Summation of my week: overheard in a Kindergarten class…’I’ve got shark nails’. (Sharp). With a third grader…’Could we have a salami in Rochester?’ (Tsunami).

One of my second grade cherubs wrote me a note, ‘Dear Teacher…I want to try to do my best because I want to be god’. (Good).

A very tall order indeed. Things to think about on a grey late winter afternoon…

I leaned through the open car door window and said to Lolly girl who was grinning and waving from her car seat, ‘Girl! We’re in the middle of a pandemic. What do you think?’

She leaned back, all curly locks shaking in every direction and screechy laughed. She pointed at me directly and continued to suck on her single soggy French fry.

It’s good to be a mere 15 months old…

I’m on hold…breathlessly awaiting the long promised connection to a live person who can possibly connect me to another live person who will set up a delivery time for a large item which has been siting in Buffalo for a week now.

Normally, I hate being subjected to inane ‘on hold Muzak’…trapped by a slaughtered version of a Beatles song, a well watered down/cleaned up version of a Rod Stewart tune (sans lyrics) or an attempt to aggressively ‘bee bop’ a sacred hymn like Amazing Grace into a road trip kind of a sing-a-long.

Today, I’m pleasantly surprised at hearing the gorgeous tones of a Chopin prelude playing liltingly on my phone…minor key, slow movement…European angst with dark chords…gathering clouds…and then it occurs to me this might not be good. The invasion of Poland. The funeral march. Death.

I’m going to be on hold for eternity…

It is not snow. It is powdered sugar.

We are living on top of a very large doughnut.

Received as a text on my phone early this morning: ‘Good morning, Mark. Adam and I stopped by and dried out the rear lot camera and checked the other two. Please let us know if you have any further difficulty…Charles’.

I do not know Mark. I do not know Adam or Charles.

I am unclear as to what a rear lot camera might be.

I may have further difficulties, but I suspect Charles will not be able to help me. I hope these three men had a successful day.

This afternoon…the little one coughed, raised his hand and when called on said simply, ‘Miss, I have a hair ball!’

My response…’I can’t take care of that right now’…

Back to work.

Can’t make this stuff up…

The look on the head secretary’s face when I told her I was going to hop the counter instead of being buzzed into the office; priceless.

I know I would never do it. She knows I would never do it. I actually am incapable of doing it. No way. Not if my life depended on it.

But for a split second…I ruled the world.

Truly the best quote of the day: I was talking with an elderly neighbor this afternoon, a retired teacher. She crossed herself and said ‘I would testify in a court of law…truly, the lowest form of life is an 8th grade boy’.

Agreed…

At the corner of Westcombe and Longton, she sits in the front yard on a small wooden chair. She sits brilliantly in the cold sunshine. A slight woman dressed in long fuchsia cloth and wearing a small turban, she watches as I drive by. I wave. She turns her head slowly toward me, unmoved; unmoving.

I think about her as I run a number of errands. I’ve seen her walking slowly along the sidewalk, barely five feet tall; age undetermined. Her face is wide, brown and lined. She could be sixty or one hundred. I have heard her homeland is Nepal.

She stares out and up at the sky at lands I don’t see, feeling winds I don’t feel; seeing the sun at an angle I have never felt. Her face is stone; absorbing with a direct stare the range and depth of the mountains from whence she came. My face is fluid. I look around mountains, above mountains and beneath mountains; thinking of how I will traverse the heights.

On my way back I look for her again but she and her small wooden chair are gone. She has left the mountains, the wind and the waning cold spring sun and the shaggy front lawn. She has closed her door against the fishbowl which is suburbia…