Generations

"I found out today that Julia Child is one of my student's great-great aunt!" my friend Mary told me today.

I was impressed, but then I started questioning how closely they were actually related. "So she was his great-grandmother or great-grandfather's sister?" I mused. "By blood or marriage?"

Mary told me she would investigate further, but we both agreed it was pretty cool. 

As luck would have it, I have a picture of my own great-grandmother on the desktop of my computer. I recently came across it while browsing the hints on my genealogy website. A stark black and white photo, she had it taken for her passport in 1919. Her head is tilted and the entire left side of her face is in shadow, but it is the first image I ever recall seeing of my father's grandmother, who died just 4 years before I was born, and I'm pretty sure I never met any of her siblings. 

These days, great-grandparents are quite common; almost all of my mother's friends had "great-grands" as they called the children of their grandchildren. I suppose it wouldn't be uncommon for those little ones to know the brothers and sisters of their great-grandparents, especially in a close family. And when I consider myself as a middle generation, rather than on either end of this familial spectrum, great-great aunts don't really seem so distant. My older nephews are both in their mid-to-late twenties, and were they to have any children, then my own dear Aunt Harriett would be their great-great aunt, not such a vast span at all.

Have Them Your Way

Just as surely as the cicadas emerge every 17 years, so, too, do the recipes for them. Most articles and interviews profile chefs, nutritionists, and scientists in a quest to normalize insect eating and thereby improve life on the planet by adding a more sustainable protein to everyone's diet. 

Described alternately as soft shell crab like or nutty, cicada tacos, sushi, brownies, and dipped in chocolate dominate the food press, just as I remember happening in 2004 and 1987. 

I wonder: Will 2021 be a true turning point toward greater insect consumption or just another flash-fried cicada in the pan?

Non-Billable Hours

I started the call a couple minutes early, at 11:58, but I really didn't expect anyone to be waiting. In the waning days of this weirdest school year, office hours have become even less of a thing than they ever were. As sparsely attended as these Monday support sessions have been, today even my heart wasn't in it. Instead of checking through and checking off completed assignments, I flipped through a couple of magazines and read the NY Times online, all the while keeping that channel open in case somebody needed some help or guidance. But the empty black box in the lower right-hand corner of my screen stayed quiet, except for the minutes counting up. Next Monday? Is a holiday, and I think my office might just be closed the last two Mondays after that.

Act of Attrition

It's been a cool May in these parts, and the arrival of the 17 year cicadas was so delayed that many folks who were either too young or too far away to recall 2004 were beginning to doubt that anything out of the ordinary involving large, flying insects was actually going to happen. "I just don't believe it," I heard from several, but after a week in the 80s and 90s, they understand the fuss. An eerie hum straight out of any UFO episode of vintage TV fills the air, and there are so many smushed cicadas all over the street and sidewalks, that it seems impossible that very many of the brood are fulfilling their life's purpose to get up a tree, mate, and lay some eggs. But that is the cicada's survival strategy: defeating predators and pavement with their sheer number. Even when the ground is littered with fallen members of the brood and every bird and squirrel and rat and whatnot has had its fill of protein-rich biomass, they keep coming, and hundreds of millions make it aloft and find an arboreal perch and a willing partner to spin the lifecycle wheel forward for another 17 years.

Priceless

The second day of the millionaire question did not go like the first. Most of these students wanted stuff, all the stuff, or even more money, and spending for college was a rare consideration. Of course, there was the random awesome reply like buy a tarantula ranch or have my own Chipotle, and one student said he just didn't think it was right for anyone to have a million dollars. And I guess that was kind of the crux of the situation-- 12 year old kids don't really have any idea what a million dollars is, even the brightest of them. Take for instance this exchange:

Student: Tax evasion.

Me: What do you mean?

Him: All millionaires evade taxes. 

Me: No they don't. 

Him: How do you know?

Me: There are a lot more people who have a million dollars than you might think. Especially here where real estate is so valuable.

Him: If it's so easy to be a millionaire, then how come you aren't one?

Audible gasps from the other students both on the call and in the room.

Me: How do you know I'm not?

Other students: Oooooooooooh (Now there's a sound I haven't heard in a year or so.)

Him: You're a teacher. Teachers can't be millionaires.

Me; Oh, we can, too. Now what would you buy with that million bucks?

Finding Us Working

Inspiration exists, but it must find you working. ~Pablo Picasso

Anyone who teaches young writers has heard the complaints: I don't have anything to write about. Nothing ever happened to me. My life is not exciting.

Sometimes, kids are so committed to the notion that they have nothing to say that it's nearly impossible to help them find inspiration and meaning in their experiences, but usually it only takes a conversation or two to guide them toward a topic. 

That's kind of how it was today, and I heard a few great stories from my students as they worked. One boy told me that when his mother was a kid, her father was stationed in Taiwan and couldn't be with the family for Christmas. So he made a cassette recording of himself reading The Night Before Christmas which was a tradition for them. To this day, the family still listens to that recording when they get together at the holidays. "I never even met my grandfather," the boy told me, "but I hear his voice every year."

Another student was stuck for an idea until we started talking about spirit days in school. Then she remembered the time in kindergarten when she got her days mixed up and was the only one who went to school with crazy hair. To her credit, she could laugh about it, but she's always very careful about her spirit days now.

And then there was the kid who told me he was starting a new trend. "What do you mean?" I asked and he pointed to the floor. He was wearing his shoes on the wrong feet. "Why would you do that?" I asked him.

"I like it!" he told me.

I could see his big toes poking the sides of his shoes. "Isn't it uncomfortable?" I said.

"Only if you can't take a little tightness," he replied, "but it's worth it to be different."

"Can I write about that?" another student asked.

I'd Buy You a Monkey

Today is National Be-a-Millionaire Day. The premise of the occasion is to encourage people to start saving and investing now, so that one day they might have a million bucks or more. 

If, at the age they are now, the sixth graders in my class could somehow save a couple of hundred dollars a month, they would be millionaires by age 50 (assuming an average 10% return on their investments), but the question of the day today was, What would you do with a million bucks? 

We listened to The Barenaked Ladies singing If I Had a Million Dollars for inspiration as they considered their replies, and I was a little bit surprised and moved at the number of kids who would give a lot of the cash away to charity or people in need. Many would choose to save it for college, or give it to their parents or family. Of course some would use it for games or clothes or cars, but in general, it seemed like that amount of money was too large for most kids to even imagine spending it all on themselves. 

"I really wish a million dollars would fall into my lap!" one student sighed at the end of our conversation.

"Yeah, but it would probably break your legs," said his buddy, not really joking. "Especially if it was in coins."