Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Two years now on the last day of the school year I give my middle school classes a break from the brainbending work of figuring out non-linear writing and trying to make sense of their increasingly virtual world and instead show them how to make virtual snowflakes. The flash-based software is pretty cool, to be fair, allowing more precise cuts and more perfect folds than real paper, where folds turn thinness into mass so quickly by doubling rules.

What I like about this activity is that it reaches an unexpected set of kids. Normally, my teaching style hooks a specific type of kid, not necessarily the best and brightest by traditional standards, but those who can visualize and reimagine the world flexibly. Over a term, they build a relationship between real world and virtual which explands their views of rhetoric, of space and time as applied to communication and perception -- a tall task for the average fourteen year old.

Here, however, the kids who get stuff quickly are lost and too-quickly bored. Instead, it is those who need seasonal magic -- a few cuts turning into something delicate and lithe, hexagonally-speaking -- who brighten up. The sad kids who just needed a plaything, the different-brained kids who turn to games out of a lack of understanding of basic writing parameters; the kids who loved the hands-on work of elementary school and have lost their way in the new paperwork of middleschool -- here is the moment, the magic, the time to find them more than just a new medium for expression of the same old cumulative concepts.

It is no-stakes, in one sense, but it means everything for them. The room fills up my time with kids eager to share what their virtual scissors have wrought. For a change, the "lost boys" want me to see their work, instead of hiding its skimpiness from view as I pass by. I get to smile and praise students who have not been praised or smiled at for weeks. And I get to see their secret selves emerge, if they let me, if they try, if they let their newly jaded middleschool selves get hooked.

If I'm careful, the lesson can continue from there. I've got scissors and paper ready; I do not push, only mention that what can be true in cyberspace can be made real here, as always. Against the back wall counter, I show those who seem interested how to turn the online lesson into a tempate for real paper, real folding, a lesson hiding topology and imagination-to-real lessons which will hide in their brains until they need to use the virtual world to make the real world work to their advantage. By the end of class, while their peers play space invaders illicitly on the internet, those few and happy kids lag behind, finishing one last papercut before slogging off to math and the endless spate of sugarparties that inevitably characterize that last pre-holiday schoolday, lost to too much energy, curriculumless and chaotic.

But I am left with their temporarily recovered childhood of paper dolls and cheer, proudly pasted to windows and walls. It makes the heart sing as I close down the computers for the long break, to know that their last day was full of pride and youthful glee. Over break, the custodians will scour the paperscraps from the floor, hiding the activity; on the first day back, the sowflakes pinned there will come down and be filed away, or more likely fill the recycle bins. But one or two will stay, high in a corner where no one will notice much. It's enough, I think. Maybe, just maybe, they'll remember when they return.

Those who stop in from time to time may have noticed I'm not really here these days.

I'm fine. Happy, even. Just living life instead of blogging about it, mostly.

I'm also musicblogging. If you're interested in folk music covers -- both covers OF folk music, and folk music covers of popular songs from Cat Stevens to Britney Spears, head on over to Cover Lay Down!

Labels: cover, covers, folk, folk music, mp3, music

A letter today from an old, old friend on the other coast just about to pop with firstborn child, and I'm thinking about California, especially after last night's chat with Dad. He always says how sane I seemed, there on the road and the highclass hotels, despite homelessness and joblessness. I guess I've come to love uncertainty, now that I've learned to trust the way my best self emerges in chaos, the more the merrier.

And then, I guess, too, I've learned that as long as everyone is safe we are whole together, there's nothing to fear. And here we are, the kids and wife and I growing every day: the spouse in the background making jam from wild concord grapes she harvested down the street, homemmade streetfair pretzels from downloaded recipes; the elderchild tapdancing out of rhythm and gleeful, learning to be okay with male authority as she learns to love kindergarten gym class; the wee one growing ever-less wee despite lingering linguistic quirkiness, doubling her plurals, refusing to use the letter s in combination, asking for more chippez while she sucks at an applesauce moon. Meanwhile, the larger family dissolves into diaspora; we walk on eggshells, recast our relationships, put each in its new place, safely.

Me? I've got that asthmatic bronchitis again, and the doctor says it's not quite pneumonia yet; the meds ream my system sickly, but I know I can take pain, and it's worth it. No cigarettes since I first awoke, just gum instead; it's hard to figure if the delirium is from the lack of nicotene or the illness or the meds, probably everything and anything. Middle school teaching's going great and smooth after two years of figuring it out, but no matter how honest the workdays, there's nothing like a day off work to stomach-clutch and swim in the trippy haze of meds and gut mayhem.

''Stok: it's like Jolt, but for coffee''

I never know how to count coffee consumption. It takes two mugs and a thermos to drop the liquid level from six to one; I know, because for most of my teaching life, it's been two mugs to get me into the car, and a tall metal sippy cup to get from there to the end of first period. Is this five cups, or three? And more importantly, is it enough?

I have a hard history with caffeine. Jolt -- "all the sugar and twice the caffeine of regular cola" -- got me through high school AP exams; those No-Doz were a lifesaver in college, at least the first time around. And coffee? I chewed espresso beans to get through my graduate program; drank a twenty ounce every Monday for a seven year stint at my latenight radio show, deep in the bowels of the now-dark classroom buildings, and on a school night, yet.

Once, then, I would have jumped at a testrun of Stok, these new coffee shots in creamer tubs, recently boingboinged via their new gadgetblog. That they come in both black and sweet would create a conundrum of delivery like nothing since the day I discovered there were other dark roasts besides French. The idea of adding an extra minishot to every cup would be worth serious consideration, at least.

Not this year, however. Because this year, in an attempt to find a cure to the as-yet-undiagnosed syndrome of yesteryear, and also because I finally noticed the uncanny coincidence of summer mellowmode and the halved ration of coffee that gets me to and through it, I've been drinking a cup less in the morning.

I still have energy in school -- still sing "Won't You Be My Neighbor" at the top of my lungs as the kids stream down the hallway from the bus, waving my coffee mug like a mug of grog. I still get there, ready to go; in fact, I've been getting there earlier. But I'm a little more focused, a little less anxious, and a lot more happy. I'm also falling asleep early, which is a mixed blessing.

As an added bonus, it takes less nicotene gum to get me through the day.

Maybe I'm on to something, here.

There must be a word, I think today.

(But a word about what? At the time, there was some thought of a new perspective, an illumination that should not go unnoticed -- one as yet unworded, unnamed. By the time I got here, it was gone. All was vague of purpose. But here I ended up regardless:)

And unbidden, I think of this space, and the language begins to scan itself. Three paragraphs swim into blurry unfocus, the smooth flow of the light serif blocks out in the brain. The public mind awakens as if no time had passed.

Once I spent a summerweek writing my blogging life. Four chapters, an hour at a time by the banks of the Smith College waterway, by battery in the rough-hewn wood of a Japanese Teagarden, my back to the woods and dormitories beyond.

In the end, I took the unfinished half'script home, archived it -- and never opened it again.

Today, a thought: perhaps it was only a beginning. Or a part of the larger writing, the life-logging constant, in review.

Regardless. If there is to be a language flow -- if I dare let the hidden itch rise to the surface, to grow back into the constant nag of the brain that this, too, must be written.

Maybe the book is there. Maybe not. Maybe this is a hiccup, a faint one-fer, a retired novelist's daydream, a once-poet's bubble amidst another life.

But there must be some sort of word, I think.

And so goes this unblogging. And so comes the return, like shingles: reluctant, blossoming, and oh, the relief of the fingernail scratch on the keyboard like skin. Perhaps an outbreak. Perhaps a fluke. But for one moment, awakened, here I am again.

In the evenings I empty my pockets of blogs that might have been, postcards from a life on the road. In and out of days, weeks, a month and more, they pile up in my computerside cubbyholes: a growing catalogue of the unread and unedited, living out a darkened existence on the back of envelopes and old maps in a shaky hand.

They cry out to me, sometimes, when I cannot sleep, these almost illegible scrawls, written up against the steering wheel on the back roads and highways.

Some excerpts from a life unblogged:

...Every once in a while on a different way home I pass the house not taken and wonder what that life would have been. Back on our familiar streets closer to home, the neighbors have removed the inflatible leprecaun from the lawn, though the tinsel shamrocks still swing from the trees. How much polyurethane, how much air and light, how much sheer commercial kitsch will it take to ring in the subsequent season? What will Easter bring? We'll soon know...

...I'm in therapy now, paying ten bucks a week for the privledge of talking about myself for an hour uninterrupted. The health plan picks up the rest; I wonder what they think I'm getting out of it, whether they'd tell me if I asked, if the answer would help me understand why I go back every week...

...The urge to write still comes, sometimes, but my heart stops me. Without a grand entrance prepared, the prodigal return seems unsurmountable. Does it take humility to come back home? Am I so stubborn still? ...

...I care too much, and cry at the radio, play and replay the same sad songs and stories from This American Life: children challenged for who they are, their parents cursed for who they would never be. I try to care more about people, less about things; more about nature, less about human nature. But still I dwell in my mind's eye, seeing my children in these voices, these rooms, these roads, years from now, in an imperfect world I could not fix for them....

...I've lost my voice, and cannot sing. My sinuses stifle, my ears clog. I cannot hear myself. The poignant pieces of our trivial lives -- this one's first haircut, the paper plate rainbow that one makes for me in school -- overwhelm my senses. I used to want to feel less, to protect my heart. Now the feedback I once depended upon for understanding goes missing, and I know not how to recover it...

This evening after supper I bring in the last of this year's wood. Clearing the line brings light into the yard where no light has been for months; the neighbors house and the woods beyond emerge after a long winter.

Afterwards, in the waning light, I raise my eyes to the sky, give of myself back to the world, give over to the urge. And like an answer, out of grey nowhere, drops begin to fall from the sky.

Snow melts away into Spring below my feet. The smell of ozone fills the air.

I feel the rain on my face.

The rest is still unwritten.

Labels: Spring, wandering, winter, writing

It's been two weeks, and though I have nothing to say, I suppose I owe it to me/you/us to create some closure. Quickly, then, and fragmented as it comes, before the moment passes:

In the myriad possibilities of wandering, there must always be an acceptance of that which passes. After all, we cannot carry our entire histories on our shoulders as we go. Sometimes, if we are to go forward, entire worlds must be left behind.

Maybe I'll come back one day. Maybe I'll need this place that never existed, yet can always be found, right here where I left it.

Until then, I suppose. May the road rise up to meet you.

And may our paths cross, once in a while. You'll know me: I'll be the boy smiling at the evernew world in his hands.

I've been thinking about poetry again, wanting to capture the way the mothers huddle together at the end of their driveways, glancing half-anxious over the hill's horizon as they wait for the bright yellow buses each afternoon as I drive past.

I think there's something there, maybe an image to pair with the way my old students, now hulking high schoolers, stand huddled in their own coats, watching their breath and the cars pass each morning, watching for another town's bus, way on the other side of the same mountain.

Of course, I'll never write it now.

In the halflight before the sun came up this morning the world was covered in a thin layer of snow, and everything -- the sky, the ground, the trees, the air -- everything was the same color, the same shade of grey, the color of bleached night.

It's like poetry, this world. Sometimes, I guess, it's enough to leave it at that.

Labels: commute, poetry, students, winter, writing