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…”
690 Saint Paul 