Tea Time Tuesdays

Dear Melissa,

Is it really the last day of February? The last day before my least favorite month of the year? March always gives me the blues. The snow browns and sometimes turns to slush. The trees aren’t budding yet. My students and I are reading for a conscious uncoupling but have no hope of separating before April break. This year it’s a little different. Work is going well and teaching both To Kill a Mockingbird and Purple Hibiscus seems apt and timely. I’m bringing back Tea Time Tuesday. I have a group of 13 advisees grades 9-12 who I see every day save Wednesday for 25 minutes. I bought 14 crazy mugs at Goodwill and a huge box of assorted teas for Tuesdays. We need to wash the mugs with serious soap next week. 

I’m writing to you from my home state of New Hampshire (live free or die) where I’ve met some pals for a ski weekend. I’m up before everyone else, as always, and I’m waiting for a reasonable time to creep downstairs and suss out the caffeine situation. There’s something I love about waking up early on Saturdays. This morning, my nose wanted to stay under the covers. It was -8 here last night. 

Did you get into this whole blue/black and white/gold debate? I have to say given our last two letters it is a day I could do with history erasing. Aside from it being a great TOK lesson, I wonder why it is we can collectively get so passionate and riled up about something so small when compared to, say, domestic and foreign affairs. Or the fact that talking about the treatment of people in this country based on the color of their skin remains difficult. Did it make waves over to Barcelona?

I am feeling better. A few days before my migraine, I met my friend Sophie for a drink at Hunt & Alpine. They have a lovely bar, huge windows and serve pickled things, of which you know I am fond. Their happy hour menu made me snort:



I am not sure you are familiar with Allen’s Coffee Brandy being such s classy lass who didn’t spend any formative years in Maine, but let’s just say the usual cocktails involve milk and Allen’s and names fit for a song by Robin Thicke. (I’m not sure that’s how you spell his name and don’t feel it’s worth my time to fact check.) After some gentle assurance by our bar tender, I had the Mexico, Maine and Sophie had the Revolver. We were not disappointed. 

I must confess I only knew the name of the boxes sculpture because of my friend Laurent who looked it up in his French guidebook. Like you, my mind was sent akimbo several years ago when I bought a postcard of our neighborhood Miró and found out it was not a bull but a woman and a bird.  I guess, like the dress, it’s all about perception. 

Now that I know you are an outdoor cat, I wish you were here right now. I’d boil a pot of water and make a pot of the orange pekoe I brought back from the Azores. I’d put a splash of milk in the bottom of our cups before pouring and then grab your glasses, putter upstairs and say, “Meli! Time to get up!”

Love and Rabbit Rabbit (almost),

T. 

Coming Home

Dear Melissa,

The funny thing about all this is that I know that you secretly love fiction when you give it a chance. Haruki Murakami? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? You introduced me to two of my favorite books, each by one of these authors. I see your point about nonfiction, and admittedly one of my all time favorite and most life-changing books is Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. I cried during silent reading in class while reading a section of John Suchet’s biography of Beethoven. But can I imagine my life without them? Probably. Novels resonate more deeply with me, but maybe that’s just because I love poetry and words. My life would be different without Elizabeth Gaskell, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat and John Steinbeck. Like you, the lessons I want to teach stem not just from making educated, rational decisions (especially in the voting booth) but also from empathy. As this article in The Guardian suggests, literary fiction increases one’s capacity for empathy. Nonfiction does, too, of course, but I think it’s easier with fiction.

I smiled while reading your post, as I always do, mostly because I was imagining waiting for the bus with you in Barcelona before work, as we did so many days, on the corner of Consell de Cent and Rocafort in front of that sweet church. On the day I am remembering, you were rummaging through your bag, frantically looking for a few euros to buy a bocadillo and a cortado. When you found the money, you ran across the street to that little uber Catalan cafe, which for reasons we could never explain had “Welcome to our World?” written in English (question mark included) across the top of the sign. While I told the bus driver to wait a momentito, you had to hide your forbidden food in what I lovingly refer to as your “Hermione bag” (and you get the reference, because you do love fiction, remember?). I was reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers. We talked about it and you said, “Oh, a book you read I might actually like.” We laughed and then I told you I couldn’t talk to you anymore because I had to keep reading. You went back to secretly eating your sandwich before Marta the bus monitor caught a whiff of the manchego. I agree with your assessment. What a beautiful, heartbreaking and important book.

Thanks, GoogleMaps!

When I think of last January, waiting for the 8:07 bus wearing a light coat and a scarf, I can’t help but realize how different my life is now. I leave for work at 6:05 a.m. most days, and meet my carpool at 6:20. We arrive at 6:45. I begin teaching at 7:45 and am done with my first class before our first classes began in Barcelona. But more than the time shift is the weather. As I’m sure you saw on the news, a true Nor’easter rolled into Portland on Monday night. Because there were 2 feet of snowfall predicted, for the first time in my Maine teaching career, the superintendent called off school the night before. This made for an exciting and relaxing evening. It was an actual blizzard on Tuesday. High winds, snow falling at 2-4 inches an hour. By the time the winds stopped gusting to such high degrees on Tuesday afternoon, my upstairs neighbor and I had about an hour before the sunset to assess the damage. I put on my long-underwear, fleece pants and then snow pants, layering layers until I resembled the boy on “A Christmas Story.” When I stepped out the door, I sunk into the snow and it was well above my knees. We didn’t bother clearing the path but spent about an hour shoveling around the cars in case we had to get to school the next day. You’ve been to my apartment, so you know there are three floors. My landlords (Annie and Doug) live on the first floor and their grown son Dave lives upstairs with his wife Louise. Dave and his wife are both teachers at different schools, and their daughter works at a local elementary school. Annie roasted a chicken and invited us all downstairs for a “blizzard dinner” at 5. I brushed off the snow from my boots as best I could, took a quick shower,  made a cup of tea to warm up and headed out to the landing in my slippers. As we sipped wine and ate, we listened to the news as each of our schools canceled for the next day. We cheered for all four. Sometimes I think superintendents are in a staring contest, waiting for the first one to blink. Portland always cancels earlier because so many students walk to school. Bath was next (Dave), then Kennebunk (that’s me!) and right after dessert, Louise’s school canceled in Falmouth.

Snow in front of my house

My second snow day was a glorious gift. It started with a hell of a lot of shoveling, but there is something beautiful about looking out down a quiet street seeing your neighbors with red and blue and silver and gold and green shovels trying to get out of their houses and make safe passage down the street. The snow blowers didn’t start humming for hours. As Dave and another neighbor worked on the parking lot, Louise and I cleared a tunnel in the path and then worked on the front steps and helped our neighbor with her car.

A few hours later, I hobbled upstairs with a sore back and rosy cheeks. The snow stopped falling, so while it was still treacherous and slippy, with the proper boots, people were beginning to walk around the neighborhood. I made my first Dutch baby pancake for some weary shovelers. I cut down on the butter (and probably could have cut down more), added a tablespoon of sugar and served with lemon juice, brown sugar, and a jar of maple syrup one of my students gave me from her family’s farm for Christmas. I had the rest of the day to read, clean out a closet and go for a chilly walk.

Getting up for work this morning was disorienting. What day was it? What classes did I have to teach? Would I be ready?

But then I read this letter from you, and I was transported back to warmer climates and bus-time conversations about books. Will you take a chance to read All the Light We Cannot See? It’s the best book I’ve read in years. Longfellow Books, where I took you to a reading in December, sold out before Christmas, as did the Evil Empire of Amazon. I borrowed a copy from a colleague, but it’s back in stock now. You’ll love it. Promise. It transports you to another world and it’s not always pretty but every word is beautiful.

Love you,
T.

Leaving Home

Dear Tasha,

Sometimes I see things that aren’t pretty, and I like them better than things that are. I prefer this photograph

for example, of this corner in this tiny public bathroom–so tiny you can’t even close the door all the way when you’re in it. I like it because it feels empty even without any space to speak of and because there are two toilet paper rolls, one new, one old. I like that the attempt at modernization is evident, that–in that sense–a moment in time, perhaps even a thought, is captured. I like it better than, say, gorgeously staged food popping off a white wooden palette in a kitchen somewhere in Sweden. I am infinitely bored by those things. Sure, crisply saturated color and white make fine friends, but why would you want your truth to look like everyone else’s? I guess this is why I don’t like fiction.

You like, I have to imagine, the “artfulness” of fiction, the way a story can be told so realistically and well that it becomes fully individualized. I find it a distraction to the art of real life. When I was younger I became fascinated by non-fiction, in literature, on film. I sat in the bookstore and paged through books by Magnum photographers–Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith–and other documentarians too. I was fascinated by Robert Frank‘s series “The Americans”, Diane Arbus‘ photos of deviant lifestyles, and the achingly beautiful color of William Eggleston‘s work, before anyone even imagined a virtual filter or an Instagram account. I admired their guts, their desire to often be in the wrong place to look at the world the right way. Once I understood it, how it worked, I couldn’t see the world in the same way again. The way education is supposed to work, if we do it right. Right?

Part of what I wanted to teach when I became a teacher was how to look at the world the right way, and largely it didn’t matter what that way was as long as it was through a new lens. The problem is that the process, as we’ve discovered, is long and arduous, and theory is always marred by practice. Sometimes there is a moment where you see the lens shift, but it rarely happens in a classroom, in the time we know our students or in particularly overt ways. It happens when they pick up a book they didn’t think they would like, the one they didn’t bring to silent reading time, because it happened five years down the road. It happens when they choose their courses for college, when they realize they’re not actually a Republican like their father, when they realize in a sense, like I did, that they can never go home again.

I’ve been reading a book about India–another one–called Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a stunning reportage by a woman named Katherine Boo who spent three years in a slum in Mumbai, documenting the lives of several families through the eyes of the children that live there. It is hard to put into words what the book does, in a narrative sense, in a reporting sense. It’s a game changer. But what it does best is to tell the paradoxically simple story of a handful of kids who never have never had–never will have–the privilege of leaving home. And I mean that in both senses of the phrase. In the classroom, we die a slow death waiting for the moment when when our kids’ philosophies and understandings of the world shift for the better–hoping to see what we’ll never see–deep down in that tiny place in their brain so small that even they don’t even realize it’s happening. On the pages of Boo’s book you can witness it in the most surprisingly tangible way–given that she’s an almost third-person observer through the lenses of privilege and translation–because she spent several years with those few children, in a small–albeit claustrophobic–setting, in an intensive way, and had time to reflect on the changes she witnessed. Obviously, I’m not trying to make a parallel connection between a slum in India and the classroom, or even her work as an observer-reporter and ours. But I do wonder what roles personal gratification and internal change play in that setting–so different in good and bad ways from our own–and if, at the end of it, a piece of freedom was ever achieved. In whatever way it might have looked.

I can’t stop thinking about it, and I guess, in the end, that is what a good book does, your fiction or mine. I’m off to China now with Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. I’ll let you know how the journey goes.

xx,

m.