Fog

“I was thinking of about you driving to Detroit this morning.” This is from the piano teacher. She always chats with me for a few minutes before and after the lessons. Before class today, she noticed I didn’t have my usual stack of papers to grade, and instead was holding a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. I picked it up at the library down the street from where we live. I took home The Kinfolk Home, and two copies of Domino magazine as well. I went in looking for a few of Brene Brown’s books because I’ve never read anything of hers and I hear she writes about being brave or strong, or something like that.

“We don’t have her books in this branch,” the librarian told me,” but we can order them from another branch. Would you like us to do that?”

“Nah,” I said, and pivoted in another direction. I already had Strayed’s book in my hand. I think I’m more interested in quitting than I am in being strong or brave. I’ll read about someone walking on the PCT and I’ll read some decorating books instead.

It’s difficult for me to respond rationally to people’s observations or questions. “How’s the job?” “That would never happen in my class.” “You look exhausted.” “You’re so wound up!” I take all of it personally and I’m always on the defensive. I am proactively defensive. It’s like what I’m trying to hide about myself is seeping out and shining for all the world to see, so when the piano teacher said, “No grading?” I gripped my thighs to keep me from jumping down her throat.

“Not today,” I told her, smiling. “I needed a break,” I fake laughed.

“Grading’s miserable,” she said.

“It really is,” I replied and fake laughed again. My fake laugh game is becoming more and more legit each day.

The girls went to their lesson and I read about Ms Strayed’s mother dying, then her divorce, and then about her learning how to use a pick ax for the times she needed to cling to the side of a mountain or die. This morning, I had to help facilitate a tornado drill, and I truly wonder which is more difficult: climbing a frozen mountain or telling twelve year olds to stay lying on the cafeteria floor with their hands over their heads. It’s a toss up over which I’d rather do, and that’s saying a lot since I detest nature and I’m considering where one might find an pick ax. Do you get those at Home Depot or REI?

It was at the end of the lesson that she tells me she was thinking about me this morning.

“Yeah,” I say, putting my book in my bag and pushing the girls towards the door. I don’t want to stay and chat. I don’t want someone to tell me how hard my job is. “The fog was bad,” I said. “I drove slowly, though, so it worked out.”

I did drive slowly. I was careful, though I’m not sure the fog was bad. It made me see things differently.

In The Lightning Thief, the Percy Jackson book my students and I are reading, whenever something other worldly is going on, mist settles around humans so they can’t see what is really going on. They’re not aware of the changes that are taking place as they go about their day to day tasks.

I’m not a Percy Jackson fan. I think the characters are underdeveloped, any time there’s a conflict or tense scene, a joke with a punchline Hadley could write takes place, and Chiron, the alleged mentor of the story, should take a nice, long walk with Gandolf and Dumbledore. But the morning I drove through the fog, I remembered the mist in The Lightning Thief, and I liked thinking that things I cannot see are going on while I do my best to put one foot in front of the other.

When I was a kid, my mom and dad would sing a song about angels to me before I went to bed. Two were at my feet, two at my head, two at my hands – angels were everywhere. I used to imagine personalities for them: one to make me brave, one to make me calm, one to make me funny, one to make me smart. I thought about my angels all the time. They came with me everywhere: to sixth grade when I didn’t think I had any friends, to high school when I tried out for the Drill Team and didn’t want anyone to know for fear they’d make fun of me, to college when I wanted to go home more than I wanted to take another breath.

Through the fog that morning, I remembered my angels and as the night sky slowly blued and the brake lights on 94 became more clear, I thought fondly of those moments. “You got through those, and those moments turned out to be great. You can get through this, too.” Call on the angels.

A train crossed an overpass in front of me and for a second the space between the train’s cars looked to me like figures wearing cloaks. I thought of dementors and their ability to take your soul with a kiss. Fog swirled around the train and my breathing grew shallow as I squinted at what I saw. It was with relief that I realized what it was – just an empty space. I laughed at my over-active imagination and turned the radio up. “I need more angels and less dementors,” I said out loud.

Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds played “Maker,” while I drove.

“I’m not a stranger in the eyes of the Maker,” Dave Matthews sang.

No matter whose flying around me, no matter what is happening to my soul, I’m not a stranger – I’m not strange – to the Hand that made me. I think He’s given me more than I can handle, but I took it. Like Esther, Mary, and probably Ruth, I took it and I am not a stranger.

“I remember that commute,” the piano teacher says.

“Oh, yeah?” I have one foot out the door. Hadley and Harper are running towards the car.

“Hmmmm, mmm,” the piano teacher has this great southern accent. “I used to teach. I used to make that commute every day for years.”

“You used to teach?” Suddenly, I have a thousand questions for her.

“Oh, honey. Yes.” She puts her hands on her hips. “I know,” she adds, and I want to cry.

“That fog can be thick,” she tells me, waving a hand goodbye and I am at the bottom of her front steps looking at her wide-eyed. “You be careful out there,” she says and closes the door.

“I will,” I say to the door, and I run to catch up to Hadley and Harper, not afraid of what I do not know and hoping for things unseen.