Sunday, August 29, 2010

Confessions of an Eternal Teacher's Pet

I started grading papers back in high school. Perhaps because I was a top student, but more because I was a trustworthy sort, several of my teachers were willing to hand over student work for me to score. Essays and such, anything that required a subjective score, they did themselves, but I often got to mark up my classmates' multiple-choice quizzes, fill-in-the-blank work, and French dictations.

Several times, in my Advanced Placement Literature class, the teacher gave me papers to grade while the rest of the class watched a movie, and once she even invited me to come to school on Saturday to help out. After school, I often went to the library to make myself available as a tutor to lower-level French students, and when no one required my services, there were always papers to grade. This was an extra-credit opportunity available to all advanced French students - but for me it was a chance to feel valuable, mature, privy to secret things; a chance to rise above the ordinary rabble of the high school crowd and hobnob usefully with the Powers that Be.

Several teachers had said they would be interested in having me as a student aide if I were ever so inclined, but I never took any of them up on it until my last semester before graduation, when I joined a second-year French class to do basic classroom chores, preside over workbook reviews, and - of course - grade folder after folder of papers. The workbook reviews were my favorite, naturally; I got to stand up in front of the class while the teacher worked on other things (sometimes she even left the room) and direct the action. Not everyone understood why I would want to spend a precious hour of my school day as a student aide - why didn't I take another academic course, or use the free period to relax or get started on my homework? I explained that I hoped to be a college professor someday, so helping out in a high school classroom was good practice. I never mentioned the pure thrill of having authority over my fellow students, however borrowed and fleeting; the joy of having thirty pairs of eyes on me, a sea of hands raised for my attention; the satisfaction I felt at writing a grade in large red ink across the top of a quiz, doling out the measures of the burden at which I myself trembled all the rest of the day.

One of the highlights of my high school career must have been getting the chance to run Scantrons for my Spanish teacher. I was given a note which granted me access to the back rooms of the office building, the inner sanctum under the doorway prominently labeled "NO STUDENTS ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT." For the mild-mannered, unadventurous soul, there is perhaps no greater pleasure than being individually granted official access to forbidden territory. I fed the Scantrons one at a time through the machine, just as my teacher had demonstrated. Any teacher who had a free period just then might have walked by and seen me standing there doing their job just as competently as could be. Something inside the machine clicked as it laid down the little pink line next to every question that had been answered incorrectly; I could tell just by listening who had done well (thunk . . . . . . . . . . thunk) and who had failed (thunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunk . . . thunk). Let my classmates think what they would of my studiousness and sheer ineptitude on the high school social scene; in the Scantron machine I had my last laugh, a quantitative measure of the virtues of silence. As I returned to the classroom, the thick folder of Scantrons clutched protectively to my chest, I walked with a swagger and confidence deliciously foreign to my mundane existence.

A couple of times, my mother, who taught at an Episcopal elementary school, called in an excused absence for me and took me to work with her.  She did it once when she was teaching her students about the westward migration of the mid-1800s; this had been a special interest of mine since I was seven years old, and it was easy for me, clad in an old-fashioned dress, to ad-lib the part of a pioneer woman, telling the children of my adventures on the California Trail.  Another time, I got to serve as an escort on a class trip to Knott's Berry Farm.

The Episcopal school closed its doors the year I graduated from high school, and my mother found a job at another Christian school.  In the first months of the year, she told her third-grade students stories about her daughter who was away at college in Massachusetts.  When illness forced me to come home halfway through the school year, I may have felt disgraced among my family and my friends, but those third-graders welcomed me as if I were a minor celebrity.  They greeted me with enthusiasm whenever I came to visit the classroom; often they sought out chances to talk to me, and they were delighted whenever I took part in a lesson or class activity.

My mother teaches seventh grade now in a public school, and I have the privilege of lightening her workload by grading stacks of papers and occasionally helping to create assignments.  These days, I grade everything from spelling tests to essays to year-end projects.  Because I have plenty of time on my hands, being unemployed and not currently in school, I am able to give the student work more time and attention than my mother could easily afford; she has repeatedly expressed delight in the thoughtful, corrective, and encouraging comments I write on the papers she passes back.  Another advantage for her in letting me do the grading comes from my near-eidetic memory for verbal material; I have a knack (and a passion) for detecting plagiarism.  Year after year, I have seen plagiarism decrease over the course of the school year as each new batch of students learns they simply can't pull one over on me.  My mother has been known to invoke my name to put the fear of God into them: "Now, I'm going to have Truth grading these" is apparently all it takes.

I make a little money grading for my mother, and I love feeling that I am contributing to the education of the young people in her class, if only in a small way.  I enjoy collecting the sometimes hilarious misunderstandings and malapropisms that show up in student work.  Most importantly, I love knowing that there is something important that I am trusted to do, under the belief that I will do it thoroughly and well.  Still the teacher's pet, after all these years.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Songs of Myself

The other night, my friends and I had gathered online for our usual evening chat, and the conversation turned to music.  I asked everyone to name a song that would be his/her theme song if s/he had to choose.  One woman remarked that it was hard to choose just one, and I had to agree.

No one turned the question around on me and asked me to name a theme song, so I didn't have to narrow down the choices.  Upon further reflection, I decided I shouldn't have to.  Life is a rich enough experience that a person's entitled to more than one theme song.

It was with this in mind that I put together the following soundtrack to my soul, as it were; an album-length playlist of theme songs, along with the reasons I chose them.  It's a bit of an exercise in self-indulgence, and I don't honestly expect anyone to read the whole thing unless s/he is terribly interested in the strange private world I inhabit.  Nevertheless, this list of songs was challenging and fun to pick out, and will, I earnestly hope, constitute a sort of pieced-together portrait of the enigma that is Truth Unleashed.

TRACK LISTING:
We Belong (Pat Benatar)
That's the Way It Is (Céline Dion)
Once You Had Gold (Enya)
People Are Strange (The Doors)
An Emotional Brain (The Amygdaloids)
Then Again (Court Yard Hounds)
I Am a Rock (Simon and Garfunkel)
I Made It Through the Rain (Barry Manilow)
Because You Loved Me (Céline Dion)
Somewhere (Barbra Streisand)
King of Pain (The Police)
The Bottom Line (Depeche Mode)
Burn (Jo Dee Messina)
Sometimes When We Touch (Dan Hill)
Strong Enough (Sheryl Crow)
The Music of the Night (The Phantom of the Opera)

Now, for the reasoning:

We Belong - This is the answer I usually give when I am asked to name my favorite song.  The music contains a soaring tension that is splendedly repeated in the chorus, and if I'm listening alone, it's one that always makes me get up and dance.  (It's by far the most frequently-played song on my iPod, since I can't seem to listen to it without pressing the replay button four or five times.)  As with the rest of my "theme songs," however, it is the lyrics that make this song especially dear to me.  This is a song about living life with a passion, in the thrall of immense and ineffable forces, and diving into this sometimes painful existence with joy and courage, embracing a distinctive and sometimes isolating worldview.  Just as much, it's about having a companion for the journey.  The relationship described by the song is marked by ambivalence and sometimes hurt, but ultimately by love.  In fact, the pain and the love and the ambivalence are all bound up as one; to consistently "cut [a person's] feelings to the bone" requires intimate understanding, after all.  Catherine Earnshaw's declaration of her love for Heathcliff comes to mind: ". . . he's more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. . . . I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself - but as my own being. . . ."  I have never shared this depth of love with another person; although I burned several CDs of love songs for my ex-partner, "We Belong" was never on any of them.  It simply didn't apply to her and me.  One of the few whimsical romantic notions I permit myself is a vague idea that when I find someone to whom I could rightly dedicate this, I'll have found my life's companion.

That's the Way It Is - Laugh if you must, but I shall always believe this theme song was given to me, chosen for me by Something beyond myself.  I'd loved the song from the first time I'd heard it, but it didn't become special to me until the day I came back to California after my ill-fated first attempt at higher education, which ended with a downward spiral into clinical depression and two months in the hospital.  The woman who is now my mother's partner met us at the airport.  On the drive home, the two of them sat up front and talked while I brooded in the backseat, listening to the radio.  The songs didn't particularly entertain me; they felt remote from this hour of failure and grief.  There was a long set of songs sung by male vocalists, and surely a female singer was long overdue.  I found myself hoping they would play "That's the Way It Is."  I knew it was unlikely, however; the song had been out for several months and was no longer in such frequent rotation that one could count on hearing it often.  Still, it was just what I needed: a cheerful song urging, "When you're ready to go and your heart's left in doubt / Don't give up on your faith."  As I stared glumly out the window at the familiar landscapes I had hoped to have left behind forever, I was astonished to hear the first notes of this song.  "Turn it up," I requested, and as I closed my eyes to focus on the vigorous tune and uplifting lyrics, I felt a kind of peace settle over me for the first time since . . . I couldn't remember.  Surely I had not been abadoned after all.  Such a little thing had been given to me, meeting such a huge and raw need.  Perhaps hope, like love, "comes to those who believe it . . . when life is empty with no tomorrow."

Once You Had Gold - Those who read my recent post about my first visit to Idyllwild in ten years will know that I have suffered some bitter disappointments in the past decade.  Sad to say, the response of those around me to my misfortunes was either to blame me for them entirely or to write me off as a lost cause.  This song does neither.  The haunting, crystalline melody rings with compassion; the singer seems to understand that sometimes, despite any amount of effort, a person must see his/her world swept away by "rains / Out of the blue."  This is no syrupy sympathy, however, but a gentle urging to carry on in hope, even in a world in which "darkness and dreams" are so often bound together.  This song reminds me that it's okay to feel my pain . . . and also that there is a "new day" beyond it.

People Are Strange - I loved this song even before I'd ever heard it.  One day, when I was in the hospital, I saw a fellow patient wearing a shirt that read "WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE, FACES COME OUT OF THE RAIN / WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE, NO ONE REMEMBERS YOUR NAME / WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE / WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE / WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE."  Intrigued, I committed the lines to memory immediately and wrote them later in my journal.  Years later, I discovered that they were the lyrics to a song.  Having lived all my life as an outcast in some form or another - the precocious toddler adults found disconcerting, the brainy little loner who embodied "does not play well with others," the troubled and apparently sexless adolescent, the young adult living under a barrage of diagnoses - I know what a cruel place the world is "when you're strange."  Rarely has the feeling of alienation been expressed so clearly and succintly as in this song - or with so little angst.

An Emotional Brain - "An emotional brain is a hard thing to tame / It just won't stay in its place / Every time I think I got it / It gives me another face / Happy, sad, disgusted, or mad / These are the things it shows / I keep trying to reign it / But it goes and it goes and it goes."  Being blessed as I am with a plethora of neurological and psychological disorders that affect the emotions, how could I not love a song like this?  (If you think your emotional brain is a hard thing to tame, try living with an abnormality of the limbic system.)  This cheery song about a sometimes merciless biological reality never fails to put a smile on my face.

Then Again - Of all the songs on this list, this is my most recent discovery.  Court Yard Hounds's eponymous album was the MP3 Album Deal of the Day a few weeks ago, and although I wasn't familiar with their music, I thought the promotional blurb sounded interesting and I decided to give them a try.  Well, this song alone would have been worth the four dollars I shelled out for the album.  Listening to the lyrics, I found myself wincing - and smiling - in recognition.  Having always found myself in the scapegoat role in my family, in a number of my friendships, in my one romantic partnership, I often "have bitten my tongue 'til I can taste the blood."  All my life I have wished I had more gumption, more aggressive drive, more of whatever it would take to keep those with fewer qualms and inhibitions from running roughshod over me.  It's hard to pick a single line or verse from this song that resonates with me most; listening to this song is like hearing my years of self-doubt, recrimination, and frustration given voice at last: "Just to keep the peace and quiet / I'd forfeit my peace of mind / Then again, I never did understand me."

I Am a Rock - It's scary how much I can relate to this song, how much I always have.  This is the anthem of the sensitive soul, unable to withstand the world's cruelties, cutting itself off from human closeness out of sheer survival instinct.  I have been there.  I have been so afraid of further hurt that I made myself harsh and cold, rejecting potential friends before they could have a chance to reject me.  I have sealed myself off from love or the hope of love, insisting that only pain and weakness could come from giving away any piece of myself, proclaiming that entire self-sufficiency was the only way to keep myself useful and intact.  "I've built walls / A fortress deep and mighty / That none may penetrate . . . I touch no one and no one touches me."  The narrator of the song, however, for all his bluster, retains a telling streak of vulnerability.  He may be safe, but he isn't really happy.  "A rock feels no pain / And an island never cries," he sighs in the end, over the tender notes of a guitar humming like a series of gentle sobs.  I have, for the most part, put this way of thinking behind me, daring to reach out to others in love and friendship, accepting the risk of pain in the pursuit of something profound and sweet.  Yet when I feel threatened or hurt, the walls go right back up again, and I push away the ones I love just when I need them the most.  Being able to recognize, accept, and articulate that I do this has been a huge step for me; I don't know if it's a tendency I shall ever be able to overcome entirely.

I Made It Through the Rain - This might be the first song that I ever thought of as a personal anthem, and two decades later, it's still inspiring and consoling me.  I was no more than seven or eight when my mother told me this song always reminded her of me.  She knew I was a lonely outcast, that I had no friends at school or in the neighborhood, that I never quite seemed to fit in anywhere.  She thought of me as one of those special people who would "come shining through those lonely years."  Listening to the song again with myself in mind, I resolved that I would make it through the rain.  For the first time, I understood that I wasn't alone in my struggle.  Well, I was alone for now, of course, but there were others out there with a similar burden, and one day we would find each other, and I would be "respected / By the others who / Got rained on too / And made it through."  I believed, as never before, that there might be an end to the struggle that I was living, that joy might come in the morning.  I have never forgotten that promise, and I have "kept my world protected" ever since.

Because You Loved Me - I would not be who I am if not for the many wonderful people who have made a positive difference in my life.  Some have been there from the beginning; some I knew for only a few years, or months, or days.  Some were family, some were friends, some were acquaintances; some had Ph.D.'s, some were profoundly mentally ill, some weren't technically people at all.  The one thing they all had in common was the time and care they put into me.  Without them, I would not be what I am, where I am, or who I am.  No list of songs that claims to represent my essence would be complete without some tribute to them.  "You were my eyes when I couldn't see," dear ones.  "You saw the best there was in me," and thanks to you, I see it too.

Somewhere - This is another one that became dear to me early in my life.  I grew up always wondering what it felt like to belong.  In my family, in the neighborhood, at school, even at church, I was always the one who just didn't fit in.  I was a foreigner, an alien, a stranger in a strange land.  I had to close my mouth and conceal my most piercing fears, my most poignant loves, my most private truths, as I had learned early on that the reactions of others to my feral and pensive inner world ranged from inappropriate amusement to horrified disgust.  Still, as I struggled to conform on the surface, I never ceased to cherish a dream that I would one day have a place to come home to in my heart, among people of my own kind.  I dreamed of "a new way of living," one in which I would not be shamed for my emotional nature, my intensity, or the darkness in my soul that I have never denied, my intimacy with things painful and perverse.  I have denied and tried to suppress my need to belong, but the hope of finding "my people" - "somehow, someday, somewhere" - has never died in me.

King of Pain - Perhaps I internalized my role as the family scapegoat a little too well.  Perhaps I was simply blessed, and cursed, with an extraordinary degree of empathy.  At any rate, I have always had the tendency to absorb the emotions of those around me and take them to heart.  I know what it's like to have "the world turning circles running 'round my brain," the sufferings of humanity and all sentient beings and yes, even the indignities visited by this brutal existence on inanimate objects.  I have often wished I could take all the suffering, especially of my loved ones, onto myself, to spare them.  Perhaps, after my long years of emotional abuse and clinical depression, I almost believe I am strong enough and sufficiently practiced in the art of endurance to take on the weight of the world.  Sometimes in my mind I see myself gathering up sorrows like burning coals, filling my arms with them, then running down to the river and plunging in, losing myself but quenching the fire that would have done so much damage.  This song encapsulates my experience of seeing myself reflected in all the world's suffering, and taking a sort of pride in my portion, "my destiny to be the king of pain."

The Bottom Line - This song describes, better than any other, my experience of love.  Loving another person is a deeply spiritual experience for me, a compulsion that runs over me like a magnet over metal, realigning my particles on the atomic level.  "The apple falls / Destiny calls . . . I feel love's wheels turning," and I am changed, diverted, given.  I no longer know where my own footsteps are taking me; I only know that I am willing to go, whatever may be at the end of the road.  It feels profound and natural, inevitable, like a flower turning its face toward the sun, or a river building itself up over the miles to lose itself in the sea.  Sometimes it is ecstasy; sometimes it is torture; but at all times it is right, the only thing I could possibly do.  I don't think I could ever describe the experience as vividly as this song does, though I could happily spend my whole life trying.

Burn - This is another newly discovered favorite.  To me, this song embodies what I believe love can become at its finest: encompassing, supportive, and complete.  The narrator is willing to offer the one she loves her encouragement and assistance in anything he might wish to accomplish, asking only that she see in the end that her devotion has borne fruit in his life.  The song includes one of the most vibrant and intriguing metaphors I have ever seen: "I'll lay down on your bed of coals / Offer up my heart and soul / But in return / I want you to burn . . . for me."  Nothing great is possible without sacrifice, and the narrator of this song offers all that she is for the purpose of seeing the one she loves become what she knows he has within him to be.

Sometimes When We Touch - What is it with me and passionate dissonance?  If "We Belong" is the song I'd love to dedicate to the love of my life, "Sometimes When We Touch" is the song I like to imagine him dedicating to me.  Of course, there is conflict and ambiguity inherent in knowing and loving another person completely.  Past the initial rosy stage of infatuation, one becomes aware of the beloved's faults and flaws, and it's only natural to feel a little disillusioned, as if that idealized image had somehow been a lie.  This can be the moment that makes or breaks a relationship.  To accept a person completely - to love a person completely - means to embrace their flaws and their scars and their contradictions.  Only by hanging on through times of conflict and doubt can one come to know another person so honestly that a simple touch can leave him feeling utterly revealed and exposed.  This is how I want to love and be loved: seeing and seen without flinching, knowing and known to a depth ever more profound.  Perhaps this is too much to ask.  But this is love, as I understand it.  Also, the narrator's apparent integrity and touching vulnerability just melt my heart.

Strong Enough - Ah, another unrefreshingly complicated love song.  I'm beginning to embarrass myself here!  Why can't I have just one song with dopey, sappy lyrics about how I love you and you love me and everything's just so wonderfully perfect?  Because I'm too damn difficult, that's why.  I am intense and moody and perverse and I think too much.  These are not criticisms of myself, but facts that are a part of my nature.  Like the woman in this song, I push people away when I need them the most: "I'd be the last to help you understand . . . let me be alone tonight / 'Cause you can't change the way I am."  I need someone strong enough to bear with me and break through my defenses when the storms raging inside my mind get to be too much.  I need someone who will wrestle through with me to the other side, when my solid and sensible self takes up residence in my mind again.  Whoever would love me must be up to the challenge of reckoning with all of me, which is a lot to ask of anyone.  I didn't choose to be so complicated, but I am, and I have never been easy to love.  And there you have it.

The Music of the Night - If I had to choose just one theme song for myself, this would be it.  Everything I know and love and believe is in this song.  This is the music I hear inside of my head when I'm not listening to anything else.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Faithful Hound

There is one story that is dearer to me than any other.  Older than dirt, it's a favorite of the human race as well; variants of the tale exist throughout Europe and Asia, and have evolved with the cultures and the centuries, springing up now and then in modern times.  The version I love best is the one I learned first, when I was a child.

In the thirteenth century, King John of England gave his son-in-law, Prince Llywelyn of Wales, a greyhound named Gelert.  A special bond developed between the man and the dog.  One day, Llywelyn went out to hunt, but though he called for Gelert, his usually devoted companion of the chase was nowhere to be found.  Upon Llywelyn's arrival home, the dog greeted him exuberantly at the door, rubbing up against him joyfully and whimpering with pleasure.  Gelert's fur was matted and sticky.  Llywelyn noticed that the furniture was in disarray, and there was blood all over the floor.  Seeing his infant son's cradle overturned, Llywelyn realized Gelert must have mauled the child to death.  He drew his sword and, with a cry of anguish, plunged it into the dog.  Gelert looked up at him, his eyes wide with pain and confusion, and let out one plaintive howl as he died.  As the echoes of the dog's howl faded in Llywelyn's ears, he heard a baby start to cry.  Lifting the cradle, he found his son lying unharmed in his blankets.  Behind the fallen cradle was the body of a large wolf.  Llywelyn understood then what had happened: Gelert had risked his own life in a vicious struggle with the wild animal.  They had tussled around the room, knocking over the furniture as they tore at each other with teeth and claws.  Gelert had saved Llywelyn's son and heir, and Llywelyn had rewarded him with a sword between the ribs.  For all his remorse, there was nothing Llywelyn could do but bury the dog with greatest honor.  He carried his guilt with him for the rest of his life, and never smiled again.

This story has been recounted over and over again, in different ways.  The turn-of-the-nineteenth-century poet William Robert Spencer retold it in verse ("Beth Gelert; or, the Grave of the Greyhound").  More recently, a British animation company called Griffilms made the tale the subject of a charming little movie that is easily worth the two dollars it costs to rent it from Amazon Video on Demand.

The oldest of this tale's many variants is probably "The Brahman's Wife and the Mongoose," from India.  (It may also be the most tragic, as it involves a mother's hasty slaughter of her own son, and in one version, an entire family of four has met with violent death by the end.)  More than a quaint folktale, this story continues to sprout new variants in modern times, making it one of the world's oldest urban legends.

The story of St. Guinefort is contemporary with and nearly identical to the story of Gelert, with a French nobleman standing in for Llywelyn and a snake in place of the wolf.  After he slew the dog, the nobleman buried Guinefort in a well and built a shrine of sorts on top of it.  The locals came to regard the dog as a saint with special powers of protection over infants.  The Catholic Church tried to stamp out the cult of St. Guinefort, going so far as to proclaim the poor dog a heretic, dig up the bones under the shrine, and burn them, but occasional mothers continued to beseech Guinefort on behalf of their sickly children through the middle of the twentieth century.

What makes this story so special?  Researching variants of this tale online, I was almost surprised to see it characterized as a warning against hasty action, or a lesson that, as Aesop summed it up, "It is dangerous to give way to the blind impulse of a sudden passion."  Perhaps this is because I have always identified not with Llywelyn, the personification of impulsivity regretted, but with Gelert, embodiment of loyalty betrayed.  As such, I have always read this as a story about noble self-sacrifice, devotion even unto death.

On the surface, this story would seem to take a rather cynical view of such whole-souled dedication: No good deed goes unpunished!  Yet to the Faithful Hound, the act of loyalty is its own reward; Llywelyn doesn't take any more from Gelert than he was already willing to give, throwing himself into battle with a wild predator.  Symbolically, Gelert does give his life for the child; it is his dying howl that wakens the infant from his slumber and restores him to his grieving father's arms.

And in his sacrifice, the Faithful Hound transcends death, transcends the loftiness of man and the lowliness of dog.  Shrines, stone monuments, are built in his honor by the slayer who will never again smile, haunted eternally by the memory of his faithful companion's lugubrious death-cry.  The French nobleman passes namelessly into history as a proverb about folly, while Guinefort becomes a saint.

Most of what I have seen online about St. Guinefort takes a distinctly mocking tone ("Those crazy medieval peasants!  They prayed to a dead dog!"), but I have found one lovely essay that treats seriously the possibility of dog as saint (or, for that matter, heretic).  The author states that if a dog has no concept of the Divine, the labels of "saint" and "heretic" are inapplicable - but Guinefort was indeed a martyr, "to love for and faith in his master."  He concludes by holding up Guinefort as an example to humanity of pure and complete devotion; how much better it would be, he suggests, if humans could devote themselves to God as simply and unreservedly as dogs so often do to imperfect humans.

I might take it a step further, however.  I might argue that to a dog, the Alpha is the Divine.  If spirituality is the soul's thrill and surrender to greater forces, then dogs are gifted with a native spirituality of which most humans, posturing and scrambling to save face, are scarcely capable.

I like to think of Guinefort as the unofficial patron saint, not of sickly infants, but of those lowly souls among us who expect no reward for their acts of loyalty and self-sacrifice, and too often receive none but to be exploited to the last extremity.  Gelert's grave is a monument to all of us who have ever suffered an injustice silently and chosen to take the high road, remain faithful to the end to our principles and our hearts.  In my mind, the story of the Faithful Hound is a reminder that the only fate more noble than to die in the service of love and greatness, is to live in the service of love and greatness.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

ABC is for Another Bumper Crop . . . of Student Bloopers!

Every year, my mother assigns her seventh-grade students a massive final project: to create an illustrated ABC book reviewing all the world-history topics they studied that year.  The results have ranged from lovely, polished creations that were a pleasure to read to crumpled, sloppy messes full of outrageous errors.  This year, I was given the dubious honor of assigning grades to these year-end projects.  Since they were turned in only a few days before the end of the school year (the ones that came in on time, that is), I had to put in long hours around the clock to get them all done on time.  The work was not without its consolations, however; making things a little easier on my mother during the hectic days at year's end, for example, and assembling this marvelous collection of fractured historical facts, malapropisms, and delicious turns of language.

There's the alphabet, for starters.  Students only had to complete pages for 23 letters of the alphabet to get full credit, so they didn't really have to think of anything for, say, Q, X, and Z.  With all the topics covered over the course of the year, the other letters should have been easy.  Some students, however, chose to be a little more creative . . . and some . . . well . . .

A is for Age of Evolution
D is for Don't keep Roman slaves
D is for save your Drama for your Llama
F is for Fight Your Race
F is for how Fun llamas are
H is for Can Slaves Have Freedom?
J is for just another Middle Ages castle
K is for Knowing Llamas
N is for Most Renaissance Art was of Naked People
N is for No way did the Incas and Mayans have conquests
O is for Oh my god the medicine in the Middle Ages was horrible
O is for Ohh, Mayan Mystery
O is for Scientific Revolution
Q is for Aztec and Inca Con-Q-uest
R is for Really Poorly Drawn Hands
T is for tasting was not a very good idea in the Middle Ages
T is for the Incan llama
U is for hard to understand castles
X is for XL shields were not permitted
Y is for You
Z is for ZING!  It's NOT Martin Luther King!

Now, I present . . . the history of the world from ancient times to the Renaissance, according to seventh graders.  A few very minor modifications and additions have been made to improve the flow of the narrative, but the essence remains unchanged.

The early man is like the cavemen, well it is the cave man.  They were always said to be like outdoors and a type of animal.  They are explained to be look alikes of Tarzan.

The wealthy citizens of Rome were called patricians.  Baths, slaves, and entrapment is a life style of patrician citizens.  Romans built the Coliseum that was able to hold at least fifty thousand people with their own tools.  The coliseum had all/mostly some of the events.  With a very rigorous audience patricians enjoyed the entertainment or harsh humans getting attacked by monstrous beasts.  Gladiators would be going against people who were taller.  Patrician women took baths to the extreme.  They did not use soup like we do now but used oil to clean them.  All Roman people would lay and eat.  In marriages, people might feel a little bit anxious in Rome and some can feel so elated.  The parents of those couples feel very apprehensive but in Rome all parents must feel encouraged.

One important event that occurred during Roman times was the rise of Christianity.  One of the most known Christian stories is "Abraham's Ark."  The bible states that Jesus was born during Christmas.  Jesus' parents chose the same day celebrated by the Muslim so that while the Muslim celebrated they would not find the Jews celebrating the birth of Jesus.  Assertion is when Jesus went back to heave, as stated in the Bible.  Every single Christian has to be baptized because that's the way Christianity is.  Communion is a Jewish holiday.  Everyone has different opinions.  Mostly the Christians.

Another important world religion that developed a few hundred years after Christianity is Islam.  Muhammad would always succeed little and never big.  I think hajj is important because Muslims go to this especial ceremony and sacrifices every one of his or her life.  During the Muslim time, the Muslims themselves made man contributions, such as the astrolabe and anatomy.  A astrolabe is almost the same as a G.P.S. system.  Anatomy is when a dead body is cut open.

Meanwhile, several civilizations were thriving in the Western Hemisphere.  The Aztecs created fire and half sun.  The Aztecs were nice.  (later, in the same paperThe Aztecs were mean.  The captured ruler agreed to pay gold or silver for prison cell.  Mayans gave us chocolate, because even today in my life everybody loves chocolate.  I would also say that the Incas are interesting too, but my opinion is that I don't really find the Incas very interesting.  The Incas used llamas.  The llama was a type of delicious.  Everything about a llama was big.

Civilization was thriving in Asia, too.  China had one of the earliest times of humans.

In Africa, salt was worth its weight in gold.  Back then they didn't have all the technology that we have now to discover if something is really worth a fortune.  If the people from back then knew that gold was worth what it's worth now, they probably wouldn't have wasted it like they did.

The Middle Ages followed the fall of Rome.  All towns often burned down.  During this time the town wanted to go back to Europe.    This was the era of feudalism, with sharp distinctions between king and peasant.  In every castle there would always be some kind of treasure that you couldn't find anywhere but right then in that castle.  The life of a present was harder than anyone else because the average present had to perform many chores in their homes.  Medieval people had some weird ideas about food.  Most wealthy foods are mostly from the sky.  Closest to hell was the vegetables.

Do you remember when you were a little kid running around with pieces of cardboard on your body to protect yourself from getting hit by those plastic Bee-bee guns you would buy from the ice-cream truck?  That's what medieval armor was like.  Armors are very sharp.  Little kids should not be allowed to play with them.  Of course, the ancient Romans had armor too.  Both are structurally the same except that Romans went in completely naked.  During wars the knights will wear a big facial armor on body in order to protect him.  They also used some knights with solid hammer-head that can knock out a man in armor.  Knight Battles were very dangerous for the horses.  People threw stuff and killed you.  One example of medieval weaponry is the modern gun.  The Crusades were a series of notorious wars of the Middle Ages.  The crusaders were sent to the Holly Land.

People have died in the shivering streets, smelling the decomposed skin.  You may hear of the Black Death and you might know or not if your village may get it or not.  The Black Death is a horrible plague that we can stop by getting rid of rats, fleas, and traders that can be trading your health for diseased fleas.  Avoid church bells.  When I think of this disease I feel my body tingle.  All three types of plague are very dead.  The plague was high fevers, sweating, death unattended, shocks, and non-enjoyable moments in life.  The symptoms keep getting bigger and bigger.  In people's houses all there was were high fevers.  If you had the disease, no one would want to be around you, you would also begin to smell like a trash can full of dead things.  There is a problem with poor people wanting to live their life before they die, so it ends up causing so much trouble.  The only people who acted weird for the plague or the bubonic plague, were the Muslims and the Christians also.  Panicking is like the number one thing in the world right now.  I understand that people think Jews are witchcraft, but do you rather be died or be witchcraft.  Unfortunately, medieval medical practices weren't much help.  Back in the middle ages doctors thought that simple reamers would solve everything.  Doctors spent most of their time studying urine.  In Africa and the middle ages many people died because most of the treatments were made by plants made by themselves.  When people died and went to heaven and they saw the three plants they would say "that's what made us sick."

Luther was nowhere to be found.  (Yes, this was the first sentence of one student's page on the great religious reformer.Luther's scariness led him to think God as a God of mercy.  Luther was going to make the church look better from the inside and also look better from the outside.

King Henry VIII was another important figure in the Reformation.  He was a very attracted man.  He was married to six women, after a divorce the king might behead them (cut their head) and save the body.  In a way he was an excellent king.  He was married to six wives such as Catherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Howard, and Katherine Parr.  Anne of Cleves had a number of monks and had devotion.  The last wife survived from being beheaded.  Henry's two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, became queen after his death.  Through the months Mary thought she was pregnant, Mary died of childbirth, after the false of the pregnancy.  Elizabeth was born in September 7, 2010.  During the Elizabethan era, women would always dress like they were going to a party.  Men didn't dress over the top like women did.

Shakespeare went to London to become a player in a glob.  Sometimes she would want him to play on her place to entrain the queen.  Sometimes men played parts of a woman in the plays.  What William also saw an execution where they chop a humans head in front of a town or a village.  Some parts of life were mysterious like melted up in the air.  Teasing the bares was a type of entertainment.

The arts thrived during the Renaissance.  To the Greeks and Romans, the subject of art was ordinary art.  Renaissance art was used to worship.  It was about nudity.  Today, if we were to see art with nudity of course some would be immature.  Back during the renaissance, nudity was beautiful.  Renaissance art was mainly Jesus, education, and importance.  Some of the artist will be Leonardo da Vinci and Van Ike.  Nowadays teenagers get in a habit of doing drugs when beautiful art is around earth.

Have you ever seen someone give a person a nickname just because they are handsome?  Leonardo da Vinci was a guy that was very handsome during his time of being a teenager.  He always will be happy.  Leonardo was somewhat the type of person that pulled planks.  Although you may think, with all Leonardo could do, he wouldn't be into partying.  Most of us think of geniuses as a no-fun zone kind of personality.  Leonardo also grew to become famous because he invented fish paint balls.  He even signed a universe.  All he wanted to do was make sense to the world.

Do you know a person who is a mathematician from the Age of Discovery?  Back in the Middle Ages, people would get stuck in science, but came back in the renaissance.  Then everybody stared inventing and discovering newt things.  They had lost the scientific revolution.  But then they found it.  Now they are ready to go on into the future.  The last stage of the scientific method is interpreting the revolt.  Galileo looked at his telescope and it didn't match.  Galileo said that the two balls would drop at the same time.  He was right.  Galileo also believed that all objects fall at the same time.  Successfully he was right and he smiled.

People exploded because they wanted to find different ways to travel faster and just wanted to trade.  They traded plants, foods, animals, and various types of deadly diseases.  When Henry the navigator died a man named Portuguese rounded up Africa's south tip then called Christopher Columbus who went and found America, but took him a long time to notice.  Some things that went to America were many fruits.

Clearly, all of these inputs had made great outputs.  And that's the history of the world, according to seventh graders.

So, did they actually learn anything?  I think the lessons of history can best be summed up by the following:

If you want to learn about a type of culture and how they live so then do the research on them and don't think that it will be weird.

Most importantly, these young scholars learned what really matters in the educational system:

Teachers are very wonderful but they can't expect every thing they wanted like if they write a definition of a word and put it in a key to explain what the thing is.  They will say it's "PLAGIARISM."  Yeah, that's right.  Every thing you do that you copy is plagiarism.  Yeah its wrong to do that but if it's a definition that's different.

Monday, August 16, 2010

The Landscape Is Changing

A lot can happen in ten years. An innocent, intelligent, wide-eyed young woman of seventeen might, in the course of ten years, graduate from college, go on to earn her master's, and make a good bit of progress toward her doctorate. She might travel abroad, get to be fluent in a couple of foreign languages. She might see her first book published, and even her second. She might get to be worldly and wise, accustomed to engaging in elegant, witty conversation with people of culture and refinement. She might take charge of her first class of undergraduate students, standing at the front of the lecture hall with confidence and poise, thoroughly in command of herself and her subject. She might even find the love of her life and get married.

None of those things happened to me.

"It's not exactly the same, you know," my mother pointed out when she told me we would be spending three days in August in Idyllwild, my favorite place on earth. "There was all kinds of construction, and a lot of the trees were chopped down." Yes, she assured me, we would be staying once again in Cabin #12 at the Idyllwild Inn, where we stayed during each of my four previous visits; yes, she was pretty sure that my favorite little gift boutique was still there; the lovely little sweet-shop with its two dozen flavors of shaved ice was still running a brisk business. The bookstore with its rows and rows of half-priced used books wasn't where it used to be; it had taken up residence in one of the gift shops last she'd heard, and it was still there for all she knew, though she couldn't say for certain.

It had been ten years, after all, since I'd last breathed the cool, piney air of the San Jacinto Mountains, since I'd last strolled up North Circle Drive under the majestic thumb of Tahquitz Rock. The rest of my family had been there, many times, without me, but I hadn't been to Idyllwild since the free and magnificent summer after I graduated high school, ten years ago, when I was seventeen.

Idyllwild was never just a vacation for me, never just a tourist destination. From the very first time I stayed there, when I was fourteen, I always felt this small town to be the natural home of my soul. The rustling of the leaves in the summer breeze seemed to speak just to me; the stones of the mountain, keeping their own dignified counsel, recognized me as kin; and the forest was full of sweet and plaintive secrets I alone might unravel, if I only had the time to devote myself to its mystery. Maybe it's just the thinness of the air a mile above sea level, but when I'm in Idyllwild I feel as though the greater part of the burden of living had been lifted right off my shoulders.

At least, that's the way it was when I was seventeen.

Could there have been enough construction, enough deforestation, in the last ten years to render my beloved place unrecognizable to my spirit?  Would I know Idyllwild after all this time? . . .

Would Idyllwild know me?

"Don't overthink it," a dear friend advised me, but it wasn't that simple.  Is it ever that simple?  The last ten years had not been kind to me, not at all.  I had endured humiliations I could not have imagined, loved in ways I had never believed possible, and survived losses that have left permanent scars on my soul.  The worldview, the self-definitions that sustained me when I was seventeen had been battered by sudden shocks, eroded away by subtle cruelties, until they were no longer applicable.  I was not who I had been.  Through it all, my longing to return to a place of peace and beauty had been one of the few constants.  Idyllwild was the symbol and the focus of my craving.  If the brutality of the past ten years had taken away my soul's joyous response to that beloved place, would I ever feel at home and at peace again?

It was evening when we left, the last traces of the overbearing summer sun fading from the sky.  My family chattered happily and listened to comedy on satellite radio as we passed out of our most familiar environs and into the more sparsely populated lands to the east.  They were on vacation.  I joined in the laughter, but part of me was detached, remote.  I was on a pilgrimage.  I was going home.  I was off on a journey of salvage.  All three.

We pulled off the freeway into Banning, the little town at the foot of the San Jacinto range, and a few minutes later we began the ascent toward Idyllwild.  There isn't much in the way of foothills above the desert plain of Banning; the mountains begin suddenly and ascend sharply, like a moment that changes your life.  The road winds itself gently up the mountainside and into the heart of the forested heights, hugging the walls of stone.  By the time we got that far, the radio was off and I had the window down.  The cold night air rushed over my ears as the car wound its way along the road.  To one side of us was the mountain, solid and imposing and covered with scrubby little plants, and on the other side, the lights of Banning in their neat grid of city blocks lay spread out on the ground far below.

Higher up, the desert scrub gave way to towering pines that rose high above the road and dotted the distant cliffsides like dense stubble.  I had never traveled this road at night before, and it seemed there were more buildings and Forest Service signs than I remembered from before, but other than that, it was the same familiar journey.  My eyes, parched for this wild beauty, drank in the scenery with thirsty greed.  Above the level of smog and light pollution, the air was crisp and clear under a generous sprinkling of stars.

I was the only one in the car who saw the meteor: a bright streak of light trailing for a second through the night sky, vividly there and then forever gone.  A tiny piece of the solar system had ended its lonely aeons in the void, drawn to the earth's gravitational field and burning up in the atmosphere as it hurtled toward its new center.  Had I been superstitious, I might have made a wish.

We passed the sign at the town limits, and then the ranger station, and suddenly there we were in the heart of Idyllwild's commercial district.  The stores were closed, the streets were dark; it was too late to do anything but go to our cabin and quietly unpack.  Cabin 12 was mostly as I remembered it; some of the furniture had been replaced, and there was some new artwork on the walls, but the little touches were all still there: the yellow-and-salmon-colored window frames, the "Flaming Fire" notice on the living room wall charmingly detailing the proper use of the fireplace, the nail in the wall between the two beds in the room that has always been mine when I am there.  I was the first one in, and immediately claimed what I have for years thought of as my "honeymoon bed."  I was never the sort of misty-eyed romantic who plans out her whole wedding before she's even met her prospective groom, but I've known for years that if I ever marry, I want to spend my first days of connubial bliss in Idyllwild.

As our mothers set up the kitchen with the food we had brought from home, my sister and I lay prone on my bed and read a comic book she had brought.  Since I hadn't had any dinner, I helped myself to a peach and some Cheez-Its.  My mother and her partner admonished my sister and me not to stay up too late; they know we're night owls and could both stay up long and happily into the night with a good book.  With my circadian rhythm disorder, staying up at night isn't just a matter of preference for me, and normally my family respects my need to keep my own hours, but since I was sharing a room with my sister, I would have to cope with having the lights out at a more conventional time.  Although I wasn't tired at all, I brushed my teeth and changed into the shirt and shorts I had brought to sleep in.  I wrote in my journal a bit, and then we turned out the light and let the deep dark of genuine night, far away from any city, settle over us.

It was only a little past my hours of peak awareness, and I was in Idyllwild for the first time in ten years.  Of course I couldn't sleep.  I didn't really mind, though.  I was in Idyllwild, tossing and turning in my honeymoon bed.  There was nowhere else on earth I would rather be, even if all I could do there was lie awake in the wide black dark.  I lay wide awake for a long time, unable to settle even into the unrestful, forced half-sleep that one can usually attain by lying awake long enough in the dark.

There was something I needed to do.  I felt it pushing itself into my brain.  It was important, it needed to be done tonight, and it would have to be done before I could have any peace.

I needed to go in search of where I belonged.

It seemed as though the whole cabin creaked as I left the bedroom and crossed the living room to the front door.  I walked as quietly as I could, opened the door as gently as possible, but the hinges still whined loudly as I slipped out into the night.  Only a few scattered, distant lights made it possible to see where my feet were landing as I stepped down off the porch.  The world was blurry as well as dark, and I realized right away that I had left my glasses on the nightstand.  Well, I'd made enough noise already in a house full of sleeping people; I wasn't about to go back and get them.  Carefully, one hesitant step at a time, I made my way around the side of the cabin and into the field between the row of cabins and a small dirt service road starting up at the rental office.

I made my way blindly, as if I were floating in a fog.  I knew what I was looking for, and at first I didn't see it.  I felt the soil beneath my feet, and the occasional scratching of some dry reedy plant against my shins.  The trunks of tall pines solidified before me as I picked my way across the field, a deeper darkness congealing against the lesser darkness that was the air through which I moved.  To my left I could barely make out the small playground; to my right stretched a volleyball net.  Geography was coming back to me, my feet remembering the way even as my eyes widened to take in more of the night.

Then I saw it, still there, exactly where I had remembered: my rock.  Long, and reasonably flat, perfect for sitting on; situated by the end of a fence at the edge of the service road.  I remembered sitting on this rock when I was seventeen, writing in my little notebook, looking up at the trees and the mountain and the vastness of open space.  This was where I had come when I needed to be alone with nature and my thoughts.  This was where I needed to be tonight.  Ten years later.

I settled down on the stone, shifting around to get comfortable, letting my eyes wander across the dim, yet familiar, landscape.  I looked up, where I knew Tahquitz Peak stood, hidden behind treetops and darkness; I looked behind me, at the faint lights that marked the deserted main road.  I looked back across the field, toward the cabin.  Everything I saw, blurry as it was to my eye, stood out in clear focus to the more delicate instrument of the mind.

This rock, my rock, hadn't moved an inch in ten years.  It hadn't changed at all.  It had probably been right in that very spot for decades.  Centuries, perhaps.  It had maintained the integrity of its structure and shape through untold millennia, born of the earth in heat and pressure, becoming a thing that had not perceptibly changed since long before any of us were here, and would, left to its own devices, remain the same long after all of us were gone.

The last ten years were nothing to my rock.

The pine trees all around me had been here too, ten years ago.  Birds had looked down from these same lofty branches to spy on my yearning, hopeful adolescent self.  Living five times longer than the human lifespan, the trees too were all but untouched by the passing of another decade.

What I had come looking for, I had found.  I shifted again and lay back across the full length of the rock, my head nestled into a little indentation and my arms and legs hanging off the ends, like a human sacrifice.  Idyllwild was still here, still the same.  Nothing that had happened to me since I was seventeen could take that away from me.  Nothing ever could.

How presumptuous of me even to have questioned it!  A small, trifling thing such as I, supposing anything in my life could change my relation to the vast, the timeless, the immutable!

Life would come and keep on coming.  I had changed, and would change again, continually reborn, renewed.  But my existense, immense as it was in my own eyes, was but the tiniest drop in the great river of space and time.  I was a piece of something greater, something that would prevail with or without me.  No matter how much my circumstances changed, no matter how badly I was hurt, even if I was utterly destroyed, that which nurtures and sustains me would carry on strong.  What matters most to me - what matters to me even more than my own happiness, safety, and well-being - is invulnerable.  Whatever losses I might sustain along the way, I have the consolation of knowing that everything I stand for will long outlive me.

The sky over the mountains was alight with stars drowned out in more populous regions by the hazy light that hangs over urban areas.  Away from the dusty noise of the city, the stars twinkled their identities free and proud across the light-years.  Ten years ago, the illumination that was now reaching my eyes was a stream of energy pulsing through a great emptiness.  So immense is the cosmos that light must travel for years, centuries even, from the stars before it arrives in our solar system.  Lying on that rock, looking up into the sky, I was gazing into the past, gazing into a thousand scattered histories of fire and ice and immensity beyond my understanding.

And because I am a part of that universe, of those stars and those trees and mountains, I dared to speak to them, to whisper into the night the story of the past ten years.

"I went to college, all the way across the country," I whispered.  "But I was hospitalized for depression.  I was in the hospital for nine weeks.  And after that my family brought me home to recover."

While I was in the hospital in Massachusetts, the trees here in Idyllwild had stood tall and silent in the night just as they stood now.  Their branches would have hung heavy with snow, but the snow would have melted as I adjusted to my new life, struggled to reconcile my academic ambitions with my new identity as a diagnosis.

"I took some classes at the local community college that summer," I told the trees, "but I got rebellious and stopped taking my medication.  It was hard to accept that I would need it for the rest of my life.  I had a relapse and ended up back in the hospital again.  This time, my father wouldn't let me come home."

I told the trees how I had attempted suicide for the first time not two weeks later, in December again, when this rock on which I was now lying must have been glazed with ice.  I lived in a group home for a few months, in and out of the hospital every few weeks, and then, in June, I was hospitalized again, mostly on the basis of a false report, and this time they wouldn't let me go back.

"For over a year," I whispered into the sky, "I was in a long-term hospital.  I was so lonely there - I had visitors only once or twice a month, and I was aching to matter to someone.  My skin was starving to be touched.  And I had a roommate who took advantage of that.  I tried to give her what she told me she needed, at first because I cared about her, and later, because I was afraid of her.  It was degrading and horrible, but I could never bring myself to say no until she had already gone too far."

After the long-term hospital, I had spent nearly six years in another group home.  "I made a friend there, a special friend," I breathed into the night air.  "And one day she told me she was in love with me.  I didn't feel that way about her, but I couldn't bear to break her heart, so I shoved all my romantic notions aside to devote myself to her.  But I wasn't really what she wanted.  She changed so completely.  I never could have seen it coming.  I don't think it was really me that she loved, but some vision she had of how I could be.  And I couldn't be what it was that she wanted, though heaven and earth, I tried.  And finally she gave up trying and threw me out."

Lying on a rock under the stars, it all seemed like a dream, the past ten years.  If I closed my eyes I could imagine that I was seventeen again, on a night very much like this, and in a few weeks I would be packing my things to fly across the country to college and begin a new life.  Time and trouble to nothingness did sink, and nothing seemed to matter very much except this vastness all around and inside me: not my damaged mind, not my violated body, not my broken heart.  Still, I continued on whispering my secrets into the night: names I had never heard ten years ago, belonging to those who would to varying degrees shape my fate.  Friends new, old, and forever lost; unrequited loves; passersby who left their footprints in the clay of my soul.  Everything that had made the girl I once was into the woman I had become, I gave back to the universe, to the stones and the trees and the stars.  And I whispered of my new hopes, the fruit of the windbent core in me that refuses to die.

I saw another meteor streak across the sky.  A pebble that had travelled an untold, nameless eternity in space, and might have travelled a million years longer, had slipped into our gravity and burned, dying in a glorious blaze of light.

It was the sign I did not know I had been waiting for.  I slipped off the rock feeling calm, cleansed.  I made my way back to the cabin, crept back into my honeymoon bed, and slept surrounded by Idyllwild.