To the Finish Line

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.