Tommy (not his real name) has been working In the office for years. When he first came, he seemed a certain kind of proper and prim. They’re quiet as well from that background different from my loud one, which is what I assume gives him his ultra upright demeanor.
After having been the United States culture for long enough and at that the school long enough he starts to lighten up. He starts to become more “hood“. Whether he always was this and is now more comfortable showing or whether he has over the years become this, is not for me to know.
What I do know is that I am more comfortable with him this way.
As I am leaving the office, he says, “Hey Dana, wait a minute. I have something for you.”
Although we have become friendly over the many years by exchanging a sentence, or maybe two as I sign in, we are not friendly enough for him to be giving me a present. I wonder what’s going on.
He hands me a bag of art supplies that someone has donated to the school and hopes I can use them.
I am shocked that I am the one in the school of 600 students that the office associates with Art.
There is no art teacher. Neither is there a maker space teacher. There is no one there to show the kids how to make something with their hands!
I teach one class one afternoon a week and I am the one they associate with art. Tragic in my mind.
Offhand people say oh, there’s no budget for that.
They have no understanding that in art a kid learns how to listen to their inner voice. How to listen to themself. How to make decisions.
They learn how to get an idea and follow it through to completion.
If you don’t like sports, and you don’t like academics, you better have art in your school or you are gonna fall through the cracks.
Art builds confidence in oneself the way no other academic subject does !
Teaching ceramics at three elementary school is a lot of things. One of them is stressful. The stress starts early in the day when I am wondering if the school bus will be blocking the entrance to where I park. I need to park close to the school to unload the dolly full of ceramic equipment. There’s new school bus drivers this year and there’s new school buses. In fact, I think they are electric. There are nice school drivers and then not so nice bus drivers and then there’s those in between. The one time I had the trouble and was not able to get in some parent encouraged me just to drive over the curb into where I had to park and that I did.
The next week the driver was friendlier and moved the bus a bit.
The week after that, she wasn’t there, and there was a white haired lady who told me that she had fixed the problem. I asked her who she was and she was basically the all-around person at school.
I realized that she must be replacing taylor. What a change. Taylor had been there for many years and looked like an African-American Graphic novel hero: powerful young man with dreds and very black skin.
He seemed a little scary, but actually, he was friendly, and he worked with small children. He had his own office. He had a very fancy sports car which he parked next to where I parked.
Once in the driveway with the car unloaded, I can get into the cafeteria where I need to teach. The next stressful moment is: will I be able to find someone who can open the kiln room for me? The kiln room is the dungeon room, down a dark staircase holding electric curcuit breakers and storage.
No one ever really needs to go in there so when the office gives me the set of many keys, they don’t know which one it is. When Pete gives me the set of keys he knows exactly which one it is. André the janitor gives me a choice of three.
It’s best if this doesn’t take too much time. I give myself an hour to set up, half of that with an assistant. I set up on two very long tables in the cafeteria where some 200 kids are congregating after the school day. Eventually most of them leave. Then 20 select ones come to my class.
It is a fast paced, hectic meaningful hour full of love and instruction. I try to fully meet each child.
After the first 20 leave, the next 20 come in.
Same same: love and instruction but now with a little fatique mixed in
After the second group, the cleanup looms enormous, but it is doable, and eventually it ends with me going down to the kiln room, to load all the kid artwork into the kiln, while the assistant finishes up the last of the cleaning
It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it and the children are wonderful. As am I and
at the end of each Wednesday, I feel like I should get a medal for pulling it off yet one more time
I’ve been writing a short short story a day for eleven weeks, I am doing this as a participant in a Round Robin at The Writer’s Salon in San Francisco. I now have 77 stories. they are piling up so I have decided to share some here. Each day there is a prompt which starts me off. From there, anything goes. Rule is: one can only write for 12 minutes and can edit afterwards.
Two TREES on the edge of a cliff
~I’m tired of being here
~What do you mean you’re tired of being here? You can’t be tired of being here. You are a tree. We are trees. We’ve been here a long time.
~Right, & we’re supposed to be here for a long time to come, but I’m tired of it. Sorry, but I am even tired of you. You and I, all the time, here on the edge.
~It’s better than being on the edge alone, you know that.
~Right well, you got me there. UHG..this time of year…I hate the gray skin. I hate the nakedness of it all. Truth be told, I’m tired of the whole winter, spring, summer, fall thing. It’s same old same old all the time. So predictable. Nothing happens.
~Yeah, but you gotta admit in the winter we have a lot of fun and in the fall our leaves are the brightest, orange yellow-ish color anywhere on the planet other than some sunsets which never last very long.
~It’s true I like the splat contest. I like that we’re not on a farm and that the people who live near us hardly ever come at the right time to get our persimmons. I like how we play the game who can get the most splats in the day.
~True that’s a fun game but we always know at the beginning of the day how it’s gonna end. Always depending on WonderWind and what mood she’s in that day and the way she cares to gust, blows the surprise out of who wins on any given day she’s around.
~Yeah, But it’s super fun and she’s not always around being the deciding factor.
~True, but I’m tired of being taken for granted. We are saving these humans lives, and they are so busy they can’t even see or appreciate us.
~Remember that time when people used to hug us?
~Yes, that was nice. I think the worst time was when that idiot Shel Silverstein wrote that book “The Giving Tree”. I mean what the fuck bullshit message was that? What was he doing? Trying to teach people how to have a dysfunctional relationship?
~Yeah, I don’t think people read that to their kids as much as they used to.
~I hope not. If that guy walked under my tree, I would make for sure to have a big branch fall on his head giving him a headache for a couple decades. Better yet I’d have one of my roots trip him, so he’d fall off the edge a little bit, not so much as to kill him, but just enough to injure his right hand.
~Hey, wait a minute! hold on there! Why would you ever want to injure anyone? Those human beings are in such a mess. They are constantly injuring themselves! Directly or indirectly.
~Yes, I know it’s true. Even I, a species able to maintain complete equanimity feel sad for them. I wish there was some way I could help.
Just then a young woman comes up to the tree. She has a stool with her. She sets that down under the tree. Forlorn, she pulls a rope out of the bag she’s brought with her. Dejected, she stands for a long time at the edge overlooking the chasm. Is she considering jumping? What is she going to do with that rope? It’s for sure she’s not going to play with it. She has an agenda. She comes back to the stool, stands on it while she ties one rope end around the tree branch and the other around her neck.
WindWonder starts to gasp and move quickly around in a flurry. The trees start to wiggle and wobble in the wind. The girl pushes the stool out from under her. There is a moment inbetween, when WindWonder wooshes, and the wanting tree yearns. The branch breaks. It all falls down.
The young lady gasps “THANK GOD!” She lays down beneath the tree and looks through the intricate lace of the old grey naked branches. She watches the clouds in the sky pass one after the other. For the rest of the afternoon, she looks up through the maze of the tree’s pattern at the clouds changing shapes, appearing and dissolving moving across the endless sky.
She comes back many years later, with two small children, gets on a stool and hangs a swing.
betweenstops 