That's Your Dirt In the Boss's Hole

This afternoon I was asked how I felt about working at a school where almost all the teachers were new to the school. I was being asked by one of the teachers who is new to the school this year, so I felt that I should be a little careful in my reply. I want to be forthcoming, but I don't want to cause any kind of stress-inducing fuss. So, I said this:
"It's good to be at a school where change can happen. We've been through a lot in my nine years here. I have worked with nine different principals. The principal we had three years ago passed away suddenly at the beginning of the year from liver cancer. The main building has been slated for modernization for eight years now. Two years ago they started the demolition work on the top floor and moved everyone up there out to portables. Those of us who were downstairs worked below the hammering, pounding, and even a broken pipe that caused a brief rainstorm in my classroom. All through this phase we walked kids through a chain link fence down to what we quietly referred to as 'the dungeon.' During this time our staff stayed relatively steady, last year we only replaced one teacher. Then came the bad news about our test scores. By all the standard measuring sticks (API, AYP, MOUSE) we were failing. That is to say that we were not making 'adequate yearly progress' or at least we were not making the progress required by state and federal legislation. Among our staff, we all pretty much agreed that holding steady under our current condition was progress enough. But weren't the ones who made the decisions about what happens to a Program Improvement school. We were given the choice of becoming a charter school or having our staff reconstituted. The charter option we were offered was sketchy at best, and so we picked option number two. Most of our staff left or wasn't asked back - the punch line being that our API went up almost thirty points last year. Sometimes I wonder if I was fortunate to be one of the teachers who was asked to stay. I got what I asked for, that's for sure. Now we have ten new teachers and the same gargantuan task. How do I feel? A little like Sisyphus, I guess."

Track Meet

I had met a lot of hippies. I grew up in Boulder. But I had never met one my own age. Ken was working on the shoulder-length hair way back in seventh grade, and started growing a beard by the end of eighth. It took us only a few months to get to know each other - we connected over Monty Python originally, then bonded firmly via a mutual adoration of "Jesus Christ Superstar." Ken liked the idea of playing Jesus, and he called me Herod. "So if you are the Christ, the Great Jesus Christ, prove to me that you're no fool - walk across my swimming pool." He drifted toward musical theater, I was in band. We needed each other for comic relief during our tormented early adolescence.
By ninth grade, I had made some effort to sublimate my band experience by going out for sports. I was on the middleweight football team, the wrestling team, and the track team. I tried hard to fit into the jock scene. I was surprised to see Ken show up for the first track practice of the year. A friend had talked him into running middle distance. We had apparently arrived, in ninth grade, at the same conclusion: girls might notice you if you went out for sports.
Near the end of the first practice, we were lined up in pairs to run 440 yards for time. Ken and I ended up near the end. We waited our turn, then stepped up to the line. I was in the A lane, he was in the B. Coach Straight (his real name) hollered at us to go. Off we went - once around the quarter mile track. Ken was lanky and had a longer stride from the start. I chugged along in my best tortoise fashion, and had pulled back even with him at the halfway mark. As I started to pull away, I could hear Ken exerting himself - a sound we were probably both unfamiliar with. On the straightaway, I increased my lead. There were a few hoots and shouts of encouragement. I was winning a race. I pushed myself still harder until I heard Ken calling from behind me, "Caven, don't beat me!" If he had been any closer, I would have lost the race by falling down laughing. When I crossed the finish line, I looked back and watched Ken labor through the last twenty yards.
Ken stayed on the team for the rest of the spring, though he never had a race. I was the backup shot put and discus thrower. I got to compete at two meets and was solidly trounced by all the other schools, including a guy who grew up to be an offensive lineman for the Indianapolis Colts.
When we got to high school, Ken and I stuck to theater and band. We didn't go out for sports because we knew that the winnowing process had begun in junior high. We weren't Jock Material. We kept our friendship - though he began to refer to himself as King of the Scots rather than the Jews. I wasn't sure what to make of that, since he still referred to me periodically as Herod. Maybe it was because of that race.

High Expectations

I am so very proud of my son. Yesterday he got together with a friend of his from across the street and they gathered up toys, videos and clothes that they could part with and arranged them on a tarp in front of our house. With a little help from Mom, they made some lemonade and got some cups. They set up a train track in the garage. Then they put up the signs: "Hurricane Sale," and "Train Runs $1.00." They stuck a big red construction paper cross on the front gate, and they settled in and waited. The Silly Six Pins game sold for two dollars - that was the big sale for the day. A few neighbors saw the signs and stopped by to drop a few dollars in the can (a Nestle's Quick container with a red cross taped to the front). They took turns watching the front and "checking on the train." They did this for two hours in the middle of their Sunday. No one ever did pay to run the train, and there was still a lot of extra stuff left to sell - no one bought the Teletubbies video, can you believe it? They counted up the money at the end. They had collected ten dollars and eighty-two cents. They put it in the mail to the Red Cross.
I have a friend who lives in Manhattan. He has very fresh memories of human suffering from 9/11. He was in Houston this past week on business. He had an afternoon to himself, so he hailed a cab and drove to the nearest grocery store. He filled the trunk and back seat with food, diapers, toys, and other things he could think of, then told the driver to take him to the Astrodome. When they got there, there was no one to tell them where to go, or what to do, so they got as close as they could. People lined up quickly and politely and when the contents of the cab were exhausted, he got back into the cab and returned to his hotel.
I want to be that proud of my government.

Running on Empty

I watched two guys pumping gas today. One was filling up the family mini-van, the other was gassing up the SUV. They leaned against their vehicles and didn't say a word to one another. A sign in front of the station listed two sets of prices: one for gas ($3 plus a gallon), and the other listed the price for a carton of Marlboros ($38.26). My guess is that in health-conscious Northern California, neither of these guys smoked, so they must have been saving money, right?
Some of the notions that have been swirling in my head for the past few hours suggest some kind of resiliency. The second phase of my grief (as well as most subsequent stages) involve some smart-ass response. It occurred to me that the National Guard should make good on the sketchy "commitment" that George W. Bush made back in the 70's and ask him to come on back for a month or two to help out in the Gulf Coast. He's shown how good he is at clearing brush on his extended stays in Crawford; why not put some of that talent to use clearing rubble in Biloxi or New Orleans? I understand that the government will help his employers cover his absence, and if he's gone for an extended period, maybe they could hire someone to replace him.
The other twisted notion was to have Disney buy the whole area, and have them turn it into one big entertainment complex. They could have a chance to rebuild New Orleans Square to scale, and the "cast members" could be hired directly from the pool of applicants waiting in line for food and shelter. At the very least, they could make standing in line a little more tolerable by having Mickey and his crew drop by to sign autographs and take some photos while they wait.
But really - here's what Tim Russert said on "Meet the Press" today:
"Joining us is the man in charge of the federal response to the disaster, the director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff.
Mr. Secretary, this is yesterday's Daily News: 'Shame Of A Nation.' And I want to read it to you and our viewers very carefully. It says, 'As for Chertoff, if this is the best his department can do, the homeland is not very secure at all. It is absolutely outrageous that the United States of America could not send help to tens of thousands of forlorn, frightened, sick and hungry human beings at least 24 hours before it did, arguably longer than that. Who is specifically at fault for what is nothing less than a national scandal... It will never be known exactly what a day could have meant to so many unfortunates whose lives came to an end in those hopelessly tortured hours--on scorching roadsides, for lack of a swallow of water, in sweltering hospital bads, for lack of insulin. But what is already more than clear is that the nation's disaster-preparedness mechanisms do not appear to be in the hands of officials who know how to run them.'
Mr. Secretary, are you or anyone who reports to you contemplating resignation?"
To which the Secretary of Homeland Security began to prattle on about his master's talking points. Then he was pressed more directly about the government's lack of preparedness. The wheels started to come off:
"And one last point I'd make is this, Tim. We had actually prestaged a tremendous number of supplies, meals, shelter, water. We had prestaged, even before the hurricane, dozens of Coast Guard helicopters, which were obviously nearby but not in the area. So the difficulty wasn't lack of supplies. The difficulty was that when the levee broke, it was very, very hard to get the supplies to the people. I-10 was submerged. There was only one significant road going all the way the way around. Much of the city was flooded. The only way to get to people and to get supplies was to have airdrops and helicopters. And frankly, it is very--and their first priority was rescuing people from rooftops. So we really had a tremendous strain on the capacity of--to be able to both rescue people and also to be able to get them supplies.
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Secretary, you say prestaged. People were sent to the Convention Center. There was no water, no food, no beds, no authorities there. There was no planning."
Come to think of it, maybe I'm not feeling any better about this just yet.

Lactose Recollection

I made a reference recently about someone being "the milkman's kid." I received blank stares as my response. Oh, that's a reference that has been made culturally irrelevant. I still remember the pre-dawn arrival of our milkman. The big Watts-Hardy Dairy truck came rumbling up the street, stopping first in front of the Cunning's house, then a faint tinkling of glass bottles in a wire rack. Sometimes I would lie in my bed and listen as he finished the delivery next door, then moved to our house. Sometimes I would stand up on my bed and stick my head up under the curtains to watch him work.
I have a sentimental notion of our milkman wearing a starched white shirt and clean, pressed pants - with a bow tie and a cap worn at just the right jaunty angle. It's more likely that he wore a grey jacket with the Watts-Hardy logo painted on the back. We had a milk box on our front porch where we put our empty bottles to be picked up and exchanged for fresh, full ones. I recall feeling that our personal space was somewhat violated when, on occasion, our milkman would use our hose to rinse out the empties.
There was a wonderful rite of passage in our house that involved the milkman. When you were old enough, one of the ways you could show your newfound responsibility was to be allowed to mark the milk card. It wasn't a difficult job, but you had to be very detail-oriented. We wanted one bottle of whole milk, two small cottage cheese, and one skim. At Christmastime we would get eggnog. If you were clever enough, you might just write a "2" instead of "1" in the eggnog column. The next morning, you could go out on the front porch, open up the box, and have them in the refrigerator before anyone was the wiser. I wonder what our milkman's name was - maybe I should ask my little brother...

Put Down The Camera And Give The Guy A Sandwich

Please remove this remote control from my hand and unplug my television. I do not want to watch anymore. I have stopped learning anything from watching the pain and suffering of my fellow Americans. The periodic refrain of that notion - these are Americans wading through waist high water; these are Americans waiting in line for buses that never come; these are Americans shooting at helicopters that are trying to bring supplies; these are Americans dying.
Reality TV my ass. "Too many cameras and not enough food," sang the Police once upon a time. There was a bit of smug solace in suffering taking place across the globe from us. I think of the T-shirt I got for donating to Live Aid. On the back it said "This Shirt Saved A Life." I've thought about that shirt a hundred times since then, always wishing that if that were really true if I could possibly be more discriminating about the life I chose to save.
But that's the real trick, isn't it? It doesn't matter in the end - a life is a life - in New Orleans or Niger. We watch and try to imagine what it must be like and then thank the deity of our choice that our lights are on and we're not sleeping in a domed sports stadium with no idea where our loved ones have gone. We're a privileged society with a short attention span. What happens when that society gets stripped away isn't pretty at all. Still, there's a lot of talk about where the Saints are going to play their home games. I consider this an amazing example of Ironic American Resiliency. It reminds me of the concerns after 9/11 about when it would be okay to play football again. Right now, I say - before I turn back to CNN.

Labor Day

Ah, here it comes - the Labor Day Weekend. I always get a little wistful this time of year, and not necessarily because it's time to put away the white bucks for the year. I return each Labor Day to the summers when my family would spend three months living in the mountains above Boulder. Tucked away in our little cabin, we had no running water, no telephone and perhaps most significantly, no electricity. No electricity meant no television. Each summer we lived in a world without reruns. When we stayed up late it was to read MAD magazine and comic books by kerosene lamplight, not to catch Creature Features on channel two.
On Memorial Day weekend each year, we knew that we wouldn't see the Indianapolis 500 because we would be moving in: two loads in mom's squareback VW, and Dad brought whatever didn't fit when he came up from work. Then we were set, sometimes for weeks at a time, until we headed "into town" for supplies.
Did I miss TV? Not in any active way, but there was a latent itch that I couldn't scratch. It was on these trips that we found ourselves, however briefly, around a television set. While the last load of laundry was in the dryer, my little brother and I would sit slack-jawed in front of whatever program we were fortunate enough to find in the late afternoon. I became quite fond of "The Match Game" as a result. Gene Rayburn held great significance in my world. Then it was time to turn off the tube and head for the hills again, wondering what came on later.
June and July flowed together, but August showed up as a warning. The days grew shorter, and we all knew that our lives as the Grizzly Family Caven were dwindling. No matter how I chose to prepare myself, Labor Day always came as a surprise. We talked a good game about getting home in time to see some of Jerry Lewis' MDA Telethon, but we all knew that was a sign of our summer's apocalypse. We wandered around the house, putting things away, watering plants, finding missing socks, taking baths to prepare for our reentry into society. And I can still hear Ed McMahon in the background, asking for a drum roll, as Jerry mugged shamelessly as the tote board revealed still more incredible amounts of pledges for his kids.
As a family we knew that the quiet time was over again for another year. The TV was on, and we were headed back to school.