Such a challenging moment. I think it is right and appropriate to be grieving right now, but in our upbeat culture, we’re pushing forward with that great determined American spirit. And of course, we must push forward. As teachers, people are relying on us.

Nonetheless, I find myself swimming in deep, choppy waters.  I recently read a piece by Richard Rohr about the Dark Emotions.  Despite the whiff of condescension in this comment, it resonated:  

While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most.

I am rattled.

I am worried for a friend.  And beyond that, I am afraid of two things:  the trajectory of the virus, and the shortage of medical care for the wave that is directly in front of us.  And the real possibility that Donald Trump has a good and legitimate reason to suspend November elections.  (Did you know that his approval numbers are up? Because he stands up and lies on TV every day?)  Many states have a mail-in voting system, but not all 50 states.  And there is inadequate money in this new bill to make the election safe from COVID19.  Why aren’t people freaking out about this?

In another sense, I am completely fine.  I’ve been walking, practicing yoga, cooking, baking, cleaning, and packing a few things up.  I have writing to work on, and my creative projects are whispering to me from backstage.

I am living in slow motion here in my little house. Everything has come to a grinding halt, and like everyone, I am spending an inordinate amount of time staring at screens: iPhone, laptop, television. Yoga practice comes through a screen; my meditation experiences begin through an app, and now my social experiences? People are ZOOMing happy hours, getting the brief respite a friendly face can bring.

I worry over it, even as a sit in front of this keyboard, reading and writing for hours at a time. Is this the way we are to live? Barefoot and in our robes at 2:30 in the afternoon, looking out at the world, the COVID19 numbers, and thinking about what comes next? “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” say the experts.

I might seem glum, but in truth, the smiling, super-productive people worry me. (I don’t begrudge anyone the fact that they got dressed. I could be taking things a little too far today.) It’s just that this is no time to be posting things on social media that makes it seem like the good times just don’t stop, and that stock-piled hand-sanitizer and toilet paper are going to carry us through unscathed. People are dying. In New York City, they are putting the dead in refrigerated trucks.

There is a purposeful way to live in a world rendered eerie and unrecognizable by a virus we cannot stop. For me, I think it involves getting off screens for a sizable part of the day.

Strange thing to be saying on the day that I resurrect my blog.

Pie four is classic apple and it featured a delicious flaky crust (that simple butter crust that I’m starting to trust), with an organic Granny Smith apple filling.  It was tart!  I cooked the apples in lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg until the apples were soft; then I drained off the juice, and cooked the juice over a low heat with butter, until it reduced and caramelized a bit.  Maybe I was too impatient. Also, I think this pie still looks too light in color.  I want a golden brown, so to my eye this pie looks pale.  Maddy disagrees.  She says it looks right.

Another thing about this pie is that I did not adequately meld the top and the bottom together, so the top sort of lifted off.  And again, the edges…I don’t know how to make that beautiful fluted edge that my mom used to make with her fingers. She just did it, and like any magic trick that you live with day-in and day-out, it just seemed ordinary, so I didn’t pay attention.  SMH.  All those magical things that Evelyn did when I wasn’t looking or paying her any mind.  What I wouldn’t give for another year with my mom.

Pie is all about the crust.  I’m just trying to find the right crust recipe, and I think this may be it — three ingredients: flour, butter and ice water.  And next up in the skill department:  I need to learn to seal and crimp edges.  Still wondering about that uneven color (could it be my oven?), but this crust was flaky, delicious, light, and it did not rip.   I did use an egg wash on top.

School is getting ready to start up again, and January — the end of first semester — is going to be hairy.  In addition, Erich and I have a writing deadline, and there’s SO MUCH grading to do, so it will be a while before I tackle Pie Four.

But 2016 is the year of many pies. #52pieproject   Tools that I want: interesting cookie cutters for decorative flourishes, and a good quality pastry brush.

Happy New Year!

For Pie Two in my #52PieProject, I liberally modified a Martha Stewart recipe for the filling (and never again! Her site is plagued by advertising pop-ups — worse than most! and the recipe called for apples and raisins, which I just am not interested in trying), and then I used the very same recipe for the crust as I used for Pie One.

The result were these lovely little empañada-style pies — delicious and fun to eat.  I’d like to make more and freeze them.  They seem like the perfect lunch.  And I’ve found a new pie crust recipe that I cannot wait to try with tonight’s Chicken Pot Pie! Stay tuned.

I always give the finger to anyone who blows their horn at me, even if they have a point.   It just seems like the right thing to do.  Horns lack subtlety of any kind, and even though the guy today may have been justified in blasting his big Dodge Ram horn at my little Toyota Matrix, I still felt I should flip him off, so I did.

The thing about teaching at a large public high school though is that the closer you are in proximity to the school in the morning, the more likely you know the person in the Dodge Ram.  Even more likely: they know you.

Teachers live in a fishbowl, and fish inside fishbowls should not give the finger to anyone. Or fin.  Fin You!

The morning is such a struggle.  I walk Hank, and we don’t even go that far.  I am always trying to leave earlier than I do, but I end up leaving right at 7:00, and even a little later.  That puts so much pressure on my commute up the 605 — nothing can go wrong.  And then I’m driving in with all the parents and kids, and I frequently end up practicing deep breathing to keep from losing my mind.  I walk in with my bags draped across my body (backpack, lunch bag, canvas sack of (untouched) work, purse) and open the door to the kids.  Bell rings, and it’s off to the races.

What would be better:  getting up much earlier, and walking Hank much farther, and leaving earlier, and getting to school earlier.  All of that would be better.

Most people need to sleep more.  I need to sleep more.  And people get better sleep and rest when they go to bed earlier than they do when they sleep in later. Just more time in bed does not necessarily mean more rest or better rest.  And they say that 7 hours of sleep is essential. (Essential.  I think we’re going to find out that all of this sleep deprivation we’ve taught ourselves to live with is just as bad as smoking.)

Here’s another thing they say: we should disconnect from screens at least an hour before bed.  It’s even better to disconnect TWO hours before bed.

So here’s the day as it SHOULD be.  I should hear my alarm at 5am, and get up the first time.

Because the other thing they say is that you should set your alarm a half hour earlier and get up the first time.  With this simple act, you teach yourself to overcome the fat, hairy resistance that sits between you and your higher purpose.  There are so many things that we want to do, but we never get started.  But we teach ourselves to do what is best by getting up the first time the alarm goes off.

So, it goes off at 5:00.

I should be clean already.
My lunch should be made.
My clothes should be pressed and ready to go.
I go out to the kitchen, drink lemon, honey and cayenne pepper on an empty stomach.
Then I should do a 10-minute work out, working towards the day that these are easy, and I need to add more strenuous exercise to that short routine.
By now, it’s 5:30.
Get dressed, pack up my bags, get everything staged for loading, eat oatmeal, and some lean protein. Maybe chop up a hard-boiled egg white and toss it into the oatmeal.
6:00 a.m., walk Hank for 30 minutes.
6:30 a.m. settle Hank in, and then leave.
Arrive at school at 7a.m. at the latest.
Why? No traffic.  No long line at the copy machine.  Quiet time in the classroom with the black journal, plan the day.
7:30 TEACH LIKE A MANIAC ALL DAY
1:00 Lunch.  Get out of the classroom and seek the company of other adults.  Eat a healthy lunch. 
1:30 Drink a big coffee, and work (grading, planning, never ending email) until 4:00  [work hours:  8 hours]
4:00 Come home, drink a big water and eat a gigantic salad.
5:00 Hank time
6:30 Write, read, plan, work until 8:30. [2 hours]
8:30  Yoga mat
9:00  shower, prepare lunch, lay out clothes, journal, meditate.  Bed by 10.

The routine that I always thought to be so rigid, so inflexible, so SQUARE — look.  It’s actually the path to liberation.

Here’s some wisdom I’ve finally earned:  there is no time to waste.  I like to be flexible and you know, take a phone call now and then, but honestly, the day is busy.  The weeks fly by.  There are not enough hours to do everything that I want to do, everything that I should, and get my work done too.  Everything — the food, the exercise, the quiet time, the Hank time, the writing time, and reading time…all of that adds up.  And when I’m into a stack of papers, I can’t stop, can I?  It’s difficult.  When I’ve built up some momentum with a stack, I need to keep going.

If you have an answer, let me know.  Surely this is the path to sanity, but my feet do not seem able to stay upon it for long.

It wasn’t terrible, but for me it was out of character.  My excuses are perfectly legitimate — I hate the question, I’m sleep deprived, and I’m defensive about this because the question (no, the answer) seems to imply I’m disinterested or incompetent.

The students turned in essays on Friday, and today is Monday;  the question this unsuspecting student asked was, “Are you finished reading the essays?”

And because I spent so much of my free time this past weekend working on grades — and it was a sunny, crisp fall weekend, perfect for golf, hiking, biking, maybe one of the last nice weekends in a while — and I am cranky from reading student work all of the time, like a martyr or a lunatic, I snapped.

“Are you kidding me!?  Do the math!  That would be impossible.  There are not enough hours in a weekend for me to take home a tall stack on Friday, and be done on Monday, AND get report cards in.”

He was taken aback by the ferocity of my answer.  (Kids have no idea.)  I turned on him like a cat whose tail has been stepped on.  He was apologetic, which made me see what a jerk I was.  Because what was this kid actually asking?

“Have you read my essay? Is it any good?”

And that, homies, is MY JOB.  My work is to give meaningful feedback so they can grow, and these papers I’ve collected are their personal statements, so they have bared their souls and are feeling nervous about it.  They want and need a gentle and helpful reader.  Someone who takes them seriously as a writer.  And although their peers have been all over those papers, what they really want, and what they really need…is me.

But I think that kid may be a bit wary of me from now on.  I apologized to him twice, but I feel like I damaged something.

This is what I spoke about at the October 10 School Board meeting.  I said to the board, “I have 175 students.  If I assigned one paragraph to all of my students, and if I took 4 minutes for each writing sample — to read it, analyze what’s working and what is not, then to write a terse and directive note, and a note of encouragement — it would take me over 11 hours to work through that stack.  So I can’t give that paragraph 4 minutes.  The best I can do is 40 seconds — and the only thing I can say to a kid in 40 seconds is Check! Plus! Minus!”

Not helpful to the writer.  Not a good use of my time.  Scoring in this way becomes nothing more than a bookkeeping task, when what kids actually need is feedback.  More than a grade, they need to know what to do next to improve.

And when would I put those 11 hours together to read those paragraphs?  During my paid work day?  Not possible.  I take my free time to do that work — time that other people spend doing things like, well, everything else that composes a good life.  Me? I need exercise and rest and time with my loved ones.  I don’t get enough of that vital stuff during the school year.  I also don’t take the 4 minutes that the kids need on that paragraph.  I cannot.  Because the next day, it’s something else.  There’s always something new to do.

And here, we’re talking about essays — not just paragraphs.  On an essay like this, I cannot give any kind of feedback in under 6 minutes.  Six minutes is fast reading, fast writing.  And, of course, I’m a veteran, so I would never assign (rarely assign) every student on my roster a paper that is due on the same day — even the same week!  Even so.  To get through these essays is going to take some time.

It is unreasonable to expect English teachers to see over 150 kids in a day.  It just is.  It’s not this kid’s fault.  And it’s not mine.

I first noticed you maybe two years ago?  Maybe more?  You were so tall, so substantial — so wide!, and when you walked you swayed and swung your arms, sort of stiffly, like a metronome.  There, in the early morning light, as I passed you in the car on my way to work — I saw you that were wearing earbuds, striding down the street to your own private and steady rhythm, in the dark, in the rain, in the early morning — every day.

I saw you every day.

Soon, you were scenery.  I’d note your presence, but you did not occupy my thoughts.  I’d think, “Oh gosh, there’s that lady with the big butt.  Good for her.”

When I see you now, you are still tall, of course, but so slender,  still swaying when you walk but lately mostly running — a testament to patience, persistence and discipline.  Now when I pass you, I reflect on the lessons in your gait.

I often have thought of writing you a letter to tell you this  — I saw you one time, talking on your cell phone and getting out of a car on a driveway, so I’m pretty sure you live right around the corner from me — no more than 10 houses away.  But then I think, “she walks through the neighborhood with such a light step, with no self-consciousness about her.  What if she starts wondering who is watching her, who is writing her letters?  What if she starts peering into passing cars?” and I stop.  I’m sure I’d get the creeps if I thought my daily activities were being observed by a stranger and noted, no matter how benign the intentions.

So I’ll write to you here, on my blog.  You’ll never see it, most likely.  It’s for the best.

But you are one of my heroes, and every day that I pass you, I send out a little puff of love and respect.  Maybe you’ll run through the cloud I send, or maybe its particles will dissipate and float around, and a stray few will eventually settle on the top of your head and shoulders.  I hope so.  I hope when I drive by, you don’t know why, but suddenly your pace feels easy, and a renewed energy floods through you.

Namaste.

I am in the middle of several books, and really, no real reading can go forward until I finish Infinite Jest.  I have nearly every single book possible written by or about David Foster Wallace, and I’m working my way through.  I have a posthumous fangirl thing going on with him.  In addition, I belong to two book clubs.  The 2nd Thursday Book club (I refer to this one as ‘the real book club’) just finished This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, and has chosen Black Swan Green by David Mitchell for April.  The book club at work (not ‘a fake book club’ by any means, but younger, more fluid in its membership, and less regular in its meetings) is reading Gone Girl by I-don’t-even-know-who.  Welch?  Flynn.  It’s a bestseller.  Look it up.

Yesterday, I went to the 31st annual Literary Women conference in Long Beach.  And I was bowled over.  And I purchased books.  I have new heros:  Dana Spiotta, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Michelle Huneven, Charlotte Rogan, Amy Waldman.  I bought some books.  I downloaded others.

My professional reading is piling up: I’m re-reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with my students; I’ve collected essays from kids, and the professional journals and emails pointing to web content are collecting on my actual and virtual desktops; loose pages, like the Fed-Ex packets of draft chapters from my work on the state framework committee, and binders of text to support our school’s accreditation work (WASC).  Did I mention the essays from kids?  Yes.  Those.  Hundreds.

Finally, a dear student from many years gone by has asked me to read her novel.  I read in snatches.  I can’t string together the requisite hours to give it a fair read.

And somehow, Blood Meridian has been speaking to me from the shelf.  Who knows why?  Clearly, I don’t have time to read Cormac McCarthy right now.  My real book club opted to read All the Pretty Horses for July, and not Blood Meridian, despite my suggestion — we have a friend who is a little more sensitive, and some things are just too harsh for her, so we often choose our books with this in mind — for example, The Road exemplified a terrible read for her:  too bleak, too dark, too violent. I wake up from sleep, drawn to Blood Meridian — a book known for its twisted violent vision — a book I’ve never read.

I can’t explain it, so I went and pulled it down from the shelf and opened to the middle.  Look at these sentences:

The judge knelt with his knife and cut the strap of the tigre-skin warbag the man carried and emptied it in the sand. It held an eyeshield made from a raven’s wing, a rosary of fruitseeds, a few gunflints, a handful of lead balls.  It also held a calculus or madstone from the inward parts of some beast and this the judge examined and pocketed.

And these, soon after:

They rode all day upon a pale gastine sparsely grown with saltbush and panicgrass.  In the evening they entrained upon a hollow ground that rang so roundly under the horses’ hooves that they stepped and sidled and rolled their eyes like circus animals and that night as they lay in that ground each heard, all heard, the dull boom of rock falling somewhere far below them in the awful darkness inside the world.

And just a few lines down:

The riders wore masks of boneblack smeared about their eyes and some had blacked the eyes of their horses.

warbag.  madstone. panicgrass.  boneblack.  pouring contents into sand.  the inward parts of a beast.  the awful darkness inside the world.  Holy shit, Cormac McCarthy.  That’s all I can say this morning.  I have things to do.  And I haven’t read your famous book.  Not yet.  But you’re working on me.  I don’t know why or how, but you’ve entered my head.

UPDATE:  Former student Marcus texted from college to tell me about a movie he saw and liked: Sunset Limited — based on a play by Cormac McCarthy.