Rain hits the awning like slot machine nickels and the air is tawny ash. People under umbrellas surrender and break into runs. The sidewalk empties fast, even as all other vehicles slow down, slicing the sluiced streets, leaving slow boat wakes heavy enough for brave urban jetskis. Eventually the plate glass window is empty of people, and now there is only setting, only scene, and it’s a deluge. It would be impossible to cross the street now. To step off the curb would be to soak to the shins. It’s an inside hour, with the sky lifting towards green, with the wind beginning to fugue, with the funnel forming somewhere overhead. It’s an inside evening, with the restaurant lights dimming, and the baguette on the table stale and pried to crumble. It’s an inside night, now that the coffee has soaked in all the milk and has returned to black, while the puddles outside are textured with wind whip. There is absolutely nothing to do in weather like this than to sit and wait for the rain to come and submerge us all or for the tornado to touch down on my shoulders and spiral away with the only thing here that needs to be undone.
Doodle.
It’s a bar named after a seedy city, and it’s at basement level, with Halloween lighting and one dartboard where meaty dudes curse majestically and pretend to know the rules. The one waitress is in slow circulation and she attends only vaguely to the patrons she doesn’t know, while for the Pall Mall smoking regulars, she’s sitting in laps and throwing arms lavishly around fleshy necks. And hee haw, if it isn’t open mic night, and an older dude wears his guitar strapped tight and high and thumbs through some jazz Hendrix. There’s a full list of contenders on the torn lined paper sign-up sheet blue-taped to the tower amp, and a row of
guitar cases along the entry wall. Somewhere in the crowd is my former student, now 23, whose boyfriend works the bar, and I’m trying to stay ducked down because she’s a full-press hugger and I’m a bit weirded out taking free drinks from people I will forever remember as children. Out and out this is a strange place for two teachers to meet to plan out a professional development workshop on media literacy, but bizarrely we’re done in under an hour, and I have a course agenda striped with brilliant ideas and sketches of square tulips, all rendered fierce under the dimming orange bar light.
Shortcut.
The alley in sunlight is all concrete glare. There are cracks along the slab roadbed, and places where entire armadillo-sized chunks have been pulled up. The chunks are gone now, long since pulverized by the sanitation trucks that bobble along the alley on Wednesday mornings. In the late hot spring, weeds have shot out of every crevice, rocking their way through mortar and stairsteps and rail fences. Paper bags and fry sleeves litter the ground; green and brown bottle glass grind under running, spinning feet. There is the persistent stench of old dairy. In the day time the light is too bright, as if the alley were a hapless apprehended perp, pinned sprawling under the helicopter spots. It is altogether desolate–to some. To others, the arroyo here is not so dry. To the gifted few, it is a rushing river of memory, of ice-snapped noses, of gravel-pocked palms, of air-tearing lightning strikes, of whispered cackles and shouted renegade dreams that not even the sun of late afternoon can burn away.
Thread.
Someone died. I didn’t know about it until after, until a long time had passed, but all the same, it happened. From over here, from the relative safety of the keyboard, I can be cool and analytical and wonder at the fact of it, but I am aghast. Somewhere, hours away from here, someone died, underwater, in the middle of the day, in a crowd of people, all of whom were engaged and vividly embracing of the tasks and goals they had set for themselves, all fins and tanks and regulators and diving masks. I was nowhere near. Almost no one I know was, except for one person, a particularly and acutely sensitive one, a dear friend, a normally reliable colleague. She was there. She saw. She witnessed and drew close and felt, and now she’s close to shatter, close to up-ending. All of us around her rally. We are lost for good answers, but we arrive. Not many of us has been near at the moment of a death–not many of us are medical or military or adventurous. We live lives of quiet safety, of water slides and trimmed lawns, air bags and organic milk. Only we are not so safe, and the effortless way the universe removes us from its tapestry, only when the threads pull out and ravel all connecting fabrics, even those as far away as possible, on dry land, in full sun, in the company of soft pillows and smiling friends, do we really remember how tightly we should be buckling in, how firmly we should apply the brakes, how much there is to lose.
Goggles.
The pool is closed. According to the sandwich board splayed open on the curb, they’ve reached capacity, 400 swimmers, and you can hear them, shrieking in the splash and spray, just over the roof of the changing stations. They’re in; they’re ecstatic. Another fifty wait in line outside, with eight dollars in cash, beach towels, wrap around shades. Most of them have already shed clothing, giving the sun maximum access to the skin exposed by bikinis an drop-front trunks. It’s hot and the pool staff are walking the queue, handing out ice and suggesting gently that people give up, go home, get out of the heat. They say that opening day is always crowded and patrons can expect lines more superable next week. All of us can hear the rush of water down the spiral slides and, in the line, the children scowl and gnash. One of them weeps silently in the shade of a magnolia. She’s seven or so, and it’s clear that she believes that she’s missing out, that all of her friends are inside and oblivious to her absence, that all of the best moments of the pool season have already passed. Some version of those dire daydreams pass through us all, keep us in line, here, at the area’s only public pool. Neighbors and classmates in upper income brackets have bought themselves memberships to the private ones–$950 a summer, two member recommendations required, 100 family waiting lists. What most of us wouldn’t give right now to go yellow one of those fine fancy places right now, as the line clicks forward by fours and fives on the the Monday of Memorial Day Weekend.
Throttle.
The broken arm boy can play badminton, cast dangling, a counterbalance to his lavish overhand swings. We’re both sweating in the shade, and he’s got one sock on and a tubby belly, and we’re trying to wave away the pollens that lurk like ghosts in the backyard shrubbery. This is morning: coffee spilled in the grass, waffles plated onto bare hands, a beagle passed out on the sidewalk. With a few volleys behind us, we grab a backpack full of water bottles and binoculars and pull the bikes off the porch. The kid can’t reach the left handbrake with the cast on, and I’m momentarily apprehensive about the downhills along the route, but he’s already off and away, alarming a few pedestrians, but effusively courteous as he slices past them. Halfway there I realize we forgot bike helmets, but I figure we’re fine, and as long as we see no one we know, we’ll escape castigation. Anyway, we’ve got the flags. After a straight line mile on the hilly street, we reach the high-fenced overpass and kickstand the bikes. The boy is already standing on the cement barrier, fingers laced through the chain links, calling for me to hand him a flag. As I do, I remember him at three, on the same wall, with probably the same flag, puzzled expression, covering his ears against the roar below. We’ve cobbled together a tradition here, a gentle one, 30 minutes a year, small effort, big return. The weird half-grin emerges instantly beneath the wet mop of curls, and he’s swinging his little American flag and counting how many horn honks blare beneath him, as 1,000s of Harley Davidsons roll like thunder under our bridge.
Insect.
The dirt is already deep under the nails before I remember the gloves. The sun, high here even at 10, is melting my back, dripping me into the garden. I am gathering weeds by the handful. The dog is following tightly, nose to the rummaged ground where the fresh smells are most compelling. I’m pulling and raking for a half-hour now, without any sense really, just making things tidy. The problem is I’m not sure what qualifies as weed or as latent vegetable. The spinach is easy–the leaves are the product, and they’re emerald green, with a blue sheen in morning light–but everything else popping from the ground is also just leaf at this point. There are no flowers or seeds or nubby fruit. With nothing to go on, I’ve just zeroed in on the healthiest looking shoots, the ones popping up in multiples, set out in some vaguely gridded pattern from early April, and clearing the ground all around them. When I’m done, I’ll have a series of green tufts surrounded by moats of bare, dry dirt, and I’ll hope that I haven’t destroyed something innocent and tasty or preserved a pernicious root-sucking fiend. But there’s not much anguish, really. I’m just crawling about in the dirt on a gorgeous day, head full of daydreams and delicious, bad ideas, and I have completely forgotten what I planted in this half-assed garden.
Bop.
It’s a hot classroom, last week in May, with the facilities staff refusing to put the air on before Memorial Day, and I’ve got sweat spots creeping out from under my sleeves and all my students are limp. I have them testing out their new writing skills with AP-style paragraphs (“these are sexy,” one buffoon announces), but I’ve flicked both switches down so they must pencil in the dark, where they might trick themselves cool. The prompt asks them to consider the purpose of a particularly devastating piece of literature, to find the agenda within the storytelling, to locate the message intended just for them inside the words. They are sagging. Some have genuinely expired, lying on the floor, face mashing paper into carpet. (“There’s ants!” they notice.) One of the steadier students slowly stands up on a chair and stares across the bodies of the fallen to where I am posing on one leg under the dollar store flag. Her eyes have gone liddy, and she seems about to swoon. Instead, she begins to sing. It’s a dumb song, heavy on the radio, some boy band charm assault, and everyone knows it. Everyone knows it, but the part of the everyone that are girls start singing along, while the boys continue to write or faint. I realize as more and more of them take to their feet to croon that it’s over, at least for the next three-to-five minutes, and I surrender. The song is easy enough to find on the Internet, and we project the video and let the class dance and dance until their faces are wet with abandon.
Choice.
Sixty-four water bottles, a solid block in shrink-wrap plastic, weigh down the projector cart. Its bottom shelf holds the four boxes of 16 granola bars, the three 24-packs of number two pencils, the handful of printer paper, and the scientific calculators. I could fit my coffee mug up above, but last week, it dumped in transit and I had to jog back for paper towels to mop up the potential sneaker skid pile up. The cart wheels squeak along the lino tile on the way to the library, where our tech guy has set up 70 laptops, hard-lined them to the old T1 network, AC corded them, moused them all externally. It was labor, if not of love then at least of exactitude, a precision, a diagramming, a snap-tite implementation. Each screen already displays the four rectangles of grayscale, the visual verification that the test session is correctly-loaded and ready for live internet connection. I have already place the goldenrod test tickets at the computer stations and the students should be arriving soon. For now the room is humming dully, powerstrips warming the thick atmosphere of mandate and accountability, the clocks working now in reverse for the kids, who will come tromping in with their test anxieties exponenting up with each step. I unload the cart–paper, pencils, calculator–and only the water bottles, I remember, have any life in them. The entire staff knows to confiscate them on sight, once the test session is concluded, due to the fact that some of the more ingenious and bored and devious students have discovered that, with a push pin hole poked in the cap, these bottles become squeezy water guns. It’s amazing what these kids will do to be free within this system of standardized assessment and debasing numerization. They will find again and again the swiftest path to immaturity, to rebellion, to joy. I love them for it, and today, I will confiscate no bottles.
Soak.
Shirts and dresses stick to skin in the parking lot downpour. Late afternoon, the sun’s still powerful, brightening us even through the storm clouds sending down stacks of rain. The umbrella is useless and becomes a prop in a drunken twirl. Kids and parents alike spin in reckless reeling circles in the center of the deserted blacktop. Curls droops. Tresses cling to necks and cheeks and half-hide the giddy grins. The little girl chuckles shyly but with a searchlight smile, while her mother giggles and elates, chasing the raindrops through the blurry air. The boy and his dad race in zigzags, dodging, finding speed and sun in the spaces between the gray. Both kids seem slightly embarrassed by their adults, a bit worried, growing everyday more aware of how mortifying their parents can be. Shoes have gone to sponge as the children kick at the puddles, painting the world with a wet glaze, polishing us all with a shine of delight. And we do delight, and as the lightning unzips the air all around us, we frolic and beam and stick out our tongues, and the rivers that leak from our eyes run off to pools of happiness, reservoirs we’ll hoard and guard against days when no rain falls.
