‘Here. Taste this. It isn’t right’. The mug of steaming creamy coffee moves across the counter in my direction. I shake my head. ‘No, no…I don’t want to taste anything until I’ve had my own coffee’. ‘What is wrong with this?’ He grimaces. He moves toward the perfectly appointed cupboard, which I feel compelled to point out. ‘Don’t mess my cupboard. I’ve organized and cleaned everything. I know where everything is. It’s perfection. Don’t touch things’.

He lifts down a turquoise canister and clunks it on the counter. I open it up. ‘Where’s the sugar?’ He looks around. ‘In here, the sugar is in this canister’. I look into the heavy container. I look at his creamer. ‘It’s your coffee from Puerto Rico. It’s your sugar free creamer. Why are you looking for sugar with sugar free creamer? It’s the same stuff I always buy’. This question goes unanswered as he licks his finger and sticks it deep into the canister. I take a deep breath and look away. He yelps. ‘This is salt! It’s salt! Why is there salt in the sugar canister? Taste this!’ He points his salted finger at me.

‘No, no…I don’t want to taste or eat anything before my coffee’. I step back. ‘I have salty coffee’ he wails. I quietly take his mug and go to the sink. ‘We’ll start over. There’s enough fresh coffee still in the pot’. I pour a second cup. It only reaches three quarters of the way to the top. He looks at the mug skeptically. ‘I need a different mug’ he declares. ‘It’s all psychological’. ‘Yes, indeed’ I sigh looking at my cupboard. My perfect turquoise world looks a touch tarnished. He pours carefully the new coffee into the new mug. ‘Still doesn’t look right’ he mumbles. He pours it back. Now there is coffee on my counter.

I look at my ceiling. ‘Man, it takes a lotta work just to get the day started’ he states. I spread fresh cream cheese on my hot toasted bagel. ‘Hey, is this peanut butter okay? Taste this’. I shake my head. ‘No, no…I do not want to taste anything before I have had my coffee’. He moves over to my cupboard; my turquoise cupboard. ‘I’m putting this peanut butter back in your baking area. I don’t think it’s any good’. I stare at him. ‘Why do I want it in my cupboard if it is no good?’ He thinks about this briefly. ‘Well, maybe if you bake it it will be okay, even if it is no good. Plus, it wasn’t opened. There…I stuck it in there’.

I avert my eyes. I know I’m going back later to ‘fix’ the peanut butter in my well appointed cupboard and to switch out the errant salt and sugar. Later. Right now, I’m getting my coffee and bagel because I’m afraid there will soon be yet another taste offering…

A brief trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts…a jaunt through Harvard Square after all the rain. It is muggy. We are tired. The relentless damp steams off the leftover sidewalk puddles and settles on our faces and spirits.

Suddenly, he strikes up a lively conversation with two Harvard custodians…one from Honduras, one from Mexico and now he joins in bringing the twist of the island.

Surrounded by a thousand picture snapping visitors from Eastern portions of the world, I am odd woman out. I watch the last fat drops of silver rain plop off the ends of the branches hanging off the huge spreading tree under which the three kings stand and converse.

I listen and listen in the richly moistened elite air of Harvard Square. I hear the nuances and the differences within this linguistic circle of men and their conversation and I know for the first time I’m hearing a language which is no longer noise…

I used to think some things were odd; the woman standing at the corner of Central Avenue and North Clinton dressed in a heavy winter coat, a wool cap and boots…when it is close to 80 degrees; steamy hot. I used to find that odd.

At that particular corner, she stands only a few short blocks from where a specialty factory tailors $2,000 suits…worn by eager, energetic businessmen in Manhattan…only one block from the busy train station ferrying eager people on the Empire Express, around the vast bends in the rivers and into the rising canyons of cement and money.

The divergent paths will never cross…the over dressed woman who waves an illegible placard as she scuttles across North Clinton in the general direction of the red brick train station…and Manhattan. That’s odd. But these days, I no longer find it to be strange.

I think about her heavy, misplaced clothing. There is no transitional clothing for those who stand on the corner of Central Avenue and North Clinton. The journey is winter coats and boots, and then flip flops and t-shirts; nothing in between.

Spring is a luxury ill afforded. It’s winter or summer. It’s black or white. A confused placard or a $2,000 suit. The middle is a luxury too highly priced. The middle is a dangerous place. It should be a safe place, but it’s not. Now that’s odd…

Was there anything more glorious than sitting on the porch with a bowl of cold Caesar chicken salad and a whole lot of pickled red onions? She didn’t think so. From deep in the house came the faint strains of the Bach double violin concerto; the talented hands of Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh driving their bows over the strings, pulling life’s essence and exquisite beauty out of cat gut and wood. Marvelous. Was anything better?

She leaned back in the Adirondack chair and closed her eyes. ‘I wonder if Bach ate Caesar chicken salad and pickled red onions?’ She tried envisioning this. She couldn’t quite pull it together in her mind as she was drifting off in the heat; the porch was so cool, the neighborhood absolutely silent.

A slight breeze moved the wind chimes at the edge of the porch and the music inside the house wound down, both artists bringing Bach to a brilliant close with a flourish and a nod; all three musicians long gone now, yet the music was still there, still giving life, still stirring thoughts and emotions, evocative images from the memory of sound.

The whole nation should be seated on the front porch, eating cold Caesar chicken salad with heaps of red pickled onions. Heaps. There isn’t anything more glorious.

The creative mind lives in perpetual tension; balanced tenuously between getting things done and flying by the seat of one’s pants.

The urge to fry every food in sight as one considers the lowly salad; the wide open prairie travels alongside the captured taxi with bright yellow sealed doors and exact mileage.

The need for silence and the need for noise…it’s all a blather and a whirligig bru-haha with a crossed ‘T’ and the dotted ‘I’…a rounding up and a tamping down…

In the heart of July, a child’s westward trek to South Dakota, leaves behind the coastal waters and rolling hills as they flatten out through the roads in Ohio; traded in for searing heat, rippling grain fields, blue flax and corn in good seasons…burnt, crisping drought at other times and the odd wooden clapboard floors in small towns with ancient names. The James River disappears into dried mud.

One gas pump, a root beer float and cash only, please; a sign warns ‘last stop for the next hundred miles’; the land swallowing us gone as our car pulls back out onto the pink ribbon of highway.

Drought feels and knows…rutted mud so dried out and thick that tripping and injury awaits the child in careless flip flops, the bruised soles of small feet tell the story. The crops, struggling up against a steady prairie wind which beats back and all around a single row of sparsely planted Russian olive trees; one row of these green gems holds the line determinedly against all odds. There is nothing in any direction for the next hundred miles and we are alone.

The radio plays quietly with static, fuzzy crop and herd reports…and we watch the land out of a tired and melting window. The sun has made a half round, shifting from one side of the car to the other and the day readies to wind down.

Then…in our stupor, there rises up ahead the figure of a lone Native American runner with a long black braid…strong, striding with singular purpose along the edge of the burnt tar, at the edge of pink stone quartzite…as our single car quickly, in all that incomprehensible vast sea of prairie and wheat and sweet air…sails past and disappears into a wall of bright, shimmering, unbearable heat. The runner with singular purpose vanishes behind us.

What is fairer or rarer than a petal-strewn day in June? She launches her walk, cambric furled…breezily, easily sailing on her way…exits the cove…enters the choppy blue-shirted sea.

The brined, hurly, burly, tawny, tough and tired crowd…surging waves at the corner of University and Culver. Shimmering raging sun splashes on the metal bucketed crowd…spilling forward through the factory exit…lurching out onto the sidewalk…’shift’s over boys!’

Dodging buses and honking traffic…in a heated hurry to get home, the waters of blue swallow her up as she merges heel and toe into their thickened stream. Broad heads and barrel-chested stiffs, Irish eyes and thick rugs of reddish hair with roughened jaws…a half-hearted struggle to catch her eye as she sails by. She sidesteps the dangerous shoal…the knowing wink and the sly grin…trolling through their work grime…she sails on by, heel and toe, heel and toe, head above the fray and spray.

My people, my blood, my past unknown…dark and distant swirling waters…lost at sea…but still pulsing, connecting, soaking…a twinge of genetic memory, Irishly sung in the greening distance. Grace twitters gently above and around the thickened strand of the rowdy males…wispy tendrils at neck’s nape.

The waves break to let her pass…a lassie up against the sweat and calloused hands, the sunburned shoulders and potato whiskey minds. The day is done and spent for the crowd at the corner of University and the fire station…the sealers and plodders merge briefly with her…heel and toe, heel and toe…on toward separate paths…flowing in ten different directions where the sidewalk ends.

She strides quickly forward with a furrowed brow…as much as she would sail around the reef of choppy blue, she recognizes those strained spines which labored and struggled to carve out inch by inch, the rugged Eastern Coast of this great country and the unforgiving Western reaches. Reckless abandon with hammer and truck, lathe, song, God and drink…they still cross in waves over the street, steel booted…heel and toe…slamming over the pavement.

‘Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave, who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep, its own appointed limits keep, oh hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea…’ Left foot, right foot…past and future…heel and toe, heel and toe…passing gently through the swaggering, surging crowd.

Handsome man with a thick head of hair…hardened by years of physical exertion…building a softer, safer world for his grandchildren…a quiet seabed. Chest, widened and stretched by sorrow’s lance…working and sweating out like a sick fever, the harsher memories. Forearms for an eternity lifting and tugging and dragging bags of Fleischmann’s yeast…in the bakeries, back alleys and balustrades of the rough and tumble city. The worn red leather armrests of his rocking chair, back and forth, heel to toe on that splintered porch, listening for the drone of a lonesome airplane on those summer ice-creamed afternoons.

The steel tipped and leather booted crowd…disperses like water bugs…streaming with a hurry, flurry, scurry in all directions…willy nilly with stretched sinew and aching spirit. Taut after a day’s labor…stretched weary…spent and sweated out…grimaced jaw…bent on the next destination. ‘Watch the rocks, boys…mind the shoal!’ Home, church, the bar, the game…that upstairs room…’anywhere but here boys, anywhere but here’. Heading for land…heel and toe, heel and toe..as she sails on by.

She voyages with safe passage…resting on the brawny shoulders of trawling giants; reposed on the shoulders of giants…

I wandered in orange…radiating in the warmth of kinship, rebellious as la Principaute d’ Orange…warmed at the edge of apricot fires and heartened by summer orange ladybugs. And yet…there remained a mellowed and amber discontent.

Enter you…butterscotch surprise! Warming, cheering, energizing with tangerine flames and the promise of peach blossoms which have yet to blossom and bloom.

No love is so orange that it does not lean toward trade…seeking to replace the old with the new…pining to stem the flow of active plenty for a deeper golden hued sunshine and contentment…trading up to live with one who also seeks the orange life.

Together we feast at that mango table…joy and plenty, the red brought nearer to humanity by its yellow…the full fiesta plate.

One small student begins school but hardly ever attends…here’s what happens: Official district letters are mailed and more attendance letters follow. Phone calls are made. Family members are contacted and new and/or alternating busing arrangements established. The result: more days are missed, more emails are sent and social workers are sent to the home. The child returns sporadically, then quits coming again.

Calling cards are dropped off at the house and then addresses change. Phone numbers change. Contact is lost. This small student is in and out; in and out. New busing is arranged. The system bends over backwards and stands on its head, all for naught. A milestone is reached; 50 days absent.

The crowd of adults trying to cajole just one family to send their child to school grows weary and tired of it all. Resolve is broken. Then the district head of attendance is contacted. Child Protective Services is reached; a report is filed. The big guns attempt to shake something out. Days go by. 60 days absent. No case worker contact; then 63 days absent and counting. To anyone working outside the confines of our district, be assured this scenario is real and shockingly common.

The veneer of organization and efficiency needs to be peeled away…and something else needs to be done. Find a way…some way to enforce attendance…immediately. 63 long days…

Day 66…absent. No information on the recent district attendance blitz. A blitz? We need a major change; maybe something besides using slightly antiquated terminology.

It needs to be impossible for any one child to miss so much school.

Day 67…no student. It is a circular firing squad…which office/person didn’t call/document/respond/pursue…and how shall we fix not calling/documenting/responding/pursuing…what next?

Day 68…no student. Enforce attendance! It’s a challenge; apparently an insurmountable one. School attendance is something we as a nation, our culture agreed upon…years ago.

Day 69…no student. I wonder how many people who work outside our schools have any idea about our absenteeism problem?

Day 70…big unwieldy systems do not work well. It is too easy to hide behind phone trees, voice-mails, protocol, social niceties and the hope that ‘someday, someone will probably do something’…

Day 72…if any other attendance official from Central Office wishes to grace our presence and lecture us about attendance, I would suggest that they don’t. Find my/our student…then we’ll talk.

Four years later…an update…I had hoped for change. However, one of my students missed 133 days of school this year. I do not know what happened to my missing student from four years ago, other than that the family moved to Queens, NY.

Time laughed in my face, and I laughed back…heartily laughed, uproariously doubled over with chuckles…for the school year has ended…the tail lights fading in the distance. We have rolled smoothly right around the tracks to the first Monday of the rest of our lives and the rich smell of rain before it swoops down and the startling clap of thunder and the grey green clouds.

And now…the path is the loneliest road…unstructured creativity and the intentions of a thousands hours. Let it rain…let it pour…over thirsty roads…filling up all the deadened gullies…for I am dust covered in standards and stagnation…the demise of ideas and the burdensome weight of a tumble bug, a rock-o-plane and a shoot the chute of the public school system.

Let it rain, let it rain…come cover me wetly.