Safe

We were watching The Year of Magical Thinking on West 45th. Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion (sort of) was talking about her daughter Quintana, who was in an induced coma. I had always told her I’d keep her safe, she repeated. Safe. It was a thread running through the whole play: she kept the home fire burning, she had it under control, she would make them live, her dead husband and her gravely ill daughter, through the force of her will and her persistence—they would be safe.

I sat in my theater seat. Your safety isn’t the same as mine, I thought.

In her essays and books, she tells us in the details: the Corvette, the dinners at Morton’s, the Westlake School for Girls, flying to Honolulu just to write a screenplay, the Bohemian Club, the minute, intimate knowledge of what china patterns convey what message about one’s upbringing in certain Orange County circles: this is her milieu. Her themes are universal: power, history, justice, death—but her social stratum is rare, specific, and not mine.

I’m not judging this writer—whose work I love—for being wealthy. But we seek ourselves in other people’s stories. I do. This is what I hear in her story: the wild injustice of loss, the power of will and memory… and the strange, distant trappings of a luxurious life.

When she describes how she keeps Quintana safe, it involves speaking with teams of the best doctors in the city, some of whom she’s known for years. When her condition worsens, Quintana is flown via Medi-Vac from Los Angeles to another specialist in New York. Redgrave recreates the scene in the plane: she describes holding Quintana’s red suede Prada bag in her lap, her jewelry, her watch. She always weaves this layer of material detail; her story is always in the details.

They get sick like you and me, but this writer and her family do not live, or die, like you and me. When they die, their obituaries run in the New York and Los Angeles Times, and they are mourned and interred in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. You get the sense that it isn’t just that Didion and her husband were successful writers; you imagine that it was always this way. One doesn’t live on a bluff in Malibu and drive a Corvette so early in one’s married life just by writing Run, River, a successful novel, but not one of stratospheric consequence.

She never marvels. She mentions the names of restaurants, the brands of shirts, the neighborhoods, the streets, as though they were everyone’s names, like Formica or Levi’s or Elm.

It isn’t a revelation that Joan Didion is wealthy, or that any author or famous person is wealthy. I live in Manhattan, across the street from a building full of tacky apartments (if you ask me, which, maybe you didn’t) that happen to be worth more than two million dollars, and that’s starting with the one-bedrooms. Wealth is everywhere in this town. Wealth sits next to you, looms down from the billboard, stands across the street in stilettos, swishes right past you.

Vanessa Redgrave’s gorgeous, radiant face practically touches you with her lively eyes, her urgent cadences—It will happen to you, she actually says. Didion’s matter-of-fact, even prose insists nothing is unusual. Her purported point is never the detail—the restaurant, the china pattern, the maker—but she mentions them relentlessly. Sometimes, they are part of the pleasure of the litanous rhythm of her writing.

Yes, my husband will die one day, but I am not like her.

I don’t begrudge her the details—I like her work too much—but I was struck, watching Vanessa Redgrave, a more generous persona than Didion—that when she says safe and home, she and her daughter don’t worry over the things I am obsessed by: why do I feel like cleaning my mother’s house every time I go home? Does my mother have enough money to retire on? What will happen if she gets old and sick and feeble—who’s going to pay for it? How am I going to afford an apartment in this town, at $1580 per square foot? What if I don’t want to move to Bay Ridge, what if I want to live in the West Village, where Calvin Trillin could afford a down payment on a townhouse as a newlywed reporter, sixty years ago? How am I ever going to make enough money to feed my children, who don’t even exist yet?

It’s nothing new that New York pushes you to the edge of sustenance—what would pass for comfortably middle class in another city becomes barely scraping along here. In Through the Children’s Gate, Adam Gopnik writes that in New York, real wealth doesn’t buy you “luxury, twisting staircases, panoramic windows”—it buys you a “normal” home with “kitchens that look like kitchens” and “bedrooms that look like bedrooms.” A couple with Master’s degrees and Decent Salaries (one a schoolteacher, the other an architect), who pass for yuppies on the street in their $300 designer glasses and Diesel jeans and Camper shoes, who live around the corner from the Chelsea galleries, split the rent for a 400-square-foot studio and cannot fathom putting together the $140,000 down payment it would take to buy a one-bedroom apartment nearby. One that, with a little drywall and cleverness, we could raise two children in.

I grew up in a flimsy two-story apartment that eventually grew mushrooms out of the ceiling, raised on my mother’s postal clerk salary in California, which was commensurate, at the time, with a teacher’s salary. I imagined we were “middle class”—“lower middle class” if I was going to get technical. But not poor, like my classmates whose parents didn’t have green cards and washed dishes and picked oranges for a living, who sold tamales door to door on the weekends, who lived with their ten brothers and sisters in two-bedroom apartments with their abuelas. By this measure, we are rich.

Maybe Joan Didion is just an accurate chronicler, a faithful ethnographer, of her class. I said I didn’t begrudge her the details. It’s so simple: maybe I begrudge her all those comforts—from here, they look so good: a house in Malibu, never having to look at the total on the dinner check, real living rooms and bedrooms in Manhattan. Simple, predictable: I want the greener grass. It seems so callow when I’m talking about a story of losing your husband and your daughter. But if she didn’t mention it all the time, maybe I wouldn’t notice it.

Come on already

Dawn and Stirling staggered down the hill to us from the Earth Day thing in Central Park. Nika was perched near Stirling’s shoulders in a backpack baby carrier, woozy under her hat. “Ugh,” said Dawn, “It’s Babypallooza up there.” When Nika wakes up, she grimaces exactly the way Stirling does when he finds something distasteful; my mother said babies look like their fathers for the first nine months to make sure they stick around. Every time I see Nika, I have a new favorite thing about her: today, it was her big-eyed, rapt attention to grown-up talk as we yammered over her head. No, wait. It was when she tried to eat grass.

We were telling them about Tuesday night, when we met Ben at a restaurant on the Lower East Side to toast his first day at The Nation. “He said you were meeting at eight,” Dawn said incredulously. “I know–it may as well have been midnight,” I agreed. It was lovely–swilling wine in a French restaurant and making a thousand toasts–but the next morning, when I crawled out of bed at five-thirty, I felt like I’d been hit by the A train. The whole day, I was so tired I could feel it in my teeth. “Yeah, I can’t do school nights, dude,” I said.

“You guys already act like parents,” Dawn said for the 12th time. “Just pop a baby out already!”

She has a point.

Oliver, Part I: Stirrings

He had an old person’s name; he didn’t look like a teenager. We met at church 13 years ago, when I was in eighth grade and he in ninth. His hair was long and fine; he had wide, flushed, radiant cheeks and green eyes. His two comrades, Mike and Jesse, were tall, willowy, and widely admired by brainy, rebellious teenage girls.

Ollie had an appetite for a kind of worship-love that was epic and enduring: when we became friends, he was shattered, as he often would be, over the gentle rejection of a pretty girl. They wanted to be his friend; they wanted to make out with Mike and Jesse. They were not always brainy or rebellious, but to him, they were magnificent, luminescent, floating just above the ground. Ilona, Saskia, Larissa, Cat…the loveliest names, like wind chimes.

Our friendship was sealed one night when he lay his head in my lap and moaned softly over the first one. The affliction was familiar: I loved distant people the same too-hard way.

They were in a band together: Oliver was a jazz pianist, a guitarist, and a reedy, pitch-perfect singer. Jesse loved his bass almost more than his girlfriends, and thrashed at it with sinewy abandon, and Mike sang a pretty, haunting harmony and played guitar.

The first months of our friendship, I was dumbstruck that there could be smart boys with weird tastes, who didn’t skateboard or play sports, who were both nerdy and cocky at once. We talked on the phone forever. We were avid poets, drawers, alt rock enthusiasts, and vaguely into whatever underground political movements our parents and teachers had flirted with and mentioned in passing: communism, socialism, the “New Left,” peaceniks, Dadaism. We didn’t know what we were talking about, but we thought it might help us lift off from the banality of our adjacent suburbs.

Whenever Oliver discovered he liked something, he became its prophet. He became territorial but evangelical. This is how I came to like “A Coney Island of the Mind” and Walt Whitman and the Ween album “Chocolate and Cheese,” but my affection for them was private, never to outdo Ollie’s public declamations. I sat at the edge of his furious, ecstatic firelight, rapt for that first almost-year.

In Riverside Park (an old essay)

“I lost my virginity to that man,” I tell my boyfriend, pointing to the snarling one in the foreground. Legs wide apart, hips jutting forward, chin down, Nathan, the lead singer, looks ravenous. I click the window closed on his laptop.

I fell in love with Nathan in Riverside Park. I was 19. Talk about ravenous! I was so stupefied that this college Marxist version of Mick Jagger was paying me the slightest attention that I projected years’ worth of accumulated fantasies onto him in a matter of weeks. He was smart. Not just smart, but well-read. His father was a professor. He’d read Freud in the eighth grade, and kept a picture of him pinned on his wall next to the bed. He’d grown up on the Upper West Side and gone to Columbia Grammar. His house had walls of built-in bookcases. He was Jewish. His parents read the Times over breakfast. His little brother was a genius.

I grew up in a dilapidated stucco apartment in southern California with wall-to-wall carpeting. My mother, a postal worker, didn’t finish college. My cultural/spiritual background had more to do with Linda Goodman’s Love Signs and occasional inferences from my intuitive mother about numerology and “the universe.”

Nathan encapsulated everything I loved about the northeast: “seriousness,” “authenticity,” the way people, who were mostly neither blond nor stoned, leveled their stodgy, literate gazes at you when they talked. I realize now this was only a narrow swath of privileged eastern demographic, based mostly on my exposure to college professors and their progeny, but it was so different from where I’d come from that I assumed everyone in the north Atlantic states wore tweed, knew from theorists and literature and bagels, listened to NPR, and drove Volvos. Nathan’s attention was confirmation I’d made the right choice moving 3,000 miles from home.

I printed dozens of photographs of us together, taken the weekends I went to visit him at Wesleyan, a two-hour bus ride away. They were lost years later in a fire that consumed the boxes I’d sent home after graduation.

Nathan combined his braininess with a swaggering rock-and-roll aesthetic: he was interviewed on his college radio station and referred to the “teen angst/fellatio dialectic” and described his music as “expressionist rock.” He actually swaggered when he walked, and wore square-toed Italian boots, tight pants, and little Calvin Klein t-shirts, which he neglected to launder, and I secretly loved the way they smelled, balled up in the corners of his unmade bed.

There was a moment, I believe, when he was in love with me, too. It was just before Thanksgiving; he’d clutched at me all night in my own twin bed before we drove to the city, whispering, “You’re so fucking wonderful.” He’d taken to calling on a regular basis at two a.m., and when I woke up the next morning, I was never sure if I’d dreamt the conversation. We were spending a night at his parents’ place in Westchester, and he was eager to introduce me to his mother, “who will love you,” he said. We got in after midnight, but I insisted we visit Manhattan, which I had only been to once.

He took me to Tom’s Restaurant, the one from Seinfeld, which thrilled me, though I knew enough not to admit it. We crossed Broadway and headed for Riverside Park. An actual rat flitted across my shoes, and I screamed.

It was eerily warm. It reminded me of home. I looked at him, framed in the hazy amber streetlamp glow, his forehead now, as always, faintly perspiring, forming curly tendrils at his hairline. I’d anticipated this feeling. This must be it, I thought: this wild, inexhaustible affection, this vague feeling of possession, of unimaginable privilege and luck, this coltish desire. “I think I love you,” I whispered. I don’t remember if I said it loud enough for him to hear; it sufficed that the moment passed at all. I knew I would keep it forever, that it didn’t matter if he loved me as much, or that it was all downhill from there.

We broke up over the phone in January, in a conversation that was so convoluted I had no idea what was said by the time we hung up. I was heartbroken for awhile. I never saw him again, except in weird coincidental run-ins, when we happened to move to the same Brooklyn neighborhood, or happened to work in the same building in Chelsea. I quit shortly after, for unrelated reasons, and left the city.

He still swaggers, apparently, from what I can tell in the band photo. A friend from college who lived in Brooklyn reported seeing him on the street: “He’s gained weight,” she said.

I like to think I know so much more now than I did at 19. The night Nathan and I met—it was Halloween, and we were drunk, sitting on the steps of the dining commons at my school—he said something about his propensity for “dark, literary girls from California.” The idea that I could be construed this way—as “literary,” or “dark,” as part of classifiable, desirable genus after whom boys in bands pined—I ate it up.  This, I thought, this was worth leaving home for.  Oh, well.

Sightings

C stood in front of the mirror last night after dinner, examining his naked middle. “I feel skinny, white, and fat,” he said.

We’d had dinner with M at a little place across Ninth Avenue and ate a transgressive banana bread dessert that defied prior notions of both banana bread and dessert.

I hadn’t seen M in years, and the last time I saw her, it had been years since the time before that.

We went to the same high school—“like The O.C.,” she explained to C, “or, actually, Bring it On.” At the time, I called my classmates “nymphets.” I was convinced they were bred on a farm and shipped to our school: so startling was their uniformity, their finicky precision with tanning and exercising, their long, straight, blonde hair. Also, like robots or zombies, they lacked manners and empathy.

This is why I liked M. She had been friends with the blondes for years, but she had none of their haughtiness. She was sardonic and whip-smart and truly pretty, not like a glazed-over Seventeen model. She was classier than I was. She had better manners. She could read people and interactions with a medical acuity, sizing up comments and cryptic notes and someone’s father’s embarrassing behavior in a way that explained it all for you, and I was grateful for her inadvertent primers on the strange, privileged resort world I stumbled into when I transferred to her school.

Then we graduated, and she went to Dartmouth and I to Hampshire. She emailed brief, pithy missives: uproarious, spot-on ethnographies of the blue-blood enclave she found herself in. I have always appreciated how M talks candidly, without pretense, about money and class. I thought she was classy because of her middle-class pedigree in a San Diegan suburb. Now we were both going to college with people from prestigious boarding schools, who had actual trust funds or famous parents. She was somehow more like them than I was, but she also waited tables while she studied. I was as grateful for her perspective as ever.

The truth is, M has always dazzled me. She is fierce and charismatic and invigorating. She’s quick, and I quicken to keep pace. But her dryness and sarcasm, charming as they are, belie what I am not qualified to name but will venture nonetheless is an abject fear of burdening someone else with her business. My grandmother is like that. Stiff upper lip Yankee. M convinces me in every gesture and remark that she is fine, in fact has never been better, even when she tells me she isn’t, when her eyes glisten and her voice quivers. It may be that I don’t actually know her very well, compared with her oldest friends or her sisters; why would she let me in, of all people? I was drawn to her invulnerability—the flourish of her armor—when we were 17. I was fascinated by what she could be working so hard to protect.

When I hear from her, I remember how much I like her. I think of how good it is to have vivacious, critical girlfriends who can discuss Lindsey Lohan and the politics of the death penalty with equal fervor and intelligence. Who appreciate good jeans and quality eye shadow and the thrill of a tall man who can cook, but only as deep, discerning, smart girls do. I still feel like I have something to learn from her. I think she can do anything.

I am sure that I romanticize her as much as I ever did, probably because I don’t know her much better than I did in high school. She is still larger than life, than my life. Which I hope will fall away, over the years, as we grow older and old. We’re past the age when you see the world as a giant candy store of potential friends and lovers; I find that it is harder to make friends, or even deepen the friendships I have, now, since turning 25 and 26 and 27 and becoming domesticated (an indoor cat, so to speak). But the true things still loom, still float forward from the noisy storm on the periphery. Maybe my friendship with M will stay on, will transcend the typical vagaries, the ordinary busyness that keeps you from noticing what is worth tending. I like to think so.

How To Be a Better Teacher, or, I Suck

I thought I was getting comfortable. Competent. If not great, at least better than last year. Slipping a little more gracefully into my role as Benevolent Dictator of the ELA fiefdom in Room 200. My school is a training ground for overlords: I don’t like how Striver High does authority, discipline, pedagogy, collaboration, or community, but it’s a million times better than many city schools. Even if teachers here rely on worksheets, textbooks, and threats more than I would like, it is a relatively peaceful, supportive, dedicated place to work. Henry was suspended today for saying “faggot” in my class. Where else does a kid catch such swift retribution for that ugly but commonplace act?

Then I started reading book for class today on the subway: “The Differentiated Classroom.” I was being  responsible and doing my reading for class BEFORE the  paper was due, eschewing the New York Times Book Review (my standard Monday morning fare) for insight into how to teach diverse learners.

“In Mrs. Wilkerson’s 8th grade English class,” the author writes, “students often read novels around a common theme, such as courage or conflict resolution…Mrs. Wilkerson also varies journal prompts, sometimes assigning different prompts to different students. Often, she encourages students to select a prompt that interests them.”

Here we go.

“In Mr. O’Reilly’s 8th grade English class,” she admonishes, “students read the same novels and have whole-class discussions on them. Students complete journal entries on their readings.”

AND WE’RE OFF!  Bring on the guilt:

Us: (Deep breath) We’re reading “Ethan Frome.”
Them: Noooooo!
Us: Yes.
Them: This is wack! I hate this book! I don’t get it! This is borin’! I hate ELA!
Us: Read it anyway, young punks, or you’ll fail the quiz/marking period/semester/Regents/high school/life. See you in tutoring. I’m calling your mother.

Cue self-flagellation…

I could tick off the dozen or so reasons WHY I suck without blaming myself, chief among them the utter lack of coordination or planning in our department, confirmed, for example, by the list of novels we were handed to teach that was cobbled together by our new chair the week before school started, with no input from us; there is also the Ferris Bueller-style lecturing at the front of the room, followed by rote note-copying and multiple-choice exams, that Striver High seems to favor. When I try anything more “student-centered,” that seems to empower the kids and ask for their input, I’m suspiciously regarded as “lowering the standard.” Like, What, you don’t think our kids can handle the real stuff? (The “real stuff” being the longstanding pillars of old school-style education: book reports, five-paragraph essays, books by dead white guys.)

Recently, I suggested designing an independent writing project for a student who’d been removed from my room for discipline reasons; he hadn’t done a single assignment all semester. I wanted to design material with him in mind; how could I unlock this kid’s potential? “No, he’s fully capable of doing the regular work, like everyone else,” snapped the department chair. I know he’s capable, but he probably thinks it’s boring and irrelevant. And I sort of agree.

Anyway, back to sucking. I am in a pedagogical rut without the breathing room or the time to design something better. Forget planning it with my colleagues; I’d be developing it on my own, and there’s no way. For all the mediocre curriculum I plan, it takes an awful lot of maintenance. And I’m not the worst teacher in the world: I tutor five or eight hours a week, have everyone’s parents’ numbers on speed dial, manage 35 kids for 80 minute-stretches like a champ, enliven our by-the-book lessons with theatrical panache, make connections with students…my old kids from last year (the year I REALLY didn’t know what I was doing) wander in and tell me how much they miss my class, God bless them.

But I know it, I KNOW my class sucks more than it has to, I can see it in their faces when we do ANOTHER quiz just to prove they read the book they hate that we’re all reading that I didn’t choose. I need a vision, man. ‘Cause I could be awesome. But for now, I’m not. For real.

I’m Calling Your Mother

In the waning hours of tutoring yesterday afternoon, Ms. Kamath beckoned me into the hallway, her face cloudy with rage. “I’m calling Denisha’s mother tonight,” she hissed. I nodded. “She’s insane. She’s being totally disruptive.” I nodded again, and she looked at me expectantly. “Look at her. She’s DANCING AROUND YOUR ROOM IN HER SOCKS.” I turned around, and Denisha was, indeed, twirling around the room in her socks as Ryan and Ashantay tried to write the essays that were due four days ago. “Um, I think you should call her mother, too,” Ms. Kamath added. Right-o.

I felt like tissue paper: transparent and prone to shredding. I’d spent the last two hours trying to wring proper five-paragraph essays from stubborn freshmen who swore they didn’t know how to write a sentence. I’d blown up at Jackson (diagnosis: emotionally disturbed), who had banged a chair on a desk several times to get my attention as I tutored his classmate. I’d shooed Ashantay and Tyanna and Denisha out of the room to eat their fried chicken in the hallway, because the smell was making me gag. I observed that the classroom was at least as loud when this particular squad of four is present as when there are 35 kids in it. The cacophony was making my ears bleed. When a fourteen-year-old feels like she can’t do something, she’ll fight you to the death to prove it.

I walked back into the class and made a grave announcement. “You know,” I began, surveying the room, “I’ve had to quiet you guys down way too many times this afternoon. I’m gonna have to…call your parents,” I sighed. Denisha looked stricken. “Ms. Magnolia, you CAN’T call my mother. I’m gonna have to run away, and she’ll be on the news for murdering me. I am so serious. You CANNOT call my mother.” I looked at her, like, Seriously? “I’m mandated in my contract to call a hotline that goes to Albany if I believe any of my students is being abused,” I explained. “No, no, you don’t have to call a hotline,” she said quickly. “Then what? What do you want? A second chance?” I asked, impatience mounting. “It’s NOVEMBER. You’ve had your second, and your third, and your 27th chance. This is nonsense. You wrote the check, Denisha; now you’ve gotta cash it. This is on you. End of story.” Ashantay groaned, “Oh, I’m gonna get a beatin’.” “Ms. MAGNOLIA!” Denisha pleaded.

“I swear to God, I am gonna shut up for the rest of my life in your class,” Ashantay announced. (If anyone is a longtime reader, Ashantay is the ninth grade, raw-state version of TJ, my favorite sahsaying 12th grader). I stared at him. “Can I have that in writing?” I said, pushing a piece of loose leaf toward him.

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious.”

“I PROMISE TO NOT TALK IN MS. MAGNOLIA’S CLASS UNLESS I AM CALLED ON,” it read, signed, “Ashantay Davis-Hartford. 11/01/06.” Denisha eagerly penned hers, including permission to call her mother immediately upon violation of the contract. (Like I need permission.)

“I have short-term memory,” Ashantay said as he packed his things. I stifled a laugh at my desk. “I’m not gonna remember that tomorrow,” he said. Which I figured. As they prepared to leave, they traded stories of the epic beatings they got from their mothers over various indiscretions over the years, usually for cursing out an elementary teacher.

“Fathers should not beat their children, because then they would die,” Ashantay observed. Once, he claims, he ran away for an afternoon to avoid his mother’s war path, eventually finding a police officer and insisting he’d been kidnapped. I listened, fascinated, horrified.

“Do you think you’ll beat your children?” I asked them. “No,” said Denisha firmly.

“I’m gonna slap my kids,” said Ryan, demonstrating, “but that’s not beatin’ ‘em.”

“I’m not havin’ kids,” declared Ashantay, which was oddly reassuring, because I have never met a child who seemed so dead set against empathy or sincerity. (Think Joan Crawford meets Truman Capote. Everything is a performance.)

Worried for the future, I remain,
Ms. Magnolia Avenue

PS: Update: Ashantay was silent and intent as a coroner today. He seemed serious, which I liked, but unlike himself, which I didn’t. Denisha put a piece of Scotch tape over her mouth, which was creepy and thankfully didn’t last.

Fire Anniversary

Journal Entry
October 28, 2003
Northampton, MA

“The flower beds are still there,” Mom tells me over the phone. I’m sitting in my roommate’s ugly fluorescent kitchen with dim windows, the cord dangling across the table. A million miles from home. “And…the porch, ’cause it was made of brick.” Her voice breaks a little. “And the chimney.” My Aunt Judy was surprised, in fact, at how much was left. “Holly was hysterical,” Mom says. Their whole block was obliterated. Half a million acres so far; 1,500 houses. It’s headed for Julian, where Camp Marston sits in the middle of a forest of draught-stricken, bark beetle-infested timber.

“You kept telling me to send the boxes,” she says. “Don’t feel bad about that,” I order, thinking, See? I told you to send them. “You couldn’t have known,” I insist. “Seven boxes are expensive to send 3,000 miles.”

I think of the precise moment when each thing combusted–the death of each object, from curling edges of paper to flaming skeleton to pure flame to cinders.

Old journals, 1998-2002
Boxes of old photos dating from as far back as 1890
Letters
Files
That gigantic Larousse French-English dictionary
An autographed copy of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’
My senior yearbook
Prints from college photo classes (old boyfriend, trips to Boston, ex-girlfriend, house parties, etc., etc.)
Clothes, CDs, papers, notes, ephemera

There. That’s the stuff.
Right now: you can see the sky from it, there’s no roof; gnarled black trees cling to the smoking hills; I haven’t seen it, but I know. My stuff is two square feet of ash. Aunt Judy’s house is a smoldering black pile. Unrecognizable.

I can’t speak to my aunt’s loss, aside from the obvious. The enormous, life-altering obvious everything.

If you’ll allow me a brief, indulgent mourning while it’s still fresh: All the anguish and elation and obsessive archiving from four years of my life-things I was convinced would outlast me, would be mined by descendents or scholars–gone, never to be recovered, the molecules irrevocably changed. As I write this, I feel it being read–and relaize it’s not that I’m psychic, it’s just a habit. There’s no permanence. Now my things don’t feel like posessions; they feel like unruly birds on their way upward. The sun blinds me and I let them go.

Shred of October 2003

Journal Entry
October 12, 2003
Northampton, MA

I like being on the inside, knowing the digestive system of something as tireless and puzzling as a restaurant, squatting on milk crates in the alley with fiftysomething war-tank waitresses. “You’ve got a friend who writes for the Boston Globe?” Krissy growls, peering at me over her bifocals. “Tell him I got a story for him,” she says, launching into a detailed critique of the last Red Sox game. “He writes for the Ideas section, not Sports,” I tell her. “I got IDEAS about BUNTS!” she snaps. She’s off and running to Table Three before I can answer.

History Lessons

At the suggestion of a friend, I gave my kids index cards and told them write two anonymous questions for me on them. The first had to be about school or English, and the second could be anything. We would discuss the appropriateness of questions before I answered them.

Very popular:
How old are you?
How long have you been teaching?
Do you have a boyfriend?
Do you have kids?

More than once:
Why did you decide to become a teacher?
Have you published any novels? Are your plays famous?
What was ninth grade like for you?
Were you a straight-A student?

Most intriguing:
Do you like African Americans?

The last one cracked me up. Well, cracked me up and moved me to my core. “Obviously, YES,” I said. But obviously, there is more to both the question and the answer than that. I remembered Kevin from the first season of The Real World on that episode where he had a fight with Becky and called her a racist, and he declared later, “The black/white thing is always in effect.”

I said, “There’s some heavy, heavy history between black and white people in America. So I feel that,” and they sort of groaned, like, here we go with the black/white thing. “But on a face-to-face basis, are you kidding? Of course I like black people.” A sea of 30 black faces considered what I said. Chanel, mouthy and sharp in the front row, giggled and said, “So like, what if a BIG black guy was coming toward you? Would you be scared then?” I shook my head, like, Next question.

When I read the question, “What was ninth grade like for you?” I began, “Well, it was the fifties…” And they were like, “Are you SERIOUS? Yo, she’s OLD!” And I was like, “Uh, no, it was the nineties, I was kidding.”