What Fresh Hell is This; or, Boxes of Feelings

Teachers do this awful thing during our "down time," i.e. unpaid vacations scattered throughout the year.

(No, we do not get paid for the times your kids are not in school. Our districts just spread our paychecks out evenly over the school year, or, in most states, the entire year, so we don't go completely broke during those long vacation months).

So now that we have ascertained that it's MY unpaid time---I've decided to treat my unpaid self to a week of----wait for it!---cleaning like a madwoman.

And that's the other crazy thing we teachers do.  Are we lounging around, watching soap operas, baking, doing whatever people supposedly do who don't work? (don't worry, those of you who work as domestic gods and goddesses---I know all of these are ridiculous stereotypes and myths). At least in my case, I am doing all the deep cleaning I can't do during the school year because I'm spending (unpaid) hours after work and on weekends doing my job that I can't do because of 1001 meetings (or because---heaven forbid---I chose to spend time with my own family instead of work on some weekends). 

Not that I don't love my job. Please, please don't get that impression. Good grief---I've been at it since 1991, so yeah, there's something there.

I've been reminded SO MANY times this week of why I love teaching. More about that in a bit. . .

Here's the deal: I have this horrible habit during moves (13 times in 24 years) of throwing those things we don't want to deal with in a box and repacking them over and over and over and over again.

Some people eat their feelings. I don't eat my feelings; I pack them in a U-Haul or moving company box and throw them on a shelf in a closet or garage to deal with, well, never. And one box has become seven or eight boxes, and I HAVE to deal with those things because I don't want to leave them for my kids to deal with, once the eight boxes have become 10. Or 20. Or a whole basement.

I am a hoarder of feelings. 

In anticipation of move #14 to our second overseas location, I don't want to move SEVENTEEN freakin' THOUSAND lbs. of goods to a new house. I still can't believe that's what we brought with us. I want to have only things we want, we need, we love.

So Dorothy Parker, whom I adore and wish I had 1/10 of her wit, had a habit of saying, "What fresh hell can this be?" any time anyone came to her door. Over the years, this became, "What fresh hell is this?" For some reason, it's one of my favorite expressions, and I have said this ad nauseum while opening those boxes of feelings I've been avoiding for years. Spring break has been SO much fun. It's been a fun-fest of feelings and shredding. Because the best way to get rid of feelings is to shred them----it's become quite satisfying, actually, to hear the constant hum of my trusty old shredder. 

There is paperwork for the four houses we have bought and sold. Each house meant so much---the first house in Colorado, which was still one of my top two; the house in Washington, where we brought home a baby boy; the haunted house in Texas that made me decide to never, ever live in a house built in the 1940s ever again (the ghost had nothing to do with that, btw); the last Texas home where we brought home another baby boy and lived in the longest of any house we've lived (8 years). Some of those houses were bought hastily and were probably not the best fit for us; others cost us money to unload, and caused a little resentment that things didn't go as planned. Today we have chosen a life where we will probably not own another house for many, many years. So seeing the former life of home ownership spread before me has dredged up many feelings, and shredding all that paperwork has been a little bittersweet. 

There are mementos from my childhood. Do I need yearbooks and scrapbooks and autograph books and diaries from my childhood? I took hundreds (I'm starting to think thousands) of photographs, starting in middle school, and although I've managed to mail several of them to friends in the US, I am finding even more that I need to get in envelopes and give away. My children are not going to want school pictures of kids they don't recognize. And honestly----I don't even recognize some of the people in the pictures. I am at the point of NO guilt over throwing out some of these things. It's all beginning to feel like clutter, and it doesn't have that official context of mortgage paperwork that had me holding onto it for so many years. It's sentimental stuff, and I'm trying to be tougher about throwing out something that's been thrown in a box for 15 years and I haven't thought about since. 

Those are the easy things. The harder things are those associated with feelings of failure and shame: paperwork and letters and pictures from what started as a lovely relationship (or so I thought, at 16 years old) and ended as a rather nasty divorce at 22. If you haven't been through a divorce, then you don't know this fun little fact: you will carry your divorce papers with you for the rest of your life. You need them to buy or sell a house. The military asked for them several times when I was a military spouse, and again as I am a civilian working for the government. I honestly forget about that first marriage (as a friend calls it, it's my "starter marriage") until I have to gather them again for official government paperwork. Incidentally, I recently gave my starter marriage an annulment (long story, too boring for a blog) and I did shred that paperwork. I am not Catholic, and no offense if you are, but I think annulments are silly and pointless. And the ridiculous amount of paperwork it required was taking up way too much room in my boxes of feelings. 

The more difficult boxes have paperwork to remind me of times of financial hardships, of very stressful health issues, of friendships that just petered out for some strange reason or another. I don't know why, but I had people I thought would be in my life forever, and I see now our relationships have just dissolved. It's neither person's fault; it just happens. It's life. And like a set of divorce papers, those cards and letters and photographs are reminders of something that maybe I should have fought for (or maybe something I should have never tried to make work). Unlike divorce papers, they can go to the shredder. 

There are letters and cards from people I have loved who have died. What do you do with letters from your Granny, especially when they make you smile and laugh every time you re-read them? What about cards? If they don't have a note in them, do you throw them away? But just being able to touch my  father in law's handwriting again, and chuckle at the types of cards he chose for me---he knew my personality so well---keeps me from throwing them out. This is the guy who called me EVERY SINGLE WEEK for the entire year that my husband was deployed to S. Korea to check on me. His loss 15 years ago isn't any easier today, and I grieve every week for what my kids missed. Will they get to know him by reading his funny little sarcastic notes and postscripts on cards and letters? I hope so. Those I kept. 

my Granny Ann's chicken scratch---she was a dreamer, a cloud gazer,
 a lover of small animals and children, and believed in sending and receiving letters.
As a college student, if I went over a few weeks without sending her a letter,
I got a note reminding me that I should write her.
And I did---often.  

I really do suffer from hyper-sentimentality, if there is such a thing.

That being said----I have shredded EIGHT extra large black garbage bags full of materials. I feel like I'm doing some illegal operation for the mafia (or the government). And those eight boxes are now 2 bins, very neatly organized into materials I am keeping for legal (and yes, some sentimental) reasons, and one more box to go through. I feel so accomplished. That supersized box of extra large ziploc bags came in SO handy. I can see everything neatly organized, and seeing everything spread out gives me reasons to do a second and third sweep and get rid of even more. 

Coming back full circle to teaching---one thing I have never thrown out is the letters students have written me. 

Since my first year of teaching, students have given me Christmas cards or even thank you cards at the end of the year with wonderful little notes. 

Some notes are written with sloppy handwriting and bad spelling; others are in the student's very best print. Sometimes they have a photograph or even a piece of poetry the student has written for me. And other times there is no letter or card---it's just a piece of artwork done for me.

I will be honest---I can't picture the face of a few of the students, especially the ones from way back in the 1990s. 

But have you ever gotten a thank you note for doing your job or a piece of poetry written for you? It doesn't happen to me a lot---and I will be honest, it has happened very little since I have been here. I don't know why; maybe it's just this generation communicates almost exclusively electronically. I have several emails and facebook messages that have made me smile and thankful that I get to work with teenagers.

An email isn't the same as a hand written card, however. Getting something so personal, especially when I know how hard it is for so many teenagers to express themselves to adults, has made me hold on to these things. They were a labor of love, and something I will definitely keep. 

YOU'RE, Tyrone, YOU'RE. But the sentiment is appreciated
Wonder if he'd feel the same of me at 47? And don't worry, kid;
I've had administrators at the above-school level
who didn't know the difference
between your/you're, either.
Also, Tyrone is 34 years old today. Ouch.

This process has been somber, and in a lot of ways, it's created feelings of grief. I won't even go into some of the personal things I have found, but there are little things you throw in a box, and when you reach in and take them out, they can give you all sorts of feels. If they can be shared with someone else, I'm boxing them up and sending them on. If I no longer have a relationship with that person, they are being thrown out. If it's something that makes me feel regret, I try to throw it out, too. Why hold on to sadness?

Here's to a life that eventually contains no boxes of feelings, where everything can be unpacked and displayed, and with no boxes to shuffle from one house to another. It may not be completed over spring break, but I have a manageable project that won't have me hollering, "Oh what fresh hell is this!" every time I pull out another tidbit of my past from a messy, unorganized cardboard box.

Fortuitous News; or, A Valentine to Austin

Do you like how I posted about how I need to be like Ferdinand recently, as in, I need to chill out and enjoy life more, and worry less, and now we are headed for the land of Ferdinand?

It was seriously a coincidence.

I have had friends congratulating me and tell me that I "deserve" a great place to be, but I don't feel it's something I earned; ending up in Spain is fortuitous and I did nothing special to get there. There are so many amazing and wonderful teachers in the system also waiting for their own golden ticket to somewhere else, and they may end up having to wait another year. They, too, "deserve" to transfer, so I feel very uncomfortable when anyone says that to me. It's all a numbers game and I just happened to have the right combination of certifications, years, and places I was willing to live ("worldwide," by the way). I am lucky; I am not deserving.

So I'll just say "thank you" for all the congrats. THANK YOU! 

absolutely awful picture---but I think the only one I have---of Austin (center)
with my friend J.Carol and my husband

You know when something big happens in your life and you have to call someone to tell them? We called our family as soon as we found out that we are moving to Rota in the summer, but there was someone we really both want to call but can't. I have thought about her so much the last few weeks (and honestly, a lot since we moved to Cuba). 

Dr. Karen Austin---or simply Austin, as all her students who loved her so much called her----was one of the best teachers I've ever had, and as I've gotten older, I've realized the best lessons from her classes stretched way beyond the books and lectures in the classroom at USM.

I had Austin for several upper level Spanish classes---advanced grammar (seriously fun---I'm not kidding, I love grammar and I love conjugating verbs), Spanish history (she made the Spanish Civil War comprehensible), and maybe a Spanish linguistics or conversation class. I really don't remember too much about exactly WHAT she taught; it was her fervor of the nuances of the Spanish language, the stories behind the history, and her own personal connections that made it so interesting and made her memorable.

And she was larger than life---she was tall and not a small woman, with wiry, crazy hair, and smoked like a chimney when I first met her (so did many of my other profs---even in the classroom. She quit, and by the time I graduated, you couldn't get near a building with a cigarette in your hand). She had a boisterous laugh and a lively spirit. I was devastated when I heard that she had died shortly after we got here, because in the whole process of moving here, she is the person my husband and I wanted most to talk to about Cuba. She would understand more than anyone else why we were dropping out of civilization, giving up life in the US, and starting over in the unknown. She loved risks and was a hero to me---she broke the glass ceiling at my college by becoming one of the first tenured female professors. She helped take care of a friend dying of AIDS in a time when most people were terrified to get near anyone with the disease. She had lived in Spain as a single woman under Franco's rule. She was adventurous, unafraid, opinionated, and brilliant.

As much as I loved and admired her, you can triple that for what my husband felt for her. She was his advisor and did so much more for him than any advisor I ever had---she took time to get to know him and her door was always open for him (or any other student). She advised him on life as well as college. He will always (deservedly) give her more credit than anyone else for motivating him to graduate college, and she had a soft spot in her heart for the skinny kid who would let her insult and scream at him in her Spanish for Law Enforcement class and played along as she read him his Miranda Rights in Spanish.

When our son decided to go to college in Madrid, I wanted nothing more than to pick up the phone and call her. I wanted him to meet her. The last time I saw her, he was only a toddler, and she sat him on her lap and sang him a lullaby in French. My adventurous son would love the crazy lady with the wild hair, the big laugh, and the great stories. I can imagine the pure joy on her face and her excited voice and animated manner as she would tell him the best cuisine and places to see, and share some of her hilarious stories as a young lady in Spain that would amaze and amuse all of us.

I was driving home a few days ago again lamenting the fact that we will be in Andalucía, the area where she lived and loved the most in Spain, and I can't tell her how excited we both are about it. 

My husband and I hadn't discussed this at all, but later that night, he said, "you think Austin's watching over us?" He feels it, too. I just feel like she's guiding us along the way. I'm not superstitious and don't feel she's literally watching over us, but I do feel like her life has influenced us both to be brave, adventurous, and helped plant the seed for a good case of wanderlust. And we know that without her in our lives, living in Spain would not have even been on the radar. 

She's been gone 4 1/2 years, but as her obit reads, she "was a force to be reckoned with." (If you get a chance, read her obit---she LIVED life).  I hope we do her proud in our adventures in Spain, and I will think of Karen Austin and her infectious laugh often; instead of sadly regretting the stories we didn't get around to sharing, my husband and I will be telling our sons stories about Austin and creating our own Spain story.

Goodbye; or, For Todd

This week a cloud has hung gloomily over me, ever since I found out that a former neighbor died last Saturday. He wasn't quite the boy-next-door; he was the boy a few houses down and across the street.

My parents moved to our house on Allen Circle when I was 5 years old. Across the street, a few years later, a family with 4 beautiful boys moved in. In addition to each being absolutely handsome, the boys all displayed freakishly good athletic abilities, and soon decided (without consulting us first) that our yard would make the best football field in the subdivision. Soon kids from all over the neighborhood came and played ball in our yard, which I have to admit was kind of perfect. The yard had no trees save the two spruce trees that stood like bookends to the flat expanse of grass---instant goal posts! A straight brick sidewalk perfectly bisected the yard---a 50 yard line! The little landscaping at that time consisted of mostly juniper bushes under my sister and my windows. 

I should also mention that my parents didn't really approve of the kids playing in our yard. Nobody ever asked permission; it's like one day a gang of boys showed up and it was decided from then on that our yard was the community football field. The kids would do things like knock over flowers or leave the water running after they helped themselves to a drink, creating a mud pit. They were rough, too, on each other as well as the yard---of course, this was the 70s and early 80s, before people worried about parents suing for their kid breaking a leg on your property. 

My younger sister and I spent many a day peeking from behind our curtains and over the junipers at the boys playing football. Having just each other as siblings, boys were a foreign species in our house. We studied the mysterious older boys as anthropologists would, watched their moves, eavesdropped on their conversations, and when that got boring, took opportunities to harass them. Sometimes they'd take a break and leave their shoes on our porch, so we'd squish juniper berries in the toes. If they actually noticed, it didn't deter them from coming back. 

Those original football boys eventually grew up and/or moved away. The night before I graduated high school, one of the across the street boys was killed in a car crash. Unbelievably, a few years later, another brother died in a car accident. 

The football tradition was carried on for several years, until one middle school kid showed up drunk and almost aspirated in our front yard, and that was it. Dad and Mom (who ended up taking Puke Boy to the ER) put the kibosh on the games. No more football in our yard. 

Flash forward, many years later. My parents still live on Allen Circle, but most of the families I knew while growing up are gone. Hurricane Katrina took out one spruce, and the other died. My parents ripped up the sidewalk and put considerable time and money into nicely landscaping the yard. The hideous juniper bushes are gone. I still look out the window and think fondly of the boys who played ball, and I get a lump in my throat every time I think about the loss of 2 of the 4 neighbor boys. Then, a few years ago, one of the guys contacted me online---a neighbor Todd, one of the original team, who moved when I was still a geeky, awkward middle schooler and whom I had only seen a few times since their departure from our little town. 

Facebook is a weird thing. It's where the superficial flourishes. It doesn't matter if you hardly know someone; anyone can request to be your "friend," even if they didn't say three words to you growing up. This was different. Instead of that thing people do after a lifetime apart---basically run down your résumé of where you've lived and what you've done---we told each other childhood stories. Funny stories. They started with my family's football field and went from there. The one constant was they all were about things that happened on our little street, and most contained at least a cameo from Tim, the second brother who died. Tim was handsome, smart, and absolutely witty and hilarious. Girls were in love with him. Guys wanted to be his friend. He had that impact on people. Todd and I traded funny childhood stories, and that was the extent of our online "friendship." But in a lot of ways, it was huge. 

It was important to me because it wasn't about how I got contacts and put on some much needed weight and didn't end up as homely as expected, or how I had my heart broken by both so-called friends and boys in our little town, or how I still manage to be somewhat of a geek, but not in a so-sad, pitiful way. It wasn't about reminiscing about high school and college and other experiences we missed out on in each other's life. It was a nice slice of my childhood that he was there for, and few other people can say that. We spoke the language of the kids who grew up in my neighborhood in the 70s and 80s---the Mini Mart, the Icee store, names of people long gone, of swimming holes and creeks. We shared a collective memory and told each other new stories about that time and place that was, to me, much better than trying to impress each other with our lives today. 

Last Saturday Todd suddenly passed away. In light of the world of "friends" and facebook, do I call him my true friend? We hadn't seen each other in over 20 years, and I didn't even know what he did for a living until I read his obituary. But I re-read the chat texts from the last 2 years---late night musings about football games, and who fought whom in the neighbor's yard (now my grandmother's yard), and who talked his daddy into going fishing (without him). Tim, naturally, was a part of these and the rest of the better stories. We talked about grandparents we have lost and how they made us who we are. Ironically, our first conversation was about how we loved our little town that we both had moved away from and never planned on moving back to so much, we both wished to have our ashes scattered in Lawrence County water (him=Cooper's Creek, me=Pearl River). For bringing me back to that time and place, he is definitely a friend. For the loss of someone who was an amazing storyteller, and from all accounts, a great friend to those who have known him since middle school, I feel a huge loss, much more for those folks and his family than for myself. It's also one of those times I have to face the inevitability of being mortal. He was only 45 years old. 

But it doesn't mean it didn't hit me. Hard. 

When I'm back in my town, I will do that thing I always do---I'll wistfully stare out at my parent's front yard and daydream of the boys who played ball and entertained my sister and me so many years ago. And Todd has now joined the league of boys who are no longer on this Earth, and I'll look at his house and feel the loss for those stories we never got around to sharing.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running; or, Suffering is Optional

I have a love/hate relationship with running. 
Actually, it's more of a hate/hate relationship. 

I have a hard time with pacing myself---I almost always, without fail, start out way too fast and end up having to catch my breath (asthma doesn't help). I'm slow. I'm lazy. I have old lady bunions that hurt. 

But I also like to do nothing but think about my (mildly asthmatic) breathing, and count steps, and check my time as I go. It's sort of like meditation. 

I see how people are addicted to it. 

And that's why I also love it, although I really hate it, too. It's so hard. How can a sport requiring nothing more than 2 feet and a good pair of lungs be so difficult??? 

I have finally done a first here---I've joined a runner's group of sorts. If you like running, Gitmo is the place to be---I counted 26 people running in the few miles to and from the NEX one day. It can be 6 am or 11 pm and you'll see five or more people running on base. My "runner's group" is actually just a group of ladies from my neighborhood, and when motivated to keep up with the leader of the pack, I have managed to run faster the last 2 nights than most of the 2-3 years I've been running. 

"Pain in inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you're running and you think, 'Man this hurts, I can't take it anymore. The 'hurt' part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself." ---Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

So I am a big---huge, actually---fan of books with non-linear timelines, quirky characters, multiple storylines, and exotic locations. My favorite book is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have recommended it to dozens of people. I can count on 2 fingers the number of people who liked it---but those two people felt like I did when I finished it the first time---it was a spiritual experience and the final scene delivered a full blow to the gut. I also feel this way about most of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's books, especially my favorite, The Wind-up Bird Chronicles. Man, it blew me away. 

So when I heard he had written a book about his experiences as a marathoner---he's a hard core runner---and it owes much of its title to yet another book I love by the late, great Raymond Carver, I had to get it. 

Except, I haven't gotten it yet. It's not at the library here, so I'm mulling over getting it to read on the iPad or bringing yet another paper book into the house. (The floor boards are straining. The bookshelves are crammed. Confession---I have at least one---maybe more, but I ain't telling---boxes of books in storage. STILL. I know, I need help). 

But that quote---"pain in inevitable. Suffering is optional"---it's so true. It's the first Noble Truth of Buddhism. The way he applies it to the act of running makes so much sense, and I get it---I wish my mind-over-matter just worked a little more efficiently. And so it goes with life, too. 

It is hard not to wallow in self-pity when things aren't going my way. 

I've stayed in jobs (and probably relationships) waaaay longer than I should because I was paralyzed by despair AND too afraid that change would make things even worse. 

I have learned through running that I am not as stubborn as I thought. I really want to go up a hill, but I can't make my legs keep going some of the time. It's frustrating. Why do I start walking? What switches in my brain to make me stop? 

I also found that if I chew gum, put my hair in a bun (ponytail swinging really messes up my groove), and never, ever look down, I do better. 

And it's the silly things that get you through life, too. 

My heart really hurts today because my former school lost a precious kid. He was a senior, with a great smile and a mature way about him. He was a regular in the library, and it was very easy to fall into conversation with him and forget that he was just a kid. He loved books---especially zombie books. What's not to love about a kid who loves zombies? 

Last night he took his life, and I'm sad to think that he didn't learn the lesson that "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." 

So it goes. 

Well, this is the most depressing thing I've written in a while. It started with running and ended with an unrelated tragedy. Talk about a strange tangent. 

So here are some Gitmo firsts from the last week plus, and small reasons to celebrate: 

1)I did finally get to see the Bay from a boat this week. The oldest kid and his English class took a boat cruise to a cay while wearing togas, read letters they wrote in character, enjoyed Greek food, and after putting their letters in bottles, threw them out at Romance Cove. The book was The Odyssey, of course! This was their class odyssey, and quite a brilliant plan. He'll remember That Time I Wore a Toga on a Boat in Cuba for the rest of his life. 

2) The youngest and I have become regulars at the Arts and Crafts Shop---we are now masters of ceramic painting (and hopefully, I'll learn some pottery while I'm here---there are wheels, an extruder, that thing that rolls clay out, and something that looks like an air brush machine for painting pottery. In case you haven't guessed, no, I have no clue how to actually use any of that equipment to throw a pot). And you know just what we need---more (ceramic) trinkets for the house! I'm still purging! I promise! The boy actually said, "You know mom, we can always sell this stuff in a yard sale." That's my child! 

3)Ummm, we sorta had a small earthquake Friday. Or maybe just aftershocks from elsewhere. Two of the four of us felt it (I didn't), and there is absolutely nothing in the news about it, but we know enough people to verify that 50% of our household is not completely delusional and insane. Nobody and nothing was hurt so---another reason to celebrate! 

4) FIRST DIVE IN NINE YEARS! It went well, despite some lingering asthma (yes, that again) causing me to have problems at first. I rarely get asthma, and only when my allergies turn into a severe upper respiratory infection---but when I do get it, it is hell to shake off. It will be a few more months before I'm breathing normally again---and yes, I am taking medicine for it every single day. 

I love my dive buddy---he's been with me for over 20 years. I'm so happy that the fun (and funny) guy I took lessons with as a grad student is still by my side. I am thankful that he is still a wanderer and traveler and adventurer. We didn't take Cheese Wiz and hot dogs to feed the eels like we did on one of our first dives together, but we did manage to see some amazing corals and fish. The comments in the dive logs from our '92-93, '04, and now Cuban experiences are hilarious to read. I guess we are on a 9 year cycle---wonder  where we'll be diving together in 2022? 

post script: There is a possibility that Todd's death was an accident (and what a horrendous accident it was). My understanding is that the evidence is inconclusive. I would like to think that he had a change of heart and it was an accident; whatever happens does not stop that an incredible, bright young man has been taken from this world. See? I'm a downer again. Sorry about that.