We're not in Kansas Anymore, Toto.

One Time on the Mulberry River…

Hi. It’s been a while. 
Much has happened. The worldwide Coronavirus pandemic continues, to a somewhat manageable degree in most of the industrialized world, but even more so in areas with less access to modern medicine. My oldest kid graduated college and entered the workforce. The younger one entered college, discovered he hated his major and changed it almost immediately, and is now living his best life studying music. I finished a Masters degree in Education. 

My father died. 

Twelve hours before he gave up the fight, while hospice nurses, private aides and my mother tried their damndest to get on top of the pain that had suddenly ratcheted up like a display of fireworks during a finale, I held his hand and told him it was okay to let go. I told him him he could rest, and I promised I would take care of my mother. I told him not to worry, we are ready for this, and if he was ready, then just let go. He held onto my hand like we were crossing a wooden step bridge over a wide gulch together, though I cannot say whom was leading whom. 

Ten days later I stood before an audience of over 150 people and gave a speech I’ve been planning to give for years. This was no small feat. It required an extraordinary amount of will, a cocktail of prescription drugs, and the knowledge that two tiny bottles of vodka were in my purse, just in case. I have never simultaneously wanted and dreaded a performance more, perhaps since giving birth. (That also involved sheer will and lots of drugs, but no backup vodka.)

Twenty years ago I could speak before an audience with no problems, I have a decent amount of workshop training in live speaking, actually. But somewhere along the way I developed a bizarre, crippling fear of stages and microphones. It isn’t the speaking that makes me panic, it isn’t the audience. It’s the microphone. I don’t know exactly why. This is why it’s called a Panic Disorder. Anyway, I did it. 

And it was good. People laughed in the right places, I didn’t pass out, I didn’t chicken out, I didn’t need the airplane bottle of vodka. I’m proud of it, both having written the eulogy and delivered it. So I’m putting it here. And then I think I’m gonna move on.

I’m no longer collecting snippets of ideas and thoughts and stories knowing my father will die someday soon, and I have a speech to give. Instead, now I have a stack of his own writing- his thoughts, essays and emails- to edit, and hopefully publish. I’m gonna call it:

”One Time on The Mulberry River“  

*********

Thanks everyone for coming today to help us celebrate my dad. He gave a few eulogies in his life, those that know him well know that he was never short on words. But he always said it was different, getting up and talking about someone you loved so much. So I’m giving it a shot. 

Love of words was something I definitely shared with my dad. I was never into golf, I don’t have the hand/eye coordination. Chris caught the love of golf, and dad was so proud of him and his game. But I mostly think of something completely different than words or golf when I think of the things my brother and I inherited from our father. Because the number one thing I learned from my father is empathy. 

 

Empathy. Dennis had an unending reserve. A bottomless, cold water spring, of empathy. And he taught it to me, indirectly, at a very early age. 

 

Let me tell you a story. 

 When I was little, I remember being at The Jones Store with Dad and Chris. It was crowded, it may have been around Christmas time, and there was a guy in a wheelchair making a scene near the escalator. People were pushing past him and ignoring him, as if he were a homeless beggar in the street corner. I remember feeling a little scared, I was small and the guy didn't speak clearly as part of his handicap, and that kind of freaked me out. But my dad stopped, surveyed the situation, and asked the man if he needed to go downstairs, which he did. Dad told us to stay put, and took the man's chair, tipped it back gently and rode with him down the escalator. Then he got back on the up escalator, collected me and my brother as we went about our day. 

 

I don't know why I remember this event from about 1980 so clearly.  Maybe it was because dad left us standing there among a huge crowd of people. All I know is that in that moment, I understood that helping people, that looking out for others without being asked is a responsibility. 

 

Dennis paid it forward often and regularly. So observant of people around him, he could see when someone needed assistance or even a kind word- a retail worker getting reamed by a customer, a waitress in the weeds, anyone- he would verbally acknowledge their struggle, telling them to hang in there, or don't let the bastards get you down. 

 

And he would sometimes intervene, telling someone berating a retail clerk to relax, or back off, or give the guy a break. As a 6ft tall white man with a deep voice, people being jerks rarely challenged him back. 

 

My father never met a stranger. He would strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Waiting in line, sitting at a table in a restaurant... to the extent that he would sometimes even butt into conversations he was clearly eavesdropping on, to my and my brother's horror. 

 

Oh, were we in a hurry? Too bad, Dad is lecturing that guy in Dick's Sporting Goods about the virtues of DIY camping gear, he just uses a foam egg crate he's had for 30 years, works great, you don't need all that fancy expensive stuff. 

 

"One time on the Mulberry River..." Is a sentence that filled me with dread. To satisfy his need to talk to someone when nobody would listen anymore, he volunteered for many years at a retirement/nursing home. He would spend a few hours a week talking with residents who didn't get many visitors, listening to their stories and enjoying the audience, who would rapturously listen to him telling his own stories. He enjoyed the minutia of their past lives, giving them a chance to tell their own stories, and finding out details that made them special. 

 

It was always about people. 

 

It was so much about people for him that the career he finally settled into and built for himself was in Executive Search. A recruiter. A headhunter. In his career in executive search, his goal was Finding talented employees for companies to hire. “He called it Mutual Need Fulfillment.” Most of you know that phrase well. 

 

I worked with him for 10 years, and sidenote: if you had told me at age 16 that I would spend a large chunk of my career working alongside my father I would have laughed you out of the room. But we actually worked pretty well together. Our similar personalities that threatened to destroy our family when I was a melodramatic teenager living under his roof meant that when working together as adults, we could read each other's minds and finish each other's sentences. This was super annoying for the rest of our family, although still a better scenario than my teenage years. 

 

At some point in my early college life my dad came across a framed glass picture that we call "The Thought Picture." It is a series of statements about how hard it truly is to live your life as the embodiment of good. He gave it to me, then my brother, then he bought one for himself, then he started buying them for anyone he decided needed one. Eventually he couldn't find them anymore and he worked with an art store to make them from scratch. 

 

It is, essentially, Dennis's moral code. His rules to live by. The bottom line is there will always be forces working against you; Do Good Anyway. 

 

When I said that my father never met a stranger, it really isn’t that simple.  Dennis made friends everywhere he went. But he didn't have just friends. 

 

• Because you don't float down a river in a canoe in whitewater rapids over and over for decades- until you know each other's habits and strengths and can guide each other through safely with but a few words - with just friends. 

• You don't create golf tournaments to honor tragically deceased buddies and then play that tournament for 30 years with just friends. 

• You don't hike to the top of a 14,000 foot mountain peak - or just short of the top- and tend to each other's injuries  - and egos - with just friends. 

• Fraternity brothers from a lifetime ago. 

• His KCBobos Book Clubbers. Who recorded themselves reading a book for him when he could no longer see well enough to read the selection at hand.

• His Core of Four. His “Let’s Roll” crew. 

 

It is Mutual Need Fulfillment personified. He didn’t just talk about it. He lived it.  

 

The thing that I've avoided touching on so far has been, of course, how much he loved my mother. I consider myself a decent writer but on this topic I am without the proper words, I struggle to convey the depth of their relationship. 

 

It's a fairytale, honestly, a love story that most of us know cannot exist in the real world, yet here they are. They met, dated for 6 weeks, were engaged and married 6 months later in 1967. 

He always let her win, he ate everything she put in front of him regardless of whether it was good or not, he worked to give her the things she wanted whether she knew them or not. 

 

His weakest moments and his greatest fears revolved around just the chance of her unhappiness. He would tolerate no such thing. He spent much of the last five years trying to prepare for her to be comfortable after he was gone, as if that would somehow be possible. 

 

At the onset of the isolation of the Covid-19, he was a little cavalier regarding staying home in quarantine. After a while, my brother and I decided it was time for a Come to Jesus meeting. 

 

"I'm dying soon anyway, what do I care if it's the cancer that gets me or this Coronavirus?" 

 

I said, fine, but if you take my mother with you, we're gonna have a problem. "Oh." Nothing more was needed. He would risk himself, but not her. 

 

I want to wrap up here with a couple of poems. I first came across Ithaka by greek poet Constantine Cavavy in 1994, when it was read during the funeral of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

 

Ithaka

BY C. P. CAVAFY

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Secondly, my father knew that I have a nerdy love of old books, that I collect them. Mostly volumes of Shakespeare but I have quite the collection of other poets and writers as well - Spenser, Whittier, first editions of classics from long ago. At some point, he gave me a crackled, disintegrating leather bound copy of Tennyson poems, probably for a birthday because there is a Hallmark envelope marking a place like a bookmark. I don't know if the spot was chosen, or by chance, but it happens to be the center of Tennyson's long poem "In Memoriam." 

 

Now, I am not going to read you all of In Memoriam, it is long and tedious and only the English majors among us care. But I am going to read this one section. 

I wage not any feud with Death

For changes wrought on form and face;

No lower life that earth’s embrace

May breed with him can fright my faith

 

Eternal process moving on, 

From state to state the spirit walks;

And these are but the shatter’d stalks, 

Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.

 

Nor blame I Death, because he bare

The use of virtue out of earth;

I know transplanted human worth

Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

 

For this alone on Death I wreak

The wrathe that garners in my heart;

He put our lives so far apart

We cannot hear each other speak. 

My father was a lot of things, but subtle wasn't one, so I doubt his bookmark envelope was placed purposely. I never asked him. I think I’d call it kismet. Or maybe what Ann Lamott calls “Tiny Epiphanies.” 

 

Regardless, these words soothe me, may they bring you peace, as well. 

 

##

 

 

Mad World.

I realize I haven't posted here in a while. Most of my quarantine thoughts have played out on Facebook. But recently I hit my wall of "this is ridiculous, what is even happening?" So, here we are.

 

 

Last summer I was preparing to go on a trip to France as a chaperone with my son's high school band. I was shopping at our local Bag & Baggage store, looking for a good crossbody bag that could hold all of my goodies, but not be super heavy. I was there late in the evening, close to closing time, and it was just me and the manager in the store. We started chatting about my trip, just conversation as she showed me some options then left me to browse.

Somehow we got on the topic of someone I know who has a thing for Tumi briefcases. Now this person has a whole selection of really nice leather briefcases in a bin in the basement. Things he doesn't use anymore, but can't seem to get rid of. I was complaining because I know these things take up space and they're never going to get used again, they should be donated, some of them are broken, they would need to be fixed before they could be used again. But this guy just can't let them go. In fact, if you bring it up, an absolute temper tantrum will ensue. And as she was walking around the store tidying up her racks, she started telling me stories of people that she knows that love their Tumi bags, they are after all very high quality and can last forever if cared for properly. But then she mentioned people get attached to their things, it's hard to let go.

And as she said that, I absentmindedly mentioned that it might be because his parents divorced when he was away at college, and got rid of all his stuff when they sold the family home and split up their households.

She stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me.

"Honey." She said softly. I looked up at the change in tone. "He has baggage."

It gave me goosebumps.

Oh my God. He literally has emotional baggage manifesting in his baggage.

 

Now, watch as I tie this into teachers returning to school this fall.

 

We've been through a lot to be teachers. We go through a specific teacher education program, with a rosy outlook plan to love and teach young minds to prepare them for the real world. And then we get into the classroom where we discover that over half of that gets thrown out, because technology changes constantly, districts update guidelines, reading programs and new math every 2 years. Then throw out the other half of what we learned about student engagement, because our biggest worry will be keeping our little loves alive.

 

Every time there is a school shooting, teachers get a little more PTSD. In fact, the rise in school shootings have completely changed how we teach and function in schools. Our biggest fear used to be tornadoes that might hit before we could get everyone into the safe place. Now it's that we may have to choose to die throwing our bodies in front of our roomful of children.

These are split second decisions. Decisions we all know we could make in the fraction of a second. It's a terrible ask, but it would also be over immediately.

Now you want us to plan to die, while learning, juggling and managing completely new teaching methods. Maybe. But not on purpose. Some may get sick and die immediately, some possibly further down the road. You want us to traumatize our kids in the process in the name of prevention by hiding our expressions that helo convey safety and love. And you want us to do this every single day, for months on end, not knowing if these new procedures will or won't keep us protected.

 

Maslow's hierarchy details how the brain can't learn unless basic needs are met. Basic needs include food, shelter, safety. We all learned this in our teacher training, including district administrators. We apply this ti students every day. Yet, teachers are being asked- no, told - to function without their safety needs met.

 

Our desire to be healthy and our will to live has become baggage. Many have already drawn that line and said no, this is too much. Many will try to make it work. Though I plan to give this a shot, I'd like to hang on to what health I have left, I have already given up so much in terms of my personal health. I am someone for whom this disease could potentially be more dangerous. 

 

We should all be ashamed it has come to this. But if you've been online lately, you know the savagery directed at teachers who have tried to raise alarms doesn't remotely show that. 

 

Live Through This.

On Thursday morning, February 15, 2018, I had a hard time going to work. My heart was beating so fast that I had to crank up the music and scream to blow off some of the adrenaline that flooded me as traffic carried me down my usual route. Once I arrived, I barely made it into my classroom and locked myself in before I lost it. I sat at my desk and sobbed for a few minutes. Thankfully, it was a block day and I didn't have a first period class. I had some time to pull myself together. 

It wasn't fear, really. I feel pretty safe at my school. And I wont lie, part of that feeling of safety is taking small comfort in statistics. We've already had a shooting event on our property, before I came to teach there. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same spot. I tell myself this, regularly.

But. Still.

It was an overwhelming sense of helplessness. It was imagining my own students, all of whom I adore and would lay down my life for, laying injured on the floor, or dead. Envisioning the same of my friends on staff, knowing who would be in the hallway giving directions in a crisis. It was the realization that the lockdown/intruder drill we held just the FUCKING DAY BEFORE would be meaningless based on what happened in Florida. He pulled the fire alarm and waited for people to come to him.

(Side note: don't talk to me about mental illness right now. Premeditated. Planned. He's not insane.)

I cannot wrap my leather belt around the hinge of the door when the fire alarm goes off. I can't push a table in front of the door and turn off the lights and say we stay here until we get the All Clear.

I cannot retrain my kids to erase the muscle memory reaction we've taught them since the age of five to exit the building when they hear the alarm. I will not do that. I will not ask them to override their natural instincts. Or mine.

We are sitting ducks. And I can't fix that.

You have no idea how powerless this feels.

When Sandy Hook happened I was in a low-boil panic for days, maybe weeks. My Fight or Flight response was dialed up to 11 all day, every day, while I forced myself to appear calm and functional to the point of total exhaustion. I spent all my free time standing in the middle of my classroom imagining the various scenarios of where would I hide children when he came for me. How could I arrange my classroom footprint to ensure the most survivors? I cleaned a bunch of junk out of my storage cabinets to make room for little bodies.

My youngest son was in the classroom across the hall at the time, in fourth grade. Would I run for him first? Or second to whomever was in my room at the time? How would I choose? I didn't have an answer. But I wondered constantly. 

It has occured to me that this event may have been a catalyst in my adrenal system overload which resulted in Fibromyalgia diagnosis, or at the very least, the final straw. You can't imagine the stress this puts in teachers everywhere. How many teachers in this country operate daily with PTSD? And I mean just those of us who have yet to live through a real event. This is the point of view I have. I cannot speak for the survivors. 

That we have accepted that a massacre of innocents like this in our schools or churches is a When, not an If and that we must prepare, is mind-boggling. And it breaks my heart.

Like the time of Sandy Hook, I have avoided the news. I have not read the articles, not read the names, turned the channel, watched only coverage of the Olympics. I am unable to let myself process this. I've turned off the spigot of that emotional water pipe. I can't get to angry in the grief cycle, because I cannot start the process. I'm too afraid I won't be able to stop crying once I begin. I won't be able to get out of bed. I won't be able to go into my classroom. I won't be able to face my students without trembling at the slightest noise. (I already jump out of my skin when somebody pops a balloon. Did I mention my Fight or Flight response is broken?) It may not be healthy, turning completely away, but it's keeping me functioning on some level.

But I have not been able to stop the scenarios that run on a loop inside my very imaginative brain. During a five day week I teach classes that include all grades of students K-12. How would I manage the situation with my high schoolers differently than my kindergarteners? They all have phones, they could help each other since they're more mature, perhaps we really could be stone silent and wait to be saved. Have you ever seen a group of kindergarteners be stone silent?

Some don't even include me, some of these scenarios are about my own children. What would happen at their school, a public high school just down the block from where I teach, not unlike the one in Florida? What if they're in the band room - it has an outside exit and doors that connect to other classrooms, plus doors that look like closets. Their English and math classes are at the end of the farthest hallway, they'd have more time there.

The scenarios in my brain run as both a teacher and parent.

How are we supposed to get past this?

And why do we have to? 

 

 

 

Letting the Days Go By, Let the Water Hold Me Down

Another school year down. The boys' school district finished last Friday. Today at noon my school dismissed, my first year of teaching as a Real Teacher in the books. I really do feel a little like Pinocchio: A Real Teacher, like someone waved a magic wand over my head. A month ago I felt like there was no end in sight, and yet here we are. What an adventure we’ve had.

This year I started a new job, took on an extended volunteer job within Scouting that could have been at least a part-time, 20-hour per week job, and added an extra teenager to our already busy life. Why not? What could go wrong?

Here’s why not, roared back my aging body. My immune system apparently took it as a dare. YOU WANNA SEE WHAT HAPPENS? LET’S GO, DUMB GIRL. Let’s crank up the chronic pain, a couple of funky autoimmune disorders, rekindle those migraines AND migraine associated vertigo, which will keep you barely functioning sometimes for weeks at a time. HOW BOUT DA?

So yeah. I maybe overdid it this year. But I regret nothing, let’s make that clear.

Ten months ago I noticed a brief line in a school district newsletter about foreign exchange students, and suggested to my family, hey, that might be cool, why don’t we look into it? A week later we met a darling Korean teenager at the airport at 1:30 in the morning, fresh off a flight from Seoul. He was goofy and excited and quiet, all at the same time. He spoke a formal, classroom style of English, but he spoke it pretty well. He didn’t understand American sarcasm, memes, or my dad’s terrible jokes. He didn’t really speak unless someone spoke to him, initially. But he listened quite a bit. He always seemed to be off to the side, listening, watching, quietly taking it all in. I soon learned that when he needed something he would come find me in the kitchen and kind of hover nearby, until I asked, “is everything ok? Do you need anything?” He would say “well, actually…” And then we would drive to Target to retrieve whatever thing he needed for school or soccer or personal care.

He could sleep anywhere, at any time, but especially in the car. At first I chalked it up to the time change and jet-lag, daily soccer practice workouts and a full day of school in his second language. If we drove somewhere longer than five minutes away, he'd be asleep like a baby. It became something of a joke. Oh look, he’s asleep again, on the way to a restaurant for dinner out. So cute.

I made a conscious effort to slow down my speech and avoided using slang and contractions. I asked specific questions every day when I picked him up after soccer practice, good questions that did not allow yes or no answers, to force him to talk to me. I told him about my day after he told me about his, until eventually he began to ask about my day, unprompted. I corrected his grammar or word choice, and explained why. (My inner English major loved that part.)

Sometimes I let the car fill up with an awkward silence, just to see what would happen. My theory stands, as I found with my own kids, that teenagers love to talk when riding in the car, when adults can listen but not make eye contact while driving. He didn’t have a lot of social skills at first, and he kept to himself in his room quite a bit those first few months. My own boys are introverts, they prefer their video games and laptops to group engagement, so it was fine.  But we got into a rhythm as a family of five. I cooked a lot of rice in the fall, so he always had something comfortable available in the fridge. But honestly, he was the least picky eater in my house, he ate everything I put in front of him. We sat down to dinner together as a family this past year more than we have in several years, at least until spring came and everybody’s sports/activities/music/clubs schedule exploded again.

After the holidays and we went back to school in January, we hit a rough patch. My Mom attention-span got stretched a little thin. My bizarro, unexplainable, chronic pain (fibromyalgia) issues kicked in and I’m not gonna lie, it was likely stress related. I forgot things, or I got them wrong - the who what when why where part of our lives. My family isn’t used to me screwing that up so it was tough on everybody, especially me, so smug in my Supermom ego. Teenagers don’t forgive and forget easily. My kitchen became a constant scene of loud, dramatic, passive aggressive rhetorical questions: Why are there no forks? Who drank the last of the orange juice? Who ate my Poptarts? Why are there twelve pairs of shoes in the doorway? Who moved my backpack? I was supposed to take the first shower! (Hint, it wasn’t always the teenagers, sometimes it came from the adults.) Sometimes it felt like I was drowning in a sea of cranky, testosterone fueled drama, like an old episode of Real World: The Suburbs. We all got tired of each other at about the same time. I tried to tell myself maybe it was okay because all three boys were either alone in their rooms with the door shut, or arguing constantly, like bickering siblings.

This is normal, according to the exchange agency coordinator. Happens to many host families - the shine wears off. March and April screamed by, and suddenly it was almost time for end of year band concerts, dance club concerts, finals and graduation. Suddenly it became clear to all of us that our little experiment was about to end. The kids began to tolerate each other better, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. And our student friend became more and more sad, each day of May that went by, anticipating the end of this experience and life as a member of our family.

Back in August, on his first full weekend in Kansas, we went to a Royals baseball game, in part because my son's marching band was performing the National Anthem. Bookending his time here with live sports games, on his last evening in town before flying home to Korea we went to a SportingKC soccer game. We sat in the front row behind the corner kick flag, and had a blast. We took selfies with kitty noses and whiskers drawn in, and I commented “look how cute we are! I like that, it makes my face look less fat.” Actually, it's a feature, he replied. American sarcasm, achievement unlocked.

It was an amazing year. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes it was hard. I was often reminded why my husband and I had deliberately chosen to only have two kids. But seeing someone experience the life we take for granted was humbling, and I am grateful for it. I'm glad my children had a chance to see a different point of view. He played competitive soccer, read Hamlet (in his second language, can you imagine? The metaphors alone are barely understandable in English!) He went to prom, and patiently defended his beloved country to American teenagers who don’t understand the difference between North and South Korea.

 

Last August, I greeted an adorably awkward, foreign teenager at the airport, and brought him into my nest as one of my own.

Last Thursday morning I put a young man back on a plane to Seoul. And onward we go.

Watershed.

Hidey-Ho lovely people. I'm going to pretend there are actually people here reading, even thought I know at this point I've lost everyone to some other intellectually stimulating thing, since this is mostly abandoned. Ten years I've had this blog, ten years last September. A lot is different. Even more is not. 

 

It is Christmas Break again, I have finished my last semester of graduate school, and starting in January I will student teach at a middle school nearby. There is a lot of negative that has happened during this exercise in More Education, but I'm trying to let it go and just get what I need out of it. I am not worried about the student teaching, I'm simply wanting to get it over with, so I can get on with the business of actually teaching and being paid for it. I've said goodbye to all my friends at the elementary school which I adore working, at least until I return in April, a shiny new for-real teacher. Except there isn't anything shiny and new about me, just a muffin top and gray hairs that stubbornly refuse to take any color. 

 

New year, new beginnings. See ya on the flipside, folks.