October 14, 2009
-
The Daily News1 Ever notice how life sends you cool messages all the time?
2 Yesterday was one such day.
3 First, the windnrain threw all sorts of natural debris all over my front yard and driveway. When I went out into the wetnwind first thing in the morning, it was a military drill to tiptoe past the wet twigs, soggy thorns, massive branches, and drenched leaves to get the Merc News.
4 Anything that could turn an ankle or help hurt my foot sat waiting, and each one struck like a bad version of a video game about rain debris.
5 I managed to step on every single thing, and then did that tiptoe jog back into the house in order to minimize the damage on the trip back inside.
6 It poured the entire time, and my foot hit three lakes before I got back in.
7 Ah, the poetry of rain.
8 All in all, it felt wonderful.
9 I had spent the previous night trying to finish grading something like fifteen reams of papers, literally, and to put them into a gradebook.
10 Naturally I failed miserably, which didn't bother me too much. I had worked three straight weeks from dawn to dusk meticulously commenting on billions of "alots", "everydays", the "theres", and multitudinous other offings from the frabjous minds of otherwise brilliant teenagers. I was down to grunt work, which is transferring all of that tomfoolery into a gradebook and turning it into points, and eventually, grades.
11 On that one I felt a bit like Clooney in The Perfect Storm, the scene where the boat can't quite get up that 40-foot swell.
12 I decided to simply count all the points and give a scale, all of which could be knocked off on a rainy day, if I had a coupla movies goin' on.
13 The stenographical stuff could go in later.
14 After having worked so diligently for three weeks, I knew I had it licked, because I studied each student's work deeply enough that I thought I had taken teaching to a new art form. The actually counting and calculating of points was practically moot.
15 Well, it worked. Once I knew I had it licked, I brought in the Merc, had a cuppa coffee, and relaxed.
16 What's funny is that everything stopped for a moment.
17 The rain pelted down on my roof, and I hopped on Facebook just to see how old friends were doing.
18 The sky turned beautiful from the rain, and the sound of the raindrops gave me a moment of reflection.
19 Everything stopped at that moment.
20 I sighed.
21 I realized that I missed everybody.
22 When I get deep into perfecting the art of teaching, I sometimes go so deep that I forget to keep in touch with everyone.
23 It seemed a lonely moment, staring at the computer screen, sighing about almost everything.
24 I guess we've all been there. I wanted to talk to all sorts of people, but still had a tonna work left to be done. It bothered me, because people we love are much more important than all the stuff we do that we think is important.
25 Cliche' as it may sound, John Lennon's classic line in Beautiful Boy rings true sometimes: Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.
26 Anyway, I hauled all those papers down to the school, got to the Cathedral (my nickname for my awesome classroom), put on the heater, and took my Twilight Zone DVD's out. The rain looked wonderful out my large window.
27 Plus the room was uncharacteristically dark due to the weather, giving the classroom a perfect atmosphere for a movie. I have a small lamp on my desk, the only light in the room, and soon, the music from the Twilight Zone came through my system, and the DVD went to a Twilight Zone menu, a perfect setting for wet students coming in from the rain.
28 It all worked. Two shorts, The After Hours, the one about the woman who keeps landing on the mysterious ninth floor of a department store, complete with mannequins that haunt her, and The Dummy, in which a ventriloquist knows his dummy is more than knotty pine, played in perfect order for the students.
29 They came in with a perfect pre-set, large screen, Twilight Zone music, warm room, and dark with touches of light. Absolutely perfect for a rainy day.
30 It all worked. Kids clung to one another in absolute fear, even though it was an old black-and-white television show. The plot of The After Hours was brilliant: a woman looking to buy a gold thimble for her mother's birthday enters a department store and is taken to the ninth floor, where all the display cases are empty.
31 There is only one mysterious sales clerk on the floor, and only one item in one display case on the entire floor.
32 A gold thimble.
33 And when she finds there is a scratch on it and tries to return it, the manager informs her that she must return it in the department from which she bought it.
34 ...which is on the ninth floor.
35 There's only one catch:
36 There IS no ninth floor.
37 Mannequins talk without moving, and the woman is haunted by voices.
38 The students held on to one another for dear life.
39 Teaching as art.
40 Meanwhile I dove in and finished up all the grading, all the while enjoying the Twilight Zone, and the students' comments and laughter.
41 At the end of the day it became a race to get the grades in by four. My room became a frenzied sea of papers and staples, rubber bands, crumpled papers, and erasers. At exactly four o' clock, I finished posting my last class's grades, and put on my iPod. A toy piano version of Here Comes the Sun came on, working perfectly with the rain.
42 I meticulously cleaned my room so that it was neat and organized for today.
43 As I was about to leave, something popped to the ground.
44 It was a small piece of a chair, or of a table or something, shaped like a hat, a minuscule derby.
45 At first I tried to figure out where it came from. I felt under the arms of my chair, and looked everywhere. I KNEW it was somehow important, and that I should put it somewhere I wouldn't lose it. I held it, thought about it, and spent time wondering where to put it, instead of just chucking it into the waste basket and calling it a day.
46 I wound up putting it in a miscellaneous area of my desk, which we all have. It is there with a couple of other small screws, strange-shaped pieces of metal, and plastic things that are irrelevant. It is there in the event I need to call for an old hat.
47 And then I remembered that three weeks ago I had just finished writing a song called Old Hat. And I realized that I could put everything behind, and begin writing songs, singing, and getting back in touch with everyone.
48 When I left for the day, I took one last look at my clean and organized room, and smiled.
49 I headed home in the gentle rain, knowing that I had caught life, at least for one day.
50 Live life.
51 Love life. Tell someone you love that you love them today.
52 The other plans can wait.
52 Peace.
Recent Comments