Play Misty for Me

I walked in a Gaussian blur this morning, glasses tucked inside my pocket.  It's an interesting exercise, to view the world through imperfect vision. . . . although it could be argued that there is no other way to see things than imperfectly.

I found this softened view at once disorienting and quieting.  Neighbor and dog, now smeared along the edges, became "probably Jan and Kira" rather than the certainties they usually are.  And the mist, which, yesterday, got in the way of things as it built up on my lenses, had a completely different effect today.  No longer a deterrent,  it became something I could just enjoy, as it found and held me, its cool fingers whispering "hello."

Halfway through my walk, my eyes adjusting to their new view, I found myself looking for the larger lesson, one I could apply to all the stifling ugliness outside of me.   No clouds parted.  No booming voice rattled me from my thoughts.  But I did see something--namely a large, dark mass huddled under a pine up ahead.  My mind went where my eyes couldn't yet take me, from a curious fox to a slumbering man.  It wasn't until I was nearly upon it that I realized it was a flattened cardboard box.

The lesson?  I need to shed my preconceptions and get close enough to see what something--or someone--really is.

There is something to be said for tossing aside a pair of glasses that guarantees only one kind of seeing.

This is the Place Where the Earth Was Breathing

Saturday.  5:17 a.m.

Mark is downstairs, eating a bowl of Cheerios before going to work.  I know this because this is what he does every work-day morning at this time.

It's not him I'm hearing, though.  No, I am roused by something else.  Something lower.  A rhythmic, older sound just outside my window.

I shuffle the sheets and turn towards the window, straining to hear it.   Too airy for a screech owl.  Too quiet for sirens.  It continues, even after Mark pulls the car out of the drive.

Eventually, I get out of bed and crouch near the opened window, waiting intently.  And that's when it strikes me.

Breath.  What I'm hearing is breathing.

The realization confounds me, so I grab a pair of shorts and head outside to look into things.  Finn joins me, his ears standing at alert, which offers me little comfort.

Bare feet on cool patio, I turn my eyes upward, taking in the last quiet moments of a night sky, tracing my fingers along Casseopeia's letter-like edges.  I know this is nothing more than a delay tactic, but I stand there just the same.

I feel unsettled by the task.

As I walk down the drive,  two competing thoughts name the source of the sound and I wonder what I'll find when I reach the space between two houses--a slumbering man or . . . nothing at all.  It is this second prediction that makes me think I'm not fully awake just yet.

I mean, how on earth could the earth actually be breathing?! 

Sure enough, there is no man laying crumpled upon the dewy, uncut grass.  Just the grass and the shrubs and the fence line, wrapped up in cricket song and earthy exhalations.  I stand in wonder, half expecting to see the ground lurch upward.

Eventually, I head inside, for raspberry preserves on English muffin, before going to the park, where a bushful of monarchs flits from flower to flower, as though it were just another day ending in 'y.'

Four Little Birds . . . .

I'm nuts about birds.  Always have been.  And what's not to love about them? 

I mean, they live outdoors.  They sing.  They fly.  And they don't need to buy outfits from Younkers, which just closed, because they are naturally beautiful. 

But, like everything that we love, there comes a time when they break our hearts just a wee.

This is a photo of a Baltimore Oriole (one of my favorite birds) that I saw last spring.  I was on a walk with school friends and the Oriole was in a mid-flight fight with a pesky Grackle.  Seconds later, the two feuding birds swooped low, in front of a car, and the Oriole hit the bumper.  I rushed into the street and nudged the Oriole towards the curb, where it died a few seconds later.  I took a photo of it--lovely and quiet and internally broken--as a kind of witness, I suppose.

We continued our walk and I pretended to be okay, although my mind and heart remained with that lovely, lovely bird, now growing cold on the street behind us.  I hated to think of it deteriorating, alone, on the asphalt, imagining a nestful of babies waiting for their mama.

. . . I'm a lousy faker.

Last weekend, Mark--who encounters creatures of epic proportion out there, where airplanes take off and land--brought home a hummingbird that had died in a hangar. 

My goodness, but she was beautiful.  That luminous coat.  Her tiny feet tucked under her soft, white belly.  And that thread-like tongue, protruding from her beak . . . .

I've been witness to two other lovely, post-mortem birds--an olive-green Ovenbird resting quietly by our sandbox on C Street and a perfect Cedar Waxwing laying on a sidewalk along M Street.

Each of these four birds gave me the chance to lean in and look closely.  In their deaths, I learned more about their lives. 

Holding the Hummingbird, I was taken aback when I parted its breast feathers and saw those tiny, tiny feet.  Leaning over the Oriole, I was mesmerized by the way the colors alternated on its wings.  Gape-jawed and ignorant, I had to hit the books to name that lovely Ovenbird, the only one I've ever seen.  And I don't think I'll ever forget finding the lovely yellow band that ran along the Cedar Waxwing's tail feathers.

I was looking through my address book the other day and found a page filled with bird names.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that, next to the list of my human neighbors' names was a list of the birds I've met in my neighborhood since moving here in 2004. 

Both humans and birds have made this a very lovely place to live.

Mean Girl With Crazy Overbite

Finn, who is not Tessa.

I admit it.  I hate Tessa.

I hate her stupid haircut.  Her dumb dirty-blonde hair.  Her tinny, awful voice.

In fact, I hate her so much that, in all these years of living near her,  I've never even bothered to find out what her stupid name is, until this morning, when I was forced to learn it.

"TESSA!  STOP it!  Or I'll bring out the water.  I mean it!  Okay.  I'm getting the water. . . "

Again--the damned water that never appears.  And, again,  I am left calming myself, cursing that stupid purse dog and her tiresome "owner, " as though any human has any chance at all of owning Tessa.

It's like a scene from "Groundhog's Day."

Every morning, tucked into the corner of her Tom Sawyer picket fence, Tessa lays in wait, giddy with dreams of gaslighting Finn and me.  It's as if she can sense that, by the time we reach her yard, I'm finally peaceful, having just forgotten who our president is. 

If Tessa were an 8th grader, I'd call her a mean girl.  She's Scott Farkus, with an ugly overbite.  And her owner is that desperate stoolie by her side, always threatening to act, but never quite following through.

To be fair, Tessa didn't get this way on her own.  She's the product of years of reactionary, waterless threats, not a backbone within miles of her.  And therein lies the rub for me.

Tessa, it turns out, is the perfect product of her upbringing.  Which makes my thoughts turn to baseball . . . .

Baseball might be America's favorite pastime but it makes a lousy repository of parenting tips.  If we've laid the foundation at all, three strikes are two strikes too many.   Empty threats eventually are exposed for what they really are--veiled permission to repeat the infraction.  And even a dumb dog is smart enough to take advantage of that kind of loophole.

As a dog lover, I'm ashamed of how much I hate Tessa.  But maybe my gripe isn't with her after all.  Maybe it's with the robed woman underneath the porch light, who always shows up 30 seconds too late, uttering nonsensical sounds falling on deaf doggy ears.

Maybe she's the one who needs a time out.

Dissing My Mission

Why is it that so many people are so quick to ask why anyone would want to work in a school?  And--equally baffling--they often say it like it's some weird,  backwards way of supporting us and what we do.

Do you think that, had I become a lawyer or an accountant or a dental receptionist, I would have donned belly-dancing garb with my work pals to shake my booty on some steamy summer evening?  Yeah, no. 

I'm pretty sure that at least half of the dumb, joyful stuff I've done in the past 30 years is because of my school pals.

Maybe--just maybe--those of us who have chosen education as our career path aren't as lost or as desperate or as misguided as everyone else thinks.  Most of us really like the young 'uns.  The chaos.  All that potential, wrapped up in hope, just out of reach.

And, as fun as my colleagues are (and--oh, my--are they a fun bunch), it really is the kids who draw me back to the building each Monday.  Even the annoying ones.  Maybe them especially.

Let me be clear.

Tests be damned.

We adults who show up at school every morning--in the office, in the classroom, in the halls, in the cafeteria--we know what really matters--the relationships we forge with those young folks.  The chance we have, each day, to really see them.  To count them among the counted.  To love them, even when they wonder how anyone could possibly love the messes that they are. 

. . . granted, sometimes it helps when we ourselves are messes.

So, to all of you who can't imagine what it is that would draw anyone into the schools for a living. . . I do believe you are trying to be supportive.  But your support would be more welcomed in a vote for what we do, in a nod to the value of young people, in a donated sackful of clothes you no longer need that might help a young person feel good at school this year.  Minus the beaded bra and thumb cymbals, perhaps.

Ode to Joys

Even though I was nearly 500 miles away when this little beaut grew its wings, I felt deep joy at its introduction to this wild, weird world.  Of course, the mother in me would like to point out that the reason I was able to experience this joy was because my kids--decent beyond decency, good beyond good--filmed its wet-winged release so that I could experience it.

I cannot imagine a world without joy.  Especially right now.

What if it turned out that the best thing we could do in the face of so much ugliness and hatred was to simply enjoy something when the opportunity presented itself? To refuse to let that  moment of joy be taken from us?

It strikes me as wonderfully radical, this notion that joy, like breakfast, should never be skipped, lest the world come unraveling before our very eyes.

Last week,  I read an article about U.N. Ambassador Nicky Haley telling a group of conservative teen leaders that "owning the libs" (a term new to me, although it also hit close to home) was nothing a true leader would pursue. After reading it,  I realized that maybe I'd been played all these months.  And, yet, I also saw a sliver of hope in her message to these young leaders.

So I devised a plan in response to all that owning.

But it turns out that my new approach to this crazy life is actually my old approach to it--to never turn down an opportunity to embrace joy, to stand gape jawed in the presence of a newborn monarch butterfly, its wings still wet, its mind wondering where all the good milkweed is.

Joy, I believe, just might hold the key to something better.

In fact, I know it does.  . . . a better me, to begin with.

Now, Juxt a Minute!

I love this photo my neighbor Gary took--the beer in the foreground, the nuns and Calvin and Allie and soon-to-be Theo in the background.  I love it because of its juxtaposition--things that a person might not normally fit within a single frame.  And yet, here they are, tucked in together.  No wide-angle lens necessary.

As an ex-Catholic living on a very papal street, the fencewalker in me feels fine enjoying my nun neighbors and my now-UCC religious roots.  Certain that I can happily have both, just because.

I can't decide if my love of odd bedfellows and my tendency towards fencewalking are reasons or excuses for me.  Do they inspire my actions or explain away my inaction?  Chances are, the answer falls somewhere in between.

And yet, I have a handful of beliefs that are anchored in certitude.  For instance, I fervently believe that the only way we will get through these dark times is if we walk out together--nuns and ex-Catholics, believers and deniers, Democrats and Republicans, white and black and everything in between.  Odd bedfellows make powerful communities.

That said, you'll understand if the thought makes my stomach a little queasy . . . .

I mean, I wasn't the greatest Catholic and am hardly anything to brag about at work or at home or sitting in the back pew with a handful of other religious orphans, quietly composing my grocery list.

But I'd like to think that I'm willing to show up and give things a whirl.

Considering all of this, then, I'd say that odd bedfellows generally inspire me to act, even in the midst of my discomfort.  And that is a good thing.

As for my well-developed fence-walking tendencies?  Yeah, I'm pretty sure I lean into these when I don't want to lean into anything else too terribly far.  Or when I want to kind of fake it.

When I was what my friend Matt and I referred to as a "bastard lovechild " in the English Department (what else to call someone who only taught journalism and pop culture?!), I'd use my fence-walking skills to try to fit in.   Hungry to be mistaken as an intellectual (a highly-prized label in a literature-soaked environment), I'd feign excitement about polysyllabic words, philosophically-driven mission statements and heady discussions about the "why" of things, despite being a who-what-when-where kind of person.   Soon enough, though, the jig would be up, when a true scholar would ask me to look over her rough draft and I'd find myself drowning in commas and compound sentences, not knowing how or where to even begin.

Alas, it turns out you can't teach an old Strunk-and-Whiter Faulknerian tricks.

Still,  I  appreciate the different ways all of my English bedfellows teach and speak, despite my continual return to the comfort of a 20-word paragraph.

How can I explain this love of diversity living next door to a tendency towards the non-committal?  Look in the mirror and tell me yourself.

We are all much messier than the shiny slivers of selves that we portray on social media.  We are hypocrites and hypochondriacs, yet also capable of being deeply moved in the presence of beauty.  Maybe--just maybe--our truest selves are found at the antipode of purity--living at that furthest point from the clearest thing, muddied and relieved, and certainly not so easy to understand.  Juxtaposed from within.

You know.  Beautiful, in a sloppy sort of way.