There was a discrepancy with my phone bill. I tackled the problem on Monday at 7pm. I picked up my phone and dialed the 800 number, which was referred to as the ‘customer loyalty number’. This ‘loyalty’ number was given to me by someone in the AT&T building on Jefferson Road. It was scribbled fairly sloppily, and it was wrong as I discovered since I dialed the number four times, and each time the phone connection was cut off preceded with a terse message informing me that that particular number was not available in my area, whatever that meant. I started feeling less loyal.

I searched the bill for a customer service number and found nothing. I searched on the internet and found a number. I dialed. The customer service person with whom I spoke was pleasant enough, referring to me as ‘madam’ an exorbitant number of times. I guessed perhaps I had landed in Calcutta or maybe Singapore. There was a lengthy, polite discussion about the incorrect bill and there were apologies and a lot of crackling over the connection in addition to a noisy collection of voices in the background quoting other numbers to other customers. It was quite confusing. At one point, the person calling me ‘madam’ informed me there were no notations on my account promising me what I had been promised. Feeling less and less loyal, I said, “But that’s on you”. Pause. A few more apologies and I was transferred.

I’m not sure which department the next person was in. It could have been billing. It could have been the true place where the ‘loyalty’ number was supposed to take me but I’m not sure. It may have been on a new continent. I discovered I had the wrong ‘loyalty’ number, or rather because it had been written sloppily, I had read it incorrectly. There was polite laughter and some apologies and I was called ‘madam’ again several times. Then I was asked if I could be called ‘Elisabeth’. I was told I was very patient and would I mind being put on hold? So then I had the correct number but no person on the other end of the line. There was more fuzzy crackling and I know I heard voices in the background and before I knew it, I was back on the line with someone I could not quite understand. I was informed I was patient and was promptly transferred, somewhere else.

The next person sounded generally American. A third continent? Maybe. I wasn’t called ‘madam’ and I wasn’t told I was patient so perhaps I really was back in the USA. Together we worked on subtraction. There was the original bill. There was the incorrect bill. There was the early contract termination fee. There was a flurry of numbers we thought might be subtracted: part of a promotion, a service change fee, a TV access fee (I thought if I owned the TV I should have access), a protection plan (from what? I thought maybe AT&T but I wasn’t sure), and a regional sports charge. We got these subtracted and added things up. We came up with a different number, not matching anything on the paper. I was transferred.

I was switched out of the USA and ended up…where? There was a lengthy period of ‘musak’ and I had time to consider what we managed to export to other nations. ‘Muzak”…not good. In the next department I was informed they would remove the contract termination fee. I was told this was ‘pending’ and that I was very patient and would I mind being placed on hold? I gritted my teeth and said, ‘yes’ and the contact at the other end of the line must have sensed I was no longer ‘loyal’ because he or she stopped and then said, ‘Madam, would you do me a favor?’ I thought he or she wanted a good survey result and I answered ‘Yes’. I am patient and loyal. ‘Would you promise me that you will put a smile on your face and keep it there for the rest of the day?’ I was silent. I looked up at the ceiling and counted some tiles. I lowered my head and chose to laugh politely into the phone and answered ‘yes’ while my brain thought ‘doubtful’. I was put on hold. Muzak. Voices. Numbers. Crackle. I looked at the clock and noted that it was 8:16pm. The phone call suddenly dropped and I left that continent.

Today I received a text from AT&T asking me to complete a survey about my experience with Leo. This was in the middle of my class where my little one had just asked me if I took showers and that she did and she washed all her body pieces. I had to look at the ceiling.

I think I spoke to six people last night. Who’s Leo? As the leprechauns are my witness, I don’t know anyone named Leo. Poor Leo. Poor soul. Somewhere on one of the seven continents on this lovely planet, there sits a person named Leo who waits in vain for AT&T survey results from a tired American woman. It’s not going to happen. My survey choices ranged from very dissatisfied to very satisfied. I was looking for the word ‘trapped’. Poor Leo. Poor soul.

Columbus Day 2019 dawns gray, dull and empty of plans. He goes downstairs, opening the front door leading off onto the porch to check the weather. Upon doing so, he heads quickly back up the stairs claiming out loud what we already knew. It is chilly, damp and gray. There is sugared coffee and hot toasted bagels in the reading room where we settle into a morning of reading and discussion. The only sound from the street is the rumbling wheezing sound of the garbage truck on its rounds…squeaking from house to house as it picks up and empties, picks up and empties.

It is a calm and sheltered world hidden away from the absolute chaos which is bleeding out all over the middle east. The Turks, the Kurds, the Syrian army and in the end…all the innocent civilians who will not live to see the end of this terrible day; it feels wrong to be quietly seated in a safe neighborhood. But what can we do? Reality is usually an odd thing and is not often something which we could have ever guessed. The problems across foreign waters are not simple and neither are the answers.

Right now, those of us resting safely far away, living under the shadow of another flag and underneath the lettering of a different constitution enjoy the long established three day weekend known as Columbus Day, the brief time of respite as we experience the peculiar weariness which comes from the relaxation of effort.

For our Rochester City School teachers, this weekend is pure magic, falling as it does on the third payday of the year. Not only is there money in the bank, there is freedom allotted us, the joy of knowing that Monday is empty of obligations. It falls right at the crucial moment in the beginning of the school year when the bloom is off the rose. The initial energy of the new year, the excitement of the students, and the brief time in which there is relative peace in the school building…all have vanished. We are in for it now. We have begun the long endurance, the grind of monitoring recalcitrant children as we keep our eyes laser focused on the semester’s end. We are used now to the daily foot traffic of troubled children on their way to the room where they journey when they can no longer function in healthy ways in classrooms. Many feet make that lonely trudging trip past my office door, with some children sticking their heads through my door to give me a swift greeting.

Later in the day we ride around enjoying the stunningly beautiful autumn foliage, the brilliant reds, oranges, yellows, golds and copper hues…the Persian rug which lies heavily yet gently over the rolling hills and valleys of this lovely corner of Western New York. The sky looks as if it is ‘full of snow’ as older family members sometimes mention. Next week temperatures are scheduled to dip into the thirties but it is still too early for snow. The heavy sky is a feeling, a warning, a sense…a leading to the search for the heavier blankets stored away in the closets, the scarves buried in drawers and the soft whoosh of furnace heat flooding in waves over the carpeting, up the stairs and under the edges of freshly cleaned curtains.

“Do you know if you can get internet here?” The ruddy faced man with glasses and a slightly odd stare looked directly at me but with his body turned away at an angle as I looked up from my phone. We were both seated and waiting in the chiropractor’s office. I looked at him and then down at my phone and I said, “I’m looking at my email right now, so I know that you can get internet here in this office”. He stared at me. Something was just a touch off. Waving his phone at me he said, “I mean, I have a tracker phone. I don’t have access to internet. I need the WIFI code from this office so that I can log on to the internet that way”. I shrugged my shoulders and answered, “You could ask the woman at the front desk if they have a code. I don’t know what the code is. I have an iPhone”. He turned his head away quickly and snapped, “I don’t have lots of extra money like some people do. I have a tracker phone. I don’t have money”. He faced forward.

I looked at the back of his neck and at the reddening skin and decided that he really was angry. He was angry at me. I did not respond. Then I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the exchange. There was no indication that anyone else was paying any attention. “I live in a house with a lot of people and I pay rent and I’m going to get out of there because all I can afford is this tracker phone and I’m 35 years old and I shouldn’t be living with my Mother anymore and I’m going to leave”. His rambling dropped off into silence. I looked at the ceiling and thought, “I may die in my chiropractor’s office today”.

He started up again, addressing no one. “Everyone needs to get away from their Mother. I’m 35 years old”. I shifted in my chair, leaned forward slightly and spoke. “Yes. Everyone needs to get away. Things happen. It’s good to get away”. I leaned back. He was silent. The chiropractor working on the table behind the counter in front of us looked up. The huge fish tank bubbled and gurgled. One beautiful orange and white fish squiggled in and out of a gray castle on the bottom of the fish tank. It was my turn for my adjustment so I stood up and I walked carefully around the man with the glasses. I went to my table. I stretched out.

“I never get physical with them because then, they’re going to call the cops because they are just cowards. They are cowards. I never get physical with them. They call the cops”. I heard him stretch out on his table two cubicles over from mine. I sighed and looked at the floor through the medical paper stretched over the opening in the head rest of the table. “I’m probably going to die in my chiropractor’s office today”. I resigned myself. I was just too tired.

There is a thin space between here and “there’ for most of us. For some souls, the one area of space has bled on into the next layer and they don’t really know where they are anymore. I’m reminded today of what was purported to be some of J.S. Bach’s final words before his death. Supposedly he uttered, “Don’t cry for me. I’m going where music is born”. Sanctuary for some comes in the briefest encounters with other people, no matter how odd. The moment before the rubber band snaps, someone says something and the person is able to come back from the edge and go “where the music is born”. It’s never enough and after all, sympathy butters no parsnips, doesn’t heal, doesn’t repair but it may offer the only available temporary cushion between bleeding over into the “there”.

I did not die in my chiropractor’s office, and as usual I left standing up straighter than I entered. I made sure I was gone before I had any more encounters with the ruddy necked man. I dropped my iPhone into my bag and drove away thinking about sanctuary, and mental illness and the place where the music is birthed.

I take a long singular look at the little girl seated at my table. She is decked out to beat the band. Fabulous hair, new leggings which she proudly shows off, clickety clackety boots and all of it topped off with a magnificent glitter bomb pink bow. She is ready for the stage. I complement her. She smiles shyly. She isn’t one to talk very much. There are noticeable gaps in her vocabulary and speech flow when she does talk. I take a sip of my tea and then I pose a question. “Where have you been the last two days? We missed you. Why weren’t you in school?” She looks down and away and considers. “I forgot about school”, she finally states. I look at her for a minute. “You forgot that you had school?” She nods yes. I try again. “What about your Mother? Did she forget about school? Did she forget that you come to school on Mondays and Tuesdays?” She looks at the table and then back at me. “Yes”, she answers. “She forgot about school”. I make one more attempt and know that I will be forced to move on because that is what we do in the Rochester City School District. We just keep making the best of it only we are not making anything ‘best’ at all. We just keep moving on. “You’re telling me that your Mom forgot about school?” She picks up a paper lying on the table and answers steadily, “Yes. She forgot”.

Early this morning, I step outside and realize instantly that something has changed. There is the finest wispy white layer of frost covering all the houses across the street and the front lawns, scattered between the middle and the edges of the street. I take a deep breath. It is marvelous and clean and crisp and I want to enjoy it as long as I can. I climb into the car and start the engine. It is not yet 7am and the dashboard registers a cool 38 degrees. I open the passenger window and the rear window and ride to work this way for as long as I can stand it. Somewhere over the railroad tracks by the edge of Jefferson and before I make a left on West Henrietta, I give up and close them. My fingers are numb on the wheel.

I’m listening to all the news coverage about the floundering Rochester City School District and the $30 million dollar shortfall. I am never surprised by the things I hear about this place where so many of us work and where almost 30,000 children attempt to get some semblance of an education. What surprises me is that the pundits on NPR are always surprised. Then I remember that the only people who are flabbergasted at the condition we are in are those who don’t work in the district. You have to be in the thick of it to get it. You can’t make some of this stuff up. Unless you are here, I mean really here…you will continue to be surprised.

The chief financial officer for the district resigned last night. I suppose it would be hard to justify that pesky $30 million dollar gap when everyone downtown swears that they heard last spring that everything was good for this upcoming year. That stubborn $30 million…

We have a letter from the new superintendent, who I assume by now is sorry he took the job. There are many areas where there will be cuts. One potential cutback catches my eye. Substitute teachers. The district pays out a load of money for substitute teachers. Because there will be no budget for those teachers, all the special subject personnel such as music, ESOL, gym, art, foreign language, and speech teachers will be alerted first thing in the morning on any particular day that they will be in classrooms as substitutes. They will be thrown into classrooms where they are not wanted and where they do not want to be. There will be quite a fracas and this will go on until the union files a grievance due to all the services being denied a whole group of kids and then the whirly gig will go around and around again until someone yells “Uncle” or jumps off and then we shall see what we shall see.

I listen to the teacher in the room next to mine attempt to teach Spanish to a group of sixth graders. I am going to have to close the door to eat my lunch because I can not tolerate what I am hearing. Every attempt the teacher makes to teach is greeted with resistance, interruption, rude comments and insults. They continually talk over her about nothing at all. Nonsense. Someone makes a snide comment about another student’s clothing and then it really takes off. “Stop talking about my Mother”. “She’s looking at me funny, Miss? Miss?” In between I hear the steady voice of the teacher trying to explain to one student how to conjugate a series of Spanish verbs. The student tries, makes a smart remark to his neighbor, tries again and then starts singing loudly. Another girl gives up, pulling her hoodie over her head and stretches back to take a nap. They will all pass the class. They will pass, not because they know anything. They will pass because the teacher will have no choice. They think they understand so much. I close the door and go back to lunch.

Early Monday morning. It has rained heavily during the night and the air is black and thick. The rain gutter clicks away madly as the final drips and drops run off the edges of the roof, down the pipe and out onto the edges of the gutter buried deeply in the grass. I look out the window. A low flying plane descends mysteriously overhead as it prepares to land at the airport. Where has it been? Who rides on board at this early hour? Am I connected to any of these people in the air in any way other than sharing our humanity, the damp fall air, and similar hopes and dreams, thoughts of beauty, a possible desire to be quiet and the pursuit of freedom from anxiety?

I enter the school building and think about what I read in my early morning musings. Progress is and always will be impossible unless and only if it is built on a changeless standard. I understand this to mean that there are absolutes. There are good ways to teach our children and bad ways to teach them. Our culture cringes at the radical thought that there are layers of better and layers of worse. We convince ourselves that all things are equal. But all things are not equal. I am witnessing a lot of really bad and inadequate ways of education in our school and I wonder about all the children being left behind, because adults refuse to be honest with themselves and with others. We have become a culture which craves change for the sake of change.

The rain continues irregularly throughout the morning. Several of my students are absent today, one set of twins and another child in one of the special education classes. These are children who miss school when it rains. I attempt to explain this strange fact to my student teacher and she can’t understand it. “They will miss a lot of school because it rains a lot here in Rochester”, she states simply. “Yes, they will”. It is the situation in which we find ourselves on a rainy Monday. Some children don’t come to school when it rains.

The elevator door opens and I almost run into a man who is obviously trying to exit the box in the wall as fast as possible. I know him. He works in the room in our building where we take the students who are no longer safe in the classroom. They are not safe to have around other students and they are often a danger to themselves. “I’m looking for a runner” he says. “Have you seen him?” I can honestly answer that I have not see this child today.

This year, in a burst of friendliness and with an eye toward making everything equal, the school wants us to refer to these students who leave the classroom regularly, these ‘runners’ as ‘elopers’. The good Lord save us from our own idiocy. My husband and I eloped and we were not running out of any building away from anything. More importantly, we actually came back and settled down. These students are not elopers. They are runners. They are ‘on the lam’ because they do not want to remain in the classroom for a thousand different reasons. If I read one more email about “elopement”, I’m sending the principal a copy of my wedding announcement.

I watch the rain out the window on the third floor. “We are here…and you are not; all the rose and caramel dappled skies are drifting lovely above the road to the city…and I feel the glory of October winds. I’m looking for something else; something solid like the grasp of your hand and the black, bristled shoe brush of the whisked sound of you polishing my Sunday shoes. I want my Mary Janes back. I want that time back. I’ll take October’s glory and its’ confusion instead…only because I must…”

The entire house, every nook, every corner smells like roasting pork. The sun is pouring through the curtains and early in the morning, he rises up mumbling about needing to put the pig in the oven. I have a foggy memory of yesterday’s purchases; one roasted pork with gandules for us and one to prepare for his friends at work. This is his area, the preparing of the meat and the rotund pots full of gandules (rice and beans) and the plates of thinly sliced tomatoes and the deep fried tostones with the ketchup and mayonnaise sauce. It’s his home away from home and I partake of it gladly.

Early mornings are time to savor rich strands woven into our life’s fabric. I pad around the house, searching out books, pens and a notebook and the slippers which forever elude me upon first seeking. They have a world of their own, these slippers. On occasion, they rest under the couch watching the news or listening to our conversations. Somedays, they wander off to one of the upstairs bathrooms having been tossed aside after the owner’s shower. They hear the neighbors outside, the two little ones playing at being pirates in the backyard, even though the children are small and fragile as blond glass and live as harmlessly as the tiniest white butterflies still flitting around the edges of the windows, after our first frost. They are hopeful creatures, our neighborhood pirates, my slippers and the butterflies.

After the hard freeze of Friday evening, he states with sad conviction, “It’s time to get out the flannel sheets”. The air is brilliantly cold and I slept the deepest sleep in a long while. We relish deep rest which comes from sleeping in cold air. It is difficult to describe but it is delicious. It is security. We doff our caps to outdoor creatures soon seeking similar shelter under woodland covering, bundles of hay, weeping willows and for the smaller creatures, the safety of small rocks, wet and mashed leaves and the fallen log. Covering is woven tightly into my mind and spirit and experience.

One summer when visiting family in Hawaii, I was shown my bed and aside from the fitted sheet, it was bare. I was informed I had no need of any blanket or even a flat sheet. I could not understand it. “Surely I will need at least a flat sheet?” My cousin, having been raised in Michigan, understood my reluctance and in the end, gave me a top sheet which I duly flung aside by early morning. She was right. In that tropical climate, there was no need for covering. I did not need the warmth but all the same, I felt unattached and disconnected. The temperature readings on the weather report were the same, varying perhaps a degree or two for days at a time. I stepped outside the home and saw a variety of creatures clinging elegantly to the stucco walls and I knew that everything was in an upside down world. They sought cover underneath their bodies. I needed it on top of my limbs.

I am sorry to launder and pack away the ocean blue linen sheets. They performed splendidly in the summer. I lay awake and pretended I was in the Caribbean watching lizards on the wall, eating pineapple freshly cut, believing the temperatures would remain the same for the next ten days. Now I have re-committed to flannel. Autumn leaves and branches are woven into the fabric of this bedding and soon the kitchen candles change from pineapple cilantro to pumpkin harvest and homestead apple and another page turns in our book and I will be more savagely on the lookout for errant slippers and a thicker robe.

It is early Monday morning on the last day of September. Before 6am, I sit in absolute silence in the reading room and listen to all the things which are empty. The air outside is black and the warm corner light glows over the edge of the coffee mug and the damp hem of the thick plaid blanket. It rained around 4am and in a few days I will need to start searching around for socks and shoes with closed toes. I see myself going through the tedious process of removing all the plants from the porch and trying to find the best place to put them; a location where they receive maximum waning autumn light.

I look out the window and consider my day. I decide that when the cars move on my street, the moon moves with them. The red tail lights flicker and fade away in the rain. The moon is gone. As I drive in along the edge of the golf course, there are mini ponds set in the fields sporting layers of filtered fog stacked up on top of each other. All around the ponds these layers look like tubes riding up to heaven. I know there are trolls and leprechauns in that air and I keep both hands on the wheel in case my car starts to vanish in the thick fog, or in case a deer leaps out at my vehicle from the swamp side of the street.

The trick in our building is to ride the elevator without other people. I drag my bags through the front doors of the school and keep my eyes straight ahead looking at the entrance to the corner where the elevator travels. A group of people climb in and one waves as if to ask me whether or not I want them to hold the doors. I shake my head and I step back in a waiting posture to avoid crowding on with them. I look left at the wall and read a poster which states boldly, “It’s okay to not know what you are doing”. I like that. I approach the elevator and I listen as it moves up to the third floor, the faint ding of the bell sounds, muffled doors slide and I hear a voice and then I hear the box in the wall make the same trip in reverse. The door opens and I enter alone. I ride up three flights passing the 44 steps on my side of the building. The stairs are divided into 4 sections of 11 steps apiece. On the other side of the building in at least one stairwell, there are still 44 steps but they are divided into a set of 16 steps, 6 steps, and two sets of 11 steps. I don’t like this side. The uneven chunks of numbers is irritating.

One of my seven year old fellow travelers stops by my office. He’s on the lam again. We talk. “People are telling me to do things I just don’t want to do”. I ask about his Dad, who is no longer living with the family. He hops up on the window ledge in the hallway and stretches out like he was on a bed. We talk a bit more. I ask him if he wants to walk me to the bathroom. He says “No”. He waits back in my office with my student teacher while I take a jog down the other hall. When I return, one of the vice-principals is in my office talking to the seven year old about football. I hear a reference to snacks. The two of them strike some sort of a deal and they disappear down the hallway together. I close the open window on the ledge where he has been lying. It’s beginning to rain again.

I do not really eavesdrop but I love a good dialogue. People tell you everything in time. Just listen long enough and deeply enough. People will tell you more than you would ever wish to know. I can’t explain it and I don’t often understand it. It just is. They talk and they talk and in the end it sounds just like the quietest whisper of a driven leaf on a grey chalk day.