Halfway through a kindergarten lesson this morning, one little boy looks up at me and asks, ‘Hey Mrs. Algarin…do you work here?’ I’m not sure why this was unclear since he has been my student since September 1. Appropriate for the beginning of the week, methinks.

‘Wait…what?’…the child stares at me with stupefied incredulity. ‘Mrs. Algarin is your name?’…’Yes’ I respond. ‘Mrs. Algarin is my name’. ‘Awwwww…’ she responds slowly and returns to her writing. I wait. ‘I thought your name was something so, so beautiful like…like Ariel’.

A little one tells me today…’I speak Linguish and Spanish’. So, I pose the question to my smaller students as we gather around a circular table. ‘What are some of the differences between Puerto Rico and Rochester, NY?’ I am informed that on the island, ‘pit bulls ride around in cars’…So there is that to consider.

As the day winds down…I am told in no uncertain terms, ‘You’ll all be sorry when I figure out how to breathe fire!’…would that I could breathe fire…

It is mid year and I consider the possibility that there may still be a gap somewhere…

Real things are never simple…they are more than worth ferreting out…but never simple…and terribly exhausting.

Let me tell you a story. Only, it isn’t a story. Let me tell you the truth. At 8:30 this morning, I engage a distraught first grader; spinning on the floor, raging, yelling in the corner, throwing trash on the floor. I hold him, talk to him, stroke his head and ask if he won’t try to be good for me; just for a while. He nods and quickly explodes again as I leave.

At 9:00, an unpredictable, wild fourth grader I know bounds through the doors, exploding with energy, gives me a huge hug saying, ‘Oh! You’re working on the main idea, details…right?!’ He leaps and spins away and I call after him, ‘You’re looking as handsome as ever!’ ‘Thanks!’ he yells and disappears. Minutes later he is racing around, tipping over the large garbage bins in the cafeteria; shrieking.

At 9:40 I have a rather disconcerting conversation with another fourth grader; a strange and silent boy. He is the one who sits at his desk, quietly pulling out all of his eyelashes. I sit down next to him. ‘I’ve been out because I have a new dog’, he offers. I know this is not true. I smile. He looks up. ‘Do you know there’s a red planet?’ ‘Mars?’ I respond. ‘No”. He shakes his head. He is silent. He looks at me and speaks from somewhere else, ‘Like the future when cars can fly?’ I look at him carefully. I respond, ‘Maybe. I don’t know’. He looks away. After a brief period of silence he says quietly, ‘I wish that were now’.

This is a small corner of my day in my school. In our schools. This is our city. These are our streets. This is a snapshot of our nation. We are suffering moral, societal and spiritual bankruptcy. For God’s love, we don’t need any more laws. We need healing of the highest order.

I love an excellent book. No wind, wiring, password or government can steal the gift of literacy. In the most dire of circumstances I can throw an old favorite into a shoulder bag and in time be transported to places and ideas and worlds far from the never ending wave of electricity and emails. Don’t look for me. I am under a bridge with a candle, reading Proust.

‘Harlem! Harlem? Unmute yourself!’ The young boy stares at the Zoom rectangle which is my face. He seems to be dozing. ‘Harlem!’ I try again. His head jerks up and he leans forward, almost falling into his computer. He reaches forward and unmutes himself; clicking the invisible button which connects him to me. ‘Harlem! Harlem on my mind. Where have you been?’ He hears me. He looks more intently at his laptop, then leans back and laughs.

I am pleased with myself. I have successfully transferred a joke with this small human. ‘Harlem On My Mind!’ I am referring to the title of a book I saw as a child; an adult level text from my Father’s library which I pulled off a dusty shelf, crawling under the piano with it to look uncomprehendingly at all the photographs.

There was no place of connection for me; a white child, raised comfortably in upstate New York amidst forests of trees, fields of corn and apple orchards. What have I to do with Harlem?

I have not leafed through that book for decades; the book where I was introduced to the image of a black Santa, bloody images of beaten men after a riot and abject, obscene urban poverty. I turned the pages carefully, lying on the rug under the sanctuary of a Steinway grand. It made no sense.

‘Harlem! Harlem on my mind! Where are you?’ He laughs and says, ‘Here I am, Miss!’ He has no idea how that book is turning itself in my mind, We proceed with the lesson and I know in some brief moment, an inexplicable moment, we are coming full circle. The book, the very pictures themselves which I stared at with trepidation, appear in the face of the little one watching me through a screen in which there is no contact, other than eyes, voice and spirit. ‘Here I am, Miss!’ I share my screen, but I keep the book…close and on my mind.

So what I was THINKING about this afternoon was the next piece of poetry I would write, however what I HEARD myself say was, ‘Well, when you are an adult, you learn how to vomit so that you don’t vomit through your nose’…presenting the terrible tension between my inner world and my outer world in the land of first graders…

After an unsatisfactory couple of weeks in the world of fast food: poor service, incorrect orders, double charges, surly employees…I’ve concluded that Covid has left its mark. Whether or not Eli and I should have ventured into this world in the first place is a post for another day. Feel free to judge.

Tonight on our way home, after another bad experience…Eli reached his limit. As we sat in the drive through at Walgreens he decided that ‘No hablo ingles’ was the way to go. He drove so I had to lean over to shout my order through the window. ‘No hablo ingles’. The clerk looked confused. I changed the card on file and he said again to the clerk, ‘No hablo ingles’. She looked at me and I smiled and nodded and responded in English. We got our purchase. Before he rolled up the window, he looked back at her and said ‘No hablo ingles’. We drove off and laughed and laughed. Feel free to judge…

‘What are you doing?’ I look at him. ‘I’m counting. You know I count. I do three things or five things. I get a lot of stuff done this way’. ‘Three or five?’ he responds. ‘I’ve explained this before’ I start with a sigh. ‘Three things done…Father, Son, Holy Spirit. The spiritual world orders my material world. Five things…Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. The secular in turn, helps order my spiritual, theological, material world’. He looks at me. ‘You’re nuts’. ‘Yes, I am. Determinedly so. Sign me up. Under the column labeled ‘nuts’ write my name in all caps’.

He looks out the window at the snow, the empty street, at the possibility of yet another day looming…working from home, talking in rectangles on Zoom, moving in smaller spaces and cramped quarters…’No, you’re not nuts…just creative in attempting to forge purpose, organization, movement and meaning out of ten months of shifting sands’.

I look at my lap. Time to stand up…’one!’…I throw the blanket off my lap…’two!’ I stand up. ‘Three!’ I switch off the reading room light. I head down the hallway to the stairs. ‘Hey! how many steps upstairs?’ he calls out. ‘Fifteen…five groups of three…so…sacred!’ I respond. He’s thinking. ‘Hey! How many steps into the cellar?’ ‘Thirteen’ I respond quickly. Silence. Now I’m thinking. ‘I haven’t decided what to do about the cellar. Thirteen is throwing me off’. Silence. ‘If you go downstairs twice, that’s two sets of thirteen, adding up to twenty-six’ he says. ‘Thirteen groups of two…Old Testament and New Testament’. I think about this for a minute. ‘Now who’s nuts?’ I query. ‘But I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it’.

A hearty voice booms out a cheery greeting to someone I can’t see…a conversation continues down the hallway and fades. I can’t know the outcome because I am in the other room. Who spoke? Are there plans for lunch?

January meals; we charge against the wall of grey cold armed with only a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on rye, crisped in curried butter; a bowl of cold, stinging, oily and vinegary coleslaw and a mug of black coffee and fresh cream, boiled strong.

This is a gut cleansing lunch meted out in bits and bursts and bayonets; heated with friendship and talk of the storm, politics and the playoffs. From the other room I imagine the battlefield…caffeinated steam rising up beyond the window and over the dirty edge of the Genesee river…as we ready ourselves for the final week of January.

This is how I remember feeling most of the time in high school during the winters…an odd combination of terror and invigoration…wanting to remain forever under thick blankets while standing late at night outside when the snow actually crackled and split with cold. Watching blue snow that glittered brightly under the moon…eating scalding hot French fries with mustard as I walked home…not being able to feel my finger tips while my tongue burned…

It’s been a long time coming, this winter. I stand at the window, staring at a grey green yard, at the exposed hose which winds around the corner of the house like a disappointed reticulated python; too cold to strike, too tangled up to go anywhere else. The forgotten bag of mulch slumps, growing flatter by the day along the side of the house. The street remains empty, void of people, bikes and energy for months now. I know there are people out there and I see the cars drive by in the early morning, but the energy is missing.

Last evening, I feel the wind rising as I exit the store. The temperature dips quickly and the man behind me in the parking lot picks up his pace, running quickly with his grocery cart, nodding as he scurries past me to the trunk of his car. In a flash, the trunk is open, groceries are tossed in, the door rattles shut and with a frantic burst, he rushes over to the open metal roofed shed where carts are returned. He releases his cart. Bang! It skids in along damp cement, slamming into the back of the wall. That slamming sound makes me feel even colder. I am bundled up and I turn up the heat on the drive home.

Early this morning I awaken to six inches of fresh white, frozen glorious snow. The hose is buried. The forgotten bag of mulch is invisible. The air feels brighter and sparkly. It looks like January. I wonder. The gene lies latent, submerged in inaction, narrowed in the small lens through which I view the world right now. I wonder. I check the temperature; 20 degrees, with an icy wind. I go upstairs and pull out a pair of white plastic flip flops, which I tug on. I’m wearing jeans and a denim shirt; no coat as I exit the kitchen and head into the freezing garage.

The cold strikes quickly and I bend my head to the task. I squeeze between the car and the large shelf which holds the recycling bin; bending over again and again, pulling out every item from the sticky interior, trying to move quickly. Out come the milk jugs, the creamer cartons, the plastic pie pan, the stacks of papers, catalogs I will never look at nor buy from, tins of canned vegetables, coffee jars…the cold seeps through the thin plastic into the bottoms of my feet and spreads over to the top of my toes. I can see my breath. I move faster, piling everything up on top of the large freezer into a large box which will have to be recycled as well. When the entire bin is empty and the box too full and heavy to lift, I press the button on the wall to open the garage door. The door rolls up, creaking and groaning, resisting the motion which allows the wind and cold to blow and sift into the garage. I walk along the car length, careful not to slip in puddles and step gingerly into the snow to dislodge the blue bin sitting off to the left of the driveway. It is stuck in frozen mud and crunchy ice.

Placing my feet carefully apart, I begin to wrangle the bin left to right, left to right until it loosens and coughs up out of the earth. I pull it back into the garage steadying it neatly between the two cars. I pad back and forth to the freezer, lifting pieces out of the box, carrying and depositing them into the bin at the opposite end of the room, until I can finally lift what remains in the box and tip it fully into the large container. I roll it back out into the snow and shove down hard into the mud where it will hold until early Monday morning.

I tread over to the other side of the garage where there are five or six boxes too large to squash down, but which are loaded with non-recyclable pieces. I am really cold now. I wrench the items out, one by one, careful not to cut my hands or fingers which is easy to do in this low temperature. These I lug outside the garage, and I wrestle open the lid of the black garbage can because it has frozen shut. I shove everything down in as deep as it will go. I slam the top as hard as I can and I hear ice crinkle and crackle as it falls on the edge of the driveway. I stack the oversized boxes up neatly, storing them carefully behind my car, making a mental note to avoid driving over them. Then I remember that I am not driving anywhere soon.

I take a last look around and head quickly into the house, closing the garage door against the wind. The house is shockingly warm. I sigh loudly, rub my hands and arms and bend over to remove the flip flops. My feet are red and uncomfortably chilled, chapped and numb thoroughly through. I stand up, wipe my feet on the rug to begin the warming process and take a deep breath. This is really nothing. I’ll be fine. I still have it…

I am thankful for the Super Moon, glowing directly over my front porch and street; a reminder that this world is not the beginning and the end; nor humankind the final measure of all things.

The Snow Moon, the Hare Moon, the Hay Moon, the Darkest Depths Moon…all point in another direction; away from the chaos which is humankind…