She sighed deeply and closed down the top of her laptop. “With this gesture, I thee dismiss!” She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms over her head. “What’s that?” asked her husband looking up from the book he was reading. “Who’s being dismissed?” She stared at him fondly, across the room, that man sitting comfortably there with all the books and highlighters. In his free time, he busied himself with reading and learning in such a fierce manner that it was endearing. Except for the highlighter marks which surfaced occasionally on the arms of various couches and chairs. Those weren’t endearing. But he tried so hard, this lovey of hers.
She stretched to the left, counted to three and then again to the right counting again to three. She sighed again. “No one is being dismissed, rather something is being dismissed, shoved aside if you must know. I am dismissing or ignoring rather, any scrap of information concerning the Rochester City School District, at least for the summer”. He gave her a meaningful glance over the top of his glasses. “At least for as long as I can get away with it”, she corrected herself. He nodded and she looked down at her hands. She glanced at the closed laptop. The blue light on the corner of the lid blinked back at her. She had just finished reading an email about a ‘not to be missed’ professional development opportunity for teachers in her school. There were so many times when something was labeled ‘state of the art’, a ‘not to be missed’ experience. Everyone was to be continually entertained, it seemed and the district was no different. “Education is becoming part of the entertainment industry” she stated.
Standing up she said quietly, “I find there is almost nothing which really impresses me anymore”. Her husband looked up again. With a slightly concerned look on his face, he murmured, “surely it can’t be that bad?” She turned away to head into the kitchen and said, “Well, I know that when someone claims that I will ‘love it and will not want to miss it’, I cringe. I do all within my power to ‘miss’ whatever ‘it’ is. I am my father in a thousand ways”. He chuckled and returned to his book while trying to hide a fresh highlighter mark on the chair arm by placing his hand over it.
In the kitchen, she began making iced coffee, starting with grinding spoons of fresh Yaucono beans from Puerto Rico. They were produced in a place called Ponce, a place she had not yet visited. Early on in their marriage, her husband stated once that people from Ponce thought they were something special. “What do you mean?” she had enquired. “Ponce is Ponce and everything else is parking” had been his response. She thought about that statement for quite awhile. Insults did not always translate smoothly between languages and here was a good example. What could be so wrong with parking, after all? Wasn’t parking a sign of civilization and progress? Paved roads were one of the reasons one could travel so smoothly, from town to town. Or perhaps, just perhaps parking in this case meant that others had the right to run one over, not physically of course, but socially or relationally. Most people had at one time or another felt the sting of not being part of the group. Any group could snub another, here on the mainland and even on the beaches of a lovely island.
690 Saint Paul 