Story #53: Hiatus

I have not written for awhile. On Wednesday I left for Chicago and have spent the past five days with my family. My mother, recently diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, is in the ICU at Loyola University Medical Center. It is hard to think of other things much less write about them right now. I have so appreciated hearing news from friends in the outside world while I've been away. It is a powerful and important reminder that there is more to life than what is happening in our family right now. Thank you to everyone.

My trip home was not only distressing, it was at times very entertaining too thanks to my nephews Henry and Samuel. Many, many pictures to follow--most of them taken by Henry. Below is a preview to whet your appetite. I will post the rest of them soon but for now, I am back in San Francisco and ready for dinner and a good night's sleep. I am sure it will not be long before I post another, more upbeat story...so, stay tuned.

Nathan & I hanging out on the futon, photo by Henry Kotleba age 2

Story #52: Going to Camp

What a surprise, it is 3 a.m. and I am packing to go to camp. I am having flashbacks to last year. Tonight's production is much less extreme than that, though, because when that post was written I was moving out of my whole entire house and going away for almost twelve weeks...unlike now when I am just trying to write a four-day-weekend worth of curriculum and pack up for a school day, a work night, a city sleepover, and a family camp's worth of time away from home.

Somehow it's still hard and it's still the middle of the night and I'm still awake.

I had gotten really good at packing and unpacking, those sixteen months that I was away. Thinking back on that time I cannot help but remember packing for camp, since that was where I went first when I left behind my fancy and well-appointed but underwhelming life in San Francisco. The day that the movers came to take my things out of 1000 Judah and put them into storage, the morning I dropped off my soon-to-be un-partner at the airport and drove someone else's Subaru up into the mountains for the very first time was the beginning of my life at camp and of my year-and-a-half-long sabbatical. I had no idea what was ahead of me and my only refuge from the craziness of living in the woods with hundreds of other people was my little camp house behind the office beside the trail on the way down to Pipeline. That first summer I learned a lot about how to live in nature and in community, how to be flexible and accepting when it comes to dirt, and how to be honest and patient with myself. Now it is two years later and the lessons are different but the need to always learn them, and about who I am, is the same. Packing, while it had gotten very easy during all those months, is hard again.

Back then all I had was three bags and five pairs of pants and my stuffed sheep Pierre. My home was wherever I was, I had no place else to go. Now I have a couch and a Kitchen Aid Mix Master, I have recycling to take out and plants to water before I leave town. Which is easier? Both are complicated. Which teaches me more? In the process of first going away and later coming home, I have discovered how to learn no matter where I go. Camp will always be a home to me, and packing has gotten easier since the first time I went because now I know exactly what ratio of days away to clean socks I should use when calculating my wardrobe needs. What hasn't gotten easier is being up all hours of the night trying to get ready to go. לילה טוב, lailah tov as we say at Camp Tawonga...good night.

Story #51: Meet My Nephew, Gloria

The other night I was on the phone with my brother Nathan, who lives in Iowa. Nathan has two sons: Henry is two and a half, and Samuel is two months old. Samuel is not old enough to talk on the telephone, but Henry is, and partway through our conversation Nathan asked me if I'd like to speak with Henry. Well, of course!

First came the predictable scuffling noise that is Henry trying to lift the phone up to his ear--it is heavy and takes both hands for him to hold it, you see. Then began the adventure that is any conversation with Henry: trying to figure out what he is talking about. You see, Henry is not savvy enough to know that when he begins speaking with someone new he should use social conventions for entering a conversation, such as a greeting such as "Hello!" or a pleasantry along the lines of "How are you?" No no, Henry just continues to speak out loud into the phone about whatever happened to be going on in his mind at the time. This, along with the fact that there is a LOT of conversational filler in Henry's speech along the lines of "ah, ah, ah, ah...." makes it very challenging to know what he is talking about sometimes. The absence of visual cues makes it even harder to understand what is going on.

But, it is always an adventure and so this time--like every other chance we've had to chat by phone--I just dove in.

"Hi, Henry, how are you?" I asked.

"That that that ah, ah, ah, that is not my name," came Henry's tiny high-pitched voice across the miles between us.

"Henry, you have to tell Aunt Sarah your new name, she doesn't know it yet," came Nathan's voice in the background as he coached Henry on what to say.

"Do not call me Henry, my name is ah, ah, ah, Gloria!" Henry said emphatically.

"Gloria?" I asked, confused.

"Yes!" he replied firmly.

"Let me talk to your dad," I said.

It turns out that Henry has decided he wants to be called Gloria, because that is the name of his favorite character in the movie Madagascar. So now we call him that and he loves it. Remember back when it was so easy to try new things, to shift your identity, to imagine yourself as any one of a number of different people with different strengths and talents and dreams?

Story #50: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are

This is my friend Sage. She is super-pregnant with her and her wife Emily's first baby. This baby was conceived during the summer Olympics when there was lots of swimming being done by a very famous American. And, babies swim. And, they didn't want their kid's prenatal name to be Peanut or Ishy-Squishy or Cletus the Fetus (they actually have friends who used that moniker for their baby before the baby was born). So Sage and Emily's baby is called Phelps.

Phelps was scheduled to arrive on May 5. Cinco de Mayo! What a fun day to have a baby. We all could have worn sombreros in the delivery room instead of our Team Phelps shirts (pictures to follow). But no, Phelps did not arrive on that day. Five days later, Phelps is still not here. We are all waiting (not so) patiently. Last night sitting on the deck watching the sunset and enjoying a dinner of grilled lamb with vegetables, green salad, orange-basil corn on the cob, and red wine Sage tried to explain to Phelps that it is nice out here and we are looking forward to meeting her/him. No luck. No Phelps.

As you can see from the photograph, this womb's expiration date was May 5. Come on Phelps! Pack it up, let's go.

Story #49: Full

My schedule this past week was very full. Standardized testing rages on in the public schools of California and as our site's test coordinator, my days are kept quite busy managing 28 teachers as they administer a total of 72 different exams. The principal's office is a sea of Trader Joe's bags that get checked in and out each day, one per teacher, with booklets and pencils and schedules and huge ziploc bags filled with pretzels and Goldfish.

I also had a chance this past week to meet up with an OLD friend from high school, a woman who I hadn't seen since more than half my life ago. We went to Sugar in Hayes Valley and played hipsters for a night--well, she lives in New York City so I think she is probably a hipster most of the time if not always. So fun to see her again and compare stories and lives over overpriced cocktail lounge drinks :)

Then there was the third round interview for something I'm trying to pull together this summer.

Then there was the Tuesday evening therapy appointment and the Thursday evening book group. Did I mention the Friday afternoon haircut? What about the early morning carpools into the city? Oy vey....my days and nights have been very full.

I would expect myself to be paralyzingly tired, what with all this and more going on. But it is as Kelly said: "When you are doing things you love, that make you feel good about yourself, you find more energy. Not even that--the energy just comes! Suddenly late-night phone calls and midnight text messages are racy and delicious, not exhausting."

Um, she's right :)

Story #48: Talking School, Speaking Kid

This afternoon I was sitting in the Starbucks conference room (who knew there was such a thing) at Mariposa and Bryant, taking part in my professional book group. We are reading the book How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. It is a book about communication, about different "languages" or models of discourse that can be found in everyday interactions between people. Sounds boring, maybe, but the content is very key to success in my line of work and also the people in the group are awesome, so it's super fun.

Partway through we were sharing quotes from the book with one another. The person whose turn it was to share a quote would tell us all the page number and approximate location on the page (i.e., "second full paragraph, last few sentences, start where it is 'And in this way...' or whatever). Then we would all find it, and read along in our minds as that person read aloud. Once, though, the woman sitting next to me was lost and could not find the quote on the page that had been announced. "Wait, what? Where is it?" she asked as the person began to read aloud their selection from the text. I leaned over and pointed in her book to the spot where the person had begun to read. "Great, thanks!" she murmured, relieved, as she began to follow along on her page.

As the discussion unfolded I was only half paying attention because the act of showing her where we were reading had taken me back in time to my last classroom, that huge room with a wall of windows tucked upstairs in the ark-inspired building on Brotherhood Way. I taught there for five years, in my little home-away-from-home, and in our class we spent far more time on building community and reinforcing positive social behavior than on parts of speech or memorizing math facts. Just like Kegan and Lahey describe there being languages of interactions between adults, there are certainly languages of interactions between kids too and one joyful thing for me was to help every kid who came into our class become a fluent speaker of the language that helps us get along with one another.

This idea of discourse with children is one of the reasons I first started blogging, almost six years ago now. It was really all Matt's idea in the beginning, he was the one who was most insistent that the stories I told around the big redwood brunch table in his kitchen actually had a far wider audience. Like me, Matt is a bit of a whore for languages and through conversations with him I came to understand that not all adults speak Kid in the way that I do. "How did you know what to say to them, how could you tell what they were talking about?" he would marvel. A bit of natural affinity, perhaps, but a WHOLE lot of practice.

One thing that was always part of the language of my own classroom was the way that you help your neighbor when they get lost during read-aloud time. If we are all looking on our own copies of a shared text (like Friday afternoon during Social Studies, for example, when we would read our weekly newsmagazine Time for Kids) and someone gets lost, you should help them find their place. However, you should not do what comes naturally--pointing at your own page--because then they have to look at your page, find the word you're pointing at, look back at their own page, find the word there, and by then we're on to the next sentence and things have gotten worse instead of better. Instead, when someone is lost during read-aloud you should point on their own page since that is where they are reading anyway. Then they can easily get back on track and you can return to reading your personal text. Don't get me wrong, this took a lot of practice. Kids are developmentally very self-centered. So it was not easy to get them in the habit of leaving their inner world to point at someone else's page. But with time they got it and soon it was second nature.

So simple, right? But such a revolutionary idea: helping each other the way the other person needs help, not the way WE think they need help. As I sat in the Starbucks conference room, pointing to the spot in Jen's book where she should start reading, I smiled to myself and thought back to all the kids out there in the world who point to other people's books and help them get back on track. It is nice to know that the long hours and underwhelming pay and emotional fatigue that come with this job are balanced by the good karma of hundreds of kids becoming adults who have learned the value of helping someone else the way that person needs to be helped.

Story #47: Weird Meat...Blogging From School

Just now I was in the office, in between meetings and curriculum correlations and student paperwork and test coordination. I was, I am not embarrassed to say, actually sitting down and having my lunch like a proper grown-up...something that was truly much easier to do when I was a classroom teacher. I had barely pulled my magnificent leftovers from last night out of the microwave when I heard the secretary's summons. "Sarah!" she called, "Come here, I need you!"

Rushing out with my tupperware and fork in hand, first bite halfway to my mouth, I found two small and somewhat damp kindergarteners sitting sheepishly on "the chairs", a line of brown-upholstered high-backed seats lined up against the wall facing the massive main desk nerve center where the magic of our school site really happens. "Yes?" I asked the secretary. "What's wrong?"

She waved her hand dismissively, on the phone in that way I think she fake-talks when she doesn't want to deal with the world on the other side of her desk. Turning to the two students, I took a deep breath. "Yes?" I repeated. "Why are you here?"

They looked at each other, then at the floor, at me, at each other...time for a different question, obviously, since I was not getting anywhere just yet. "Are you hurt or in trouble?"

"Hurt," the taller one murmured, pointing at his behind. "I fell on my butt and I hurt it."

"You fell on your butt?" I asked, bite number one of my lunch passing my lips as I realized this was not an urgent enough situation to prevent me from eating. "How did that happen?"

"I was running in the bathroom and I slipped on the floor and fell on my butt," he replied, eyes still on the ground.

"You were running in the bathroom?" I asked, for clarification. "Why?"

"We were playing tag!" the shorter student answered, enthusiastically.

I turned to him. "In the bathroom?" He nodded. "Why?" He shrugged. "Is the bathroom the place we usually play tag?" He shook his head vehemently. "Where do we usually play tag?"

"On the playground!" they chorused with practiced certainty. I could tell they'd had to answer questions like this before. Sigh...another bite. "Did you fall on your butt too?" I asked the shorter student.

"Oh, no, I just brought my friend to the office so he could get an icepack for his butt," was the earnest reply.

"Do you need an icepack?" I asked the taller student as I continued to eat my lunch. "Would that help you feel better?"

"I actually feel fine now," he said, twisting his hands in a mix of embarrassment and desire to return to recess.

"I feel fine too but you know what?" his friend asked me, standing up from his brown chair and tying his shoe in preparation for heading back out to recess.

"What?" I asked him.

"Your lunch smells funny. What are you eating? It smells like weird meat." The secretary, finished with the imaginary phone call she'd been on to avoid having to talk with these kids about their sore butts, was now trying to hide her laughter by covering her face with an attendance folder.

"It is weird meat," I replied, nonplussed, fork to lips.

"Can I see?" he asked, shoe tied, on his tiptoes craning his neck to look into my bowl.

"No," I said definitively. "Go back to recess."

"Aren't you vegetarian?" the secretary asked as the boys ran back outside, sure to slip and land on their butts again as they raced across the rain-slick pavement towards the playground.

"I am," I answered around another mouthful of the magnificent Mac-And-Cheese-Chicken-Apple-Sausage combination Sage whipped up for me as comfort food when I went to her house last night.

"Vegetarians don't eat weird meat," the secretary pointed out.

"Spending this much time in an elementary school causes people to make all kinds of weird choices," I answered as I walked back to the principal's office.