MindSpinner

I went into school today to finish a yearbook page that required more expertise with Photoshop and Illustrator than my yearbook students currently have. (They are just being introduced to Photoshop and to digital photography. We’ve recently received funding from a mini-grant for a digital camera to be ordered next week, one that will be capable of handling most of our needs, with my camera, the wonderful gift, to supplement.) The seniors wanted the last page of the senior color section of the book to have their pictures set in puzzle pieces. I am a novice with Illustrator, but I did find a page online that showed me how to shape a basic piece of a puzzle from a simple square, and after six hours’ work, including a batch of time spent scanning prints, I had the page I hope matches the one my students envisioned.

The project, begun yesterday, was interrupted by the Fall Festival, an event at which the seniors traditionally run the jail as a fundraiser. The jail consists of four heavy panels of unpainted, pressed wood, with a door and high, barred windows fashioned by an adult who wasn’t thinking of the fact that little kids will have to jump up and down to see out. These four panels reside in a locked room at the back of a locked shop behind the school, and it was the business of half an hour just to find a way in when the key to the inner room was not to be had. The panels then had to be hauled to the center of the gym floor and nailed securely together so that its “prisoners” could not harm themselves by rattling it down. (Next year, there will be a power screwdriver and screws.) Festival goers put each other in this hastily assembled jail by paying two tickets, and prisoners may either serve their five-minute sentences or pay two additional tickets to be set free. This proves to be a genuinely popular attraction, for reasons I don’t adequately grasp, and the seniors have a box full of tickets (to be cashed out) for their trouble and mine. Disassembling the jail was at least twice as much fun as putting it together, and hauling it back to the shop was the highlight of the evening ;->.

At school on a Sunday afternoon, the place is generally quiet, but sometimes I can hear the copier running downstairs, and today, when I came out, the middle school science teacher was mowing the narrow lawn that stretches along the facade of this old building, in front of its unusually well-thought-out beds (where school landscaping is concerned) of flowers, liriope, and shrubs.

“I didn’t know teachers got to mow the grass,” I called.

Mr. M. stopped the mower. “When I wanted to do this,” he gestured at the landscaping, “[the principal] said that, if we did it, I’d have to take care of it. The kids made it, really. It was a community service project.”

He made a garden with the kids, and now he takes care of it, and there he was, mowing the grass in front of the school on a Sunday afternoon.

The best things that happen at school happen not because of testing, accountability, standards and whatnot but instead because someone cares to tend to kids and to making school a good place to be and to learn, on and on.

There are implications that come with that realization. For starters, I’d better get going checking yearbook pages.

“You don’t like me.”

“Yes, I do.”

“But you moved me up front.”

“That’s to help you pay attention. I can cue you better that way, and you’ll be less distracted.”

“This class blows.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“It’s not you. It’s having English last period and my medicine wears off and I’m hyper. I can’t help it.”

“I know. I can deal with that. I’m not mad at you. I know that you have a real battle to pay attention when your meds wear off, and I’m trying to help you. That’s why I moved you. I’m not fighting against you; I’m fighting for you. And if you have to sit by yourself to write a paper sometimes, that’s not because I’m trying to punish you; it’s because that’s what works.

“I bet you wish I wasn’t in here.”

“No, I don’t wish that. I want you here. I like you. I like every one of you, and I’d miss you if you were gone. Class wouldn’t be the same.”

It’s true. I really do like them all.

Outside in the water garden (a large flowerpot, planted halfway into the ground, low-budget, DIY-style), the two goldfish look cold. They rise slowly, rather than swim up, to eat the papery orange flakes I feed them. I’ll have to dig up their pot and move them indoors soon. The Knockout Roses bloom yet, but their bodacious show of fuschia on green is a matter of days at best.

The season of the garden turns to the season of the hearth. It stirs different longings. These longings do not include checking yearbook pages and working the fall festival this weekend.

When the trees are all undressed and shivering in their bare limb bones outside, analogously it seems as if all life’s elements are more starkly rendered - our need for light, for warmth, for simple food served hot, for nearness through the night, for books and blankets and something hot to sip, for giving, for singing, for sleep come early.

There’s another kind of winter that lays bare the structure of a life, its strength or its brittleness, its beauty or its flaws, its skyward reach or brokenness, or both. I know a tree not only by its leaf or bloom, but also by its silhouette against a winter sky, by how it takes the ice and wind, and bows and stands again - or splits. At my mother’s last year, a great oak fell. At its base, its girth must have been fifteen feet; its trunk was as hollow as a drum.

Wandering through blogs and Web sites today, as is my half hour’s decompression ritual after school, I happened across Jack Beatty’s political essay in The Atlantic, entitled “Blame Character.” In it Beatty explores George W. Bush’s character as the source of his destiny (not to mention ours, at present) and asserts what seems obvious - that we might readily have predicted the course of Bush’s presidency from what we knew all along about his life. Beatty reminds us of the Greek concept of character, the one we see writ into classical tragedy and the characters of Faulkner (etc., etc.):

“Charackter” is a Greek coinage meaning “to engrave”—referring to the power of early experiences to shape later life. Character, for the Greeks, was destiny. What you did you would do. Your past predicted your future.

I think of the seedlings growing now in my back yard, my someday shade. As I shape them, they will grow, and it is very likely the structure and strength they attain early on that will determine, in concert with weather and time and perhaps disease or pestilence, their destiny when they are 50-foot trees. Weather and time will discover them.

So weather and time discover us, too, lay us bare, strip all the pretty leaves of our words and personas and aspirations away to reveal lives that can bend without breaking, stand in storm, thrive after winter, or else fail because we are stubborn and brittle or diseased or simply weakly made.

It seems especially sad that the fall of a hollow tree with a great girth is not only the tree’s destiny but also the destiny of everything that lies helpless in the path of its fall.

Leaves are falling; certain parts of the garden are spent, but the roses hang on to the last, and the tiny violas will persevere into winter.

I like Jane Kenyon’s poems. They have the honesty and simplicity of fruit plucked and eaten while I’m still standing in the garden, except that they are never merely simple. The one I think of most often is “Otherwise“:

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood,
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Kenyon’s words hang in the air like prophecy, even now.

When I was a little girl of six, my mother, two-year-old brother, and I followed my father when he was transferred to Okinawa. We lived on base the first year, where every afternoon Taps was sounded at 4:00 p.m. Wherever we stood (and I was usually outside), everyone stopped at attention. Military personnel saluted. I did not salute because I was a child, but I was motionless for the duration of the bugle’s haunting strains, as children are seldom motionless otherwise. The music was moving and sad and tugged at something beyond my understanding. And then it ended, and I was once again at play. Someday, everything would be otherwise.

Early in 2002, when my father was buried at Arlington, I heard Taps again. As the lone bugle sounded, time folded over on itself, and I was once again a little girl of six, standing on the sidewalks of an Air Force base on an island in the Pacific. And for the first time, the little girl of six finally knew that all those still moments all those afternoons in the presence of that haunting music were always moments that would become this one, where I stood before my father’s casket on the hill near three pines above the Pentagon, which was still then breached by the wounds of 9-11.

At William and Mary, in 1978, a freshman hallmate told me she’d talked to the boy I’d just begun to date. Did he like me? He said he did. How much? A lot. A lot a lot a lot. In a rose garden at the Williamsburg Inn, he would propose three years later. He borrowed the last of the money he needed for a ring from my friend. There would be a wedding and children would be born.

Now all this is otherwise (excepting the children, of course), and I seldom think of what has come and gone. Much more has come and gone than this, including the pain of this otherwise. Tonight my freshman hallmate called from Virginia for what is turning out to be a lifelong conversation in annual two-hour installments, punctuated every so many years with a visit there or a visit here. She remains a link to a life before otherwise.

Sometimes my son, who struggles on and on with depression, says, out of the blue, “I want to go home.”

“Where’s home?” I used to ask, thinking home might be one of the many places we’ve lived. I know now where home is, for him. Home is the time before everything was otherwise.

I have four years left with my children. From the days when I held them at my breast, I have been keenly, poignantly aware that they will someday go. Life then will be otherwise. There won’t be eight weekly loads of laundry or a messy boy’s room downstairs. There won’t be punk rock reverberating in the house, or Fruit Smoothies and chips on my grocery list. There will be only one bottle of shampoo in the bathroom, of a very ordinary sort.

Last week, life almost became otherwise prematurely, abruptly, when my daughter took it into her head that she wanted to try living at her dad’s. (Reasons will not follow.) The notion stuck there, and felled by grief as I was, I would not have stopped her. It was her stepmother that put an end to the idea instead, and her father called today to tell her that things just wouldn’t work out. So she will be with me still - the otherwise I dread is still coming, but not yet. On the other hand, I have no doubt that from this day, for her, some things will always be otherwise because this is the day she learned where home could no longer be.

So otherwise looms as loss we fear.

But that’s not all it is. Otherwise is also the eventual result of the imperceptible progress of healing after great pain, the sort of pain that you get through first only by whispering, “Just breathe. Just breathe and hold on.” Even that, too, becomes otherwise, but only when you’ve learned to bear what there is to bear, and finally to look beyond.

My daughter is at her dad’s for the night only, as usual, and my son is visiting a haunted house across the river with friends (and parents of friends). The cat lies in his basket asleep with his paw over his eyes to block out the overhead light. The room is still except for the hum of the laptop in front of me on the bed. The new, glorious camera sits out on my dresser because I almost made it home in time to catch the sun shooting rays through the clouds at sunset, but not quite. Beyond the camera, I see reflected in the mirror a woman sitting cross-legged on a bed, her head cocked the better to see through that little swathe of clarity at the bottom of her glasses. I study her for a minute. She seems more content than she might be. She looks - and for a moment I see her as if she is someone else - like a woman who’s found constants in the midst of the ebb and flow of otherwise.