Story #13: Picking Up the Fish

On Wednesday I was at school, hanging out in the office at lunchtime as I often do in an attempt to offer triage to the wide variety of lunch- or recess-related problems that can find their way to the front desk between 11:20 and 12:50. It did not take long for something interesting to happen, of course.

Two very small boys, in Kindergarten, come running into the office. The first is pulling the second by the wrist, and the second is screaming. In Spanish.

"Teacher!" the first one said, screeching to a halt in front of me while at the same time taking his friend by the shoulders and firmly pushing the screaming child down into a sitting position in one of the brown chairs lined up against the wall. "My friend is hurt!"

"Yes," I said, coming around from behind the desk where I had been practicing my one useful office-related skill: peering into the tiny, black-and-white video monitor to see who is at the front gate when they ring the bell and then buzzing them in. "From how loudly he is screaming it sounds like he is very hurt."

The young chaperone wheeled around to his hurt friend who was still screaming at the top of his lungs while sitting in the brown chair, eyes squeezed shut, face red and streaked with tears as he cradled one hand in the other. "Silencio!" the chaperone demanded, poking the hurt student in the shoulder for emphasis. Immediately the screams subsided to hiccupy sniffles.

Handing the sniffling casualty a tissue, I knelt down in front of him as he continued to sit in the brown chair. "Hey," I said gently, "What happened, how did you get hurt?"

"Teacher, he don't speak no English," the chaperone said impatiently, hands on hips and tapping his foot. "That's WHY I came with him to the office."

Ahh, yes. At a school with English-only kids as well as two bilingual strands (Spanish and Filipino) communication can be more complex at times than one might expect. "Does he speak Spanish?" I asked the chaperone.

"Yep, we're in (name of Kindergarten Spanish bilingual teacher)'s class," the chaperone said by way of explanation.

"Okay, great, so this means you speak Spanish too then?" I continued.

"YES I speak Spanish!" the five-year-old's patience, both for his hurt screaming friend and this ridiculously clueless teacher, were very evident.

"Great," I said definitively, "Ask your friend how he got hurt."

The chaperone turned to the injured and a not so much a conversation but rather more an inquisition began, with the chaperone yelling at the injured and the injured bursting into tears once more before yelling back. This continued for a few rounds until finally the chaperone turned back to me, shrugging. "I don't know. What he's saying, it makes no sense."

I took a deep breath, all the while looking over the injured for open wounds, compound fractures, and freely-flowing blood yet finding none. "Okay," I said, trying not to lose patience. "Did you not understand his words, or did you not understand his idea?"

"I understand his words just fine, but it makes no sense what he's talking about!" the chaperone protested, so agitated now that he was jumping up and down and pumping his fists.

"Well, let's start with what we have. What words did he use to tell you what the problem was? What did he say about how he got hurt?" I asked, faux-patiently.

"He said he was playing and someone stepped on his hand when he was picking up the fish," the chaperone explained in an exasperated tone.

"When what? He was picking up the what?" I demanded, now completely impatient and as annoyed as the chaperone.

"Picking up the fish!" the chaperone yelled.

"Can you please ask him again? I just don't understand what that could mean," I said doubtfully.

"He'll only say the same thing! Just give us an ice pack so we can go back outside!" the chaperone pleaded, sensing his own frustration was not getting him anywhere with me and instead resorting to groveling. "I just want to go back to recess, please Teacher, come on!"

In complete confusion I turned back to the injured. "Picking up the fish?" I asked him, as if he would understand me.

"Si," the hiccupy tearstained Kindergartener nodded. "Fish."

I stood up and reached behind the desk to the mini-fridge, wrapping an ice pack in a paper towel. "Here you go, little man," I said to the injured. "You two have a good rest of your recess." And the chaperone grabbed the injured by the wrist again and dragged him back outside to play.

All in a day's work.

Story #12: Found

Monday was my birthday, and when I walked out of my apartment building on the way to work this is what I found on the ground:



I am one of those people who finds things. It's pretty cool, actually. Usually I find pretty everyday stuff, but every now and then I find something really good. It's like it got left there somehow just for me. Yesterday morning's discovery seems like a great thing to find the morning you turn 35.

As Momi would ask: "What is the meaning of this?"

Sidepoint: Lots of you haven't even met Momi yet.
Oh, that's like four stories at least, right there.

I'm not sure what finding this special little birthday-morning thing means, yet, but I think it will be cool to find out.

Story #11: Catching Up

I have to say, this is not the best blog I've ever had--and, I've had a few. The premise was to write a different story every day and that has not yet happened, as evidenced by the fact that today is January 27th and I am on Story #11. Yikes.

Not only that: the layout is bad, and my camera was lost for the first three weeks of the month so I haven't had any interesting pictures to put up except the ones other people have sent me or I have thiefed from the Internet. Hmm. This endeavor is not so great so far.

But, I still like telling stories and I have a feeling that some fresh new material is headed my way. Don't know why, just a prediction I have. So in the way that the month of January is a little bit like a trial run for the rest of the year, I think the first dozen or so posts will be a trial run for the rest of this blog...you know, give me a chance to hit my stride and iron out the kinks and all like that.

Yeah. I gotta get caught up! There are so many stories to tell, you know.

Story #10: Advance, Australia Fair!

Growing up, I had a very important job in the my family. Every year when my dad would get a new planner, he would give it to me to fill in all the not-to-be-forgotten dates: birthdays, school vacations, and of course the most important holiday of the entire year--Groundhog Day, his favorite celebration of them all. I was always a little confused, though, when I got to the end of January and saw that the box for my own birthday on the 26th already had a holiday printed into it by the publisher. Australia Day?!

It wasn't until a few years ago when my T.A., herself a *very* proud (aren't they all, though?) Aussie, really impressed upon me what a "lucky Sheila" I am to have this fabulous holiday on my very own birthday. It seems the whole of Australia knocks off work on this day and--since it is midsummer Down Under--everyone heads to the beach or the football field (that's soccer to us Yanks) or the cricket pitch, everyone grills on the barbie and drinks Foster's and spends the entire day celebrating the national identity of a group of people whose country was founded on 26 January 1788 when the British shipped a bunch of prisoners to New South Wales and made it a penal colony.

So--yesterday was Australia Day. Which means it was of course also my birthday. And, birthdays are among the best when it comes to being events that generate stories. One of the things I did to celebrate was play a trivia game with my friends to see who knew the most stories from my life. It was funny to hear what people remembered. Even funnier, though, was hearing the fake stories people made up as part of the game in the moments when there was something in--or related to--my life they'd never heard about before.

You'll have a few of those stories, the real and also the fake, to look forward to in coming days. Want to hear about a funny, and yet very highly esteemed, award I won one summer while I was an undergrad? Want to read tales of my bedroom-hopping, not just for a night here and there but in some cases for weeks at a time? Want to know what my middle name is, and what *way cooler* middle name someone guessed I have? I'll tell you. Stay tuned...

Story #9: Censored

Maybe you noticed that stories #7 and #8 are gone. They were the stories written by my guest author, Aaron, while he is in Africa doing work with refugees. His organization did not feel the pieces he wrote were in support of their preference around how to describe the work they do with clients, and so they asked him to take it down from his own site. By extension, he asked me to take it down from mine. That is really too bad, for a number of reasons: Aaron is an incredible writer and photographer, and he is in Africa having an incredible experience right now, and I think his insight gave new voice to the refugee experience...oh, wait, which is not what we want to do. Right.

Moving on.

Story #6: Bacon

Let me start out by saying: I am vegetarian. Also: I keep kosher.

Today I went to brunch at the home of a friend of a friend. There were two signs taped to the door when we arrived:

1) Shoes off, please!

2) BSG spoilers strictly forbidden--THIS MEANS YOU

We made our way inside past those formidable messages and greeted everyone in the kitchen: a small crowd, since it was early, which gave me a chance to make a true confession to the host that yesterday he stepped off a curb in front of my car and I almost killed him. "Oh," he said, nonplussed and unsurprised when I told him this story, "Was I not looking? I forget to, sometimes. This actually happens kind of a lot, I think. Hope I didn't scare you, sorry!" Um, no problem...

The menu offerings were quickly dubbed "Carbtastic" by a fellow brunch-goer but I did not let this stop me: fresh-baked raisin bread still warm from the oven, pastries from Cheeseboard, homemade coffee cake with that amazing crumbly goodness on top AND homemade fresh whipped cream...the offerings went on and on, all very starchy, all marvelous in my opinion.

As the morning turned into afternoon, the spread diversified somewhat: a salad arrived, carrots and humus, a whole tray of sushi...but as the variety increased, so too did a murmuring among the guests.

mmm blah blah hmmm bacon? blah blah mmmm hmmm bacon! mmm blah hmmm blah bacon...

You see, this is a household with two things posted above the stove: a flowchart for meal item selection in which every box and arrow leads to bacon, and a new-in-the-box pair of action figures named Mr. Bacon and Mr. Tofu. So the presence of bacon in the brunch offerings is legendary, and yet was absent, and the assembled were getting restless.

"I saw the bacon on the counter, next to the refrigerator," a woman confided to me in conspiratorial tones, her hand cupped around my ear as she whispered breathlessly. "I just wish someone would fry it up already!"

Never one to not take initiative, I went into the kitchen and confirmed the bacon's presence, and then went to find the host. "There are questions about whether or not someone might cook the bacon at some point," I told him, to which he responded "Tell the people asking the questions that this is a do-it-yourself kind of brunch and that they can cook the bacon whenever they feel like it."

That was permission enough for me. Only moments later I was in action at the stove: cast-iron skillet, plate with paper towels, fork. I have not cooked bacon in decades nor eaten it in years (ahem) but really, it's a fairly straightforward food to make and soon enough the room was filled with the briny fried aroma of bacon-y goodness. People began to stream into the kitchen from other parts of the house. "Bacon? Is there bacon? Someone's finally frying that bacon? Thank God, we thought we'd have to wait all day!" So popular, I had suddenly become.

At one point a kid who was at the brunch, with whom I had been playing earlier building a Rube Goldberg-ian machines on the front of the fridge with those magnetic chutes and funnels you roll marbles through, pushed his way through the crowd up to where I was standing in front of the stove.

"What are you doing?" he asked, wide-eyed.

"I'm cooking bacon," I answered. "Do you want some when it's done?"

"What is bacon?" he asked, looking up at me skeptically.

"It's a kind of a meat, it comes from pigs," I explained.

He shook his head firmly. "I don't eat meat," he said with conviction.

"I know, neither do I," I replied.

"But why are you cooking the bacon if you don't eat meat?" he wanted to know.

"People were complaining because even though there was a package of bacon no one was cooking it, and a lot of people wanted to eat it, so instead of listening to people complain anymore I decided to cook the bacon so they could have some and be happy," I told him.

"OH," he said, nodding with deep understanding, "that kind of thing happens at my house sometimes, when it's just easier to do something you wouldn't usually do than to have a big conversation about it." And with that he walked away.

Um, right, exactly. This is why kids are awesome.

The bacon, of course, was delicious and gone as soon as we pulled it out of the very greasy skillet. Not that I would know personally if it was good, since I do not eat bacon myself.

Story #5: Lunch With the Grown-Ups

Let me say this: Recent events aside, I have mostly only ever been a teacher. This means I've spent a LOT of time with children during the day, and very little time with adults. The adults with whom I do spend time are mostly other teachers, and in a similar situation as me, so even when I do get to see the adults during the day we mostly talk about the children. Or of course there are some days when the few adults that are around get so overstimulated by being with the children all day that we spend the limited time we do have available to be together, such as lunch, hiding in our classrooms with the lights off eating the PB&J we have brought from home since lunch is only 25 or 40 or however many minutes anyway and there's no time to go out anywhere and get food and p.s., we don't even make $60,000 a year generally speaking...so, take-out=less of an option for many reasons.

However on Wednesday my world was rocked because I got to have lunch with (bah dum duuuummmmm....) The! Grown-Ups!!!

Yes indeed, I was in San Francisco for an appointment in the morning--such an adult-oriented appointment that I was wearing a suit, if you must know--and when I was done I sent her text as we had planned to see if she still wanted to meet for lunch. She texted back and said Sure, Great and gave me directions to her office and I went downtown to find her.

Um, okay, so first of all I find her office and it is in a huge building with like a dozen elevators. Not all of the elevators go to all the floors though so I kind of dork out briefly and have to consult the note I have written to myself ON THE BACK OF MY HAND (so not a grown-up thing to do) describing which floor her office is on so I know which elevator to take. I get to the proper floor and it is FAN-CEE and there is a man at the desk and he asks me my name, and then he calls her and tells her I am there and she comes out to get me and WE GET TO INTO THE BACK PART AND SEE HER OFFICE and I am trying hard to not actually let my jaw hang open. There are grown-ups everywhere! They have on headsets and are talking on the phone, they are putting on their coats to go OUT of the office since they have more than 25 minutes for lunch and likely during that time no one will ask them for help opening a Go-gurt, they are going to the bathroom without having to find anyone to be legally responsible for supervising their students because THERE ARE NO STUDENTS ANYWHERE. I am astounded.

We go into her office and I get to sit down on the upholstered chair opposite her desk while she signs something that someone had put into her box (!) and then we go to get lunch. For lunch we walk to a hipster salad place where there is a HUGE list of ingredients and you can design your own combination and also there are pre-designed options with hottt names like the "Cowboy" and the "Disco". Uhh...? She tells me just to tell the saladista what I'd like when it is my turn. So, I do, and he writes it all down on a form, and gets it mostly right, and we go to pay. The cashier consults the little paper the saladista used to write down my order and this is how the cost of my salad gets determined, because different options have different prices, next thing I know my salad is quoted at the price of TWELVE dollars. For a salad! I am horrified but she said she's paying for lunch so I got a $4 lemonade or whatever else too.

Once we are outside and seated at a table I get a chance to look around a little and I see we are in one of those community open spaces so popular in SOMA--there is a fountain and a waterfall and perhaps even koi but I did not see any, there is a zen-like slowly moving sculpture that looks like really huge hoop earrings and yes: there is bamboo. SO much bamboo, growing against the side of the adjacent building to camouflage the concrete and make it look like we are really In Nature. The whole time we eat I check my watch obsessively because surely the bell will ring any moment, or someone will show up and need their coat zipped, or who knows. But, wait...we are with the Grown-Ups! And, here are the top five ways I could tell people around us were indeed adults and not children (or, people who spend all day working with children):

1) Many people wore clothes that appeared to be dry-clean only, since likely they would not have had to consider the possibility of being thrown up on anytime during the day when they made their wardrobe choices in the morning.

2) Almost all the women (and, one or two of the men--I decided they must work at design firms and not i-banking offices) were wearing RIDICULOUSLY high heels, again because the chance of them having to chase down someone who refused to come get into line after recess=probably pretty slim.

3) No one was wearing a backpack full of emergency supplies that they are required to have on their person when leaving their immediate work area, unlike teachers and their JanSports full of epi-pens and inhalers and wet wipes and emergency rations and sunblock and the like.

4) People were actually sitting down and eating instead of carrying their food around and eating while walking and simultaneously making sure people remember the slide is for going DOWN, not UP.

5) No one blew a whistle to get other people's attention, not one single time! Incredible.

And, of course all good things must come to an end so after about an hour and fifteen minutes of relaxed, adult conversation that might have even included profanity at one point (shhh....don't tell!) we walked back to her office. I really wanted to ask if I could come upstairs and use the Grown-Up Bathroom one more time but I was too embarrassed so I just got on BART. The whole experience was so fun! And, so fascinating. I'd need to go to lunch with the grown-ups a few more times (and, have someone buy me more $12 salads or $15 burritos or whatever) so that I could tell for sure but you know, while she and I had a great time, I have to say overall I probably find it more comfortable to have lunch with the children. Most of the time. Not always. Because if I did not have lunch with the children, when would I get to use the entire repertoire of professional vocabulary that I've developed over the past dozen years?

"Sit DOWN, please!"

"You may not use your hands to do that while you are also using your hands to eat."

"Where is your napkin?"

"Before you go play you need to take as many more bites of food as whatever grade you are in."

And...my favorite: "Did you try to open this with your mouth before you handed it to me to open for you? Because I do not like that. Do not do that again, please."

Now, that's a nice lunch, right there.

Story #4: I Know Famous People!

My best friend is Rebecca. She and I met in August, 2001 at the Teacher Inservice of the school where we had both just been hired. I knew she was cool because she had on Birkenstocks and a fabulous outfit and was carrying some kind of totebag from some kind of workshop, the "I Like To Read Books and I Support Gay People" conference or something, I don't remember, something about literacy and queer identity is all that comes to mind--anyway it was a cool totebag with a cool logo and Rebecca is cool and I love her and since then for the past seven and a half years we have been best friends.

Since we met there are some things about my life and Rebecca's life that have been the same, and some that have been different. We have both been to Israel a number of times since then and on two of those trips we've actually gone together. We have both moved a number of times and thanks to her my library and my kitchen at my old apartment in the city were both impeccably arranged. We have gone to farmers' markets together and celebrated each other's birthdays and a few times, last year, because she trusts me a lot Rebecca even let me teach her First Grade class while she was away getting married and on her honeymoon. I love love love Rebecca :)

There are, as I mentioned, also things that have been different about Rebecca and I during the past seven years as well. Rebecca is married to Mark, and they are expecting their first baby oh, sometime next month (!) so that is very different, because I have never been married and I do not have a February due date or really any plans to have a baby anytime soon at all. I was so, so fortunate to be with them when they got married--oh, it was really I think one of my very favorite days of my whole entire life--and while I don't expect that I will be with them when their baby actually arrives I hope they let me see her really soon after she comes and I have a daydream that maybe even they will let me hold her if I promise to wash my hands REALLY WELL beforehand.

Rebecca and Mark are so wonderful: they are generous and fun and thoughtful and creative and they will be such good parents. And, in addition to all these things, they are...FAMOUS. They just became famous today actually. Check them out:

http://superherodesigns.com/journal/

(There is no permalink so scroll down to the entry for January 11, 2009)

Look how famous my friends and their baby are!

Story #3: Prewriting

As a teacher who loves to write, or maybe a writer who loves to teach, or both, I spend a lot of time listening to kids talk about their writing. I also spend time talking to kids about their writing. I don't usually talk to kids about MY writing, but sometimes. Modeling is a good instructional strategy.

One moment that I knew my hard work was paying off was about two years ago, almost exactly this time of year. I was teaching Third Grade at the time and we were sharing together in one of our favorite parts of the week: Author's Chair. Ahh...Author's Chair was every Friday afternoon, and you could sign up as the week went on if you had something you wanted to read to the class but you didn't have to, and we had a special chair from IKEA that we only got out at this time of week so it was very special to sit in the actual Author's CHAIR. We had feedback forms that the audience could complete with two distinct columns and items to check off in each as a way of giving admiration and encouragement (and, to build our vocabulary along the way---oh, it took a lot of practice but by about mid-October I'd trained them all to say "I admired it when you..." or "I encourage you to try..."). Author's Chair was so fabulous. Sometimes there were even snacks.

So one rainy Friday afternoon in December it was time for Author's Chair and I got out the sign-up sheet and people took turns bringing their work to the front and sharing it with the class. There was admiration and encouragement and I think someone had brought in one of those *massive* packages of like a gallon of Goldfish crackers, cheddar flavor of course because--um, OBVIOUSLY--kids like cheddar flavor best.

Soon enough everyone was done with their turn in the Authors Chair and we'd even already packed up our backpacks and everything. I looked at the clock on the wall: fifteen more minutes of school? Dreading the amount of transitional energy it would take to move everyone into a game of Heads Up, Seven Up (or as we played it, Heads Up Ten Up because Ms. Kotleba is a socialistic egalitarian maniac and with twenty kids in our class Ten Up meant everyone got to be either a picker, or picked) so I decided to read to the class from my own writer's notebook.

I got up from my desk and walked to the Author's Chair, notebook in hand. I read my piece, a story about life with my brother when we were both growing up. The story had boogers and biting and kids being sent to their room as some of the key elements, so I thought for sure my kids would be into it. But, hmm, no. I was wrong. The people I called on for the "admiration" part of the feedback said totally vanilla things, like "I admire the way you used different voices for different characters when you read your story." Okay, fair enough and thank you for the compliment but what do you ENCOURAGE me to improve upon? Finally one of my students raised his hand.

"YES! Go ahead! What is it? What kind of encouragement would you like to offer me that you think would help to improve my writing?!" I was desperate for someone to say something, not only for the indication that would provide that they have some form of literary aspirations themselves, but as proof of the fact that I had actually taught them a variety of text analysis skills. Or even really that they had been paying attention at all.

"Um, Ms. Kotleba, no offense--but, did you use the Prewriting step of the Writing Process when you wrote this piece? Because it's funny but kind of hard to keep up with since it has no REAL plot. It doesn't seem very organized. You could use a web or some other graphic organizer from the packet we have in our yellow writing folders to plan out your next story before you write it. That might go better. I could show you how if you want next time we have Writer's Workshop."

...

And so it is with the different stories I write here on this blog. In case you were not able to tell, I do not always Prewrite before posting. Things can get long or kind of hard to follow. If you want to sit down with me sometime and share with me your favorite graphic organizer, that would be awesome. I am sure I still have a lot to learn about being a writer. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the reason I like to "teach" kids how to write--so they can actually teach me.

Story #2.5: Chapters

Hello, friends. I have started a number of different stories, since it is now officially one week into the New Year and I've only posted twice--or, 2.25 times but that doesn't really count. All the stories I've started are beginning to seem like they are very long, which is why I haven't published them here--because none of them are done yet. So instead of a different story on every different day, maybe sometimes if I start telling a story of great length there will be a different *chapter* of a story on every different day. Yes. I think so. That seems more like fun and less like work to me.

The thing is--I'm not naturally, how would you say? Brief.

Story #2.25: Working on It

I realize this blog operates much less frequently than once a day and I want to change that. I am just a little tired, is all. I tried tonight to write two separate entries (#3, followed by #2.5) about writing and the process and my experiences with it and how they pertain to this blog and then I fell asleep on the couch. So for now I will publish this 3rd-but-not-really post. More to come.

I just don't want you to think that my storytelling has gone the way of so many other New Year's resolutions from the past. Not that you would know what I was talking about when I say that, anyway :)

Story #2: Party Trick

I took BART into the city on the afternoon of New Year’s Day to chat, eat, see, and be seen at one of my favorite events of the entire year: the First Day party at a friend of mine’s house. I had a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth since the last time I went to this party, two years ago (hard to go for 01.01.2008 since I was in, you know, Jerusalem) I met a boy and it was fun and he was smart and we went out for sushi a few days later and I wore a cute outfit for our date and in the end it was a complete disaster. But I reminded myself that lightning never strikes in the same place twice and I went and it was, of course, fabulous.

I rang the bell downstairs and got buzzed in, letting myself into the apartment and ducking right away into the bathroom to wash the BART off my hands. Plus, I like to ease into situations like this slowly. I wasn’t quite ready to walk into the roiling, teeming kitchen or even the lounge-y living room so I took off my coat, put some stuff away in my bag, you know.

It didn’t take long for the hostess to find me, since she is one of the most fabulous hostesses I have ever known and her Sixth Sense that someone was in the house and had not yet been greeted or given a plate of food or flute of champagne had been activated the moment someone buzzed me into the building. She showed me where to put my things away in the bedroom and led me to the kitchen to pour me a glass of this party’s annual tradition: The Eggnog.

I was not even out of the hall when someone came to find me and say hello. “We’ve been talking about you, we’ve been waiting for you to get here because we have a question for you,” he said. Oh, my. Right away I knew what was coming...Sarah’s Party Trick.

Looking back, I am not even sure how this got started. I think it was one chilly, foggy weekend morning when the two of us were going to the Post Office out on Geary to check his mail. I remember parking the car and crossing the street, where we found the door to the building’s lobby inadvertently blocked by a woman with a small girl. The woman was kneeling on the ground, tying the girl’s shoe, and the girl was clutching a huge (well, for her) pile of mail. We stood there and waited while they got organized, because there wasn’t much else to do since we couldn’t go inside. Soon the woman stood up and, seeing us for the first time, apologized repeatedly: “OH, I am so sorry, I didn’t even see you there! We should have done that somewhere else, how inconsiderate of me—I hope you weren’t waiting long, oh, I apologize…”

Walking through the lobby, he said something about the kid needing to learn to tie her own shoes or else get ones with Velcro. “Aw, come on,” I said. “She’s only three, you can’t expect her to deal with her own feet yet because she can barely even bend down to reach them without losing her balance and falling over.”

“How old was she?” he wanted to know.

“She was three,” I replied, becoming mostly uninterested in the conversation and wanting to see if anything cool had come in the mail.

“But, are you sure? How do you know?” he persisted.

“Think about it,” I said. “I spend six hours a day, five days a week, with kids. I went to college and graduate school with the sole professional purpose of learning about children and how they develop…and, sometimes, how they don’t. I can watch any kid anywhere for one minute and tell you how old they are. It’s my own useless life skill, I guess.”

Since then my expertise in learning styles, developmental timelines, and age identification have become my badge of honor. Just last week I fielded a phone call from someone I know who’d gone home to celebrate the life of his childhood friend’s mother at her funeral. What did his friend’s 3-year-old son understand about what was happening, he wanted to know? When do children begin to comprehend ‘death’?

And such was the case at the party I’d just walked into, also. Armed with a stiff glass of egg nog-y goodness, whipped cream on top, in my hand I was led back to the living room where another friend was enjoying one of the few premium spots on the couch. “Oh! Good, you’re here,” he exclaimed as the woman next to him nodded definitively. “They’ve been talking and talking about you and this party trick of yours,” she said—kind of awkward since I had never met her before and had no idea who she was, whereas she was apparently a total expert on me and my supposed superpowers.

“So,” my friend asked eagerly as we all sat down to a coffee table spread with everything from nut mix to shortbread, glasses of egg nog and champagne in hand. “At what age do kids begin to recognize sarcasm?”

Obviously this party was about to get a lot more interesting now that the child development guru had arrived…

My First Story in a Long Time

I remember a conversation we had once, years and years ago, when we were getting to know each other. You know--that fresh, tender part of every relationship when the urge to ask questions, the need to learn more about the other person is stronger than the urge to breathe.

“What would you be, what would you do, if you lived a hundred years ago?” he asked. I knew the answer without even having to think. “I’d be a teacher, just like now,” I replied. “How about a thousand years ago?” he wanted to know. That took a little more thought. Were there teachers a thousand years ago, I wondered? Not like there are today, I was pretty sure, the kinds of teachers who pitch kickball and tie shoes and open Go-gurt, who teach kids to read and add and play fair even when things aren’t going the way they want. What would I be?

“I would be a storyteller,” I blurted out, surprised by my own answer. That was the closest thing I could think of, the position whose responsibilities would be most like what I thought of teachers doing today. “I would be the person in a community who sees everything and remembers it all, who asks people about their lives and what they’ve learned and then turns it all into stories that everyone can hear and, most of all, learn from.”

“Hm,” he said, a thoughtful look on his face. “A storyteller. That seems like something you’d be really good at doing.”

And in the decade since that conversation, that is just what I became: as a teacher, as a writer, as a traveler; in letters, in professional publications, and in a series of blogs. My identity as a storyteller had become an almost-central element of my self-identity. That is until, for a variety of reasons--some surprising but others not--I gradually stopped writing in recent months. From April to August I barely wrote in my journal, from August to October I wrapped up my sixteen-month blog chronicle of my sabbatical and its round-the-world adventures, and finally in November I first slowed and eventually ceased the spiritual practice I first undertook on my 30th birthday in 2004 and had continued without fail since then: writing and mailing a real pen-and-ink letter every single day.

As you might guess, with almost no writing going on I haven’t been telling nearly as many stories. I guess I’ve felt tired, and like I wasn’t sure who wanted to listen anymore. I know I stopped looking around and listening as much to see everything and remember it all. But coincidentally (or, not?) I began to hear from people around Thanksgiving, friends and family and colleagues who had noticed my silence. “Why did you stop writing?” they asked, and “Are you going to start again soon?” I wasn’t sure, I didn’t want to. But I did begin to look around again, I was reminded that the world is full of stories and there are messages everywhere.

Last week I was on vacation in Hawai’i, on the north shore of Maui, and for the first time in a long time I began to try and write again. First a return to my daily letter-writing practice in the form of vacation postcards, then a slow segue into journal entries scribed by the shore of the sea, next the late-night drafting of a poem or two, and finally a short story about a man from Seattle standing on the beach in the pouring rain grilling hot dogs and drinking beer from a can. Not only did I write but I began to once again, after months and months of silence, slowly share my writing and my stories with others.

The trip back to the mainland was fraught with surprise and adventure: everything from power outages and lost reservations, last-minute gate changes and mechanical problems with the plane causing hours of delay, detention at the agricultural inspection checkpoint and airport Starbucks outposts rendered impotent by the lack of electricity. Sitting in the Honolulu airport waiting, endlessly, to board the flight back to California, I sent a summary of my day’s escapades to a friend and in return got the following text message:

“My name is Sarah Kotleba and every time I walk out the door a story happens to me.”

Hmm, I thought, he’s right…or, is he? Do more stories happen to me than to other people, or do I just see stories everywhere in places and times that others are blind to them? My thousand-year-old storyteller ancestor thinks there might not be a difference between those two questions, and knows that even if there is it doesn’t really matter one way or the other anyway. I like to tell stories, and I am ready to start writing again.

So I present to you my New Year’s project: a different story every day. Some will be long, some will be short, some will have pictures and to see the images of others you’ll just have to use your mind’s eye. I think everyone who says that in this life it’s just same story, different day probably had a different job a thousand years ago than I did.

Enjoy ☺