MindSpinner

I have a poem for you, but it isn’t all made of words. If I gave you words, you’d think the words were the poem, and they aren’t. Go outside and lie on your back in the minutes after sunset, as I did tonight on the deck, as if you were a child and no one was looking and it wouldn’t matter if someone did. Lie on your back after the hour has passed when you’d have to turn your gaze away from the too-bright sun. Witness the metamorphosis of clouds and depthless blue, the solid geometrical counterpoint of the roofline, the course of starlings over the trees.

# 1

Pimientos. I think they are in the stir fry mix I am having for lunch just because they are red. What flavor they have isn’t worth the planting, the growing, and the chopping. And who can believe they are a member of the audacious pepper family? They are deceptive, decidedly sub-ethical - they only look tasty. They are not so much food as an aesthetic affectation, and if there are too many of them, I have to pick them out.

# 2

Pointy-toed women’s dress shoes with tiny spiky heels. I realize that these often coveted accessories visually elongate the leg and that they are sexy (all to the good). But after I’ve worn a pair for a half an hour, I firmly submit that those reasons for their existence are simply not good enough, at least where my own feet are concerned, hot-wired as they are to pain receptors in my brain.

# 3

Standardized tests. I once heard a principal say, “The sole measure of the success of this school is its scores on the [state] test.” My heart sunk like a stone, and if I had actually believed him, I would have resigned that day, loaded up my car with all the stuff I’ve bought over the years for my classroom, and never come back. It’s not that testing is so much an evil in its own right - it has potential diagnostic uses, if well designed - but when it becomes the be-all and end-all of a school’s efforts, that’s a crime against our children and our future. Used in that way, testing mediocritizes education and attempts to standardize young people in way that alienates students and teachers alike. Students know when their schools care more about scores than about students themselves, and they withdraw their investment in learning. They are rightfully cynical. Teachers feel like automatons, their intelligence, humanity, caring and creativity squandered, when they are required to focus solely on teaching to a test. Truth is, the most important ends and accomplishments of education simply cannot be measured on a standardized test. They are measured instead in the scope and reach of lives. That principal can worry himself into his grave over test scores; I’m going to empower lives.

No doubt there are other things to add to this pimiento-inspired exercise, such as the annual duplication of last year’s medical information on new forms at my doctor’s office, but this will do for now. No point in getting out of sorts ;->.

A few posts back I envisioned getting away without hand-coding XHTML and CSS for the Web site project. Hah! Well, now I’m coding both, in a trial-and-error, beginner’s luck, book-in-hand sort of fashion. I’m pretty sure any shortcuts would lead to more work in the long run, not less. Best to do things right in the first place. As of today, the right stuff shows up in the right places on the template page, the fonts are correctly applied, and it’s on to details and page creation tomorrow. For right now, I’m taking a good, long walk by way of decompressing.

As a person who finds no resemblance between the spirit of the gospels and the thrust of the conservative political agenda, I find Anne Lamott’s little essay, “God doesn’t take sides” to be considerable solace, a cup of cold water, a breath of fresh air in very smelly world. I really need that. But I need more than a cup of cold water; I need a bucketful dumped over my head to cool me off. I’m trying to figure out what it is that makes me so angry - that powerful people try to make God into a puppet, an oversized caricature of themselves, purportedly infallible? that they thereby obscure who God is in a world that needs the genuine article? that they miss the entire thrust of the gospel, which is love? that they play on peoples’ feelings about a couple of issues in order to manipulate behavior at the polls and thereby run the world? that they alienate and exclude rather than embrace? that they take words and make them mean what they want them to, carrying me ever farther from the language of my own faith, such that I now feel I have to define what I mean when I say I’m a Christian? Yes, Anne Lamott is definitely handling the matter more gracefully than I am. It’s just that I’m not sure it’s merely grace that’s called for.

I see it now. Pregnancy, birth, gurgles and coos, a landfill’s worth of diapers, slops and smears of baby food, the first treasured stuffed animals, the innumerable succession of toys, the tree blocks and the fairies made from pipe cleaners and topped with acorn hats, the cuddle time spent reading books together, the stories we made up, the giggles and tickles and games, the art projects, the first day of school - days, seasons, years - they all clicked steadily by as we went chugging, chugging onward, up through the years, the inches grown, the sizes in the children’s department. Only I didn’t know it was a roller coaster we were climbing - it didn’t seem precipitous in those days, not until we were over the top and plunging.

My daughter is cleaning her room. She’s put the last of her childhood out into the upstairs hall - the toys, the books, all of it, in a great pile, “Do something with this stuff, Mom. Sell it. Take it to Good Will. I don’t want it. It’s yours.”

“You don’t want your My Twin doll, the one I had made to look like you?”

“No, Mom! Why would I?”

The question hangs in the air, where it will hang for a decade or two, until she can answer it herself. Then I remember to breathe.

She’s fourteen, she wants a cool, grown-up room. She has a friend coming for a sleepover on Friday. I’ll save the best of the stuff for a time when childhood will matter all over again. Now, where to put it?