Got Me A 1-Way Ticket on the Crazy Train

Much to my surprise instead of being enervated by the wagon load that is my life:  work school marriage I am frighteningly energized, or at least my mind is.  In my mind I'm running an 8-minute mile, I'm gonna live forever and I'm not a day over 40.  This may be because I'm on my last physical self-improvement project, carving off the 30+ surplus pounds I've carried for years.  Diet.  Exercise.  Good-bye, Dewar's Red Label.  I feel better, much better, and am always in need of a mountain to climb anyway and this one (weight loss and fitness) is as good as any while I as slowly finish my education training.

That and a moratorium on listening to the news.  Even Trump bores the shit out of me.  The Democratic presidential field is so packed I'll pay attention to the race once it thins.  The awfulness of the world is beyond my control, and a certain amount of attention paid to it results in paralysis, not action.  I try to compensate by applying myself better to my job and to my New Haven work.

All the above a partial explanation to being on the crazy train, a ride I haven't taken for years, but it's real:  moments of clairvoyance (I kid you not) interspersed with moments of transgression.  I have to think twice before I blurt shit out.  As I write this, part of it is that the freak that I left behind in New York wants to come out and play, and I'm indulging her a bit.  May not be healthy for others but she and I are having a blast.  What's the point of hiding?  Many many posts ago I wrote that I was shoveling litter over my shit as I slowly positioned myself to be hired to work in public education.  The plan's still on but if someone doesn't want to hire me because I am coarse vulgar opinionated and can't be trusted to toe the party line, well color me lucky.  It's a door shut, door open world.

As as I have been saying about Nancy Pelosi and her showdown with Donald J. Trump, forget all that fancy-pants analysis.  She's a 76 year old woman who raised 5 children.  If she ever told one of them chillen that if they did not bend to her will, she was going to kill them, you best believe she would follow through on that threat.  (Parenting Tip No. 3,458:  Don't go nuclear unless you mean it.)  And literally, the woman has no fucks left to give.

What's so lovely about all this is that I'm hiding in plain sight.

And Then I Fell Into Max Roach's Arms ...

... which I did not actually do, at least not on purpose.  I almost did as we were being introduced.  These things happen when you are backstage at BAM and you are wearing a leather motorcycle jacket (why on why did I ever imagine I looked cool in that ridiculous armor?) that is so huge and so heavy that your center of gravity shifts to about 2 feet in front of your nose.  And you trip without someone behind you snatching your harness in time.  One recovers, not without embarrassment, and we do not speak of it again until this moment when one of us in that brief encounter is left and spending this year looking over her shoulder.

It's fall.  The new year.  It has turned cold.  For real.  And again I am not ready.  This is the season I finally come alive.  Whatever it is about my particular body chemistry and the atmosphere, I am suited, if not for the cold, the cool.  And the diffusing light.  And the V's of geese making their way to Target (or some such shopping destination).  I have been in my wonderful job for a year, and there are parts of it that I've finally grown into, parts that still catch me unawares, and many many mysteries, which is a good thing.  I have been given a reprieve in school by finally taking a course I can understand without threatening to plunge sharpened pencils into my own ears from frustration.  And having come to this study very late, I know that I don't have time enough to take more Java courses.  I will have to be satisfied with this, and like all things in the autumn of one's life (didya see how I did that!?!?!?!) the knowledge adds piquancy to my pleasure.  For instance:

public class Dispatch
{
public static void main (String [] args)
{
String partingWords = "Au revoir, mon ami, à bientôt.";
System.out.println(partingWords);
}
}

The above is about as close as I'm going to get to write poetry for a while.  It will have to do.  I get the code right and you can hear me barking and clapping like a baby seal with her first taste of squid.  And that is how I occupy my non-jobbing hours looking from the inside out as the leaves contemplate their kamikaze dive to earth.

There are things and people that I miss, plenty of them.  I miss writing.  I miss Fred.  I miss the wonder of newness when something happens or you experience someone or some place for the very first time.  And teaching.  But there are pleasures, too, as I vicariously share the ardors and joys of early parenthood, career-making, partnering, and the surplus of beauty and vigor and passion that defines the young.

In a couple weeks I will be in Seattle for a business meeting.  My first impolitic reaction was:  Seattle?  In November?  The fuck?  And then I got over myself.  At least, I thought, I may have a chance to see a dear friend that I met in my freshman year at Antioch.  (I saw my other dear friend from those days this summer.  Whoot whoot!!)  And one half of the couple that I named Daughter No. 1 after.  And maybe a friend who then, if not now, lived a mere 5 hour drive away.  (I'm hoping that a 5 hour drive to her is like a 10 minute bike ride to me.)  But, in terms of visiting with my past, I'll take what I can get and be grateful for it.  (Who was it who first said, "Everywhere I go I meet myself."?)  I haven't been there since 1990 on my way to a writer's colony on Whidbey Island, and I'm sure I won't be back any time soon.

That's how life goes and Time does, too.  I must walk to my office to retrieve my bike, and learn some more about while loops, and clean another room as if to prove that humans, not beasts live in this house.  (I'm thinking maybe I can then seal it off and forbid entry until Thanksgiving.)  Then with what is left of the day, who knows?  Au revoir, mon ami, à bientôt.

I've Been Across the River

It has been almost 6 weeks since I've been here.  Even for me that's a surprising absence.  This time I can't blame it on mathematics -- I'm in school, yes, but taking an educational foundations course, not a come-to-Jesus math course.  So, that's not it.  But what is, is that I am now working for somebody else (part-time) and I haven't figured out the line between impolitic and sometimes profane discourse (this blog) and my job responsibilities.  This will be the first of many attempts in real time to do so.

As I said before, I turned 60 this year.  It's been glorious and I may well celebrate it for the entire 365 days I'll be this age.  Husband, son-in-law and daughter conspired to throw a party in Brooklyn that was Absolutely Fabulous™ what with friends long- and short-term, great food, dancing, my own personal 60 crown with feathers and glittery pipecleaners, and a kick-ass pair of false eyelashes which I'm conspiring to wear again.

I returned to Planet New Haven to resume a life of studying American education, and enjoying a wonderful job that is both a continuation and an extension of some of the public health work I've done here as a citizen-activist.  Both in school and at work I am overwhelmed (in the best sense) by what I'm learning.  I feel myself to be fortunate indeed.

Of course, in times like these, I barely write.  So, once again I'me struggling with the paradox of being stimulated by so much that is new and being energy- and time-delimited from trying to turn it into fiction.  At best, and as far as I'm concerned it's a nourishing best, I will write some for my course, "The Child in the American Culture".  The title seems innocuous, and godknows, American education courses get dinged all the time for being content-lite, but I'm getting a lot out of this one.  The professor is a kooky pro and students, as they will, mistake her kookiness for a tolerance of mediocrity.  But she's sly:  she'll let a student get as much or as little out of the class as they want.  She asked us after a few classes how we wanted to conduct the remainder of the course.  Currently, we have a dense chapter a week to read and then a student has to present on the assigned chapter; and we've been given a few independent research assignments.  She wanted to know what else we wanted to do, and as she polled I kept hearing:  I find the textbook (American Education by Joel Spring) hard to understand so I'd like to discuss it in class ...

Now.  I gotta tell you that 1) even state school tuition's expensive and I am always conscious of paying for this 3 hours, once per week course that starts at 7:30 in the evening and  2) the textbook is hard to get through because in a typical chapter the author can cover decades of  Supreme Court decisions that altered American education, educational theory and contemporary movements in education, and an analysis of the impact of No Child Left Behind on say, bilingual education.  In all fairness to the other students, a majority of whom are in their early to mid-20's, the book's not easy and the hour is late.  But, goddamn.  The people in this room are, for better or worse, going to shape generations of American minds, and if there's one thing I know about learning it is if you can't demonstrate that you've learned something, you can't teach it.

So, when she rolled around to me, I was bloody, but I was quick.  I simply said that I was about 25 - 30 years older than most of the other students in this class and frankly, I don't know how much value I'll get out of classroom discussion (although I did say that I could be surprised), and that some of what Spring writes about I've lived, that many of the Court's decisions I read as contemporaneous accounts, I've raised kids, I'm a writer and I'm used to writing and so, in addition to in-class discussion, I vote for having to do a research paper.  Or, as I put it to friends:  Oh hell no I'm not paying to show up for 3 hours at night to hear some 20 year old talk about their feelings (largely because they're so incurious and ahistorical that although they are probably going to teach in public school they've never heard about Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, or Dred Scott, or how Loudon County Virginia closed it's public schools for years as opposed to desegregate, or the genesis of charter schools and magnet schools in Connecticut).

And so the course is a hybrid of class discussion as before, and a research paper where the first draft is to be shared with a partner to critique (a suggestion of yours truly) before the final version is written.  People, a little rigor here, please?

One friend said to me that the others will appreciate what I did later.  Don't know; don't care.  This is the minimum I demand of myself.

Tomorrow I leave for New Orleans (pronounced Nawlins) for a national meeting.  I haven't been there in 35 years since I graduated from college.  Loathed the place back then -- much of what I learned about the enduring trauma of racial oppression I learned in Louisiana -- and will probably see very little of it this time what with being consumed by presentations and meetings.  Didn't gloat when Katrina happened, it made a profoundly unjust culture exponentially worse, but am not sentimental about the place or its cultural roots or its food.  But, as in the case of my 20 something classmates, I may be surprised.  One can hope.

So, until the next intermittent dispatch, au revoir.

A Letter to My Faithful Readers

... and to the porn sites which account for 90% of my traffic.  It has been 3 months and change since I last posted.  I stopped blogging for practical reasons:  my life was organized around the care of a dying friend.  I had no desire to write about "it" then, and I am reluctant to write about it now.  The irony is that many of us (in my generation) sculpted ourselves into fiction writers by confessing, mining the travails of our own lives and convincing ourselves that it represented the anxieties of the age.  Had I that need still there would be plenty of entries here, but I don't so there aren't.

It's spring.  Like many in the northeast I had my doubts that it would ever arrive.  I've been awarded for my patience with a front yard that is filling out with strawberries, echinacea, hydrangeas, day lilies, ferns, daisies, oxalis, clover, mint, sage and more than a few spectacular flowering weeds.  During the winter I would sit in my dining room willing the plants into existence, wondering if last year's volunteer squash would take over by late summer, imagining what color the hydrangea blossoms would be.  Now I happily bury the stools of the feral cats that use our yard as their litter box, pull and slice the roots off of weeds so that they can be composted.  And think.

I've been dreaming lately.  A few nights ago I had one where I was practically stalking the Math department's advisor to figure out what my next class should be.  (You don't have to go to far back into last fall's entries the discern the magnitude of my bitchin' and moanin' about how hard my coursework is.)  Nobody in my family believes that I will or should return to school.  (I didn't enroll the spring semester.)  That, too, is an old story.  But, I have spent a lot of time with people who have been delimited by physical illness, mental illness, addiction, and poverty.  One of the enduring effects of any of those conditions is the the lowering of expectations.  Of being defined by what one can't do as opposed to what one can.  And once you've bought that definition of yourself, you've taken over the maintenance of your oppression.  Then it's game, set, match for the oppressor.  Math is my instrument; public school students and adult learners are my audience.  To have the math to work with them I have to do more coursework.  It's as simple as that.

And last night I dreamed that I was in prison, but mysteriously released on furlough.  I spent it at a bar with a friend talking and drinking coffee, surrounded by totebags of paperwork and clothing.  I knew that I had to return to prison.  My friend, who had been imprisoned but was now paroled left to catch the subway.  I packed my bags, and then at the last minute decided I wasn't going back.  Fuck it, I said to myself, I'm an old lady.  Whadda they going to do to me?

Which is the attitude I've been taking now that I'm bike riding again, occasionally without a helmet after a (clears throat) 40 year interregnum.  Cuthbert and even strangers counsel me to do otherwise.  Of course they're right.  I know all too well what can happen and godknows this city has more than its share of reckless and unlicensed drivers.  But, oh freedom, and all of that.  It feels so good to fly down the street and split the air.

Perhaps these latest dreams about about the poles of Freedom and Obligation.  And the dance between the two as I enter my 60th year.  Don't know; may never know.  The sun's up; weeds await me.
 

This I Know About Getting Old

You gather around the radio on Saturday night to listen to "Prairie Home Companion".
And dress for it.

Everyone you meet you've met before.

The list of food and beverages you can ingest without doing serious harm to your body and mind is getting smaller and blander.

Never shocked, seldom surprised when you learn about the death of contemporaries.

 Almost every fantasy is nipped in the bud with the admonition, "That ship has sailed."

I've never been ashamed of my age.  Of course when I was a little girl I wanted to be a big girl; and when I was a teenager I wished I was old enough for some of the men who were buying me drinks, but ask me how old I am and I'll tell you the age I will be once I've reached my birthday milestone for that calendar year.

Except for now having sat in class for 2 semesters with 19, 20, 25 year olds.  Once again for the first time I'm in an environment where I'm simultaneously conspicuous and resoundingly invisible as an almost 60 year African-American woman taking a Calculus class.  I can see it from their POV:  She's almost dead; what's she doing here?  In some ways it's the Same 'Ol Same 'Ol -- girls good in math, African-Americans good in math, now it's competitive old hags doing math -- cognitive dissonance personified.

So, when one of my fellow students and I were chatting before class one day comparing notes about when either of us will be done I pulled my punches when I calculated out loud that I'd be about (cough) sixty-blah blah blah by the time I got my degree.  What a coward, I thought instantly.  All because I overheard a 19 year old ask a guy with a monk's tonsure how old he was and he said 36 and she gasped.  (You would have thought he farted in the elevator.)  I said to myself, they will not turn around and ask me.  They will not dare.  And they didn't.  Not to protect my sensibilities, mind you, but because even for the Facebook generation it would be TMI to know that that were taking a class with a 57 years old.  I mean that's like going bar hopping with your grandma.  Ewwwwwwwwwwww ...  One more class and I get to play with kids more my own age.  Or so I've been led to believe.