Fifteen Gifts – Day Seven

I am standing at the copier when a woman comes in smiling. She’s so friendly and even though I’m not in the mood to talk, I smile and say hello. How’s the writing going, she asks me. I say fine because I don’t want to talk about how my writing is going. It’s going terrible. I am behind on so many projects and my thoughts are a three ring circus. She’s so sweet though, and I can’t tell her the writing is going terribly. If it were a graduate school friend, I could say something. I would tell him or her I don’t think I can do it anymore. I think it’s turned into navel gazing and I think it’s turned trite. We’d talk about this over beers in Port Townsend or iced coffee in the Tea House in Sante Fe, but I can’t talk about my writing while standing at the copier at school. I tell her it’s going fine and turn to the three hundred thousand copies I was hoping to make on Friday afternoon. Just once this school year, I wanted to go home on a Friday with no school work to do, but things went pretty wrong on Friday and so here I am on Monday scrambling to get my lessons set up for my students.

She nods and holds a book out towards me. It has a dachshund and a pig on it. “I have a story,” she tells me and I can’t see her face because the book with the dog and the pig on the cover is in front of her. “It’s creative nonfiction,” she tells me and the plastic protective covering crinkles as she presses her fingers on the book. I love that sound.

“So this pig has no family,” she tells me, turning the pages, “and this dog takes the pig as her own baby!” She’s showing me photographs of the pig playing with its dog brothers and and sisters. “This is true! She really did this for the pig!” Her eyes are sparkling as she shows me the last picture and here is the full grown pig next to its mama. The dog is about 100 sizes smaller than the pig.

“That’s a great story,” I say, and I mean it. I’m not an animal person, but I like this instinct we feel at times to help care for something that isn’t ours. “Well,” she says putting the book at her side, the plastic crinkling again. If shimmering had a sound, I think it would be the crinkle of the plastic covering of books. “You have a great day.” She walks out of the copy room and I am left listening to the whiff of papers shooting out of the copier. It’s a monotonous sound, an exhausting sound.

It was spring my Freshman year of college, and my friends and I were walking to our dorm. Spring makes me rowdy. I think it has something to do with the weather. You know, it should be flowers and sunshine and flip flops but it’s not. It’s rainy and gloomy and there are miles to go before we sleep. Or get a tan. Anyway, my friends must’ve felt the same way because we were not acting like Calvin students who were offering their hearts promptly and sincerely to the Lord. I can remember exactly the conversation we were having and perhaps if I were writing in the third person I’d recreate the story for you.

So we’re walking along, taking up the entire sidewalk and then some, yelling and guffawing and probably trying to trip each other when this elderly couple shuffles up to us in the other direction. The woman keeps her head low, but the man puts up his hand in an attempt to stop us. At first, I think he’s going to scold us for being in appropriate, but then I think, “Nah, he can’t hear us.” We stop and he grabs one of our hands and starts to shake it.

“Thank you,” he says shaking the hand he’s holding. “Thank you so much for taking time to learn and grow and develop yourselves so you can go back into the world.”

I think it was Alison, the most articulate and mature of our group, who said, “You’re welcome,” while the rest of us swallowed laughter. The man and woman shuffled along, stepping on the grass surrounding the sidewalk because we were on it. He hooked his arm with his wife’s so they’d be steady on the dirt with its lumps and divots.

What he said was not a turning point in my college career. I was never what you’d call an academic. The summer before I left for Calvin there were Luv-a-Bull auditions going on, and I remember wondering if I could convince my mom and dad to let me go to Junior College so I could try out and dance in the United Center during half-time. Still, I remember how excited he was to talk to us and his eyes sparkled as he spoke like he really wanted us to know how proud he was of what we were doing. For a second he made me consider thinking about what it was I might figure out about myself and the world beyond boys and Drill Team.

The paper burns a little as I lift the three ton stack from the tray and walk it to my classroom. I have to turn the handle of my classroom door with my hip because of all this paper.

“No more worksheets,” I mumble as I dump the stack on a desk. “No more grading. No more figuring out if they ‘get it.'” I turn on Miles Davis’ “So What” album.

Just shimmering, crinkling stories that stop them in their tracks and shakes them up a bit.