All She Has

A Collage Essay.

I am at the pool with a friend when her son and his friend, both of them 10, both of them dripping wet and shivering, ask if they can get a treat from the Snack Shack.

“Yes,” she says, and her son’s friend smiles and watches a water droplet race down his knee and his eyelashes reach his nose.

“Coke?” my friend’s son asks.

“No Coke,” my friend says.

“Mom. Mom,” the son says. He says “Mom,” several times even though she is listening; even though she is right there. “Mom I dove off the board. Did you see me? Mom, how about Pepsi?”

“Yes, I saw you dive. No you cannot have Pepsi,” my friend says.

“Mom. Mom. Hey, Mom. I was afraid. I didn’t think I could do it. Mom. I did it. Mom. So no soda at all. Right?”

“Don’t ever call it soda. It’s pop. No, you may not have any kind of pop,” my friend says.

“Let’s get Sour Skittles,” the boy’s friend says. “I saw on YouTube it you eat a whole bag your tongue starts to bleed.”

“Let’s get Sour Skittles!” my friend’s son says.

My friend and I pick up our conversation once the boys leave. We are discussing a bulletin board that was taken down because it was racist. Not the bulletin board, but the bulletin board’s intent. Well, it wasn’t intentional, but it ended up being harmful all the same, and we are discussing the fact that it was taken down.

The boys come back with their Sour Skittles. “Callie, what’s your favorite color Skittle?” my friend’s son asks.

“Red,” I say, and he digs in the bag and finds a red Skittle and I watch him and think how close to 5 and also 2 the age 10 is. Or maybe 10 is a culmination of all those years – here you are on the brink of change again but before you go let’s celebrate that you’ve learned to move and yell and maybe flush the toilet.

He hands me the Skittle and I pop it into my mouth.

The boys walk away and my friend asks me what I think.

“It’s sour,” I say, “but if you can take the sour, after that, it’s a Skittle.”

I chew and swallow. “I’d eat another.”

My friend laughs then says, “No, what do you think about the bulletin board?”

The diving boards crank and bounce under the weight of kids prepping their dives and cannonballs. I love that sound. I can hear it from my house, just as I can hear when the Wolverines score in the fall.

I tell her about my last job in a school. I was a Title I Tutor. We push into classrooms, helping students with reading and math. We push in because we want to be inclusive. It would be exclusive to take a student away from her classroom where she is struggling to keep up and into a resource room with books, literacy games, hand held whiteboards and paper to color and write on, and in the quiet of that room, sit across from her and say, “This is your story. Now, let’s see what we can do with it.”

Instead, anywhere between 3-5 adults plus the teacher are in the classroom sitting next to the students we are supposed to help while they look around the room at their classmates who are looking at them and nobody needs literacy concepts to understand the message that is communicated through 7 year old’s eyes who moments ago was bouncing a ball on the playground to the rhythm of a song she hummed because she liked the melody and the feel of slapping the ball on her palm, and the effort of matching the bounce to the beat.

But there is no room for the both of us at this table and so we go to a corner and sit outside the classroom’s bathroom where there is (pardon the pun) a steady stream of students using the bathroom, blowing their noses – singing – and she is sitting at a makeshift desk with her hands on either side of her face sounding out words with the same effort it takes to get past Clemson’s defensive line and just above her is a bulletin board decorated with growth mindset phrases. “Instead of thinking, ‘I don’t like challenges,’ think, ‘Challenges make me better!”

I tell my friend that this is the bulletin board I want to talk about. I tell her I don’t think I know, or believe in the point of education anymore; that it seems to be about obtaining an answer and clinging to it no matter what. There is no room for mistakes, for failure, for why, for exploration, for questions. I say I can’t believe there’s been another school shooting. I say that I think if teachers are required to carry guns in schools, then police should be required to teach those they arrest algebra and Shakespeare and the parallels between To Kill a Mockingbird and The Hate You Give.

“I don’t have the capacity to consider this, and I guess that’s one of the reasons I left teaching,” I say, and she nods, and we are quiet.

//

Jesse and I go to the Farmer’s Market to get herbs and flowers for our garden. It would be more efficient to get them at Meijer or Lowes but I want the romanticism of the Farmer’s Market. I want to live a life where I begin every day riding my bike to the Farmer’s Market for sunflowers and blueberries. Today, we drive and park about a block away and as we walk Jesse tells me about a diagnosis of a dear friend of ours and immediately I start to cry. We keep walking and the closer we get the more people ask me if I want to sign a petition to change everything that is wrong with the world and I spot red marigolds that I think match our red front door and my parents always had marigolds at least I think that’s what these flowers are, and I always thought daisies were my favorite flowers, but it’s these and I tell the person shoving the clipboard in my face and pleading with me to be a part of the change, “I just want to look at those flowers.”

//

Minutes before a church meeting, I am checking email looking for the Zoom link I’m supposed to be on when I see a message from a writer I’m mentoring. She tells me this week she didn’t spend as much time writing what she had planned because of the school shooting. Instead, she tells me, “I took everything I’ve been learning from you and tried to turn pain into art.”

I want to write back and say, “I know,” because a few days ago I’d read what she wrote and I felt like Mr. Miyagi when he’s watching Daniel do the Crane Kick. I want to tell her that she did turn pain into art; that reading it grounded me. I want to tell her that another writer texted me and asked if I’d read what she wrote. “It’s damn good writing,” she said.

I can’t tell her just yet, because I have to get on Zoom to discuss how we will form people’s faith.

The meeting starts and someone asks if we read this morning’s devotions. Our church’s members take turns writing reflections on scripture. We all say, “Yes, we have,” and “It was so good,” and, “I cried.”

I’ve known the writer for a few years now and have always thought of her as an irreverent Jan Karon. I can see her scooting up to a bar next to Flannery O’Connor, sliding a drink her way and saying, “You need to calm the hell down.”

But in January, on the day I became an elder, her husband died suddenly. Her writing has changed since then. Now, it is Flannery I see buying the drink, sliding it toward her and saying, “Go on and tell. Do what you need to do.”

What she wrote that morning was the best writing I’ve read from her and I say so in the meeting.

“I have no idea how she did it,” I say to the Brady Brunch – like screen.

“Her art is all she has,” a woman tells me.

She’s telling all of us, though.