Unbelievable.

The vastness of the devestation of New Orleans is just beginning to resonate in me. One minute I think, "It can't be as bad as the news makes it out to be. Those photos can't be real. It must be a hoax. Everything is fine." And then I think, "Where are my friends?" I don't want to even write the line of thought that follows. It's too terrifying. It's too horrible to comprehend. Try as I may, I can't make it real. I keep waiting to see a post on Jack's website. Or I call incessantly to hear incessant, deadened beeping of disconnected lines.

I wonder.

Every day I wonder about someone different. I wonder about my friends. I wonder about my ex-husband. I wonder about my former boss, my former office mate, my former customers. I wonder about people whose names I never knew. I wonder about the nice, young girls who worked at the credit union. I wonder about the hispanic lady who owned the coffee booth at the mall. I wonder about the old preacher on Canal Street and about the groundskeeper of the statue garden in City Park. I wonder about the statues and about the beads in the trees. I wonder about the bronze pigeons on the fountain in the French Quarter and about the giant face on Basin Street.

I just don't know what to believe or what to think. My head feels swollen with unnamed fears and a dreadful sort of anticipation. I wish I could know something.

Oh, New Orleans.

I just don't know what to say. I felt my stomach sink today as I watched the news and saw the city awash in fetid water. It broke my heart.

What beautiful memories have now been completely carried away and erased by a storm?

I can't help but think again of the Pacheco poem for which this blog is named.

"only the wind is your shelter.
And the wind, as you well know,
is a boundless vacancy,
the sound the world makes
when a moment dies."

I obsess so often on time's erosion of time. It eats away at itself, erasing itself from space and from memory. There are no walls to contain it. No spaces to hold it.

And I continue to imagine moments when I will pass memories on the street - pass the fat old woman in feathers and velvet crooning and banging on a beat-up keyboard - pass that wizened bearded man with the umbrella hat preaching the end of the world - pass that old clapboard house with "Let Love Rule" blocked along the side - pass so many backgrounds that were backgrounds of other times. At those moments, I stand and see myself with longer hair, wider eyes, smoother brow, brighter duds, laughing or frowning, falling in love or thinking of excuses to skip work. And now, through the passage of one storm, I may have lost the streets where memories would have met me, and I wonder if they'll be able to find me without the signposts.

Andy Griffith - a cure for anxiety?

I find myself drawn to Andy Griffith lately. I skim through the dozens of channels, but again and again I'm pulled to Mayberry. I've never been a big fan of the show. Lately, though, spending day after day in the benumbed, cruel, dark world of modern teenagers, I feel overwhelmed with anxiety and depression, and I seek the refuge of false simplicity. In many ways, I suppose I'm rehashing the cold comfort of the Cold War t.v.-watchers. Every other channel over-stimulates my countless neuroses, adding to the gnawing in my stomach as I lie in bed at night, dreading. Everything seems too much, too fast, too harsh, too ugly, too mean, too far gone. I remember a line from a Edna St. Vincent Millay poem - "we've gone too far." We've gone too far. We become, it seems to me, each day, a more disturbing nation, a more disturbing world. It makes me sad, and I wonder where there is to go. I'd bet money that even Mayberry has had a Wal-mart shoot-out.

Word verification.

I just added word verification to the comments, and I'm sorry to the real people who read this for any minor inconvenience. I still love to read what you write to me. I just noticed today, however, that the site is suddenly awash in spam comments. I find that intolerable. Sorry again.

Tai chi in the park and other paths.

I had a dream Friday night that I walked into a field where dozens of silent people were moving from one tai chi pose to another. The transitions were seamless non-actions. I don't remember much about the dream aside from the tai chi.

Saturday morning, I took Fain to City Park in the center of Rocky Mount to feed the ducks. We hadn't been together in a month or more, and I wanted to spend some time with him outdoors since the weather is growing milder. I nearly changed my mind because I had other things to do, but I decided to put other things on the back burner.

On the way to the park, we passed a field where peanut plants clung to the soil and radiated green. In the middle of the field, Canadian geese were scattered in various poses, quiet and still. They seemed mysterious and important to me. I've never seen so many geese gathered anywhere other than a lake. I've never seen them so motionless.

As I drove past the lake at City Park, I saw a flock of geese dive, flippers first, into the water, wings spread, brown ankles jutting outward. I wondered if these were the same geese that I'd passed in the field. Why shouldn't they come here, too?

In the park, a small group of men and women wearing black and white tai chi suits were passing from one pose to another. Palm up and out, leg bent forward, chin up then right, and so on. I stopped and stared and held Fain's hand.

I thought several things. I thought of old fairy tales about human-bird hybrids that change forms at will or at random. I thought of coincidences and the curiosity of dreams - mental debris or occasional harbinger. I thought that I was on the trail of something meaningful that I didn't understand yet.

Of course, it meant nothing at all, but it seemed strange at the time.

I'm thinking of you.

Jack, Maltese Pirate, the lot of you who may or may not still be sitting and waiting in New Orleans for the approach of this hurricane, I have been thinking of you all morning. Please write to me when the storm passes to let me know that you're unharmed. I'll be sick with worry until I hear from you. Autumn

Nostalgia.

My mom and I went to Via Cappucino, the local coffee shop, to hear a couple of musicians tonight. They played in New Orleans not too long ago. I saw this on their little flier. They played at the Neutral Ground. I don't remember where that is.

The guy, Ron Morris, had a nice voice and sang some nice songs about love and hope. He played guitar and smiled and closed his eyes to the three or four of us sitting there. The girl, Jess Pillmore, accompanied him, and she had a robust, mournful voice. Then, she'd take her turn and sing with this strange depth about dive bars and awkwardness.

When he played, I felt transported back to the mountains, and I could see a gravel road stretched out in front of me, a creek next to it on one side, a steep slope upwards on the other. Thick trees canopied and stretched and puffed up overhead. Blue skies. Solitude. This painless sense of being in a world alone, bumping and skidding and righting myself.

When she sang, I was back in New Orleans, sitting in a red darkness, ears assaulted by pool balls and juke box music and forgotten sitcoms hanging over the bar. Outside, somewhere, the smell would be similar to that in the mountains, somewhere, but the smells I remember are the close ones, the stale ones. And it may sound as if this isn't a good memory, but it is. No skies. Solitude. But it wasn't painless. There were people, and I was still alone. And it may sound as if this isn't a good memory, but it is. Nostalgia can be that way. Melancholy takes on the somber profundity of a Dutch master. Water stains on wood panelling begin to take on the luster of a carefully-painted pearl earring.

And, listening to them go back and forth, feeling myself, like that poor sap in in Slaughterhouse Five, being shuttled between two separate yet equal states of sentimentality, I realized that I don't even know what I miss anymore because I've left so much behind me. I miss so many things that the absence of them becomes a presence.

Last night, while I was sobbing in bed at the thought of another day ahead of me, I could feel absent arms around me. That may not make sense, but I could feel the lack just as if it had a tangible body. So that, in a sense, this nobody seemed to hold me. It was sad because what I thought I wanted more than anything was just to feel small again. I've reached a point, like Alice, at which I am too big for the house and find the idea of staying this size, awkward and fearsome, miserable. I'd like to be small again, so that I could fit on someone's shoulder.

For lack of a more eloquent phrase - teaching blows.

I mostly hate teaching...again. Somehow I thought it would be different now that I'm older and wiser. But it still blows. Kids suck. Yes, okay, I know that these completely lack-luster words seem to go against all that I ever write about or try to be. But how much time have you spent with a teenager lately? There's no better way to say it. They're assholes.

Right. Right. Not all of them. I have one whole class that I'd walk to the moon for. They're sweet and they're easily entertained. They laugh at my jokes and they work well together. They ask questions and tell stories. I love them to death.

Unfortunately that class is sandwiched between my two other classes of 31 kids each that I've unlovingly named the FDA - Future Delinquents of America. All good feelings that I may have from the smiling wanna-learners in third period are scraped off of me within the first ten minutes of fourth period. I hate to say it, but I can't stand those kids. And the feeling is mutual. I can see it in the way they sneer and snarl.

Well, I guess the poetic veneer is all but sand-blasted away now, and I can't think of anything nice or pretty to say anymore. Maybe I'll come up with something later.

Mind in a matchbox.

It's possible that not all of my students are bound for the time-clock-punching lumpenproletariat. In fact, I have one whole class that I adore. (Granted, they still spell "supposed" p-o-s-t, but let's not quibble over details.) They at least show some signs of integrity and interest. (Aside: None of my students knew what "integrity" means. That might be a good place to start - in kindergarten.) They participate in class discussions. I don't have to struggle to get them to work or to think. I can just ask nicely, and they come along with me smiling.

I have two classes of World Lit, and both are academic - meaning, as I think I mentioned earlier, slower-track. Essentially, they have the same sorts of test scores, grades, etc. Same class - sophomores. Generally, the same age group. In the first class, we answer questions as a class, out loud, no writing necessary. We think aloud. We read together. I compliment their genius. They beam and shuffle their feet, having never been so coddled and congratulated by a teacher. We write poetry. We laugh and smile. In the very next damn class, I have to yell and force them to write long answers to dull questions. I try not to cry. They scowl and boo and hiss. Nothing works. They just hate me. And, honestly, I care for them less and less with each passing day. I've tried to do the fun, interesting, post-modern, evocative, exotic, stimulating activities with them. They complain. They feign ignorance to stall for time. (You may think that I'm exaggerating, but I explained "brainstorming" at least ten times on day last week. Nobody's that thick. They have realized that I will teach until I pass out if even one person pretends to be confused, and they use that against me - the little bastards.)

Some days I leave thinking that I won't go back the next day, but I have gone back every day with new resolve. Usually that resolve has faded into a battered pile of spent tissues by the end of the day, and then the whole cycle begins again.

I discussed the masses issue with two other teachers on Friday. One teacher shook his head solemnly over the idea of America's dark future in the hands of these knuckle-dragging moaners. But I don't worry too much. We were in AP or Honors or College-Prep courses in high school. We went through life neurotically unaware of the kids who didn't do homework, who cursed out teachers, who got pregnant at 15. We lived in a little bubble of nearly-adequate public school education amongst our somewhat-promising compeers, led by teachers protected from burn out by the promise of yet another mild-mannered advanced class, cushioned by the soft students whose parents cared enough to keep their weight pressed down on them to do homework and stay out of detention. And those kids still exist today, as do those parents and those teachers. Maybe some kids will drag themselves up from academic. Maybe I could affect a radical change in my students' thinking. I doubt it, but I'm not doing anything else between 8 and 3 o'clock so I may as well try. We'll see what happens.

Concerning the masses.

I always believed that "the masses" was a myth propagated by the greedy few at the top of the food chain. Convince the world of these masses, who were dumb-founded, fleshy automatons, incapable of original thought or undesirous of it, so that there was no threat from the bottom of the barrell. No plankton or amoebas trying to grow arms and legs and wiggle their way up to dinner at the Ritz. I honestly believed that everyone secretly burned for knowledge, ached for individual thought, wondered over freely-formed opinions. I was positive that there were minds in those googling heads, minds yearning to breathe free, minds dying from the asphyxiation of inadequate public school teachers. How unfair I was to those poor teachers.

I know several now, and they are still hopeful after thirty years of...God...what has completely disheartened me in a matter of days. I hate it. I hate that I was wrong. I hate that the masses exist and that they don't like to think. I find it more frightening than Dawn of the Dead. I tell myself, "This is not new. The masses have always existed. If they didn't who would flip hamburgers?"

But I've flipped hamburgers, and I know lots of other intelligent people who have. I've waited tables and tended bars and cleaned toilets, and so I can't look at anyone who performs these tasks and believe that nothing is happening in their consciousness. Sometimes I've even sworn that I'd rather clean toilets for a living any day and have a little more free time than work a white collar job for double the money and have in return half the time for myself - to read, to write, to live.

Nevertheless, the job does not the masses make. I'm sure you could make heaps of cash and still stare vacantly at the wall during your lunch break, sucking in the opinions of whatever bobbling head happens to be proclaiming the miraculous nature of the travel-size rotisserie sewing machine on the nearest radio wave. It just makes me feel dirty.

A lot of my students will fill in the flanks of the masses. I can see it in their eyes. I wonder what might have saved them along the way, if anything. I teach to the others, the ones who have even just a flicker of a thought-forming mechanism. But there aren't many. And to the rest of them I'm a droning prison matron.

I hate teaching.

Turning bad social experiences into bad sociological experiments.

After that whole manifesto on how I would wave the flag of equal education for all - even the disengaged and the disaffected - I nearly let myself down on Thursday - the first day of school. It was such a long day. The bureaucrats were working double-time to make my transition from halcyon teacher work-days to hellion students' first day as intolerable as possible. I stayed up too late the night before trying in vain to get my act together. I woke up too early in an attempt to do what I hadn't done the night before. I didn't have time for coffee, and my paperwork and classroom were in disarray.

I tried to use first period, my planning period, to pull myself from the gelatinous, ever-wobbly edge of chaos, to no avail.

Second period - American Lit - was my first class. And my worst class. Here they come - hulking, dim-eyed, mumbling teacher-haters. Slumping into torturously tiny modernist nightmare desks - each different - some wood - some stone - some melamine or something akin to it - all hard and uncomfortable. Eyes rolling like horses trampling through the end of days. Loud, disorderly, unkempt. Just like in a bad movie that all aspiring teachers watch with the false belief that real kids, like movie kids, will suddenly have a change of heart and learn the value of knowledge.

And they hated me. What a blow to my ego. I have come to believe that my charm and wit and good-looks would win over even the most hardened hearts - but, alas, it is not so. Teenagers have some sort of protective coating - not candy - though it is colorful.

In retrospect, it wasn't their lack of enthusiasm that disheartened me. In honesty, it was purely the jab to my self-image. I'm not funny anymore. I'm old.

Anyway, third period the kids were quiet and well-mannered - or were they just dazed and complacent?

Fourth period they sat on the fence between good and evil, teetering precariously, some bright, like young Darth Vaders, pondering the sleek, shiny black masks of the dark force versus the drab brown jackets of the goody-two-shoes.

And by the end of the day I was asking myself, "What have I gotten myself into? I don't want to teach. I haven't signed a contract yet. I don't want to come back tomorrow. God, a whole year! What was I thinking!? Maybe I'll just give them 20 worksheets a day. That'll keep 'em in line. They don't want to learn anyway."

My mentor, the sweetest lady in the world, sat down with me after the faculty meeting, and we talked through the day. It helped, but I was still exhausted and depressed and disillusioned.

I slunk to bed that night. And meditated on the day. Remembered my high hopes the previous night. Remembered something that my darling angel friend Molly once said about a similarly frightful experience - "Just look at it as an opportunity for sociological observation."

Yes! That's it.

I can't fathom not loving knowledge and school and books and writing and learning. I can't wrap my head around it. Yet these people find it loathesome and hideous. Why?

I can use this whole semester as an attempt to gain an understanding of why these particular teenagers hate school. That makes the experience less personal, more scientific. I'll make notes and begin to draw up a thesis. Maybe I'll even learn something!

And, after all I've been through - divorce, childbirth, poverty, hunger, anxiety, isolation - what can a bunch of jaded sixteen year olds do to me? Why should they thwart my plans to create a new world order?! If these are the huddled masses, slack-jawed and querulous, let them do their worst. I'm going to teach somebody, dammit.

Novels and other things that I fantasize about.

I spoke with a fellow teacher today about novel-writing. He's working on one of his own, which I will not describe here in order to protect myself from being sued when he publishes it and becomes rich and famous. (Maybe he'll become a patron - hint, hint.)

I was ecstatic to finally have a conversation that was...oh, I don't know, not Rocky Mount. I've begun to feel limper and limper in the brainpan region. Noodles just boiled beyond al dente and wiggling towards my earhole.

I've been having trouble with one of my stories for several years. I keep writing the first five chapters over and over again. (I've got one particular scene and dialogue worked to a perfect pitch.) I don't know why I can't finish it. I don't mind admitting that the idea is fantastic. One character - the almost main character, the sort of foil to the main character, the soul of the story - is all his own creature. I know his history from birth onward. I know which leg is a prosthetic. I know what color his ex-wife's teeth are. I know exactly how many hairs are on his head. I adore him. He's lovely and fat and obnoxious and extraordinarily wise. He wears too-tight black cowboy shirts and too-tight black slacks and too-pointy black snakeskin boots. I hate not finishing the story more for his sake than for mine or my damnably elusive main character's.

I love writing novels (even though I've only finished one and she remains exiled to a folder on the hard drive, waiting eventual editing or deletion) because I love the little planets on acres of white paper. The idea that words can move from the mind to paper to mind again, from one complete form with bicycles and window-boxes full of geraniums in my mind to black symbols that don't even represent ideas but instead represent sounds which represent ideas to another mind where it re-emerges as a complete form, though slightly different from its original self - perhaps the geraniums are a little wilted or the paint less chipped - is amazing to me.

Kind of like radio waves or cell phones. But I guess I'm simple like that.

An entirely new kind of anxiety.

I received more kind words regarding this weblog, and somehow I've transformed it into a new kind of anxiety. I don't know how I do that. My great-grandmother, Dearie, called it "borrowing trouble from tomorrow." Essentially, I don't feel that I have an adequate amount of anxiety today, so I borrow anxiety about something that could possibly happen in a few days time. Let me give you an example.

I read the lovely compliment from this poor hung-over devil just today, and what were my secondary thoughts? (My primary thoughts were, of course, inexpressible girly, giddy squeals of delight owing to the fact that someone complimented me.) But the secondary reaction? Here they are, folks, the thoughts of a lunatic: oh my gosh, someone likes this. what if i can't write anything decent ever again?! i can't write. there's nothing to write about! why did i ever sign up for this damn blog in the first place!!!????

Crazy? Indubitably. Delicious? Yes, that too.

Thank you, Maltese Pirate.

A World without Shakespeare.

I'm not Shakespeare's biggest fan, though I do love his work. Reading a play rather than watching it can be daunting even for a literature buff, but I can't help but think knowledge of Shakespeare is somehow worth the effort.

As a returning novice to the field of education, I've been reminded of the knowing smiles and nods of seasoned veterans.

A novice might say, for example, I might try to teach two novels this semester. To which the veteran will reply - oh! you have honors English? The greenhorn, with a slight frown, answers that she does not, she has academic (read: not academically gifted - funny way of saying it, right?) And the old hand smiles slightly with the left side of her mouth, her eye squinted just slightly, and her head tilting and tittering to the left side. She might say, It's nice that you're so hopeful.

But I don't think she feels that way. I think she feels pity for the tender-hearted tenderfoot. Maybe even a yellow chalk-dusting of schadenfreude.

I'm thirty. I've been out of the profession for years, and I had a horrible experience my first go round. I can remember the days prior to teaching, when I would propound on the need of all people for a quality education that included humanities, critical thinking, and the rudimentaries. I would go on about how anyone who had his or her full mental capacity, i.e. was not mentally handicapped, could learn, could be intelligent and even intellectual. And, when the recipient of this passionate profession would look at me with that sad, disillusioned smile, I'd feel my throat go tight and my eyes well up because I was terrified that I was wrong and, not only wrong, but nuts to boot. As I said, my first experience was horrible, but more due to politics and other disillusioned faculty and immaturity on my own part. So maybe, as they say, believing the same thing again despite the failure of the system the first time is insane.

Nonetheless, lately I've found that same old belief system percolating in my chest, popping up into my throat and making me feel giddy with anticipation, with the idea that I could make a difference, that all...ALL...ABSOLUTELY EVERY ONE...of my students could leave my classroom believing that they are capable of insight and intelligence. Maybe not going to college, but understanding that, while Shakespeare's English may be near unintelligible today, his ideas, his beauty, his thoughtfulness, his wit, his compassion and love for humanity and the human condition are still true and relevant today.

I don't want to live in a world without Shakespeare. But if we don't start forcing kids to learn, really learn, not memorize and not sit quietly and obediently filling in circles with number 2 pencils...LEARN...THINK...GROW...CHALLENGE...if we don't start forcing them to care about their future roles in the world, their future contributions, then Shakespeare will be banished along with wit, beauty, ideas, compassion, and all that other stuff that I like about other people, and they'll all be sitting on some island with Prospero and Calypso and Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson and Pi and God knows who else. And I'll be stuck here with American Idol and that atrocious actor on CSI: Miami. I won't have it, I tell you!

And, yes, I get that look. Some teachers look at me with the sympathetic eyes of a witness to a ship wrecking on rocks far below the cliff on which they safely stand. But, dammit, I don't care! And you can laugh and you can shake your head, too, but I'm going to teach those kids to be intelligent. And if what I'm doing the first semester doesn't work, then I'm going to do something different the next semester. But I will not be down-trodden and I will not surrender the belief that all humans can learn. So there. Pbbbblllltttt. : P

Bookish Anxiety.

There are only a few books that I've read in my life that I truly, rabidly love. I've enjoyed hundreds, but there are only a few that have left me breathless - paragons of every virtue that I hold dear in literature.

I love books that are beautifully versed - descriptions that are poetic and also true, scenes and portraits that become a distinct part of my memory, inseparable from the real memories of my own life.

I am reluctant to admit this, but I need plot. I know it seems awfully pedestrian in this post-modern world, but I'm an old-fashioned girl and I like a story with, well, a story.

I love little twists and silly laughs. I love depth, but not at the price of humor and humanity.

I love, for example, Our Man in Havana. Greene was having a hell of a day when he wrote that little gem. How he managed to make satire funny, I'll never know. Few pull it off.

I love The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera, mostly for the character development and the lyricism.

I loved Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, which brings me to the anxiety part of my bookishness. I read Fingersmith just over a year ago, and I was instantly enamored with Waters' language and mystery and clever plot tangles. I couldn't put the book down until I was done. When I did have to put it down, I counted the minutes until I could pick it up again. Every time I thought that I had figured out the plot, she threw another curve ball. The settings were tangible. The characters were fascinating. I was head over heels for this book.

Waters has several other books, and I've been toying with the idea of reading one of them since I finished this exemplar of hers. But I am terrified that the next one won't be as good. I could never enjoy any of Greene's novels as much as I relished Our Man in Havana because what I wanted was more Our Man in Havana. I wanted to extend that experience, but I couldn't. And I couldn't make it new again by re-reading it.

I hate that.

Life as a mainstream novel with literary inclinations.

When I was a girl, I was hopeful. Having read every one of my grandmother's Mary Stewart novels, e.g. The Moonspinners and Madame, Will You Talk, I was fairly certain that life, for a young single woman, would be a mundane secretarial position upset by a holiday jaunt to the South of France. There, beset on all sides by gun-wielding ruffians and handsome-yet-dangerous men, she would prove her salt and win the heart of the once brooding and bitter man - who, of course, was redeemed through her strength, wit, and subtle beauty. It was a lovely thought for a young girl.

As I aged, I liked to throw in a few James Bond novels and a Raymond Chandler or two for added excitement and grit.

I was thoroughly convinced that life would model itself in the likeness of an epic myth or at least a bodice-ripping adventure in the Sahara.

But life isn't at all like a romance novel or an adventure or even a nice, reliable mystery.

Life is mainstream literary.

It doesn't make much sense (though it has lush settings and maybe a smidge too much character development).

Try as I might to understand it, to grasp its symbols and profundity (which all the great critics tell me are certainly there just beneath the surface), any meaning eludes me.

And, frankly, the ending is rarely satisfying.

Nonetheless, I force myself to nod at the rest of you with faux knowing and agree how brilliant it is just so that I don't appear to be a completely uncultured nitwit.