Tag Archives: reflections

Much of May

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May has been much, much, much at school and I am grateful for it. 

I’ve struggled to understand my students in this first year back teaching. They feel not only inherently different from the students I used to teach, but inherently different from me. It takes me longer to really see them than it used to. In the last few months I’ve taken to reminding myself that the world in which they’re coming of age is quite different than the one in which I was fifteen and seventeen. History—the kind that will be written in books—has happened in the meantime and their perceptions of life and fairness and value and the way things should be are sometimes alien to me. 

I’ve cared for them and enjoyed them, but I’ve felt a gulf between us, a gulf which not only seems difficult to cross, but which I haven’t been entirely sure that I want to. I’ve sometimes fallen into annoyance and frustration rather than choosing the patience required by love.

But May has been a slow pulling together of the pieces. I gave a talk in chapel in which I was honest because that is the way I know how to be. My little all-boy class held an NFL-style draft for which elderly residents at the nursing home they’d be matched up with before we embarked on an interview project. The school launched a house system, my freshmen drew the nine circles of Dante’s hell, and some of the boys in my AP class performed “Man of Constant Sorrow” for me for extra credit. And student after anxious student recited Psalm 90, eyes boring into the carpet, then glancing up to me for reassurance. 

All these things have been tackle ropes thrown across that gulf, hooking into the soft flesh beneath my armor and tugging the cliff of me and the cliff of my students nearer to one another, inch by definite inch. 

I’ve had proper sit down conversations with a few kids this week, some of whom I haven’t even taught yet, and have been struck by the individual complexity and openness of their questions, how good it is to laugh with them. I now find myself wanting to feel gently towards them. I want to see their humanness, the lines around their eyes that Graham Greene talks about in The Power and the Glory. When I watch them stumble, I want to choose grief over irritation, love over easy dismissal.

And last week I wandered around a secret place on campus, a place on which for the last twenty years most graduating seniors have had the chance to make their mark. My own seventeen-year-old self is there with my classmates, as well as the upperclassmen I was once awestruck by and many of the boisterous kids I taught myself, all of us immortalized at that odd and painful wonder of a moment, on the cusp of we-knew-not-what.

So many things were felt in that place and then pressed into it in felt-tipped marker with immediate eagerness: joy, confidence, cynicism, vulgarity, wisdom, wildness, complacence, nostalgia. And every feeling expressed by those youthful hearts and hands, from before me all the way to after, promises loudly in that place to last forever. In the deep convictions of our emotions, we did not, a single one of us, really understand how much we would change. We considered our words to be final. 

There was an extremity in our certainty, in our hope, in all our desires which demanded fulfillment in permanent ink. And God at all times and in all moments stood watching us in that place, a resounding magnetic force, drawing the true desire rooted deep in each of us toward his center. 

So here I am, tired and content on a Friday after oral exams, digesting the assurance that my world is not so distanced from that of my students as I thought. The cacophony of the teenage years, its extremity, its color, the rawness of its desire for more and better has always been and will always be. May is much, much, much, and so are they.

The Mysteries of Loneliness

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What I’m about to say might be best off as a poem. But let’s try it like this anyway.

This year I’ve lived alone for the first time in my life, and I can’t imagine giving it up. Solitude is a luxury equal to none. This place is my place with things where I put them and all my own beloved oddities on the wall. With the world being what it is, I can even order exactly the food I want to my door—I can choose what suits me at any given moment. I am not responsible for others, for understanding them or for making myself understood. I eat dinner anytime between 4:30 and 11:30. I sit in all my different chairs in turn and take long baths without guilt. I think aloud to myself. I look at a book or a screen or a wall or a pen in my hand or the mirror or out the window where the rain puddles on my neighbor’s paving stones. It’s so easy to be alone.

But sometimes I suspect it’s too easy. With the freedom I have, I choose less for myself. I choose a smaller, more manageable world in which obligations are trimmed to the bone and disruptions are strictly outlawed. But just because I am my own favorite company doesn’t mean I’m my own best company. And perhaps I should already know that I’m meant to have company other than myself.

For much of history this world has not been a place in which someone, particularly a woman, could survive well on her own. Except for believers who sequestered themselves as a decades-long spiritual discipline, people needed community: someone to fix the leaks and someone to bake the bread and someone to stitch the sheets and someone to take out the waste, someone to fill the cabinets with medicine, someone to feed the cattle and someone to keep the hearthfire burning. It took more than two hands to support the flourishing of a human life. In the popular imagination (or at least in mine) people who are perpetually alone eventually starve to death in cramped garrets in Paris while the world dances on just outside their door.

Which is all very confusing when being alone feels so nice.

On top of that, from what we see of Christ in scripture, he was just alone here and there—only when he expressly planned to be. In fact, his moments of solitude are notable exceptions in the midst of a full-to-overflowing life and ministry, just as devout hermits were notable exceptions in the midst of a general population of families and villages and towns. But of course, his life for the first thirty years, before his ministry really began, may have looked much different. We can’t take the pace of Jesus’ early thirties as an exactly prescriptive blueprint for the entirety of our own lives. (And yet, we shouldn’t just ignore it either…)

Perhaps it’s clear already that I have no closing statement to make. Really, I’m just beginning a conversation with myself. It’s not really a discussion of whether or not I should be alone, but rather how I should treat the solitude which already exists within and around me: As a restorative? As a reward? As a natural and unavoidable state? As a place to hide? As a place to create? As a place from which to escape? Or as a place into which to welcome others, a place which can be expanded? And if so, how? (And where and why and when?)

Dearest Freshness Deep Down

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Last weekend I flew to Vancouver for Jolene’s wedding. This act of travel, of going to this other home of mine, was good for me. When you fly west, you end up chasing the light, and we landed around sunset. The skies were clearer than I thought they would be, for all the dumping cold grey the Pacific Northwest has been having, and a smile bloomed involuntarily from my gut when I saw the city’s glittering, twisting self rising to meet me. I split my time between looking toward land, and watching the faces of others who were watching it as well—still and childlike, lit by the reflection of the sun. I would’ve cried if I hadn’t been so busy with the watching.

This is my 300th entry, and I think that after more than a decade of this blog and thousands upon thousands of words I may finally be in a place (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, semantically) to tell you what the dang thing is actually about—it’s about the things that are more than they seem, which make joy and surety and gratitude rise strong and indisputable out of nearly nothing.

The day before I left I finished All the King’s Men with my AP Lit kids and told them that I had cried at the last chapter, that I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d found so moving but that I’d thought—oh, I’d thought—that it was Jack finally calling Willie his friend. And on the plane I watched Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, which was sweet and fun and not notably profound except that when the Dior dresses came out on those models, and the little London house-cleaner gasped over the beauty of them and imagined which she would buy, I thought, “Yes, yes, yes,” and scooted as far forward as my seatbelt would let me. And now back home I’m teaching The Sun Also Rises, which I haven’t read since college, when I remember finishing it right before class one day at a crowded cafeteria table of strangers during the lunch rush, my nose tipped into the book, and every muscle in my chest taut because I could tell something was happening to Jake Barnes, something big. He was being brave.

This blog is about those things, the small, thorny, glistening gifts of this world, of art, of nature, of circumstance. Things that can be buried, unnoticed for a long old time, but then they’re brought out in some new way, and it’s like that song of Andrew Peterson’s: “When the joy that you feel leaves a terrible ache in your bones, that’s the voice of Jesus, calling you back home.” 

So now I’m reminding myself (and maybe you) to look always for the land that’s been lying fallow, to roll up my sleeves and, with gentle assurance, to turn over that soil, to unearth Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things” which have been waiting there, their faces ready to reflect the light.

A Writer’s Retreat

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While I was at Regent I got in the habit of telling people to go on writer’s retreats. A friend would be talking about struggles with focus and confidence in their work, and I would announce to them with great authority that this was the solution to their problems. So they’d go and book a place for a couple days away on one of the islands and come back to me just raving and glad I recommended it to them, because they’d gotten so much done and felt so much better about where their project was headed. I mean, maybe I exaggerate their joy and gratitude, but as someone who rarely takes others’ advice, no matter how thoughtful, I was always caught off guard that they had taken mine and somehow it had actually worked out for them. And maybe I also felt odd about it because I’d never actually gone on a writer’s retreat myself—in that all alone, book-a-place-just-to-go-away-and-focus kind of way.

So anyway, I’m here to announce that I finally have, because we’ve been on winter break and I had a long weekend. I got a room at a historic inn just down the road from Saxapahaw which is ostensibly a town, but mostly consists of a little strip of shops for bougie farm-to-table country people who want to buy home-made soap and craft beer from a “five star gas station” and have bumper stickers that say things like “Manifest that Shit.” It’s good for a day out.

And my place was nice. The grounds were big, with uncertain paths wending their way through something like woodland. I wished I had a map (mostly because I like maps), but didn’t mind scrambling and wandering. I almost never do. It was still and calm as all get-out there except for the sounds of passing cars and daffodils growing, but there was a big brick-pavered front porch which would have glowed all lit-up for a party.

My first day I napped a lot and took two baths. I was coming in so tired, more tired than was optimal, really. I lay and listened to the sound of the road from my bed, waiting for my brain to slow its spinning gears and stop shooting shards of metal off every which way. And then I wrote, because the act of writing can help to order disparate pieces. It is so often like sliding beads onto a string: building up one tentative idea on another, warm and hopeful.

I’m just cracking my way into something long and non-fiction, so the notes I was making were about my own life, from childhood on. I was using what already existed to tell the truth. Instead of having to manifest the facts out of thin air, like with a novel, I had them already growing fertile in my own memory. And I was shocked to find, as I kept going and going, how much life I’ve lived in just thirty years.

I don’t think I’m a special case. I think everyone lives a lot of life. And to marshal so much of it together onto a page into some sort of order, to run your fingers over all its silver threads of meaning which connect one thing to the next to the next, is a real marvel. Not everything that has happened to me has been good, yet even the pains contribute to the great abundance of my experience, experience which has all been grace, every bit of it. I’d forgotten that writing was such an exercise in gratitude. Perhaps this is what those Regent friends were responding to when they came home from their own retreats all lit up.

On Saturday night I took myself to dinner in Saxapahaw. I’d made myself a reservation for one, which felt weird but good, and as I drove, I watched the last remnants of the sunset still leaking out over the horizon, like the celestial clean-up crew had yet to finish their job for the evening. I searched for the color of the sky where the blue and orange met. I wanted to know what that color was. It remained a mystery to me even though it was right in front of my eyes.

I ate alone under soft lighting, and imagining how I must look flattered my vanity, but much more than that, I liked being around people for the first time in days. It was an upscale pub populated by friendly waitstaff, families and groups of friends eating together, people who leaned toward each other comfortably as they talked. I journaled and ate stew and key lime pie and drank wine and just sat. It was my great joy to be quiet in the midst of noise.

In Spite of Our Grief

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My mind has been on my students more than usual recently. Not any kid in particular, just all their half-grown faces. I frequently wonder if they know just how very much is written in their eyes, loud and legible. I see openness and stone walls, loneliness and love, innocence and disillusionment, cruelty and raw compassion, things that make me fear for them and things that make me hope—a dozen absolute contradictions bundled in every glance. They walk around bristling with them.

Recently I was reading the story of Jacob in Genesis and I was struck by the way he too is a whole sharp passel of things that should not be able to exist together: the desire to win, the desire to be loved, brazenness, fear, deceit, remorse, anger, wanderlust. And he was a very long time ago.

This tugging, ripping tension existed then and it exists now, in adults as well as adolescents. Really, I think we never grow out of it at all. And the fact of the matter is that the unwieldiness of these contradictions in ourselves and in others is too much at times, falls unevenly on shoulders which are—in their humanness—fundamentally too weak to bear it, pushing us down into the mud. When I think back over the last couple weeks I can see griefs of contradiction at church, at work, in my own sodden heart and in the hearts of those around me, contradictions which break our molds of understanding, which come near to breaking us.

No wonder my students’ swagger sometimes goes a little crooked like there’s a heavyweight boxing match happening in the space between their collarbones. We’re all left wading through the sludge.

But how? How do we get through?

Well, I’m only guessing, but I think what you do is read The Velveteen Rabbit to your sad freshmen, tear pages out of books to decorate a bulletin board, keep an eye out for the kids looking for a place to sit, cover your friends’ classes, make dinner plans for next week, teach when you’ve lost your voice, and go home with your hands in the pockets of your coat and take a nap in your big chair. You take a long walk with unwashed hair and then make shepherd’s pie and listen to Mark Heard sing about how Jesus “looks at their faces and loves them in spite of his grief.” 

Because we do not struggle through the mud alone. The Lord knows all about contradiction. He allows it, and he himself has lived it. We do not need to force ourselves to master grief and love together perfectly, because he already has. Instead, what we must do is mark each fight, each unknowable contradictory struggle, with an ebenezer monument which proclaims: Here I have wrestled. And here God promised to prevail, against even the flailing labyrinthine darkness of the human soul.

For the Brave and the Steadfast

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I am, in essence, a be-er. I’ve been around the sun enough times by now that I know this about myself. My initial impulse is always to stay home, to say no, to plant myself on the sidelines, to wait and see how the thing plays out, thank you very much. When I dream of the future, more and more frequently I just think of Yeats’ poem “Isle of Innisfree” where peace comes dropping slow and evening’s full of the linnets’ wings.

I leave the pushing and the challenging and raising of voices loud enough to be heard even by those who don’t want to hear them to the fighters of the world. They can have that, I think. I’m not built for that, and I don’t want it.

But in the last month I had a large and sticky situation rise up. It was clear to anyone with two eyes in their head that without my asking this thing had fallen directly in my lap. And as I sat there for a few weeks with it heaving great shuddery, mucus-y breaths on my knees and occasionally baring its teeth, I understood that I needed to do what I never do—I needed to fight. I needed to take a few good swings and risk missing. I stood up, wiped the slime off my skirt and had a series of hard conversations where I pushed and I pushed. It wore me all out. So when I was certain that what I had to say had been heard, I retreated safely to my Innisfree to sleep and sleep the whole thing off. I went back to being the self I knew.

This is not the first time in my adult life I’ve chosen to get up and walk against the current. I’ve done it here and there before, but I can only exist in resistance for so long. I am not one of the perpetually brave. I soon run back to the hollowed hands which say, “The Lord will fight for you, you must only be still.”

And I don’t think I’m wrong, not really. Jesus didn’t spend most of his earthly life picking fights. In fact, he spent decades of it just making tables and eating with his family and praying and following the seasons round and round in their rotation. But when the fights came, the moments to push landed in his lap, he took them. And he fought in all the ways no one expected him to, all the way up a hill, onto a tree, and back down again.

So I think God’s world has a place, an important place, for both the fighters and the be-ers, the brave and the steadfast. But as I have been thinking about all this in the past few weeks, there are a few things the contemplative watchers–like me and maybe you–must remember.

Peace is not dead space. It requires cultivating, which, in fact, is a fight of its own kind. Even Yeats’ island retreat has nine neat bean rows. In peace, we must teach stubborn soil to grow, both the soil of the earth and the soil of our “great sloth hearts.” While we stay at home, we must paint beautiful colors loud and bake good bread and sing with all our might and dole out glasses of cool water. When I sit on the sidelines avoiding the tumult of grit and sweat and uncertainty, and pull out my journal to write a few disjointed words, I must not leave them there to shrivel on the page. I must take them home and add more to them and more, till at last they join up properly and I have made something I can call good. 

If I was formed, as I believe I was, to plant my feet deep but send my words out like lines, to pour my overripe little heart out onto a page from the peanut gallery, if writing is indeed part of my being, then my peace-time, my bee-loud glade, should be full of written words. If I’m not out fighting demons, I should be home with a pen in my hand, teaching castles to rise from stone.

2022 Retrospective

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I started off 2022 by testing positive for covid, along with the rest of my family. But I was working a shift with an elderly client within two hours of getting back to Madison and testing negative. The tone, though I did not choose it, was set for the anxious winter of my discontent. I took walks in slate-colored snow that matched a slate-colored sky and wore through a pair of boots I’d loved for years. I made lots of French toast for Bonnie and tried to find shows on Netflix she would like. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. I finally finished the novel to my general satisfaction, and spent a few months querying agents on its behalf. Eventually I got fed up with the whole dang circus, but just in time to save my faith in literary dreams someone asked me to talk to an undergrad student who wanted to be a novelist, and he was so serious and earnest that my lungs filled with fresh air again. 

For days and weeks I sat on couches and listened to the interminable sighing of clients’ oxygen machines. I slid into another car on the ice on the way to work one morning and cried, not just because of the accident but because I felt that I was sliding too, away and away. My parents visited, though, and that was good. My mom cooked and cooked in my friends’ kitchen. Other friends brought me food and had me for dinner and I met Joy at a coffee shop sometimes. Also a friend of Abby’s gave one of the cheapest and best haircuts I’ve ever had.

Then after one of the hardest winters, came perhaps the happiest summer. It was a gift dropped in my lap just when I’d stopped waiting for such goodnesses. It began with a flying trip back to Vancouver for in-person graduation and the thousand hugs covid never allowed. The green of it all reminded me how to stand up straight. Back home in Madison, change was coming. Abby and Taylor were house-hunting in Indiana, fell in love with a house they called Big Red, but had their dreams crushed. I sat and held my client Phyllis’s hand as her breath labored its way in and out of her lungs a few hours before she died. I spent a while searching for jobs in Greensboro and realized, with slight shock, that I’m qualified for more than I thought.

Then I took a trip to the UK that I couldn’t afford and in no way regret. I went to the circus with my family and to parks and art museums—sometimes on my own. I gave a paper at Cambridge and choked humblingly at the first question from the audience. I stayed at a castle and toured an artist’s studio and made butter from cream and scrambled up the muddy sides of mountains ahead of friends. I felt both moody and at peace which are two of my favorite feelings. I came home to a renewed appreciation for Abby’s friendship which had housed and homed and fed me for the past year. It is not simple, but it is good. We took her babies to see my client Bonnie one morning in July.

Then fall came with alarming alacrity. And there I was back in Greensboro teaching vaguely familiar kiddos in very familiar hallways except this time I was teaching literature and I knew none of my co-workers. I realized in successive bursts that I love teaching and am good at it, but also that as far as some of my students were concerned, I was going to have to earn my stripes all over again. Eventually things fell into a rhythm. I went to a brewery with friends, sat too near the band, and played a card game. I worked on filling my new place with things, hung a canopy over my bed, and battled with College Board over getting my AP syllabus approved. I successfully joined a community group at church, rediscovered the wonderfully erroneous map on the basketball court at Lindley, had eight solidly pleasant parent conferences in a row, remembered how little I like spirit week, and let my freshmen make chaos on my carpet with acrylic paint. Regula and Mary Frances both came to visit, and I liked watching them in my childhood kitchen, chatting with my parents, disparate parts of my life coming together as if they belonged all along.

This year like, I suppose, all years before it, has been much. I ate brunch and taught poetry and got a large wooden chest upstairs all on my own. I argued with a 102 year old over whether he or I should carry the groceries and drove through WV in the midst of its blazing October leaves. I went to a retreat I hated and to one I loved. I ended up in the ER twice—once for myself and once for someone else. I walked to playgrounds, walked a farmers’ market, and walked a lot of hills. I visited two whiskey distilleries in two different countries, and neither time was my idea. I brought my mom pasta when she ran out and got hit by a bike while on the phone with my dad. 

I somehow managed to start both a writers’ group and a conversation club that meet monthly. When I wonder how that happened, I then remind myself that as an adult I’ve become the woman who keeps activities moving along at a birthday party which she is not hosting, and volunteers to be the timekeeper at a writing workshop and cut people off when their time is up. Those things happened this year too.

I have fewer philosophical thoughts than usual about this last trip round the sun. The one thread which I’ve found it easy to pick at and unravel is that so many things have brought me back to the beginning. My accomplishments are a varied collection of starts and restarts. I picked up paint-by-number and put one on my wall already. I got my first house plants (but also my first traffic ticket) and shoveled my first driveway. I entered a new decade and celebrated it with two very longtime friends.

Even though my writing has largely been lying fallow the last few months, other things long dormant have been poking their heads up from the soil. Within 24 hours of each other I accepted a job at Caldwell (this made me cry) and agreed to take over the lease of an apartment three blocks from where I grew up (this made me laugh). Now I have a picture of that day taped to my desk at work (because this makes me smile). Beyond those building blocks of life, in the cracks of my days I’m reading more than I have since I was a kid—rereads like Jayber Crow and P.G. Wodehouse and new things like Tana French and memoirs about people’s mothers—and also playing my cello sometimes, and cooking for the first time in years. 

All of these returns, these dances with my former self, are reminders that living my life faithfully does not require that I am capable or impressive. What is required is a willingness to step out onto the floating islands where the Lord controls the currents, to say, Yes, I will follow the Mystery, follow it as it takes me over Calvary and on and on all the way to the feast of all things made right. This trust is not easy, but as I watch the ghost of young Alice and her hesitating steps, I realize that it’s easier than it used to be. Perhaps because every year I understand the promise of that feast—and its host—a little more fully.

Last week, though still recovering from a bad car accident, my mom threw a Christmas party. Fifty people stuffed into four rooms and sang and drank and ate and talked. My brother squeezed past me at one point and said wryly, “Aren’t you glad our parents are so popular?” And then we went for a walk to see the lights and at one point a passing car slowed and someone yelled out of it, “WE LOVE YOU, MISS HODGKINS!” And while I don’t know who that was, it’s a worthy sentiment. I’m all for worthy sentiments. Heather comes to visit this weekend for a mini writing retreat, so I’m getting ready to shake the cobwebs off and chase some new lines of inquiry using words on a page. I’m ready and waiting. On Christmas day I got some very good books as gifts and went to church and ate the Mystery with the people of God—full with the richness of promise.

Christmas Past

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In the past few weeks, I’ve talked to several friends from other places and times of my life, including two close friends from Regent who’ve been to visit me, one after another. We talked about much: vocation, biscuits, classes, dating, creativity, brick churches, teaching, weddings, travel, houses, memories, cocktails, and, of course, the world and its problems and how we would solve them if we were in charge but how we’re really glad we’re not.

And something struck me after a few days of long conversation. We spent plenty of time talking about mutual friends, but it’s been a few years, and I noticed that with the ones we’d fallen out of touch with, we referred to the relationship in the past tense. “She always told me…” “I always thought he…” “That was why I liked…” That sort of thing. We spoke of these people with deep affection and even loyalty—we still clearly cared—and yet there was this assumption that some of these relationships were past. If not exactly over, they were permanently dormant, frozen in time at the moment we’d last interacted.

Regula and I decorated the tree I bought on Black Friday, hanging it with ornaments I’d had packed away for years while I was off in Other Places, and I thought about the past and whether it was over or not. 

I live now in the neighborhood I grew up in. And from my bedroom, I can hear the trains as they go past. These aren’t passenger trains—this isn’t Europe—but instead cargo trains, almost interminably long. So when they come through, they take a quarter hour doing it and I lie in bed, blocks away, hearing them continually passing and passing and passing, both here and long gone, all at the same time.

This is the best image I’ve found in all my scrambling for how it is, that the then and the now, the past and the present can be separate pieces, but all a part of the same vast eternity with its overlapping waves. 

For how it is that every year we unbox the ornaments at my parents’ house to decorate, and there are all the ones we’d forgotten: Shakespeare and the Korean masks and the washing board and the fragile construction paper Santa made by small hands that are now large ones. But despite their age here they are again, waiting for us patiently, the same as always, just a little more loved.

Or how it is that, after a very long week, in church this morning we began to sing that Sandra McCracken song, “Come Light Our Hearts,” that always used to close the Advent service at Regent. And I closed my eyes, and time folded right in on itself back to 2019 and a crowded carpeted chapel, my soul remembering for the umpteenth how to “for him in stillness wait.” That memory and reality of those words woke up again, just like those friendships may one day.

Because the passing of time doesn’t matter much more than the passing of trains. Love will return again and again to reassert himself.

The week after Thanksgiving I read “The Second Shepherd’s Play” with my freshmen. It’s a one act play about Christ’s nativity which used to be performed for groups of illiterate medieval peasants who were eager for a show. In it the shepherds bumble around before meeting Jesus, complaining about the cold and their bosses and stealing each other’s sheep, and all the while keep using oaths their Catholic audience would have been familiar with: “Deus” “Our Lady” “By Him Who Died for Us!” till any sense of historical timeline gets scrambled up in literary irony and slapstick comedy. And then the angels bust onto the scene right at the end, surprising the audience just as genuinely as they did those shepherds: “God is made you friend now at this morn!”

This play was performed every year. Unto them a child was born, just as he is to us, every year, here and now: the truth resurrected from its sleep in a cardboard box to announce itself just the same, time repeatedly folding back on itself to a single night thousands of years ago.

A Weekend

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On Friday night I went to a big basketball game in the Caldwell gym. I’d forgotten how those things go to the core of me—the rumble of the crowd and its rising yells, the sharpness of the whistle and the basketball shoes squeaking on the floor, the smell of popcorn and heat and the hundreds of faces and the youth and intensity of it all and the sound of the buzzer. But most, I am taken by those kids on the court who struggle and slouch in my class, but who spring and leap and even fly with a ball in their hands. I’d forgotten how moved I am watching my students do what matters to them. I like to see them capable and eager and playing confidently to a packed house—it’s fuller than the version of them I usually get. I like being reminded. (I also like it when we win, which we did.)

Then yesterday afternoon I went to Walmart, which is notorious as place where one can observe a subset of humans who seem unable to fit into their clothes, read a price sticker, wash themselves, or exist appropriately within the world (or so that blog that used to circulate, “The People of Walmart,” would have us believe.) But as I navigated past little befuddled-looking family clumps in the home goods aisles on my way to buy curtain rods, we spoke gently and politely to one another, squeezing our carts through, despite the blasphemy of our ill-fitting sweats and unkempt hair. And I thought to myself—”We’re all the people of Walmart on the inside, aren’t we?” I mostly thought it because it made me laugh, but it’s softened my vision ever since. 

And then last night I went to the homecoming dance for a bit. I pinned my hair up like I used to do in college and wore my charity shop coat. We ended up having to turn off nearly all the lights to get the kids to actually dance, because with them on they just milled awkwardly in groups. But in the dimness, they finally loosened up and cheered and jumped and acted like teenagers. We threw glow sticks down on them during “Party Rock,” and they lost their minds as we intended. I got out there and danced a little with a few of the other teachers. I felt full. I turned to Leslie at one point and said, “You know, in high school, I would have been glued to a chair at something like this.” A student cheekily asked me earlier in the week if everything good happens before you’re twenty-five, but I’ve rarely been more glad to be thirty and not sixteen. If only they knew.

I’m grateful that things are not always as they seem they ought to be, grateful that I am frequently wrong, grateful that God comes riding in on his donkey with his bruisable body and his broken bread and his empty tomb and says, “No, actually, child, it’s entirely different than that.”

A Fall Teaching Entry

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Here’s a thing I’d forgotten about my job before I came back to it. As much as I aspire to be (and usually am) in control of my classroom, hiding in its corners and quiet moments are delights and strange kernels of time which I could never plan, could never make, can only notice if I’m looking at them in just the right slant of light. They’re the oddities, the unclassifiable outliers, the secret gifts of teaching.

For example:

-The moment when we read Blake’s “I Saw a Chapel” and my group of boys actually listened to it. I asked them what they thought, and one of them said, “It’s weird.” I smiled because he meant it and also because he was right.

-Students who come and sit on my tall, soft stool to spin idly round on it between class times, sometimes to talk to me but more often to talk to each other. Sometimes I tell them to get off, but then bite my tongue and wish I hadn’t.

-How I passed out “Dream of the Rood” in translation from the Old English and had them read it in pairs with no outside guidance then watched, touched, as they drew bright pictures of the paradox of Christ’s cross, encrusted in both blood and jewels.

-The afternoon a junior came in and as he passed my desk ran his fingers absently over a turtle candle-holder I keep there, a gift from a student my first year. That turtle is even more beloved than it once was for having come such a long way.

-The map of Huck and Jim’s journey carefully traced onto butcher paper on my back wall, with a bright orange carrot drawn next to Cairo, IL, because the artist thought Cairo looked like “carrot” which it definitely doesn’t. 

-The desire to laugh and cry and burst with pride at the absurdity of it all while listening to a roomful of fourteen-year-olds stumbling in unison through the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hathe perced to the roote…”

-Two boys who spent their mid-morning break in my room with heads down on the desks, covered by sweatshirt hoods, sleeping slumped right up against each other’s shoulders.

The thing is, the end of the first quarter has come, and with it, the love has hit. I hadn’t forgotten that the love for my students would come, but I’d forgotten the force with which this seemingly mild affection would barrel into my chest. This love, this concern for adolescent welfare, this enjoyment of the utter weirdness of their particular youth expands me and makes me grateful for things well outside its scope. I am grateful this week for voice messages, for Little Free Libraries, for Peter, Paul, and Mary, for counters to sit on, for crockpots and for sidewalks. I am grateful for that which gets us from place: for conversations, for seasons, for weeks and weekends, for growth which comes step by unusual step.