Letters from Lisa

I’m heading out for three days with my students for fun in the rain and wind hopefully glorious sunshine of Rhode Island. See you all on the flip side!

My family keeps asking me for a wish list of presents, since my birthday is coming up in a few weeks. I always find this difficult. It’s not that I don’t want things — goodness, but I do — more that I have a hard time knowing what to ask for. So maybe what I should do instead is make a wish list of what I want to happen in the year I’m turning 28, and let folks decide if they’d like to help me make any of this happen.

And before I start, I just want to point out that yes, I realize that 99.99% of the people in this world need basic supplies and better environmental conditions to live in the same approximate comfort and safety as I do right now. We all have to decide for ourselves how best to help them. I have my ways — I’m sure you have yours. See how I’m engaging in a pre-emptive anti-guilt strike, anticipating that someone’s going to tell me that I’ve got a great life and don’t deserve anything else? Amazing.

OK, we’re going to get off the guilt train and get to the list!

Things I want to happen in my 28th year of life (i.e. this one)

• travel to China and the Himalayas
• have the time and energy and resources to work on my book
• take piano lessons (or at least get the darn thing tuned!)
• see an opera
• see Paul McCartney in concert, if he promises not to play a certain song that I can’t stand (”We will FIGHT… for the RIGHT…. to live in FREEEEEEEEE-DOM!”)
• acquire Bob Dylan’s genius, but since I can’t, I’d settle for his new CD

To be continued when it’s not 5:49 am. Whoops, 5:50. The clock is ticking!

Today is Blogging for Kids with Disabilities Day

Today I speak for kids who will eventually speak for themselves.

They’re a varied group. Some are athletes; others are clumsy. Some can’t draw a straight line, while others are skilled artists experimenting with 3-point perspective. Some of them are quick with jokes and stories; others struggle to formulate their ideas and thoughts into words. Some love math, and others hate it.

They have some important things in common. They are all kids. They all want to learn, to have fun in school, to get good grades. They all want to succeed. And they have all been diagnosed with learning disabilities that could prevent them from achieving goals that should otherwise be in reach.

I won’t pretend to be able to tell you their stories, or explain them in any comprehensive way. I can’t say I know how hard it is for them, though I see how hard they work and how it can hurt to always struggle with things. It is a constant uphill battle to feel stupid and incapable, at least at the things that society feels are important.

When I was away this summer in Australia, volunteering, I felt stupid and incapable a good part of the time. I needed things explained in minute steps. I needed several demonstrations instead of just one. There were a lot of skills I didn’t have that were “background knowledge” things, like how to set up tents or start campfires. I was always paranoid that I was about to mess up in front of everyone, or that people would think I was dumb or hopeless because I was always the one struggling a little bit more. It was very emotional, very frustrating.

And then I thought, I bet my kids feel like this most of the time.

I would not presume to understand, but a small part of me began to understand.

So I think kids with disabilities are heroes. Quiet heroes, because they don’t want to stand out — they just want to get it, like everyone else. They would gladly give up the extra time on the tests if they could also give up having to work extra hard. It’s a long road, with many detours and speed bumps and construction zones along the way — but eventually it does lead somewhere.

I look forward to the day when they can explain all this for themselves. That’s my job — to teach them how. So stay tuned.

Took a longish outing to Brook Hollow Farm, located in West Yesterdayland, North Country Bumpkin Road, Bush-Cheney Township, New Jersey. (That’s near the Delaware Water Gap, off Route 80.) We picked apples, raspberries (hence the Spaceballs reference in the title) and pumpkins right off the vine. They have pick-your-own Christmas trees as well, if you’re into pine needles and ancient pagan fertility symbols.

New Jersey is the Garden State. I sometimes refer to it as the “Piles of Dirt State” because at any given time there are 4,000 bulldozers redoing some stretch of paved highway, and other various assorted piles of dirt having to do with new hotels or banks or (in my town) a gigantic Metropolitan Plant Exchange. Further outside of the metro areas, the piles of dirt have more to do with corn fields and animal manure than with development. And you are more likely to see dinky clapboard houses, trailers and hunting equipment stores than a Plant Exchange (since there is real plant exchange going on on the farms).

It was nice to get away from the city and into the countryside, at least for an afternoon. Now I have to go pack for the overnight — another trip into the back roads! Except these are New England back roads, more Kennedy country than Bush-Cheney… that’ll be good.

Last night I managed to give myself a good clunk on the head on, of all things, the towel rack in my bathroom. I don’t think I sustained any serious injury — no severe headache, dizziness or loss of consciousness, which are the primary symptoms of a concussion — but I’ve been a bit fuzzy and tired today, so who knows what I did to my poor frazzled brain.

Funny how one worries and wonders about airplanes crashing, hurricanes, terrorism, assault and weapons of mass deception, but it’s the benign bathroom storage implement that nearly ends it all.

OK folks, keep in mind that this was written back in 2001 when I was teaching preschool in a special education setting. There are some mild epithets in it — things that my precious 4- and 5-year old students were saying to each other on a regular basis. (They also said far worse!)

All photos are the property of WWE or whatever they’re calling themselves now.

WWF Classroom!

Q: We haven’t done an interview in a while. Are you avoiding me?
A: Well, not at the moment. Obviously.

Q: I’m going to ignore the snippy tone in your voice and proceed in good faith, because I can rise above it — I’m a professional.
A: Ah, you think you’re clever by quoting Spinal Tap at me.

Q: It’s a good movie.
A: One of the best. Hey, we just agreed on something!

Q: I know. Bizarre. I’d better change the subject. So… I hear you are going on a big overnight field trip next week with your school.
A: I’m glad. I haven’t used my duffel or sleeping bag since I got back from Australia. Too bad I don’t need the tent.

Q: You want to sleep in the tent?
A: Did I ever actually sleep in there? I seem to recall a lot of tossing and turning, not so much actual sleeping.

Q: You’re a terrible sleeper in general, aren’t you?
A: Like with everything, I perform best when I can concentrate my efforts into short bursts.

Q: So you’re a product of our fast-paced, sound-bite information-overload advertisement-driven consumer culture?
A: Sorry, you have exceeded your quota of hyphens for this question.

Q: What’s on the agenda for the weekend?
A: I’m working on a book. Also, I have about 400 Australia photos that are not in a scrapbook.

Q: When are you going to post the rest of those pictures online? You are seriously slacking.
A: Patience, my young apprentice.

Q: Speaking of The Apprentice…
A: Don’t. Please.

Q: Oh I forgot. You don’t watch TV anymore.
A: Correction — sometimes I watch Animal Cops late at night.

Q: Seriously? Animal Cops?
A: Don’t get all highbrow with me. You used to watch Joe Millionaire!

Q: Oh yeah? What about that phase you went through with The Real World? And the Challenges? And the Inferno?
A: I have two words for that…. JUDGE JUDY.

Q: OK, if you’re going to bring Judge Judy into it, what about YOU watching “professional” wrestling?
A: That was strictly for educational purposes!

Q: Educational? Surely you jest.
A: Surely I don’t. I used to teach preschool, and I had that one class where the kids used to try the wrestling moves on each other? We had a standing No Smackdown! rule in the classroom.

Q: So you watched Smackdown to learn all the signature moves.
A: I found myself yelling things like “Malik, you’re not The Rock! You can’t do the People’s Elbow!”

Q: You wrote a little spoof about this, didn’t you?
A: You know what, I like it so much, I’m going to post it here. Stay tuned!

Q: Wow, exciting…
A: OK, OK, don’t gloat.

Q: Sorry.
A: No, you’re not.

Q: You’re right. I’m not.
A: I knew it.

We don’t need to see your identification.
You aren’t the droids we’re looking for.
Go about your business somewhere else.
Move along!

(spammers are idiots)

I’ve been playing aroundon 43 Places asking questions about different travel destinations. I know it’s a bit early to be thinking about next summer already, but I want to be able to save up enough money, get any required visas, and book any important arrangements far enough in advance that I actually have options.

The thing is, the Australia trip completely spoiled me. I didn’t have to deal with being in any big tour groups, ever. I have done those. You get on the bus at 6 am, get off the bus at pretty waterfall to take pictures, wait until everyone else gets back ON the bus so you don’t have their head in your photo, get back on the bus, drive some more, get off the bus and tour the glass factory, get on the bus, pile into a restaurant for pre-ordered meals, get on the bus and drive around the city watching monuments and attractions whizzing by, get off the bus and pile into a (formerly) quiet church, have 10 minutes to go get a coffee, get BACK on the bus…

In Cairns there was an entire industry built around booking day or half-day tours out to the reef, rather than doing an entire tour itinerary with the same group, but even then some of those groups could be over 100 people. I don’t think anyone travels thousands of miles to get crammed into a boat with 99+ strangers, but people just accept this as part of the “travel experience” and don’t realize that there’s another way.

Then my tour of the Northern Territory consisted of the tour guide, myself, and a nice Australian couple. And that’s it! That tour was fairly expensive — air conditioned vehicles and nice hotels and so forth — so it’s not the kind of thing I could do everywhere I go. When I travel again I’m going to look for that kind of option, but with more budget-style accomodations.

The trick is knowing whether you’re going to a place where you need to have an expert tour to show you around properly, or whether you can just wing it and still end up with a good experience. I admire people who randomly set off to meander around a country or region for a year, figuring they’ll find accomodations and guides as they go along. I would be nervous about doing that (but more so, it would freak my family out if they didn’t know where exactly I would be every single day!) but for the type of trip I now want to take, I may have to start planning in a more flexible way.

For right now I’ve been trying to look for tour packages and options that take care of airfare and basic transportation, and provide guides for places where they are needed, but allow for a lot of freedom and “alone time”. I haven’t really even decided on a destination yet — I’m trying to figure out if I want to do just a week or two (in which case I might go to Iceland or the Galapagos) or if I want to commit to a Big Trip (the Himalayas!)

Choices, choices.

You know I’m in a serious mood when I step into a bookstore with a $20 gift card and wander through the biography, travel, nature, psychology and journal/stationary/scrapbook sections, to step back out with… absolutely nothing.

I could spin excuses as to why this particular store had a terrible selection and was badly disorganized (The Insider’s Guide to Charleston was filed under “Southeast Asia”), but in reality, I just wasn’t satisfied with anything I picked up, and didn’t really know what I wanted anyway. There was all this self-imposed pressure to spend the gift card on something “worthwhile”. As if I’m not constantly buying books!

There is a well documented phenomenon that occurs when people are presented with too many basically equivalent choices. We can’t process more than a few options at a time, and become overwhelmed when we’re asked to constantly make basically insignificant decisions hinging on so many different factors. It decreases the overall level of satisfaction you end up with, because you are more likely to feel regret or uncertainty about your choice. It’s much better to have one mediocre vs. one terrible option, because there is a clear decision. Choosing between 17 highly similar “alternatives” leads to feelings of fogginess and overload.

Such is the modern world. It’s all about getting to the point where you’re privileged enough to encounter those 17 options. Then you try to simplify — get back to nature and humanity’s original purity on well-organized SUV-powered, thermally-ventilated weekend getaways.

OK, maybe this crabbiness extends to more areas of my existence than just bookstores.

And on a completely different note, September 26 is Blogging for Kids with Disabilities Day. I’ll be participating!

It’s that one guy who stands in the passageway between the #7 and the A-C-E line at 42nd street. Do you know what he was assaulting innocent subwaygoers with today?

“My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic!

File under Songs That Should Never Be Played In Public, Period, Much Less On A Bolivian Flute For Pete’s Sake.

Sheesh!

I haven’t shown the kids many pictures from my Australia trip yet — I’m saving them up for a big assembly, with a PowerPoint, so that I can get to everyone at once, and also field everyone’s questions at once.

But just for kicks, I popped in the Ingram Island Photo CD at work to do a market test — asking kids which photos they thought were the most interesting, what topics they wanted to hear more about.

The reaction was hysterical — first everyone said that the photos of the beach reminded them of that one summer they went to Miami, or their country house — until I showed them the drum of water and said, “That was the ’sink.’” That got them! Then we flipped over to some of the video clips, which are more instructive about what it looked and felt like than I could possibly explain, and one of the boys said, “Weren’t you SCARED?”

“Well…” I began.

“You’re wearing a wetsuit!” a girl pointed out. “Why were you afraid of wearing a bathingsuit?”

(What did she think I was wearing under there?)

Then the questions ran together:
How did you know it was a turtle and not a shark?
What’s the difference between a male and female turtle? (When I said that the females had a place to have eggs and the males made sperm, one little boy piped up, “I have sperm too!”)
Who’s that driving the boat with his foot?
How did you not tip over?
etc.

And then the boy scrunched his face up and asked, “How do you even know these people? What were you even DOING there?”

Well, kid, you’ve got a crazy lady for a teacher. Next question?

This assembly is going to be something. A room full of kids that know me, some unflattering photography, and of course once one kid asks a question, they’re all off like a frog in a sock.

Edited to add: Several parents have now approached me wondering if they can look at the photos, too. I didn’t do a parent assembly last time, but if the school isn’t totally 0pposed to it, I’d be happy to babble on about the experience to anyone who is even half-listening.

So I just typed the last sentence of the script (”Don’t you dare eat my ice cream”) and we are good to go! Finally. I told everyone that the script would be finished by tomorrow, and here we are… 15 minutes from tomorrow. Do I keep my word, or what?

I feel like doing something festive, like… getting to bed!

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time, how moments and experiences and accomplishments accumulate, but we’re so wrapped up in day-to-day affairs or obsessed with the future that we don’t notice. The other day I was standing at my classroom window, which overlooks the school’s garden, and watched the middle school kids milling around and eating lunch. Some of those kids, now 7th and 8th graders, were my very first students at the school. This year I’m teaching Class #5. This is the first year that I’ve felt the length of time that I’ve been at this job, probably because there are a number of new staff, people who don’t remember certain kids or the time the bus got lost going through the Holland Tunnel or how we changed the report card format — again –three years ago.

Then I thought about my very first students, the preschoolers I worked with between 1999 and 2001. They were turning 5 years old. They have all doubled in age. And then there’s my ‘baby cousin’ who is now in her freshman year of college. Since we’re ten years apart, that means that I was starting college around this time of year, ten years ago.

Ten years is a long time. Here are some of the things, big and small, that have happened since then:

• I got my BA with honors in psychology, and a dual Master’s degree in elementary and special education.
• I built my entire CD collection from scratch. Seriously.
• I got my first laptop, cell phone, Discman and (much more recently) mp3 player.
• I got my first ever email address. Then, a year later, I got my first internet connection at home.
• I flew by myself for the first time.
• I met, loved and broke up with my first boyfriend. Four times.
• I got my very first passport.
• I took my first trip out of the country — two weeks in Paris with my two best friends.
• That led to tours to London, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.
• I took my first permanent full time job, as a teacher. At the time I didn’t have any education credits or plans to go to graduate school, but in order to get provisional certification I had to take at least one class. That led to… well, you know how it turned out.
• I quit a full-time job for the first time. I thought that meant I was leaving the teaching field, or at least the agency I was working for, but they hired me for another position a few days later. I didn’t quit the agency until the following summer.
• I got my first — and last — C in a class. (I successfully fought to have it changed.)
• I learned to speak Hebrew and American Sign Language, and then forgot most of what I’d learned. But I fully intent to pick both up again. Especially ASL.
• I learned to dance salsa, Cuban style.
• I went back to both piano and dance lessons after giving them up as a kid, and both in my senior year of college.
• I learned to draw.
• I saw Bob Dylan in concert for $8 and then started buying everything he ever recorded. I’m still working on it.
• I also saw Paul Simon (twice — once with Garfunkel), The Who, Bob Dylan again, Tori Amos, Brian Wilson, and Ben Folds.
• He didn’t sing, but I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Central Park.
• I participated in my first Earthwatch trip to St. Croix. Biggest highlight: the leatherback turtle egg that hatched in my hand. I also swam and snorkeled in the ocean for the first time.
• Two years later, I went to Australia for Earthwatch, Volume 2. Among my firsts: using a travel agent, visiting the Southern Hemisphere, crossing the International Date Line, traveling solo for the duration of the trip, camping, and jumping off a moving boat. But of course, you can scroll down the page if you want to know more about it!
• I voted for President three times (and was disappointed twice.)
• I wrote my first novel.
• I directed my first six theater productions. I also wrote a book about how to write and perform theater with students.
• I discovered Monty Python.
• I learned the train systems of Paris, London, New York, Boston, and Sydney.
• I stepped foot in two countries — Belgium and St. Maarten — completely by accident.
• I lost my two remaining grandparents.
• I taught (or student taught) in five different schools. Six if you count my substitute teaching stint as a college student.
• I went on four overnight field trips with students.
• I ran my first 5K.
• I made my first homemade rugs, soaps, and candles.
• I donated my hair to charity. Twice.

Been busy… I’m sure there’s more to add. Or if there isn’t, there will be shortly!

A few things on this difficult anniversary:

9/11 memorial via CNN

Help is still available from the Red Cross, and donations are still needed

Taking Stock of the Forever War, from the New York Times Magazine, is an excellent analysis of 9/11 and the growth of global terrorism, one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time.

Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in “ridding the world of evil.” We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished - as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show - by fighting precisely the kind of war they wanted us to fight.

The article goes into impressive detail about the tumultuous history of the Middle East, including some key players whose names will sound familiar (Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney) and some key decisions made by America that turned out to be the wrong decisions, such as funding jihadists in Afghanistan in an attempt to draw out the USSR and giving weapons to Saddam Hussein. It’s clear that the mission of “bringing freedom and democracy” to the Middle East is a fallacy at best, since truly democratic elections in those countries might bring anti-US governments to power, and the US has never stood for that. Finally, it explains why invading Iraq may have been exactly what the terrorists wanted.

And now on a personal note, here’s my own 9/11 story:

Background info: I had just started my student teaching on upper west side of New York City, nowhere near the downtown area. All of Midtown was blocking our view, and we didn’t hear or smell anything until we got outside. Also, we didn’t have TV, computers or radio inside the classroom, so we didn’t know anything until parents started arriving at school to take their kids.

We were proceeding with the second school day of the year, the kids scattered around the room, drawing pictures or constructing small block towers. I was at the art table, coloring with crayons, commenting on the kids’ drawings and designs, when my supervising teacher said, “I want to talk to you for a minute.” At first I thought she was going to tell me I needed to alter my level of involvement with the kids, i.e. I was talking too much or directing too much of the conversation. She took me over to the doorway, saying, “Brace yourself — this is big.” When we got to the doorway, she opened her notepad to a new page and wrote that both towers of the World Trade Center had been hit, and that the Pentagon had been hit, and that we are at war. I froze, exchanged a long look with her, really thinking that we could all die, that another country’s planes had reached and penetrated our coast and were about to take out the whole city.

Then it occurred to me that my dad was supposed to go in to the World Trade Center that day for a job training thing, so I got really frightened. I put it out of my head, or tried to, because I didn’t know how we were going to address this with the kids. My heart completely sank — everything was over. Life was over. We were at war now — total loss, instability, crumbling. I looked at the kids, who didn’t know anything about this, and wondered if any of them had been orphaned. One little boy, C., had a rare genetic disease that required him to eat every 2 hours or he would go into hypoglycemic shock, and didn’t get picked up, so we didn’t know what happened to his parents. All the adults kept exchanging glances, a few whispered words, but we didn’t tell the children in the morning group because we couldn’t promise them that their families were safe. We just didn’t know. We tried to be cheerful and engaged with them, talking about their toy structures and drawings, but it was just so hard.

The supervising teacher was worried about her father, who turned out to be on the ferry and completely okay. I was terrified for my father. I sat in the back of the group at storytime, staring at the kids’ backs, thinking about how my mother was reacting all alone in the apartment, knowing I had to call home but not wanting to hear bad news in front of the kids. As soon as the kids (minus C.) were out of the room, I raced to my bag and got out my cell phone. I ran to the window to try to get phone reception. I couldn’t get through at all, so the supervising teacher dialed on the school’s phone for me. (That didn’t go through, so i dialed again.) I got my mom on the phone, found out my dad was at home and not in the city, since they saw everything from their bedroom window (she was crying, saying, “He would have been there, Lisa… he would have been there”) and my friends had started calling to make sure I was okay. Even though they hadn’t yet heard from me, they told everyone I was fine. There wouldn’t have been a reason for me not to be.

C. was sitting at the table, playing with his homework folder, and I really couldn’t speak freely or react because I didn’t want to let on that something was unusual about the day. I got off the phone with my family, ran to the bathroom, and cried. My stomach was completely nonfunctional. I stared at everything, memorizing it as though I would never see it again — the soap sitting on a dish by the mirror, the paper towels, the small room and the hallways and all the new people I’ve just met who I could potentially lose, who could have lost everything. Everyone had on grim smiles. We didn’t have radio or TV news, were just getting bits and pieces of rumors and misinformation. We didn’t know what would happen in terms of kids, parents, school opening/closing, getting home. We thought there might still be hijacked planes in the sky, thought we could even hear them overhead. (Those turned out to be military aircraft, we found out later.)

A little boy from the afternoon group and his mother showed up, and he and C. goofed around together while his mom sat with the supervising teacher and spoke quietly. A little girl came in and started saying, “Did you hear about the World Trade Center?” so I pulled the supervisor aside and asked her how we were going to handle this with C. She didn’t know exactly — we considered taking him out of the room but didn’t want to act suspicious — but it ended up not being issue because his father arrived a few minutes later, red-eyed and grim-faced and sweaty from having walked all the way from midtown. We told him that C. didn’t know about the attack, that we didn’t want to tell him anything because we didn’t know what the situation was going to be.

Meanwhile, we let the kids play for a long time (only five of twelve showed up for the afternoon session, anyway) and then we talked about the attacks in a meeting. The kids were very subdued and quiet, almost zombie-like. They talked about the buildings being hit with planes and falling down — one girl said her father worked in the building and was still there, helping the other people. She also thought that the planes had hit the buildings by accident, saying, “They weren’t looking where they were going!” but another girl said, “Oh, no, they did it on purpose.” Two of the children said that they were probably going to have nightmares about something like this happening to their buildings. One boy had heard a long word on the news and didn’t know what it was — “Can you say it in Spanish?” we asked him, and he said “Pennsylvania” in a Spanish accent. That was the first time we’d heard about anything happening in Pennsylvania, and said to each other, “What is in Pennsylvania that they’d want to hit?” Then we dismissed the meeting, telling the kids they could choose to play or to keep talking about the day’s events, and three of the kids went off to play.

Two boys sat in the meeting area, aimlessly staring out the window (which looked out onto another building, and had no view of downtown at all) so I started joking with them and finally got them interested in the book Stellaluna. We were guessing names — I had to guess one boy’s friend’s name, then another friend’s name, then I asked them to guess one of my friend’s names, and finally they guessed Stellaluna’s name, which got us into the book. Within minutes, all the kids were crowded around me. I tried to use the story to demonstrate that an attack can happen, but kids and parents can survive and reunite. (Stellaluna’s mother is attacked by an owl, but survives.) I felt a lot better once we all started reading — I felt I was actually doing something, and I was comforted by that. The other two teachers sat in the background and let us finish the book, then we all sat down at the lunch table.

One boy couldn’t eat at all, and one girl couldn’t touch her sandwich. She told me she had a beagle, but it died. The kids were so silent, so in shock. I ate a little something with them at the table, saying to them, “Well, I’m not feeling very hungry, so maybe I’ll drink my water and eat some grapes, and maybe I’ll be hungry later.” (I wasn’t.) The kids in the class next door, totally on their own initiative, built an Empire State Building and a World Trade Center in their block area, assigning one group of them to put a large number of blocks around the structures to make sure they wouldn’t fall.

The one little girl who had said her dad was helping the other people in those buildings was very nervous, especially as dismissal time grew closer. Her dad had indeed been in the World Trade Center (building 1, I believe), had seen the plane coming, and ran. Then he walked all the way uptown and picked her up at school — we were quite shocked to see him there, and tearfully glad for her. I had to go into the bathroom again to cry. I knew my friends were okay, and that my immediate family was okay. We had a meeting of lower school staff, everyone with somber faces, talking about how we were going to deal with the kids’ reactions.

Later, after trying to figure out whether there were still more hijacked planes in the air about to crash into something (we’d heard as many as eight) several of us set out on foot towards midtown. We filled up our water bottles and bought extras, took extra empty bags in case we had to buy supplies — and we stopped at 101st st. to borrow a stroller for the teacher’s little boy who was 4 years old and had fallen asleep on his grandma’s back as we walked. My mother called to tell me to go to my cousin’s apartment instead, so I parted ways with the group. I had to wait outside for a little while until my cousin got home. Then I went upstairs with him, and saw video footage of the attack for the first time all day.

I’m glad I didn’t see the footage earlier. I had time to process what was going on before being shocked by the visual image. I watched the towers collapse a few times on TV, then shut it off. I stayed the night at my cousin’s, played with their cats, then took the bus uptown the next morning and met my parents and sister to walk home across the bridge, which had just re-opened to pedestrian traffic.

I was grateful to be working at such a supportive school, where we had staff meetings specifically about how we were all feeling after the tragedy and how we could support the kids. The kids in my class created a block city, complete with several World Trade Centers and Empire State Buildings, going so far as to design barricades and escape routes and even “vitamin pipelines” to feed the people who might be trapped inside. A short documentary (unfortunately no longer linked on the school’s website) was made about it. It taught me a lot about how to deal with difficult situations, both personally and with kids. Something I wish I didn’t have to learn, but there you are.

So that’s it — be safe and peaceful today.

First a charitable note: Yet another worthwhile organization acting to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina is Hugs Across America, a group started by one of my coworkers in response to September 11th. She observed that her own students were comforted by having teddy bears to hug, and realized that children around the world traumatized by disasters of many kinds would benefit from having teddy bears of their own. She has already gotten requests from several aid groups in hurricane-affected regions.

In other news, I’m still plodding along on the musical… would ideally like to have it “finished” (in quotation marks because scripts are always a work in progress) by the time kids sign up for clubs on Friday. Still not rushing to get it done, since we can’t even audition until October. But I’ll certainly have the peace of mind, knowing that it’s in a presentable form. Kids have been asking me about what the musical is going to be, and so far the response has been enthusiastic when I’ve told them. I’m hoping we get a sufficient sign up to actually do the show the way it’s currently written, but I’m prepared for the possibility that I may have to retool it based on our numbers.

Really this isn’t all that different from the other shows we’ve done, which I’ve adapted. The only new thing this year is that I wrote the music as well… which is actually a pretty big thing for me. I can remember a time when my fingers trembled uncontrollably as I played the piano in front of people, and now I think I’m going to be able to calmly sit in front of 100 or so people, including all my coworkers, and play my own stuff. Yeah, I’ve cracked. It’ll be one of those years where I sit with the stage-frightened and soothingly say, “I know just how you feel…” and actually MEAN it.

I left the source material at school, so I can’t actually finish the show this weekend. But by Friday, it’ll be ready to go. After that I’m going to develop strategic amnesia about the fact that I wrote it, and treat it just like any other show we’ve done.

Sheesh.

Just finished A History of the World in Six Glasses, a very readable and fairly lighthearted look at history, organized by the predominant beverage of the times — beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and finally (and inevitably) Coca-Cola. Nothing earthshattering, but an excellent choice for random trivia buffs like myself who enjoy random tidbits, such as how Coke and Pepsi fought for dominance in the Eastern bloc during and after the Cold War, and how the nickname “limeys” for the British originated.

An even better choice is Salt, which is a much meatier and more substantive book — perhaps because it’s about food, not drinks?

Around 4:45 pm in the 42nd St. - Times Square subway station: A lone Bolivian flute player, accompanied by what sounded like a bad karaoke tape, butchered Unchained Melody. It brought back horrid memories of fleeing the theater after the pottery-making scene in Ghost when I was ten years old and away at sleepaway camp. I spent most of the evening eating movie theater candy and calling my parents collect, since we weren’t allowed to call home regularly. I’ve never actually seen Ghost all the way through. But thanks to the flute player in the subway station, I don’t have to venture far to be reminded of it.

When I picked my students up from music class today, they practically leapt out into the hallway, bursting with energy, and shouting about who won and who lost the game they’d been playing. They were happy and exuberant, except for one little girl at the end of the line. I sent the rest of the class ahead with the other teacher and waited for her.

As we were walking the girl said, “Lisa, I’m a little sad.”

“Oh, why’s that?”

“Because I think of music as something really special, and some kids were not taking it seriously. Music is like art, not a game.”

I sympathized with her as I inwardly chuckled, pointed out that some kids really liked turning things into games, and suggested she join chorus so that she can be in a music-producing atmosphere among other kids who “take it seriously”.

Post-modern, progressive education classes don’t prepare you for the kids who complain when something is TOO much fun!

A good place to donate for survivors of Hurricane Katrina is the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

I find the Bush-Clinton thing interesting. It’s been developing since Bush Sr. and Clinton were dispatched together to tsunami-affected regions. Supposedly they have developed quite a strong friendship. Besides fundraising, their main role seems to be PR cleanup for the current administration whenever it doesn’t respond quickly and publicly enough to a natural disaster. I think it’s great that they’re doing it, but I have to question why the administration still hasn’t learned its lesson, and why everything important seems to happen while Bush is on vacation.

Oh, and why Homeland Security has no idea how to evacuate a major city so that evacuees have access to adequate food, clean water, shelter, and communications. Asking people to check a website or call a hotline for information is pretty stupid when no one has electricity or phone service. Large numbers of families were separated during the movement of evacuees from one place to another, so people have been living in fear and doubt as to what happened to their loved ones, on top of the general trauma of losing one’s home and living in incredibly unsanitary, dangerous conditions. It’s pretty obvious that the infrastructure isn’t there to actually sustain a population of folks after a disaster of any kind.

I have faith that the survivors of this hurricane are going to pull through, and I know that to a certain extent this was beyond anyone’s control, as nature tends to be. But I question why it is necessary for them to suffer extra hardship and stress.