Borrowing Trouble Blog
Neither a lender nor a borrower be--from Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The best advice from the foolish Polonius
The best advice from the foolish Polonius
Robert told me today that his class was "rough" and wanted to know what I was going to do about it. I asked him how he was going to react when I removed him from class tomorrow. He is one of the toughest actors in the room. He is the friend who walks me downstairs to Magnet duty every day because I shouldn't "walk" by myself. He is cutting class as he does this community service for me daily. You have to meet people where they are. You have to see behind the urge to sing out loud for no reason, gather attention any way possible but still expect to be treated like an individual. To pass a required English class with a good grade. To get home safe and eat dinner. What more could we want? The other side of the coin is dreadful. Distressing.
Note on children Children in literature tend to fall into the rut of darling cherubs who do no evil and charm the socks off of the most taciturn hearts, or they are conversely evil, plotting beasts. It is interesting to consider the real spirit of a child. Children are so much more complicated. Even with older children like Josh in this story, they spin in a world that revolves around them; they are careless with their loved ones to the point of breaking them; they are capable of rash decisions and have no concept that retaliation for actions can occur. When their little universe spins out of control, they are hurt and bruised but, most of the time, exhibit a resiliency that rivals adults. Most of the time, the poor decisions and follies of the young are excused and tolerated by adults. But every now and then, fate rears up and bites down viciously on one of these young fools. They are always astounded and want to blame the nearest parental figure they can locate. Their ire is unfathomable until they focus on themselves again and begin to see the truth. Then it is too late; they have awakened into adulthood. Josh from this story is based on a real boy whose story could break your heart. Justin F. was seventeen years old when he entered our school during the third quarter of his senior year. He was a transplant from Baltimore—I think either Cherry Hill area or Pigtown from our discussions about home. Social Services placed him at a shelter and arranged counseling through Maple Shade on the Eastern Shore because he’d been in a number of brutal fights in the Baltimore facility and needed a change of scene. He was an obvious recovering addict with old track marks on his arms from low grade heroin, sometimes smelled sweet with pot, sported weird, homemade piercings and deep blue streaks in his short black hair, wore a bit of rough facial hair that hid some of an addict’s version of raging acne, but gave me a wide, intelligent look from bright blue eyes and sat up straight through every lesson. He turned out to be shy and a genius with historical facts and deep reading in literature. He’d spent so much time confined to his room at various shelters; he had improved his reading by absorbing everything he could find. He had imaginatively created a fantasy grandfather whom had served in WWII and fought the Japs on an aircraft carrier. He had a disturbing interest in Hitler, guns, armed vehicles and war. He harbored Neo-Nazi views, dallied with becoming a white supremacist, but his best friends and later a first girlfriend were all black kids. He sometimes talked to himself if over stimulated and rocked. We discovered he was off his medications when he did that. By April when he was “overactive,” two of his other teachers sent him to me so he could sit in the back of the room, read his favorite WWII ship book and draw boat after boat in close precision. I admit I found him an interesting conundrum because he didn’t seem to fit into the ungainly collection of gang bangers and regular kids they put him into at the end of the year. He watched them spout their neighborhood wisdom and mumbled about Baltimore. He knew what tough really was and didn’t get too impressed with small time hoods. He’d make eye contact with me or one of the other kids and roll his eyes at the nonsense. The Monday he returned to school bleeding, I finally got the whole story. His roommate, a seventh grader at the school adjacent to ours, had beaten him up after their bedroom doors were locked for the night. He had complained to the monitor, but little had been done to stop the beating. The boy who did it was in a rage over something that had happened on a home visit, but Justin felt he couldn’t retaliate. That month he had turned eighteen and knew if he was charged with a crime, he would lose his spot at the home and be arrested. First I noticed that he was very quiet. We were in the Media Center researching for an essay so I wandered from student to student. I noticed he smelled sour and rank beyond the normal, gamey smell of boys that age. My first reaction was to take a few paces back. A sweet-faced black boy who had befriended Justin raised an eyebrow at me and tossed his head to get my attention. I moved over to his side, and he toned clearly, “He’s bleeding, Mrs. C.” The boy’s look was grim. I looked over expecting a bloody nose. Even in high school, sometimes kids are not too good with functioning when they are surprised by them. Justin must have brushed his hand along his face a moment before and disturbed the swollen knot where the boy’s ring had smashed him over and over again. Standing that close to him, I could see the imprint of a little square shape that I later found out was the shape on the ring. As I examined his averted face, I realized there was crusted blood in his jet black hair and in the whorls of his ears and along his neck. I touched his shoulder and he shuddered, “Who did this to you? Did this happen this morning?” I was thinking there must have been a fight on the bus. Justin just shook his head. His friend leaned over and said very clearly, “His punk roommate did it. Nasty little nigger from the middle school. It’s a terrible place where they have him.” He gestured to Justin with a thumb and his bottom lip trembled. “Justin, did you hit him back?” I know I must have sounded harsh, but reporting a beating is a two-sided disaster. Usually the victim is judged just as harshly as the attacker in a school or institutional setting. “Only to get him off me. I can’t get thrown out. I have no place to go.” He swallowed suddenly and looked up so I could see the bruises beginning to color. They were new and needed ice. When I sent him to the nurse’s office, I called the guidance counselor and the deputy. The rest of the class watched me and mumbled about do-gooder teachers who cause trouble. My one concern was how hurt he really might be under all that crusted blood. I had noticed he had stopped wearing the wild Baltimore clothes that were black and grey with long chains and studs. Someone had told me somebody at the home threw bleach into his laundry and ruined his wardrobe. The home supplied him with something right out of a Polo advertisement that made him look slightly more civilized but odd. The collared shirts and khakis looked clean, but they seemed to rob him of his personality. After a visit from his social worker from Baltimore later that month, the original style of clothes returned with even more personality in bright royal blue and black. Justin had chosen his gang affiliation in just two months in Salisbury. Justin received his diploma after a few courses in summer school that year. They moved the roommate to another site and paired Justin with someone calmer. He came back to see me by November this year and sat in my classroom to vent a bit about real life. He was in the process of dropping out of community college; the Army had finally rejected him because of his manic depression medication and ADHD. That failure was close to breaking him. If he couldn’t go to school full time, he couldn’t stay at the home. My heart ached for him, but the careful sense of protection I have after years of dealing with troubled children and adults warned me. We were sitting in my empty classroom at the end of a quiet wing, and he was raving about how unfair life was treating him. He was bordering into an eruption of violence like I’d seen one time when someone pissed him off. He left before I called the office for help. Ordinarily I’d have hugged him, shaken his hand or walked him to the door, but I waved him a goodbye, waited a few minutes, shut my classroom door and locked it. I haven’t seen him since. The guidance counselor that I enjoy working with most at the school because she is so even tempered and realistic, cried a bit when we discussed Justin the day he came to school caked with blood and relieved to be with us in the safety of school. She told me his story was one that was too familiar: drug addicted parents, one of whom had died, grandparents who were overwhelmed by disabilities the boy was born with because of his mother’s alcohol and drug use during pregnancy, and the abuses he encountered as a beautiful child in the brutal world of foster care. It turned out that Justin had been in foster care since he was three years old. As she dabbed away the tears, she asked, “What do you do with a life like that? How can we help him survive once he leaves here?” She told me that in counseling today these children are considered “throwaways.” I don’t have any answers. Self preservation kept me from trying to get over involved with Justin; I told myself that he could kill us if we got too close; I have a young daughter; he will need meds for the rest of his life. You know the drill when you are making excuses. The hurt I absorbed from knowing him well and caring for him the best I could while he attended school yielded this character Josh Avery. Josh falls short because he is not as destroyed as Justin is. Josh is salvageable and attractive. Daphne is too strong and good at being a guardian. It is a manufactured denouement for a fraction of the person who could be saved. Postscript Justin stopped by to see me today. Really—the day after I wrote the remembrance of him from above. He was not as intense as the last time I saw him. Short hair with a trim beard, all black on with some kind of band tee shirt. He didn’t know whether to hug me or not but I had to because I had thought so much about him yesterday and there he was. He told me that he had a hearing in a month in Caroline County where one of his grandmothers lives to decide if he can continue at the home. He is nineteen and dropped out of Worwic so he should be out on his own. He worries about where he will go; he knows it wouldn’t be long without his meds on his own. Now he is trying for a job with the armory but it’s part time. He gave me the catalog of relatives he can’t live with: Mom who he is trying to speak to again in Frederick, the grandmother who barely returns his call from Denton, and a pregnant girlfriend who the grandmother took in. (She is obviously not all bad.) The grandmother has her thirty year-old son living there, too. He tells me she was born the day her father flew out oversees to the Gulf War in the 1990s. Everything is still defined by its relation to the military in his mind though he reminded me that he can’t serve. I took his number and gave him mine for a recommendation. I will see the guidance counselor tomorrow to get him the information for the Job Market. When they called looking for him, he hurried away to catch his ride back to the home. It is all just too much to imagine a mentally disturbed nineteen year-old to handle.
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Crumbs in the Chillest Land--Resurrecting Hope through Writing
Summary for Nanowrimo: An auspicious start to a collection of crumbs scattered for hope. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is a Thing with Feathers,” the little metaphoric bird is buffeted by storms but asks nothing from the speaker—not a crumb. Hope is that brave, sometimes miniscule creature perched in the soul—refusing to give up to despair. Asking nothing and persevering despite the storm. Watchful of the thing hiding in the closet. This collection of crumbs will be nonfiction accounts taken from life. Teaching in an urban public school during the day feeds the dramatic side of the novel. The artistic part of the process is recording my observations. During the last week in October alone, I said goodbye to a student who was moving to Baltimore, grieved for a teacher who succumbed to cancer at 51, hugged a student who told me he was entering residential rehab for alcoholism, calmed students after a two brutal fights that became a small riot, and cautioned yet comforted a co-teacher who made a decision that may cost her career. I also took part in a nonsensical Halloween celebration with my department to raise funds for another co-teacher who is undergoing chemotherapy. There have been births, deaths (one of a seventeen-year old), arguments and soothing conversations. These are the crumbs that the little hope in Dickinson's poem did not demand but that I will. 1 Two events in the last week rise to the rim of memory: the request to write a character reference and the announcement of the death of a colleague. I knew my co-worker was terminally ill with cancer, that she had gone into hospice and that her daughters (one a former student and Facebook friend) were at her side. The announcement and moment of silence that followed during Friday morning homeroom routines tilted an already sliding planet. Cancer is a blight that strikes down the best, the blasé and the worst with equal measure. The disease sneaks into the back door, takes its time wandering through the contents of a life and then chooses which room to announce its presence. When it arrives, we rush to contain it, and then it hides in the closet and we forget it for a while. If we’re lucky. The character reference was for a young man whom I’ve known for most of his life. In one defining afternoon, he and his younger cousins sat in my living room and waited for the police to arrive. His father had hit him the previous night which resulted in a black eye that had spread onto his cheekbone and run like lumpy fingers into his buzz-cut hair. It hurt to look at him. The violence in their family had festered into outbursts that resulted in ex-parte orders, slow-burning grudges, but weird, abiding love that clashed with the senseless arguments. The boy who would grow into a man who needed help this week was destined to disappointment with his parents, three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the near deaths of his wife and first child, and the pressures of being the father of a child with cerebral palsy. During the interview with the police in my living room when he was twelve and marked by standing up to an adult bully, I remember wanting to shake all of them. Couldn’t anyone see the pattern of violence that would reverberate and touch everyone? Couldn’t they see that saving them started with this moment with the boy, his father and mother? But we did nothing. We followed the law and the will of those intimately involved. We allowed the violence to fester and grow in the closet. An auspicious start to a collection of crumbs scattered for hope. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is a Thing with Feathers,” the little metaphoric bird is buffeted by storms but asks nothing from the speaker—not a crumb. Hope is that brave, sometimes miniscule creature perched in the soul—refusing to give up to despair. Asking nothing and persevering despite the storm. Watchful of the thing hiding in the closet. Guided by economy and a yen for the sun, I walked the boardwalk in Ocean City yesterday. I had a three o’clock rendezvous at the Dunes for tea, but Becca had a party on 81st at one-thirty. Instead of wasting gas and patience, I drove into the outskirts of town and began a ramble down the boards toward the Ferris wheel at the inlet. After a week of chafing against the demands of other people, it was a relief to be alone for an hour. The sun shone directly in my eyes and made it impossible to see people, dogs and bikes coming in my direction, so I looked out to the beach. The breakers were stacked in series of threes, about four foot high and tossing themselves directly onto a beach shortened by recent storms. The stretches of hilly beach were sparsely populated, a smattering of diehard surfers paddled out and rode back and a few sunbathers lay in sweats asleep. Only the year-round shops opened their doors with merchandise and signs spewed out to attract the off-season strollers. Conversations from balconies and storefronts were whisked away in the strong breeze. I walked as far as 4th Street and then turned around worried that I needed time to walk back to the car. I felt good—warm from the sun, muscles stretched and limber, invisible among the other walking people. It is good to slough away the layers and walk without purpose. It is good to watch the grey ocean roll and froth itself into the madness of hurling to shore. I pick up the crumbs and continue my walk into the distance. I know my path though I cannot be sure the way will be lighted. For those who haven't been exposed to the mania of National Novel Writing Month, Nanowrimo bands together a diverse group--thousands of writers from around the world--into the valiant effort to produce 50,000 words in a thirty-day period. There are pep-talks, regional Facebook conversations and the daily accounting for writing. Everyone says it--if you want to be a writer--WRITE.
The Nanowrimo goal is length, not edited or polished prose. I've written only two original novels during this effort, but I've rewritten three novels--two during November and one during Camp Nanowrimo in July. Inspired by The Martian by Andy Weir, I plan to blog my 50,000 in the vain attempt to rekindle sputtering hope in humankind. This has been the autumn that has cooled a few fiery desires that have kept me teaching for twenty-five years. The schedule, meetings, testing and behavior have battered the little bird that hope has become. “Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314) BY EMILY DICKINSON “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me. Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999) |
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