MindSpinner

It was picture day, and I am in charge of picture day. I am also in charge of prom and graduation and, no doubt, the weather for the senior picnic. I had done everything right to make the day go smoothly. I had approved the picture schedule with all of the middle school and high school teachers. I had talked to the company with the photography contract, and not just once, to make sure I had what the woman who schedules the pictures thought would be a workable schedule. I based it on her requirement that the middle school pictures and the high school pictures be treated as two different jobs going on concurrently in the same gym lobby. I had scheduled around the juniors who are gone in the morning, the seniors who are gone in the afternoon, and the fifth graders who go to lunch at 10:30 in the morning. I had even found a time for softball pictures even though juniors attending vocational school get back to the building five minutes after two school-to-work seniors on the team generally leave for the afternoon. I emailed this schedule to everyone ahead of time. I had hard copies of the schedule this morning for every teacher, printed on colored paper, because I knew from fall pictures that half the teachers don’t check their mailboxes or their email, so the only way to make sure they get the schedule is to hand it to them on the day they’ll need it. I had arranged, yes, even argued for the necessary announcements to be made over the intercom to get certain scattered groups to the photographers at the right time. I considered this schedule something of a feat on the order of solving a difficult puzzle. I had assigned two yearbook staff members as assistants to each photographer. I thought I’d passed the planning test - until I found it hadn’t started.

Two photographers arrived. Unfortunately, only one of them could take group pictures. That’s right. There’s something fundamentally mysterious about this, but there seems to be a distinction between being qualified to take a picture of one kid sitting in front of a camera and being qualified to take a picture of multiple kids seated in a group. I, having utterly no clue about such things, have obviously been clicking away all year with no qualifications at all, even taking the club pictures on fall picture day because the photographer couldn’t get to them and we had to have them for the yearbook.

Given the resolute specialization of the one photographer, the schedule for middle school now conflicted at several points with the schedule for high school, for both group and individual pictures. I should have scheduled all the individual shots for photographer 1 and all the group shots for photographer 2 and somehow divined this though it contradicted what I was told by phone. The photographers and I reworked the schedule, and I traipsed back to tell the teachers whose classes would be affected.

That was all before there turned out to be a short in the cable that enabled the “group” camera to trigger the flash and before the 9th graders had sat for a half an hour waiting, consequently missing their breakfast. There was not an extra cable in the photographers’ vehicle. There was no one to bring an extra cable from the office an hour away. There were no suitable cables to be bought in a camera store or borrowed or hi-jacked. “We have to order this from out of state,” I was told. The recommendation from the home office, “Stretch the cable out and bite it” either did not work or the photographers respected themselves too much to try it. The upshot was that, while individual portraits and casual pictures of small groups of friends could be taken, sports group shots or class group shots could not. This means the photographers have to come back. Again. This spring.

But I am a teacher, and teachers are used to stuff like this. Really. All the time. Consequently, I did not grab the cable and bite it myself. Nor did I bite the photographer. I wrote a nice little note to the teachers about the changes, scheduled spring picture day, take 2, and went on to the rest of the school day, which involved half again as many twists and turns, but I have no inclination to write about them.

Fourth block tackled a writing assignment, an analysis of a poem. Some had written a proficient answer in 25 minutes; others required much support to get the hang of what they were doing. Most succeeded, but I’ll have to follow up with two or three. Worthwhile class. Progress made.

Fifth block stayed so busy and engaged with differentiated assignments they did not notice it was snowing out. You don’t see that often.

The afternoon meant a trip with my son to meet with the court designated worker assigned to his truancy case. My son took responsibility for having missed days he shouldn’t have (each representing a struggle between us) and signed an agreement to attend school every day and not to be late. On the way home, he turned to me in the car, out of the blue, and said, “Mom, I love you.”

And that last part is really the only thing I need to remember about this day.

Watch out! I have a new laptop (no ordinary laptop) and a two-week spring break approaching. No more borrowing the kids’ eMac at 5:00 in the morning or when nobody’s sitting in front of it. No more passing over what wanted to be written because there’s no ready opportunity to sit down and hash it out. (Pen and paper don’t work so well for me anymore.) No more checking my mail through Yahoo and jotting only the quickest replies. Now I can sit on my bed and write whenever I make the time (beating back lesser claims upon it). I can download photographs and share them, upload and order those pictures my mother wanted of the kids, and find out what I want to know via the Internet without having to wait in line or deal with haphazard connections at school.

I’d rather cook dinner every night over an open fire than live without a laptop and an Internet connection. I’d rather wash clothes in the bathtub and hang them out on a line. Did I mention how grateful I am to have this extraordinary tool, this doorway to the world, this means to conversations that matter? Or how grateful I am that this dimension of my life is important not only to me but to people who care about me? WOW moment in progress here.

“I am so mad,” said my son in the car the other day, on the way home from school. “Everything is so fucked up.”

“What’s wrong? Did you have a really bad day?”

“No, I mean the country. I’m mad that my country is so fucked up.” At seventeen, he knows something precious has been stolen - his pride and even his ethical comfort in being an American, along with something of his future. He doesn’t say this lightly, and he doesn’t rely on soundbytes. He reads extensively for a kid his age, actually - The Atlantic, The Economist, the BBC News on the Web.

—

She has outlived the currency of her principles and her beliefs, my 76-year-old mother lamented to me on the phone yesterday. They are simply disappearing from the world. She comes from the Appalachian mountains where a spirit of independence instills many people with the idea that less government is better and people ought to do more for themselves. We’ve debated politics before. She was president of her college debate team, and she actually relishes debates I find painful, but there’s no debating going on now. She’s been betrayed, too. She sees the government and both major parties as hopelessly corrupt. There’s nobody to champion now. “I’d vote for a Libertarian or Green Party candidate,” she concludes, “if I thought they’d have a chance of winning, but they don’t.”

——

A friend who has become dear to me reveres the ideas that founded this country, a country he has chosen to serve with his considerable talents for many years - but with eyes always open. He speaks eloquently at American Conscience of the perils and possibility America confronts today. He sees much. To see, these days, is to find reason for deepest concern, so it is no surprise that sometimes when he calls, he’s discouraged.

He wondered aloud the other day whether our conversations had changed the way I blog - had he turned my attention toward political matters and taken it away from other affirmations of what is timeless and important in life, from what serves to sustain? The answer, of course, is no. I write about what occurs to me, what asks to be written on a given day.

It’s simply that we can’t afford to be fooled by those who try to construct reality as if reality were nothing more substantial than a movie set and we the extras paid a pittance to bleat prescribed lines on cue, in unison.

We are all alike betrayed by the direction the elected leadership of this country is steering, not only for us, but for the world. This is not the voyage we signed up for, not the purpose for which this ship of state was lovingly crafted, not the flag we want to fly. There’s no nailing us down in the hold of the ship to shut us up in the dark. We’ll stand on each other’s shoulders and break through the deck board by board.

In a time like this, silence convicts us as passive accomplices. So I can’t be silent, though I’ll never run for office and need more time than I have in order to stay as informed as I ought to be.

I can’t vote for one candidate who might be expected to tow a party line when that party line leads to perdition. I am responsible for finding and supporting candidates who stand for what I believe in.

When I peruse the American political landscape in hopes of finding integrity and a constructive vision, it’s Barack Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that I remember. A recent profile in The American Prospect fuels my interest; Obama speaks of exactly what I care about - effecting a sustainable future that attends to the welfare and the freedoms of all:

Where I probably can make a unique contribution is in helping to bring people together and bridging what I call the ‘empathy deficit,’ helping to explain the disparate factions in this country and to show them how we’re joined together, helping bridge divides between black and white, rich and poor, even conservative and liberal…. The story that I’m interested in telling is how we can restore that sense of commitment to each other in a way that doesn’t inhibit our individual freedoms, doesn’t diminish individual responsibility, but does promote collective responsibility.

Apparently, given his 72% approval rating in Illinois, the senator has a certain gift for reaching people. He describes his values as

…deeply rooted in the progressive tradition, the values of equal opportunity, civil rights, fighting for working families, a foreign policy that is mindful of human rights, a strong belief in civil liberties, wanting to be a good steward for the environment, a sense that the government has an important role to play, that opportunity is open to all people and that the powerful don’t trample on the less powerful.…

That’s my list. That’s what I want this country to be about.

Obama understands what’s happened to the American electorate, too - why we aren’t acting, collectively, like the informed, engaged citizens true democracy depends upon in order not to be reduced to a puppet show manipulated by power and greed. Interviewed in a New Yorker article of 2004, Obama identifies part of the problem:

Americans aren’t simply too tired to think about politics, he said; they’re being deliberately turned off. “If you make political discourse sufficiently negative, more people will become cynical and stop paying attention. That leaves more space for special interests to pursue their agendas, and that’s how we end up with drug companies making drug policy, energy companies making energy policy, and multinationals making trade policy.”

Of course, the exhausting pace of our culture and off-putting negativity in politics are not the only toxins that dull our senses. There are weapons of mass distraction, outright lies, religion co-opted, and the strategic silencing of voices of truth. Awareness is the antidote for these opiates, and we must quaff it now, whatever its bitter taste. We have the weapons we’ve always wielded - our voices in a free society, our votes.

I’m not feeling young these days, and another birthday is just around the corner. Barack Obama is four months younger than I am, to the day. Young to be a president, but old enough to be wise, if wisdom is in your nature. If wisdom isn’t in your nature, aging can only accomplish so much. George W. didn’t sober up until he was just four years younger than I am now. He’d driven cars into trash cans and companies into ruinous debt. So, too, now the nation.

Currently Barack Obama demurs most graciously at talk of his running for president anytime soon. He doesn’t like to get ahead of himself. He says instead, “I find that I perform best when I’m focused on being useful as opposed to becoming something.” Actually I’m beginning to focus on his being as useful as he can be in a time when this country needs to find its path forward into a future that gradually restores hopes now threatened and national integrity now compromised. That will require a president with a vision, unsullied integrity, a deep intelligence, the broadest possible vision, and a way of bringing people to see what we have in common and what we need to effect in the world together.

My pussy willow is a dwarf tree with cascading branches. I thin its branches in the spring and bring them indoors in a vase. Lovely.

I don’t often name plants, but my pussy willow tree is an exception. What could its name be

but Cousin It?

My Excite home page, configured long ago, generates “a quote a day” in the left-hand column. This must be the third or fourth time I’ve seen this quote by Washington Irving:

There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.