A week or so ago, my downspout responded to the call of the wild, shook free from shackled moorings, sailed with wild abandon toward Blaydon Loop, and settled quietly in a stranger’s front yard. New home, new beginnings…alas, no. Through social media, said downspout was promptly retrieved, scolded and reassigned to the porch post, promising to behave.

Yesterday, wanderlust struck again and assisted by winds over 80 miles an hour, the same downspout made a farewell speech and set sail, permanently resettling on distant shores; I know not where.

I have a stash of downspouts plopped in a paint bucket and resting all angles in the garage; a collection of other criminals recaptured but never claimed by owners. I never wanted my downspout anyway as they are prone to head for open seas, unduly influenced by New York winds and seduced by the lure of dangerous adventure…

I am not listening, as I am not yet wearing my glasses…

I recently had a lengthy conversation with a four and one half year old while waiting in the lounge at the Hochstein Music School. He told me about himself and his family and that he ate ‘stinky cheese’ and did not like it. I said I wouldn’t like it either, most likely.

He asked me if I needed a picture drawn and I did. This happened four times. It was a lengthy conversation.

There are four crayon drawings of me on the couch. I told him they were good because they were how I felt.

I don’t know that he understood, but we both laughed.

I don’t think retirement or old age will require much adjustment…

She looked at me and said, ‘I hate your jacket’.

I looked at her and said, ‘I hate your hair’.

Then she laughed nervously and said, ‘Miss, I’m only kidding. I like it’.

I didn’t laugh but I responded, ‘Me too. I like your hair. It looks good’.

We went back to work.

And that is how sixth grade gets handled.

Spring winds at my back; I can almost see her behind galleon clouds…faded Emerald Isle; she rests in green splendor side by side with family bones, rocky soil and troubles. The troubles.

A simple jig plays, as I search for verdant velvet hedges and my own leprechaun waiting for me at home. I dream and drive, while sailing homeward bound in fresher, safer spaces.

On my mind, a photo of my Grandfather McMahon at the tender age of twelve…standing with no shoes…in a glass factory…surrounded by rough looking men.

The boy, the man with the lovely tenor voice…

Memories.

I’m marking time today in a different way. It is a slow slog. Every hour is a new normal after twenty-two years of the same halls, the same corners and the same processes. The Coronavirus has dropped a smart bomb into my solid set of systems, my ways of being, our places of buying and eating and roads on which we drive. It’s a great reduction and we are in the sauce…for now.

Usually my internal nature, my culture, my surroundings…these forces look and reach outward, forward, upward…comfortable in their very movement, their continual movement. Even in the stillness of quieter days there has been that motion and the push of even more movement.

It’s all sort of dribbling off and grinding down and sideways into nothing…right now.

‘Maybe there will be an extension, a waiver, a check…remote learning…something’. Someone whispers on the porch.

My neighborhood is very quiet. Very still. The porch chimes clang wildly in the March wind.

Today it shall be my cupboards, then…all of my cupboards will be cleaned.

And then…I will look for something else…something else to relieve my mind.

By fate, flaw or fancy, I make my home on an incline in the rocky soil of New York; land where tone and dialect change on a dime. From the tortured ‘o’ of a Brooklyn coffee to the unbearable nasal of the Buffalo twang buried in snow and on to the flat sound of Rochester; language brushed even by open fields, hunters and the power of the Genesee flowing North for goodness sake!

I sing the true laborer out on the greasy roads, brunted up against frost bitten winds and the line man, swinging on the wires…graciously allowing me time to read about distant shores and other days…for I am a true dreamer.

By hour, by genetics I remember Daddy polishing my scuffed Mary Janes on a Saturday evening for church in the morning. The lineman in the cold strings lines and props poles and slugs down scalding coffee and thick beef sandwiches as Daddy listens to the wind and polishes back and forth; first with a cloth, then with a thickly bristled brush and I dream of heated shores and other lives somewhere else.

I sense it is all somewhere else; far from the roots of my soul…

In bold letters…the ‘OFFICE OF ACCOUTABILITY’…misspelled words splashed across the neatly nauseating power point we are viewing in our staff meeting.

I pity the cog man newly appointed and required to school us in all the new terms. Ridiculous twists and phrases…such as ‘previous methodology’, ‘newly re-identified designation’, ‘different filters’ and ‘percent gap reduction’. Save us all.

Save the tentative first grader approaching me regularly with a carefully placed kiss on my right cheek and a murmured, ‘I love you’…one English phrase she masters and likes to practice very, very quietly. Unkempt, shabby, shy and given to lengthy procrastination in the cloak room; unable to manage her coat, boots, hat, mittens, book bag…

I present to you the child through the looking glass…as I keep my heart out of sight…