Sara Holbrook's Blog Spot

My School, My Toilet

2012-01-30T08:53:00.000-05:00

When my mother was a kid, she used to proudly announce whenever her parents drove past her elementary school: "That's my school, my toilet." This statement makes more sense if you remember that she went to a small school in then rural Zanesville, OH, with an outhouse. Perpetuated as family stories are through telling and re-telling, when I was growing up we never referred to my school with out mentioning the toilet, even though mine came with indoor plumbing and individual stalls.

I tried it a couple of times with my kids and they gave me those narrow-eyed stares that meant the story was just not working for them and toilet talk from Mom wasn't as nostalgically amusing as I thought it to be.

Life moves on. My old elementary school, its worn marble staircase and toilets with wooden doors, is now a parking lot for the high school. Today, when I think of my home school (my toilet), I think of Westerly Elementary in Bay Village, OH. That's where my oldest daughter Katie started kindergarten (before it became an intermediate school), where Kelly attended and it is the home of a whole stack of poems, from my long ago encounter with Mrs. Woodburn that lead to The Dog Ate My Homework, to the list poem about a school in my book Zombies!

So, a visit to Westerly is always like going home. Thanks to the efforts of Martha Fisher, we had a spectacular visit the first week in January. I was even able to give Mrs. Woodburn a hug. Even though smart boards have replaced green boards, nothing has managed to replace the students love of poetry. Hooray!

And yes, the toilets work just fine.

Antiques Made to Order

2012-01-14T22:21:00.003-05:00

In a world where 65 year olds have no wrinkles, wherePhotoshop magically gives adult women the 18 inch waist Scarlett O’Hara dreamedof, and spell check makes us all appear more clever than we really are, youwould think I would be used to the idea that nothing is as it appears.

Still it’s a bit of a shock to see signs in store windowshere in Bali announcing, ANTIQUES MADE TO ORDER.

Reminder, trust nothing unless you buy directly from thecraftsperson (or in the case of antiques, someone who attended the McKinleyinauguration.

So I bought this bag in Beijing from a woman dressed intraditional Tibetan garb, the hat, the draping, the skin darkened by yearswithout sunscreen. The only one of itskind in her booth. A ratty looking boothin an open-air market. Price, about $20USD after a respectable negotiation, good for her, good for me. Not a designer bag, but designed by someoneand good looking. Hand stitched. Deep enough to carry my tech stuff. Not exactly directly from the craftsperson,but not too many people in the food chain making money off of the craftspeople. Good deal.

I get to Bali and my friends Larry and Rai Collins take alook at the bag and say, nice bag, we bought some for friends in Thailand lastyear.

Not Tibet? I ask?

No. Thailand. $6.

Okay. $6 - $20, nottoo bad of a mark up. Who knows how muchthe ladies got for all that hand stitching. More people in the food chain than I would have liked.

So, yesterday we are in a juice bar having seriously healthycarrot/apple/ginger juice and what do we see hanging for sale? One of kind? Hand stitching and all?

Same bag.

$150 USD.

True story.

Or is it?

Happy New You, 2012

2012-01-02T16:27:00.003-05:00

Michael took this picture (okay, I begged and whined a little asking for this angle and that) in the botanical gardens in Singapore. I was limping along and this sculpture embodied who I wanted to be.

So, this is my screen saver and pictorial inspiration for 2012.

2012. Riding into the second decade of this new century.

Wheeeeeeeee!

Seeing Stars

2011-12-02T12:43:00.001-05:00

The fall of 2011.

And then . . . Singapore, Beijing, Newark, Mantua, Chicago,D.C.

Because travel is part of the job of a self-employed writer,busted pelvis or no.

Last night I was walking the three dogs and took oneuntangled moment to smile up at the broad panorama of stars visible through strippedtrees, waving in the breeze, beckoning winter. I was suddenly aware, I was almost not limping. That it was high time to finally put the “fall”behind me, just as it began – seeing stars.

In my own defense, the railroad tracks were sticking up higherthan the road. On that misty Sunday morning, August 21^st one track grabbed my bike wheel and threw me tothe ground, so quickly I didn’t know what happened until I blinked my eyes opento a sideways world. That unfortunateencounter with irregular railroad tracks led to the dent in my helmet, theambulance, the wheelchair, the walker, the cane, the promise to myself that Iwould get on that plane on September 15. More stars as we flew from Cleveland through Moscow to Singapore.

Three word-filled weeks with the eighth grade, seeing morestars as kids wrote and performed their poems.

Michael and I made so many new friends – I remember the faces and linesfrom poems.

A stand out for all time:Respect does not make shadow puppets in another person’s spotlight.” But the good lines were flying around and so fast, it is hard to name a favorite. It makes me giggly to hear that the poetry writing has continued and the poetic spirit has grown at Singapore American School after our visit.

Nancy Johnson was the impetus behind thisvisit, enriching us personally and professionally by introducing us to hercolleagues Bryan, Scott, Rebecca, Crystal and Brenda. Belated thanks and hugs to all.

Here is an observation that is a metaphor for something(notsure what), during the precise times that I was actually composing poetry withstudents, I don’t remember experiencing any pain. Adrenaline or the healing powers ofpoetry? Unfortunately that reprieve didnot extend beyond the actual writing experiences, so we were not able to takein many of the cool things to see and do around Singapore with me hobbling around with a cane. The cane is one I picked up in Korea, thinking it was a cool walking stick, NEVER dreaming I would actually have to use the thing. I hope to returnone day as Jane Kenyon would say, “on two strong legs.” (Check out her poem Otherwise, available online).

We did manage an evening boat cruise with Kate Brundage and MaggieMutsch, friends we made through AIE and TARA in Bahrain, who have now landed inSingapore. Small world. A global community of educators – how lucky weare to connect and reconnect. This picture is of a hotel, about the hugest hotel you could imagine. I don't think that hugest is a word, but this thing is so big, it invites descriptors thought its mere existence. And the picture below is of a museum. Something to see on the next trip.

AND more stars in Beijing!

Well, to tell the truth, it was hard to see the sky mostdays we were there. Note the haze in the photo below. That was a pretty typical day. And here we are, on the map in Beijing, touring with our new friend (we were old friends by the time we left, but here we were new friends) Trish McNair.

But one night, themoon was shining so brightly Michael tried to comment on it to the taxidriver. He got all flustered and thoughtwe wanted to go someplace else and pulled over. Michael whipped out his IPad and called up apicture of the moon, which made us all laugh, images pulling us past language barriers. That taxi driver is not to be confused with the drunk in the orangejuice can on wheels we took back from the Wall. That experience can be read about on Michael’s blog, check out “neardeath experiences.”

Hardly any city on the planet can match Beijing in terms of history. If Williamsburg is a glimpse of the past, Beijing is looking through a telescope backwards. Thousands of years, walls, dynasties, stories, wars, movements have all sprung from this place and to visit for a mere two weeks is only a taste of history.

Entering the Forbidden City.

Tienanmen Square.

Chairlift up to the Great Wall.

Beijing itself is huge, 20 million humans. To put that in perspective, the population of Canada is only 34 million, and by size, Canada is the third largest country in the world. Another star to mention, the anonymous guy who caught me when I did a trust fall into his arms diving from this thing on one leg waving my cane around like I was angry with the birds.

You have heard the Great Wall is big? You have no idea until you have tried to climb the height of it on one good leg. But knowing the thousands of years and feet that had passed up these stairs was inspiration.

And the wall goes on and on. A huge concrete snake that follows a mountainous path over 1300 miles. I have heard it is the only manmade structure that can be seen from space, and it was before space exploration was even a dream. They don't call it great for nothin'.

Other stars to mention, Alex the owner of The Bookworm, Karen and Kevin who took us shopping. You would think that all we did was tour, but not so. We wrote, performed and listened to poems of all shapes and sizes by poets who fit the same description.

We started with a quick two day visit with the elementary students at Western Academy of Beijing. Elementary Librarian John Byrne lent an able and cheerful hand in making the drive-by visit to the elementary a success.

Poetry is conversational.

Sometimes poetry is emotional.

Then we moved on to the International School of Beijing where we met with upper school students.

At ISB we focused entirely on writing workshops, where students discussed, wrote, discussed, wrote and totally impressed themselves and their classmates with the quality of their creativity and eye for detail.

For second language learners especially it helps to talk through the writing before committing pen to paper.

Sharing poetry helps us as writers and as human beings.

See the blur in the background (a teacher moving in to help another pair of writers) and the laptop open to the world? And in the midst of all the motion, two girls sharing poetry? This is the place we need to find -- the I need to find -- a quiet place for thought in a crazy busy world. I don't think this challenge, finding space to think, is any worse in a city the size of Beijing than it is in my little suburb of Cleveland. A universal challenge.

Big thanks to Nadine Rosevear for the gazillion arrangement emails (by exact count) and warm reception upon arrival at ISB. Thank you!

After our visit to ISB, we were back to Western Academy of Beijing to speak to the middle school students. On the last day of our visit, WAB was hosting an international day, a day to further understanding of other cultures and countries. Here kids are streaming over the bridge between the upper and lower schools.

Trish, as many international teachers, has worked in schools around the globe. She was kind enough to lend me an abaya so that we could be international queens for a day. Can you tell who is who?

Most poets dream of reading their poems to admiring audiences. Depending on how shy the poet and how flexible the school is, this can be a far off dream. Luckily, Western Academy set up a mic so that students could share poetry with one another at an after school coffeehouse.

Here (to the students' delight,) a teacher and non other than the Vice Principal also came to read poetry.

Poetry brings us together.

Michael and I were also caught reading into a microphone over the weekend at the Bookworm where we joined a Polish troupe of poets. Talk about an international experience, the Polish poets performed in Polish with translations of their poetry projected behind them in English and Chinese. Michael and I just did our thing in English, additional language challenged Americans that we are.

The cities, the poems and the friends. So many images crowding my memory, jamming to get to the front like a Beijing driver. Hard to sum up in one blog and my new year's resolution is that I will be more on top of my writing about the day to day. Now that I look back on this past fall, I wish I had documented every moment. I'm not sure if I was woefully behind or busily engaged.

Michael took this last photo of a man touring the Forbidden City.

A man this age in China has seen so much, revolution, famine, skyscrapers and donkey carts. His eyes only glance over his shoulder, though. He was touring the historical landmark, not texting or updating, but looking and learning. As people, we have so much to learn from one another.

And, of course, Mou Mou.

I am not doing justice to the exquisite tapestry ofexperience that was this past fall. Making new year’s promises in advance to be better with documentingexperiences here on my blog.

9/11

2011-09-08T21:17:00.003-05:00

On Sunday Michael and I, along with 3 other Cleveland poets will be honored to read poems of our choosing at a Cleveland Orchestra Concert commemorating 9/11. The poems I chose were Jerusalem by Naomi Shihab Nye and Reality Demands by Wislawa Szymborska and a sonnet of my own. I am posting the poems by the other poets here because they are available elsewhere on the net. It promises to be a solemn event, but also uplifting.

Jerusalem
BY Naomi Shihab Nye

"Let's be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let's fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine."
-Tommy Olofsson, Sweden

I'm not interested in
Who suffered the most.
I'm interested in
People getting over it.

Once when my father was a boy
A stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother's doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.

Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
"I am native now."
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child's poem says,
"I don't like wars,
they end up with monuments."
He's painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.

Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it's ridiculous.

There's a place in my brain
Where hate won't grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.

It's late but everything comes next.

REALITY DEMANDS
BY Wislawa Szymborska

Reality demands
that we also mention this:
Life goes on.
It continues at Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There is a gas station
on a little square in Jericho,
and wet paint
on park benches in Bila Hora.
Letters fly back and forth
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a moving van passes
beneath the eye of the lion at Cheronea,
and the blooming orchards near Verdun
cannot escape
the approaching atmospheric front.

There is so much of Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.
Music pours
from the yachts moored at Actium
and couples dance on their sunlit decks.

So much is always going on,
that it must be going on all over.
Where not a stone still stands
you see the Ice Cream Man
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been
Hiroshima is again
producing many products
for everyday use.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.
The grass is green
on Maciejowice’s fields,
and it is studded with dew,
as is normal with grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
all grounds are battlegrounds,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch, cedar, and fir forests, the white snow,
the yellow sands, gray gravel, the iridescent swamps,
the canyons of black defeat,
where in times of crisis,
you can cower under a bush.

Oblivious?
BY Sara Holbrook

The charred remains of one more bombed out bus.
A swat team storms, a hostage sits alone.
Another hidden camera shot of thugs.
Amber Alert! A child’s been snatched from home.

Some loner kid went postal up in Maine.
Explosive vests? Is everyone extreme?
Death threat! A woman’s clinic up in flames.
More bad news from the flat screen fear machine.

How many died from that last IED?
I can’t take more. I mean it. I am done.
The information age is killing me.
I leave to take a shower of pure sun.
Oblivious, some bird with open throat
starts up a symphony of joy and hope.

A Bunionectomy when the Pain is Just too Much

2011-07-03T12:30:00.003-05:00

There's nothing poetical about getting your feet cut -- voluntarily. The pain really has to be too much before you present yourself at the hospital, turn over all your worldly possessions, and naked under one of those drafty robes say just do it. My pain hit that tipping point coming out of Melbourne at 4:36AM last March. Add to this the fact that like many I have had to make compromises on health insurance (a $5000 deductible). BIG decision.

Since many have asked, here's how it has gone so far:

Operation day starts at 4:30 AM. The choice between "twilight sleep" and total anesthesia is easy, KNOCK ME OUT. I don't remember waking up, Michael driving me home, or how I got into the house. Total blackout. So far so good.

First couple days: Ice bags and keeping my feet elevated above my heart keeps swelling down. Where is the throbbing pain, say pain like I had on the airplane last March? This pain is tender when touched. When I leave the toes alone, no problem. I use a borrowed walker to get back and forth to the bathroom in my stylish black surgical shoes. A word about the shoes -- they set me back in a couple of ways. They cost $60 each (not covered by insurance) and they are designed to throw me back on my heels when I stand. Michael brings me all meals and I watch waaaay too much television. Pain is about 4 on a 10 point scale. I only use the prescription pain killers at night to sleep, mostly they make me nauseous. Have to use a shower hose to wash while sitting on a shower chair, my feet wrapped up in plastic bags with rubber bands.

End of first week, Michael takes me to visit the Dr., in a wheelchair. He rewraps the feet and I get a peek. Black and blue with a red tinge gets rewrapped in an ace bandage. Still using the walker for getting around. Michael still preparing all meals.

Second week -- I start to get out -- in a wheel chair, using it kind of like a toddler does a walker. I try out the electric cart at Costco and the grocery. I learn that when you are in a wheel chair, people don't make eye contact. They come at you, catch the wheelchair in their peripheral and then purposefully look away. It is an amazing insight. I promise myself to say hello to every person in a wheelchair from now on. I can fix a quick meal (toast or chopped fruit in yogurt). Elevate, elevate, elevate. Ibuprofen for pain, which is a little uncomfortable but no where near the pain I felt before the surgery.

Third week -- Back to the dr. for exam and Xrays. No wheelchair. He says I don't need the throw back shoes any more and rewraps the feet in new tube ace bandages and gives me new black velcro shoes with flat bottoms. Three and a half weeks, I fly to San Antonio for a three day workshop. I have no trouble standing to teach for 1 hour at a time. Walking slowly through airports and of course the flying causes extra swelling. The new shoes give me blisters, so I switch to sandals with velcro, adjustable straps. Hardest challenge is descending stairs because it hurts for my feet to bend. Good news! It's okay to bathe. Feet are peeling like crazy for whatever dumb reason.

Fourth week -- Freedom! I can drive an automatic car easily, but using a clutch is tricky because I have to use my arches instead of the ball of the foot. Manage to teach two full 8 hour days, but the result is some pretty significant swelling. Incisions are completely closed and scabs mostly gone.

Fifth week -- first attempt to ride a bike goes well. Wearing hiking sandals. Descending stairs still requires thought and care, but am able to navigate the grocery and a short hike in the woods with the grandkids. Still walking stiffly and slightly reminiscent of a duck. Basically off of Ibuprofen. Incisions are smooth. Feet still too puffy to wear sneakers easily.

A friend of mine had this surgery last December and told me that she just ran a 5K. I'm not sure this will turn me into a runner, since I never was before, but hopefully in 6 months I will be free to walk in sensible shoes. Generous, heartfelt thanks to Michael for feeding and support, grudging thanks for ordering me to sit down and put my feet up.

Everyday is better than the last. Glad I got both feet done at the same time.

Memoir from Reading on the River

2011-06-21T09:54:00.004-05:00

Sometimes writing by assignment can bring some surprising results, This morning Michael led the teachers in his memoir activity. In my brainstorm I felt compelled to write down "prom dress." I started to censor myself. Prom dress? Birds. Lice. Prom dress? But I just decided to go with it. Then Michael said we had to use all the details in the brainstorm. And the memoir had to start with a line chosen by my listening partner. 10 minutes to write. (prom dress?) mmm . . .

I tried to be a good Samaritan and got lice.

Lake Erie was tossing under the shy April sun that afternoon as I raked up the previous autumn’s leaves under the singing pine in the backyard. The muffled groans of lawnmowers echoed from house to house, the giving, soft earth embraced my feet. This time of year sweatshirts replace down coats and the Indians kick off another losing season.

Plop.
A naked baby bird wiggled on the pine needled ground, mouth upturned and gaping.
I picked the bird up and stretched to put it back in its nest and continued raking.
Plop!
Again, I replaced it in the nest.
Plop.
I must have put it back four times.
A warm feeling on my arm made me lift the cuff of my sweatshirt and there it was, a cloud of lice moving up my arm.

I darted like a deer into the kitchen to scrub them off with a brush from under the sink.

Which is all to say, when you see a bird colorfully dressed this summer, it’s like a teenager in a prom dress. There’s a lot going on under there.

I did not get lice in my hair.

Like a Feather LIfts from More Than Friends (co-author, Alan Wolf)

2011-05-02T16:09:00.000-05:00

Love and Joy

2011-04-26T07:20:00.005-05:00

It happened again. This time a young woman. College aged. She came up to me after our recent poetry reading at Bowling Green University Firelands campus.

"Do you believe?"
"Believe?"
"Religion. You know, Jesus. Are a believer?"
"I believe in poetry."
"That's it?"
"That's it."

It's true. I'm not particularly a prayerful person in the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John sense of the word.

Maybe my attention span is attracted to shortened lines more than chapters and verse numbers. Or maybe I just like the divergence of thought. But in poetry you can find all the best of the spiritual world. The 800 section in the library reads like a Bible in thousands of volumes (only a small fraction of which is available on your Kindle, sorry to say). A good day for me and all too rare are afternoons lost in places like the poetry section in the Oberlin Library or some used bookstore, pawing through poetry looking for . . .

Read Poe and you hear the cynical voice that proclaims from joy are born all sorrows. Adopt a philosophy of life like that and you can see why it was hard for the man to pull on his pants and face the day. And yet, that sentiment is true and it invades us all from time to time. In the reading is the realization that our dark selves are not operating in isolation. Somewhat of a consolation, I suppose.

But I don't find myself reaching for cynics in dark times. Dorothy Parker, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath -- they may all have some insights to share, but not at times when your head is already halfway in the oven. Not much to hang onto there. In dark times we want words that help us through.

I have a friend who is very ill. Within her shines a light that has illuminated classrooms and hearts of teachers, her friends, desk clerks and porters worldwide. She is that kind of person. Bonnie Campbell Hill.

Her family has kindly set up one of those Caring Bridge sites to keep her world of friends updated. I read the postings of her friends, many of whom are prayerful people, and I'm grateful (envious?) for their postings.

Were you ever out in the great alone when the moon was awful clear? And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear? Robert Service

Friendship is a bouquet of memories, some primary bright, standouts and dozens stems of green filler. On one of my darkest days ever, Bonnie threw my things into my suitcase, jammed $60 in my hand and put me in a cab to the airport to fly home to my granddaughter Stephie's bedside. Nothing could take away the pain or aloneness I felt traveling that day, but her loving kindness helped me get through it. Smooth and caring. Poetry without words. Prayer in action?

The end of life is a transition we all make alone, ultimately. It's hard to even think in times like this, let alone say (to others or to self) something/anything wise. We are too close up on it, like children sounding out letters, it's hard for us to find the big idea. Wisdom is retrospective.

I first met Rabindranath Tagore at the Erie Street Bookstore on a rainy Saturday afternoon and was almost disappointed to later find out that not only had he won a Nobel Prize in 1913, but some new agey types had rediscovered him and claimed my new friend as their own. Still, even though I didn't exactly discover him, every time I read his work, I find a new discovery.

In his book Sadhana, The Realisation of Life, Tagore uses the words love and joy interchangeably. He quotes the ancient seer-poet who sings, "From love the world is born, by love it is sustained, towards love it moves, and into love it enters." A few pages before that, he quotes the seer as saying, "From joy are born all creatures, by joy they are sustained, towards joy they progress, and into joy they enter." I once used this poem/song for inspiration for a poem for Kelly and Brian's wedding, a day of great joy.

But the meaning of a poem is in great part what we bring to it. And today, I bring my sadness and am reminded that transitions are part of the natural flow of life, even the great transition that each of us is destined to make. Spending too much energy on the seeming unfairness of it obscures our vision of the love and joy that radiates from such a luminary as Bonnie.

Bonnie has a Big Idea. She wants part of her legacy to be libraries in India built through the Room To Read program, for more information go here. She also wants to fund grants for teachers to attend conferences, so many of which have benefited from her presentations.

From love, by love, towards love and into love. The joy that is Bonnie.

The Monkey Mind

2011-04-21T12:03:00.004-05:00

The next move, Lisa suggests, will help to quiet the monkey mind.

My monkey mind immediately scratches behind my ear, looking for possible escape routes. Orlando? Technology? McCarthy era? A power point show of flashing images Hanoi, Hong Kong, Bali, the garden. Make a note of Pickway, OH. The carpet in the bedroom is beyond salvage. Cleaning out Max’s room. . .what to save? Less clutter. The closet. The laundry room.

The monkey scrambles over to my purse and starts pawing through the broken pens, gum wrappers and wadded receipts to fling out zippered bags full of lipstick, hairclips and lint. Is it time to downsize? We’re away so much anyway. How long would it take to clean out the house? Starting in the attic or basement? Could enough money be raised from a yard sale to fix the guest bathroom? Have the floors refinished?

Zip! The monkey jumps to the ceiling light and sits picking nits off of a half dead monkey that wasn’t even in my line of vision. “We used to be poets.” How am I getting back to the airport? What time is school on Monday? Need to update my website yesterday. Tax extension. Time to start the lettuce seeds. Urgency. This is insomnia with the lights on.

Unable to be still for more that a nanosecond, the monkey pinches its companion (yelp) before swinging down on one arm to land on an imaginary motor bike. Varoom Varoom. It cartwheels off to dance foot to foot before taking off through an open window. One look over its shoulder. Daring me to follow into the woods.

Breathe.

Lisa Lofthouse is my cousin and a master yoga teacher. Twice a year she conducts a yoga retreat workshop in the sweet sloped outside of Asheville. I went last weekend to try and get my pieces parts back together after a whole lot of travel and probably a little too much street food. For more information about her workshops, go here.

United Nations International School of Hanoi: Poetry Week

2011-04-21T10:41:00.010-05:00

When librarian Joyce Miller contacted us about dishing up some poetry at the middle school in Hanoi for April Fool's Day she was not just foolin' around. She not only scheduled assemblies and a seamless week of workshops for both of us, she managed to convince French, Spanish and (gasp) calculus classes to try their hands at poetry.

Here Joyce welcomes students as they begin to filter in for the lunchtime poetry jam. The library is the heart of any school and Joyce proved it here big time as music throbbed drawing kids to words.

The poetry topics could not have been more diverse. One day the eighth grade dropped everything to break into teams to study the pros and cons of a proposed nuclear plant in Vietnam in light of the tragedy in Japan. The dangers were researched and laid out against the dangers of mercury poisoning from coal plants and the feasibility of solar and wind turbines. At the end of the day students participated in a UN style debate. Here I'm talking to one poet who is trying to find just the right word for his fortunately/unfortunately poem on nuclear energy.

But how do I write with the French students when I don't read/write French? Well, we learned together. I showed the a model of our poetry writing strategy in English, they wrote in French. What I learned is that in French, we don't say something "feels like." French don't speak in similies that way -- they go straight to the metaphor. I'm sure this says something about the French, but I'm not sure exactly what. Many thanks to the language teachers for making this a learning experience for us all.

Percentage poems. They're fun. They're specific. I've written them all over the world with kids of all ages. But I never before saw a student turn one into a pie chart in the (no exaggeration) blink of a cursor. UNIS is a one-to-one laptop school which opens up new possibilities for poetry research and composing.

Write what you know, we are told by the wordwise. Personally, I write what I know and what I wonder about. Here's the deal on calculus. I don't even know enough about the subject to wonder about it. As far as I am concerned, calculus is a more exotic language than French. At least I can mispronounce my way through good day and thank you in French, but I'm not even conversant in passing pleasantries in calculus. Besides which, it is hard (not rock hard, calculus hard) for a poet to talk her way into an IB (International Baccalaureate) high school language arts class let alone a maths class. (Yes, they call it maths)

So, I was one thrilled(and, okay, a little bit scared) poet to be invited into Melissa Griffin's 11th and 12th grade maths classes. Not only did I learn something of the language of calculus, (it's curvy), but I wanted to learn more. Isn't' that just like a good teacher, tricking you into wanting learn more. But this post doesn't do justice to our time together. For more in depth understanding of how the language of calculus can curve into poetry, visit Melissa's blog. Prepare to be astounded.

Finally, at the end of the week we relax over tea. Thank you to all the students at UNIS, the involved and engaged faculty and special thanks to Joyce who worked so hard to make it all work, including introducing us to street food dining.

And P.S. don't forget to visit Melissa's blog:
http://aodandmore.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/poetry-and-mathematics-%e2%80%93-who-knew/
.

Hanoi! On the move

2011-04-21T08:41:00.010-05:00

How does the tourist cross the road? Or. Would you step into this traffic?

Hanoi!
Developing.
On the move.
New friends.
The Dragon Hotel is our home.
Motorbike shops.
Up with construction.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Motorbikes.
Open intersections of always,
all ways traffic.
Cross?
Here?
Now?
Don’t stop. Don’t run. Don’t hesitate.
Cross.
Buses.
Taxis.
Zipper Street.
Bucket Street.
Mosaic Wall.
Steaming pots of pho.
Conical hats.
A laid back dog.
Street-side barber shops.
Broom swept curbs.
Dust.
Lights reflecting on the lake.
1000 years old.
Monuments.
Colonial remnants.
Silk shops.
New bedspread.
Wires on wires.
Temple of Literature.
Rickshaws.
Motorbikes.
Motorbikes.
Motorbikes,
transporting
shops, mops,
families of four.
All kicking up dust.
Hanoi!
On the move.

EARCOS 2011 Borneo

2011-04-16T08:52:00.003-05:00

If the above photo doesn't look like an attendee at a teacher's conference, prepare to expand your vision. EARCOS= East Asian Regional Council of Overseas Schools, and every spring they put on a teacher conference like no other. From snorkeling to blow darts to technological looks into the classrooms of today and the future, directives on how to outgrow old thinking and gender issues, cultural divides while maintaining room for read alouds and (yes) poetry and performance leading to understanding ourselves and our lessons.

Okay, the snorkeling was a side trip we took because we arrived a couple days early for the conference. But imagine a conference in this setting! Think no one would come to the sessions? Think again. The sessions were overflowing with ideas and participants, lively discussion by teachers from international schools. These schools hold themselves to a very high standard without being tied to "the standards." Here innovation and effective best practices trump scripted lessons. Who benefits? Kids.

Thank you to Dick Krajczar, Bill Oldread, and Elaine Repatacodo for including us and for all their hard work in putting together a spectacular event.

Under the Land Down Under

2011-03-13T19:03:00.012-05:00

All the commotion, (laundry, packing, emails, phone calls, house sitters, doggie day care and a last minute trip to buy travel sized toothpaste that won’t pose a threat to national security) settles into a darkened drone for 15 hours over the Pacific and opens into the brilliant sun of Sydney, Australia. Landing at 5AM, it takes another 12 hours and two more stops to get to the island state of Tasmania, south off the mainland of Australia. I mention this for all my friends, who as I am, are geographically challenged. Tasmania is waaaaaay down there.

While our ride over the Pacific was smooth, when we touch down we learn the tragedy of what was shaking beneath us. So much devastation. Heartbreaking images coming out of Japan. Sad sad sad.

Here the sun is brilliant, the mountains are dark and rolling, and the people, wallabies, and wombats are very friendly. The famed Tasmania devils? Not so much. And just to put the endangered devils in an even better mood, the female population is in heat leading to overall agitation and grumpiness.

The wallabies have gentle mouths and are polite in taking turns being fed. They are gently curious about what other food you might have and nose around in purses and pockets. This herd is universally friendly with visitors (although they may not be in the wild and those back legs look like they definitely pack a mean kick) even the mother with a baby on board.

Looking for a metaphor for lazy? Sleepy? Lack of get-up-and-go? Here you have it, your branched out curl-up-and-sleep koala.

And here's animal I never even heard of before. A spotted quoll. I mentioned to a bus mate that quoll would make a good Scrabble word. She assured me others would challenge.

The wombat has a blankie. Seriously. It is an orphan (mother hit by a car, baby survived in a manmade pouch.) When it was reluctant to come out and take a look at the tourists, the keeper lured him out with (what else?) his blankie.

And Emus growl. They rumble, a group of them sounding like far away thunder. These we were encouraged to NOT handfeed.

Today, more to see. More to visit.

Tomorrow, school.

BALI

2011-01-28T22:05:00.011-05:00

How many ways can you conjugate green? This is a view from our porch at Alam Sari Keliki. What I can't show is the soft sounds of wooden cow bells, the bird songs and the rooster who thinks that it is dawn at least once on the hour. Of course there is also the persistent buzz of motorbikes on the road below, which I'm sure I would find a lot more annoying if we didn't drive one too. Here we are following our Cleveland friends Larry and Rai Collins down a back road south of Ubud on our way to meet with their supplier of organic incense for their store in Cleveland Heights, City Buddha. The kids were just getting out of school at about 1PM. No snow days here, but the kids don't seem too upset about it.

The making of the incense is a fascinating process involving a secret recipe of flowers, herbs and spices. The house where we visit has to be one of the best smelling places on the planet. First the sticks are coated in coconut charcoal held together with tapioca, dried and then dipped in the secret recipe and then burn for over an hour with a rich but not overwhelming aroma that is pure Bali. Go here for information about City Buddha.

Sampling flavors of incense and sampling Balinese coffee and incredible little cakes. Yum.

This is the picture of the inside of a Balinese house -- which is really outside. A series of little buildings with a wall around it. You can see the incense drying in the sun -- not a quick process as this is the rainy season.

Our first trip to Bali about four years ago only lasted three days and was basically consumed by doing all the first time tourist stuff. The fire dance, the gamalongs, the jaw dropping vistas -- all with the help of the hotel minivan. On this trip we had a chance, fun-filled encounter of the Facebook kind -- Larry happened to see that we were going to be in Bali, not only in Bali, but very close to where they live in Ubud. Here are Larry and Michael standing on the path by their house. These little streams run all around and outside of the city we see people bathing and washing clothing in them.

And yes, we did negotiate this path on the motorbike. Well, Michael did. I just hung on.

For better or worse, the movie Eat, Pray, Love has had a big impact on Ubud and we are very grateful we came here in the off season. The traffic can be pretty intense. But no one gets angry, The flow is very organic and many many smiles. Here are some kids we met. They wanted to practice their English -- Hello! What is your name! And they could all count to 10. At Michael's urging I taught them my shortest poem, which they acted out and thought was hilarious.

Shampoo
Boo Hoo.

A universal.

Hong Kong

2011-01-28T21:29:00.007-05:00

The thing about us Americans is that we just plain need to get out more. Seriously.

While we are in Hong Kong riding spotless subways, double-decker buses, viewing the latest in technological gadgetry and neon, some bonehead in congress is introducing legislation to force teachers into teaching creationism. Where did anyone ever get the idea that the road to the future runs through limiting our scope of knowledge to a single book written thousands of years ago? Hasn’t this woman seen the latest from Afghanistan? They used to be among the leaders in math, engineering, and poetry.

Nighttime streets of Hong Kong

That said, Hong Kong is a lesson in contrasts. Eye popping high rises and open air markets. The well-heeled go to private schools, the general population goes to public school if they can afford the fees. Everything is for sale here except fresh air. The taxi driver tells us that the smog is floating in from mainland China, land of few (or non-existent) environmental regulations. It is ubiquitous. A lesson to us all on the true costs of zero pollution controls.

View from our hotel window.

Still, Hong Kong is a destination I would like to revisit and explore, if only for the restaurants we didn’t get a chance to sample. And I’d love to bring a boatload of neighbors, friends and family with me.

Canadian International School of Hong Kong

2011-01-23T09:15:00.008-05:00

To paraphrase that NPR philosopher Garrison Keillor: The Canadian International School of Hong Kong is a place where the faculty is bright, the facilities are ultra-modern, and all the poets are above average.

Every new school is an unknown destination – whether it is across town or on the other side of the world. But setting up a school visit in Hong Kong means emails, phone calls, travel agents, and a certain amount of risk taking on everyone’s parts. After all the front work (not to mention the 15 hour plane ride from Newark) you sure want everything to go well.

And it sure did. We wrote in groups, we wrote individually, and we practiced our oral presentation skills. The school itself is a ten-story testament to modern learning technology. From the school issued laptops to the well-stocked library the school is all about learning in the 21st century. So here was my question to the students: Why Poetry?

I mean seriously. These kids are multilingual, more digitally literate than your average poet and on the fast track to world citizenship. Why do they need poetry? I asked.

Among the answers:

It helps release what is inside of me.
Poetry helps with self-expression.
It helps us appreciate each other’s differences.
It is fun.
Poetry makes beautiful times more beautiful.

Thank you to Joanne, Tanya and Myrna for all their good spirited hard work in making this visit happen. Thanks to Stephanie for showing us some cool classroom technology tips. Most of all, thanks to the kids for their eager curiosity and welcoming enthusiasm.

Maybe the best part? Michael and I silently standing to the side and watching kids requesting and checking out poetry books in the library after our presentation.

Cool.

Voices in the Virtual Silence

2011-01-14T08:19:00.008-05:00

It wasn't on the calendar in advance. No prior knowledge on my part. But as the weather cooled and the travel escalated, I kind of withdrew from my blog and facebook. Virtual silence. I've been lurking around, reading, an occasional comment, but I was putting my creative energy into other buckets. And then came the holidays and family and ahhhhhh relaxing.

The first week after the new year Michael and I flew to Aiken, South Carolina for the first school/teacher visit of the year. What a great way to come back into the world, not the virtual world, the real one. Real kids. Real classrooms. Real words put on paper. Thank you Beth and Sue and Joanne for all your hard work in putting the visit together.

Sad. Shy. Proud. Crazy. Here kids acted out an emotion before they wrote to put their movements into words, focusing on the motions of emotion.

Days like we had in Aiken, surrounded by a tumble of kids and ideas are what I need to feed my spirit and enable me to be strong and hopeful in the face of societal tragedies like what happened in Arizona.

Today we pack and get ready for our big trip to Hong Kong, Bali and Jakarta. Two big cities with paradise sandwiched in between. More excited writers and a vibrant green respite to do some of my own writing in Bali.

HONG KONG! See you soon!

What's Wrong with this Picture?

2010-11-11T11:24:00.005-05:00

Is it true that the wisemen brought pumpkins to honor the infant?
Is that the Holy Ghost dressed up as a scarecrow for Halloween?
OR
Does this image beg the question: How was it that the parable of the scarecrow-as-cheerleader was somehow omitted from my Sunday School lessons?
AND
Why do most passion plays eschew the pom poms?

These and other pressing questions occupy my mind as I walk the dogs around the block. Whatever this display represents, it scares the persistent barking out of Lili. In her mind, any scarecrow suspended and presiding over a cradled infant cannot be good.

To the Young Poet Standing

2010-11-09T12:31:00.004-05:00

To the Young Poet Standing

“Failure drives a Nissan Cube.”
Your opening line is succinct.
Neither made up in a slather of cosmetic adjectives
or itching to shake off an entanglement of adverbs.
Personification plain and simple.
You have written to your audience.
Read the lines with clarity and intonation.
Everything that was asked of you.

Since Failure has not enlightened you
to the vertigo induced by hunger,
the clinging stench of falling face first
into a cold hallway ripe with urine,
or introduced you to those
who remain uncompensated for stolen trust
or whose fast track to success was barricaded by
some unrepaired cleft . . .

Given that Failure has never taken
your straight-toothed, winning smile for a tour
of a refugee camp in its ninth season,
or even the other side of town.
Hasn’t pointed out where
it had the snot beat out of it as a kid,
where it broke its teeth on the curb
after being pushed down by minimum wage,
or pointed out the exact sidewalk square
where it gave up trying . . .

That you cannot see that Failure
has limited the lessons
taught in this brick building
to what is fitting for your neighborhood,
and knowing that under that T shirt logo
label you may wish for something else,
but at thirteen-years-old
you don’t know what. . .

Mindful of all of the above,
I leave this lesson contemplating
Failure.

End of Daylight Savings Time

2010-11-07T09:07:00.005-05:00

While reading the news online this morning, I found a cache of poems allegedly about the end of daylight savings time. (click here) I'm not sure these poems were all written for this purpose, or indeed if any poem has a purpose. Most honored poets seem to be all mournful about the death of summer, anticipating rebirth, following classic poetic lines of thinking (some to the point of exhaustion on the parts of readers). I don't know if I've just been spending too much time in the company of oppositional middle schoolers or at grooming the dogs' shedding coats off of the animals and my clothing, but I'm (famous last words) ready to be transported out of autumn. I think the trees are with me in this.

Smug.
I walk the dogs at 7:46 on a Sunday,
beside trees ankle deep in confetti.
Not the least bit forlorn,
they seem ecstatic to be shed of their
shady responsibilities.
Masts fully trimmed,
they bolt from their roots
and reach freely
into the wind
with jazz hands,
ready for the icy voyage,
begging for adventure,
cheered on by puddles,
generally so unassuming,
now glittery with excitement.
I receive this advance notice
in a quick sniff,
grateful that this morning,
this one morning,
I am ahead of time.

Gatekeepers Through the Ages

2010-10-22T10:13:00.005-05:00

Once upon a time in the long long ago, parents were the gatekeepers of knowledge for kids. Sharp knives and matches were dispensed to kids on a need to know basis by grown-ups.

Over many generations, that dribble of knowledge begot kids doing their own thinking and writing books which begot libraries. Libraries begot gatekeepers called librarians who could say things like “ask your parents,” when kids wanted to check out bomb-making instruction manuals.

Then the little bomb-makers grew up and begot television which blew up a lot of gatekeeper duties until that medium begot the FCC which also gatekept things like movies and music which begot a lot of frustration among the next generation of bomb-makers. So they begot HBO and kids suddenly had full frontal answers to all their questions. This begot parent controls about the same time the Internet was being begot (begotten?) and that begot file sharing and blogging and that exploded old gatekeeping traditions such as editors and editorial standards and that begot a lot of nervous parents who rushed to their school boards who begot sheets of educational standards designed to limit the fire hose of knowledge streaming into the brains of our kids.

These school boards begot a lot of regulations limiting what teachers and textbooks could discuss with kids. But then the Internet begot knowledge gold-mines such as Google, Amazon, and the Discovery Channel. Of course the Internet also begot a lot of fool’s gold, so often when kids of all ages are doing research they have to act as their own gatekeepers in ascertaining if information contained therein has any merit beyond the perimeters of the Land of Urban Myth.

Which brings us to today where the Texas School Board has begot regulations dictating the number of times the word “Islam” is mentioned in a text book hoping this will limit kids learning about Muslims and begot the removal of udders from cows in textbook pictures to limit kids' HOLY COW knowledge of natural functions. A school district in OH can claim victory after winning their court case to limit teachers from deviating from the dictates of her school board and for letting kids read and discuss in a structured setting fiction that students could easily find themselves through a “if you liked this, you might like this” search on Amazon, whereupon that same student might buy the novel to be downloaded onto his/her phone and read or listen to it on the (gasp) school bus, without the guidance of a grown-up (a teacher, with Dancing with the Stars on, what parent has time for novels?) helping said student sift through the words to find what's true.

This outcome might beget frenetic knee-slapping, jester jumping hilarity if it weren’t so pathetic.

Cousins Take Manahattan

2010-10-20T13:58:00.001-05:00

English Companion Ning

2010-10-13T07:40:00.003-05:00

Michael found this and I am pasting it right in here because we are THIS excited about our book club discussion about our new book on the English Companion Ning. If you are teacher and you haven't seen all the great resources available on this ning go there adn check it out! Developed by Jim Burke and some very dedicated teachers such as my friends Lee Ann Spillane and Gary Anderson, it is the best place to get answers, support and ideas for classroom teachers.

Vocabulary instruction out of the box! Notice how the creator of this video (Michael's son Frank) shows what the word is and does and also what it does not do.

2010-10-12T21:45:00.002-05:00

I took this picture with my cellphone about a week ago beside the driveway. It was the first week of October and this stubborn little dandelion wasn't being shy at all about crashing fall. Not a bit. And I've been wracking my brain to find this poem about dandelions standing around on street corners like rebellious kids and I can't find it on the internet. On my shelf. In my brain.

I found that Ray Bradbury sold newspapers on streetcorners and Yeats has a line in a play about a fool blowing a dandelion to tell time. Roughly a gazillion people liken writing ideas to behave like dandelion seeds (note to self, never use THAT metaphor).

So, I asked Salinger passing down the hall -- trying to find this poem, I tell him. Do you know it? "No," he says. "Give me a minute and I'll write one for you." Sure he could. So could I. But I'm sure the one I'm remembering is better. It is sterling. It captures the rebelliousness of the dandelion perfectly. Vachal Lindsey was into dandelions before he got into drinking Lysol and May Swenson had me noticing their little lion heads, but lost me at calling them sweet. I have now spent 2 hours looking for this perfect dandelion poem.

The dream of perfection pushing me beyond logic -- kinda like a dandelion blooming in October.

Where were you on 10/10/10?

2010-10-11T08:16:00.004-05:00

Where were you on 10/10/10? This seems like an important date, and I almost missed it. I mean, I was here, but where was I? In computer update limbo. Kicking with my software. Holed up in front of this blinking cursor. What kind of a memory is that?

A big date like this should be like a cornerstone in which we lay memorabilia, photos, reflections, artifacts evidencing the way things are today, on this day, on 10/10/10.

My grandmother used to tell me (and I heard this story SO many times and wish I could hear it just one more) that she turned 19 on the 19th day of October in 1919. She wore a white dress with lace on the sleeves. It was a big day.

Yesterday I wore khaki pants and a grey T shirt. What kind of an image is that to pass along to the grandkids? Surely there were songs sung, poems written, pictures drawn, stories crafted to commemorate this milestone? Balloons of fancy rose somewhere. Happiness squirmed. Where? How? Who?

I need some images to put in my memory bank to override this mess.

Help!

Found Poem

2010-10-09T17:09:00.002-05:00

Comment
I NEED A JOB
The Great Recession
or
The Great Depression?
To just one does not all credit go.
Changed
Great Recession has affected way in which we live.
Try
finding words
that describe goals,
plans.
We want jobs now.

I'm not usually into these things, but this one kind of jumped off the pages of the Lake County Herald.

2010-10-07T21:10:00.006-05:00

So this is what
it comes to
after all.
The promise of spring now
stacked sticks,
twisted vines,
faded blossoms,
all cracking up over lost suppleness.
Past the point of usefulness.
Uprooted.
After all those phases of the moon,
the sun and rain,
the hosings and the horse manure.

Most of its fruit
has simply been digested.
Still some of the garden’s flesh
hangs on, wrinkled and scarred.
This is what
is left. One last supper
and the rest stuffed into
a bag for collection.

A Question of Mushrooms

2010-10-06T18:03:00.009-05:00

Mushrooms in the garden?

Mushrooms in the grass?

Mushrooms in the trees?

Is this too much to ask?

Clouds!

Stop raining?

PLEASE!

And those pictures are just from one half-mile walk around the block. Cleveland! Gotta love it.

Fierce

2010-10-05T08:12:00.002-05:00

Fierce
is a 3 lb 8 oz dog
who
shivering with righteous fury,
tethered by a thread,
ears at attention,
chin extended into
a relentless chain of scalp-tightening yelps,
stands up to the back side of
an overstuffed cable man,
head under the tent of his truck,
before returning home to
release one more
harbored huff of indignation
as she settles in
by the heat hole with her
stuffed bear.

High Definition Vocabulary

2010-09-17T09:52:00.002-05:00

Four years in the writing, more in the research. So much time and yes, fun, in the making. Finally!

Teaching Kindness?

2010-09-09T15:17:00.004-05:00

Book smart = street dumb

This thinking is ubiquitous in too many of our upper schools. Smart is stupid, dumb is good. To mark the depth of this river, all you need to do is walk in the door. Ivory towers. Sissies. Nerds. Society just doesn’t give that much respect to the pocket protector sub-group, treating them more like a sub-species until they get out of school and star in a movie elevating the underdog to greatness or invent something that even bone heads can use, like an I Touch.

In an environment where weakness can get you teased and bullied, why risk showing off your book smarts? Bullies are often the most insecure of cowards and they can smell easy meat. Somewhere around 6th grade kids start to learn this and too many begin to stop learning in school. What’s the utility of engaging in a practice that’s going to get you socially ostracized? Nothing drains the enthusiasm out of a classroom faster than the skinny-eyed stare of the kid a silent majority has voted most likely to slam you into the lockers. My experience with adolescents is that it isn’t so hard to get them to buy into the lesson, it’s getting past the fact that they don’t want to show that they are interested. It’s hard on a teacher, but for some kids, it’s a life or death choice.

Nowhere is this worse than in my home district, Mentor High School. It’s been in the news lately since that rough patch couple years back, a two-year period in which five (5) students committed suicide due, at least in part, to bullying. Now a second set of bereaved parents has filed suit. They had complained, talked to the administration, withdrawn their daughter (a recent Croatian immigrant), and even hospitalized her for depression due to the abuse she was receiving daily at school. Like the gay boy before her and the three other children (children) in Mentor schools, she was the victim of what one commentator has labeled an atmosphere of “aggressive conformity.”

Are we teaching the wrong stuff? Is the increased pressure on schools to teach by the book toward measurable outcomes not only making teachers nuts, but driving kids crazy too? By increasing the pressure through testing, are we doubling down on the wrong things? I picked this list up from a cheery piece of reading you might want to add to the stack on your bedside table (you nerd you) entitled On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools by Gerald W. Bracey, Heinemann 2003.

Creativity
Critical thinking
Resilience
Motivation
Persistence
Curiosity
Humor
Reliability
Enthusiasm
Civic-mindedness
Self-discipline
Empathy
Leadership
Compassion
Sense of beauty
Sense of wonder
Integrity
Courage
Self-awareness
Resourcefulness

This is a list of what proficiency tests do NOT measure. Isn’t it also a list of characteristics you would want in a neighbor, parent, or co-worker? Characteristics of a successful person?

I’m not sure all of these qualities (motivation? kindness?) can be taught, but I think we can do a better job of not discouraging those traits by handing over control of our school communities to muscle-headed and spike-heeled bullies, ignoring the human needs of children.

So, I would suggest the following if asked (I decidedly was not asked being a poet, which makes me bottom-line suspect from jump). First, make it a legislative imperative that teachers report when a student is being abused by another student in the same way they must report if a child is being abused at home. Teachers can lose their licenses for not reporting abuse at home, why not the abuse on the stairs?

Second, make school more interactive with small learning groups where kids have to rely on one another instead of the prevailing competitive, every kid for him/herself paradigm. I don’t care what the test scores say, if kids are killing themselves or overdosing (oh, yeah, there were 5 of those this year, too) the school is failing.

If a school fails one of its own, the group who enabled the abuser with their collective silence needs to pay a price. If it is the jocks with the thick necks and the girls competing fiercely to hang from them who are perpetuating this terrorism, how about cancelling a few football games? Suspend the cheerleading squad? Oh, not fair to the athletes vying for scholarships? How about the nerds vying for scholarships who are afraid to participate in class because they might get teased to death? Let’s work to level that playing field.

One good thing kids glean from sports is that you don’t let the rest of the team down. They can also learn it from band, plays, poetry readings or their chem. lab group. But in order to succeed in the workplace, kids need to learn it, whether or not they can throw a ball.

Finally, suspending the abusers individually is not a remedy. Doesn’t work. Just causes more kids to feel isolated and angry. We need to listen to kids. Give them a forum to talk (I recommend poetry performance, naturally) and listen. Give them an audience. One of the most powerful moments in my teaching experience was when a mentally challenged student read a poem to a warm around the collars group gathered in a Michigan middle school library about what it was like for her to be chased to and from her locker every day. It made a difference. The talking and the listening. We all learned something that day.

Street smarts. The hand-on-a-hot-stove kind of learning that doesn’t come out of a book, but is both meaningful and memorable. The kind we get from talking to one another. We need more of that.

Po-etiquette

2010-09-04T09:47:00.005-05:00

When doing a poetry reading, it is always best NOT to take yourself too seriously. Prepare, yes. Have your papers in order, yes. Rehearse a little. Know your audience. But all of us who read our words aloud have grown to appreciate nobel prize winner Wislawa Szymborska's sentiment:

Poetry Reading

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds?
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining,
the rest are relatives. O Muse.
The women here would love to rant and rave,
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave.
Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet,
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life,
for lack of muscles forced to show the world
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore:
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more,
she's making him that tart she used to bake.
Aflame, but carefully-don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

Okay, so I did Vertigo Xi'an Xavier's Canton First Friday! The Poetry Spectacular last night. Beautiful night, fun arts event for families and galleries. Highly recommended. Don't wait for a written invitation. The streets were hopping. It wasn't raining at all and some of the crowd even came inside for the poetry reading.

In the theater, the opening act was the local HS forensics team. They wept, screamed, and scratched their skin through three performances. The audience clapped politely as one watched her kids drown on the Titanic, one drank bleach, and one (even more frighteningly) attempted humor. Then they all stood up with their entourages and noisily discussed how well they did as they departed and as I was being introduced. Michael mentioned to a couple of them that my poems have been used to win several state forensic oral interp competitions. Perhaps one kid shrugged.

Then a young woman came to the stage as I was putting my folder on the music stand.
"What time is the open mic?"
"After the feature," answered Vertigo, the emcee (who is working overtime to build this event and sincerely seems to be a great guy).
"What time is that?" She asked.
"Are you leaving?" He asked.
"Yes. I’ll come back to read. I’m first on the open mic."
"You should stay for the feature," he nodded to me, standing at his elbow.
She looked me straight in the eye and said, “most poetry bores me, no offense.”

How could I take offense?

The rest of the evening went much better and we were treated to energetic performances by Mary Turzillo and Geoff Landis among others. Will the poetry gods forgive me for cutting out for the first poet in the open mic and then returning for the rest of the evening?

As I departed, the young woman (who had returned to chat her way through the last couple of my poems and take cell phone pictures of her friend) called to me, “you’re leaving? I’m crushed.”

My reply, “no offense.”

(cross-posted at cleveland poetics)

Orwell in Bed

2010-09-01T12:23:00.003-05:00

I read Animal Farm as a kid, maybe third grade or so. It was on the bookshelf by my bed. I remember slipping the slim, green volume in and out surreptitiously to read with a flashlight in bed. Mom didn’t know I was reading this book without pictures in which pigs talked, which definitely made it more attractive. I’m not sure if mom would have censored the book from me if she had known.

Mom would have arranged the shelves in the bookcase to look nice, not as some kind of plot to expand my mind. Besides being fiercely intelligent, she liked things to look nice, not like those ratty looking children’s books with the torn covers that she sent to the Goodwill as soon as I learned to read. In fact, she trashed the book jackets on all books. Messy looking. I’m not sure it even occurred to her that I might be reading those Book-of-the-Month Club selections carefully aligned by height and color. That I didn’t truly understand the meaning of Animal Farm, the story within the story, didn’t matter. I liked the book and the words weren’t too hard.

This narrow bookcase sits in my office today; it holds a disorderly mishmash of my ragged old journals. I’ve kept it around, just like my love of reading in bed after the lights go down. This habit has been greatly enhanced by being able to read from my back lit little ITouch. The words are newspaper column-width and just as exciting or disappointing as they would be on the page. Yes, I still like books with covers, but under the covers, I love my ITouch enabling me to read in the dark.

Surreptitiously? Not so much.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is my latest read. It is a rich book set in Ethiopia in which some of the descriptions are so graphic that the words on the screen seem to bleed (the main characters are surgeons). In fact, I’ve had to self-censor a few passages. Though, like Animal Farm, the book doesn't contain pictures, some of the images are powerful and fully capable of causing nightmares. Humble compliments to the author.

This book was recommended to me by my friends at Amazon who know I like books set in foreign places. You think elephants have a memory? Amazon never forgets. They know every item I have looked at from school bus tents for Thomas to books on stalking/window peepers (eight years ago I ordered a paperback on this topic to help understand the mentality of these people, it’s a long story), to those little ankle high boots I thought I couldn’t get through the winter without and which now follow me onto every single site I visit on the internet, scrolling across the top, flashing at the side. Amazon remembers such things. Forever, it seems. And sometimes they are spot on. I like this book, in fact.

In Cutting for Stone I found this little story within the story that I liked. The story was about a miserly Baghdad merchant who had a battered pair of slippers everyone teased him about. He finally decided to get rid of them, threw them out a window, they landed on the head of a pregnant woman, she miscarried, and he went to jail. The second attempt to get rid of the slippers he dropped them into a canal, they choked up the drain, and again off to jail. A listener to the story observes, “He might as well build a room for his slippers. Why try to lose them? He will never escape.” All kinds of cool inferences can be drawn from this little story, an imbedded mini lesson. Everything in your experience (the slippers) becomes part of who you are. The author sums it up saying, “the key to happiness is to own your slippers.” Love it.

Loved it so much I tapped the passage with my finger and up jumped a little window on my ITouch that said, “1247 people also liked this passage.”

How Orwellian is that?

Deal with it.

2010-08-26T07:46:00.005-05:00

‎"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in. Forget about them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." – Emerson

Obviously, Emerson never had fruit flies.

I woke up to yesterday all over the kitchen, stray basil leaves and scraps of chopped pepper from cooking tomato sauce, leftovers that I didn’t sweep up before bed. Did Emerson always sweep the kitchen floor before bed? I don’t think so. Oh and yes, don’t forget the cloud of fruit flies darkening a bowl tomato trimmings that didn’t get taken out to the compost.

Let me ask you, did Emerson compost? If he did he would never make such a statement. This is, I mean, this statement is so smugly 19th century. What did ol' Mr. Leisuretime do to combat global climate change caused by (hello) Yesterday.

Did Emerson ever wake to 37 emails that penetrated the spam filter over the night like fruit flies through window screens, or wherever fruit flies and offers of wealth and health fly in from. Did he never eat out and two weeks later find a styrofoam container growing like a science experiment in the back of the fridge or a preposition dangling at the end of a sentence he had written? Eh?

He probably never filed an extension on his taxes, either, so he could have the water-torture joy of waking to unfinished homework for five months every year. A milk crate full of receipts moaning like caged zombies under the desk. Unopened financial statements that made him regret he never got an advanced degree in accounting. And don’t forget the 187 pieces of correspondence populating his inbox that really should be answered.

Oh. And who do you suppose was the “high spirit” he woke up with every morning? No one who has ever lived with another human being for longer than a week expects to be greeted with sunny smiles every dang day. Sounds a little lascivious, Ralph Waldo. If the Reverend and his “spirit” woke up high, isn’t that just evidence they didn’t sleep long enough? Bet his two wives (the ones who probably swept the kitchen for the "individualist") loved THAT story.

Okay. I’m willing to admit that even though I have some questions about Emerson’s philosophy, I do not have all the answers. I’m going to slap a label on the coffee pot, rename it “serenity,” slug down a couple of cups, make a wide sweep of all the “yeah, buts” off my desk with the back of my arm, and start the day over.

Here’s where I should conclude this philosophical rant with a summary statement about fruit flies, but what more can really be said? They exist. Deal with them.

August Reflections

2010-08-18T18:48:00.015-05:00

August light turns in by eight
and night comes early in the forest
lullabied
by crickets' chorus,
shrilly sung crescendos
by a choir that no one sees.

A piece of poem.
Don't know when I wrote it, but when ripened tomatoes start to sag on drying vines and shadows begin to lengthen in late afternoon, it floats through my mind, looking for a place to go.

Last week Danny, Scotty, Sara and Thomas and I went creeking. I've talked to many teacher groups about this creek. How on one frosty Easter morning I used my walking stick to roll one rock on top of another so I could tip toe across and not get my feet wet.

I asked my friend, is that fair? To move the rock like that? Maybe we should just play them as they lay. "I don't know," she answered, "if I were a rock, I wouldn't want to stay in the same place for the rest of my life."

I went home and asked my daughter Kelly what she thought. Was it fair to move the rock? She reminded me that there were organisms living under that rock. Move the rock and you have disturbed the habitat. So I asked her football/golfer boyfriend (soon to be husband) Brian, and he said definitely, no. You move the rock, you take the sport out of it.

So, on this hot August day, no frost to be found, I visit the same creek with two of their sons, Dan and Thomas. We talk about whether to take the high road or the low road beside the creek. We confer with Scotty and Sara. And we all manage to round the bend and follow the creek with (mostly) dry feet, even though the mud DID try to suck the shoe off of Dan's foot during one rock maneuver. Life, like the creek, is constantly moving on.

Back then I also asked my friend Sharon Draper in an email, what did she think about moving the rock and she quick shot back an answer, "Jackie Robinson moved a rock and everyone has been following in his footsteps ever after."

Good answer. I asked other friends. I asked Father Ned, who answered, "We are co-creators in this universe, move the rock." That turned out to be my favorite answer. We are co-creators. And while it is up to each of us to make our own way, It sure helps to have friends and family to talk over the possibilities.

About which rocks can be moved and which we need to climb over.

A few weeks ago a teacher from TN wrote and asked me for the poem about the creek. Like the August poem, it is just a little piece of poem. Never fully developed. Just a little story, a memory to savor like the tongue-burst of backyard, sun-ripened tomatoes.

Zombies! The Making of the Video

2010-08-12T14:43:00.009-05:00

First impressions are important. As an author, the good thing about making a trailer for your new book is that you get the opportunity to introduce the book to friends in your own words, your own vision. Like introducing one friend to another, the introducer gets to help with the first impression. You can say things like, "I want you to meet XXX. You may think at first this kid is a little over the top, but you are going to love the way he stands on chairs wearing a sombrero and sings at the top of his lungs."

A good introduction can go a long way toward making a positive first impression.

I was so excited when I saw the drawings Karen made to go with my poems. They seemed to be dancing all over the page. I wasn't sure about the music they were dancing to until I taught myself Garage Band. I played around with sound effects and music clips, cutting and pasting until I thought the beat matched the movements. It took me all kinds of hours to learn the program, but I had a crash, bam, boom, foot-tapping time experimenting.

At the same time, I taught myself to use the program I Movie. That process took a few days and several large containers of popcorn just to get me into the proper mind for movie making.

I didn't have a script to begin with. Just some vague thoughts about how important it is to daydream and then my eyes landed on Karen's picture of Susan Todd singing her heart out. And I thought, that's it. I want kids to know that this book will help them find their voices through poetry. So that became the plot of the video.

Hope you enjoy the video, the book, the poems, the pictures, and that the writing tips put you over the top just a little.

God Bless You, Mob

2010-08-05T00:46:00.014-05:00

Singing "kookaburra sits in the old gum tree-ee" makes a whole lot more sense if you have heard the mouthy bird and understand that a gum tree is a sweet smelling eucalyptus. The "baaa necessities" become more clearly defined when you learn that Aussies drop most r's, don't run the heat when no one is at school, wear locally grown wool for warmth instead of layers of useless manmade fibers and elect local officials based on their environmental policies. Also, knowing that a mob is a herd of kangaroos and not criminals with machine guns helps to make the school chaplain's blessing a bit less startling at second period tea time, crumpets optional (but who can resist?)

We started our visit in Australia with a couple of bus hopping, ferry riding, opera house touring, zoo visiting days in Sydney. The winter here is mild and incredibly sunny compared the kneedeep wind chills we are accustomed to in Cleveland. Not unpleasant at all. Much more to see. Would love to return.

The opera house is truly stunning and we were lucky enough to score tickets for a cabaret performance in one of the theaters. It is covered with tiles that reflect the color of the sky, a site that really can't be captured with a camera.

After a smooth bus ride to Canberra, ACT (the Washington, DC of Australia) we were collected by our trusted friend and host, Dan Ferri. He not only put up with us but put us up for a week and a half while we toured Canberra (pronounced Can-baha, see above) and Radford College.

Before we began our residency at Radford, we took about an 8-kilometer walk to the national Australian Museum. Since I don’t know a kilometer from a mile and we didn’t have a map of the city, we didn’t exactly know what we were in for that day, but it turned out to be a clear blue sky, sunny day and a fascinating museum where the modern is mixed up with the ancient to give you a picture of just about everything Aussie. The War Memorial was particularly fascinating as they had a C plane there that I think is what my Uncle Bill flew in the South Pacific. Somehow it was not part of my history lesson that Australia was bombed and Japanese subs were in Sydney Harbor during the WWII, "let's move on, we have a lot to cover" being the hasty mantra of all my social studies teachers 1-12).

Everyone knows a true sign of becoming old is that you go to a museum and see one of your prized memories of childhood behind glass. But how about going to a museum and seeing the original jerseys of one of your grandchildren’s idols enshrined for posterity?

Yep. The Wiggles. Hanging alongside pith helmets, Darwin’s notepad, and aboriginal masks. Oh, well. No worries, mate. One of a couple of handy phrases I picked up and reckon to remember along with the mobs of meat pies and kangaroos, smiling students and pleasant teachers we came in contact with while down under. My absolute favorite, below.

But the real business of our trip began when we went to school. First we did a short drive by visit to a public school, Ainslie School where Karen took us all around. The place was alive with writing and word walls, artwork and bulging classroom libraries at all grade levels. Here I learned that a perimeter is always closed, never open and not a muddle. Principal Jo Padgham was away the day we visited, but her imprint and vision is clearly evident all over the school, a very happening place.

The next day we began a five-day residency at Radford College. In Australia all schools are colleges, post high school schools are called universities. We visited with the elementary kids, a few year 12s (seniors) but spent a great deal of our time with the seventh grade. The sixth graders wrote about their recent walkabouts to visit local dams and ecosystems. I learned about the hazards of desalination from one sixth grade poet and about all kinds of other fascinating creatures, plants, and rivers (few of which I could spell in the group-writes much to the amusement of the kids).

Many many thanks to Claire, Peggy, Louise, Dylan, and the rest of the mob for making our visit a learning experience for all. And special thanks to Dan Ferri for the invitation and for all his generous hospitality.

IRA World Congress Auckland, NZ

2010-07-14T21:04:00.011-05:00

New Zealand, where the air is clear and the pies are steamy, the people are friendly and the internet is expensive, sparse and achingly slow. Michael and I came downunder for the IRA World Congress, a multi-national literacy conference that convenes every other year. We had a few days to take in some sights and sites, but not nearly enough time to explore.

The center of Auckland is this Sky Tower, which the guidebook describes as looking like a "hypodermic needle giving a fix to the sky." Don't know about that, but people sure seem to get off on jumping off the thing (strings attached) and harnessing up to crabcrawl around the little ledge at the top. NZ is the bungee capital of the world. Who knew? Michael is still bugging me about not taking advantage of the two for one winter special for a death defying leap from this thing. He called that a bargain. I called it insanity. One of the teachers I met at the conference who was leading a group of Virginia grad students reminded them that while the health insurance would not cover injuries from bungee jumping, it would pay to have their remains repatriated to the U.S.

One of the first things you notice walking down the street is that Auckland truly is an international city. In fact, the area around out hotel was predominately populated by Korean nationals. One of Korea's biggest exports seems to be its people. There are little convenient stores around, each with a different ethnic band -- middle eastern, chinese, korean. The country itself has three languages, English, Maori, and signing.

We took in the Auckland Museum to get some history and background on the indigenous Maori people and customs. The Maori are credited with being premier navigators, traveling as far as South America in what look to be pretty primitive craft. Most notable is their Haka dance of strength and intimidation. But their carvings and art are stunning and unique.

In our ongoing quest to visit every aquarium around the globe, we visited Auckland's designed by visionary resident wacko Kelly Tarton out of what used to be a sewage disposal facility. Here you climb into a little disney-like ride to get up close and personal with the penguins and other exciting creatures.

In the closest we got to trekking, we took a ferry out to Rangitoto Island, which arrived via volcano overnight a few hundred years ago. The beaches and all surrounds are black volcanic rock with tea trees growing all over. A tractor pulled up part way up and then we followed this path into the sky (see those distant little blue patches?) to reach the breathtaking summit. The road were built by convicts in the 20s and 30s who unfortunately didn't have the foresight to also lay fiberoptic cable.

The conference itself was terrific and we felt welcomed learning and sharing our learning. A great introduction to NZ. Hardly enough to last a lifetime. Hopefully we can come back for more out of the city exploration.

"We don't have polio any longer."

2010-06-04T04:02:00.009-05:00

So my question to the wise women writers I have dinner with now and then was: Do you think that every generation, when people get to a certain age, they just think the world is going to hell, or do you think the world really is going south this time?

And alternately, we each added to the list of the world’s woes. My own list included the oil volcano in the Gulf, the disappearing wet lands, the special that’s coming up on the chemicals in our fresh foods, chemicals with side benefits like cancer and autism, the Texas Board of Education is trying to limit learning, Gaza stripped, too big to fail, nuclear headed weapons, how I just liked a group on facebook about how the introduction of corn syrup into baby formula is giving kids obesity and diabetes and to top it all off, Tipper and Al Gore are calling it quits. I feel about their divorce as I would have had I watched a precious antique piece of furniture fall off the back of a truck and get smashed. 40 years? They don’t make marriages like that anymore.

This is a brilliant group of writing women brought together by Sarah Willis
Kristin Ohlson, Karen Sandstrom, Thrity Umrigar, Loung Ung, and Paula McClain . I love not only our exchanges about writing and publishing but their well-traveled, intelligent take on the world. I always have leftovers after these meals -- something to bring home that won't just go bad in the back of the fridge. We don't get together very often and rarely all at the same time due to travel and other conflicts, so this week was a real treat.

So what did they think? Does every generation grow to think that change is ruining the world? Wasn't this the cry when society industrialized itself? Freeways, factories, fashion (those falling down pants hobbling our young men, are you kidding me?), each new generation flips off the former and chooses new paths -- hence the inevitability of grumpy old men (and women).

Is what is happening today and how discouraging it sometimes feels just the natural march toward the future or have humans really messed things up beyond repair? We bounced the question around -- united in our mourning over the horrors of oil mixing with water, but while nobody particularly relishes seeing boys with their boxers exposed, we all agreed we need to fight any tendency to become more conservative with age.

"I'm happy to be living today," said Thrity. I wanted to say, "really?" Not that kind of Saturday Night Live "reeeeeallly" that has lately (annoyingly) permeated conversation (see what I mean about the grumpiness?), but really? "Yes. Fifty years ago could we have all accomplished what we have? Would Loung and I even be here? Look. We don't have polio any more."

And there it was. My take home idea. Something to hang onto while watching news hour images of dying pelicans and gasping dolphins.

One bad habit I have unfortunately nurtured over the years is stacking up the bad stuff. I'm good at it. I gather outrages and images using resentment as mortar to give bad stuff more substance. And when the stack starts to waver, I search around (under the desk, on the Internet, in the gutters) for more bad stuff to prop up the stack, all of which -- the late night searches, the rearranging, the tumbling and rebuilding -- tends (big surprise) to weigh me down. There's lots of bad stuff out there.

And Thrity reminds me. Once again. Finding inner peace comes back to gratitude. Not losing all sense of empathy or outrage, these can be powerful motivators. But we (I) also need some inner peace since that's what eases us along as we continue to seek solutions to all of the above. Besides, no inner peace means no sleep which makes it hard to deal with the crisis of a broken pencil let alone a broken oil well.

At least we don't have polio any longer.

I should be walking

2010-05-29T07:55:00.009-05:00

When life becomes a blur, about the only thing to do is buckle your seatbelt and wait for the ride to stop. That's when you stagger away, slightly dizzy, searching for a focus point.

Since my last post I visited Shanghai, North Dakota, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, Connecticut and various points in OH.

I met great kids, poet of all ages -- pre-school and up, up, up.

wrote with them,

celebrated their images, words, and performances,

had a new puppy born into the family, (video starring Lili, cameo by Suzi, videography and production by Michael) made new friends, tested the limits of old friends, and finished the page proofs on two new books. The third set of page proofs is arriving by mail next week. I argued strenuously but self-consciously about cover art and what would print to fit in the books. The struggle to balance what I feel is right and remain likable thrashes within me like those submerged plumes of oil in the Gulf, immeasurable, deep, and not easily dispersed.

This past week was my Sunday. I rested. I biked a little. Gardened a little. Walked a little. Started a rag rug out of old T shirts and didn't think much at all.

I did not drive a car (grocery, bank, post office all easily accessed by my bike) and spent too much time listening in horror to news about the oil volcano in the Gulf.

I'm so far behind in this blog, I don't even know where to start with catching it up. My lap top was stolen a couple of weeks ago and there went most of my pictures from Korea and Shanghai along with all of my teacher presentations and one picture book in process. Sigh.

I sit here trying to reconnect with my writing, blog, friends and think, I should be walking since I eat too much when I'm stressed. Which means that this past spring cost me four pounds.

The grandkids are screaming next door, birds are grousing about it, and puppy Lili is growling in her sleep under my desk, Michael is in his biking gear. Enough with the resting. Time for that walk.

Heart and Seoul 2 -- Korean Folk Village

2010-03-14T07:31:00.007-05:00

First the hand off. We are passed from one librarian to the next -- from SIS to KIS -- from Chris to Kris Feller -- at Sunday brunch. Right after that we drive to the Korean Folk Village to be entertained by daredevils on horseback, a tightrope walker (no net for this guy) and dancers with zero respect for gravity.

The folk village is made up of relocated cottages and reproductions completed with meticulous attention to detail. The day is cold but clear and as I stand watching the horsemanship, the sun warms my back. We are definitely not in Cleveland, but the weather is not that different than a sunny February day by the lake.

And the look on Elka's face says it all as she and her mother Kris huddle in the sun. The look of sheer delight.

Heart and Seoul -- weekends are for touring

2010-03-14T06:37:00.008-05:00

Gyenongbok Palace: Pictures don't do justice to this massive building. The changing of the guard is a serious procession complete with whipping flag routine, air slicing curved knives on sticks and whopping drums.

As I stand watching this ancient, powerful routine I feel cheated that my education was so Euro-centric. Why weren't these images ever in my social studies text? Why don't I know more about the Korean culture? These are some pretty wicked looking swords on sticks and how about that drum that takes both arms of a very strong man to play?

This place whispers of palace intrigue that surely would have been equal to the knights of the round table. And I know there are plenty of Korean Americans (I don't have numbers, but PLENTY). Why wasn't this in my social studies text? I grab brochures as we walk along and study the guidebook at night feeling like there is so much catching up I need to do. I remember cutting out wooden shoes and making flags of all the countries in Europe, but Korea was just part of a giant pink blob called Asia on my classroom scroll down Denoyer Geppert map. Never we were taught any distinguishing characteristics of the different cultures of Asia.

And how about this guy. He is the stuff of fantastic fantasies -- a made up creature who looks to be part cat and part reptile. He could have been lurking in the dark corners of the room protecting me from the dragons in the closet if I'd only known that he existed (fictionally speaking).

Thanks to Chris for carting us around town, trains and buses and coffee shops. Oh, and one knitting/fabric store. We only had time to visit 2 of the seven stories of this place that make Joanne Fabrics look like the Easy Bake Oven of yarn, fabric and sewing supplies. Thanks to all of the teachers at SIS for making us feel welcome.

Seoul International School

2010-03-13T20:01:00.007-05:00

Banners in the hall, coffee and brownies in the library, and attentive students -- what more could any poet ask? The grounds of the school are dotted with sculptures and the athletic field glows green on the damp, grey day we arrive. It's cold in Korea and workers have fires burning at their building worksites as we walk to school. And every corner has a building site-- Korea is growing up and out and on every corner.

Korean students have a reputation for being very serious about their studies -- and they are. We begin every presentation with an advertisement for the importance of poetry to scientists and engineers -- helping them to develop precise language skills.

This is normal for any HS presentation, but it has to be punched up for Korean kids. It is here that when Michael tells an audience of tenth graders that he has a book in which he took SAT level vocabulary words and wrote poems to define them that he gets exuberant applause. Nowhere else in the world has this EVER happened. We laugh.

But the students get serious again as they begin to write about what is important to them -- words that they want to think about, conflicts and joys. The personal reflections of poetry.

And then the smiles return as the writers see their own thoughts turn into poems. Thank you SIS and Chris Fazenbacher for making this a wonderful visit.

Welcome to Korea

2010-03-13T19:54:00.005-05:00

When burdened with too much baggage, dehydrated for fresh air and fluids, invariably sweating because it seemed easier to wear that coat than pack it, hazy-headed, you push through the milky one way doors out of the uniformed forest of customs officials and get shunted between metal railings for inspection by a waiting crowd of strangers yearning forward to make connections, there is hardly any feeling to match finally seeing those one or two faces of familiar. Kris Feller and Chris Fazenbacher come to greet us in Seoul and we are once again amazed that in this big, confusing world human beings are able to connect in a foreign port.

As welcome as this greeting is, the joy of it is only a miniature of the elation I feel when I receive an email the next morning with the subject line: Your bag has been found. I had fallen asleep on the airport limo bus on the way to the teacher apartments and left my travel bag with passport (visa for China included), camera, blackberry, I Touch, $500, credit cards and even my driver’s license behind. The next morning it was returned. Intact. Right down to the loose change. This is only partly good karma (somewhere I must have done something right) but mostly attributable to the Korean culture. This is how I greet Korea – warm smiles and friendly honesty.

Okay. And a little whiff of garlic, racing traffic, soaring glass monuments to modernity, ancient temples, and millions of Koreans all going somewhere in a hurry. The first day we are there we just go PICK UP THE BAG and then we had lunch at a combination mall, amusement park (Lotto World) and skating rink where the speed and figure skating kids were practicing for Olympic Dreams.

The American Community School, Abu Dhabi

2010-01-31T06:54:00.009-05:00

“She is the light which draws all the butterflies,” says a teenaged boy of his mother in the book Mother without a Mask by Patricia Holton. I read this line in the opening pages of the book and think how the description is also the perfect way to describe a school library – the light of the school, warm and beckoning. It reminds me of an old poem:

THERE was never a Queen like Balkis,
From here to the wide world's end;
But Balkis tailed to a butterfly
As you would talk to a friend.
There was never a King like Solomon,
Not since the world began;
But Solomon talked to a butterfly
As a man would talk to a man.
She was Queen of Sabaea—
And he was Asia's Lord—
But they both of 'em talked to butterflies
When they took their walks abroad!

from The Butterfly that Stamped by
Rudyard Kipling

Michael and I spent the last week walking abroad and talking to butterflies at American Community School, Abu Dhabi, he in the middle school and I at the elementary. We certainly are not kings and queens, but you can bet we enjoyed being treated like royalty, which we were. During the week, we camped out in the hubbub that is the ACS library, the penultimate goal for all literacy lessons as what we want is for students to become life long readers. The ACS library seems to be doing a booming business attracting students.

Years ago, I was gardening one afternoon and Kelly (no more than three) toddled over and exclaimed, pointing, “butterfly.” I told her, “I always talk to butterflies,” and she toddled off, jabbering to the breeze, an early lesson for me as a mother and a teacher in the power of suggestion and modeling.

In the ACS classrooms, the elementary butterflies had writer’s notebooks at all grade levels and were deeply into writing thesis statements. I went to each class and made my case that writing poetry, how learning about its patterns, precise language, descriptive words and images and a poem’s ability to summarize an experience concisely would help them with writing all text types. As usual, the kids were all over the poetry like butterflies to a lavender patch.

Many of the classes sent me thank you notes (just a couple pictured here) and letters. The coolest part is that these were NOT the poems I wrote with the classes, but instead examples of the teachers taking our workshop and adapting it to their own classrooms -- as did fourth grade teacher Mr. Kraus and his class who used our model of making a list and turning it into summary quatrains, cranking it into warp speed and writing about the solar system. This is the best result of a writing residency, when students and teachers continue with the writing we started in class. Many thanks. Also thanks to master teacher Megan Sloan (Seattle) whose lesson I adapted to use with the K-1st graders.

I received kind gifts from a couple of students and library/curriculum aide Young Le who wanted to make sure we were well-prepared for our upcoming trip to Korea and gave us maps and tour guides. Thank you to all the teachers and students who embraced the lessons, infusing them with their thoughtful words and sharing their poetry.

Following our week at school, hosts Dianne and John took us to Dubai (see next blog for touring photos and anecdotes). Dubai rises like an illuminated fountain out of the desert where Abu Dhabi seems to blossom. In Dubai we visited the museum, saw the world’s tallest building, looked down the throats of sharks at the aquarium, took a ride across “the creek,” and strolled through a shopping mall roughly the size of Delaware. Elementary librarian Dianne Ritz Salminen spent a good chunk of time at the bookstore collecting new butterfly food for her garden.

Thanks to Steve and Janet, Mark and Mary, and all the administrative folks who stopped by during the week. Dinner at The Club was elegant and dinner on the floor the first night was excellent. Special thanks to Dianne and John for hosting us and taking great care to teach us about the area and make us feel welcome.

Rabat American School

2010-01-26T03:53:00.007-05:00

ESOL is for amateurs at Rabat American School. Here the norm is ETOL or EFOL -- English as a third or fourth language -- or more, I am reminded as we come together to find our poetic voices how students in the USA (me included) suffer from not having access to more than one language. Here the students and teachers flow easily from Arabic to French (two languages most common in Morocco) and then to English. Many students have even another native tongue -- Russian, Korean, German, whatever from wherever. The music of their speech is magical to me as they confidently confer like well-seasoned chefs with one another in their native tongues and then serve up similes in English. I wait like Oliver, spoon in hand, thinking, "more, please."

Last November at NCTE we heard Dr. Nancy Johnson observe that second language learners naturally speak in poetry -- reaching for images to explain concepts for which they have no words. If I don't know that thing on the door is called a knob, I might describe it as a door hand or a button for turning. Pure poetry. Voila! I think this is what makes primary kids naturals, also. Could it be that sophistication in language, spending all our lives mastering English, is really a handicap to writers? As I write with the students of RAS, I become more convinced that it is. I've decided to adopt a new phrase when I go home to talk to young writers in the States: if you were from another country and you didn't know the word for that skateboard, how would you describe it? What would you call it?

Michael and I had opportunities to write with all the middle school students, many of the high schoolers, coach performance skills, and I even got to have library chats with several of the elementary grade classes. After I went directly from a high school assembly to talk to kindergartners, the principal asked me if that gave me whiplash. We both laughed. But the truth is, all the kids were so steeped in thinking in images at every grade level that the age-diverse audiences had more similarities than differences.

Many many thanks to upper school librarian Lora Wagner and assistant librarian Rhonda for all their work in preparation, toting us around and making our stay in their library a joy. Thanks to ALL of the teachers for their enthusiastic participation. Thanks to Paul and Patty for the lovely dinner and reception at their home. Warm thanks to Janane (sp?) who took us on a small tour of Rabat on Wednesday afternoon while the teachers were in professional development (which didn't seem fair at all, but sure was fun). And special thanks to Cynthia Ruptik and her husband Woody for housing and feeding us, offering candlelit laughter and a nurturing exchange of ideas while hosting us at their cottage by the sea. And thanks to all the kids who wrote and then shared their poetry in class and at our grand finale poetry night. Great respect and admiration to you all.

Along for the ride

2010-01-25T05:59:00.022-05:00

It’s nobody’s job to shut the doors on the train speeding from Marakech to Fez in Morocco.
Cars do-si-do, in a rhythmic two-step, doors wide open to the rush.

It’s someone’s job to punch the tickets, and another’s job sell the snacks, while four people claim jobs teachers, they are really touts, stepping quickly between moving platforms that never quite meet, so casually offering to become illegal guides. Each has a fictional cousin in the States and probably non-fiction realities they are trying to feed.

It’s someone’s job to pick the olives, make the morning crepes, kill the chickens for dinner and another’s to daily roll a cart full of tangerines into the crowded, climbing medieval streets of the medina to be sold one or two at a time.

It’s our real guide’s job to explain the complex designs of the tiles on the wall of the mosque and show us streets “too narrow for a fat American woman.” He carries in him a poet’s heart and he makes it his job to drop lines of poetry into every story. Write this poet’s name down, write this history down. It is his job to pass out wisdom like the butchers throw trimmings to the wild cats, hoping to bring some peace and harmony to the marketplace.

It’s Suad’s job to give the cooking lessons to the tourists, make the harira soup, thick with peeled tomatoes, toss the couscous in olive oil and roast the eggplant right on the burner, to mix the salads and the macaroons with her bare hands all the time expressing distain for machines.

Though not an official part of her job description, she tells stories of her heart seasoned with generous laughter.

Would you believe that it’s someone’s job to collect pigeon poop to cure the goat and cow hides for Moroccan bags, coats and briefcases? Another’s job to jump into the tubs of lye barefoot. Another’s to hang the skins to dry. Someone picks the saffron for the dyes, someone bends over a low table cutting pieces by hand, and another sits on a low stool stitching with black fingers. The man who sells the products does not have dirty hands.

It is someone’s job to guard the villas of the wealthy and someone’s job to put corrugated steel roofs on the slum shacks that flip by the train windows in dizzying succession. No one chases down the black and white dog dragging its broken rope through the brown field beside the tracks.

Cooking the tagines before lunch is someone’s job and collecting the uneaten bread for resale is another’s. For some children it is their job to go to school in white lab coats, for others to try and sell tissue packs for pennies to tourists. Like the blind old man calling as he walks in the medina and the ancient women creased with decades of worry who crouch quietly with their hands out, some people would switch jobs if they had the choice.

It’s someone’s job to sell the spices, to stitch the shoes, and another’s job to make the bread and take it to a community oven where another does the baking, a chainlinked support system old as the seventh century medina walls.

Haunting voices sing the call to prayer at two-hour, predicable intervals. Darting motorcycles call prayers to the lips of the shoppers in the medina without warning. Someone slaughters the animals, shears the wool, sells the hoofs, pickles the meat and tans the hide so that no part goes wasted.

The train makes short stops beside open markets, standing groups of unemployed young men whose job it is to look and shepherds who watch over sheep grazing close enough to the tracks.

It’s one Indian doctor’s job to explain to the Americans that America is not what it once was, no longer a leader in industry and technology, speaking like the past president of the chess club talking about the former star quarterback who has developed bad knees and a pot belly. Morocco is a land where sewing machines hum, baskets get woven, laden donkey carts are lead by men gripping their harnesses, lumbering under local products, weighing out the benefits of change as they used to weigh wives.

Everyone drinks mint tea prepared by someone at cafes beside the shops where men urge passers not to buy, just look. It’s free. The hierarchy of jobs in a carpet shop appears rigid as any bank’s, the shops’ wealth locked up by ancient knowledge, the derivative worth impossible to be valuated by the untrained.

Simultaneously speeding through 2010 and 1431, skating across a land of mountains, deserts and dusty villages, elegant palaces, ragged children, princes, donkey carts and Mercedes, the train gapes, sunshine or rain, and it’s nobody’s job to close the door.

You are Welcome in Marrakech

2010-01-12T13:16:00.006-05:00

This is Morocco -- food and frenzy. Everywhere "we are welcome," which generally means, do you want to buy? We were met at the airport by our hosts in Rabat, and after a relaxing two hour lunch, wandered the medina where Cynthia helped to introduce us to the culture before we took off on our own to Marrakech. The next morning we took a 3 hour train ride to what has to be the shopping mecca of the world. Our rabat (bed and breakfast) met us at the train station. Good thing, because there isn't a chance in the world that we could have found this place on our own. Below are some pictures, but mostly I have just been directing Michael to "take a picture of that!" so more pix on his blog.

This is the breakfast room at our Riad Al Mamoune. Gotta love the internet. Part of what sold us on this Riad were the reports of the good breakfast and the crepes are indeed light and perfection. The staff is extremely helpful. The only drawback is the walk back at night down an unlit tunnel of an alleyway.

Marrakech is not just a place where things are sold (although everything including what is nailed down seems to be for sale) but also where thing are being made. Leather coats being sewn, weaving, metal work, old tires being turned into stools, stitching and beading -- all in process. Here men are making tiles in the morning light.

We spend an afternoon at the Palace Bahia -- home to a long gone king and his four wives and gaggle of concubines. No furniture, apparently they fled with all the goods before the guy turned cold. But they couldn't strip the place of it's intricate tile and wood working, which is beyond impressive. Here is Michael in what he calls his Bollywood movie poster pose.

In the ancient palace there was an exhibit of modern art -- one picture, true sentiment.

More later, time to eat again.

Outside of the box

2010-01-08T14:06:00.004-05:00

All December we were boxed in -- by the weather and by deadlines. Three deadlines for me for books upcoming in 2010:

ZOMBIES! EVACUATE THE SCHOOL!
WEIRD? ME, TOO. CAN WE BE FRIENDS?
HIGH DEFINITION: VIGOROUS VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION

But now we are breaking out of the box! On our way to Morocco and then on to Abu Dhabi. So exciting. Waiting to be cleared at JFK for our flight directly to Casablanca. Exotic just to say. Happy to have passed the weather so far -- and now ready to face the long security lines. On our way.

Whenever we leave to take our walks abroad, anxiety over details and the unfamiliar seesaw with excitement in the anticipation of all the opportunities. Traveling outside of the comfort zone is what keeps us growing. Like Danny in this photo from the Smithsonian, we need to trust.

And then dive in like Sara in the sea of new colors.

It helps to try and see into the future like Thomas, even knowing that is not entirely possible.

We are making calculations about the unknown, reaching out for the fantastical like Scotty.

All of this is a heavy lift, as illustrated by Ben in a recent snowstorm in VA.

Those we love are what tie us to that comfort place called home. We see it in the faces of families at the airport saying goodbye, standing close right up to the metal detectors and conveyor belts.

People invariably ask: Are you scared to go to these places? And the quick answer is, of course not. Driving around deadman’s curve in a snowstorm in Cleveland, falling on icy steps, eating McDonald’s in a pinch: those things are scary. But traveling? No. But giving due respect to total honesty there is always one moment, slight as the gasp between sight and recognition that is shiverous. I’m not even sure that shiverous is a word, making it a perfect choice to describe a fear I’m not sure is even there.

Concerns swirl around being so far from all we love, but the call of adventure, new friends and new experiences is strong. It takes a loving ground crew to enable us to travel, Katie, Kelly, Claudia, George, Becky, Amy – all pitching in. And Max and Frank, of course. Not to mention all of our friends on the other side, who have offered advice, work, don’t forgets, and cautions. So, off we go on Air Morocco with excitement and gratitude. Now if the weather only holds . . .

Not sure.

2009-11-17T22:37:00.005-05:00

I found this embedded on a friend's blog, so I did what all good researchers do, I copped the URL. Yesterday was a good day for a melt down. I wasn't in school and I had the time to fully appreciate the pressure of having three books due by year's end. Today was a great day for a recovery -- a full day at my desk to put ideas in documents and chapters in folders. How long will my productive recovery period last? Not sure.

The book on vocabulary development, High Definition is the closest I ever want to get to a dissertation. Too close, as a matter of fact. Lots of research, lots of URLs, piles of books, three years of classroom student samples, even index cards. Yes, I come from that generation of small white cards sorted by topic. On a good day, I think like stacks of little index cards. On a bad day, the cards are all airborne and refuse to be corralled. This is a real image in my mind. Putting ideas in little stacks. What images come to the minds of kids whose hands guide controllers and keyboards instead of pens? Not sure.

Exchanged email with an old friend (we are of course not old, there have just been a lot of years since we met) who commented that my blog really put my life out there. Another friend once observed that for some people their life is an open book, mine (because of all the books of poetry) is like a billboard. Is that too much or just enough? Not sure.

I exchanged a couple of emails with an artist friend who is illustrating two of the new books and currently working on Zombies! Evacuate the School. I told her that my insecurities were barking yesterday. She told me that sometimes hers "meow and growl and beat on the door with fists." Producing art of the written or drawn kind is a constant struggle with the critical internal voices that push you to do better one minute and trip you up the next. Will I ever be able to quiet them? Seems like I should have mastered that by now, but at this point . . . not sure.

Then, I hit save on the poetry chapter of the vocab book and with a few spare minutes before bed, I found this little video which makes me wonder all over again if any of this has any practical value. Maybe I should be investing more of my time on facebook and less on writing? I'm not sure.

Time for bed.

In search of Peace

2009-11-10T09:07:00.010-05:00

If we're going to the beach, you have to put on shoes.

I don't want to wear shoes.
Here let me help you.
I can't find my shoes.
Here's one.
I don't want to wear those shoes.
These are fine.
I want my other shoes.
Start with putting on socks.
I don't want socks.
You need socks and shoes. It's November.
Where's my purse?
You don't need a purse.
Scotty has a purse.
That's a pouch for collecting things.
I want a pouch.
I gave you a pouch, where is it?
Sara took my pouch!
There. Everyone has shoes, socks and a pouch. Into the car.
Me! Me!
Everybody.
Scotty won't let me shut the door.
Sara is trying to shut my foot in the door.
Everyone in the car and buckle up.
I don't want to buckle up.

A trip to the beach with an almost 3 year old and a six-year-old is not necessarily a trip to the beach in the idiosycrinatic sense of the phrase. The fighting continued for the seven miles to the Mentor Headlands parking lot. As I turned off the engine, a continuation of complaints.
Can I leave my shoes in the car?
Can I leave my fleece in the car?
I'm hungry.
Where's the water?
We never went this way before.
Can we go swimming.
NNNNOOOOO!

As we entered the opening of trees and took the path through the dunes, winding our way another half mile to the shore, gradually we began to hear the calming whispers of waves. Lake Erie was Sunday morning lazy, barely breathing. November 8. The shoes immediately came off, along with the socks and the fleeces. Pouches were filled with special rocks and beach glass. Scotty is an experienced beach comber and selectively collected smoothed glass. Sara took the three-year-old approach, scooped up a handful of rocks, filled the pouch in one scoop, and skipped away to walk logs like tight ropes and make sand angels.

It's been a crazy-busy couple of weeks. Rewarding. Tiring. Two days at Pierce Middle school in Milton, Mass and a warm and walking weekend with Christine and Larry Charbeneau.

We celebrated literacy and rich food, explored Boston's historical highlights. Christine's seventh graders dove into writing definition infomercials with the gusto of seasoned pitch people and the families were so fun to talk to on literacy night. I love a two day visit as there is time to really connect with folks.

Then we flew back to Cleveland, got in the car and immediately drove to a two day visit in Mason, OH. Mason is next to Montgomery, OH where I remember working at a GE plant typing freight tags the summer of 1971. The area was a cornfield back then. No more. The land has sprouted into neighborhoods and the MS/HS campus looks like a community college. Michael and I did three assemblies for the 7-8th graders, 600 kids at each show. They were very well prepped (thank you Jenny May) and enthusiastic about reading and writing poetry.

Saturday was the Buckeye Book Fair, seven full hours of signing and chatting and then I dropped Michael off at the airport for a gig in Chicago and picked up Scotty and Sara for a sleepover, all three of us in one bed.

The sound of waves smooths the spirit just like the lapping lake smooths glass shards. Setting aside the environmental anxiety over sixty-five degrees in Cleveland on the 8th of November, Scott, Sara and I walked, inhaled, and tossed rocks -- filling ourselves with peace. The achievable kind of peace. The peace you can hold in your belly.

Smiles all around.

It's Love/Hate

2009-10-16T07:44:00.007-05:00

Watch CBS News Videos Online

The boy is right -- seems like everyone either loves or hates the president -- no middle ground. But unlike the way people either love or hate coconut, opinions swing wildly. I don't know if that reflects the fact the president is a moving target (unlike the flavor of coconut which remains pretty much the same and as long as you keep it away from my chocolate, I'm not going to pick up a sign and start marching on its hairy head). Or maybe it is more reflective of the fact that not only is the middle class evaporating, so is that wide swath that used to be called the middle ground. And that's not limited to politics.

No one is ever mildly annoyed. They are either jumping for joy or mad enough to rip someone's head off, blustering around like some kind of Tanzanian devil. It's like our whole society has plunged into into a perpetual state of adolescence, wildly mood swinging through events until manic has become the new normal. Too much TV? Too many shoot your way to conflict resolution video games? Have pumped up World Federation of Wrestling Neanderthals winning through prat falls and intimidation become our role models for building community?

Whatever. Drama queens (and kings) are no longer the isolated firecrackers they once were. Attention seeking behavior has become routine and any activity is justified, whether it is eating bugs or scaring the socks off of someone, if it brings you a little fame. Where do you go next when fame and infamous collide?

I would hope people talk about this fourth grader and his question to the president, but they probably won't. He didn't kick him in the shins, throw a tantrum, or threaten Obama in any way. He left that kind of behavior to the grown-ups. He just posed a question, politely asking. He waited for a response. He listened as if he really wanted to know instead of counting the seconds to a zinger comeback.

Good kid. Good question. But not such good T.V.

Austinburg Elementary School

2009-10-12T14:14:00.010-05:00

Austinburg Elementary is old school. Literally. It is a very old school. Tall wooden windows, a gym with a real stage at one end, heavy wooden classroom doors. I couldn't find an age on the building on-line, but I'm guessing the old girl is pulling up hard on a centennial. The steps into the front door are well worn, the secretary's office is the size of my dining room and just about as cozy. I loved walking in there, it reminded me of my good ol' Berkley Elementary where I went to school (now a parking lot, I don't want to talk about it.)

The kids were primed and ready. We had a laughing good time through three assemblies and then I got to meet with the fourth grade for writing. I have a special connection with this school as my nephew Edison goes there. The kids were anxious to write, we included good visual details and talked about how poetry writing doesn't have to be hard because you don't have to get it right the first time (like say, sky diving). If you don't like the way you wrote it the first time, move the lines around like Legos. Which is exactly what Edison elected to do with his draft.

Great job Edison and thanks to all the teachers who worked to make the poetry day a success.

"Poetry makes me less scared"

2009-10-06T21:25:00.006-05:00

Two fantastic schools in two weeks -- Central Elementary in Edgewater, MD and
Garfield Middle School in Lakewood, OH.

Today in Lakewood I met with the seventh graders, first in writing workshops and then for an assembly. In the course of our writing, one student observation stood out, "Poetry makes me less scared." Shyly, she whispered the line. I asked her to read it and read it again. One more time. I love that line.

Teachers Leslie Eiben and Trish Csongei had done a careful and fun job of preparing the kids for a poetry day -- enlarging a few of my poems defining feelings -- annotating them for better understanding, and then using them as mentor text for kids to write their own poems about feelings. Everybody was excited to see their poems posted for others to read. Now, posting poems in a middle school hallway identifying feelings may seem a bit scary in itself -- but instead it had the opposite effect as students were excited to point out their poems to others. Maybe acknowledging feelings in print really does take some of the scared away. How cool is that?

Sometimes kids will ask which age group I like the best and I always tell them that what I like the best is mixing things up. And that's the truth. Last week my first school visit of the fall took me to Edgewater, Maryland where I met with pre-K through grades 5. We played our tummies and played our lips, making the sounds of poetry. We had great discussions and I not only met some very dedicated teachers, this school has a very active parent group. One of the mom's brought in a poetry book written by her cousin, an Iraq war vet. Very powerful writing, the images still haunting me a week later. I regret that I forgot my camera!

I've been closeted with my computer through the month of September working on new books and thinking about school, vocabulary, poetry, and zombies (another story). It felt good to get back to school.

Travelers

2009-09-28T08:44:00.010-05:00

While trying to stay within the lines and not tearing the the pictures of baby Moses in the weeds with my crayon in Sunday school, I remember hearing that if you talk up the fact that you did a good deed, points get deducted from your naughty or nice permanent record. So, I'm going to take a minute to talk up the artwork created by Debbi McCullough,
my artist and activist cousin who (among other good deeds) makes art from trash discarded by immigrants in the desert. The faces mounted in shoes and tuna fish cans which the travelers carry and drop along the way. Behind the faces in the cans are pages from the Spanish Bible. The sculpture on top is mounted on a section of cactus and in memory of the five people last month who received a death sentence for trying for a better life crossing the desert between Tucson and Nogales. Her work is beautiful and puts a human face on the tragedy of desperation.

I come from a family of do-gooders. It's true. That phrase has been tarnished of late by hateful folks who spit do-gooder out with scorn while stockpiling ammunition, but that's what we are. In order to do my small part in the world of inequities, in April 2008, (this is the part that's going to get me the point deduction) I checked a box to make a monthly donation to an organization Women for Women International, a flagrantly do-gooder group that is worth mentioning despite the fact that I'm a small contributor.

This organization provides an allowance for women in desperate situations to help get back on their feet. It connects each do-gooder with one woman, translates letters, and distributes the checks. The first woman I was connected to was and Afghan widow, I wrote to her and sent her a picture of my daughters and me in April 2008, but I never heard back. Monthly when I saw the $27 hit on my credit card, I'd wonder if she and her two children were even alive.

And then out of the blue (or out of the mailbox, as it were), I received a new partner abroad. Her name is Anastasie and she lives in D.R.Congo in a refugee camp where she has been since 1997. She is married and was born in 1969. She and her husband have two children ages 4 and 4 months. Under my cozy desk lamp, in my dry and warm house, compliments of the internet, I was able to search images of Mugunga Camp II. I studied Anastasie's letter and the translation. So, I looked up the phrase "jina lake" in Swahili to find that it means: name is (seems to work for my name is, her name is, his name is).

Somehow these images came together for me this weekend, voices from a wilderness of need and insecurity -- travelers who remind us to be grateful every time we turn on a water faucet or a light switch. Last week I also had to get my auto license tag renewed and had to stand in the inevitable line -- I even took a minute out to be thankful that I had a line to stand in, one that moved and ultimately worked. I didn't have to pay a bribe or a coyote to be legal.

We are all travelers looking for that place called home, that place where Frost reminds us "they have to take you in." But for too many, there is no one to take them in, no one left or never was. And that rather than building walls to keep those travelers out, isn't it safer for everybody if simply, in whatever way we can, we help one another along the way?

First: Kill All the Teachers!

2009-09-08T11:46:00.007-05:00

This past weekend provided a luxury of reading time as we visited with our friends Sarah Willis and Ron Antonucci in the vicinity of Chautauqua, NY. Hiking, naps, reading in the hammock – a restful way to welcome in the fall for three writer/teachers and a head librarian. Suzi even stretched her stick-fetching skills plunging Phelps-like into the pond, getting a paws-on education in how to gauge the shortest route from the edge and how not to leave shore before knowing where the stick has landed in order to avoid swimming endlessly in circles.

So, I had time to read Luong Ung’s book First They Killed my Father, about her childhood in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge’s genocide that resulted in the deaths of 2 million of its citizens. It is a powerful story of survival including the author’s child’s eye view of the absolutes taught by the Khmer Rouge.

Their first dictate was to kill the teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals – basically anyone who was educated was under suspicion. “Children in our society will not attend school just to have their brains cluttered with useless information.” (p.61)

Last week, Michael and I watched The Kite Runner, after both having read it. It was a stark reminder of the restrictive view that the Taliban takes regarding education (particularly of girls). Literature and daily news reports are constant reminders that teachers and students alike put their lives in jeopardy for even learning to read under Taliban rule.

One of the most vivid books I have read about the Cultural Revolution in China under Mao is a YA book, Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji-li Jiang. Guess who the revolutionaries picked first for public humiliation and execution? Teachers. Stalin, Lenin, Hitler -- similar mandates.

It's impossible not to draw parallels. I know the Khmer Rouge and Mao banned religion and the Taliban uses religion as a justification, but the results are the same – dictators using young zealots to help limit access to education as a means of controlling a populace – and the first thing you have to do to limit education is kill the teachers.

Teachers are a hard-headed lot. They taught kids in holding camps on their way to the gas chambers during the Holocaust. They teach in refugee camps. They teach drawing numbers in the dirt in Africa and Afghanistan. They teach in places right here in this country where many people would be afraid to traverse the parking lot.

So, whenever I read something like this account of college conservatives making a hit list of professors they (in their mature wisdom) think are liberal, it scares the la la la out of me. (you know the la la la, that’s what you do when you have your fingers in your ears and don’t want to listen to what’s being said). http://www.thefoxnation.com/college/2009/08/31/college-republicans-compiling-liberal-teaching-list

Or how about those creationist museums that seek to limit any study of what happened in this world if the hieroglyphic or rock is over 6000 years old? Teachers haven’t been killed for teaching evolution in this country – but they can lose their jobs.

Or how about the folks who constantly discredit teachers on the radio and television? The campaign against teachers has been one of the most focused and successful public relations campaigns on record. Ask the average person what the state of education is today and they’ll say it’s awful. Then ask the same person about how her kid’s teacher is and she’ll say, “Great.” It's not as if anyone is calling to kill teachers, but you kill all respect for the profession, if you kill the teachers' self esteem, if you marginalize teachers, shaming them publically and relentlessly, what does that say about our collective position on education?

I don’t know if this organized attack on teachers is designed primarily to break the unions or to privatize schools into profit centers for the crooks on Wall Street, but as in Mao vs. the Taliban, it really doesn’t matter what’s behind it. The net result is to straightjacket those who seek to educate through inquiry and wonder, those whose life’s work it is to help the next generation to not just jump in the pond and swim around in circles until you sink like a pooped out Papillion – but to think.

My wish for this school year is for every citizen. The next time you hear someone spouting off about wanting to limit education in any way, from banning books to underfunding schools to standardized tests designed to clutter up the curriculum with mandates that keep teachers from helping kids to think on their own, ask yourself: What is this person’s agenda and why doesn’t he/she want our kids to grow up to be independent thinkers?

Obama's Speech to Students

2009-09-04T11:49:00.007-05:00

Obama is the leader of this country, homegrown like my vegetables, and elected by a clear majority. He is not a foreign power or running for office. A lot of kids look up to him, as they should. As I did to Eisenhower and Kennedy when I was growing up. I didn't know about the President's politics, I just knew he was an important guy and if he took time out to talk to us, that was special. Heck, when the towers fell on 911 Bush was in a classroom talking to kids. Nobody insisted on reviewing his words in advance.

And to those worried about a socialist agenda, guess what? You already live in a country with socialized fire departments, roadways, police departments, medicare, educational systems and we are protected by a socialized military. Socialized means society chips in to pay for common programs that benefit citizens and that are chosen by our elected representatives. It is the antithesis of being dominated by a culture of personality, which would be a dictatorship.

The only human services function that is NOT socialized in this country is medical care and that is sinking us both as individuals and corporations, which are struggling to compete in a world economy where the USA stands alone insisting that large companies bear the burden of health care expenses.

I can't imagine in my childhood being asked to support Kennedy or Eisenhower and people objecting. Supporting the president means to support the country. People need stop all this hate speak and suspicion before a lot of people get hurt.

You know that poem that begins: First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me." attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)?

I have not spoken up about all the hate email I've been copied on since Obama's inauguration. The whackjobs who call themselves birthers. I've not spoken about health care, as I have been one of those left out in the current system. I didn't say anything about the outrageous lies perpetuated by the media. I've not spoken about the mean-spiritedness and media's over coverage of the violent, ignorant few. And I meant to write about Obama's speech, but it took a conversation with Kelly and reading her blog to realize how upsetting all this hate talk and suspicion is.

So, let's start here. Here is a true health care story, not dramatic except to me. I am self-employed and too young for medicare and old enough that insurers don't want anything to do with me. I currently have a $5000 deductible for which I pay $4000 per annum. I have a pre-existing condition (who doesn't) so most companies legally can turn me down. Kaiser has one month of the year, mandated by the state, (unpublished, unadvertised, you have to know someone inside the company to find out that it is October, and that person will swear you to secrecy because they could lose their job if they tell) during which they would sign me up with the pre-existing condition, for better coverage (not great, but better) -- the price tag on that is $16,000 per year. My current coverage does not pay for mammograms or any other tests and I pay an amount for prescriptions and tests that is four times (4) what insured people pay since I do not qualify for the "insurance negotiated amount" until I satisfy my deductible. If I fall ill, Kaiser can cancel me at any time.

I know from when my mom was deathly ill, under insured, and almost but not quite broke at 61, that in order to qualify for medicaid, you have to have no resources for a period of three months before you can apply. Longer until it kicks in. That means if I ever got seriously ill, after I sold my house and all possessions, there would be a three month period before I would qualify for any assistance. This is the kind of thing that would keep me up every night if I thought about it, so I don't. I pay my premiums, eat healthy, exercise, and hope for the best.

And for me, the best would be a public option. For those who oppose or feel threatened by that, I say, what part of option do you not understand? We already pay for the very poor to get healthcare through taxes, it is just the middle class under-insured and uninsured who are vulnerable. Public option would mean that people like me who are willing and able to pay would be paying into the system.

As far as I'm concerned, Medicare is guilty of age discrimination. Fine for those over 65, but what about those who are 50+. Why can't we buy into medicare? That's what public option means to me, any of us being able to buy into medicare. As an option.

So, maybe the controversy over the Obama speech has a good side. Maybe it will motivate more people like me who have been trundling along, shaking our heads, to say something. So, there. I'm saying something. And the something is, ENOUGH.

Enough with the hate. We are all in this together. And kids, listen to your president. Stay in school. The previous generation is leaving you a big mess to clean up. You need all the skills you can garner.

Forty years ago?

2009-07-21T09:25:00.006-05:00

What'd he say?
What'd he say?

We were in the student center, gathered around a black and white television, a jumble of summer school students. Some jocks there for football camp, the girl who was making up time for playing her french horn to victory as Miss Ohio, people who had transferred and needed extra credit, me who was trying to graduate early and avoiding summers at home. And odd, discordant collection of students and staff brought together because we wanted to watch the original moon walk. The transmission was scratchy, the picture vague, the television bulbous with pre-cable, pre-high def resolution.

No one had a television in their dorm rooms, let alone a microwave, electric toothbrush or electric charger (for anything). Dorm rooms where the only appliances I had was an electric typewriter and one of those heat sticks for making tea. There was one phone in the middle of the hall that we all shared, but it could only receive calls, there was no dialer on it. For that you had to go to the pay phone in the lobby or ask an operator to connect you for a collect call. I did have a hair dryer, one of those inflated bonnet things things that connected you to the fan with a springy life line. The typewriter of my dreams sat on a blond counter top, the Underwood writing machine that was going to last for the rest of my life -- and it wrote in script type. One font and I was so happy.

My grandfather was living in Florida at the time and watched the launch, a man who had traveled by horse and buggy and trains until he signed up for World War I. It was the year after Bobby Kennedy and MLKing were shot. The war in Vietnam, the war I learned later traveling to that country that the Vietnamese call The American War, was raging. We were six months away from the institution of the draft lottery, which I remember listening to on a staticy radio in the office of the student newspaper. The sports editor's birthday was drawn second.

For some reason, a lot of the jocks were for the war and the hippie, student newspaper types were against it. That spring we had listened to a radical priest come and lecture because in those days the Catholic Church was pro-life for the already born. "The pill" had been on the market for a couple of years which changed norms, AIDS was unheard of, hitchhiking was an acceptable form of transportation and people actually played sports in converse high tops. Smoke detectors were invented in 1969, but most of us still cranked our car windows and opened doors with a turn instead of a click.
My dad worked for Chrysler Defense Engineering, working to test flying Jeeps and hover craft for jungle warfare and was driving two lease cars ($35 per month), mod top cars, a yellow Barracuda (with a 383 engine) and yellow flowered top and a Dodge Satellite (same Woodward Ave. dragging worthy engine) with a blue flowered top.
My dad wore a flag pin and had a white belt and white loafers. Campus visits were scary, but family dinners could turn downright hostile. This was the summer of Woodstock, before the Kent State Shootings. Many of us were more innocent than we thought. We were a divided country, but we all came together to watch those first steps.

What have I learned in forty years? Maybe hope is always black and white, far away and somewhat sketchy. Hard to tune in and subject to conspiracy theories. But, when we can embrace it as a community, hope provides common goals, inspiration and occasional smiles among those otherwise on different sides of fences we never stop constructing. Technology progresses in giant leaps while the rest of us move along one small step at a time, and luck is always a lottery draw.

How Does the Garden Grow?

2009-07-13T08:19:00.008-05:00

It stretches, grabbing air, the fence, the stakes set for climbing. Green tomato shoots, a laughter of lettuce, and one exuberant pumpkin vine. The corn points, broccoli flowers, and peppers balloon in unison. A party of blossoms ready to fruit.

And I've been in that place (places?) where words seem to have lost their importance. The just living place, wandering from task to task without taking time to reflect.

I'm amazed in novels that the protagonists are always so thoughtful about the whys of their behavior and conversation and wonder if I am the only one stumbling through life mostly guessing at the how-comes after the fact. A garden commands attention, but lacks the alternative motivations of people.

Michael says, taking close ups of the peppers only makes them feel self conscious.

Last night I realized that I have an extra week in July. A no travel week. Popped up on the calendar like a rogue seed. A week to watch the garden, walk the dogs and (maybe, if I can get my brain creaking) a week to put some words on paper. Turn the sunshine into something to chew on.

A Stitch in Time

2009-05-29T21:30:00.013-05:00

"Will this thread work with this fleece?" I asked the 50 something clerk standing confidently behind the counter at the fabric store. Unlike many retail outlets, fabric departments are not tended by teenagers. 99.999999% of teens can't thread a sewing machine, let alone set a sleeve, bind a button hole, or install a zipper. Girls only, home economics (sewing and cooking) were required subjects when I entered junior high. My first project was exactly the same as every other girl's. An apron. I could choose one yard of any color I liked as long as it was gingham. Woven gingham, not that flimsy printed on stuff. By the end of the semester, every mother of a seventh grade girl at Berkley Junior High was trying to figure out what to do with her customized apron. Since steering a jackhammering needle down a perfectly straight line, one foot on a lurching power pedal, WATCH OUT FOR YOUR FINGERS, is not a skill that comes that naturally to a 12-year-old, our final projects weren't exactly runway perfect. While having those gingham lines to follow was supposed to help, mostly we learned an important life lesson in class: Ripping out and starting over is part of the process. I liked having that one class period a day with just the girls.

Sewing was distinctively a girl thing and I liked it. My granny tutored me in the summers and with a few extra lessons in tailoring from the local Singer center, I actually got pretty good at making facings lie flat and crisp edges. And then in college, about the time Virginia Slims tried to convince women that we'd come a long way baby, long enough that we could die of lung cancer at the same rate as men, I bought my own sewing machine for the equivalent of 100 minimum wage hours (a little less than $135). Blackberries and laptops may have been glimmers in someone's eyes, but in mine, I was set. That zig zag machine and my new electric Underwood were the only two machines I'd ever need.

Like riding a bike, sewing skills stay with you for life. I could recreate that apron tomorrow. Over the years I've made drapes, curtains, pants, suits, kids nighties. Some projects to be worn, and others soon found their way to the back of the closet with that first apron. No matter. I just like doing it. But like finger painting and star gazing, I just don't do it that much anymore. But I love the new fabric smell, putting the pins in, taking them out, even ripping and starting over is okay. Part of the process. Sewing is a novelty now. I've outsourced my own craftsmanship.

Unfortunately somewhere between their T Ball games and pre-calculus, I forgot to pass this knowledge along to my daughters who have never learned to sew. So when Kelly wanted Thomas to have a new blanket with weights in it (new idea for making restless little sleepers less, well, restless) I welcomed the task. No gingham, but being a bit rusty, I did choose a fleece with a block pattern.

Along with the wagon full of mother-regrets I and every other mother drag around, I deeply regret this oversight. And it's not because every time they need a hem tacked up or a split re-seamed they come to me -- I like that part. Because somehow, treading water in the tsunami of self-doubt that was seventh grade, using an overworked checkered apron as a sail, I managed to gain some self confidence. Suddenly I not only knew how dresses and skirts worked from the inside out, I began to understand how tables and cabinets are made. How pieces can be notched and attached. How to make a pattern. To know what it means to have a vision and make it. The ability to sew is part of the fabric of me, being a constructionist is part of who I am and how I view the world -- in little pieces that just might work if put together right.

So, tonight while adding the binding to Thomas' blanket spread out on the dining room table, twirling thread between my fingers to make knots, I was listening to the misogynistic debate over Sotomayer. Does she think she's better than white guys? (doubtful, but has she had to work harder than white guys to get where she is?) Is she smart enough? (ivy league, summa cum laude, pahleeze) Limbaugh compared her to David Duke of the KKK despite her lack of hateful actions or rhetoric and G. Gordon Liddy even went so far as to say he hopes he doesn't have a case come before her while she is menstruating. How stupid can an white male convicted criminal be? She's 54 years old. In lawyer speak, we call that twisted point moot. (Maybe he was the white guy she was talking about having better judgment than. Eh?) Who are these people and why does the news media give them a platform? Honestly, this kind of rhetoric really tests a woman's opposition to gratuitous, blood spattering violence, especially one no longer in possession of a gingham apron.

Which is all to say, us fifty something women still need some girls only time with the young ones. Passing along such important wisdom such as "you can't go wrong with dual duty thread," teaching them how things are made from the inside out. How to be constructionists in their own lives. Clearly, we might have come a long way, but not long enough.

Gather ye goosebumps as ye May

2009-05-17T20:35:00.008-05:00

It is May, isn't it? Isn't it? May is a bit hard to reconcile with forty degree winds off Lake Erie and frozen fingertips. When we went down to pick up our race packets on Saturday, the weather was on every one's mind. Will it still be raining? Will it snow? Did you see the frost advisories? Kelly picked up the packets for herself and 13 of her friends who flew in from all around the east coast to attend the race. And then we all proceeded to Katie's for a pasta dinner prepared by chef Doug.

This morning, the alarm went off at 5AM. By 6:30 we were shivering on the steps of St. John's Cathedral, gathering Team Stephanie, some to run the half marathon, some the 10K, some walkers, some runners, us among thousands thronging the shoot, East Ninth Street.

Did I mention it was cold? If these pictures look blurry (they are) it is because my hands were shaking. First, the marathoners and half marathoners took off. Then the 10K walkers and runners assembled.
I was so proud of Ben (aged 9) who gamely set a swift pace for his Uncle Doug and me for the length of the race. As we strode down ninth toward the lake and made our turn east, I had to put on the sunglasses I had slipped in my pocket in the unlikely event that the sun decided to make an appearance, which it did. Bold and bright. Still cold, mind you. But sunny and clear.

What is it about these events? There are too few opportunities for communities to come together. Times when people actually leave their nests to gather in the streets. Fourth of July and some scattered rib cookoffs in the summer. That's about it. But now for two weekends in a row, last week the Mitrocondrial Run Wild for a Cure race at the zoo and this week's marathon, I have been swept up in happy, moving crowds. As we came past the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame I couldn't help singing along to Cleveland Rocks.

Oh, and our team did have a first place finisher. It wasn't the ringer brought in to run the marathon. I understand he was unfortunately injured (ouch).
It was my neighbor and friend Judy Willour (pictured here with her husband Ron) who came in first in her age division in the 10K walk. We went to college together, which means I was in the same age division. Go Judy.

It was heart warming, if nose numbing and finger freezing, to come together for this race and in memory of our Stephie. Tonight, we put the garden to bed with freshly laundered sheets. Frost advisory. What month is it?

The Cleveland Marathon and Team Stephanie

2009-05-15T08:23:00.004-05:00

Here we go. This is the big weekend. Last count, over 150 people will be participating in the Cleveland Marathon as part of Team Stephanie to raise awareness for ITP. Michael has been training steadily and will attempt his first half marathon with his son Max. His other son Frank will be running with Kelly -- a 10K. I will be walking a 10K with other friends and family. Even last year's winner will be running as part of our team.

In many ways this past year has been reliving the year before -- remember last Christmas when Steph was with us? This race is a turning point in my mind. We are turning toward the future. Bringing her spirit with us as we run toward tomorrow. I suppose I should have been more active trying to find pledges for this event, but have been focused on the small faces looking up at me at poetry assemblies and keeping my balance. Oh, and walking in preparation. Hope I walked enough as to not embarrass myself. Glug.

Many thanks to Kelly Weist for pulling this all together. And to Chris at the ITP Foundation. I tell everyone I meet about ITP and its lethal potential. Every school I visit. But this one event will do more to raise awareness than years of school visits. Wish us luck!

Down the Rabbit Hole

2009-05-01T13:20:00.006-05:00

Long about the time of year that only the most well-seasoned, irrationally hopeful Clevelander could identify as early spring -- when graying snow stashes cling to shady corners, puddles crunch, and the cats and dogs jockey for camp spaces by the register. Sometime after that new pair of Christmas gloves has gone missing and before any Ohioan is bold enough to exercise her right bare arms, I go down the rabbit hole of school visits. NJ, CO, CT, MD, PA, IN, GA, FL, AZ, TX, SC, NY, My family knows the route and that I will come out the other side – sometimes with more confidence than I have myself.

A construction paper bright and wondrous place of poetry talk, new insights, new voices, new friends, ideas and observations weaving into extraordinary tapestries of writing and kids finding their voices in gold fish bowls, bathtubs and thunderstorms, this rabbit hole can be hard on friendships, garden preparations, and any manner of writing or exercise routine. It is populated by criss cross applesauce first graders and just plain cross middle schoolers., teachers looking for a boost to get them through the last few weeks and administrators juggling zero tolerance policies with sky high goals – all counting the days until the great summer laze.

In between the expanse of freshly mopped school auditoriums, spindly-armed hugs, cheerful libraries and miles of blackboards, white boards and smart boards (can anyone legibly write on those things?) is a maze of airports, endless security checks (the chiffon scarf? really?) rental car surprises and hotel clerks who contentiously write the room number on the key card folder as if some other fool might be checking in after midnight and straining to hear the room number of the canvas bag laden poet pulling the suitcase with the mended handle. From plastic wrapped cups to stemmed glassware, school visits are a lesson in contrasts and in the absurd diversity of our schools.

This year, for no premeditated reason, I didn’t document all the visits here. I just lived them, eyes and heart wide open. If I were to guess why I unplugged, it is because I am balancing travel, working on a new book of poems on friendship, an expanded garden, and a new wave of grieving that came with the air-shattering power of a spring thundershower. The grieving has become brighter as the weather has warmed, as we count down the weeks now days until this first week in May. It makes the mental musings of blogging and social networking seem like stray lock of hair, something to mindlessly brush aside. To be honest, I haven’t been that good at returning phone calls and emails to friends either. Staying on course while being tossed around in emotional turbulence requires a self-centered focus. Looking for balance, I just unplugged.

Tomorrow I leave for IRA, which is where I was when I got the calls that Steph was in critical condition but going to be just fine and then the call that nothing would be just fine again. That meeting was in Atlanta and this one is in Minneapolis. Still, I have had had to wrestle with myself to make plane reservations, hotel plans (still no reservation for Sunday night) this year, maybe because I am not at all up to reliving the memory of that week with my heart being miles away from the rest of me. IRA, the meeting I look forward to every year (the real signal that spring has blossomed) to connect with friends and new ideas is now weighted down with a memory so much heavier than that bag of new books I usually bring home. But I will go there supported by all the poetry kids have shared with me this spring.

Focused on keeping me all together, I’ve swaddled myself in the generous love of teachers across the country, the love of my extended family, the persistent proddings of friends, and the poems and smiles of hopping, hopeful and even surly children. It’s been a wonderful spring and I’ve consciously enjoyed every minute, even the tearful ones. I think (hope) once we get through this first anniversary, I will be able to pull the curtain open and re-engage.
Thanks Eva.

More Than Friends

2009-03-03T18:37:00.004-05:00

Okay, this is exciting! More than Friends is featured in Scholastic's Scope Magazine for the month of February. Since I received the magazine as a forwarded forward, I got it a little late in the month -- as in March 1, but still. How cool is it to see our cover next to the heartthrob from Twilight -- and inside a two page spread?

Well, since my cool meter can sometimes go off at the wrong moment (as in I never fail to produce a school-wide assembly groan when asked what kinds of music I like and I am working from a long list, upon which none of the artists passes the cool test) I decided to consult my daughters, who assured me -- this is definitely cool.

The day people stop saying "cool," I am, like so sunk.

The Love Song of Stephanie Lufkin

2009-02-27T18:35:00.005-05:00

Maybe the sun was out that day. Or maybe Dennis Cox looked at me at lunch. Or maybe that was one of the 47 days I was dismissed early to have my braces adjusted. Probably it was a lesson that my teacher presented more than once, but drizzled out my ear after the quiz. Platelets. What are they? What do they do, exactly?

Given the fact that I managed to avoid science classes entirely after ninth grade biology (except for that astronomy class in college, an apocryphal amalgamation of math and science still capable of giving me night terrors), it is not surprising that a year ago if you had asked me what a platelet was I would have responded, "that's something in the blood, right?" I didn't connect platelets with clotting, the lack of platelets with brain bleeding or the true meaning of apocryphal.

Michael and I stayed with Debbie and Guy Cartwright in Phoenix last week while we attended IRA. Old friends of mine, new friends to Michael. Guy's daughter Margaret fought ITP in her childhood and like most kids, eventually outgrew its threat. He told us she got to a point that she could sense when her platelets were getting low, she'd be rushed to the hospital for an infusion. Because of other people's generous donations, platelet transfusions had been available for Margaret to help her out of crisis.

As Stephie faded from our midst last May, the hospital waiting room swelled with grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors -- all of whom would have willingly opened their veins to help her, but by then, after three days in the hospital, it was too late. Today, Stephie's picture is on the front page of the ITP Foundation site and while we are all proud to see her there, we wish she were back here, singing along with Kelly Clarkston and Hanna Montana and cartwheeling across the living room.

I tagged along as my cousin Billie Holbrook donated blood last week and if you know anything about the blood suckers at the Red Cross, you know they didn't let me get away without giving a pint. I hadn't donated in years, I'm embarrassed to admit. And I had never given at a full service facility where they also take donations of platelets, a slightly more complicated procedure that takes 70 - 120 minutes. I had myself tested and it turns out I'm loaded with the things -- 273,000 per microliter. To put that in perspective, Stephie's level was 2,000 when she was admitted.

The Red Cross called me today to give me the good news that I am a viable candidate to donate platelets, which I will do for the first time next week because although it may be too late to help our Steph, it is not too late to help others.

We have all learned so much these past nine months. Learned about heartache, love, family -- and the blood that binds us together as human beings. We are continually and simultaneously propelled and stricken by the love song of Stephie. We want every person who ever zoned out in biology class to know and understand the importance of platelets.

Skano Elementary

2009-02-11T20:56:00.005-05:00

Leave it to the first grade to sum it all up. People write books about the hows, whats, and whys of poetry. I know. I have. But here the first graders at Skano Elementary, Albany, NY summed it up and their teacher recorded the whole business about poetry on one sheet, in nice bold letters.

The fifth graders pulled out dictionaries, vocab sheets and social studies glossaries to draft their definition poems of geography terms. There was that moment when I introduced the concept to the kids, sitting with their writer's notebooks open and pens poised. Here's what, kids, I know you don't know me. I know you don't know these words very well. We're going to take these words you just met and you are going to turn them into poems and then present them to the class. No problem.

And then that moment. When they just looked at me. The "are you sure about this?" cloud briefly shadowed us all. Every teacher knows this moment. The lesson has been introduced, but in order for the lesson to fly, a slight suspension of disbelief is required. But then, poof. The cloud evaporated and the kids started writing, writing about the words and writing about their world. And then they took turns sharing.

Another poet/teacher admonished me a while ago, telling me it is never okay to ask everyone to share. I didn't argue (what's the use when someone is so sure), but I do that all the time. Share with a partner. Share aloud talking over top of one another. Take turns. Speak. Listen. Communicate. I mean, isn't that the entire point of writing? To share our ideas?

I'm not sure what happens to people between elementary school and adulthood, but I'll take the open-minded instincts of youth every time. I had a great time at Skano -- thanks to librarian Susan and all the teachers for prepping the kids so well and making the two days a learning experience for us all.

CCIRA

2009-02-11T20:37:00.004-05:00

Teachers may indeed sometimes sing the blues, but when they are accompanied and led by teacher/musician Ted DeMille, the songs are bound to lift the spirit. Colorado Council of the IRA is one of the most happenin' state conferences of the year and I was lucky enough to be invited to present there last weekend. It was great to see the sun, the mountains, and connect with friends from all over the country. Many many thanks to Ruth Larson for the invite.

We're havin' a heat wave!

2009-02-02T08:56:00.016-05:00

Thirty nine and sunny in Cleveland in January after how many days below freezing (?) is beautifully balmy. We were outside soaking up the vitamin D yesterday and I am still on the uplift from all that sunshine. I had just read a reminder in my cousin Debbie's 25 random facts on facebook and made extra effort to "stay in the moment" and it worked! Sometimes staying inside the boundaries is a very good thing.

Scotty is a real trooper on the sledding hill, up and down 30 times and the closest thing he said to a grumble was "here comes the hard part" as he headed up the hill. No whining. No carry me. Just up and down like it was his business and he was on the job.

Sara K. loved it. At the top of the hill, she'd get herself all situated "on tummy" and then after bouncing to the bottom of the hill she'd proclaim, "AGAIN!"

Lucky we had Frank there to pull the tube, which still had sand in the bottom from the beach two summers ago.

After sledding and while Sara K was sleeping the sunshine off during naptime, Frank, with a little help from Scott and his dad built the most amazing coi in the front yard. Not a simple snow man.

Thinking out of the boundaries, the box, out of the pond, out of the season, a giant pink fish appeared in the front yard. The pink cast was conceived and achieved by Michael spritzing a diluted red jello veneer. Meantime, our jovial right wing neighbor was out scraping every little piece of loosened slush off of his driveway, muttering "Artists!"

Poetry Through the Ages

2009-01-29T10:23:00.008-05:00

Big assembly on Friday: Grades 3-8.

When Principal Milissa Dachisen showed me the schedule week before last (had I agreed to that? Had I (gasp) even suggested it? What was I thinking???), I kind of gulped. I admit it. I was afraid. We were going to write on Monday and Friday and have a show the last hour of the day. In between were three other schools. What if the writers forgot their poems on Friday? What if the eighth graders laughed at the little ones. What if the third graders had no patience for 8th grade angst? What if kids were afraid to read with all the other ages watching? And on top of it, my entire digestive system had exploded with a nasty flu bug. What if I wasn't up to the task?

But, if there is one thing I have learned about school visits, it is that the author can show no fear. Fear makes the audience twitch. Fear constricts the throat and the writing instrument. Worst. Fear is contagious.

But as the week progressed, once again I was reminded that poetry isn't just for one age group or another. Look at these lines borrowed from several third grade New Year's Resolution poems posted in the hallway. I see that the teacher had the students write these based on my poem "Angry," which ends with the lines "Can't you see, there's no one else to blame but me." What the writers and teachers probably didn't realize is that these third grade poems read just like the self-talk I gave myself this morning (substitute a workout for the part about basketball and gymnastics).

Do chores.
Play basketball.
Neat handwriting.
Study hard.
Go green.
Try surfing.
Learn gymnastics.
Sleep better.
Paint more.
Make friends.
Get healthy.
More recess.

Okay, the wish to try surfing is simply metaphorical for a poet living in OH in the winter, but the wish to try new things is spot on. On Tuesday of that week (did I mention the part about being sick?) Principal Audrey Wallock invited her mother to share the poetry day at Kennedy School.
Pearl is 87 years young and still writing. She read me a poem about WWI, about her grand children, about being a mother. She cheerfully acted as a visual aid to explain to the kids that poetry is a hobby that doesn't wear out with age. I sincerely hope I did not make her sick.

Here I am with Matthew Stone (picture taken by his mom, Michele, my savior for the week.) Matthew is a third grader at Jefferson School. Hard to explain how helpful Michele and her family were to me that week. Many many thanks. I've heard rumors that I DID make Matthew's brother Kevin sick. Soooooo sorry.

A poetry day at a school is only supposed to make one thing contagious and that is not fear and NOT the flu. It's words. And despite the subzero weather and other unnatural impediments, by Friday afternoon, it was apparent that words had caught fire. The principals even jumped in with their own poems composed just for the occasion. How's that for positive modeling! We barely had time to squeeze in all the poets at the mike, each performing to thunderous applause. The local newspaper even came to report on the event. Many thanks to Kelly, Michele and Milissa for making this such a successful week.

"Within the next week you will receive an unexpected gift"

2009-01-10T23:27:00.005-05:00

Oh, yeah. The world is exploding, the stock market is sending out depth charges, and I'm going to be HOW old in 2009? Right. THIS is the year I am going to start believing in fortune cookies. I lost my voice on the New Jersey turnpike somewhere between Kean University and Kelly's house, I have about 40 assemblies to perform next week -- why would I think? Who would believe?

And yet.

And still.

The workshop at Kean went great. See the teachers above perform a questioning poem about a hurricane. The vendor sold out of my books and the predicted snow storm did not smother or strand me in Hoboken. And even if I do have a lot of assemblies next week and my voice is on hot tea life support, at least I have work when too many don't. Life isn't exactly on cruise control, but it could be worse.

It has been.

I know how bad it can be.

2008 was it.

And (but?) even if this is a new year. Even if we are getting a leader in the White House to replace a buffoon. Even if I haven't lost my color enhanced hair and I still have most of my teeth or at least replacement parts that I don't have to put in a glass beside the bed -- a fortune cookie?

I have checked my credit card statement 15 times. Heinens, Sunoco, Borders, Target -- all the usual suspects -- and still no $150 change fee from Continental?

Change fees. A predatory practice. Skyway robbery. Outside, $10 in computer time. No paperwork required. Meanspirited mischief created by the airline industry in exchange for the joy of leaving travelers stranded without their toothbrushes.

Airlines, which are allowed to hold passengers hostage on tarmacs and scrambling for seats after flights have been cancelled think it is perfectly fair to charge the very same passengers $150 if they decide to leave on Thursday instead of Wednesday. Airlines do not play fair and paying change fees makes me want to spit poison darts.

So, when I came home from the Chinese restaurant last Thursday with the fortune in my pocket and cashew chicken on my breath, sat down to the computer, and changed a ticket from NJ to GA and it went through WITHOUT A CHANGE FEE, I thought there had been some kind of mistake.
A computer glitch.
Surely . . .

It has been 3 days. No fee has posted.

Could it be?
An unexpected gift foretold by a cookie stuffer?

Maybe not too late to start believing in magic?

2009.
Here's lookin' at you!

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." Mark Twain

2009-01-03T19:00:00.001-05:00

The publishing world is in scale down mode, near to lockdown. Editors and production people are loosing their jobs and major players are not accepting any manuscripts. I suspect this means manuscripts by lesser known authors than say Stephen King, which leaves 99% of authors in a funk.

It's important to remember that before there were big publishing houses with armies of skinny, young editors (all dressed in black mini skirts, black tights and black eyeliner), writers still got their words into the hands of readers. Mark Twain, among many others, sold his books in advance by subscription, eschewing the elite Eastern literati, who after snubbing him still are amazingly enough in control of the market today, almost two hundred years later. These gatekeepers are instructed with formulas for publishing success -- formulas that grant people like Sarah Palin $7Million advances. Any entity that publishes a book ghost written and published inside of six weeks by a guy called Joe the Plumber who is neither named Joe or a plumber doesn't really care about books or even trees for that matter and as far as I'm concerned, deserves to go out of business.

Hugh McQuire in his recent blog: What if the book business collapses points out that maybe the implosion the pubishing industry is experiencing is not all bad. I tend to agree with him. The whole trend toward mega publishers and mega bookstores that allot precious little space for experimental or quirky is scary. Not only does it make my teeth itch, it is bad business since us word consumers have spent the last decade getting all finicky about our entertainment tastes. It's hard to even remember those pre-remote control days when 90% of TV sets were tuned in on Monday nights to the same I Love Lucy episode -- we've diversified as consumers just as the burdens of big publishing sought to support itself on a narrowing field of blockbusters.

Facebook tells me what my relatives are up to and I care a whole lot more about them than celebrity news. Blogs keep me up-to-date on my friends' opinions, which are more important to me than ANYthing Andy Rooney ever focused a biased eye on. I read the news outlets I want to read blissfully ignoring what's on Fox. I download only the songs I want instead of buying an entire album and Amazon tells me what books I'll like based on what I've ordered in the past -- kind of like those old-fashioned, user friendly bookstore owners who found themselves displaced by Clay Akins and expresso machines in the nineties.

If I really like something -- I subscribe to it online, a system that kind of rhymes with Mark Twain.

Happy New You! 2009

2009-01-01T10:01:00.004-05:00

Out of the mouths of babes. Sara Kelly has the typical repertoire of songs for a two year old: Twinkle Twinkle, a dozen Wiggles tunes, the Pick Up song (sort of spooky, sing two notes of it and she starts to pick up toys robotically) and Happy Birthday. Kelly took this video and our best guess is that SK blended the phrase Happy New Year with Happy Birthday to You to come up with Happy New You. The best!

I've been overwhelmed by life and lately the blog has been a casualty -- long blog breaks just mean there is too much to talk about and then I get overwhelmed with trying to prioritize what is the most important to write about, which all goes back to the importance of taking LIFE and journaling one day at a time. For instance, I failed to post how much I loved NCTE because I had failed to post how much I liked the Lesley University Literacy Conference in Providence and because of that I neglected Thanksgiving, the new puppy, and then all the work Allan Wolf and I did staging More than Friends and how much we appreciated Mia's direction and Ginger's hospitality and before I knew it it was Christmas and we were running around delivering presents and then oh yeah, there was the trip to DC and visiting Kelly and Co. and Scott Holbrook's wedding and Aunt Sophie broke her hip but now she is doing great and Debbie gave me a couple of water color classes (see above) and how could I write about one of those things without writing about them all and who had time for that in the month of December?

Luckily, it is finally January. The driveway is frozen, at least for the time being. Frost is languishing in the corners of the windows and with 2009 barely 10 hours old, nothing is overdue. Finally a new year, I mean a New You. My first New You act will be to clean my office. The second will be to not neglect my blog.

Scotty's Egypt

2008-11-15T19:38:00.007-05:00

In Scotty's Egypt, there is a fire station, a hotel, a factory where people work, a garage and a sea food restaurant.

The hotel has a pool and a diving board (with ladder) and the town has a lake with a dock to stand on to fish and seaweed, because that is where the fish hide. It has a soccer field, roads that curve, on bridge and two trees.

Of course it has pyramids made from beach blocks found on the beach of Lake Erie. But the cool part is the mountains you can see in the distance. That's Arizona. Two smoke stacks made from old bottle necks, buildings of odd legos and roades made from construction paper. The factory is a happy dancing place with a parking lot and a sign that says work, work. Somehow, since Ws are Ms in Scotty's Egypt, this doesn't sound as bossy as one might think.

Considering all Scotty got from Egypt is a T shirt, I think his five-year-old vision is pretty comprehensive.

Words on Walls

2008-11-10T08:09:00.001-05:00

In Egypt the hieroglyphics are like, everywhere. I mean the Ancient Egyptians had a lot to say. After someone stumbled on the Rosetta Stone, 20th century scholars could translate these pictures into Greek. Since I can’t read hieroglyphics or Greek, I took to making up my own translations and decided each of these series of pictures could be read like a poem. And everyone knows a poem is open to interpretation, right?

Like, I think this one is advocating fitness. Read from left to right, you want to lay off the punch bowl, walk, read, eat like a bird, play a little golf, climb some mountains, eat like a bird and swim with the ducks. Watch out for yo yo dieting. A precursor to the women’s magazine section in the check out line. In fact, considering all the food stuffs pictured on the walls, this poem fits right in.

Although, doubtful the ancients needed a prescribed workout routine since their favorite pastime in the off season was rolling 1-2 ton blocks of limestone and granite up steep slopes of mud brick to insane heights and righting obelisks the size and weight of four story buildings with ropes, pulleys -- all powered by sweat.

After taking roughly 4000 pictures of these pre-phonemic awareness context clues, I noticed that none appeared to be about hearts or romance. This one seems to document the fact that we need bees to pollunate the grain. Important reminder to a modern age.

Apparently those sentiments didn’t begin to be recorded until the Greeks. Despite what their hearts may have been telling them, the Ancient Egyptian royalty were seriously into marrying their brothers, sisters and first cousins, thereby compounding sibling rivalry with marital discord. Just imagine the slammed 48 foot doors caused by those arrangements.

In fact the only hearts we saw carved in stone (this one an enhanced image of graffiti on the pyramids) were from later visitors. Since there have been thousands of years of visitors, the graffiti is ubiquitous and varied. The first to deface some of the tombs were succeeding monarchs who took exception to their followers worshiping their predecessors, so they chipped away at their faces. After the decline, between 300-600AD the Christians lived in many of these tombs and temples, hiding out from the Romans, leaving their graffiti, smoke damage and hook holes in and on the walls. Apparently some of the faces of the gods freaked them out so they chipped their eyes out so they could rest easier. Imagine kids trying to get to sleep with Horus the Falcon Head hovering.

Sand, as anyone who has ever been to the beach can attest, goes EVERYwhere. In your bed, your shoes, your knickers and your suitcase. Living here could not have been pleasant. Somewhere along the line, folks stopped keeping house and the tombs got so filled up with sand that they disappeared. Then some time in the 18th century, an adventurer tripped over the capital of a forty foot column thinking it was a rock (imagine his surprise) and as soon as he started digging, he started with the graffiti all over again. People do love to leave their marks on walls, an early version of self publishing.

Fact is, today if groundskeepers didn’t sweep these awe inspiring places out on a regular basis, in 50 years they’d be all buried again. Good for the tombs, bad for tourism, which now accounts for 60% of the income of the entire country.

While the Egyptians were inventing calendars, compasses and keystones, the Europeans were still wrapping themselves in animal skins (according to my social studies texts) and living in homes dug in the ground. The advanced achievements of this society are beyond amazing and it is a crime that so many of the images have been defaced. But left behind are stories written in their mysterious language in the forms of little heads, staffs, squiggles, ducks, serpents, bees and you name it.

More than anything else I saw in Egypt, these spoke to me, even if I can't be sure exactly what they are saying.

Cruising the Nile

2008-11-09T10:27:00.001-05:00

In the summers as a kid, I went to Bible school. Weeks at a time. One summer in particular, I went to Bible school five times, once at Granny’s, at my maternal grandmother’s, at Aunt Sophie’s and at home. Twice. It was an amazing race from one Methodist to the next Presbyterian church. An entire summer of cutting out little pictures of baby Moses and pasting him in the green construction paper rushes.

This adventure was offered to me no doubt because school was out, I was bored, and Bible school was cheaper than a baby sitter or anger management classes for mom. In my teen years I sang in three choirs for the express purpose of getting away from the parents who had parked me in Bible school all those summer. There I learned the fourth and fifth verses of countless hymns, how to construct a speech with an intro, three ideas, and a conclusion (Dr, Kirkman was a master at the 5 paragraph theme) and how to squint my eyes while looking at the stained glass until the colors began to kaleidoscope in mad circles that made me dizzy. An early lesson in how and what kids take away from learning opportunities.

Back to Moses. Every year of Sunday or Bible school kicked off with the original water baby, Moses, afloat in rushes. So, today, as we cruise down the Nile with cattle, donkeys, and farmers in fluid blue robes that catch the morning breeze it is as if those cartoonish pictures from our Bible school newsprint books have come to life. Unlike the pictures of the North Pole workshop and Dino, the Flintstones’ pet dinosaur, turns out that this place – a river with rushes and desert on either side – is real.

And let me tell you, in the countryside along side the Nile, some things haven't changed. Donkeys are still used for transportation, rice paddies are being tended by hand, fishermen are slapping the waters with sticks to chase fish into nets and laundry is still being washed by hand. And though the water is more polluted, the floods have been contained and the crocodiles are snatching fewer humans, which is change we can all believe in.

Go here for a video Michael shot as we cruised http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7jyu6O0xFM&eurl=http://michaelsalinger.blogspot.com/

I never received or sought much religious instruction beyond the paste pot and memorized verses and hymns, this ancient, generous river seems sacred to me – a path of life that has enriched the land and people for all time.

Traveling through Egypt with Rambo

2008-11-09T09:19:00.000-05:00

Rambo! The vendors lingering in doorways, trying to get us to stop to look at their products (all free, best price, come see, one minute) call out to Michael as we walk down the street. Rambo! Compared to most of the stick figure Nubians, he is quite bulky in the shoulders. People in the countryside south (Up River) of Cairo are thin – like they have not been sitting around after dinner watching TV, eating potato chips and sucking down sodas.

a. sodas are expensive
b. ditto on the chips
c. few TVs
d. maybe no dinner

It is a dusty struggle for day to day necessities here, the vendors are more urgent, the horses and donkeys skeletal, the clothing less colorful.

One night our cruise docked in a village called Esna, where at 9:30PM we are the only westerners on the dirty, rocky road. We were immediately approached by offers for carriage rides and requests to buy coca cola, scarf please, maybe later, on your way back.

A small, dark girl with large eyes comes up to me to try and sell me a scarf stretched across her arm. “La shakra,” I say, “No, thank you.” She continues to walk with us, barefoot on the rocky, littered road. When she puts the scarf back on her head I realize she has tried to sell us her own headscarf. She is talking a mile a minute. “Where you from? America? Welcome to Alaska!” Her English knows no fear.

“What is your name?” She asks and I tell her and ask hers.
“Hanna,” she says walking fast, tapping her chest. She asks me if I am married and checks out my hand for a ring. “Rambo.” She points to Michael. “He is papa familia?” Yes, I tell her, we are a family.

Earlier in the day a handsome young Egyptian, a waiter from the boat joined our tour of the tomb. He too asked me if I am married and how old I am. When I tell him my age, he switched gears. Do I have daughters? Are they married? Then, smiling he told me, he needed a girlfriend. An American girlfriend. He wants to come to America and he needs a girlfriend in order for him to get a job. I tell him, I can’t help him there. Maybe I have a friend? he smiles. I smile, too. But I don’t laugh at him. I have seen enough of the countryside to have seen the prospects for this tall, well spoken young man and beyond the cruise ship work, they are not good.

I slip Hanna a few Egyptian pounds, about equal to one dollar and ask her to show us to the Souk (marketplace). She leads the way and we turn left down a descending, rocky alley. No cars racing through this marketplace, just an occasional motorbike. Hanna has told me that she is 13 years old and she has no mama. She walks with quick sure strides in her bare feet, one of which has twisted toes. But that’s no impediment to her darting from shop to shop – trading shouts with shop keepers. She runs up to one open window selling cigarettes and small food items and I think she hides her money. Her hands are quick as a squirrel peeling acorns, so it’s hard to tell.

“Buy clothes for mama, here. Pharmacia. Clothes for Bebe. Telephono," she’s back at our elbows pointing out each shop with authority. The shopkeepers here are less outgoing, more suspicious of Rambo and his family, but they do smile back when we smile first. And when they see our guide is Hanna, they laugh and break into grins. Everyone seems to know her. She walks along shouting greetings and what appear to be joking insults at people. At one point an older man chastises her for not wearing shoes.

When a skirt on an outside rack catches my eye, we stop and ask the price. She runs to get a merchant from across the way to translate. Michael bargains and the price drops from 70 to 50 lbs. (from about $12 to $9) and everyone is happy. We walk away and she agrees, 50 lbs. “most. No more.” As we turn down another street we are in a different century. Except for electric lights, this is a crowded, dusty market from another time. The fruits and vegetables are not piled as high as in the city and people are all thin. In the USA, poor people tend to be overweight, here, no.
We see three trucks top heavy with young people – two trucks of boys and one of girls rocking around corners and heading out of town. They are happy and singing. Our guide tells us later this was most probably a wedding party. They wave and shout, “Hello,” in English.

A young man drops into our group to chat up Michael as we walk. He is rather well dressed in a windbreaker and jeans. Hanna whispers to me that he is a pick pocket. To watch Michael’s pocket. She is practically frantic. One time she saw this man take $400lb off of someone. I casually mention this to M and the young man drifts away, but not without giving Hanna the stink eye.

A well-groomed man in a caftan brushes by Hanna and makes a “phish” noise and I see her slip him the money we had given her and he banks into an alley. A little later I say to her, “That man took your money.” “Yes.” She is matter of fact. “I have no mama.” She holds both hands flat against her cheek, the universal sign of sleeping, “I sleep.”

After maybe 30 minutes of exploring this market NOT designed for tourists, it’s time to return to the ship. Most of the shops are closing at 9:30 on a Saturday night, but many people are still working. With raw tobacco piled high and treadle sewing machines in the clothing and shoe shops that smell of raw leather, donkey drawn carts driven by men and boys, we look around. Hanna guesses what we want, “go back to boat, this way.” And she points down a twisting alley. Frankly, it’s a little scary. But then, I’m game. After all, I’m traveling with Rambo, right? I jab Michael and he says, “I’m not so sure about this.” Neither one of us wants to be lead down a blind alley. But Hanna is reassuring, “this way to boat.”

We pass a collection of children on in a whitewashed doorway. Michael takes their picture while I make big smiles with a stern looking woman in an abaya across the path. She finally smiles. Cute kids. Who can resist? We both shrug. I wonder if it is an orphanage. All those toddlers together. Adoption is not considered proper in a Muslim country.

Another turn and we are on the river road, the boat a few football fields away. Time to bid good bye to Hanna and I press a 20lb ($4) note in her hand. To give a child like this too much money would be dangerous for her. 20 lbs may buy her a few nights sleep or meals for her and her friends, more than that and someone could break her like a twig to take it from her.

At first I had assumed the “no mama” line was a ruse, but now I’m thinking maybe it is true. What Muslim mama would let her precious daughter with the bright mind and gorgeous black eyes out in the marketplace to hang out alone with strangers from another country on Saturday night? Girls start to wear headscarves when they begin having their periods. At thirteen Hanna has a scarf, but whether it is her inexperience with the thing or the fact that it is the cheapest of polyester, it won’t stay put. With no mama to make sure her family apartment’s balcony is brightly painted to signify that a marriageable girl is living there, her dark skin and her twisted toes, Hanna’s marriage prospects may not be the best. What she has going for her is spunk and intelligence. I don’t understand the culture well enough to know if those are blessings or curses for a young woman of 13.

This picture of a painted balcony was taken from the boat. It is from a different, more properous village. The properity of the area is directly tied to how many tourist attracting ruins are around.

“This money is for you. You spend it on you. Do not give to that man.” I say as I press the bill into her palm. She nods. “For you.” I say. Our eyes lock. As I walk away, I can only hope that she is able to spend at least some of it before Fagan puts a clamp on her tip. Later our guide tells us that children like this are not allowed to work the streets alone, they all have to give 2/3 of what they collect to their bosses, a kind of local mafia.

But that night the reason I can’t sleep is not because of Hanna. Tonight at least, she has a place to sleep. The reason I can’t sleep is the face of the old man with skin the color and toughness of his dusty, fleshless horse. No teeth, his head in a sweat stained white turban who asked “please, please, one hour only,” for us to ride in his carriage and I said, no thank you. He was gaunt, his horse showing every bone. I can’t sleep wondering if he and the horse went to bed hungry and how much I really did not need that skirt.

Cairo American College

2008-11-08T17:54:00.002-05:00

WHAT an experience. First of all, I can’t say enough nice things about the kids and the learning atmosphere. Everyone was engaged. Many thanks to Seamus and Therasa Marriott for inviting us. We are following him around the world, first Shanghai and now Cairo. The evening on his patio was a perfectly pleasant opportunity to get to know the elementary staff and share poems and stories. We owe him such a debt of gratitude not only for inviting us, but for helping us put together our cruise on the Nile.

Planning our visit with students at the elementary was the kind and cheerful Ann Coster and at the HS, Paul Bartos. I really feel like we made friends. The felluca sail on the Nile was such a relaxing respite. Special thanks to Ann for guiding me around shopping in her off hours, answering my cultural background questions and keeping me supplied with diet coke, a habit I really AM going to break one of these days. From changing our money to managing the parade of children to talking us down from the election, thanks to both of them for perfectly orchestrating the visit.

Thanks to all the moms who ran the book fair. Wow. I loved talking to all of you! Each and every one. Thank you for all your hard work.

And special thanks to Peter Duckett, who gamely escorted us to several dinners and market excursions, explaining the menus, the customs, the history and the bargaining. He walked us to school each morning and led our tired selves back to the apartment at night. He appointed the apartment with an impressive collection of books on Egypt from his private library, which helped fill our off hours (few) with more background on this ancient, dynamic society. AND he had a bottomless coffee pot going in the office at all times, a lifeline for the travel weary. Thanks to Peter and to his assistant, Shaima. She made sure we had some genuine Egyptian food for lunch and took care of all the details. Lots of details. Spreadsheets full of details. Thank you. Shakron. I'll be posting pictures later.

Cairo reflections

2008-11-06T18:11:00.002-05:00

This is Cairo, its minarets, shops, horse drawn carts, bumper car traffic and children. Songs beckoning the faithful to prayer echo one another, each offering a different melodious voice. I never visited Baghdad before it was destroyed and tonight I wonder if it looked anything like this. Too much negative propaganda has been spread about the Muslim people. Here we are treated with routine respect, kindness, and smiles. Yes, the shop keepers want to take our money, some are pretty aggressive about it – just like tourist shops from New York to LA, but no where do people give change by slapping it on the counter or act rudely. People do their best to speak our language and everywhere, smiles.

No place is perfect and certainly Egypt is not. There are no safety nets here for children, people or animals. There is a lot of poverty, too few jobs. But one thing I wish everyone at home could see is that Muslims and Arabs are not at all evil – no way. At no time did I feel unsafe. Sentiments in the USA have become so twisted that even a checkered scarf on the cook-next-door Rachel Ray got the commercial pulled. Prejudice run crazy. That late night philosopher Bill Maher says that they don’t hate our freedom in the Middle East, they hate our cluster bombs. Too true. And who could blame anyone for that?

At 5:30AM on November 5 we heard horns honking and even a few shouts rang out as the election results were announced in the US. All through Cairo, when we were recognized as Americans, people say, “Obama!” with a thumbs up. The shop keepers whisper the name to us and smile. Obama. The name is like a password to instant friendship. Obama. Obama. Big smile.

Everyone is jubilant to see Bush & Co. step down. He does not understand, Shiama, a friend and secretary at the school, explains. Bush doesn’t realize how many innocent children and families he has killed looking for the few bad ones. Homes and lives destroyed. Neighborhoods just like the one I am looking out at from this balcony. People in Egypt are hopeful the new president will better understand.

This is another post 911 moment for us, I believe. Today the world is once again on our side. Waiting to see what the transition in government will bring. For now, the election has brought smiles, which seems like a good place to start.

It's a Magical Day.

2008-11-05T09:05:00.003-05:00

The whole world is watching

2008-11-04T14:35:00.006-05:00

The population of Cairo is 19 million at night and 23 million during the day -- it is a city on the move. We are half a world away from the US, but all anyone is talking about is the election. CNN is a different animal overseas -- truly world news. And tonight it is all the US election all the time. It will be 5AM here when the polls close in the USA -- so we will go to bed and wake up (hopefully) to a clear cut victory.

But today at school it was all about poetry for the students of Cairo American College. I got to talk to the elementary in two assemblies today, watch a first grade class perform a reader's theater rap, wrote with some middle schoolers, and Michael and I put on a model poetry slam outside for the HS.

Only in an international school do I have the privilege to talk to kids in pre-school through HS all in the same day. A student who interviewed me for the yearbook asked me what I like about my job today and I answered THAT is it -- I love the variety.

After school the elementary librarian Anne took me out to do some shopping and then we kicked back for an hour before joining elementary principal Seamus Marriott and his staff for elegant snacks and cold drinks on his spacious balcony overlooking the lights of Cairo. As we have from the first day we arrived, the conductor orchestrating our visit has been Peter Duckett. It was simply a beautiful day.

Monday is Tuesday

2008-11-03T15:06:00.007-05:00

Well, since Sunday is the start of the school week in Cairo, today seemed like Tuesday, except it was Monday. Not another Manic Monday, but a smooth school day, take a cruise on the Nile, have a relaxing dinner Monday. A fifth grader asked me today, "what enthusiated you to write poetry?" What a great word. He is learning English in addition to his native tongue and when his classmates were quick tp point out his mistake, he just shrugged it off with an "oh, you know what I mean." And of course we all did. Everyone here is learning another language of some kind. We are learning please and thank you in Arabic and trying to get everyone thinking in the language of poetry.

The days are twirling, honking, smiling as we get to know people. I'm so tired I can't even think straight. I suggest you check out Michael's site for pictures of our sail and Frank's blog for pictures of his day at the school for Sudanese refugees. http://michaelsalinger.blogspot.com/

As soon as we learn something new, another question pops up. Like did you ever wonder where those rag rugs in the store come from" These folks were working away at 9PM on a Sat. night on rag rugs. No 9-5 here.

In the same market, we saw long black abayas displayed right across the narrow market road from bare midriff belly dancing outfits. Kind on makes you wonder what's under those things, doesn't it? And some of the Egyptian teen-aged girls on the street who were dressed in long black robes (few are) have very tight T shirts in bright colors pulled on over the abaya. You just KNOW they didn't leave the house that way. Kind of the equivalent of rolling your skirt up after you left home and turned the corner when I was in HS. But overall, the teen dressing is MUCH more modest here, on the street, with girls dressing in long skirts or dresses over pants -- lots of creativity in the way they pull it all together as opposed to the classic uniform of jeans and sweatshirts. Whew -- time for bed!

Sphinx and surrounds

2008-11-02T14:43:00.009-05:00

Here she is. Cairo cat, tail curling under her lion's body. She's not flawless. And she has not, as they say, had work done. Not on her face anyway. They have rebuilt her paws, only practical. But in fact, no make up artist in the world could fix the damage to her noble face -- and yet people come from all over the world to look at her in awe. Stately. Knowing. She has seen it all. And looking at her, I want to ask thousands of questions, one for each year she has had her eyes trained on the desert. If history is prologue, do we dig into it simply for understanding? As in, whose shoulders are under us on which we are standing? Or there a hint of the future in studying the past?

The pyramids -- there are over 100. Big. Huge. School kids around the globe make models of these four sided wonders. But how were the originals made without forklifts? Without tractors? Some say they built the sand up around them and rolled the 2-7 ton stones in place. Some say it was aliens. How many died in their construction we can only guess.

The picture of the man whose task it is to guard the entry of the empty tomb puts the size of the stones in perspective. These were mined from a quarry across the Nile, brought by barge and rolled on logs into positions over decades to erect the pyramid. Beside the great pyramid are smaller ones for several of the Pharaoh's wives. Below are Michael, Frank and me posing in the mummification temple located at beside the pyramid.

Outside the entry (I did not go in, asthma and a twinge of claustrophopia) instead opting to take pictures of Frank and Michael as they join a school group on their steep descent into the empty tomb. Beside the pyramids were the usual collection of vendors hawking small models and stuffed camels. One man gently caught my elbow as I walked past. I am used to shaking off vendors, so I kept walking until he said, "Obama." I looked down. I was wearing a campaign button. He put a thumbs up. "Obama." I replied. "Barook Obama." He said smiling. "Barrack." I said. "No Jack," he said. "Obama." We were in agreement. Egypt is the strongest democracy in the Middle East, a long standing ally of the US. Here, as all over the world, people are watching our election process carefully. The peaceful transition of power. The history of yesterday and the history that is being made on Tuesday all coming together as two strangers touch hands and exchange smiles.

The final photo is of Michael sitting outside the Museum of Antiquities in front of another Sphinx. Turns out there are lots of them. This is not a model, though smaller than her sister in the desert, this ol' girl is also thousands of years old.

Cairo!

2008-11-01T15:50:00.005-05:00

The trip was seamless -- Cleveland to Newark to Rome to Cairo. Just like we knew the way by heart. We were greeted at the airport by smiles and a welcome sign and then wisked off to (can you believe it?) to a Halloween festival at the school. Today we toured the great pyramids and Sphinx and Cairo museum followed by a winding, wild ride through Cairo marketplace. Frank almost became a hood ornament, but other than that, it was all fascinating.

I have so much to write about, but it is later than I want to think about and we get to meet the students first thing in the morning, which is the most exciting of all. So, a couple more pictures and off to wash the dust off and to bed.

Virginia Association of Teachers of English VATE

2008-10-28T01:21:00.000-05:00

The drive from Purcellville to Roanoke is peaceful with crooked fingers of The Blue Ridge Parkway tempting drivers to turn off the main drag and swirl through the rolling mountains ablaze in fall color. The VATE conference was well orchestrated highlighted by a wonderful presentation by a student performance group doing Suesical (spelling?).

On Sunday morning it was my turn to speak at the breakfast and Sandra Whitaker gave me the most beautiful introduction, part of which I am sharing below. I'm not sure if this is a copyright violation, but she was kind enough to give me a copy so here goes. Since I also knew that the next day she would be defending her dissertation, it was even double, triple touching that she took time to write this beautiful prose.

"Performance poetry has its own special kind of magic. As words hand in the air, begging to touch the soul, the poet and the audience linger in a space between being and becoming. when words break past our defenses, tingle our senses and move our spirits, we change, seeing reality through a different lens or in a new way." She oh so kindly credited me with lending a hand in helping students and teachers "unleash the poet within, and to use performance poetry as a powerful way to understand academic concepts and the richness of life. When children as her why she is teaching poetry , she says (and I do), "Because someday you will need it. I can't tell you when, but you will."

Sandra writes that "poetry is truth" affirming with her hard earned PhD and wise words what I have always felt, that the overwhelming majority of poetry is non-fiction. "The funny encounters, the heartbreaks, the tragic losses, and the blessings . . . poems (and blogs) are a testament to how much the soul needs poetry." That it "isn't the state standards, or lack thereof, that make us need poetry. It isn't that old dusty books of poetry reside in many of our personal libraries. We need poetry because it is through poetry that we express what we can't say, that we shed the tears our eyes won't cry, and that we dance life's rhythms without tripping over our own feet . . . [Poetry] reveals our darkest secrets veiled in universal truth. It is the common thread weaving together all of time and place, uttering what we dared not say, giving voice to the human experience." Where upon she quoted from my poem "If I were a Poem" and handed me the mike.

Follow that! It was such a beautiful piece of writing, I wanted to just sit down and digest rather than talk. Thank you so much for filling my heart with words of poetry put into paragraphs Sandy. And thanks to Brent for lending his voice to a performance of a poem for two voices and to all the teachers who warm smiles and hugs welcomed me back to VA. And I came home with a rock from Tinker's Creek in hand and poetic words in my heart.

Tight End Poet Number 37

2008-10-26T21:17:00.005-05:00

Here's what I know about football: Someone shouts out a number, another guy hikes the ball, and then everyone either makes a break for it or they fall in a pile. They get four chances to score and then they have to turn over the ball and let the other team have a chance to break for the goal. That's the sum total of what I know. Mostly I have always felt that football was invented to keep the men folk occupied on Sundays so that I had that time to myself, which is the sole source of any warm feelings that may have visited my heart over the oh so many football seasons of my life.

That was up until Ben put on pads, and there I was last week, under the lights at Fireman's Field in Purcellville, VA (and a quilt) trying to learn what exactly a tight end does. Exactly. Which definitely puts me in the category of being not smarter than a third grader, because all those guys seemed to know exactly what they were doing and who they were supposed to hit when. Impressive. Ben's team didn't chalk up a win because of the (are you kidding me?) passing game of the other team, but they fought right up to the horn blasting in the fall air.

So, what do you think?

Can a tight end make a pencil point conversion and write poetry? Can a clear eye and determination on the field translate into words on a page at school the next day? Yeppers. Look at ol' 37 as he bends into his writing, creating a Swirl of a poem.

This was the first time I ever tried writing definition poems with a third grade class -- and they were so great. I learned that a swirl is not cardboard or a straight line and that teeth can't grow hair. Working from their vocabulary words for the week, conferring with partners, co-composing, and writing on their own, the whole class teamed up to make some pretty cool poetry.