Words, Words, Words

I am an e-hoarder.

Collecting indicates a bit of curation, a special trip to all 50 states for silver spoons with destinations engraved on their faces, some display of order, possible viewing cabinets.

Hoarding is everything collecting is not. It’s the collections that you’ve forgotten and simultaneously add to. There’s no art or order. If you were to get it all out you’d be shocked by it. Others would be shocked. They’d want to bulldoze your house just so they don’t have to deal with it all. It’s messy unquantifiable and reeks of indulgence--the kind that holds you up to scrutiny. Organizing and rummaging through would require people with latex gloves. Shovels.

I’m stuffing words in the crevices of my living e-space. I’ve got 847 pieces of last year’s subscriber mail, never opened. I have unique passwords to 9 separate email in-boxes. I’ve got summer homes in text that I never scrap and rebuild. Once I peered into the deep well of my 4th laptop; I couldn’t see the bottom. Then there are the curated words of my daily life, the posts of limited and unlimited character counts.

Deciding what to release and what to hold back is the difficulty. Now this is part of the world and we’re all living together, with no paper contracts to prove commitment.

When I stand back and hold the words out to view, I’m overwhelmed. The hoarding is brimming in my brain.  When others see what I’ve let slip out of my control--

Do they wonder what I’ve lost and what I’m afraid to lose that makes me hold on?

The physical:

I left a box of love letters at a friend’s house when I went to college.  The boy who had written them scripted sincere, romantic prose with the awkwardness of first loves. I saw him turn completely to us, and he felt fragile in my grip.

I was sent a handwritten contract of long-distance friendship from a guy who wrote the most beautifully haphazard, meaningful nonsense. I lost it in the nomadic semesters of college life. One clause of the contract was that we will do whatever we have to to see each other if in close vicinity, which has resulted in steady streams of past midnight conversation in 4 different states and Japan.

A keeper found my entire writing portfolio in a zip disk, left in a library computer.  I was the loser. It’s a lay theft that I wish I could undo. I’ve retraced those steps a thousand times in my memory.

My last high school boyfriend printed out every email that we wrote to each other, some of them unfit for polite company, and I wish I could burn their digital and concrete lives, now that they are repossessed and no longer my own.

The cloud:

The poems I’ve written in sleep and groggily put together while staring into the dark, trying to cement metaphors I’d cut from soft bits of dreams--I know they were real-- but a second sleep left them to future deja vu.

I have a stream of living dialogue I’d be loathe to lose. I consider it to be closest to consciousness that I could possibly get, and it unlocks a bit of my shared brain. Everything loops back to the way I communicate. My words there are as connected to reality as parallel lines. That is the writing that is solely mine. A secret stash. A daily milk delivery. A personal laugh track.

I live in the written--lasting, elusive, catching. It’s abstractions that only matter to me and concrete that explains me. I gather them up where they won’t be seen again, backed up by vault storage I pay yearly fees to keep. So I pile them up even if there is nowhere left to stack.

How do I know what I think if I haven’t written it yet? How will I know what I thought if I don’t hold on to it?

Elves on the Shelf

I didn’t buy into the elf on the shelf stock. I should have. From what I’ve heard it’s pretty tight parenting stuff. Building memories, magic, and tradition, and teaching kids to follow the rules all in one setup. I can barely get myself to the post office before they close. Starting traditions that require contracts is beyond my level of dedication to anything that isn’t treading water.

I can definitely thread successful kids who come through my classes to families with very stable homes with one parent dedicated to the kids’ lives. It has a history of evidence I can’t deny.

And then, contrary to the norm, the kids who have some of the most unusual family situations I’ve encountered and hang out in my room every day are funny, sharp, fascinating, and insightful. They have a lot of drama, and plenty of challenges, but I really just love all of their hard edges.

So what does that mean? How do you raise a good kid? I’ve got nothing sure here. Mine kinda get the short end of the stick between everything we have to do. We’re working, handing off, packing the kids with us on our journeys, rather than the other way around. 

And if you heard Amaya saying yesterday that I ruin everything, well, I won’t disagree that some of that’s parenting and some of that’s mistake making. I guess figuring out the difference will mean I’ve arrived.

For what it’s worth:

I have two kids who look in pictures like they’re getting the kind of parenting I wish I was giving. I’ll take it. At least until I figure out what I’m doing. And I guess for now we’re doing ok.

(Plus they do have magical powers. Like waking up before light almost every day.)

Life Refrain

Sometimes I imagine now, as “used to have been”, to

decide what I would miss most

I am currently reminiscing the buzz of carpenter bees

that seem to impossibly vibrate space

around lilikoi vines that choke

our rusted fence (the voice of its hinges like my children’s).

 

The dialogue of razor scooters and skateboard wheels in the street

and trucks that run on diesel songs,

--the ocean’s textured tongue pressing in the background--

All of it staying with us, a daily conversation in our living room.

 

I think, wouldn’t I miss this

mumbly breeze through our louvres that only close

when we’re gone

these silent panes of glass, shut, between outside and in

then (the future and past the same distance from me, here) and now

Would be final.

Insult Prone

If you’re a kid, you don’t have to eat the bread crusts on your peanut butter sandwich because they’re ew.

You can talk loudly in the grocery store about needing to go poop, emphasizing it with the doody dance.

And you can insult adults without worrying about hurting their feelings. 

You will, actually, hurt their feelings. It’s just that you don’t worry about it.

There is nothing in this world as critically reviewed as a teacher. It is the only profession, besides parenting, that people who have no training or experience in are allowed to have an opinion.

Every student who can read the English language will tell you, no matter how many copies have sold, how many people have read and liked and alluded and remade it, that this book you’re teaching is complete trash. Miss, I’ve read seven pages and it is sooooo boring. Can’t we read something good?

On the edge of my grammar book someone in a previous year wrote “This class sucks.” Just this week I noticed that someone recently added, “alot".

(Hopefully, said person will not be repeating my class, despite his/her grammar skillz.)

Even if you have 34 students who just love, love, love every second of your class, and eat up your words like adoring face-licking puppies, that one student who yells, “YES! FINALLY!” when the bell rings can ruin the whole day.

I like to make special projects out of students whose mission is to hate me. These are the kids that glare and roll their eyes when everyone else is laughing at my joke. They come see me about their grade and act like I am wasting their time if I try to talk to them. I like to kill ‘em with kindness, in my totally manipulative way. It helps me to remember to like them, too, so it’s not all about my entertainment.  I give them extra attention. I laugh openly when they scowl. I work them into my jokes about what will be reported from class back to parents out of context that night. I super high five them while they reel from the shock because they don’t know what hit ‘em. These are students that just make it part of their persona to hate anything that someone else likes, so I get that. They’re me. I’ve won over more than a few of these guys this way, by the end, so I like to think it works.

There’s a survey that asks students to rate the teacher on a scale of “Never” to “Always” according to about 100 statements. It’s part of the teacher evaluation system and is tied to teacher pay. One of the first ones is:

“This class feels like a happy family.”

Well, if you feel comfortable enough to insult your mother and expect to get a barrage of ruthless teasing in return while your siblings all laugh, I suspect I’ve got near perfect ratings.

Thanksgiving

My parents were pretty good about taking pictures of important days. There were a lot of of pictures of my dad eating.

Most of them exhibited one of the many genetic traits I received from him. Eyelids drooped and mid-bite just as the picture is shot. To say the least, not very flattering. Thanksgiving pictures were reenactments of that look, with different traditional and non-traditional foods on the table.

I didn’t grow up with many traditions. It didn’t feel dysfunctional to me. My mom clipped a new recipe from the newspaper and would try it out, we ate Japanese stew with konnyaku (not my favorite), friends invited us over for the real deal Stove Top dinner, we assembled turkey sandwiches in the parking lot of the ski lodge, we went out to the movies after a quick, early dinner. Every year was different. There were lots of memorable ones. I never once felt like we needed to revive what we had done the year before.

For some of my childhood, I think my mom was trying to figure out what basic American families eat. She did, eventually, know how to make turkeys and stuffing and apple pie. I think that’s what made us feel like we had arrived, as Americans—our understanding of the stereotypical American Thanksgiving and that we could recreate it. But, we weren’t tied down by that feeling. We didn’t have to do things that way.

It was a metaphor of growth for us. We could, if we wanted to have it, but there was no disappointment if we wanted a new adventure. I just spoke to my parents on the phone, and they went to a restaurant for Thanksgiving this year. I asked them what kind of food the restaurant specialized in and they said, “Creative.” I said, “No pumpkin pie?” My dad said, “Mom made a pumpkin roll cake.” Japanese sponge cake style. I know, some people just love Thanksgiving, exactly the way it is, and I’m not saying “Take it or leave it,” – I’m just saying I don’t have my heels dug in deep for how it should happen.

The only thing that stayed the same for us was that we were together and that food is part of our expression of love, so there was always plenty of that. Now we’re strewn far apart. I didn’t even talk to my parents until the day after Thanksgiving. Kegan lives in Japan (he’s probably the most sentimental about the traditional foods, ironically), they’re in Oregon, and I’m in the middle with a big in-law extended family. I still feel the strings of family and loyalty over those long distances even when we’re missing important days together.

I also don’t feel bad that this is our current Thanksgiving:

I’ll take whatever we’ve got with the people I love. I think that’s about all the tradition that’s worth saving.