The seventh week of quarantine. We work around and in and through this dilemma of being quarantined with a nervous hush; stepping tentatively. It still feels strange. I dream late in the night that I have spilled buckets of oil paint, heavy creamy paint all over and I can’t justify the cost and the waste. This storm must have come from somewhere. The rain must have come from somewhere when it rained. The wind must have come from somewhere when it blew and wailed around the edge of the house. But I have no answers. Only paint. That vanishes as I awake.

I drink coffee and begin absorbing my nephew’s bubbly morning chatter; an enthusiastic soul, this little boy. I sit at the table and I hear a lot of movement and thudding upstairs. My husband comes down and informs me he has completely changed the guest bedroom. I go upstairs and discover he is correct. All the furniture is moved around and resettled. It looks quite good. Even the bed is made up with the quilt lying neatly spread over the frame.  My husband is bored.

Afternoon slides into cool evening, spring sun skips along the edges of brick and I step out into the parking lot after a brief stop at the grocery store. I claw the mask off my face. I can’t breathe when wearing it.

The mask makes my shopping trips short and choppy as I pull it off my face in order to take in deep breaths and keep replacing it while my glasses fog over. I scoot down an aisle, choosing what is on my list. I find a solitary bag of dish washer soap pods sitting on top of a shelf and even though it is not my usual brand, I grab it, dropping it into the cart. The cashier and I wish each other well, making small talk about the plummeting cost of gas. For the first time in years, I fill my tank to the top for under $25.

I drive home in silence. My world has become so small. I am tired of the same old fields but I do not believe God is tired as I drive and notice the wide patches of New York farm land as they unfold in moist abandonment. They wait for spring plowing and planting. Every plot is surrounded by trees and they feel close together and bare and tight.

Most dearly, I miss the endless stretches of western prairies. Those gorgeous open lands where we spent time in July and August. They remain forever as a backdrop to the lives we lead now. Slate blue skies studded with gray and black rain clouds rest easy on one side of the highway and robin egg blue skies with vanilla cotton candy clouds sail along the opposite highway length. There are miles and miles of sunflowers and gold copper meadows buried deeply under bales of shiny hay. The chocolate creamed cattle and coal black herds of angus brutes, stand silently as wind ripples their skins. They chew slowly and watch a lone water tower and abandoned railroad tracks far, far in the distance.

How removed I am now from those loping lands, and they are what I crave more than ever; their vibrant colors and waving, shimmering grain. I miss looking out at one hundred miles of everything and nothing.

I still see the white wooden planks laid so carefully, line by line, packed up against each other; the floor of the porch, which lay under white wicker chairs and couches with rosy flowery cushions and stacks of books. Rolls of carefully measured tin foil fitted neatly along glass windows and over window frames as the shiny aluminum did battle against searing heat. We could have fried eggs on those sizzling pieces of tin foil as they stared back at scorching afternoon rays. Fried eggs on vertical glass; magical and impossible. We believed anything was possible.

I drive one loop around the neighborhood to extend the ride. Two neighbors walk their dogs and wave. The animals are blissfully unaware, happy to be outside sniffing and looking around for anything and nothing. I enter the garage and lower the door. I am back inside, caught in between walls and life and memories.

 

 

 

 

“So all else having failed, they naturally formed a committee”. She finished reading the page and thumped the book down on the table. She stretched her arms high over her head and announced to her husband, ‘And that my dear, is the problem with most situations in this old world’. She was just warming up, and he knew it.

He glanced up at her from over the rim of his glasses and nodded. She sighed and sat back against the cushions, dropping her arms into her lap. She yawned and then began to talk. ‘Do you remember that school librarian from a few years back? The one who was so incredibly cranky all the time?’ He watched her from the edge of his newspaper. ‘Yes, what about her?’ Leaning forward with a conspiratorial look, her eyes gleaming, she said, ‘Well, I always suspected that what she really wanted was a library full of books and empty of children’. He put the paper down, took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead. ‘Well, who wouldn’t actually, truth be told? Some of your kids…?’ His voice trailed off, not wanting to dredge up ‘work talk’. She grinned, ‘No, no, you’re right in that case. Anyone would have been cranky. Permanently’. She looked at him and he smiled back, both of them quietly recalling older conversations with colleagues about failed urban education policies, the history of race in Rochester and the intractable Board of Education which drove everyone mad. But those were discussions for other times. Not today.

She continued, ‘But guess what I found out about her after she retired?’ He played along, listening in hopes that the conversation would eventually land somewhere and preferably quickly. He stretched out one leg, then the other. ‘What did you find out about her?’ She propped up an errant cushion. She waved her right arm to add emphasis as she spoke. ‘She had a degree in school committee structure!’ He was silent. ‘Don’t you see?’ She surged on, making her point. ‘She went to school to learn how to organize and lead school committees and somehow ended up working in the library. Absurd! A library! An elementary library contains books AND children and to be honest she did not really want to work with children. She wanted perfect book shelving and the power to be able to give directions to her committees about running schools. The children were a sorry secondary afterthought, attached to the school. There were no committees for her, just real live children!’

‘Ah’ he said. He shook his head and looked out the window. She ran her fingers through her hair, stood up and moved the ottoman away from the couch edge. She paused a brief moment before picking up the coffee mugs and empty pastry plates. The aroma of the orange chocolate brew lingered over the edges of the glassware, and she took a deep breath. ‘Lovely’ she exclaimed. The smell followed her as she headed into the kitchen. One pink linen napkin fell off the plate and onto the floor. She sighed, bending down to retrieve it and spoke again as she stood up. ‘I find it really funny’ she said.

‘What?’ he raised his voice because he had returned to his newspaper as she exited the room. ‘I said’ she began again, ‘It’s funny; not funny as in strange but funny as in humorous’. She turned toward the sink, shaking the napkin gently over the stainless steel. ‘I mean, the whole thing, the whole district…it’s what I just read about now. The response to deep abiding failure, is always the same. Form a committee. Imagine obtaining a degree in school committee structure? When did a committee ever really accomplish anything?’ She snorted in derision.

Her husband came into the kitchen. “You know what I think is really true?’ She turned to look at him. He approached her and as he opened his arms to embrace her, he said simply, ‘I think you think it’s funny, not because it is funny but because at a deeper level, you yourself are very sad. That’s what I think’. She stepped back slightly from him and looked at him intently. ‘Yes’ she said simply. She looked out the window. ‘I am sad. I feel the same way I do when it snows in the month of April. It’s long term betrayal, something which can’t be shaken’. She sighed.  ‘It’s the same way I felt when I saw a classmate’s obituary. He was only 54 years old. I remembered he would not share his Green Hornet coloring book with me in kindergarten. That’s all I remembered. His photo moved me. He looked so old, so completely unrecognizable to me in that picture and that made me sad. Someone who is only 54 years old should still be recognizable’.

‘Yes’ he responded gently. ‘It’s the sort of sad I feel when I awaken and know that I missed hearing the early morning rain. It’s a sad shame to miss the rain’. Then, as if to reassure her, he said, ‘It’s as bad as forming a committee’.

After the good party, the kitchen feels melancholy. I pad down the hall and enter the room. Dirty plates stacked on counters, half empty glasses, crumpled up napkins, knives with cake frosting, the creamer jug and the coffee pot gather around the edges of the kitchen as if viewing a funeral. “What? It’s over? But surely not? We know these people”. The floor creaks overhead indicating my husband is awake. I look up toward the creaking sound and consider things, this morning after the party.

I begin to clear things. Silverware and cake plates clink and clank, rattling around and clashing together as they sink into hot sudsy water for their pre-rinse bath before heading into the dish washer steam. Bowls of richly colored mums and the arrogant blossoms of pink hydrangeas watch from their perch on the dining room table as my movement in the kitchen folds, turns, bends and evolves in front of them. I sweep away the brownie cake on its china platter and the rising patter of rain drops on windows and roof, sweeping along with a whoosh and windy rasp and they bend wet sounds and rivulets down the walls toward the discouraging view of the end of the party.

I don’t have time for melancholy today. I am 56 years old and I am at sixes and sevens. Those numbers flow well. Sixes and sevens. Now I can say, “Hello there. I’m 56 and I’m at sixes and sevens. 5, 6, and 7”. Marvelous. I am tempted to greet strangers with this announcement since I now hide behind face masks. Actually, being at ‘sixes and sevens’, my feeling confused in this new normal leaves me with fewer boundaries and greater inhibitions. I want to shout. I want to hide deeply. I am living in the middle of a pandemic and every day comes with a new set of rules. Nothing feels even.

I set to grinding the coffee beans. The noise seems particularly loud today. I’m grinding up a part of Puerto Rico. I watch the beans spin around and around as they pulverize. The aroma is magnificent. Somewhere, on some warm patch of land on the lovely island and long before this season of virus, someone planted and harvested a wonderful crop of coffee beans which in time, traveled far, far north and rested on a cold grocery shelf, and then in a cloth bag in my car and then in my cupboard and finally on my table…boiled up in a mug on the day after the party. That was a long time ago.

2020 started out with the usual celebrations, the cold nights, resolutions and the continual whoosh of the furnace. We settled in to long gray weekends, watching out frozen windows and drinking strong coffee…and suddenly, in a shaking of a down comforter and two loads of laundry, the year spun promptly downhill into strange days. Initially, we heard rumors…somewhere. Then a number of things weren’t so good. There was something about China, always China.  Then New Rochelle, New York. New Rochelle was under quarantine. It seemed strange and not quite right. I remarked that New Rochelle was where Dick and Laura Van Dyke lived on their television show and my husband said, “Who?”

We listened to the radio about the history of the word ‘quarantine’ and it all seemed so old, so long ago, so old world Europe; not part of us. Quarantine. On a cold Friday…all of a sudden we were told to take our laptops home. It came over the PA system in school and for the first time, it felt ominous. We weren’t going back on Monday. Someone said, “It is probably for a week or so, until they can thoroughly clean the school”.  I rolled my eyes, telling a colleague it was going to take more than a virus to get that building thoroughly cleaned. I thought the swine flu started on my office carpeting. I joked that day.

Now, it is after the party. We woke up one morning, after the party and now we are swimming in the big cooking pot with all the frogs. Frogs sit in cool water in pots on a stove and don’t sense danger as the burner clicks on and the temperature rises. Frogs sit and blink and heat up…and die. I think a lot about frogs these days.

On April 15th, our governor announced that we are required to wear a face mask whenever we go out in public. The masks are miserable, irritating things. I can’t breathe with them and my glasses fog up and I trip over the grocery cart with the spray bottle and the rolls of paper and the sanitizer and the heavyset guard is looking at me as I shift the mask over my nose. He looks uncomfortable. Everywhere in a mask is uncomfortable.

My husband enters the kitchen and glances at the dish and glasses chaos. I look out the window through raindrops onto the patio. All the chairs are covered in flexible rain proof dark green covers designed for winter protection. The chair closest to the house door has a tendency to shed the cover when gusts make their way around the corner of the house. It lifts up, folds itself neatly over into the center of the chair seat, and collapses. It’s off again. I sigh. I have placed a heavy brick on the arm, but today the brick is in the seat’s center. Heavy iron lawn poles haven’t worked either.  The rain falls more insistently.

My husband looks out the window and then at me. He says, “Thank you for all of your work”. I nod. The kitchen is silent. It is the morning after the party and it is melancholy. I pour a large mug of strong coffee and return to the table to look outside at the soaking lawn. My kitchen drawer is full of face masks and we are watching the rain together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The day starts at 5:25 with strong coffee and my will to live. It is significantly colder today and our Christmas lights are the last ones twinkling on the street. We allow them to stay lit until the end of Three Kings’ Day on the 6th of January and until the wee hours of the morning on the 7th. Now, Christmas is officially over.

I remind my husband that I get home later than he does in the evening, and that he is not to turn them on again. We have to make the break sometime. One of my fears in life is becoming the neighbor with twinkling holiday lights still glowing in spring air crowded up against the beginning of a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration. My husband sighs and says, “I know what I have to do, Pusha”. I breathe a sigh of relief.

The holidays are delicious, grand, overwhelming and with each passing year…more exhausting than imaginable. I am tired. My neighbors and family are tired. The city of Rochester is tired.

I am reading a collection of writings by the famed author C. S. Lewis. He reminds me this early dark morning that we are on the outside of what is real; we are in fact, on the wrong side of the door. I know I am on the wrong side of the door. Somedays I am not even certain I know where the door is. More times than not, I am stuck in the garage. I try to find a way out. I stare at large gray metal shelf units stuffed with the detritus of suburban life; half empty bags of grass and flower seed, bottles waiting to be recycled or returned to Wegmans to get money back, empty flower pots promising spring and color and the rich smell of earth and rain along with back breaking yard work. I note my floppy tea hat worn annually at high tea at Niagara on the Lake and wonder why it is in the garage and not a drawer in our bedroom. I see various lids, rakes and brooms, instructions for the grill…used paint sticks and a can of primer. The wrong side of the door indeed.

The coffee is extra strong this morning; a dark roasted whole bean…Chautauqua Blend, named in honor of our grand Chautauqua Institute…a Christmas gift from a family member. It’s the zing I need to load up the car and to be out the door by 6:45.
About ten minutes before I reach the school, I stop at the red light at the corner of East Main Street, and in close proximity to Grove and Gibbs Streets. There is a bus stop where I often see homeless persons congregating early in the morning. Sometimes they sleep restlessly, wrapped up in black garbage bags or old, tatty blankets. Sometimes they sit silently, looking down at their feet or staring vacantly out at moving traffic. Today there is only one man. He is tall and thin with his legs crossed and he is turned sideways facing the direction of the large garbage bin which rests within the confines of the heated bus stop. The whole garbage unit has somehow been cemented down by the city and there is a large beige colored cement lip jutting off the edge of the bin.

Since this red light remains red for a good while, I turn my eyes away from the traffic ahead of me and watch this man. He reaches down into the bin and pulls out something which I can’t quite see. He places it carefully, so gently on the ledge of the cement lip and stares at it for a moment. I look at the light and then back at him. He uncrosses his legs, turns to a bag resting on the bench where he is seated and pulls out a plastic bottle of what appears to be water. He sets this carefully on the edge of the lip, to the left of the object I can’t discern. There is a rhythm and an art to his procedure. This is elegance in the midst of chaos and abject failure. I am fascinated, drawn in, hoping that the light holds red. Then this homeless man, in his tattered clothing, picks up his plastic bottle, gently salutes the object sitting on the edge and takes a sip. What is he saluting? To whom has he offered this silent cheer, this salutation in the fresh New Year? What does he really see and what is he remembering on this cold and dank day in Rochester at the very beginning of the new decade?.

The light flashes green and the car behind me beeps impatiently. I take a last quick glance and move on. I have witnessed the story of humanity at the edge of Grove and Gibbs on East Main Street. Whether in post Christmas gray or in the greening of June, we are all trying to create elegance, restoration and beauty from the wrecks, both big and small of what lies all around us. We continually salvage the remnants of what remains in difficult circumstances. This is the definition of hope. Beauty from the ashes. Memories of a long forgotten New Year’s Eve in what may have been much better times years ago. The only difference between that man in the bus stop and myself is that I am safely in a car and that my heavy woolen scarf smells richly clean. Other than that, each of us has reached the similar conclusion. We are on the wrong side of the door and we try day after day to gain a glimpse of the other side of the door with its restoration, beauty, order and elegance.

I pull into the snowy parking lot at work and observe the blinking lights of the two rows of buses filled with more than a thousand children who are streaming out and heading into the building. I hear the bus matron with her raggedy and loud voice yelling over and over, “Let ’em out, let ’em out”.

We reach the depth of winter. The days and hours after the Christmas season and the minutes and seconds left to me before the work world begins again are sleepy, gray, driving me to an unaccustomed Saturday afternoon nap. The whipped up celebration of the New Year is finished and what is left is collective exhaustion. I recognize the beginning of our desire to hibernate.
We choose to live within a geography where the four seasons are firmly set; changing on alternate dates and with varying degrees of ferocity, but changing nonetheless and we forget that we must change with them. Entering quiet hiatus after riotous celebration is an art form.
We approach our local store, the large Wegmans which sits solidly along the length of Calkins Road with the huge Christmas wreath still hanging on bravely, braced up against snow flurries and steady wind. The parking lot is packed full and finding a good parking spot proves difficult. Everyone it seems, our neighbors, the mailman, the football fan, the single parent and the grave and elderly have the same purpose; loading up on staples, milk and bread, stopping briefly to look at all the holiday candy on sale and then walking away. The front sidewalks of the store are naked, bereft of trees, holiday wreathes and netted bags of scented pinecones. The damp sidewalk, puddled and wet, frozen and muddy seeps through my shoes and rims the black soles with gunk.
We get two carts and separate because he is interested in buying fruits and vegetables and I am looking for survival food for work. In a very few minutes, I realize I’m not prepared to be out; to be making decisions of any kind. I feel the accumulative effects of weeks of Christmas indulgence. The music in the store has changed; gone back to some unrecognizable theme. The lighting looks gray and filmy. After hundreds of hours of sparkle and gold and red and silver, the fluorescent lights hang heavily over me and the cereal aisle is discouraging. I roll past the shelf packed with laundry soap and notice that someone has discarded a bag of whole wheat bagels in between two containers at the far end. I experience a sudden nauseating image of bagels and soap and I head directly for a chair strategically placed between the frozen vegetables case and the front end of the paper products aisle. Placing my left arm on the handle of my cart to keep it from rolling away, I stretch out my legs and phone my husband.
“I’m in the chicken section”, he says in a rather sing song voice. “Where are you?” “I’m sitting in front of the frozen pizza case, to the left of the frozen vegetable section and to the right of the paper products aisle”. “That’s rather specific” he chuckles. “It’s part of my charm” I respond. “I know right where you are. Sit tight” he says happily.
I look around and think to myself that sitting tightly is exactly what I plan to do. I shift more deeply into the chair and watch other customers. Today is a big Buffalo Bills game and there are large numbers of people sporting the cheery hats, sweats and jerseys.
I check to see that my wallet is still in the cart. I close my eyes and consider a bizarre dream I had early in the morning involving me, my sister and baby niece. In the dream, we attempt to drive over the Canadian border on our way to Niagara on the Lake with a licensed and loaded gun in the Jeep. Somehow the woman driving ahead of us knows about it and lets the guard at the checkpoint know. The guard, a polite and attractive female, politely climbs into the front of the Jeep and gives us a careful lecture about how this is not allowed and didn’t we know better? She is wonderfully polite and carefully Canadian. I am flustered that I cannot make my sister understand that we are in trouble. I’m not sure why we are all in the back seat. Then, I wake up.
I open my eyes and watch an extremely old woman in a special driving cart making her way slowly down the paper products aisle toward me. She is hunched over and continually looks up at a tall, young man who is either a relative or a caregiver. She questions item after item as to price and he repeats the price, bending over so she can see his face and hear him. She tells the young man she can get better prices somewhere else.
I know I can’t possibly be as tired as she is. She is really old, appearing similar to photos from mid nineteenth century; perhaps a grainy daguerreotype? Despite prices and personal appearance, she seems spunky. She smiles as they make a wide berth around the area where I sit, maneuvering her cart carefully and they head in the direction of the checkout. I stand up and go to meet my husband who is speeding around the corner having apparently laid waste to the produce section. His cart brims with health. I look at my cart and decide I’m done for now.

I only have energy to write now. I am spent, irritated from worrying about what will happen on Monday when our district starts back up. There are so many unanswered questions about financial issues, test scores and report cards, displaced teachers and layoffs. I can’t manage to fully understand any of it. Everything bad happened mid year; a sort of bursting of waste from an entrenched bureaucracy. It is the worst time for a thousand reasons and one of those reasons is our geography and our climate. Cold and damp don’t aid quality rallying and fighting and exertion. It is supposed to be the time to hibernate, to take a long hiatus and to recover over cold winter days; and to teach well. But that luxury isn’t allotted us now. Not in Rochester. Not at this time. We bend to paralysis and set our caps against January winds.

There was a discrepancy with my phone bill. I tackled the problem on Monday at 7pm. I picked up my phone and dialed the 800 number, which was referred to as the ‘customer loyalty number’. This ‘loyalty’ number was given to me by someone in the AT&T building on Jefferson Road. It was scribbled fairly sloppily, and it was wrong as I discovered since I dialed the number four times, and each time the phone connection was cut off preceded with a terse message informing me that that particular number was not available in my area, whatever that meant. I started feeling less loyal.

I searched the bill for a customer service number and found nothing. I searched on the internet and found a number. I dialed. The customer service person with whom I spoke was pleasant enough, referring to me as ‘madam’ an exorbitant number of times. I guessed perhaps I had landed in Calcutta or maybe Singapore. There was a lengthy, polite discussion about the incorrect bill and there were apologies and a lot of crackling over the connection in addition to a noisy collection of voices in the background quoting other numbers to other customers. It was quite confusing. At one point, the person calling me ‘madam’ informed me there were no notations on my account promising me what I had been promised. Feeling less and less loyal, I said, “But that’s on you”. Pause. A few more apologies and I was transferred.

I’m not sure which department the next person was in. It could have been billing. It could have been the true place where the ‘loyalty’ number was supposed to take me but I’m not sure. It may have been on a new continent. I discovered I had the wrong ‘loyalty’ number, or rather because it had been written sloppily, I had read it incorrectly. There was polite laughter and some apologies and I was called ‘madam’ again several times. Then I was asked if I could be called ‘Elisabeth’. I was told I was very patient and would I mind being put on hold? So then I had the correct number but no person on the other end of the line. There was more fuzzy crackling and I know I heard voices in the background and before I knew it, I was back on the line with someone I could not quite understand. I was informed I was patient and was promptly transferred, somewhere else.

The next person sounded generally American. A third continent? Maybe. I wasn’t called ‘madam’ and I wasn’t told I was patient so perhaps I really was back in the USA. Together we worked on subtraction. There was the original bill. There was the incorrect bill. There was the early contract termination fee. There was a flurry of numbers we thought might be subtracted: part of a promotion, a service change fee, a TV access fee (I thought if I owned the TV I should have access), a protection plan (from what? I thought maybe AT&T but I wasn’t sure), and a regional sports charge. We got these subtracted and added things up. We came up with a different number, not matching anything on the paper. I was transferred.

I was switched out of the USA and ended up…where? There was a lengthy period of ‘musak’ and I had time to consider what we managed to export to other nations. ‘Muzak”…not good. In the next department I was informed they would remove the contract termination fee. I was told this was ‘pending’ and that I was very patient and would I mind being placed on hold? I gritted my teeth and said, ‘yes’ and the contact at the other end of the line must have sensed I was no longer ‘loyal’ because he or she stopped and then said, ‘Madam, would you do me a favor?’ I thought he or she wanted a good survey result and I answered ‘Yes’. I am patient and loyal. ‘Would you promise me that you will put a smile on your face and keep it there for the rest of the day?’ I was silent. I looked up at the ceiling and counted some tiles. I lowered my head and chose to laugh politely into the phone and answered ‘yes’ while my brain thought ‘doubtful’. I was put on hold. Muzak. Voices. Numbers. Crackle. I looked at the clock and noted that it was 8:16pm. The phone call suddenly dropped and I left that continent.

Today I received a text from AT&T asking me to complete a survey about my experience with Leo. This was in the middle of my class where my little one had just asked me if I took showers and that she did and she washed all her body pieces. I had to look at the ceiling.

I think I spoke to six people last night. Who’s Leo? As the leprechauns are my witness, I don’t know anyone named Leo. Poor Leo. Poor soul. Somewhere on one of the seven continents on this lovely planet, there sits a person named Leo who waits in vain for AT&T survey results from a tired American woman. It’s not going to happen. My survey choices ranged from very dissatisfied to very satisfied. I was looking for the word ‘trapped’. Poor Leo. Poor soul.

Columbus Day 2019 dawns gray, dull and empty of plans. He goes downstairs, opening the front door leading off onto the porch to check the weather. Upon doing so, he heads quickly back up the stairs claiming out loud what we already knew. It is chilly, damp and gray. There is sugared coffee and hot toasted bagels in the reading room where we settle into a morning of reading and discussion. The only sound from the street is the rumbling wheezing sound of the garbage truck on its rounds…squeaking from house to house as it picks up and empties, picks up and empties.

It is a calm and sheltered world hidden away from the absolute chaos which is bleeding out all over the middle east. The Turks, the Kurds, the Syrian army and in the end…all the innocent civilians who will not live to see the end of this terrible day; it feels wrong to be quietly seated in a safe neighborhood. But what can we do? Reality is usually an odd thing and is not often something which we could have ever guessed. The problems across foreign waters are not simple and neither are the answers.

Right now, those of us resting safely far away, living under the shadow of another flag and underneath the lettering of a different constitution enjoy the long established three day weekend known as Columbus Day, the brief time of respite as we experience the peculiar weariness which comes from the relaxation of effort.

For our Rochester City School teachers, this weekend is pure magic, falling as it does on the third payday of the year. Not only is there money in the bank, there is freedom allotted us, the joy of knowing that Monday is empty of obligations. It falls right at the crucial moment in the beginning of the school year when the bloom is off the rose. The initial energy of the new year, the excitement of the students, and the brief time in which there is relative peace in the school building…all have vanished. We are in for it now. We have begun the long endurance, the grind of monitoring recalcitrant children as we keep our eyes laser focused on the semester’s end. We are used now to the daily foot traffic of troubled children on their way to the room where they journey when they can no longer function in healthy ways in classrooms. Many feet make that lonely trudging trip past my office door, with some children sticking their heads through my door to give me a swift greeting.

Later in the day we ride around enjoying the stunningly beautiful autumn foliage, the brilliant reds, oranges, yellows, golds and copper hues…the Persian rug which lies heavily yet gently over the rolling hills and valleys of this lovely corner of Western New York. The sky looks as if it is ‘full of snow’ as older family members sometimes mention. Next week temperatures are scheduled to dip into the thirties but it is still too early for snow. The heavy sky is a feeling, a warning, a sense…a leading to the search for the heavier blankets stored away in the closets, the scarves buried in drawers and the soft whoosh of furnace heat flooding in waves over the carpeting, up the stairs and under the edges of freshly cleaned curtains.

“Do you know if you can get internet here?” The ruddy faced man with glasses and a slightly odd stare looked directly at me but with his body turned away at an angle as I looked up from my phone. We were both seated and waiting in the chiropractor’s office. I looked at him and then down at my phone and I said, “I’m looking at my email right now, so I know that you can get internet here in this office”. He stared at me. Something was just a touch off. Waving his phone at me he said, “I mean, I have a tracker phone. I don’t have access to internet. I need the WIFI code from this office so that I can log on to the internet that way”. I shrugged my shoulders and answered, “You could ask the woman at the front desk if they have a code. I don’t know what the code is. I have an iPhone”. He turned his head away quickly and snapped, “I don’t have lots of extra money like some people do. I have a tracker phone. I don’t have money”. He faced forward.

I looked at the back of his neck and at the reddening skin and decided that he really was angry. He was angry at me. I did not respond. Then I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed the exchange. There was no indication that anyone else was paying any attention. “I live in a house with a lot of people and I pay rent and I’m going to get out of there because all I can afford is this tracker phone and I’m 35 years old and I shouldn’t be living with my Mother anymore and I’m going to leave”. His rambling dropped off into silence. I looked at the ceiling and thought, “I may die in my chiropractor’s office today”.

He started up again, addressing no one. “Everyone needs to get away from their Mother. I’m 35 years old”. I shifted in my chair, leaned forward slightly and spoke. “Yes. Everyone needs to get away. Things happen. It’s good to get away”. I leaned back. He was silent. The chiropractor working on the table behind the counter in front of us looked up. The huge fish tank bubbled and gurgled. One beautiful orange and white fish squiggled in and out of a gray castle on the bottom of the fish tank. It was my turn for my adjustment so I stood up and I walked carefully around the man with the glasses. I went to my table. I stretched out.

“I never get physical with them because then, they’re going to call the cops because they are just cowards. They are cowards. I never get physical with them. They call the cops”. I heard him stretch out on his table two cubicles over from mine. I sighed and looked at the floor through the medical paper stretched over the opening in the head rest of the table. “I’m probably going to die in my chiropractor’s office today”. I resigned myself. I was just too tired.

There is a thin space between here and “there’ for most of us. For some souls, the one area of space has bled on into the next layer and they don’t really know where they are anymore. I’m reminded today of what was purported to be some of J.S. Bach’s final words before his death. Supposedly he uttered, “Don’t cry for me. I’m going where music is born”. Sanctuary for some comes in the briefest encounters with other people, no matter how odd. The moment before the rubber band snaps, someone says something and the person is able to come back from the edge and go “where the music is born”. It’s never enough and after all, sympathy butters no parsnips, doesn’t heal, doesn’t repair but it may offer the only available temporary cushion between bleeding over into the “there”.

I did not die in my chiropractor’s office, and as usual I left standing up straighter than I entered. I made sure I was gone before I had any more encounters with the ruddy necked man. I dropped my iPhone into my bag and drove away thinking about sanctuary, and mental illness and the place where the music is birthed.

I take a long singular look at the little girl seated at my table. She is decked out to beat the band. Fabulous hair, new leggings which she proudly shows off, clickety clackety boots and all of it topped off with a magnificent glitter bomb pink bow. She is ready for the stage. I complement her. She smiles shyly. She isn’t one to talk very much. There are noticeable gaps in her vocabulary and speech flow when she does talk. I take a sip of my tea and then I pose a question. “Where have you been the last two days? We missed you. Why weren’t you in school?” She looks down and away and considers. “I forgot about school”, she finally states. I look at her for a minute. “You forgot that you had school?” She nods yes. I try again. “What about your Mother? Did she forget about school? Did she forget that you come to school on Mondays and Tuesdays?” She looks at the table and then back at me. “Yes”, she answers. “She forgot about school”. I make one more attempt and know that I will be forced to move on because that is what we do in the Rochester City School District. We just keep making the best of it only we are not making anything ‘best’ at all. We just keep moving on. “You’re telling me that your Mom forgot about school?” She picks up a paper lying on the table and answers steadily, “Yes. She forgot”.

Early this morning, I step outside and realize instantly that something has changed. There is the finest wispy white layer of frost covering all the houses across the street and the front lawns, scattered between the middle and the edges of the street. I take a deep breath. It is marvelous and clean and crisp and I want to enjoy it as long as I can. I climb into the car and start the engine. It is not yet 7am and the dashboard registers a cool 38 degrees. I open the passenger window and the rear window and ride to work this way for as long as I can stand it. Somewhere over the railroad tracks by the edge of Jefferson and before I make a left on West Henrietta, I give up and close them. My fingers are numb on the wheel.

I’m listening to all the news coverage about the floundering Rochester City School District and the $30 million dollar shortfall. I am never surprised by the things I hear about this place where so many of us work and where almost 30,000 children attempt to get some semblance of an education. What surprises me is that the pundits on NPR are always surprised. Then I remember that the only people who are flabbergasted at the condition we are in are those who don’t work in the district. You have to be in the thick of it to get it. You can’t make some of this stuff up. Unless you are here, I mean really here…you will continue to be surprised.

The chief financial officer for the district resigned last night. I suppose it would be hard to justify that pesky $30 million dollar gap when everyone downtown swears that they heard last spring that everything was good for this upcoming year. That stubborn $30 million…

We have a letter from the new superintendent, who I assume by now is sorry he took the job. There are many areas where there will be cuts. One potential cutback catches my eye. Substitute teachers. The district pays out a load of money for substitute teachers. Because there will be no budget for those teachers, all the special subject personnel such as music, ESOL, gym, art, foreign language, and speech teachers will be alerted first thing in the morning on any particular day that they will be in classrooms as substitutes. They will be thrown into classrooms where they are not wanted and where they do not want to be. There will be quite a fracas and this will go on until the union files a grievance due to all the services being denied a whole group of kids and then the whirly gig will go around and around again until someone yells “Uncle” or jumps off and then we shall see what we shall see.

I listen to the teacher in the room next to mine attempt to teach Spanish to a group of sixth graders. I am going to have to close the door to eat my lunch because I can not tolerate what I am hearing. Every attempt the teacher makes to teach is greeted with resistance, interruption, rude comments and insults. They continually talk over her about nothing at all. Nonsense. Someone makes a snide comment about another student’s clothing and then it really takes off. “Stop talking about my Mother”. “She’s looking at me funny, Miss? Miss?” In between I hear the steady voice of the teacher trying to explain to one student how to conjugate a series of Spanish verbs. The student tries, makes a smart remark to his neighbor, tries again and then starts singing loudly. Another girl gives up, pulling her hoodie over her head and stretches back to take a nap. They will all pass the class. They will pass, not because they know anything. They will pass because the teacher will have no choice. They think they understand so much. I close the door and go back to lunch.

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…”