Somnambulist

These days it's hard enough to get my son out of bed without calling the paramedics. On any given school day, it takes two parents and a specially prepared set of ropes and pulleys to get him moving. This is what we've come to expect from our teenager: second dinners, and the ability to sleep through an artillery barrage. The need for sleep is pre-eminent, which might explain the blank looks we get at times when we are trying to break the spell that binds him to his various screens.
But that wasn't always the case. Back in the olden days, when he could still be carried about in the crook of one arm as I fumbled for various objects with the other, the need for sleep was squarely on his parents' account. He would wake up in the middle of the night and remain inconsolable for hours at a time. He was not a squalling infant, but he could work up a solid storm of tears when it came time to being convinced that it was time to close our collective eyes and wait for the morning to come.
It was on these dark nights that we walked through the house, looking out windows into the darkness. "All the birds have gone to sleep. All the squirrels too," I would say to him as I pointed out into the void. "All the cars are going home and parking in their garages. The trash trucks won't be moving until the sun comes up again." I was babbling, but I was babbling in the most soothing way I could. I knew that if I showed my desperation that he would immediately sense it and tense up, causing us to continue our pre-dawn meander out into the back yard, where we could look at the stars. I would tell thim that everyone was asleep on all the other planets too, even though I hoped that the thought of extraterrestrial life might not make him even more inconsolable.
And somewhere in there, he would drop off against my shoulder, and I would look off into the shadows of my late night, feeling his deep breaths against my chest. At this point I would slowly negotiate him back into his crib, careful not to make the last few inches onto the mattress be the thing that woke him back up. Then I would stand there, for a minute or two to make sure that sleep had come for him, savoring my comforting powers and thinking about how I might send myself back to slumberland when I found my way back to my own bed.
Today is my son's birthday. He is fourteen, and every so often he has trouble sleeping. The old tricks don't work for us anymore. He's far too clever for that. He knows what "nocturnal" and "insomnia" means. But I like to think that all the hours he spends these days with the covers pulled up over his head are left over from the spell I cast back in the olden days. When we were young.

Testing 1, 2, 3...14

It was a long time ago, in a galaxy not unlike this one. It was long enough ago that all the kids who go to the school where I teach weren't born yet. It was my first year teaching, and the time had come for us all to sit down and take the test. The test that would decide just how well we had all been doing our jobs: teachers, students, parents, office staff. That was a year that saw more than half of the staff replaced with fresh-faced newbies like myself. All that happy enthusiasm was tempered by the anticipation of a high-stakes standardized test designed to show once and for all the gaps in our students' education. As new teachers, we all felt the pressure.
Well, that's not completely true. I was the computer prep teacher. My principal had only begun to imagine tasks for me in that first year, and consequently when the first day of testing arrived, I was sitting in my room, puttering with one of the MacIntosh LCII's that were my responsibility to keep humming for at least another year. Across the hall, a third grade class was sitting down to the very serious business of bubbling in all their English Language Arts knowledge. Throughout the school, doors were closed and hallways were silent as we got underway. The teacher across the hall, a good friend of mine from our credential program, had finished with his scripted instructions and passed out number two pencils and waited for the first random question or request for a bathroom break. After five minutes of focused concentration, a girl in the front row stood up, snapped her pencil in half, screamed at the top of her lungs, and ran from the room.
The scream was heard all around the school, but nowhere better than my room, where the door had been left propped open. I saw her sprint past my room, and sat there, stunned. It was my first year, and all of my problem-solving teacher instincts hadn't fully developed yet. My friend across the hall was trapped with the rest of his young charges, and after I heard more stirring out in the hall, I got up to check out the scene.
It turns out that it had all been just too much for this one third grader. After weeks of preparation and expectation, when the moment finally came to show her stuff, she did just that: she fled. Who could blame her? Over the past fourteen years, that seemed to be the most correct response I could possibly imagine. I'm only surprised that more teachers, parents, students and office staff don't follow her example.

That's Cold

If revenge is, as Khan once observed, a dish best served cold, then Osama bin Laden got his lunch straight from the freezer. Ten years is a long time to wait for payback. Not as long as some, but certainly long enough that he probably had a moment of confusion when the Navy Seals burst in, wondering if he had forgotten to pay his cable bill. Then, probably just as quickly, he remembered us infidels and how he probably should have been expecting something like that all along.
Then there's this guy Al Kydah. He keeps talking about how he's going to get us back for what we did. Which is a little ridiculous since he was already in the middle of figuring out how to mess with us before we ever messed with him. There was that matter of the passenger trains, which really stinks since up until a week ago you could pretty much walk on to Amtrak with your family size shampoo and personal box cutters and not even be worried about being asked for a ticket until you were half way across the country. I know. It's not nearly the kind of revenge that they he was hoping for, but it will do in a pinch. In the meantime, I understand that he has been taking credit for the tornadoes in the southeast as well as the NFL lockout. He's not a nice guy. He's a terrorist, after all.
And so we wait for cranky guy down the street to do something crazy. Unless he blows himself up first.

Days Of The Teacher

Tis a puzzlement: The Day of the Teacher was last week, on the third of May. Or maybe it's really on the ninth, when our state's superintendent of education issued a press release honoring all of us who make our living as educators. It might be the thirteenth, since that's when our principal will be having us all into the staff room for lunch. Or maybe it's today, when a number of different calendars suggest that we observe "Teacher Appreciation Day." Whatever the date, it's nice to get all this attention, and this time it's not necessarily for destroying our country's economy.

The truth is, I get plenty of appreciation on my job. The fact that most of it comes from kids aged five to eleven doesn't diminish it. Would I like it if their parents remembered to drop by and thank us for the work we do? Sure I would. I would love to have the moms and dads of some of the real hard cases drop by and give us a thumbs-up now and again, but I know that's not realistic. They're busy with their own struggles, most of which contribute in some measure to the challenges faced by their children. Just like it's easy to point a finger at one bad teacher, it's easy to lump parents into categories that make their absence from their child's education understandable.

I don't know their struggle. They don't know mine. The connection we have is the kid having trouble sitting in his chair. Or winning the science fair. Or coming to school on time after weeks of being just a little bit late. I'm a parent, too. I can appreciate that.

Ghost Antics

My younger brother took the train out to Colorado to spend Mother's day with our mom. Aside from ensuring his favorite son status for months to come, he also got to share plenty of hours of conversations with complete strangers on the trip. He said that he had a twinge of regret for not responding to his fellow traveller's bizarre stories with his own vision of the world, including his belief that the world actually ended in a nuclear holocaust in 1990. The intervening twenty-plus years have simply been phantom pains much in the same way amputees experience the sensation from lost limbs. Our lives ended a couple of decades ago, but we're still sorting it all out.
Why not? He went on to suggest that if he were to be a ghost, he would like to have a choice about what sort of haunting he might get to do. This made me think of my friend Darren, who once announced to his younger sister while they watched John Carepenter's "The Fog," that he wouldn't be one of those creepy spirits that would come back and make things scary for those of us who are left behind on the material plane. He anticipated an afterlife more along the lines of the Three Stooges than Jacob Marley. Whenever things go missing around my house, or the kitchen sink sprayer squirts me directly in the chest when I'm trying to rinse my breakfast dishes, I suspect him, God Rest His Soul.
Like the sixty-one percent of those responding to the poll who were sure that Osama bin Laden was currently residing in someplace less than Heaven, I want to be certain about what waits for me on the other side. Though I expect that if I am to be truly and effectively punished for my sins here on Earth, then I will have to wait. Hopefully eternity will bring me less time with a stainless steel hook, and more time with a whoopie cushion.

Orientation

This week marks a turning point for our little family. The same day that my son's penultimate middle school report card came home, he went down to his incipient high school and registered for classes for next fall. High school classes. With high school teachers. With other high schoolers. Way back when I started writing this blog, he was finishing up his second grade year. He was halfway through his elementary school experience, and the thought of selecting classes was limited primarily to picking which teacher would nurture his cleverness for the coming year.
All of that was in preparation for this: His permanent record. The responsibility for that scholarship to the engineering school of his choice now rests squarely on his shoulders. Those ever-broadening almost fourteen-year-old shoulders. No pressure.
Or at least that's the image we like to project. But when his regular stellar performance started slipping into the merely acceptable, his mother and I had many anxious moments. Somewhere in the last semester came the mild realization that we might not be raising the valedictorian. Currently we are raising the best friend of the valedictorian. We're becoming more comfortable with that, and it seems that our smug satisfaction with that perfect four-point-oh has waned. Ultimately, we know, it's not up to us and our lofty expectations. He's making his way now, and if all the possible permutations that create what we all call "good grades," then so be it. I hope he learns. I hope he learns a lot and he is happy with the grades he receives for his effort. I hope we can help.

Yore Mama

If you really want to start something on our playground, those are the words that will start your assault. Most of the time, the rest of the sentence won't even be heard, just the introduction is enough. That is because even in our disaffected, embittered, cynical world, some things are sacred. Or at least they give that appearance. It doesn't matter what the reality of the situation may be. If you mess with somebody's mother, you're going to get fists or tears or a combination of both.
That's usually about the time that I show up, separating the warring factions, desperate to bring peace to the yard. The first thing I ask when I come on a situation that involves mothers I learned from watching "Roadhouse" with Patrick Swayze, God rest his soul. I ask the offended party if the numbskull on the other side even knows the mother in question. After a few sputtering, huffing moments, the response comes back, "No." Then I suggest that the only one on the playground equipped to make any judgements is the one who knows them best.
"Does she pick you up from school?"
"Yeah."
"Does she take care of you when you're sick?"
"Yeah."
"Does she make sure you get fed?"
"Yeah."
The the kicker: "Do you love your mother?"
Long pause. "Yeah."
Now I turn and face the tormentor. "Do you love your mother?"
Long pause. "Yeah."
"I'm pretty sure she'd be unhappy with you for talking about somebody else's mom."
"Yeah."
From there it's a short hop to the apologies, and it generally doesn't come up again, since most tough guys don't want to talk about how much they love their mothers.
I love my mom. She took care of me when I was sick and made sure that I was fed. My son loves his mother. She walks with him to school and gets him where he needs to go. That's what mothers do. So don't say nothin' about my mama.