fogey but a feminist. I object to the disrespect of women in this song, but also I object to the portrayal of masculinity. Perhaps I take myself and life too seriously. However, I saw Sarah and Lisa bouncing off the walls in anticipation of the concert. I saw the photos and doodlings of New Boyz on Brianna’s binder, and I fielded countless questions from these teenyboppers about who in my opinion was hotter, Legacy or Ben-J. Needless to say, I pleaded the fifth. These rappers are under-age minors, after all.
My students are a weird mix of innocence and experience. Strict Catholics, many of them certainly believe in “saving” themselves for marriage. However, one day I discovered an empty, discarded Trojan condoms box lying in the center of my classroom. I was horrified to realize that, thinking it was merely a candy wrapper, I had allowed it to lie there for most of the day. In class discussions of Romeo and Juliet, at least half of my students argued that love at first sight is indeed real. Their rationale? You see it in movies all the time! I quickly learned that the worst supervision duty at my school is the dances, because the main responsibility is to patrol for freak dancers, trolling the dance floor with a flashlight to break up such lewd and lascivious behavior. Seems incongruent, given our leadership-sponsored performances by Flo Rida and New Boyz, right?
In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy argues that with the rise of raunch culture and the porn industry, images of women have again been co-opted in the interests of men and making money. Women, rising in their careers and the workplace have had to play by the rules, becoming one of the boys in terms of chauvinism and giving the
boys what they want and expect in terms of image. We’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that women’s lib has come so far that we don’t even need such a concept anymore. We’re living in a post-feminist world, in which women are so sexually “liberated” that we’re free to flash our tits on Girls Gone Wild and dress as skankily as “we” (i.e., the male world) desire, all in the name of sexual self-expression. Yet, as Levy points out, in the midst of all this “liberation” many women still may not be freely expressing their own selves, but really playing into the artificial, unrealistic, even dangerous ideals we’ve been steadily spoon fed by the media. Free, informed choice doesn’t necessarily exist. So, to be a cool chick, one that is most desirable, my female students must now make themselves sexually available and emotionally unattached, as recommended by New Boyz, and drape themselves in the right brands, becoming walking billboards and victims of consumer culture, as exalted in Flo Rida’s song, “Low.” These are the values that we, as a school, are actively supporting when we sponsor concerts by such inane, commercialized performers.
South City, I think we can do better than all this. There must be some positive, socially-conscious hip hop groups we could endeavor to bring to our school via Wild 94.9’s spirit competition this year. Any input?
For those whose ears didn’t immediately perk up at the mention of Flo Rida’s name, you’d probably recognize his song/laundry list of sexy items of female apparel: “Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, you know the whole club was looking at her… them baggy sweatpants and them reeboks with the straps, she turned around and gave that big booty a slap. She hit the floor, next thing you know, shorty got low low low low low low low.” In case you didn’t know, it’s a major hit. If you didn’t recognize that one, perhaps you’d know the catchy, “Oh hot damn, this is my jam. Keep ya partyin’ till the am. Y’all don’t understand. Make me throw my hands up in the ayer, ay, ay, ayer, ayer.” That was two years ago Flo Rida rocked our gym. Obnoxious, materialistic, objectifying women, but innocuous for the most part.
Last year, though, brought us a surprise performance by New Boyz, a group who will, I predict, only be known while they are actually still new—my guess: this two-hit-wonder group has the shelf-life of its current fans’ pubescent hormones. New Boyz is made up of two super-fine seventeen year old boys known as Legacy and Ben-J. You cannot imagine the thrill in Ashley’s voice as she excitedly told me about getting to touch Legacy’s abs during the concert in the gym. The music video for “Tie Me Down” is actually pretty charming, featuring Legacy and Ben-J clad in fresh baseball caps, cardigans, and kicks. With backpacks strapped on, they look just like any of my students. They wear skinny jeans hanging off their narrow butts, and they look pretty darn cute, as in I could imagine them seated in desks in front of me stumbling through lines of Shakespeare and groaning about the homework posted on the board.
The title of New Boyz’ big hit, “Tie Me Down,” is actually somewhat misleading, since really the boys sing in the chorus about how, “She ain’t gon’ tie me down.” Alright, fair enough. It seems like a good thing for teenagers to hang out with lots of friends and keep their options open. But, curious to know more, I looked up the lyrics, and what I found horrified me. The rap portion of the song, which must have been incomprehensible auditorily to my principal, contains such choice lines as,
“Yea you cute. So what?/ But lets get it through your head,/Yea we make love, sex, weed all in the bed,/…/ Now you stuck like a stain and I cant believe that,/…/ There’s too much girls and I ain’t lettin go,/ Cause my life is great,/ And you ain’t nothing but a ho,/…/ Ay yea you know I’m a man,/ And I have no feelings.”
Is this some kind of joke? It almost seemed too bad to be true.
Now call me an old fogey if you will, but I don’t think I am. Well, only partially anyway. I would say that I am not a fogey but a feminist. I object to the disrespect of women in this song, but also I object to the portrayal of masculinity. Perhaps I take myself and life too seriously. However, I saw Sarah and Lisa bouncing off the walls in anticipation of the concert. I saw the photos and doodlings of New Boyz on Brianna’s binder, and I fielded countless questions from these teenyboppers about who in my opinion was hotter, Legacy or Ben-J. Needless to say, I pleaded the fifth. These rappers are under-age minors, after all.
My students are a weird mix of innocence and experience. Strict Catholics, many of them certainly believe in “saving” themselves for marriage. However, one day I discovered an empty, discarded Trojan condoms box lying in the center of my classroom. I was horrified to realize that, thinking it was merely a candy wrapper, I had allowed it to lie there for most of the day. In class discussions of Romeo and Juliet, at least half of my students argued that love at first sight is indeed real. Their rationale? You see it in movies all the time! I quickly learned that the worst supervision duty at my school is the dances, because the main responsibility is to patrol for freak dancers, trolling the dance floor with a flashlight to break up such lewd and lascivious behavior. Seems incongruent, given our leadership-sponsored performances by Flo Rida and New Boyz, right?
In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy argues that with the rise of raunch culture and the porn industry, images of women have again been co-opted in the interests of men and making money. Women, rising in their careers and the workplace have had to play by the rules, becoming one of the boys in terms of chauvinism and giving the
boys what they want and expect in terms of image. We’ve allowed ourselves to be convinced that women’s lib has come so far that we don’t even need such a concept anymore. We’re living in a post-feminist world, in which women are so sexually “liberated” that we’re free to flash our tits on Girls Gone Wild and dress as skankily as “we” (i.e., the male world) desire, all in the name of sexual self-expression. Yet, as Levy points out, in the midst of all this “liberation” many women still may not be freely expressing their own selves, but really playing into the artificial, unrealistic, even dangerous ideals we’ve been steadily spoon fed by the media. Free, informed choice doesn’t necessarily exist. So, to be a cool chick, one that is most desirable, my female students must now make themselves sexually available and emotionally unattached, as recommended by New Boyz, and drape themselves in the right brands, becoming walking billboards and victims of consumer culture, as exalted in Flo Rida’s song, “Low.” These are the values that we, as a school, are actively supporting when we sponsor concerts by such inane, commercialized performers. South City, I think we can do better than all this. There must be some positive, socially-conscious hip hop groups we could endeavor to bring to our school via Wild 94.9’s spirit competition this year. Any input?
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Back to School
The sweetness of a carefree summer lasted only until about mid July for me. Summer vacation was halfway over and I began have nightmares about the school year to come. In one scenario I showed up late to the first day of school because I had lost track of time while on a date. I crashed my car across the campus frantically trying to drive right up to my classroom door. In another dream it was the first day of school and I didn’t have any of my handouts prepared. I stood there exposed, a fraud pretending to be a responsible teacher, in front of 35 expectant, overachieving honors students. Worst though, was the nightmare in which the guy I’ve been seeing filmed us having raunchy sex and posted it on the Internet with my name as the tagline for Google searches. Needless to say this horror of a dream did not end well; I lost my job and my teaching career was destroyed.
Whoa, I guess I have some anxiety about returning to the classroom. Last spring was rough, and I succumbed to depression. Being laid off, toiling on my thesis, my grandmother’s illness and death; it was all bad. Having to perform for students, putting on my teacher face day after day felt oppressive. I am scared of feeling that way again this year; more scared of that feeling than I am of actually teaching another school year.
This, then, is a little feel-good motivation. These are some gems from the end of last school year that I’ve kept tucked away for a moment such as this one to remind myself why I teach. I only hope I can recreate some of this magic again next year!
“This Feeling for You”:
This is a poem written by a tall, soulful, Dumbo-eared boy from marching band. His previous credits include a short story about his numerous crushes and unrequited loves. In that story, the names of his crushes were anagrams of many girls from our class, eg Stephanie became Epishtiane in. Tim read this poem, though, as part of our open mic at the end of the year.
This feeling for you is something I can’t explain,
sometimes it’s fantastic, sometimes it’s horrid.
It’s horrible when I’m not with you,
And it turns terrific when I see your face the next day.
This patience for you is something I can’t explain,
waiting 30-40 minutes after school for you,
to say hello and goodbye to almost everyone you see,
just to spend 25 minutes walking you home.
But that’s ok,
because 25 minutes can feel like a lifetime with you,
it just depends on what I make of those minutes.
This way I act around you is something I can’t explain,
doing crazy things,
from swallowing the legs off of gumbas,
to licking tampons with fake blood on it…
don’t ask,
But it’s all just to make you smile,
and to make you feel better when your [sic] down.
This feeling for you is something I can’t explain,
sometimes it’s marvelous, sometimes it’s detestable.
It’s awful when I’m not with you,
and it turns amazing when I see your face the next day.
You can imagine the uproar when Tim came to the tampon line in his reading. It was difficult to quell the pandemonium in the room, but luckily everyone was curious to hear what outrageousness would emerge from his mouth next. I’m choosing to overlook the fact that Tim clearly took nothing away from my lesson on run-on sentences and the use of the semi-colon to separate independent clauses.
Another Romantic Moment from the Poetry Unit:
On the final day of class, I asked my students to write anonymous appreciations on slips of paper that I would then read for the entire class (ie, “I appreciate (insert a classmate’s name here), because (give a heart-warming reason here)…)
Rowan, a kid who’d almost failed freshman English, but had shown dramatic growth and elected to go into junior honors next year, wrote this in his anonymous appreciation: “To Adrienne: my last poem was about you.” Rowan had sat opposite Adrienne for most of the year, though I had never witnessed any interaction between them. When it came time for me to read and grade Rowan’s poetry portfolio, I eagerly flipped to the final poem:
Words Never Said
I look at you everyday
Never having anything to say
So I play it off
And keep it cool
And not act like that big of a fool
But what can I do
When I think I might be
In love with you
Added now to my list of goals for the next school year: orchestrate an encounter between Rowan and Adrienne. Perhaps I can pair them together for groupwork…
And Finally… The End of Year Familial Drama that both Broke and Gave Faith to My Heart:
Charlotte and Maria were two sisters both enrolled in my fourth period sophomore class. Both were quick learners, articulate writers, and eager for an adult mentor. They came from a family of three girls, all in attendance at El Camino High School. Charlotte was actually concurrently enrolled in both my sophomore and freshman classes, having failed English the previous year. Maria applied to be my TA for next year. Thus, I spent much time with both girls, and being one of three sisters myself, I felt a special kinship with them.
They’d emigrated with their mother from the Philippines to the US about ten years previous. A single mom, their mother worked two fulltime jobs from 8:00 am to 12 midnight daily to support her family. This toil and sacrifice bespoke her love and dedication to her daughters, but it also meant that the girls were expected to raise themselves. This was a tall order, and might have worked out better in the Philippines where sucking it up and working hard, supporting the collective family unit were the values in the dominant culture. But Charlotte was an American girl now, and this was a lot to ask. She roamed the streets with her friends after school, experimented with drugs, explored her sexuality, fought fiercely with her family and got in lots of trouble. Mom decided, “I can’t deal with this unreasonable, wayward daughter anymore,” and sent her to live with Grandma.
Spring semester, Charlotte seemed to fall to pieces. She cut my fourth period class every day and came tardy to fifth period an emotional wreck. Usually, she’d then ask to see the counselor or school nurse or excuse herself for a 20 minute trip to the restroom. When I confronted her about this pattern, she tearfully explained her situation and told me she could not stand to sit in fourth period across the room from her sister. “I feel like my family doesn’t want me anymore. We never talk. I can’t stand to sit here and see my sister looking at me. She doesn’t care about me.” I doubted this very much, and told Charlotte so. The counselor spent a couple sessions working with all three sisters, but Charlotte was defiantly silent. The counselor advised me to just try and hang on with Charlotte till the end of the school year. She’d likely get shipped off to the continuation high school soon enough anyway. Charlotte was now failing every single class. One day, she fled the classroom in tears. I teach in the portable that time forgot in a far corner of campus, so it was okay for her to hang out on the blacktop outside for a few minutes. Suddenly, though, a booming crash like a minor temblor shook the room. Startled students looked up from their group work alarmed. Hurrying outside to investigate, I found Charlotte nursing some bloody knuckles and heaving in sobs. She said Maria’d been mugging at her. I began to think the end of the year could not come soon enough for Charlotte.
As previously recounted, there were some pretty cute appreciations written on the final day of school. As I sat on my stool in the center of a horseshoe of desks reading them aloud for my rapt teenagers, Maria warned me, “Be careful, Ms. Sterling, some people wrote their names on the backs of the slips of paper.” So far, I had not encountered any appreciations signed in this fashion, but I diligently cradled each in my hands thereafter. And when I came to Maria’s appreciation, I understood her fear of exposure, for she had indeed signed her own appreciation in this way. She wrote, “I appreciate Charlotte for being the strong girl that she is. I appreciate her as a person.”
A few minutes later, I came to Charlotte’s appreciation. She had written, “I appreciate Maria because no matter what happens I’ll love her till the day I die because she’s been with me my whole life.” It killed me that they had written these sentiments for me to read aloud anonymously, but they could not openly share their feelings with one another. But then again, maybe they knew each other’s voices. Sisters can tell. Despite everything, I think they’re going to be okay.
As a teacher, I am a witness and a rock. I witness my students’ joy and suffering, and I am a rock in their lives. Always there. I bear witness and I stand by consistently. It is worth it, and I’ll keep coming back no matter how hard it gets.
Whoa, I guess I have some anxiety about returning to the classroom. Last spring was rough, and I succumbed to depression. Being laid off, toiling on my thesis, my grandmother’s illness and death; it was all bad. Having to perform for students, putting on my teacher face day after day felt oppressive. I am scared of feeling that way again this year; more scared of that feeling than I am of actually teaching another school year.
This, then, is a little feel-good motivation. These are some gems from the end of last school year that I’ve kept tucked away for a moment such as this one to remind myself why I teach. I only hope I can recreate some of this magic again next year!
“This Feeling for You”:
This is a poem written by a tall, soulful, Dumbo-eared boy from marching band. His previous credits include a short story about his numerous crushes and unrequited loves. In that story, the names of his crushes were anagrams of many girls from our class, eg Stephanie became Epishtiane in. Tim read this poem, though, as part of our open mic at the end of the year.
This feeling for you is something I can’t explain,
sometimes it’s fantastic, sometimes it’s horrid.
It’s horrible when I’m not with you,
And it turns terrific when I see your face the next day.
This patience for you is something I can’t explain,
waiting 30-40 minutes after school for you,
to say hello and goodbye to almost everyone you see,
just to spend 25 minutes walking you home.
But that’s ok,
because 25 minutes can feel like a lifetime with you,
it just depends on what I make of those minutes.
This way I act around you is something I can’t explain,
doing crazy things,
from swallowing the legs off of gumbas,
to licking tampons with fake blood on it…
don’t ask,
But it’s all just to make you smile,
and to make you feel better when your [sic] down.
This feeling for you is something I can’t explain,
sometimes it’s marvelous, sometimes it’s detestable.
It’s awful when I’m not with you,
and it turns amazing when I see your face the next day.
You can imagine the uproar when Tim came to the tampon line in his reading. It was difficult to quell the pandemonium in the room, but luckily everyone was curious to hear what outrageousness would emerge from his mouth next. I’m choosing to overlook the fact that Tim clearly took nothing away from my lesson on run-on sentences and the use of the semi-colon to separate independent clauses.
Another Romantic Moment from the Poetry Unit:
On the final day of class, I asked my students to write anonymous appreciations on slips of paper that I would then read for the entire class (ie, “I appreciate (insert a classmate’s name here), because (give a heart-warming reason here)…)
Rowan, a kid who’d almost failed freshman English, but had shown dramatic growth and elected to go into junior honors next year, wrote this in his anonymous appreciation: “To Adrienne: my last poem was about you.” Rowan had sat opposite Adrienne for most of the year, though I had never witnessed any interaction between them. When it came time for me to read and grade Rowan’s poetry portfolio, I eagerly flipped to the final poem:
Words Never Said
I look at you everyday
Never having anything to say
So I play it off
And keep it cool
And not act like that big of a fool
But what can I do
When I think I might be
In love with you
Added now to my list of goals for the next school year: orchestrate an encounter between Rowan and Adrienne. Perhaps I can pair them together for groupwork…
And Finally… The End of Year Familial Drama that both Broke and Gave Faith to My Heart:
Charlotte and Maria were two sisters both enrolled in my fourth period sophomore class. Both were quick learners, articulate writers, and eager for an adult mentor. They came from a family of three girls, all in attendance at El Camino High School. Charlotte was actually concurrently enrolled in both my sophomore and freshman classes, having failed English the previous year. Maria applied to be my TA for next year. Thus, I spent much time with both girls, and being one of three sisters myself, I felt a special kinship with them.
They’d emigrated with their mother from the Philippines to the US about ten years previous. A single mom, their mother worked two fulltime jobs from 8:00 am to 12 midnight daily to support her family. This toil and sacrifice bespoke her love and dedication to her daughters, but it also meant that the girls were expected to raise themselves. This was a tall order, and might have worked out better in the Philippines where sucking it up and working hard, supporting the collective family unit were the values in the dominant culture. But Charlotte was an American girl now, and this was a lot to ask. She roamed the streets with her friends after school, experimented with drugs, explored her sexuality, fought fiercely with her family and got in lots of trouble. Mom decided, “I can’t deal with this unreasonable, wayward daughter anymore,” and sent her to live with Grandma.
Spring semester, Charlotte seemed to fall to pieces. She cut my fourth period class every day and came tardy to fifth period an emotional wreck. Usually, she’d then ask to see the counselor or school nurse or excuse herself for a 20 minute trip to the restroom. When I confronted her about this pattern, she tearfully explained her situation and told me she could not stand to sit in fourth period across the room from her sister. “I feel like my family doesn’t want me anymore. We never talk. I can’t stand to sit here and see my sister looking at me. She doesn’t care about me.” I doubted this very much, and told Charlotte so. The counselor spent a couple sessions working with all three sisters, but Charlotte was defiantly silent. The counselor advised me to just try and hang on with Charlotte till the end of the school year. She’d likely get shipped off to the continuation high school soon enough anyway. Charlotte was now failing every single class. One day, she fled the classroom in tears. I teach in the portable that time forgot in a far corner of campus, so it was okay for her to hang out on the blacktop outside for a few minutes. Suddenly, though, a booming crash like a minor temblor shook the room. Startled students looked up from their group work alarmed. Hurrying outside to investigate, I found Charlotte nursing some bloody knuckles and heaving in sobs. She said Maria’d been mugging at her. I began to think the end of the year could not come soon enough for Charlotte.
As previously recounted, there were some pretty cute appreciations written on the final day of school. As I sat on my stool in the center of a horseshoe of desks reading them aloud for my rapt teenagers, Maria warned me, “Be careful, Ms. Sterling, some people wrote their names on the backs of the slips of paper.” So far, I had not encountered any appreciations signed in this fashion, but I diligently cradled each in my hands thereafter. And when I came to Maria’s appreciation, I understood her fear of exposure, for she had indeed signed her own appreciation in this way. She wrote, “I appreciate Charlotte for being the strong girl that she is. I appreciate her as a person.”
A few minutes later, I came to Charlotte’s appreciation. She had written, “I appreciate Maria because no matter what happens I’ll love her till the day I die because she’s been with me my whole life.” It killed me that they had written these sentiments for me to read aloud anonymously, but they could not openly share their feelings with one another. But then again, maybe they knew each other’s voices. Sisters can tell. Despite everything, I think they’re going to be okay.
As a teacher, I am a witness and a rock. I witness my students’ joy and suffering, and I am a rock in their lives. Always there. I bear witness and I stand by consistently. It is worth it, and I’ll keep coming back no matter how hard it gets.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Female Bonding
dedicated to my Grandma Helen
Because I’m still in love with you,
I wanna see you dance again.
Because I’m still in love with you.
On this harvest moon,
I can see you dancing
Sweating cocktail glass in hand
Soft skin pouching at the crease of
Your Hawaiian floral swimsuit
Feet shuffle in a hula sway.
Because I’m still in love with you
I wanna hear you say again,
“Well bless your heart!”
When I climb into your lap
Strong bony legs
Roped in varicose veins
Because I’m still in love with you
I wanna feel you braid my hair again
Forehead stretched tight
Tears spring between my lashes
You’d pull and twist and bind
My frizzy hair and it keeps for days
Because I’m still in love with you
I wanna roast in the sun again
Splashing through laps
Escaping the pool sweep
And testing the pH.
Let’s lay in the prickly, itchy lawn
Drink diet cokes and play us some gin.
Because I’m still in love with you
I wanna know
What made you fierce?
What made you strong?
Purple feet plant and plough
Through Montana farms
Berkeley hills and radio reports
Of bombings in the pacific
Woman of contradictions
You loved so easily, so fiercely
What made you guarded against those
Who loved you best?
I can see you now:
Ramrod spine, unflinching fingers
Carrying a grimy water glass to bed
Warm bosom and coral lipstick
Lavender hairs stretched
Round and round curlers
Oversized tee-shirt as a nightgown
Puff-painted scrawl reads:
“We love you, grandma.”
Gift of the three weird, squawking, bickering, elbowing, tickling, giggling, hollering sisters.
Warm, pink bodies splashing and writhing through the chlorinated blue.
Itching, sweating knobby knees lined up in the back seat,
Heads rest on shoulders, and we dream.
Because I’m still in love with you
I wanna say to you what
I’ve never said before
Men may run the world and steal our hearts
But trust in sisterhood
Because we are strong enough to
Stand side by side
share a little strength with mankind,
and fortify this world.
Because I’m still in love with you,
I wanna see you dance again.
Push the switches on your mint-green
Tape recorder, tell stories and
Listen to me laugh,
Learn through the world
Learn through the stories
Learn to love and then leave this life.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
On Marijuana
As a teacher, I often find myself thinking to my students, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
The first time I smoked weed, I was fifteen years old, hanging out at my friend’s party. Her parents were out of town for the weekend and she had a fully-stocked kitchen and a hot tub. Perfect party recipe. Two of my guy friends packed a bowl and taught me how to smoke. And I smoked and smoked, bowl after bowl. Because, you know that first time you’re high, you don’t realize you’re high. Afterwards, my guy friends who’d supplied the goods encouraged me to take off my top. That seemed like a great idea, too. Hanging out in my undies felt nice and free. I felt special upon receiving the compliment that I “had a nice rack.”
Now, having spent years in a relationship with a daily smoker, I have mixed feelings about marijuana use. I have plenty of friends and family who smoke. Yet, there is nothing I hate more than a “weed super-nerd.” You know the type: can reel off the specs of a particularly chronic harvest of herb, knows precisely how to calculate the desired air pressure in a water bong, and the chemical reaction involved in how THC affects the body. These weed super-nerds are fantastic at baking brownies, and understand precisely how the THC separates from the plant and will bond to the nearest fat molecules (such as butter) at high temperatures. This extensive knowledge and fascination with marijuana is obsessive—fanatical, and strikes me as particularly pathetic. Please do not worship at the shrine of weed. It’s just a plant, a drug, like any other.
Thus, I was particularly dismayed by a recent poem written by my student. In my sophomore classes, we have been reading and writing poetry in different forms. We study poets’ use of figurative language, sensory detail and concrete imagery, and try to employ these techniques in our own writing. Today’s lesson was the ode. Jake turned in a poem titled “Ode to Grapes”:
They taste so good
whenever I eat them.
Some are sweet
others are sour.
The green ones are
as green as a $100 bill.
and the purple ones are
like Barney.
It’s even better
to eat them both at the same time.
I feel like I’m on a cloud when I eat them.
The smell is so strong
you can smell them from a mile away.
The fragrance is one
of a kind.
While reading this poem, I was initially pleased that Jake included simile and detail appealing to the senses of sight, touch, and smell. But wait, I seemed to remember my ex telling me “grapes” was slang for purple weed. Urban Dictionary confirmed my suspicions. I like the fruit grapes pretty well myself, but I’ve certainly never enjoyed them so much I felt like I was on a cloud, and I wouldn’t say their smell is particularly strong. I’ve got a weed super-nerd for a student! So devoted is he to pot that he has written an ode singing its praises.
My first reaction was one of annoyance: he thinks he can get away with this and pull one over on me! He thinks he can turn in a poem about weed for credit and I won’t even realize! I’ll set him straight. However, as I told this story to more and more people, most didn’t seem to know that “grapes” is a euphemism for purple marijuana. Turns out this is pretty much an insider, street term. I realized that if I don’t handle this situation carefully, I could come out looking like the stoner. If I confront my student the wrong way, I could come off as knowing too much about weed and its related terminology.
I struggle to define what my student has done wrong, and what an appropriate consequence should be. Of course, marijuana is an illegal substance and my school’s line is one of zero tolerance. But that’s not me, and I have to teach in a way that encourages my students to make healthy decisions and think for themselves, yet without undermining my school’s policies.
I believe weed should be legalized. It is one of the biggest sources of revenue for the state of California, but right now this is all under the table and uncontrolled. College students regularly drink themselves to death, since somehow alcohol consumption has become a competitive sport and the ability to imbibe copious amounts has become a point of pride among youth. Alcohol-related car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the country, and drinking causes belligerence in many and quite violent bar fights. I’ve never known anyone to die of a marijuana overdose, and I’ve yet to meet a belligerent stoner.
However, this is not to say that smoking weed is particularly healthy. Certainly, inhaling smoke and carbon monoxide is damaging to the lungs, THC impairs judgment and clouds the mind, and marijuana has been proven to cause short term memory loss. I will never buy the bullshit line, “I’m a better driver when I’m high,” because weed is a depressant, slowing the nervous system, potentially impairing vision and slowing one’s response time and ability to think clearly. Finally, I have seen plenty of friends become psychologically dependent upon marijuana, perhaps even physiologically addicted.
Yet, cigarettes, alcohol, and coffee remain legal substances. In America, the land of the free and home of the brave, one is free to drink oneself to death, perhaps even encouraged to eat oneself to death (thanks to the government’s support of an agricultural industry that relies on our continued consumption of processed foods). Shouldn’t we have the right to smoke ourselves to death, if we so choose?
So where does that leave me? Here’s what I know: Many friends and I smoked weed throughout high school, and for us it was not a gateway drug. We were bound for success and did not have addictive personalities. We knew how to handle ourselves. However, many people I know have also pissed away their potential smoking weed, literally playing out the lines of the song by Afroman: “I was gonna go to class before I got high/ I coulda cheated and I coulda passed/ but I got high/ I am taking it next semester and I know why/ - cause I got high.” Jake is in danger of doing just that. A strong writer and the rare student who enjoys reading outside of class, Jake never does his homework and will probably squeak by with a D this semester. Is it because he gets high? Maybe. My responsibility as his teacher is to help him learn as much as possible and help him make healthy decisions. Right now, weed isn’t looking like the healthiest choice for him.
Friday, May 7, 2010
This One's in Honor of the Mothers
This is a piece I wrote almost two years ago in honor of my grandmother, Nora, who passed away in January 2008. My maternal grandmother recently passed away, too, in March, but I have yet to write her something. I will when I have the time and space to process her death. For now, this one's for all the mothers on Mother's Day (sorry folks, it's a long one):
My grandma Nora had a plaque hanging in the guest bedroom of her house, which said, “I love my friend and the reason why is he is he and I am I.” Sweaty summer nights I’d lie awake in the back of Nora’s Davis home, sheets kicked off, staring at those words. They marched across my eyes like sheep over a fence as my breathing slowed and my body slackened with sleep. Those summers in Davis, Nora played games like memory and Candyland out of her living room game cupboard with me and my sisters. Hunched over the wheel of her extra-long Ford Taurus wagon (space for my grandpa’s wheelchair in the back), she drove us to the Avid Reader, a local bookstore, to pick up shiny, crisp picture books and chapter books, and she bought us back-to-school outfits at Gottschalks in the Woodland mall. When we departed for the sticky, cramped car ride home to Oregon, Nora packed us gummi worms in plastic sandwich bags as a treat for the road.
In second grade, I interviewed Nora about her parents’ immigration and wrote a report for school. Nora’s mother and father met in Poland, in a region occupied by the Russian czar at the time. Her father and his brothers printed subversive literature criticizing the czar, which her mother distributed on the streets. Nora’s mother was captured and thrown in prison one day while passing out pamphlets, and her father fled the country. Eventually, her mother escaped jail and joined her father in Austria, then together they moved to the United States. In the US, her father continued to work as a printer at the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward. They held steadfast to their socialist views, and my grandmother gave speeches on street corners in support of labor unions and workers’ rights. This report earned me a privileged visit to the principal’s office, where I read it aloud to her face-to-face. Proudly, I mailed a copy to Nora. When my dad and his siblings scoured her home years later in preparation to sell it, they discovered this paper tucked neatly away, saved for years and annotated with her comments and corrections.
The last time I saw Nora, it was Thanksgiving—an annual family reunion feast at my uncle’s home in Palo Alto. Nora is the matriarch of the family, seated in a throne-like position, wheelchair pushed handily to the side, at the sunny dining room table, rather than at one of the myriad lesser tables nonetheless lavishly set with silver and cloth napkins scattered throughout my uncle’s generous home. My aunt will fetch her a selection of the Thanksgiving dishes.
Nora’s knees bow in and knock together, feet splayed awkwardly shuffling when she walks. The effects of her childhood polio have returned to her in old age. Nora’s a good head shorter than me, now; her back has doubled over on itself and the vertebrae have collapsed together with osteoporosis. No need to rise or walk, though. We all come to her. Indeed, at her memorial, the head of her assisted living home remarked that Nora had more visitors and telephone calls than any other resident.
Anyhow, at Thanksgiving, I somehow scoot in between all the aunts, uncles, cousins, and great grandkids to secure a seat by Nora’s side. The conversation does not flag with her at the table, as it would with my mom’s parents, who require an ongoing enunciated, higher decibel translation of all utterances. No, Nora always wears her hearing aid. She doesn’t miss a thing.
“So, Annie,” she gets right to the point, “I hear you just broke up with Andres last week? What happened?”
I don’t feel intruded upon by my grandmother’s directness. Really, small talk bores and frustrates me. Nora knows what she wants to say and what she needs people to hear. She tells me softly, kindly yet forcefully, “You know, I could see you weren’t well matched when the two of you came and visited me back in September. You were really the leader, while he hung back a bit.”
…………….
I remember a conversation from that visit back in September, when Nora, Andres and I went to eat at Baker’s Square:
“Did you hear your cousin Isaac is going to bring his girlfriend to Thanksgiving this year?” Nora asks.
I gossip, “Well, last year, he told me, ‘I’ve been dating this girl for six months and there’s no way in hell I’d bring her to meet the family.’ I wonder what’s changed…is this a new girlfriend?”
“Well, in all those years, you never brought Patrick to Thanksgiving,”
I clamp down my urge to tell her that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Patrick, my boyfriend for four years, came to plenty of other family events. Why am I drawn to defend him now, with Andres, who performs so reliably well for family, sitting right across from me? I’m like a kid caught chomping on a wad of chewing gum. I want to blow it into a huge bubble and let it splatter gloriously all over my cheeks, but instead I swallow the thought down with a determined gulp.
Nora forges blithely onward, though: “So, what’s Patrick doing these days, anyway?”
“I dunno, same thing, I guess. Work, school—you know.” What’s Andres thinking right now? He’s inscrutable, but I bet he’s squirming on the inside. This thrills me a little—when will he crack and what will it look like?
“I never cared for him too much, but he was okay, I guess.” Nora trails off.
Gosh, Nora, I think, tell me how you really feel!
Should I trust this judgment of hers? Sometimes, she’s right on the mark, but how well did she really know me and Pat together? We were so immature; she hasn’t gotten to see his growth like she’s seen mine. When Nora died, Pat was the first person I called. And he understood me and my relationship to Nora so much better than Andres did. I wish she had known him better, so she could understand him.
“How’s your hamburger, Andres?” I ask feebly.
…………
Ignoring the aromatic Thanksgiving platter my aunt places before her, Nora continues, “Annie, you’re very strong, and you attract these men who are inspired by you, because of your strength. You’re powerful and you motivate them. But, you need someone who can balance you and support you, too.”
Damn! I feel like she’s hit the nail on the head, looked through my eyes into all those memory shards of frustrated relationship vignettes and pieced them together, giving me a solved jigsaw puzzle, a beacon of light, some picture of what I really want and need, which I can now work towards. I wish this moment would hang in the air for a while longer with some mood music—maybe piano—to highlight its significance. Instead, the chatter of relatives catching up envelopes it. But, I hold onto it, like a charm in my palm to rub over till its worn smooth. The last thing I remember her telling me. Nora has got five children and as many in-laws, 12 grandchildren, 3 step-grandchildren, and I-don’t-know-how-many great-grandchildren, yet somehow she knows me and knows how to make me feel special.
Now, I can’t even recall how I answered her—it must have been something simply along the lines of, “You know what, you’re right!” or “Thank you.” Maybe someone else drew her attention away before I could respond.
…………
Two months prior to Thanksgiving, before I moved out of the stifling studio apartment I shared with Andres and our little tabbie/tortoiseshell kitten, Mocha; before I realized I went to the gym after work not primarily for exercise, but to avoid going home, I dragged Andres into the car to make that hectic grind of tires and metal glinting sun down I-80 from Oakland to Davis. I’d never visited Nora before in her new assisted living home, just down the street from my aunt’s house in Davis.
We rang the doorbell at “My Parent’s House”, Nora’s new home, and a college-age girl in jeans showed us into Nora’s spartan single room—wood floor and a twin bed. Nora looked up from her hulking desktop computer to greet me with a fuzzy kiss on the cheek. She was all dressed in old-lady slacks and a quilted blouse to go out.
I had assumed Andres and I would get some take-out for lunch, which we’d have for a picnic in Nora’s room. She wanted an outing though, and she suggested lunch at Baker’s Square, which I guess is sort of like Denny’s for the elderly. She rang a tinkling bell sitting on her desk for one of the young attendants to come show me how to load her in and out of her wheelchair and the car.
I was worried. What if Nora had to go to the bathroom while we were out? Would she feel comfortable letting me help her? Would I feel comfortable helping her? Would she feel awkward or lose some dignity or pride by allowing me to lift her out of her wheelchair and maneuver her into the car?
Nora was fine, though, of course. Dignity is something you choose to have, and carry inside. You let yourself lose it. Once, when she still lived alone at home, Nora fell in the shower. She was half-dressed, naked from the bottom down, and managed to drag herself across the entire house to telephone the neighbor, who came over with his “big, strong boys” (her words) to lift her and call an ambulance. She chose not to be embarrassed by the experience.
My reluctance or hesitation to care for my grandma—was I afraid?—played itself out in my dreams. What was I willing to do for her? Is it wrong for a family to put an elder in a nursing home or assisted living? Grandparents care for their families for so long; shouldn’t we take care of them, too?
I dreamt that Nora was ready to die. In life, she was always a great supporter of “death with dignity” and the “right to die.” She had commented before that she’d been saving up her pills in case she ever needed them. The bookshelves of her study waved winking spring-like post-its—flags marking the books she had urged family members to claim. (In her honor, after she died, I took A History of the Russian Revolution, The Speeches of Eugene Debs, Lenin’s writings, and the biography of Trotsky. I will probably never read them, but I like to feel their presence.)
In my dream, Nora had summoned me to help her die. I brought her home to an old apartment. Gathered the final cocktail of assorted white pills. A glass of tepid, metallic tap water and an accordion straw. I gently lifted her blouse over her steely curled hair. Nora’s skin was so soft and pale, folded over and over in sags down her chest. So downy and squishy and crinkly like tissue paper. The vulnerability and experience in it. This is a dream, though; it’s so surreal, unreal and clichéd all at once. I dressed her in a pink princess party dress with taffeta and netting ruffles—the kind of thing I might have worn for my fifth birthday party or to dance class. I folded back the cushiony bedcovers—sheets and quilt. It feels so cool and inviting—I could almost crawl in, away from the monotony of calendars and telephones and swiveling desk chairs, myself. Tenderly, I tuck my grandma in her celebratory dress into bed and say “good night, good bye.” I smooth the covers over her with a caress, tiptoeing out the room like a parent sending a child off to dreamland. Would I really be capable of this adult task in real life? Am I strong enough?
In my battered Honda Civic on the drive over to Baker’s Square, Nora details a long, involved drama/love story between Miriam, a Muslim Palestinian girl who works at her home, and the house director’s adopted Egyptian son. “Is Miriam one of your caretakers?” I inquire. “Yes, but she’s really my friend.” Would Nora consider me a friend, too? She surely could not narrate so exhaustively the minutiae of my love life. For a moment, I’m jealous of Miriam.
Arriving at Baker’s Square, I cautiously inch into the disabled spot and gingerly muscle Nora from car to wheelchair to restaurant table. Seated around Baker’s Square in the beige, plastic booths are more senior citizens than I’ve seen in a while. They’re smacking over their bland tuna melts and meatloaf. Flies hover in circles around Nora’s head, occasionally landing on her like they would a horse or cow, crawling at wet eyes and musty ears. Sometimes she brushes at them, but mostly she does not notice. I have a horrible morbid thought that they can smell death on her, but I guiltily push it away. My revulsion is fearful, and feels evil. Who knows, maybe I’m an oblivious harborer of flies, too. At that time, I certainly harbored in willful oblivion plenty of other persistent dissatisfactions with my job and relationship, which I worked hard to keep at bay.
…………..
During a cold snap in January, there was a two-day power outage in Davis. Nora developed bronchitis and one of her lungs collapsed. She was in the hospital for a couple days, and her body was weakened and old, and she was ready to go.
As soon as my dad emailed to me that she was in the hospital, I understood, with this firm knowledge—more than intuition; more like an acceptance of what already is, that this was it. Nora was 88 years old and she had lived a very full life. She accomplished so much and she had given life and care to so many. Nora had cared for my grandfather throughout his 20 year illness, until he died about 11 years before. And she didn't want her life prolonged like that. She was practical and accepting of death. She faced it unafraid. She made great efforts to get all her affairs and will in order for her family. She felt her life complete, and she was prepared for the next step.
Nora took a turn for the worse on a Friday afternoon, and my parents and sister drove out to go see her at the Kaiser hospital in Sacramento. All afternoon and evening, she had been nonresponsive, and when my dad got there, she was still taking heaving, labored breaths, eyes closed, on 100% oxygen and a morphine drip. My dad took her hand and talked to her for a couple minutes, told her he was there. For the first time in several hours, she opened her eyes and made clear contact with my dad, almost lifting her head off the pillow to see him. Then she just shut her eyes again, relaxed and stopped struggling. A moment later, her machine started beeping a rapid alarm, and it was all over only five minutes after my parents had arrived at the hospital. That was her final gift to my dad, to wait until he arrived.
On a heavy, misty day in January, I bombed solo down I-80 for Nora’s memorial at Davis Parent Nursery School, a cooperative she founded back in the 1950s with a few other teachers and parents. The sky was grey and the vast verdant lawn of the schoolyard was littered with tricycles and sandcastle tools. The sight of the miniature toilets inside the bathroom triggered my memory of visiting this sanctuary of Nora’s before. My grey, balding uncle, who’s a slightly smaller, more serious version of my dad, somehow quavers determinedly through a complete read aloud of the Mary Oliver poem Nora had selected for her memorial. The ending persistently hums, inscribed within me… “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is/ I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down/ into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,/ how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,/ which is what I have been doing all day./ Tell me, what else should I have done?/ Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?/ Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”
There’s an open mic, and many of the parents of Nora’s former nursery school students speak, recalling her wisdom, kindness, generosity, open heart and open mind. Their children, who were toddlers when they knew Nora, are now middle aged. Most of my cousins and I don’t say anything. We have too much to say. I want to say… Nora had a weakness for chocolate. She played classical music on the radio while she cooked, but she also enjoyed my Bob Marley. She sent away for every dinky mail-order trinket offered her, and sometimes gave them to me as gifts later. When I was little, I’d wake up early in the morning to do chair aerobics with her, seated in front of the TV with little knobs and dials in the dark, leathery den. A former nursery school student of hers made it into the NFL, and she watched all his games. In fact, every time I came to visit, she bored me with her proud stories about what her former students were now doing. She was inquisitive and read voraciously; I loved to discuss novels with her. She was very active politically, and steadfast in her views and principles without ever being pushy or preachy. She earned her MSW from UC Berkeley back in the 1940s, when she already had a child. The City of Davis is filled with her students and friends. Indeed, she made friends everywhere. Nora also found time to mother five children, and traveled with my grandfather, a UCD professor. She kept a candy jar in her living room. She funded my college education. She never disengaged from current events and her community. She was a teacher, and her life was filled with love. Nora showed me the kind of person I want to be.
We stopped off to say goodbye to Nora’s home, too, after the memorial. With housing prices going down the drain, we planned to put it on the market ASAP. While everyone else slumped in the living room, I browsed Nora’s bookshelves aimlessly, neck tilted in a crick to decipher the titles, till catching sight of a yellowing, tattered copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran—identical to the brand new volume she had given me upon my high school graduation. Intrigued, I flipped open the cover and read the inscription. It was a gift from her cousin, also named Nora, upon my grandmother’s college graduation in 1942. I felt a sublime little chill trickle down my spine and the hairs on my arms stood up.
I heard the words of Mary Oliver’s poem echoing in Nora’s voice, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I know I must actively choose and forge my life to live it fully, consciously, mindfully, like Nora did. Life is both too short and too long to just float through. I felt all bruised and worn down after this break up, but still hopeful about love. I don’t know exactly how to pray, but I do know how to love. Kahlil Gibran writes of love and relationships: “Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone…Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” I want to find that balance, that give and take, which characterizes two individuals coming together in love. Now, Nora’s gone. And I’m here, piecing together her teachings still. This philosophy expressed in The Prophet, which Nora gave me as I transitioned into adulthood, picks me up, cycling round and depositing me back to my childhood insomniac nights in her house, where like a mantra, I read essentially the same truism in the plaque on her wall, “I love my friend and the reason why is he is he and I am I.”
My grandma Nora had a plaque hanging in the guest bedroom of her house, which said, “I love my friend and the reason why is he is he and I am I.” Sweaty summer nights I’d lie awake in the back of Nora’s Davis home, sheets kicked off, staring at those words. They marched across my eyes like sheep over a fence as my breathing slowed and my body slackened with sleep. Those summers in Davis, Nora played games like memory and Candyland out of her living room game cupboard with me and my sisters. Hunched over the wheel of her extra-long Ford Taurus wagon (space for my grandpa’s wheelchair in the back), she drove us to the Avid Reader, a local bookstore, to pick up shiny, crisp picture books and chapter books, and she bought us back-to-school outfits at Gottschalks in the Woodland mall. When we departed for the sticky, cramped car ride home to Oregon, Nora packed us gummi worms in plastic sandwich bags as a treat for the road.
In second grade, I interviewed Nora about her parents’ immigration and wrote a report for school. Nora’s mother and father met in Poland, in a region occupied by the Russian czar at the time. Her father and his brothers printed subversive literature criticizing the czar, which her mother distributed on the streets. Nora’s mother was captured and thrown in prison one day while passing out pamphlets, and her father fled the country. Eventually, her mother escaped jail and joined her father in Austria, then together they moved to the United States. In the US, her father continued to work as a printer at the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward. They held steadfast to their socialist views, and my grandmother gave speeches on street corners in support of labor unions and workers’ rights. This report earned me a privileged visit to the principal’s office, where I read it aloud to her face-to-face. Proudly, I mailed a copy to Nora. When my dad and his siblings scoured her home years later in preparation to sell it, they discovered this paper tucked neatly away, saved for years and annotated with her comments and corrections.
The last time I saw Nora, it was Thanksgiving—an annual family reunion feast at my uncle’s home in Palo Alto. Nora is the matriarch of the family, seated in a throne-like position, wheelchair pushed handily to the side, at the sunny dining room table, rather than at one of the myriad lesser tables nonetheless lavishly set with silver and cloth napkins scattered throughout my uncle’s generous home. My aunt will fetch her a selection of the Thanksgiving dishes.
Nora’s knees bow in and knock together, feet splayed awkwardly shuffling when she walks. The effects of her childhood polio have returned to her in old age. Nora’s a good head shorter than me, now; her back has doubled over on itself and the vertebrae have collapsed together with osteoporosis. No need to rise or walk, though. We all come to her. Indeed, at her memorial, the head of her assisted living home remarked that Nora had more visitors and telephone calls than any other resident.
Anyhow, at Thanksgiving, I somehow scoot in between all the aunts, uncles, cousins, and great grandkids to secure a seat by Nora’s side. The conversation does not flag with her at the table, as it would with my mom’s parents, who require an ongoing enunciated, higher decibel translation of all utterances. No, Nora always wears her hearing aid. She doesn’t miss a thing.
“So, Annie,” she gets right to the point, “I hear you just broke up with Andres last week? What happened?”
I don’t feel intruded upon by my grandmother’s directness. Really, small talk bores and frustrates me. Nora knows what she wants to say and what she needs people to hear. She tells me softly, kindly yet forcefully, “You know, I could see you weren’t well matched when the two of you came and visited me back in September. You were really the leader, while he hung back a bit.”
…………….
I remember a conversation from that visit back in September, when Nora, Andres and I went to eat at Baker’s Square:
“Did you hear your cousin Isaac is going to bring his girlfriend to Thanksgiving this year?” Nora asks.
I gossip, “Well, last year, he told me, ‘I’ve been dating this girl for six months and there’s no way in hell I’d bring her to meet the family.’ I wonder what’s changed…is this a new girlfriend?”
“Well, in all those years, you never brought Patrick to Thanksgiving,”
I clamp down my urge to tell her that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Patrick, my boyfriend for four years, came to plenty of other family events. Why am I drawn to defend him now, with Andres, who performs so reliably well for family, sitting right across from me? I’m like a kid caught chomping on a wad of chewing gum. I want to blow it into a huge bubble and let it splatter gloriously all over my cheeks, but instead I swallow the thought down with a determined gulp.
Nora forges blithely onward, though: “So, what’s Patrick doing these days, anyway?”
“I dunno, same thing, I guess. Work, school—you know.” What’s Andres thinking right now? He’s inscrutable, but I bet he’s squirming on the inside. This thrills me a little—when will he crack and what will it look like?
“I never cared for him too much, but he was okay, I guess.” Nora trails off.
Gosh, Nora, I think, tell me how you really feel!
Should I trust this judgment of hers? Sometimes, she’s right on the mark, but how well did she really know me and Pat together? We were so immature; she hasn’t gotten to see his growth like she’s seen mine. When Nora died, Pat was the first person I called. And he understood me and my relationship to Nora so much better than Andres did. I wish she had known him better, so she could understand him.
“How’s your hamburger, Andres?” I ask feebly.
…………
Ignoring the aromatic Thanksgiving platter my aunt places before her, Nora continues, “Annie, you’re very strong, and you attract these men who are inspired by you, because of your strength. You’re powerful and you motivate them. But, you need someone who can balance you and support you, too.”
Damn! I feel like she’s hit the nail on the head, looked through my eyes into all those memory shards of frustrated relationship vignettes and pieced them together, giving me a solved jigsaw puzzle, a beacon of light, some picture of what I really want and need, which I can now work towards. I wish this moment would hang in the air for a while longer with some mood music—maybe piano—to highlight its significance. Instead, the chatter of relatives catching up envelopes it. But, I hold onto it, like a charm in my palm to rub over till its worn smooth. The last thing I remember her telling me. Nora has got five children and as many in-laws, 12 grandchildren, 3 step-grandchildren, and I-don’t-know-how-many great-grandchildren, yet somehow she knows me and knows how to make me feel special.
Now, I can’t even recall how I answered her—it must have been something simply along the lines of, “You know what, you’re right!” or “Thank you.” Maybe someone else drew her attention away before I could respond.
…………
Two months prior to Thanksgiving, before I moved out of the stifling studio apartment I shared with Andres and our little tabbie/tortoiseshell kitten, Mocha; before I realized I went to the gym after work not primarily for exercise, but to avoid going home, I dragged Andres into the car to make that hectic grind of tires and metal glinting sun down I-80 from Oakland to Davis. I’d never visited Nora before in her new assisted living home, just down the street from my aunt’s house in Davis.
We rang the doorbell at “My Parent’s House”, Nora’s new home, and a college-age girl in jeans showed us into Nora’s spartan single room—wood floor and a twin bed. Nora looked up from her hulking desktop computer to greet me with a fuzzy kiss on the cheek. She was all dressed in old-lady slacks and a quilted blouse to go out.
I had assumed Andres and I would get some take-out for lunch, which we’d have for a picnic in Nora’s room. She wanted an outing though, and she suggested lunch at Baker’s Square, which I guess is sort of like Denny’s for the elderly. She rang a tinkling bell sitting on her desk for one of the young attendants to come show me how to load her in and out of her wheelchair and the car.
I was worried. What if Nora had to go to the bathroom while we were out? Would she feel comfortable letting me help her? Would I feel comfortable helping her? Would she feel awkward or lose some dignity or pride by allowing me to lift her out of her wheelchair and maneuver her into the car?
Nora was fine, though, of course. Dignity is something you choose to have, and carry inside. You let yourself lose it. Once, when she still lived alone at home, Nora fell in the shower. She was half-dressed, naked from the bottom down, and managed to drag herself across the entire house to telephone the neighbor, who came over with his “big, strong boys” (her words) to lift her and call an ambulance. She chose not to be embarrassed by the experience.
My reluctance or hesitation to care for my grandma—was I afraid?—played itself out in my dreams. What was I willing to do for her? Is it wrong for a family to put an elder in a nursing home or assisted living? Grandparents care for their families for so long; shouldn’t we take care of them, too?
I dreamt that Nora was ready to die. In life, she was always a great supporter of “death with dignity” and the “right to die.” She had commented before that she’d been saving up her pills in case she ever needed them. The bookshelves of her study waved winking spring-like post-its—flags marking the books she had urged family members to claim. (In her honor, after she died, I took A History of the Russian Revolution, The Speeches of Eugene Debs, Lenin’s writings, and the biography of Trotsky. I will probably never read them, but I like to feel their presence.)
In my dream, Nora had summoned me to help her die. I brought her home to an old apartment. Gathered the final cocktail of assorted white pills. A glass of tepid, metallic tap water and an accordion straw. I gently lifted her blouse over her steely curled hair. Nora’s skin was so soft and pale, folded over and over in sags down her chest. So downy and squishy and crinkly like tissue paper. The vulnerability and experience in it. This is a dream, though; it’s so surreal, unreal and clichéd all at once. I dressed her in a pink princess party dress with taffeta and netting ruffles—the kind of thing I might have worn for my fifth birthday party or to dance class. I folded back the cushiony bedcovers—sheets and quilt. It feels so cool and inviting—I could almost crawl in, away from the monotony of calendars and telephones and swiveling desk chairs, myself. Tenderly, I tuck my grandma in her celebratory dress into bed and say “good night, good bye.” I smooth the covers over her with a caress, tiptoeing out the room like a parent sending a child off to dreamland. Would I really be capable of this adult task in real life? Am I strong enough?
In my battered Honda Civic on the drive over to Baker’s Square, Nora details a long, involved drama/love story between Miriam, a Muslim Palestinian girl who works at her home, and the house director’s adopted Egyptian son. “Is Miriam one of your caretakers?” I inquire. “Yes, but she’s really my friend.” Would Nora consider me a friend, too? She surely could not narrate so exhaustively the minutiae of my love life. For a moment, I’m jealous of Miriam.
Arriving at Baker’s Square, I cautiously inch into the disabled spot and gingerly muscle Nora from car to wheelchair to restaurant table. Seated around Baker’s Square in the beige, plastic booths are more senior citizens than I’ve seen in a while. They’re smacking over their bland tuna melts and meatloaf. Flies hover in circles around Nora’s head, occasionally landing on her like they would a horse or cow, crawling at wet eyes and musty ears. Sometimes she brushes at them, but mostly she does not notice. I have a horrible morbid thought that they can smell death on her, but I guiltily push it away. My revulsion is fearful, and feels evil. Who knows, maybe I’m an oblivious harborer of flies, too. At that time, I certainly harbored in willful oblivion plenty of other persistent dissatisfactions with my job and relationship, which I worked hard to keep at bay.
…………..
During a cold snap in January, there was a two-day power outage in Davis. Nora developed bronchitis and one of her lungs collapsed. She was in the hospital for a couple days, and her body was weakened and old, and she was ready to go.
As soon as my dad emailed to me that she was in the hospital, I understood, with this firm knowledge—more than intuition; more like an acceptance of what already is, that this was it. Nora was 88 years old and she had lived a very full life. She accomplished so much and she had given life and care to so many. Nora had cared for my grandfather throughout his 20 year illness, until he died about 11 years before. And she didn't want her life prolonged like that. She was practical and accepting of death. She faced it unafraid. She made great efforts to get all her affairs and will in order for her family. She felt her life complete, and she was prepared for the next step.
Nora took a turn for the worse on a Friday afternoon, and my parents and sister drove out to go see her at the Kaiser hospital in Sacramento. All afternoon and evening, she had been nonresponsive, and when my dad got there, she was still taking heaving, labored breaths, eyes closed, on 100% oxygen and a morphine drip. My dad took her hand and talked to her for a couple minutes, told her he was there. For the first time in several hours, she opened her eyes and made clear contact with my dad, almost lifting her head off the pillow to see him. Then she just shut her eyes again, relaxed and stopped struggling. A moment later, her machine started beeping a rapid alarm, and it was all over only five minutes after my parents had arrived at the hospital. That was her final gift to my dad, to wait until he arrived.
On a heavy, misty day in January, I bombed solo down I-80 for Nora’s memorial at Davis Parent Nursery School, a cooperative she founded back in the 1950s with a few other teachers and parents. The sky was grey and the vast verdant lawn of the schoolyard was littered with tricycles and sandcastle tools. The sight of the miniature toilets inside the bathroom triggered my memory of visiting this sanctuary of Nora’s before. My grey, balding uncle, who’s a slightly smaller, more serious version of my dad, somehow quavers determinedly through a complete read aloud of the Mary Oliver poem Nora had selected for her memorial. The ending persistently hums, inscribed within me… “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is/ I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down/ into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,/ how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,/ which is what I have been doing all day./ Tell me, what else should I have done?/ Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?/ Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”
There’s an open mic, and many of the parents of Nora’s former nursery school students speak, recalling her wisdom, kindness, generosity, open heart and open mind. Their children, who were toddlers when they knew Nora, are now middle aged. Most of my cousins and I don’t say anything. We have too much to say. I want to say… Nora had a weakness for chocolate. She played classical music on the radio while she cooked, but she also enjoyed my Bob Marley. She sent away for every dinky mail-order trinket offered her, and sometimes gave them to me as gifts later. When I was little, I’d wake up early in the morning to do chair aerobics with her, seated in front of the TV with little knobs and dials in the dark, leathery den. A former nursery school student of hers made it into the NFL, and she watched all his games. In fact, every time I came to visit, she bored me with her proud stories about what her former students were now doing. She was inquisitive and read voraciously; I loved to discuss novels with her. She was very active politically, and steadfast in her views and principles without ever being pushy or preachy. She earned her MSW from UC Berkeley back in the 1940s, when she already had a child. The City of Davis is filled with her students and friends. Indeed, she made friends everywhere. Nora also found time to mother five children, and traveled with my grandfather, a UCD professor. She kept a candy jar in her living room. She funded my college education. She never disengaged from current events and her community. She was a teacher, and her life was filled with love. Nora showed me the kind of person I want to be.
We stopped off to say goodbye to Nora’s home, too, after the memorial. With housing prices going down the drain, we planned to put it on the market ASAP. While everyone else slumped in the living room, I browsed Nora’s bookshelves aimlessly, neck tilted in a crick to decipher the titles, till catching sight of a yellowing, tattered copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran—identical to the brand new volume she had given me upon my high school graduation. Intrigued, I flipped open the cover and read the inscription. It was a gift from her cousin, also named Nora, upon my grandmother’s college graduation in 1942. I felt a sublime little chill trickle down my spine and the hairs on my arms stood up.
I heard the words of Mary Oliver’s poem echoing in Nora’s voice, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I know I must actively choose and forge my life to live it fully, consciously, mindfully, like Nora did. Life is both too short and too long to just float through. I felt all bruised and worn down after this break up, but still hopeful about love. I don’t know exactly how to pray, but I do know how to love. Kahlil Gibran writes of love and relationships: “Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone…Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” I want to find that balance, that give and take, which characterizes two individuals coming together in love. Now, Nora’s gone. And I’m here, piecing together her teachings still. This philosophy expressed in The Prophet, which Nora gave me as I transitioned into adulthood, picks me up, cycling round and depositing me back to my childhood insomniac nights in her house, where like a mantra, I read essentially the same truism in the plaque on her wall, “I love my friend and the reason why is he is he and I am I.”
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