‘Hey! Hey…why is part of your hair white?’ A curious and verbose first grader is close to my face, staring at me. ‘Um, because my hair changes color’ I respond. ‘Oh, you mean like a grandmother?’ She looks at me. ‘Sure, why not?’ I look back at her.

‘Hey! Hey…’ Another one is pulling on my sleeve. ‘I’m in love with my shoes!’ I can’t have heard that correctly. ‘You’re in love with your shoes?’ Nothing should surprise me. He stares back at me. ‘No, no…I need help with my shoes!’ He puts his booted foot up on the chair. He cannot tie the laces. I sit down in the other chair. As I am tying them together, he says, ‘I’m learning to stand on one leg. I’m learning to jump up and down on one leg. Watch!’ He begins to jump. ‘Do you want your boots tied or do you want to jump? It’s time to go’.

‘No! No’ declares another. ‘It’s 1:39 and we don’t leave until 1:45’. ‘That’s only six minutes, girl!’ I answer. ‘Oh’ she replies. ‘Is that a lot?’

I look at the whirling mass of humanity on the rug. ‘Six minutes can be a long time and today it is definitely a long time’. Another student waiting in the growing line yells to me, ‘You have to go pick up your kindergartners!’ They are keeping track of my schedule, these little earnest ones.

My chubba bubba has stopped jumping and I finish tying his shoe laces. ‘Hey! Hey…how many people are in the world now?’ This random question comes flying at me as I’m trying to exit the room. ‘Um, we’re up to 8 billion…and they’re all here in this room, I think’. ‘What?’ a child looks incredulously at me. ‘Yea…I think they are all here in this room’. I’m convinced.

‘Hey! Hey…Maistra…Maistra!’ One of the obstreperous ‘elopers’ is pointing to his face and rambling determinedly in Spanish, while tugging at my sleeve. I’m not getting most of it and he looks fine. ‘You’re fine, I think…I hope. Go home. Time to go home!’ ‘Okay’, he responds. I extricate myself from the room and head down the hallway to herd a pile of kindergartners scrambled up together near the door…’Hey! Hey…’ they all start in talking as they lurch toward me…

Without a doubt, Wednesday mornings in this school year have become the most depressing. ‘Truancy case…CPS case…no, supposedly moved to Florida, Grandma lost contact with them…no, that’s a truancy case…nope, another long term CPS case’.

‘Well, what do we do about it? Who is actually accountable? Um…actually no one at this point’.

‘Okay…continue. ‘We left materials on the porch and snapped a photo to prove I did it…house was dark, no one answered the door’. ‘Okay then…next class…long term truancy…nope, CPS…nope, no follow up…that phone number doesn’t work…nope’.

We are losing our kids…

Scenes from Zoom: a set of dresser drawers with handles…two bare feet waving back and forth in front of a floor fan…one child snacking…another child practicing raising his left eyebrow up and down…life on the underside of a bunk bed…in another home; a place I shall never visit.

I dreamt of Norway again and was suddenly on that train because someone mentioned Norway and I went willingly. And you were there, of course. Opening and closing the wallet. Opening and closing your wallet, convincing us to eat reindeer meat with red peppers and we could barely do it. But we ate our portion.

And then, ‘Look, over there! Look!’ And we shoved and scrambled over to the window and there in the middle of a brilliantly sage and kiwi grassy meadow, rising in sunshine mist by the fjords…those stunning fjords…there was a child standing and waving madly. A blond headed cherub in a bright red woolen sweater just standing and watching; waving to the moving strangers on the black smoking train. ‘Wave!’ you said excitedly and we did…waving and stretching out to him just before our train slid into the mountains and I knew then as I know now…it was a snapshot I could not take.

I will never see that child again. And you are gone, for now. Your wallet is closed and stored somewhere. But that is temporary, of course and the train is still running.

Now I’m in the Empire State and I would rather be on that line between Oslo and Bergen, waving madly at the child I can not see…

While Rome is burning all around me, I might as well toast marshmallows.

Carpe Diem…

The entire day…all day…has been taken up with all things ‘lawn’. Pulling the John Deere Tractor out of the shed. Discovering there was ‘fixing’ to do. Two phone calls; English and Spanish, three trips to Home Depot, 1 trip to Lowes, manual reading, purchasing gas, discovering a missing chisel on the front seat of the truck. Apparently we have been sitting on top of that chisel for a long time now.

More reading, changing oil, trips to the basement, testing a battery; we reach the twilight hour of 6:30pm…the lawn is not mowed and there is a deafening silence in the backyard next to the shed where he is tinkering.

For dinner I have had…cheese.

This is what comes of leaving the house…

It was that old adage which caught her up on that snowy afternoon. ‘A fool and his money is soon parted’.

And so it was, she thought. She looked at the ledger in front of her, lying open and exposed on the table. Truth.

It was a poignant…lovely example of the human condition. She stretched a bit and yawned. ‘We are all in various stages of foolishness, it would seem…’

It happens every year. Every. Year.

Halfway through the lesson, a student looks at me and asks, ‘Hey! Are you a teacher?’

My standard go-to response is, ‘That’s what they tell me’.

This always seems to satisfy them…and we move on.

My one wish during this winter season is that my little student (whereabouts unknown since January) would land safely somewhere and would encounter a system, a district, a neighbor, a police officer…someone who would insist against all odds that this child be given the respect deserved; that school for this child would start again and that what was lost would be found. Perhaps our educational system will grind forward, lurching and complaining, weighed down heavily with all the students it can not seem to find the time nor resources to educate.

God bless and keep you my little friend, D. You have been deeply betrayed by adults in charge…those leading the bumbling systems we pay for.

Godspeed…

Sunshine, glorious sun streams over the front yard. It’s only 53 degrees but it feels like a slice of Heaven. We curl up in jeans and hoodies on the porch…the wind chimes bang wildly, madly in the sunny wind.

He’s listening to Salsa Vieja…a song about having fun in New York in the summer. I close my eyes in the sun and think about New York…those blistering sidewalks in August, the surging life steam rising off the walls. Eating an early dinner at The Heights on Broadway or feeling the energy at the dreadful time of 4am as we watch workers hustle to load supplies into a diner…they disappear through a rectangular hole in the sidewalk…up and down stairs at a 90 degree angle. Moving, lifting, swinging, shouting, sweating heavily, so fast, so fast…slamming the heavy metal doors…boom.

In a flash, they climb in and the large white truck lurches out fast at an angle. They’re gone. It’s 4:45am.

I wonder when we will go back.

I open my eyes and look out from the porch to the street. A few neighbors walk by, walking dogs, waving cautiously…people we don’t know, but we sense we are all in this together. ‘The ghosts are coming out’ he states simply. ‘The ghosts?’ I ask. He responds, ‘All the people we have never seen’.

The wind picks up again, slamming the chimes against the painted posts. It’s so fierce.

Blowing ghosts and viruses around…