Speaking for Sarah

Inconveniently, I am awake at 12:30 a.m. when I need to be asleep. Work tomorrow.

And my cell phone just rang. I wasn't sleeping, but I was jolted out of my fretful tossing and turning. Not many people even call me on my cell phone, and mostly not at 12:30 a.m. Of course it was a wrong number, or something, because when I answered there was no one there.

Well, this is a boring post, I know. But writing it is making me sleepy....

Cross your fingers for me.

This week has had rather too much content. Monday night I gave my final and had to tell one of my students he was failing. This was hard for me to do even after he had handed in work blatantly plagiarized from his classmates. I made allowances for his poor work all semester because he is not a native speaker and has trouble with English, but I could not make allowances for plagiarism. Wednesday night, for my sins, I went to a speed-dating event--had 11 "dates" in the space of about two hours, each one about 6 1/2 to 7 minutes. After the first four conversations, the guys started to blur. It wasn't an unpleasant experience but a little grueling. Then there were some other things on Thursday and Friday that were difficult.

The weekend has been better, so far. Last night I went to the theater with my sister and today we, that is, my sister, my dad, my brother, and I, went to Coney Island and sat out on the boardwalk and looked at the ocean and ate hot dogs and fries. It was a good day, although I am tired now from being in the sun and the journey there and back on public transportation with my wheelchair-bound brother (he had a stroke two years ago) and my somewhat-rickety-on-his-legs 84-year-old father. (At one point, as we were walking the one very long block from the bus to the boardwalk, my father, who was leaning on my arm as he walked, said to my brother in his wheelchair [being wheeled by my sister], "Hey [brother's name], why don't you get out of there and let me sit down for awhile?" Since my brother can neither walk nor talk, this was funny only in a rather mordant way. But my brother does seem to like the ribbing.)

Sometimes my sister and I just look at each other and say, how did this all happen?

Then there are moments when things don't seem so bad. Like today, when we took my brother back to the nursing home where he lives, and my sister was showing me a communication book the speech therapist had made for him. My sister asked my brother to point to a word, on a page where about four words were written, that described how he felt. He pointed to the word "happy." "You feel happy?" she asked, somewhat skeptically. He nodded and shrugged, smiling in a way that was both wise-guyish and sweet.

Today, against all odds, we played volleyball. When we first got there, just a couple of people, the skies were gray and then it started raining, just sprinkling, really. I thought, what am I doing here anyway, I have a cold, I should be in bed. But, okay, I'm here, I'll sit around under the tree for awhile with my friends and wait for the rain to stop.

It did stop, briefly, and we set up the net. By this time there were maybe five people. A few phone calls were made and other people promised to show up. Then there were enough to play so we started. Except then it started raining again. But it would start and stop, so we kept playing, managed to get a whole game in even though it was drizzling the whole time. We kept peering up at the sky, looking for a patch of brightness, and commenting on how heavy the ball was getting. Then somewhere in the middle of the second game, there was a huge clap of thunder. We thought, okay, let's give this a rest. One of the guys said, this is it, I'm not hanging around for the lightning, and took off. It didn't look good.

But then, out of nowhere, suddenly, the skies were clear, there was sun, the grass was glistening and green. A new shipment of people appeared--a guy with his two little kids. The kids are old enough to play together, so the adults went back to the court. Then, in the middle of the next game, one of the other guys arrived, with his little daughter, my favorite elfin three-year-old, K. We all cheered because we had heard the news before he got there that he and his wife had had their new baby a few days ago. He, the dad, wanted to play and I was pretty beat so I said I'd sit out and watch the kids. Why I thought that would be less tiring I don't know.... But it was fun. I took K. on a walk to the bathroom at one point and she said, "Do you want to come to my house?" I said, "Well, I think we should go back to where Daddy is because he'll worry if we don't come back." Then I said, "Do you want to show me your new baby sister?" "Yes," K. said. Then she said something unintelligible, how the baby can't do something or other because she's just a little baby. I said, "But you're a big girl, right?" "Yes," she said.

When we got back to the court it was last game and I switched with someone and got to play the last few points. Then I was really, really beat. But happy.

Life in the Adjunct Room

She's having
knee surgery next week. We're all
of us giddy because tonight's the last
class. She says she has a minescal
tear. Or is it miniscule? I'm not sure.
We trade stories about anesthesia.

I ask about Richard III, if anyone knows
why sin will pluck on sin. I mean, I can tell
what it means but why "pluck" and is it
really from the Talmud and was Shakespeare
Jewish? Isn't it interesting? My friends say
no, confusing.

I tell them about the man I met on the subway
who told me his daughter was
sophisticated. She's a senior in high school
but the cops stop her because, her
father says, she's carrying a Kenneth Cole bag
and wearing heels and looks too grownup for
high school. They think she's stolen her bus pass.
My friends think this is a strange story

It's the last class.
I'm hungry would you buy me a banana
It's the last class
My student floats in looking troubled.
Yes, I tell her, you can hand in the paper late.

I had about an hour and half to kill after my class the other night, because I had told a friend I'd wait until after he got done with his class and we'd go out for something to eat. So I went back to the adjunct room, but I was too tired to grade papers or do anything productive. I was very tired, in fact. So I thought, I'll put my head on one of the desks and take a nap. But all those flourescent lights were a deterrent. (The "adjunct room" is a big room, about the size of a classroom, with several desks scattered around, file cabinets, etc. A lot of us share it. I like the community we have. But the flourescent lights are a little much.)

So, there was no one else around and I decided to turn on the one little desk lamp that is not a flourescent light and turn out all the overhead lights. Cool! It was kind of spooky but very soothing. (Oh, I should add that this room has no windows.) I left the door open so I wouldn't spook myself out too much. In walks one of my colleagues, a warm and lovely woman that I will call M. Of course she didn't see me in the mostly dark room. I said, "hello," and she almost jumped out of her skin. But then we turned on the lights and she forgave me for scaring her. I explained how tired I was and that I was thinking of taking a nap.

I said, "I thought I slept last night but now I feel like maybe I didn't."

M. said, "Maybe you were dreaming that you were sleeping."

That seemed about right.

I can't tell if jo(e) is teasing me or not when she says hyphens are not allowed in Fib poems, but, since the hyphen does look ugly, here's a revision, well, really, an alternate version, of the poem (and I use the term loosely) from yesterday's post.

Does
it
mean the
waiter likes
you if he pretends
to hit you with the menu? My
friend was impressed. "I've never seen that before," she said.

The
sec-
ond time
I asked for
more bread it was a
joke. The waiter swiped at me with
the menu. "I've never seen that," my friend said, bemused.



P.S. Are hyphens allowed?

On
the
bus I
stood way up
front. Enjoying the
view. "Hey Smiley," the bus driver
said. Funny, since I was not smiling. But then I did.

Last Sunday was another stunningly beautiful day in the park. I had stayed inside grading papers for as long as I could stand it and then I went out to play volleyball. When I got there all the adults were in the middle of a game so I had to wait until the next game started. The kids, four of them all under ten, were clustered on the big blanket, in that mysterious, dreamy world that kids seem to inhabit when they play together without any adults intervening. These kids have known each other pretty much all of their short lives. K., the most elfin little three-year-old girl you could imagine, was drawing with markers borrowed from the oldest boy, J., who is around nine. Every once in awhile J. would start objecting to how K. was leaving all the markers uncapped. He would say, "K., could you stand up for a minute?" She would clamber to her feet very accomodatingly and then and he and I would root around on the blanket to find all the caps and match them up with the markers. Then, the other boy, N., who is around five and I guess was bored with his toys, reached into the cooler, pulled out a beer, and used the bottle opener on it. He held it up, yelling proudly to his dad on the court, "I opened it." Then he mimed drinking it. His dad shook his finger at him sternly. I said, "Here, I'll hold that." So then I had an opened beer in front of me which I didn't want to drink but also didn't want to spill on the papers I had pulled out my bag to grade. I put the papers back. Then I helped little K. put her daddy's cell phone back in his backpack after she took it out and started trying to make phone calls.

A little later K. and I were playing with bubbles. She was blowing them and asking me to try and catch them. So I made a big drama out it, running after the bubbles, and smashing them triumphantly when I could catch them. At which point K. said to me severely, "You're scaring them. You have to be gentle with the bubbles."