Life Lessons

It seems impossible, but some people need to be told explicitly not to play ring tones with lyrics like I wanna shoot you in the ass with a beebee gun for their grandmothers. True, said person is ten, but still...

Would I Get a Lolly Pop?

Who knows where some conversations come from?

The other day I heard myself tell the students in my homeroom that I would give a lolly pop to anyone who could make me laugh out loud. To be fair, I'm pretty sure one of the kids started it. I think it went something like this:

Student: We should have a suggestion box.
Me: Okay.
Student: Or, just a comment box.
Me: Okay.
Student: Or a joke box... Yeah that's it!
Me: What would we do with a joke box?
Student: You could just read the jokes at the end of every month.
Me: Why don't we just tell jokes sometimes?
Student: Why would we do that?

And so it went, until six students were crowded around my desk trying to tell me jokes. Maybe it's performance anxiety, maybe I'm a tough audience, but so far only one has made me laugh:

Q: Why don't sea gulls fly over the bay?
A: Because then they would be bay gulls.

Wait for it...

Funny, right?

Don't Spend It All in One Place

Getting an inch of snow is like winning ten cents in the lottery. ~Bill Watterson

Day One

Okay. It's really hard not to scold kids. Here were the hazardous conversations I had to have today alone: the seven children who did not have their homework, the three who did not bring anything to write with to my class, the two who were tardy unexcused, the one who snapped the pencil I had just lent him in half and left it on the table when class was over, the one who broke one of my rulers and threw it on the floor, and the several who felt it necessary to have side conversations when one of their classmates was reading.

In Trouble

I got a scolding today. I won't say who administered it or what it pertained to, because that's not really relevant. I will say that nobody likes to be chided, and after years of teaching and aunting (and delivering more than a few tongue lashings myself) I have come to understand that such a rebuke is usually more for the benefit of the scolder than the scoldee.

As good as it feels to vent your righteous indignation, being reprimanded makes most people very defensive, and as a corollary, deaf to your message. All they're thinking of are excuses and reasons why you are more wrong than they are. That's exactly the position I was in today-- speechless, but also angry and closed-off to any legitimate concerns that may have been expressed in the admonishment.

So, although it's a little late in the new year, I hereby resolve to scold not, and also to curb my own negative reactions when reproached, because neither is especially productive.

Weather

I use iGoogle to keep track of the weather in places where there's a little piece of my heart. There are five locations stacked up and down in the center of my home page like a blue and white highrise and checking the weather is like looking out the windows of the apartments on different floors. Today, for the first time in my condominium of climate, there's snow behind every curtain-- in Minnesota, Buffalo, and Maine (which is hardly surprising but rarely happens all at once), and also in Washington and Atlanta a perfect palette of white will prevail. Cool.

The Timing Was Off

“My name is Helen,” the student read, “I sort of like my name. Helen is unusual, but I just can’t find it on key chains and stuff, which I hate. I also don’t like it, because everyone’s grandma is named Helen.”

“My grandmother’s name was Helen,” I said.

“See what I mean?” she answered.

We laughed, but later when I thought about the conversation, I thought about my grandmother. I never knew her; she died ten years before I was born. When I was growing up, my father rarely spoke about his parents, and as children, we never asked. To us, they were black and white faces in a picture frame, and nothing more.

So here’s everything I know about my grandmother: Her name was Helen and she lived her entire life in Little falls, NY. She married my grandfather, Harold, in 1920, at the age of 20. They had eight children, seven boys and one girl. I have a photograph of the entire family taken in 1942 when my father, the second youngest, was seven, and they are a very handsome family, indeed. In 1928, when the Phoenix Underwear Company mill, of which he was a manager, moved to NC, my grandfather bought a funeral home and became the town’s Catholic undertaker. The sinks and slab were in the basement, the parlors and office were on the ground floor, and the family lived upstairs.

Helen was very permissive with her children—no matter what they were having for dinner, she always made a platter of hamburgers, in case someone didn’t like the meal, and once, when the boys were rough-housing in the dining room, they tipped her china cupboard out the second floor window. When he heard the crash, my grandfather came running from his office downstairs, furious at the destruction, but she stood in front of the children. “Harold,” she told him, “they’re just boys, and boys will be boys.” Then she went and cleaned up the mess, because none of the boys were ever required to lift a finger around the house.

She was diagnosed with cancer at the age of fifty and was bed-ridden for most of a year. Dying, she was determined to make it to my uncle’s wedding in December of 1951, and to everyone’s amazement, she did. My grandmother died in the first days of 1952 and was buried on my father’s 17th birthday, something from which he never completely recovered.

That's it. My dad, my uncles, and my aunt are all gone now, and with them went the chance that I'll ever know much more about her, which is really a shame for me, because now? I'm interested.