To the Finish Line

I rush into after-care to scoop up seven-year-old Sarah after her nine-hour, 2nd grade school day, and, again, I am later than expected, or, at least, later than I had hoped.  It is 5:15 and already nearly dark, thanks to daylight savings.  Most kids, those whose moms did not have a 3:30 meeting about 403b plans, those whose moms did not get a panicked I-gave-my-eighth-grade-students-an-article-with-the-words-oral-sex-in-it-and-do-you-think-I’ll-get-fired phone call from a colleague, well, those kids have already been home for nearly two hours.   I imagine spaghetti and meatballs, with homemade sauce, cooking on their stoves.  Homework is finished (and neat).  The beds are made; stuffed animals rest on pillows.  The dogs have not been crossing their legs, dreaming of a patch of grass, for oh so many hours.

My kids?  My kids are playing on this nearly dark playground and, oh my gosh, Sarah, why is your coat inside your backpack, Honey, it’s too cold to be playing outside without a coat.  Where is Ms. T?  Oh, Ms. T, it’s cold out here, I mutter.  I want to say, why didn’t you tell Sarah to put on her coat, but I don’t.  I smile.

Sarah’s fingers are little icicles.  I do a quick scan to see if the other kids are wearing gloves, to see if the other girls have nicely brushed hair, to see if the other kids…I make a note that we still need to find Sarah’s long-ago lost hairbrush.

I wonder what I will throw together for dinner.  Maybe I will call it a “silly night” (again), and we will have Raisin Bran with milk with slices of apple on the side and Halloween candy for dessert.  The weekend somehow ended without a trip to the grocery store.  I think about the papers that I still need to grade.

Is it really only Monday?

“I need to talk to you when we get in the car,” Sarah utters, and I know it must be important.  I know that she has been waiting all day for this, for me.  She begins.  You see, a gang on the bus this morning, ruled by Charlie, a mighty kindergartner, apparently with an oversized mouth, called Mr. Harry, their bus driver, a “devil” and then, together, they espoused all kinds of hatred toward this man behind the wheel.

And what did you do, Sarah?  What did you say?  I wait for her answer.  I brace myself for the word, nothing.  She’s only seven, after all.  My expectations are always so high, too high.  And I wonder when she has even learned the word “devil.”  But this is Halloween season, after all.

“I told them to stop, Mommy.  I screamed.  I told them that he isn’t a devil.”

“Why would they call Mr. Harry a devil, Mommy?  How would they like it if they had to drive a bus, to stop at a million stops,  with all these kids who never listen and who scream and who jump over seats?”

She told mighty Charlie to stop.  She defended Mr. Harry.

I start to cry.

You see, there is this horrific news story that I just cannot erase.  Last week, a 15-year-old girl was gang-raped outside of a San Francisco-area high school for two-and-a-half hours.  Ten kids participated.  Ten other kids hovered and watched the “show.” Not a single one tried to intervene.  Not a single one called the police, who, eventually, finally found the girl, semi-conscious, underneath a bench.

As Lt. Mark Gagan of the Richmond Police Department said, “It was like a horror movie. I can’t believe not one person felt compelled to help her.”

I think about that. I wonder about that word “compelled” and I wonder if that is, in fact, true.  I think about the girl, about the participants, but, mostly, I think about the bystanders, and I try to understand.  But, who really can?   I wonder about all the mothers– the girl’s, the rapists’, the onlookers’.  How does one ever rebound from something like this?

Maybe Sarah’s defense of Mr. Harry really isn’t worthy of a whole blog post.  Maybe it should just be a quick status update on a Facebook page, or maybe it’s really just something to jot down privately inside one of my many spiral notebooks.

But it could be that I am wrong, that it is, in fact, an act worth celebrating on this dark Monday night.

I remember a particular November 1st, once upon a time, in a land deep in the heart of New York suburbia.  It is probably a Sunday, and there is young Debby Solomon, suffering from acute post-Halloween blues, or something like that.   More likely, I am just bristling with boredom.  Maybe I am in fourth grade.   I think it was pre-hang-out-near-the-powerlines-and-smoke-Marlboro-Lights, so, yeah, it must have been fourth.  We smoked’em young in Dix Hills.  Or, who knows?  Maybe I am twelve.  Or maybe this is that one year where I had that crazy Dorothy Hamill haircut, the result of Mom saying, “If you don’t start brushing your hair…”

Why is memory so woefully out-of-focus?

Anyway, I think I remember that Elyse Kaplan (gosh, I hope I have the right characters for this story) and I were doing some version of twiddling our thumbs upstairs in my bedroom, trying to figure out how to make the long day pass.  And we were hungry.  But, no, that doesn’t make sense because it’s post-Halloween Day #1, so there would have been mounds of candy in the kitchen.  Okay, slash that.  We weren’t hungry, or, if we were, it was just because we were too lazy to haul downstairs, or, maybe it was a hiding-from-parents thing, who knows? Anyway, we decided to do what every other bored, maybe-hungry kid would do on November 1st.

We decided to go trick-or-treating.

I mean, this was a town where backyards grew swimming pools and even tennis courts, where couples joined Gatsbyish country clubs, where kids wore Jordache jeans.  Dogs in Dix Hills owned sweaters.  You get the point.  So, Elyse and I reasoned that there must be mountains of Kit Kats just awaiting our arrival on the scene.  After all, Dix Hills shoppers always overbought.  There just had to be leftovers sitting in those newly remodeled kitchens.

We trekked downstairs.

I should probably write a glorious end to this fine story.  I should tell how our neighbors embraced our maverick attitude, hugged us, even invited us in for a cup of hot cocoa with mini marshmallows.  I should tell how they filled our bags with king-sized Snickers (”Here, take an extra one for your brother”) and pronounced us the most ingenious rebels ever to land in this fair town.  I should share the larger message of how the entire month of November magically transformed into a bonanza of neighbors offering free stuff to other neighbors.  “Trick or treat?  Here, would you like this scarf that I just bought at Bloomingdale’s?  Or, here, how about this vanilla-scented hand lotion?  Oh, and take this handful of Three Musketeers bars home for the youngins’.”  One skimpy day of Halloween?  No way. Not in Dix Hills.  Not once Elyse Kaplan and I came on the scene and broke that silly rule.

But, in truth, I think we rang just one measly doorbell on that fine November 1st afternoon.  We rang and then we ran, ran as if we were inches away from being mauled by a herd of German Shepherds (complete with fancy sweaters, of course).  And then we laughed.  That part I remember well.  And even though it was certainly not a prolonged act of mutiny, I remember how  deeply we reveled in our glorious Halloween subversion.  We talked about it for years.

So, today, on this November 1st, decades later, when Max starts crying because our bassett hound has pierced a hole in his favorite ball since toddlerhood, I say to him, “Buddy, I have an idea.  Why don’t you grab your pumpkin face bag and head back out into the neighborhood to get more candy?”  And he looks at me like I am half-crazy, half-savant.   And, he laces up his shoes.  And…

No.  I never tell him that.

Instead, I resort to boring ol’ mommyhood.  “We’ll get a new ball.”  “You’ve got lots of other balls.”  “I know how frustrating the dog can be when he eats your things.”  And I hug him and, eventually, he stops crying.

Part of me wishes that I had ordered my show-me-a-rule-and-I’ll-follow-it son to head outside, to ring some doorbells, to run like crazy.

Go break some rules, Son.  Go raise some hell.  Go.  Go.  Go.

But that, of course, isn’t exactly how parenting (or, for that matter, rebellion) usually works.

I guess, in the end, Mr. Rule-Bound will need to figure out his own noble cause.  And then maybe, one day, years from now, he, like his mom, will sit down to craft some cloudy version of the truth.

My friend and colleague, Colonel Napoleon Carter, announced that he will be retiring, effective tomorrow, to care for his wife, Brenda, who has an aggressive form of breast cancer.  He has taught thousands of students and, as a former student said, “Some teachers have to yell and shout or even do jumping jacks to get the attention of students, but, once in a while, you find a teacher who commands respect, and he or she doesn’t even need to open their mouth…”  Another former student wrote, “I pray that with the time the Lord allots me on this Earth I am able to touch someone’s life the way Napoleon Carter did in my life.  His commitment to his wife in her time of need is inspiring to a young man like myself who, one day, plans to find a wonderful woman to call wife.  His  commitment to the vows he took with her is, unfortunately, becoming a rarity in today’s society and I am thankful to see that some people are still going about marriage the right way.”

Here is the tribute that I wrote for Napoleon…

It is six-something in the morning on a Saturday in some cold month here in Saint Louis; maybe it is February.   All I remember is that it’s the day that every serious chess player in the state of Missouri waits for all year, a chess player’s finest fantasy.  Armed with their pawns, their bishops, their rooks, and the rest of the noble crowd, this is the day that all the geeks march to Jefferson City in search of blessed checkmates.     This is the state chess tournament.

And, on this frigid morning, I have collected Max from his bed, thrown some cordouroys on him, and sped over to Wydown.   You see, Coach Napoleon has invited seven-year-old Max and I to ride over with the bigwigs, the Middle Schoolers, and, for young Max, this is even more thrilling than a Pujols RBI in the ninth.

“You made it, Baker,” Napoleon says, as we stumble onto the bus, pillows in tow.

I have learned that Mr. Napoleon Carter waits for no man (or woman) and that a 6:30 departure time does not mean 6:31.  This colonel means business.

“Yeah,” I think.  “With two minutes to spare but only because I ran that red light back on Olive.”

Mr. Carter insists on being an early bird in his trek to Jeff City. He likes to snatch the best tables, to get all of his smarty pants registered, to prepare his spreadsheets, to strategize, all the while (in true colonel fashion) ordering the puny 6th graders to lug around the oversized bucket of chess paraphernalia.

Yeah. Mr. Carter waits for no one.   I am relieved that we made it.

But let’s imagine for a moment that your name is Richard Millett.  And you, Richard, just could not, on this freezing morning, lug your eighth grade behind from under the covers.  And, once you finally have, you certainly are not going to miss the lovely scrambled egg breakfast that your mother has prepared.

Mr. Carter calls you.  No answer.  He calls again.  Finally, he meekly tells the bus driver to just pull away.  He is not a happy man.   There are other kids missing from that bus, but it’s Richard that Carter wants.  It’s Richard that Carter needs.  He calls a few more times.

“You’re doing what?” he shouts into his cell phone.  “Eating eggs?!”    Exasperated, he says, “Okay, here’s the plan.”

We must have waited on the shoulder of some highway at such-and-such exit for 45 minutes for that Millett kid’s mother to catch her minivan up with the bus.  Twenty kids are on the bus, all overtired, all itching to move, all staging a mini when-are-we-leaving-already, let’s-just-forget-Richard rebellion.

But there is no way in heck that Napoleon is leaving without his chess player extraordinaire.

Not a chance.

For Richard is Mr. Carter’s hope, his superstar, his very own Tiger Woods.

Without Richard, there will only be second or third place team trophies, or heaven forbid, just mere medals.  Without Richard, Carter is just another coach lugging his kids to Jefferson City.  No way.

And, there is the fierce Gabriel Boyd character to contend with, Boyd, whose students always cart home a few too many prizes for Carter’s liking.   Boyd, who is Carter’s arch-nemesis.

Carter wants that first-place team trophy, and he wants it bad. And, if he does not get it, he will still rejoice, but only half-heartedly, when the team stops for its Mcflurries-and-french-fries  celebration on the way home.

For this guy did not trek all the way from the fields of Pine Bluff, Arkansas many, many moons ago, just to return to Wydown on a Monday morning, trophy-less.

*            *            *            *

The funny thing, Napoleon, is that I don’t even remember if we came home with a trophy that night or not (though you probably do).

But, as we stand here on this day, we both know that, regardless, your real trophy is not being displayed in a case out in the hallway.  Your real trophy is that woman you’ve known since you were next-door neighbors as kids, that woman whose laughter you adore, that woman about whom you once told me, “You know what, Baker, it wasn’t until she was 20 that I even realized she was a girl.”  I have never heard a man speak with greater admiration for his wife than you do for Brenda.  Never. And I know that you would have waited for her on the side of the highway for far, far longer even than we waited for Richard Millett, for she is your true superstar.

And you, Napoleon, have been a true superstar around here, a role model for thousands of kids and adults who have passed through the halls of Wydown.  Thousands of lives have been impacted by your wisdom and your kindness.  And you have reminded me, countless times, what it means to be strong, to stay strong.

*            *            *            *
I remember something else about that day in Jefferson City.  I remember that Max lost his first three rounds and each time he emerged a bit shaken, even with tears, and you reminded him, with a smile, to hang in there, to stay tough.

Now I am reminding you, my friend…You hang in there, Napoleon.   You keep fighting.  You stay tough. And you keep remembering that we are here for you, thinking about you, missing you.

And, you know what?  That darn cancer had better just watch its step or it’s gonna find itself collapsing under a fancy five-move checkmate.  After all, Napoleon Carter does NOT like to lose.

As I am about to slide the minivan into reverse to head for the Cardinals-Padres showdown at Busch Stadium, Max announces that he wants to dart back inside the house to grab his glove.  I cannot imagine a more vibrant display of hope than a nine-year-old toting his own baseball glove to a big league game.  To heck with these 44,291 other fans, that foul ball is gonna land smack here in MY leather.

Then, at the bottom of the second inning, with Skip Schumaker up at bat, little lefty Max, with the big glove smothering his right hand, turns to me and whispers, “If I catch a ball tonight, I’m gonna give it to him.” And he motions to the teenage boy sitting two seats to his left.  The boy who keeps confusing the twos and the threes under the “balls” column on the scoreboard, the boy with the droopy eyelids and the hanging-low-on-his-nose eyeglasses.  The boy who, after each decent fielding play, announces, with his hurricane laugh, that that one will “definitely” be on “Top Ten Plays” in the morning, the boy with Down’s Syndrome.

And if there are some brilliant words that I should say to my son, I cannot think of what they should be, so I just battle away the tears of pride, squeeze Max’s shoulder and say, “Really, Buddy?”   Then, I pull out a raggedy piece of paper from my purse, the back of some business card, so that I can quickly record this moment,  so that it does not get jumbled with all the other moments that have brushed by this week.

I guess I could describe how Pujols popped a game-tying RBI double to right field, or how Matt Holliday followed that up with a homerun to center, and how the fireworks exploded.  Or how Molina picked off Venable to end the seventh, and how the Redbirds brought home a 7-4 win with 13 hits. For these are the details that Max will surely want to share again, years from now, when he says, “Mommy, remember when we went to that game together against the Padres and…”  But I know that, to the disappointment of my Cardinals crazed son, I will have to admit that, no, this is not what I remember, but you can tell me again about that homerun, if you want to…

And maybe, when you, Max, are finished recounting all the details, it will be my turn.

I will remind you of how there was a perfect breeze on that last August night before school started, and how you reached out a few times to grab my hand and to hold it.  And how you told me three times that this is your “favorite way to spend special time with Mommy.”

And I will remind you of how I bought you a mound of blue cotton candy, and how I watched you pick at it with one hand, your giant glove encasing the other one.

And, finally, I will remind you of your plan to toss your prize to the boy sitting two seats over to the left, to the boy with the hurricane laugh, to the boy who you decided needed something magical to fly his way. And though that moment passed without the fanfare of a fireworks display, it was, my son, far more beautiful and impressive than Holliday’s 431-foot bomb.

I am a three.

A year ago, I handed Max a notebook with an image of the The Cat in the Hat emblazoned on the front, a freebie that I had picked up at some teacher’s conference.  Until last night, I never knew that he cared about it.

Apparently, he has become a regular William Bradford, my sweet son, chronicling his travails and his triumphs, scribbling away, night after night, page after page.

Last night, he revealed his musings to me.

Other than a snippet of disappointment about the fact that it was July and he had only been inside Busch Stadium one time in 2009,  there was not even a brief mention of his beloved Redbirds.  That was the first surprise.

Instead, what Max has created is mostly a compilation of lists.  Lists and rankings.  His scale for these rankings begins not at one, but at zero.  A four is perfection, mastery, an A-plus.

The criteria?  That’s a little bit fuzzy, the boy’s private terrain, I suppose.

But one of Max’s classmates, the son of a St. Louis Rams football player, (now traded), and “a cheater at soccer,” regularly earns zeroes.    A few girls in his class earn solid 4s.   Interesting.  And a tiny bit disconcerting.

Little Sister Sarah, whose baby-talk to the dog, Hooch, might, one day, drive Max to the Absolut bottle atop the refrigerator (right now, he can’t reach it and, anyway, refuses to drink anything but apple juice), Sarah earns mostly ones.  Occasionally, when they have conspired against me (ex:  stealthily slipping carrots to Hooch during dinner, or hiding one of my New Balance when I already can’t find my keys and they are late for their dental checkup), then Sarah’s ranking improves, but just a tad.

Lorne mostly earns fours.  You know how Dads are.  Just last night, he arrived home with some 5,000-page history of college football, complete with charts and tables, oh, and lists.   “Buddy, I found it on the sale table at Border’s for a dollar.”  I mean, how do you compete with that?

Hooch earns fours too.  Every day. That silly hound has a perfect stream of fours, even though he has disemboweled at least twelve of the boy’s stuffed animals.

And the woman who slaves over his favorite dinner (frozen cheese pizza and grapes), who always stocks plenty of Life cereal in the pantry, who taught him how to tie his cleats, to ride a big-boy bike, to move a knight and a bishop, to wear clothes that sort of match, that woman mostly earns 3s.

Once, during a visit with his aunt in Miami, he ranked some Israeli girl, with whom he had spent a grand total of five minutes, higher than he ranked his dear old Mom.  Ummm, yeah.  Maybe that’s because Ofeer got bitten in the face by my sister’s shaggy dog and so she earned sympathy points.  Or maybe that’s the day that he asked me to play a fourteenth game of ping-pong (and I refused).  Maybe…

On one particular Tuesday in April, in this Cat in the Hat journal that he keeps beside his bed (the bed with the Cardinals blanket, that you-know-who bought him, and earned a 4), Max referred to me as, “Bad Mood Mommy…” (note: capital letters have been added by the English teacher).  I think I earned a two on that Tuesday.  That seems somewhat generous for a day when I garnered such a grand title from my eldest child.

I could go on.

A few days ago, during the last morning of a writer’s workshop at Lesley University in Cambridge, a colleague asked each of us the poignant question:  “Why do you write?”

My answer is simple.  I write because doing so gives me a voice that feels more powerful and braver than my real voice.  I write to help me make sense of this crazy world and because it makes me feel so, so alive.

And I love that Max pulls out this notebook at the end of a day in his nine-year-old life and makes sense of it all, imbues himself with power, coronates himself as king with his lists and his numbers and his tallying.  He is a writer, my son.  And Bad Mood Mommy could not be prouder of that fact.

The little guy, who seems suddenly so darn big, upholds high standards, too, showering only the deserving with an A.  I like that.  After all, quality is quality, right?  Maybe tomorrow, if I hug him a little tighter or listen to his stories with a little less distraction, I might just squeak by with a 3.5.

I have been overwhelmed by the many responses to my blog post, “This Is What I Learned Today,” a description of this sweet kid, my student, who viewed life as little more than a mountain of disappointment.

Thank you for the comments and the emails, for the kind words and the insights, and, most of all, for the empathy.

In the film, Antwone Fisher, a story of resilience, and, ultimately, of hope, Antwone asks his dear friend, Who Will Cry for the Little Boy?

Great question.

Who will “cry” for this boy, my student?  The answer is that his principal will.  His school counselor will.  You will.  I will.  And, because of that, though there might not be a Happily Ever After end to this tale, right now, at least, the kid is getting what he needs.  A visit to the doctor.  New glasses.  Unbroken promises.  Attention.  Hope.

And just yesterday afternoon, he presented a copy of Antwone Fisher’s poem to me, with the words, “I Love You, Ms. Baker” scribbled at the bottom.  I will keep this tucked inside a folder, in the front of a file cabinet filled with fifteen years of paper that, mostly, I don’t care much about.  And maybe one day, my own children will discover the poem, and then they will better understand this person they call Mom.

But none of this is about me.  And while I am glad that my actions seem to have inspired others, I certainly am not heroic.

As Helen Keller, a true hero, reminds us, “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

Waltz into PetsMart on any Saturday or Sunday afternoon and there stands Amanda, scrappy dog in arms, persuading some passerby to love the abandoned animals from the Saint Francois shelter, to take them home.  She is fourteen.  She is one.

And then there is Jillian, a high school track star, who has collected 2,000 pairs of shoes to donate to those forced to go barefoot. She is sixteen.  She is one.

And then there is Sarah, who, every night, battles the tangles in her hair, crying, sometimes, as she brushes, because, gosh darn it, she is determined to let it grow longer.  Why? She wants to present her beautiful locks to another little girl who has no hair, to another little girl who is not quite as lucky.  She is six.  She is one.

Every day, I am inspired by those in my small world who refuse to be gobbled up by the enormity of the world’s problems, by those who not only cry for the little boy, but who will not allow inequity and injustice to go unnoticed.  Every day, I see those who find ways to mend the brokenness.

I hope that you, too, are this lucky.

I would love to hear your stories.

It’s Monday.

I am fairly certain that I did not teach anyone anything today.  But I learned.

I learned that if you want to take a fourteen-year-old to get a physical, so that he can look forward to something in his life, like playing high school football, so that he can get some years-ago needed glasses, so that he can quit squinting when he needs to copy numbers from the whiteboard in his algebra class, so that he can find out why his leg throbs all the time, so that maybe, just maybe, he can get a referral to a dentist because he has never been to one in his life and his left molar is killing him, yes, I learned that if you want to take this fourteen-year-old to get a physical, you had better make sure that his Medicaid card has not suddenly become inactive.  Because I never knew that Medicaid could just quit working, like a beat up old washing machine.  And I learned that if that card is suddenly inactive, there ain’t no way that you’re gonna get someone from that darn 800 number printed on the back to answer the friggin’ phone to tell you why this kid with no parents has a bum Medicaid card.  And I learned that even if, after calling sixteen times and giving up, you are willing to shell out the 75 bucks for the physical because, gosh darnit, this kid who has already missed the whole basketball season because he had no physical, this kid is, for once, gonna get exactly what he needs, well, I learned that even that ain’t as easy it sounds.

And when I yank out my credit card and he mutters, “Thanks, Ms. Baker” and looks up at me with these grateful eyes, I think, jeez, please, please don’t say thank you because you kid, no kid, should have to say thank you for getting to see a doctor at some clinic so that he can play high school football.

So we sit down and pretend to be amused by all of the little kids running all over the place, waiting for their appointments. But then they call me up to the counter and they see me, a white woman, with this black-skinned teenager and they ask, “is he a ward of the state?’ and my answer is “no” and they ask “are you are the guardian?” and my answer is “no” and they ask, “are you the case worker?” and my answer is “no”, and then they ask again if he is a ward of the state.  And now they want to know who the heck this white woman is, and I whisper, “I am his teacher,” that’s who I am.  I am someone who gives a damn about him, who wants him to get his glasses and wants his knee to quit hurting.  I am someone who knows that he is bright and inquisitive, well-mannered and lonely, and that he is three feet away from getting lost, Miss, just three feet, and I am someone who knows that that just cannot be okay.  And that maybe I am deranged for even considering this, but I think that this physical may be this doctor’s bright and shining moment, because this physical may just help save this kid’s life.

And so then they ask if I have a note from the guardian and I want to scream in jubilation,  “YES!”  because yes I do, I have this scribbled note from his guardian, this guardian who happens to be the 20ish-year-old brother of this boy, this boy without the working Medicaid card, this boy whose mom died a year ago this Friday, this boy whose dad has long ago disappeared.  And I feel this sudden rush, because, holy cow, I have this letter, I have the $75, we passed the test, and we are almost at the end of this journey.  But then she says, “No ma’am.  The letter, it needs to be notarized.”

No.

I retrieve the 75 dollar refund and I whisper, I’m sorry, to him, which, to my own ears sounds pathetic, and he says, “It’s not your fault, Ms. Baker,” and, of course, I know that.  I think.  But maybe it is my fault.  Maybe it is our fault.  Our collective fault. Because it can’t be nobody’s fault, and I just don’t know who to blame.

Then he asks me what a notary is and how a person becomes one, because this kid asks and asks and asks, this kid is hungry to know everything about how this complicated world really works.

After bumbling through an explanation, I smile a weak smile and say, “You know, after my kids go to the doctor, we always head out for ice cream.”  So we drive to Ben and Jerry’s and he orders a chocolate-peanut butter milkshake with whipped cream and I order nothing because I feel just too darn disgusted to eat ice cream.  And then he tells me that he just knew he was not going to get that physical today, and when, dumbfounded, I ask him why not– we had the appointment and the Medicaid and the note and the money– he says, because, Ms. Baker, I just don’t ever expect things are gonna work out for me.

This is what I learned today.

“I don’t get something, Mommy.  Why did Drew have one mommy at the chess tournament this week and a different mommy last week?”

“Duh, Sarah, he’s got two mommies, ” Max interrupts, in his I-am-oh-so-much-more-brilliant-than-my-dumb-first-grade-sister tone.

Though I have a slice of pizza in one hand, I grasp a pencil and pull an envelope from the pile of bills stacked next to me.  I am prepared.  This banter is about to get interesting.  Very interesting.  And the reporter in me is desperate to capture every word.

I wait.  Not for long.

“Was there a divorce?” asks the six year old.

Divorce?  When did she learn about divorce?

“No, Sarah,” answers Wise Eight Year Old, exasperated.  “There never was a dad.”

When did he become an expert on this kid’s family? He barely knows him.  But this boy has inherited his father’s shmoozing genes, so, somehow, I trust his assessment of the family background.

“But there’s one thing I don’t get, Mommy,” he says.

One thing?  Yeah, right.  Here comes the blizzard.  Hold on, buddy.  Hold the floodgates.  Let me  Google, “How To Talk to Your Children about Homosexuality” or, at least, let me  Phone-a-Friend.  Give me some time.  Where the heck is that parenting manual that I have not opened in three years?  You know, the one with all of the answers?

“Which mom’s belly did Drew pop out of?”

Which belly?  Belly! I love that.  Okay, I have an answer for that one.

“Honey, I don’t really know.  It’s not our business.  And babies don’t pop out of bellies.”

Oh man.  Did I really need to add that last part?  Did I really want to have The Sex Talk right now, over a pizza dinner, with my husband stuck in traffic on Highway 40?  What was I thinking?

“Wait.  I don’t get it,” Sarah pipes in.  “Are the two moms married?”

I don’t know.  Maybe.  Probably not.  You see, Honey, Harvey Milk tried…he really tried but people they just don’t like…they just don’t…and now in California, it’s all a mess because…

“Probably not, but I don’t really know.  They love each other, so they decided that they wanted to live with each other and have a life together.  Every family is different.”

When did I become an expert on this kid’s family?  I don’t even know these people.  But, I guess that’s a decent answer.  I’ll give it a seven.  Not quite Mother of the Year, but not terrible.

“But if they just love each other and they’re not married, then how can they have a baby?”

Had I instructed her on The Order — marriage first, babies second?  I didn’t remember.  I start to perspire and wonder if my husband is ever going to get home from work.  This is getting complicated.

“Wait…can boys marry boys?”

Well, you see, Son, voters have approved constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.

“Wait.”  Max suddenly remembers the importance of the woman’s belly. “But if they did, they couldn’t have any kids.”

“Well, I think it would be great to have two mommies,” Sarah announces.  “Because Dads aren’t that great at cooking.  And then one mommy could play with the kids while the other mommy cooks dinner.”

Down with Daddies.

“I think it would be bad because you wouldn’t have a dad.”

Up with Daddies.

****

It is a Thursday, which means that, earlier today, twelve boys had congregated in my room, as they do every Thursday, for The Baker Boys-Only After School Book Club.  Today, we talked about Indian culture, about anger, and about forgiveness, but mostly we just listened.  We listened to Sherman Alexie reading his powerful narrative, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, to this description of the narrator’s grandmother, who had just been killed by a drunk driver:

And, yeah, my grandmother was smart and kind and had traveled to about 100 different Indian reservations, but that had nothing to do with her greatness.

My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance...

My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing in the world, especially among other Indians.

“Jeez,” she said. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man?  All I want to know is who’s going to pick up all the dirty socks?”

****

And as I sit at our dinner table talking about Drew’s two moms, I think about this grandmother and I wonder how she became the person that she did.  And I think about being a mom and trying to teach my children that answers are not always simple and that laws are not always fair and that love does not always look the way that it does in those silly Princess stories.  And I want to utter profound truths, but, instead, I feel like I have barely said anything.

“Mom, I think I get it now.”

You do, Sarah?  Really?  I smile.

“And I don’t really think we should ask Drew which belly he popped out of. I don’t think that’s a nice question.”

Yeah.  Probably not, Sweetie.

Tolerance.

“But, Mom, I have another question and it’s important, so make sure you keep writing stuff down.”

Here we go.  I’m ready.

“Who exactly invented pizza?”

Several times in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch advises his children that, “it’s not time to worry yet.”  There is darkness looming, yet, he says, it’s not time, not yet.  Go play.

And the children are able to hear their father’s words and, yup, to go play.  That is the magical part.  They just, snap, snap, cease their fretting, confident that Atticus will let them know when to fire up those worry engines again.

If only life were that simple.

If only when you were so busy picking those cuticles or biting those nails or waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, or spending three hours, head on pillowcase, desperately trying to shut down, you actually had someone who could convince silly you that, “it’s not time to worry yet.” And off to sleep you would go.  Peace would grab hold of you and shake you until everything else dissipated.

The problem is that there is such a darn long list of things to worry about, with this recession and this crummy environment and this new year of bloodshed for Israel.  And I worry about what  I should say to parents whose children failed my class first semester, to those parents whose children still cannot write a cohesive paragraph.  Are they ready for high school?  Should we send them to high school?  Is it better or worse to leave them behind? And I worry whether I even have enough patience for my student teacher.  And am I being a positive role model for her?  And I  worry about the fact that my own third grader may have scored six points in the championship game this morning but he hasn’t picked up a book to read on his own in, hmmmm, has it been months already?

Oh, this is just the beginning; there’s no shortage on my list.  And there’s no Atticus, calming my fears.

It’s not like I think about this all the time though, but the topic of The Fine Art of Worrying grabbed me, yet again, when I ran out for a  gallon of skim milk this past Thursday afternoon and quickly called Dad, down in Florida, who sounded overwhelmed and defeated.  He heads in for a spinal tap on Monday to determine whether we are entering Round #3:  Gene Solomon vs. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

I wanted, so desperately, to be Scout, to hear my father’s calming voice, “No, Deb, it’s not time to worry yet,”  but, instead, I heard a voice that was disgusted, a voice that was frightened, a voice that knows, full well, that if that spinal fluid looks the wrong color, or the wrong consistency, or the wrong whatever the heck way it should look, then things are going to get ugly and ugly fast.

I don’t care that I’m 40 now, not six, hearing Dad’s frightened voice scares me and makes me cry.

So I grab the milk off the shelf, wipe my face, and quickly switch to the topic of books. He tells me he has finished Indignation (Philip Roth), which I think he had just started the day before, and he has finished Epilogue (Anne Roiphe) and now is diving into his, oh, let’s just say, his sixth book of the new year, give or take a book or two.

And I tell Dad about my eleven male students who willingly stay after school with me on Thursdays for skim milk and cookies and to listen with me to the beautiful audio rendering of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  And I hope that Dad is proud of me.

He asks how to spell the author’s name.

A-l-e-x-i-e, I say.

“What do you think of Louise Erdrich?” he asks.

So we schmooze about books, but as I pull back up into the parking lot and head back inside school armed with the gallon of milk for my Book Club Boys, I know that we’ve got to return to reality.

I hear myself trying desperately to be Atticus for my frightened father.  Try not to worry, Dad, I hear myself saying to him. Remember there are lots of possibilities here, and this is just one that the doctors want to rule out.  Dad, it’s not time to worry yet.

And I stand outside my classroom door, trying to breathe, preparing to enter, and I wonder whether Atticus believed his own words.

“A good book is never finished—it goes on whispering to you from the wall.”
–Virginia Wolff (YA author)

“Buildings are designed to hold us and protect us and shelter us. To me, a good book is the same way.” –Madeleine George (author of Looks)

They are sweater-wearing human beings with fear of isolation, with bitterness toward alcoholic parents, with anger at the middle school ghosts that still remind them years, even decades, later of that popularity that never emerged, of those boys who never behaved like the princes they had been promised. They have hopes and visions of a world where the virtuous triumph, where loyalty to a cause is not met with bitterness or sarcasm. They are not Wonder Women. Or Supermen. And certainly they are not Incredible Hulks.

They are authors.

Yes, authors have always been heroic to me. Whenever life has become too complicated, too overwhelming, too filled with hurt or confusion, I have cracked open the pages and flown away. After all, who does not seek comfort from the harshness? Books are a relief. And the just-right book at the just-right time? Perfect.

So, as I sat for days, listening to those mere mortals, speak at the Young Adult Literature conference (ALAN) in San Antonio last week, they impressed me, inspired me and made me want to jump out of my seat, get The Wave going, scream words of gratitude toward them.

But, not having done The Wave with any enthusiasm since my days huddled beneath sweaters and face masks in the University of Michigan football stadium, and certainly never having been the kind of person who would ever actually initiate The Wave, I sat silently, listened wave-less, and scribbled pages upon pages of notes, mostly on hotel stationery.

Here is a snapshot of what I heard.

These mortals write to make sense of their fears.

“I learned that I would need to fight my fear in life and that I would do that through my writing.”
–Nancy Werlin
Thus, Werlin gave birth to her novel, Rules of Survival, about the fear facing three children whose mother has angry outbursts that leave them insecure and panicked.

They write from their dreams.

“I had a dream that wound up becoming Speak. The book was really me finding my own voice. It was my way to work on my own frustration at seeing things clearly but getting shut down when I tried to talk about them.”
–Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

They write from their anger.
“I participated in many science fairs and I really hated them, so I wrote a comedy about a science fair.”
–Greg Leitich Smith

“Feed [resulted from my own] deep anger—anger about the way we live our lives… [There were always these images of] teen “cool”—images of the gorgeous, and I felt ugly. I tried to buy the clothes I was supposed to want.”
–M.T. Anderson (Feed)

And they write to express their deep sense of how the world should be.
“[Books] provide us with a lens through which we can look at justice, opportunity, liberty, and a lens by which to understand and maybe even modify our human behavior.”
–Ellen Hopkins (author of Crank)

Ellen Hopkins has 13,000 friends-fans on Facebook.

——–

“…We aren’t North American, South American, Asian…we are human beings. No matter our races, our genders, our nationalities, we share the same human heart. The surface details may be different, but what is real is the guts of it, the heart of it. This emotional truth is what I try to communicate in all my books.
“…Math and sciences are prized for being knowledge-based. But literature is the most necessary study of all—it asks us to engage human emotions, to develop empathy. It is a bridge across divides. It asks us to see the other in ourselves and ourselves in the other.”
Allan Stratton (author of Chanda’s Secret)
* * * *

Listening to these human beings speak of their craft, of their inspiration, and of their fulfillment inspired me, yet again, to draft the first few paragraphs of a story that will, who knows, maybe even transform magically into an entire novel. Perhaps this time, I will actually move beyond a beginning, into a middle and, dare I say, even to an end.

I cannot believe that I just wrote that. How I have just cursed myself, a curse equivalent to muttering aloud, “I am lucky that I have such healthy kids.”

There are mounds of other opening scenes in my pile marked “To Finish When I Have Time.” There is a whole city of skyscrapers with just one floor.

Will this one materialize?

Or will this one, too, be pushed aside, as unread student work and I-can’t-believe-you’re-an-English-teacher-and-haven’t-read-that-novel demand my attention? Will it be pushed aside because there is a flabby stomach to tone, children to wrestle with, and a whole panoply of daydreams that require constant nurturing and attention?  Will it be pushed aside because there are noodle kugels, beds, apologies, and excuses all waiting to be made?

I hear my stories screaming, “Write me already. What the heck are you waiting for? Aren’t you always urging those students to focus? Focus yourself, Woman. No, don’t click. Don’t click! Resist the pull to pay attention to something else. Be brave. Be brave, oh wimpy one.”

Off I go…