Monthly Archives: October 2022

Dark Apartments, Stingrays & Terrible Shoes

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There were noises the other night: creaks and movements in the dark. These were noises that I hadn’t heard for three years since I had last taken care of a loved one in the night. They were the sounds of someone moving around who recently had a normal bed that makes no creaks and the strange plastic sounds of an airbed with a human being moving upon it.

I met her in a dark apartment in Dallas, a hundred years and 7 lifetimes ago. By that I mean 21 years, when we were 21 and 22 years old. She made plastic jewelry in her oven in her own dark apartment, but it was in the dark apartment of our friend Ashley that we met. Ashley knew about makeup and exfoliation and hung giant pieces of fabric from her ceiling. Her boyfriend who would become her first husband barely spoke to me and never spoke to Beth. She talked about the smell of the plastic jewelry as it baked in the oven and how it was probably toxic. Toxic, but geometric; it was clear in spots and opaque in others. Squares danced upon rectangles intermingled with other shapes, too.

Later, it was raining in July at the Tarpon Motel in Port O’Connor, Texas. I was in this crazy moment of rejecting a corporate career; upon reflection, I just realized that was the last time I hated my job. But I digress. It was raining. Raining, raining. Beth sat on the second queen bed in the room. She was wearing a very fashionable hat and was very quiet. She was very quiet a lot then. We went, during a break in the rain, to drink cheap beer on the dock of the marina next door with Billy’s mom, Lynn. Lynn was great; she was a strong woman and was so loving to her kids. She was great until she wasn’t; like all of us.

During that trip, we were assured that Ashley’s brother knew how to navigate the shallow waters of the gulf and could take us to Matagorda Island to a friend’s cabin. Adam ran aground within minutes and we were stuck trying to get an outboard out of the mud, all the while conscious of possible stingrays beneath our feet. When we made it to the island, it was unbelievably hot and the cabin just had screens over the windows. The screens had holes in them, or the door did, or something, because the heat and the mosquitoes were unbearable and we abandoned ship quite soon to shimmy back in the water and the mud to the mainland.

Then there was the time we went searching for a building like the Pompidou Centre in London. I was wearing terrible shoes; a trait that Beth constantly chides me for. Terrible shoes! They were beautiful vintage men’s loafers that were the complete opposite of what one should wear while walking through London. We had lunch at the Barbican and found the building, and my damn feet hurt, and we ate vegan ice cream in a strange downtown coffee shop in the finance district and took the Tube during rush hour. She was sick, even then, and even during those days was having reactions to chemo that made her unable to do much because she was so itchy and having a hard time sleeping. We did, however, walk around London at night and eat ramen in Mayfair and Indian food near Buckingham Palace and have cappuccinos (I think) at the Albert Memorial after seeing a show at the Serpentine with Alberto and Reuben.

I just spent the evening in my workshop, applying gold leaf to a lantern I have been working on for a friend for years. We played on the wood it is made out of when it was a tree. For years, we have played on this tree. I took Matthew’s graduation photos on it. About ten years ago, it finally died after one last winter storm. I culled its bark and have hauled it around with me since. I sat tonight, applying gold leaf and thinking about how much life changes, and how losing people is so difficult. Losing people is hard for me because I can’t talk with them anymore, I can’t hear their voices anymore, and I worry about losing my memories of them. I think: do I want to be in a world without them? The answer is of course, yes, but it is a sharper world; the visions are more dear, colorful, passionate, and valuable. The big things are bigger and the little things fade into complete unimportance.

So it goes.

I will miss you.

On a Late Evening

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Last night I was up at 2am dreading the reality of the drudgery of the every day.

Lately, I am up almost every night around 2-3am, running scenarios around in circles in my mind; scenarios that I think I handle well enough, but nevertheless fill me with worry, dread, concern, and questions.

I read a poem yesterday all about being awake at 3am, knowing one’s family is asleep and at peace, and sitting in a quiet house, writing. So here I am.

My friend Beth is slipping away; she is leaving us. Since she and I went to the doctor about three weeks ago, she has begun to change, alter, shift, move, and become something else. Sometimes she is totally normal, sometimes she makes little sense, sometimes she is up, and sometimes she is away. Such is this mystery we call death. Her liver is failing due to years of chemotherapy; cancer will not kill her, cancer medicine will.

A year ago, I was up in Maine, wandering the streets of Bar Harbor in tears, trying to figure out how to feel about losing a father who was both a giant thorn in my side and a guiding light in my perception of reality. Turns out, he was both at the same time, always. A year ago, I caught myself in the sunlight of autumn in Maine, in an alley, with ice cream. I was stuck, you see, in the light and in the shadow.

On the night that he died, I looked at all the photos of him and I from when I was a baby until recent days. That night I felt like I had fallen over a cliff’s edge and was falling into a space with no bottom. He died at about 4am, alone, as made sense for him. We had been with him for the preceding 9 days when he fought leaving this mortal coil tooth and nail and lived for those 9 days with no water or food.

Beth is different. Her passing is more peaceful, and more supported by friends and caretakers. Each day she slips away from us more and more; her body failing, her spirit partially here, partially somewhere. She ebbs and flows like the river, like the tide. Today we talked and she told me that my massages make her feel better, she asked me if I would leave Cody for a wealthier husband (I think this was a joke), and she asked me if I was going to a pottery festival. She told me that my bracelet, currently in an art show, is better than she had thought it would be. She told me that her family is here to see her, and that they are crying a lot, but that we all have to process in different ways.

I am fascinated by the process of death, and I am convinced it is not the end of our existence; it is only a change of form, like how soil is formed by hundreds of faded leaves, or a caterpillar becomes a butterfly through the mystery of the structure of the chrysalis.

I am fascinated also by our choices, and how they bring us to these points in our lives that are pivotal. I wrote earlier about a 5-year-old child bringing a loaded gun to my school; I recently learned that there are DNA and fingerprint kits being sent to districts across the state to help parents identify their children in the event of them being killed at school. The death cult becomes a blood cult. All the while, in the background, children are learning to read and be happy with each other and eat snacks and go to recess. My vision of my dad changes in my mind. Beth dies. I wrestle with the fact that although this job is not right for me, I do not regret it because I have learned so much. I will continue to learn every day.

Tomorrow is October 23rd. How many more days do any of us have? When will I lose my friend? Will the date be significant or will it simply be a marker for my memory? Are those two things different?

In the meantime, Cody worries about his son, his job, the house, the future, about his all-encompassing desire to be *away*. I do not wish to be away now, but I do wish for a change, a move from this place of strange obsession with guns.

Our friend Ben took a series of photos of Beth in a blue silk dress with pointed sleeves in her bed; she wanted them taken before she gets a hospital bed. She is, forever, an aesthete, a Dadaist, an artist, and a beloved person. There is one photo of her drinking her dandelion tea (good for the liver), and her cheekbones match the sharp corners of her dress’ shoulders. The maker’s mark of the teacup is sharp like her figure; tiny in a big bed, in a big room, surrounded by light, plants, and chandeliers.

She is hosting an art show November 19, a la Frida Kahlo; she will be in her bed, in a house that is pending renovation and so is a perfect setting for a dying person’s one-and-only art show. We will say goodbye in our best clothes, naturally. So many goodbyes in this life; it is hard to hold on to the present. We say goodbye to concepts, assumptions, definitions, parents, and friends. May we allow ourselves and everyone else to change.

It is midnight. Time to try to sleep; but if it doesn’t come, I will be back here in the peaceful moments: 3am tranquility.

A Sinister Blur

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A few weeks ago, a 5-year-old child brought a loaded handgun to school to show to his friends. It was loaded with 14 bullets. It never made it out of his backpack; no one save his teachers saw the gun. Thankfully, children talk and a little boy came up to a teacher on the playground and shared what his friend had told him about bringing a gun to school. The teachers sprang into action. The gun was removed from campus within 30 minutes.

That day is burned into my memory as a sinister blur; it is much more a memory of feelings than of actual events. I was tasked with staying with the little boy who brought the gun and keeping him calm. I had to interview him about the gun and why he brought it, and where he had found it in his parents’ house. This interview process was the hardest, lowest, worst experience of all of my 17 years of being an educator. The feeling of that day is akin to the feeling I felt the night that my father died: I was falling into a bottomless dark space, somewhere I didn’t know, and didn’t understand. He described it as “Batman” at first and then acknowledged that he knew it was also called a gun. He told us he played video games with his dad that were “shoot me games” and that his dad had many guns, even “big ones” all in the same spot in his bedroom. He took the gun when it was still dark outside and his dad didn’t know that his little boy slipped into his room, opened the unlocked cabinet, took a gun, and put it in his superhero backpack, under his lunchbox.

It has taken me a long time to begin to write about this new job. I am not sure where to write about it, or how. I am sure that I am not supposed to write this story here, but I am filled with the fear that schools are not acknowledging the scope of the gun problem. Gun incidents are still being regarded as isolated moments in time, rather than a web of overlapping misunderstandings that lead to injury and sometimes death. There is no conversation about how gun possession, gun safety, and gun violence are family and community issues that require discussion and listening, and acceptance that there is one thing that we all can agree on, which is: guns don’t belong in schools.

My new job as an assistant principal in an elementary school in a small but rapidly growing town is incredibly hard for so many reasons. I expected it to be stressful; there was no way this transition wasn’t going to be hard because I am learning a whole new aspect of the school system, but I am surprised at how limited the tools the schools have to respond to behavioral and mental health challenges are. To me, it seems that either you behave and you are normal, or you go to the counselor for 20 minutes and then go to class, or you go to ISS, or you are suspended. We can’t suspend children younger than 3rd grade. That is it.

Feels limited and limiting, doesn’t it? In this current mental health crisis that we are in, we have 2 counselors for 750 students. We have 1 district social worker for 7 campuses. We have almost 1000 new students that our district has gained since the beginning of the year when demographers thought we would have 250. So many of those new students are exhibiting signs of stress, anxiety, depression, violent tendencies, failure to adapt, learning disabilites, and lack of motivation.

In this ocean of limited resources and so many high needs, it feels overwhelming. Sometimes I get incredibly sad. Sometimes I feel that I can’t do the work and I need to quit like my principal did two weeks ago. I think I will make it, but I do wonder how effective I will feel in another few weeks. It seems like I am getting very little sleep because I wake up worrying almost every night. I feel that my school district-level directors and assistant superintendents don’t know what to do, and even though I can accept that, I feel angry about it.

Who does know what to do? Where are those people? Are they out there?