Around Here

Around here we’re home improving and some of us get bored with such trivial matters, so we pull out silly putty and put it on various parts of our sibling’s body in Home Depot.

Around here we have some work to do.

Around here we’ve picked out flooring.

Around here we’ve picked out paint, or, Harper’s picked it out. She and her tall black boots are quite certain about “Graceful Grey.” I’m partial to the name, and I think Harper is, too. There’s something important about standing gracefully in the grey, isn’t there? Harper hasn’t said that, and I think when she does she’ll say it better than me. This is the girl who, after seeing a deceased firefly said, “Oh dear, but he died glowing. That’s good, isn’t it?”

Around here we’re drawing with our new art sets.

Around here we’re saying goodbye to Ray the Fish, and Stripe the Snail. They’re resting peacefully in our backyard. I’m a terrible mother and I don’t know when Stripe died, but Ray died the night I was supposed to help Hadley bake a dozen cookies for a Girl Scout Cookie Exchange, plus grade 65 sixth grade essays on a common theme that runs through both the Greek Myth “Cronus,” and the book The Lightning Thief. (The last paragraph asked students to address the following question: Why are Greek myths still important, and why do you think Rick Riordan included “Cronus” in his book? Some of the students wrote, “They are important because you’re not supposed to eat your kids and Cronus has issues because he ate his kids, and Rick Riordan probably included this myth because nobody is supposed to eat his kids.” I can’t say I disagree.)

Around here I’m sitting in my favorite chair again and reading a book with a pen in my hand. I have a great friend in South Bend, Indiana, who used to be a teacher. She and I could talk for hours about teaching and writing and reading, and one day she told me, “When I can’t read the books I want to read, when I can’t write, or take walks in the woods, then teaching needs to be reevaluated.” She said it with such confidence, and I can remember standing in her kitchen when she said it. She was pulling bread out of the oven and she was pouring wine and bringing it to the table we would eat around. Eating dinner in her home was one of my favorite things to do in South Bend. We talked about books and Notre Dame and hurricanes and teaching and I don’t know what else but I always left feeling satisfied and refreshed. Her words about having time to read and write (let’s be honest, Ol’ Callie isn’t going to take walks in the woods – walks downtown near coffeeshops and pubs maybe, but Good Lord, not the woods) fluttered about as I went through my first fall in Ann Arbor. I don’t know if I’m done with teaching, but something about the vocation and how I approach it needs to be reevaluated.

My last day at work another teacher came in and spoke with me for a bit. She wanted to know why I was leaving and I gave her as political answer as I could and then I talked about writing. I said I’m writing a book and that provided something else to discuss. She told me she always wanted to write but she is afraid. She went on to explain, but I can’t remember exactly what she said. Maybe she is afraid of making a mess on the page and not finding her way out. Maybe she is afraid of revealing too much. Maybe she is afraid of what it is that will come out. I can’t remember because I was only half listening. I was thinking, “I am not afraid to write.” I’ve never been afraid to write. Sometimes I feel like I’m afraid of so much, so it felt good to admit that writing is not one of those things.

I thanked her for stopping by, and then I walked to the gym to watch sixth, seventh, and eighth graders play basketball. As far as I could tell there were no teams. It was just a big pick up game and I loved watching the 6th grade boys I knew run onto the court and snatch a ball from another boy twice their size, then shoot. One kid who I’m pretty sure has never sat still once in the four months I knew him was a hotshot on the court, and I wished I could’ve taught him as he shot free-throws. Someone who’s pretty important at SPU once said you shouldn’t call something a poem if it hasn’t been written yet, and I don’t want my MFA taken away, but watching those kids shoot hoops reminded me of poetry. It was their concentration on the hoop when there were fifty other things going on. How do you create an arc like that with all the screaming and yelling going on around you? How do you block out all that noise? How do you do it again and again and again? I think if my friend Jill were standing next to me she’d be able to tell me. She’d write the poem into existence even though I made the mistake of pointing out that I think it’s already there. She’d write the poem, and I would read it in my chair with a pen in my hand and think about what it is I will do next with my wild life.