Story #29: The Grand Express

http://www.yelp.com/biz/grand-express-oakland

From August, 1999, to June, 2007 I lived in San Francisco. Then from June, 2007 to October, 2008, I kind of lived everywhere and also nowhere which is a much longer series of stories for another time (extra, extra, read all about it here). And six months ago when I got my own apartment again I moved to Oakland.

Choosing to live in the East Bay was a complicated decision and one that was exactly right for me at the time. It is warm and sunny and cheaper here, there are wide open spaces and big old trees and a lake at the end of my block and hills to ride my bike through. There is a stellar taco truck by Fruitvale BART and, when need be, there is IKEA. That does not mean I don't miss living in San Francisco every single day. Not long ago someone asked me the million-dollar question: "So, when are you moving back to the city?" I startled myself with my instant response: "Next year," I replied.

Those plans are up in the air because my work situation is so ridiculously uncertain. Maybe I will move back, and maybe I won't. For now I have a rockstar apartment next to Lake Merritt. It is big and old and funky and clean and safe and has three (yes! count them) closets. It has a huge kitchen which is perfect because there is little else I love to do more in this world than play with my food in the form of cooking. It has hardwood floors and a two-tone paint job and a retro telephone you use to buzz people up from the front door.

And...it has the Grand Express. Located directly across the street from my apartment, the Grand Express is the corner store to end all corner stores. It is open from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. and it attracts ALL manner of patrons. Unlike corner stores in the city, the Grand Express has a parking lot which means that it is frequently the staging area for anything from 100-person bicycle protests headed down Grand towards Broadway to late-night dance parties with half a dozen low-riders circled up, stereos pumping Kanye West in unison.

The most notable feature of the Grand Express is its large, well-illuminated sign. Clearly visible from every room in my house, including the bathroom, the blazing letters in yellow, blue, and red advertising LIQUOR & GROCERIES is a hideous, ridiculous eyesore but is indeed an excellent landmark. Just last weekend I gave directions to a person who'd never been to my house before, and of course mentioned the sign as an indicator that she'd reached her destination. She found my house, no problem. So, it's good for something after all.

Story #28: A Bad Sleeper

(This is one of my all-time favorite photos of myself because it is such a random, ironic commentary on the fact that I just can't get my act together to go to sleep in my actual bed. Here you see that I am asleep on a trampoline right in the middle of the living room floor at my friend Melissa's 28th birthday party. ZzzZZzz...)

My nephew Samuel is what Nathan calls "a bad sleeper". What this means is that Samuel wakes up a lot during the night, can't stay asleep for long periods of time, falls asleep in weird places outside of his bed and then wakes up all fussy and disoriented, and is generally not well-rested.

Some would say that babies, as they try to orient their schedules to the overall schedule of the world, are not great sleepers in general. I would say poor kid, he's a Kotleba. He's cursed. You see, we Kotlebas are not good sleepers. I remember growing up, and even now when I visit my parents, that my dad would consistently fall asleep in his chair watching the news. Attempts to wake him were met with resistance, to the point that we would all just get ready for bed and leave him there where he would remain, upright but unconscious, until a few hours later when he would get up and spend time cleaning the kitchen, locking up the house, taking a shower, and getting ready for bed. He sleeps in shifts, my father, and now so does Samuel. And, so do I.

My fractured nights have gotten worse since January when I actually got a couch, because now after dinner I sit in the living room and read or write or study or work until the time when I suddenly and seemingly with no warning fall asleep: fully dressed, lights blazing, for hours. I usually wake up on my own around midnight but then, Dad-style, have to do the dishes, get in the tub, iron my clothes for the morning...the whole nine yards. By the time I actually get into my bed about an hour has passed and I have somewhere between three and four hours before my alarm goes off in the morning. Let me tell you: seven hours slept in shifts is waaay less restful than slept one after the other.

Story #27: Lice

Not long ago I was walking down the hallway at school with student I'm tutoring. He just arrived from Russia and is a complete newcomer, logistically speaking, so we are doing things like practicing number words by playing Bingo and sorting the foods in the kitchen pantry to learn the names of fruits and vegetables. This particular morning we were walking around the school introducing ourselves to people so we can practice greetings and conversation starters like "Good morning!" and "How are you?"

We had just finished up our lesson for the day, a game where we practiced color words and spatial orientation vocabulary by jumping in and out of a rainbow's worth of hula hoops, and were walking back to class when the assistant principal came racing by us down the hall. Her long blonde curls were pinned up haphazardly on her head and her hands, rubber-gloved, were held aloft. "LICE!" was her stage-whispered response to the quizzical look I gave her.

After dropping my student back off in class I returned to the office to find a full-scale infestation in effect. Kindergarteners were piled up everywhere waiting for someone to flip through their hair with the long thin wooden sticks that look eerily like the stirrers from Starbucks. In all I think we sent something like 18 kids home. Gaah.

Getting lice is every teacher's nightmare. As soon as the last student got picked up and sent home with the trilingual information packet about how to do their family's laundry (less pertinent for families who live in transitional housing and don't have ready access to a washer and dryer, but still) I sat myself down in a chair in the principal's office and made the student advisor check MY hair. Her verdict? "Mmm..." she said, rubber gloves rustling as she used the stick to section my hair and scratch at my scalp. "Very smooth, what conditioner do you use?" she wanted to know. All I wanted to know was whether or not I had lice. In fourteen years as a teacher I have had many cases of pinkeye but never this. Fortunately with a snap of the gloves coming off the student advisor pronounced me lice-free this time too. Sigh. All in a day's work.

Story #26: Samuel

This is my nephew Samuel. He was born on February 28, and he lives in Burlington, Iowa, with his parents and his older brother Henry. Samuel's dad is my brother Nathan. I haven't met Samuel yet but Henry and I are pals, so I can imagine that Samuel and I will be buds too. I was really lucky when Henry was born, because I got to meet him when he was four days old. Unfortunately I haven't met Samuel yet but hopefully I'll get to meet him soon.

My brother and his wife, my sister-in-teeth (yes) Kelli, are those kind of parents who take their kids EVERYwhere. This makes for very adaptable children, they have found. So at the ripe old age of 14 days, Samuel went to a Mary Kay convention last weekend. There were of course many jokes about various products that can make your (face elbows hands feet insert body part here) smooth like a baby's....well. I think you know what I mean.

Story #25: Long Time, No Write

I have not written any stories here in a long time. What have I been doing? Working, looking for work, remembering lessons from last year's sabbatical, reflecting on what they have to do with life here at home, making decisions, and following through on them. Oh--and most of all, collecting other stories. Time to get caught up! Here we go...sit down please, keep your hands to yourself, and listen :)

Story #24: You Should Always Try, or--Chag Purim Sameach!

On the way home, I was feeling badly for myself. Not even the normal, natural, "I kinda had a crummy day" feeling badly but real, full-on, "Whoa, if I don't show some serious self-control I'm about 30 seconds away from being That Girl who cries on BART" feeling badly.

It was a combination of lots of things: finding myself for the first time in eight years without a Purim costume and away from a raucous Jewish day school holiday carnival celebrating the triumph of Queen Esther, worrying about when my pink slip will come in the mail, second-guessing a relationship decision I made over the weekend, spending all day in chilly itchy school clothes when all I wanted was a pair of big jeans and my cozy Stanford sweatshirt, and...maybe more than anything else, in that moment at least, not having any hamentaschen.

Now this might not sound serious, and if that is the case all it means is that you have not had the privilege of experiencing this magnificent delicacy. To save space I will not wax educational about hamentaschen and their praises here, but do I invite you to learn about them on wikipedia.

Purim kind of snuck up on me this year and without having 20 families' worth of Jewish moms generously showering me with plastic bags full of homemade hat-shaped goodness in all flavors of the spectrum (note to anyone paying attention: I like apricot the best) I just didn't know how to get my fix. I realized about lunchtime that my cookie craving was not abating but rather growing stronger and so I called the Grand Bakery in Oakland.

"How late are you open?" I wanted to know.

"Six o'clock and not a minute later, I've got some business to conduct with my bottle of etrog vodka from last Sukkot," the man who answered the phone informed me.

"I'll be there in plenty of time," I promised earnestly. "How's the inventory holding up?" I was worried demand would outstrip supply.

"HA! Just wait 'til you see when you get here--we'll have, don't worry," the baker said in no uncertain terms before hanging up the phone.

But, it all went downhill from there. My 3:00-4:00 meeting after school went until 4:30. Afterward I hustled to Civic Center BART only to race down the stairs and see the Richmond train pulling away from the platform. I finally got on the Pittsburg train 12 minutes later and there was a switching problem between West Oakland and 12th Street which left us in a weird, precariously roller-coaster style position waiting on the tracks above Peralta in Oakland with nothing visible below in the form of tracks or a platform, only laundry flapping in the cold wind.

I raced up the escalator and out to the bus stop on Broadway across from the Paramount Theatre, just to see the #12 bus pulling away and the last warm square of sunlight fading from the sidewalk. Standing chilly and crabby against the Kaiser Permanente building there on the corner of 20th, I was faux-reading my book and trying to understand how I came to feel so upset about all of this when a man walked up to me, RIGHT up and wrapped his arms around me pulling me into a surprising hug-kiss combo. At first I thought my day was getting worse because I was being attacked, albeit with affection, right there in broad-yet-shrinking daylight but actually it was my friend Jordan headed to the Y a few blocks away. "Kotleba!" he said with a smile. "I thought that was you standing here!"

He doesn't know it but Jordan and I met at a very complicated time, about a year ago, when I was trying everything I could to pull off the second half of my sabbatical. We became acquainted through the professional Jewish community and he was part of a process I went through to try and make it possible to spend three months building a school in a refugee camp in Ghana. His organization was really my last ditch effort, he was my Obi Wan Kenobi but I just couldn't make it come together and after having tried what seemed to be everything I did not go to Africa after all. I stayed home, I began to make a new home for myself and that is perhaps how I learned what ended up being some of the most revolutionary lessons that came from those sixteen months.

It was a 45-second conversation today, between Jordan and I, and it might seem silly to ascribe so much power to that one chance meeting, but it reminded me of something I had forgotten on this chilly itchy worrisome day: I have way more power than I remember, a lot of the time. And if I just try, even if it seems like it's not working out in the moment, my powers will always come through for me.

Buoyed as I was by this reminder, I decided that I was going to turn my day around and make it to the Grand Bakery by 6 o'clock after all. I boarded the #12 bus at 5:45, got off at my house six minutes later, ran around the corner and jumped into the car I've found myself wondering lately if it's really worth having, and tore up Grand Avenue towards the movie theater. I drove past the bakery and took a big risk by not turning into that little tease of a municipal parking lot that always seems like it will have a spot but never does, and immediately past the crosswalk there was a spot on the street. I pulled in and jumped out, wallet in hand, racing up the street first the wrong direction in my haste and then the right one. I saw with the delight that the stacking plastic chairs, identical to the ones found at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, were still out on the sidewalk and I ran completely unapologetically into the bakery.

"You...have...no...idea...how...glad...I...am...you're...still...open..." I panted, leaning on the counter and unwinding my damp scarf from my sweaty neck.

"Oh, hey, did you call earlier? You said you'd be here by six, right? Nice work," the baker smiled, seated by the cash register, the earlier holiday rush long since over. "What can I get you?"

I ordered my long-awaited hamentaschen, half a dozen apricot and half a dozen cherry, which he pulled boxed and ready to go from the promised massive cookie trove in the window. They were $1.10 each or $12 for a dozen. How could I resist? I ordered one lone prune-flavored cookie, loose in a white wax paper bakery bag, to round out the assortment and as the young woman was ringing me up the baker made me an end-of-the day offer.

"Free cookie if you can name the artist and song," he said, jabbing his thumb at the radio perched above the door to the kitchen.

"Oh, I'm not much one for music," I replied, embarrassed since I could tell the singer was well-known and that I should be able to identify him. "I'm really just happy that I made it here in time, you have no idea how hard I tried to get here--I came from the city and rode the #12 bus from BART and then jumped in my car along the way because I was worried I wouldn't make it in time."

"Whoa, that's pretty impressive!" the baker nodded as the woman counted out my change. "You deserve some kind of special treat for that much effort. Come on--smaller free cookie if you can just tell me who the singer is."

I thought of my brother because I know Nathan does an imitation of this guy and his drowsy, wheezy tone but let's face it--I'd had quite an afternoon and now standing in the Grand Bakery at 6:02 p.m. on Purim, cookies finally in hand, was just not up for playing games. "I'm really sorry, I can tell he's famous but I just don't know his name."

The baker laughed. "His name is Bob Dylan," he said by way of explanation. "He only has the single most-imitated style in Western music."

As the woman who won the Oscar-predicting poll at Sage and Emily's last month but then couldn't identify Robert DeNiro when he came on stage, I had to laugh at myself. "Oh well," I said as I walked out the door, calling back over my shoulder to the baker. "Purim Sameach--I hope you had a happy holiday!" Walking back to the car, balancing my plastic bakery boxes, I smiled to myself with the realization that as confusing as the past days and weeks might have been it seems I still have my power to always pull something off after all.

And now here I sit on my couch, having had all kinds of plans for a dinner of soup and kale and baked potatoes. Instead it is almost one in the morning and I realize that as soon as I came home, put on my longed-for comfy clothes and ate my after-school snack of three types of hamentaschen I must have fallen asleep right in this very spot. I think at the end of a day like this one that might have been exactly what I needed.

Story #23: Hallelujah, It's Raining...

(03-10) 17:55 PDT SAN FRANCISCO - -- With 362 pink slips for San Francisco teachers in the mail, Mayor Gavin Newsom vowed today to give schools $23 million from the city's Rainy Day fund, doubling the amount he previously promised.

The district sent the layoff notices Monday by certified mail. School officials said the money would help save nearly 300 jobs, if not more.

The Board of Supervisors is expected to also support the allocation.

Once the district gets that in writing, it can rescind most if not all those pink slips, said school Superintendent Carlos Garcia. "We're really concerned about the impact it has on morale."

The amount of the Rainy Day funds coming to city schools has been a source of contention since the end of February.

Proposition G, passed by voters in 2003, created a pot of money filled in good economic times to be drawn down when times are tough. The measure said the school district can qualify for up to 25 percent of the fund's total - which stands at $92 million.

The mayor, however, said the district might only qualify for 25 percent of what's left after the city takes its share - leaving only $11.5 million for the schools.

The mayor and controller said Tuesday the schools qualify for the full 25 percent - $23 million.

"Those tough times are here and I want to prevent teacher layoffs by using our rainy day fund to aid the school district," Newsom said in a statement.

Story #22: Harvest of the Month

It's an interesting balance: because our school supports a primarily underserved student population, we end up having a lot of resources available. One of them is the Harvest of the Month program through the USDA. Each month a different produce item is featured as part of the program, and the SNC (School Nutrition Coordinator but we call her the SNACK--my officemate, Maria) teaches lessons, prepares recipes, does in-class tastings, and talks about this particular fruit or vegetable. In February the Harvest of the Month was cabbage and now in March it is peas. At the beginning of every new month we get a message in the WAD (which stands for Weekly Administrative Directive, a digest of news sent from the district office but I just like to say the acronym: WAD!) announcing the featured item and describing all kinds of information about it. Read on and learn more about this important vegetable. Maybe you'll even try some peas on your own this month. If you do, write a comment and let us all know!

WHO: All Staff at Elementary, Middle and High Schools

WHAT: March’s Harvest Of The Month! – Peas!

Did You Know?

*Green Peas are among the top ten most commonly eaten vegetables (fresh, frozen, or canned) by California children.
* The sugar snap pea is actually a hybrid of green and snow peas. It was developed in 1979 to make an edible-pod variety with sweeter, full-sized peas.

For more information about peas, click on the links below:
• Educator’s newsletter – Peas_Educator_Newsletter.pdf

• Family Newsletter (English) - Peas_Family_Newsletter_English.pdf

• Family Newsletter (Spanish) - Peas_Family_Newsletter_Spanish.pdf

• Family Newsletter (Chinese) - Peas_Family_Newsletter_Chinese.pdf

HOW:
• Distribute Harvest of the Month materials:
- Copy Educator’s Newsletter for every classroom teacher
- Copy Family Newsletter, send home in weekly envelope

• Make tasty recipes found in both newsletters

• Prepare and offer Pea Salad with Fresh Herbs or Mexican Rice, from the newsletters, at your next staff meeting

• Teach a lesson from the Educator’s Newsletter

WHY:
The goal of Harvest of the Month is to increase fruit and vegetable awareness and to motivate children, families, and school staff to make healthier choices.

WHEN: March 2009

Story #21: My Boys

This story is the follow-up to Hanging With My Boys. It's been lingering in draft form, as has much of my life it feels like, and is now being published about two weeks later. So no, I did not just get over having strep. That was awhile ago. But this story is still worth sharing. Read on...




When I finally got back to school after being out most of the week, marooned on my couch with strep throat and hulu.com, I went right away at lunch to find my boys. They were...playing four-square.

Huh?

"Hey guys, I missed you!" I said, coming up to them on the yard. The four-square ball bounced away, forgotten, as all six of them (or is it eight? There's so many and they kind of swarm so it's hard to tell) ran over to hug me at once.

"Teacher!" one of them said accusingly, "Where you been? Why you not been at school? You know what you always tell us--we gots to come EVERY day if we want to learn! That means you too, Teacher. What up?"

"Oh," I said, "I know, you're right. It IS important to come to school every day so that you can learn. And I should come to school every day too, but I was really sick. I had an infection in my throat and a fever and I had to stay home for two whole days. It was really boring. What's been happening while I was gone? I see you're playing four-square today."

The boys all started squirming and looking at the ground. One of them started poking their unofficial spokesperson. "YOU tell her," the poke-er whispered.

"Okay, well, um, so, you see, it's like this," the spokesperson said, jamming his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and avoiding my gaze. "We were doing Kung-Fu fighting without you and, well, we got in trouble."

My heart sank. "You got in TROUBLE?" I asked, incredulously. "From who?" I felt awful that they would have gotten reprimanded for something I specifically arranged with them.

"From (insert name of an administrator here), she told us fake fighting is like real fighting and she made us sit on the bench for an entire recess and said we can't do it no more so now we play four-square and we ain't been in any trouble since then," he explained.

This is such bad news, I thought. I can't believe they got in trouble for something I not only told them they could do, but something for which I helped them create a set of guidelines. Oh, no.

"Well, did you tell her that I told you you could and I helped you make up rules to keep it safe?" I asked.

"NO, oh no," the spokesperson responded as they all shook their heads adamantly. "We would never do that to you, Teacher, cuz you would've got in trouble too for telling us we could. We would never get you in trouble because we know you care about us and because you look out for us."

Stunned into silence and totally humbled, I hugged them goodbye and sent them back to play four-square. So this is the street mentality, I realized--protect the one who protects you, always. They could have been spared losing their recess, they would not have had to spend an entire day on the bench if they just would have told the administrator who got them into trouble that this had all been my idea. She would have come talked to me, and I would have confessed that it was a stupid idea and that I should not have done it in the first place--encouraged a group of Fifth Grade boys to do Kung-Fu fighting at recess!--and everyone would have been fine and we would have moved on. But my boys stayed silent to keep me out of trouble and now they are playing four-square.

I really need to think about this.