Is sneezing a symptom of COVID? I wondered as I achooed for the fourth time in a row.
Alone in my room, I wiped my snotty nose and squirted some hand sanitizer on my palm before grabbing my phone to research the question. A quick Google informed me that, yes, sneezing has been recently added to the documented symptoms of COVID-19, but only for people who have been vaccinated.
Yet another strange twist in the pathology of this ever-so-disruptive virus.
Sitting in the car waiting for Heidi to finish the grocery shopping, I watched a huge pickup truck slowly back into a parking space a little ways down from me. The driver maneuvered the big vehicle slowly but accurately until I heard the crank of an emergency brake and the engine shut down. Out of the truck tumbled two tall young men, a burly guy who was likely their dad, and a smiling woman I took as their mom.
"Great parking job, Kaia!" one of them practically rejoiced.
"You sure got it in there," the dad agreed.
I craned my neck to see a teenage girl emerging from the driver's seat, grinning proudly.
One of her brothers high-fived her, and her mom gave her a hug. "Nice parking job!" she told Kaia.
And then the five of them happily headed into the grocery store.
I've had a lot of strange dreams in my life, but last night was a first: in my dreams I kept falling asleep!
It was that type of nodding off where when the people around you ask if you're sleeping, you blearily snap to, insisting that you. are. AWAKE!
But I wasn't awake, even when I was awake.
What are the qualities of a good babysitter? was the warm-up question in preparation of reading a short story where the sitter makes questionable choices. I encouraged the students to think both as the one being cared for and the one who takes care of younger kids.
Responsible was the number one answer, along with fun and nice, but when one boy wrote brave, I had to ask. "Why does a babysitter have to be brave?"
He puffed out his chest. "They do if they want to take care of me," he explained.
This evening as I picked up a few things at Target, I turned when I heard my name.
I often see students and former students when I'm out and about, but it's rare that they either 1) notice me (the solipsism of childhood) or 2) actually approach me on their own, and so my interactions with them are often limited to a wave or an awkward conversation.
Tonight was an exception, though. The student who spotted me came right over and initiated a conversation. "Are you here for more Jolly Ranchers?" she asked, and what followed was a perfectly appropriate interaction between two people who know each other and run into each other unexpectedly.
I shouldn't have been surprised though. When I asked all the students what they had been up to in the time that I was away for Heidi's dad's funeral, she posted, "I went to Ikea and crocheted."
"You are an old soul," I laughed. "That sounds like a very nice weekend."
The warm-up question was What superpower would you like and how could you use it to help the world?
At 8 a.m. my homeroom students were so bleary that many could not think of a thing, or so they claimed. "All right," I told them skeptically, "but everyone needs an answer before the bell rings, otherwise you can come at lunch and we can brainstorm ideas together."
The implicit threat got them talking a little, all except A. who was busy eating his breakfast long after the time to finish it had passed. As he lifted the spoonful of cereal to his mouth, we made eye contact, and I raised my eyebrows to remind him to eat quietly, a conversation we have had many times this year.
When class was almost over, I started asking about superpowers. Some chose telekinesis, others invisibility, and still others super strength or super speed. As A. got up to throw his tray away, I asked him what superpower he wanted.
"Oh," he answered, "I'd want to be a super slurper."
I laughed out loud at such an unexpected idea, but one of the girls who sits at the same table with him sighed. "Oh A," she said, "that is the last thing you need!"
The suffix was -wise and the example word was clockwise in the vocabulary lesson I taught today.
"Do you know what that word means?" I asked the class, and most of the kids nodded. They understood that the hands on an analog clock go around in a certain direction, and so "clockwise" meant rotating to the right. They understood this, even though many of them were unable to actually tell the time using an analog clock.
"It's too hard," explained one student. "I have to look at the numbers and the lines and count them."
"Yeah," one of her classmates agreed. "It takes a long time to figure it out."
I glanced at the clock and noted the time; it was automatic for me. "I guess knowing how to tell analog time is like speaking another language," I offered. "The more fluent you are, the easier it is to read. Then one day you don't even have to think about it anymore."
"But I can just look at my phone," the first student shrugged, and I wondered how long clockwise would stay in our language.
