Candid Confession

I like my job almost always. But there have been a few days which blatantly remind me why it is that I prefer teaching the entire middle school--hormones and weirdness and laziness and all--to my 50 minutes a day with a certain high school class.

And this is one of those days.

The Life and Death of Peggy Sue

St. Patrick's Day 2012: Sarah and I hopped a bus to Álcala. A magic bus. Kinda like the one Mrs. Frizzle used to drive around the universe and down the digestive system.

I can't really give reasons for why the outing felt so different than any other Álcala outing, except that perhaps leprechauns had sprinkled it with Irish love. We found a clothing store where things actually fit and were on sale to the point that we visited the dressing room two and a half times. We saw bagpipers in green wigs traipsing up and down Calle Mayor. And we definitely cried, "More Irish! Let's get 'em!" when an entire green-wigged posse slid through a side arch into a plaza full of Guinness drinkers and fiddle players. The best finds of the day were completely accidental.

And so with Peggy Sue's.

We met her on a side street off a plaza we never visit, next to an Irish bar promoting pizza and hot chocolate. We found her not far from the playground where a middle-aged woman appointed herself the playground police and yelled at us for using a swingset: "Son mayores, ¿no? Es para niños!" She stared us down with fervor, just stood there and stared. "Son mayores! Son mayores!" But Peggy Sue's comforted us. Peggy Sue's told us it was okay to be childlike.

Peggy Sue's was a corner diner.

She had pink walls with checkered tiles, bar stools and booths with their own individual jukeboxes full of hits from the 50s and 60s. She had a giant TV screen playing Marilyn Monroe and the original Ocean's 11. She had chicken fingers and Diet Cherry Coke and pizzas named "Elvis Presley" and "Frank Sinatra."

We officially made Peggy Sue's acquaintance the next Friday, joined by Adam and Emily. We ordered off the surprisingly small carta, not realizing that the cook would start the hamburgers and French fries at 8:30. (American fare, Spanish hours.) Emily tried ordering the banana ice cream (which the menu claimed was an American favorite) and was told that they'd stopped carrying it (apparently it's equally as favorite in Spain). We punched Ain't No Mountain High Enough and Nut Rocker into our mini jukebox, waiting for the music to take over the restaurant speakers. We ate our Marilyns and our Elvises and talked about how much we liked Peggy Sue's, how we were all going to bring our families here when they came to visit.

The following week, we asked Lynnette if she'd like to bike into town and do supper at Peggy Sue's. She called after her piano lesson with the heartrending news: Peggy Sue's was closed.

"Forever? Or just for today?"

"It looks like forever. Their facebook page says they closed on the 26th." Three days after we'd eaten there. The server really meant it when she said they'd stopped carrying banana helado; she failed to mention that they'd stop carrying everything!

Still, Sarah and I returned to that fateful corner once more, just to be sure.

Door covered. Booths ripped out. The fluorescent light in her eyes gone. Over. Dead. Just like that.

If only we'd had more time, Peggy Sue. If only we'd known. But it was too late.

So we walked around the corner and grabbed burgers from Buddy Holly's instead.

Then I died and went to Switzerland

A 7:00 alarm on a spring break Monday morning is equally as pleasurable as awakening to a cat clawing the inside of your ears. I was still thinking about the awful number--7am--when my watch turned to 11 and we hadn't yet boarded our 9:40 flight.

In moments like these, the key is to casually glance around and make sure everyone else is as confused/frustrated as you are. The people directly in front of and behind me had tickets that said "Geneva," so it couldn't have been just me. I had already stuffed my book deep into my one piece of hand luggage, so there wasn't a lot to do other than sit on the floor, watching the other people in line get agitated. Then I reminded myself that this inconvenience was the result of having a long spring break and the money to travel--nothing like a good dose of self-degradation to put some perspective on first-world problems. Oh, and the guy in line behind me somehow lost his passport.

Once on the plane, the captain announced that there was a French transportation strike prohibiting us from flying over French airspace, meaning the plane was forbidden to leave until ten past noon. My thoughts as we taxied around: "Crap. I'm never getting to Switzerland."

Two hours later, I was in Switzerland.

 

You know how you can visit a place you've never been and feel like you've belonged there all your life? That was Switzerland. I grew up far away from mountains...and oceans...lakes, kinda...okay, most natural landforms...so I don't know what it is exactly that is so inviting, so home-like about a mountainscape. All I know is that when I think about mountains, I am all ready to part my hair into two braids and go frolicking about with some goats.

And the Alps (the pre-Alps, really) were more mountainy than any mountain I've seen before. The mountains I've known have only been foothills to mountains I could see from L'Abri. For five days, there was an Alp staring down through my bedroom window, I slept in a wooden-walled cabin room that reminded me of camp, and it felt like home.

The village bells ring every fifteen minutes.

L'Abri, founded by Francis Schaeffer in the 1950s, isn't really a retreat center. It's more like a mountainside study center where you live and participate in the community--with some who've stayed all term, some just for a week. The Schaeffers' intent was to create a place to discuss life and Christ and the world--without necessarily trying to fit ideas into the narrow confines of cultural Christianity. A place to ask questions without being made to feel that the questions are stupid. A place where everyone cooks and cleans and sells their twice-a-week showers for extra pocket change.

We sat in the living room at night, talking about heaven and hell and why they even matter right now. Some were so certain; others, so uncertain, yet no one was panicking over the questions, trying to smother them with the right answers. The planes of thought were cutting through one another at odd angles. No one's thoughts matched exactly, in background, in interpretation. Yet a thing I love about God and brains is that He'll use one person's thoughts to pry open the closed spaces in another's. Everyone is teacher and disciple, everyone is stepping forward together. It's nothing profound, really, but it was striking in its distinct visibility at L'Abri. At, I suppose, any place where people are willing to be real.

I was scraping crust off the lip of a bug-killer bottle during daily chores when another student said, "You have thirty minutes for tea break. We work hard here, but we also rest well." And that was L'Abri: work and rest, a beautiful blend. I attended two different lectures and two "formal" lunches (wherein someone poses a theological question and we spend the meal discussing it), read in the basement of the Farel House library, and watched fog swallow up the Alps. For as much as I enjoy walking my feet off in new places to get to all the "cultural attractions," my favorite sort of vacation is one where I can wander and taste the nature. To have time scheduled into the day specifically for reading and study--the life ideal. If I'd known it was going to be so wonderful, I'd have stayed a few extra days. "You'll just have to come back again," they kept telling me.

I hope so.

Thursday was our free day--no lectures, no chores, sack lunches in the fridge. Someone suggested I check out Montreux, just down the hill. ("Just" includes a bus ticket for the horrifying sum of 6.40, a train ticket, and multiple occasions requiring French. In which I know three phrases, and I'm not sure about the third.)

Montreux sits along Lac Léman, seamed in by mountains. But the flowers! Oh, gosh, the flowers. They edged the lakeshore in precise color schemes and patterns, a gardener's love exploding in the hues. First-grade me erupted at the sight of all those flowers (by this, I'm referencing the six-year-old Shar who, after reading a story about Native American naming techniques, dubbed herself "Rainbow-in-the-Mist" and asked her parents about moving into an earthlodge). I might have gone a little overboard with the whole flower-love thing, but seriously: GIANT BRIGHT POPPIES. That is all it will take to convince me to miss a flight and conveniently stay in Switzerland forever.

I can't fail to mention my travel buddy here, but lest he ever develop an interest in libel cases, let's just call him "Bill." Bill left L'Abri a few days early because he hated the two-shower-a-week rule (hey, water's expensive in the mountains!), and also because he hated chores. To be fair, Bill paid 4 francs for a water bottle and 9 francs for a storage locker so he could wander Montreux with me, and he never said a word about the fact that I was photographing every single flower I passed. But poor Bill had two weeks left for sight-seeing in Switzerland, and with the way he spitefully clutched that 4-franc water, I sure hope his nerves lasted the rest of the journey.

We spent some time at the Chateau de Chillon, a fortress on the water which apparently inspired some of Lord Byron's tales. (His name is carved in the dungeon, though I forgot to look for it.) Most of the displays inside were about torture chambers and witchcraft--so, overall, an inspiring and uplifting tour. Especially when accompanied by Bill asking (twenty thousand times), "I don't know. Is this worth taking a picture of? It's picture-worthy, right? I mean, you'd take a picture of it, right?" Bill. You have a digital camera.


Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but I'm kinda busy over here, taking ten thousand flower pictures.

By Friday, the temptation to skip my flight was peaking. The supervisor of Chalet Bellevue only furthered the desire when she mentioned, "We've got a place called the Eagle's Nest--it's as high as one and just as comfortable. I think the snow would probably come in, but we could get you a few extra blankets." I told her to look out for crusty hitchhikers breaking through the woods in the next month or two. I'd be the tall, shabby one.

I spent my last L'Abri day reading C.S. Lewis on a tree stump near a waterfall.

Switzerland is my new favorite place in Europe, perhaps in all of the world. So if I disappear mysteriously one of these days, you'll know where to find me. I'll be the tall, shabby one in the Eagle's Nest, repeating three French phrases over and over. Even if I'm not sure about the third one.

The Interchange of Hello and Goodbye

Yesterday was a half day of school. Thank goodness. If it'd been a full day, I think the middle schoolers would've been bruised irreparably with the way they were flinging themselves into each other. The third quarter started January 10th and just ended, which explains why everyone is now in the process of becoming a rabid wolf.

Actually, okay, not everyone was rabid. My 7th grade girls flocked to the bookshelf, asking which books they should take home over the break. It filled my little heart with sunshine, the way they recommended titles to one another: Tuck Everlasting, When You Reach Me, Turtle in Paradise. It was mostly boys that were foaming at the mouth to get out of there, and the crowning glory was a dog toy flying out the window.

It was the last day for two of my students, brothers who've been at our school for seven years, now relocating due to business on the other side of Madrid. The older brother walked around in a state of disbelief all week. When his female classmates were chattering away before Thursday's vocab quiz, he pounded his fist on the desk as he's been accustomed to doing this year when the girls get to be too much. "Guys, be quiet! This is my last vocab quiz!" And then his face registered seven years of sadness as he understood what he'd said.

We stood in the hallway yesterday, saying goodbye to the high school kids who are taking a spring break missions trip to Moldova, and I noticed him in the doorway, very still. He was looking around the circle at the goodbyers, looking at the school's front gate, and I heard him say softly to himself, "Wow. Seven years."

---

A month ago, we did a short-term class week, offering assorted electives instead of our regularly schedule academia. The rest of Caitlin's and my class had gone downstairs, having been effectively bleach-splattered during a t-shirt art project, but I stayed outside with one of the girls; she needed to fabric paint her shirt still. We talked about how next year's 8th grade class will shrink a little and then grow: kids going to the States on home assignment, kids coming back again. She and one of her best friends will both be gone first semester--one to California, one to Phoenix.

"What do you think?" I asked. "Do you want to live in the States one day, or do you think you'll come back to Europe?"

"Um, probably I'll go to college in the States, and then I'll just stay there."

"Yeah? It's hard to go back and forth, isn't it?"

"Yeah. You have to say goodbye a lot. But you get to see people again. But it's hard."

"Do you think you'd ever want your kids to experience this kind of life? I mean, you get to see and do so many things most kids never will! If you have a family, do you think you'd like for them to live the way you do, or would you rather belong to one place?"

She thought about that for only three seconds. "Stay in one place. Otherwise it's too sad."

I guess I wasn't expecting that. Maybe I was. My kids have seen stuff that every American kid grows up dreaming about: They saw the Eiffel Tower in kindergarten. They've been camping in Italy. They are used to classmates that appear and vanish yearly, and if the all-school chapel service is held entirely in Spanish, their parents aren't going to write nasty notes to the administration.

They say goodbye every year. Teachers. Classmates. Family members who pass away while they're in different countries. Pets. Go away for just a few months, and in that time, everything changes. I have had to say goodbye to seven different students this year. That's been enough. I've only been here for ten months. I hardly know.

I guess they build resilience and they learn to say goodbye and probably, secretly, some of them build little shelters around their hearts to keep out anything that might hurt too much later when it has to leave.

The 7th grade girls walked out the door toward spring break after giving me hugs and saying, "We'll miss you!" And though my first response was to laugh and say, "Girls, it's only a week," I realized that this is part of the life, and you have to tell people what you think of them while you're with them, because it all goes too fast, and if you don't say it now, the chance is over. So I hugged them back and said, "I'll miss you, too," because I will, and because they need to know, and because we'll all grow up and change and separate soon enough, and because behind those words we're all saying more; we're saying I love you and I care and In this moment, you are my life.

It's finally spring.

It's finally raining.

In other news...

Laughing Boy: "I feel like a fat potato!"

and

Laughing Boy: "It's against my human race!"
Boy 2: "You mean nature?"

and

Boy with pillow between his legs, taking a nosedive into the beanbag chairs: "I'm a wizard!"

and

My students have a weird schedule today, so they've got a free period with me this hour. Right now, they're all gathered in a secret meeting at the front of the room, discussing one of my 7th graders neighbor-watching habits. I just learned that "during every awkward silence, a baby monkey is born!"

North and South

The edges of Spain carry a hundred cultures between them.

I live in the middle, in Madrid, in medieval remnants. The buildings are stocky; the earth is dry. Madrid is filled with the ghosts of kings, frozen in stone and bronze statues, with old whispers of horse hooves clip-clopping on cobblestone. It is castles and crypts and artisans who picked just the perfect flat rock to fit next to thousands of other flat rocks lining the steps that would point toward a garden that tourists, six hundred years later, would pay 10€ to walk over, never noticing quite how the grit and the gravel fit together so tightly.

The last time I remember rain in Madrid, it was night, it fell only for minutes, I was still not sleeping well. October, maybe. Madrid sees wisps of gray clouds and prays for them to fill the reservoirs; Camarma has been rationing water off and on because it is brown, dusty, dry here. Here in the land of the kings.

At the end of Christmas vacation, I bought a train ticket to Málaga, down on Spain's southern tip. Katrina was patient with me as I pointed out the orange trees on every corner, snapped pictures of water and palm trees and blooming flowers. Flowers! In January! From the top of a steep cobblestone hike, we thought we spied Morocco peeking over the edge of the Mediterranean.

Andalucía, the southernmost region of Spain, is the Spain you see on postcards and travel brochures. The tropical Spain, the Moroccan Spain. The Moors rounded the corners of their windows, their doorways. Stars are interwoven in the woodworking. It is warmer there, still ancient, but of a different flavor. You don't sense the merchants and lords and ladies on horseback as much. They are women in head coverings, stirring spices into Moroccan soup--as far from Madrid as you can get, with its bland sauces. You taste fruit and color; you are gathered into rhythm and unfurled into Arabic script, and it is just as much like Spain as you'd ever imagined.

During February's winter break, Sarah, Caitlin, and I rented a cheap hostel room in Sevilla, also part of Andalucía. We had lumpy mattresses and a roommate who asked Caitlin to borrow her deodorant at 7am, but other than that, Sevilla smelled like spring.

Sevilla is Christopher Columbus' burial site, a marriage of Gothic and Moorish, an Islamic mosque turned Catholic cathedral, an intricate carving stamped with a Spanish coat-of-arms. It is so many different kinds of history linking together in patterns that don't match and won't match and somehow still do match.

(Actually, the mosque-cathedral is in Córdoba, which is north of Sevilla. But still in Andalucía.)

Sevilla is flamenco, bullfights, trees so loaded with oranges that they're dropping to the ground in buckets, too sour to eat. We wandered the Alcazar gardens for hours, cheeks burning in February sun, and the inside of the palace was a galaxy of carving, woodwork, and keyhole doors, just dripping with magic. I started making plans just then to marry one of Europe's remaining 39 single princes, so as to move into Alcazar (a summer home, of course). And we hadn't even seen Plaza de España yet.

The fence is ceramic. CERAMIC. The fence is ceramic, the plaza has a moat around it, and we were surrounded by sour orange trees. In all of Spain, Sevilla is my favorite, like a rainbow hand-wrung over summer sky. Even when our train tickets say "Coche 9" and there are only five cars.

But if you should go north, which we did two weekends ago just because we could, Spain will be new again. On the northern coast, Spain reaches into the Bay of Biscay for British flavor. Bilbao felt how I imagine Ireland to feel: wet, wistfully lush, comfortably dreary. We slept across the street from the ocean, which was too cold for anything but fishing clam shells out of the sand, and we walked toward windmills on green cliffs while the wind grabbed our hair by the fistfuls and pulled straight up.

Bilbao is too modern for Madrid, too chilly for Sevilla, too northern-European to be Spain, and yet...it's Spain. It's all Spain, all these wonderful handfuls of mismatched foliage sprinkled across a giant peninsula that's at once dry and drenched. God is pressed into every inch of it, and you can see his tender care in the raindrops that splatter across the Basque Country, just as evident as it is in the apple blossoms that sway over dust clouds as I look out my classroom window. He is here in breeze and dust and drought, and I cannot help but fall in love with this country I never expected to live in, on a continent I was never that interested in, visiting cities I'd never thought about.

But it's so full and it's so beautiful, and He comes squeezing out of the middle of everything, and sometimes I wonder if I could explode from trying to take it all in.

Ides of March, indeed

One of the seventh graders asked me this morning if he could pinch everyone else, since he was the only one wearing green.

"It's not St. Patrick's Day yet, kiddo," I told him. "But it is the Ides of March!"

"What's that?"

I asked if anyone knew the story of Julius Caesar, of what happened to him in the fateful month of March. Together, we determined that it was, indeed, not St. Patrick's day today. Instead, it's a day of strange commemoration, a day in which we need to make sure our friends are truly our friends so they don't stab us to death in the town square.

There are such good life lessons in literature.

Dar Miedo

She came in crying and began to bite me with her words. "I don't know what you did with my sons this year, but they have not learned anything! I don't even want to send them to your class next year because you put them so far behind this year!"

I broke down crying, couldn't even answer. She was probably right.

---

This is what I woke up to Thursday morning: grasping at wisps of a dream. The mother (one of the nicest, funniest parents I've met in Spain) of my two boys who recently went back to the States, wagging her finger in my dreamself's face. It was awful.

Most of my life's fears and conflicts are theoretical, internal. I've never had a parent yell at me, nor a student. I've never been told my administration or fellow teachers that I'm clueless and am screwing up the next generation of comma-users. (In fact, my coworkers are so ridiculously affirming and gracious that it's unreal.) But I have this deep-seated fear that I'm not doing enough, can never do enough, can't be a good enough teacher, can't teach them enough. After Christmas break, I felt myself recovering from the weight of responsibility, thanks to a million good people who reminded me that my role is only a small part of thirteen years of education: not to be underestimated, for sure, but not to be overestimated, either.

Yet, I'm still a first-year teacher, and I suppose we're all prone to relapse.

---

Last night, I was jogging home from a friend's house. ("Jogging" is the loosest possible definition here. It was more like a penguin shuffle, since my hands were in my pockets to keep them warm.) The French teacher came driving by, with the older sister of one of my 8th graders in her backseat.

"I've been wanting to meet you!" big sister exclaimed as I crawled into the passenger seat. "My brother just loves English class! He comes home every day and tells us stories about stuff that happened in class, and how funny you are. He showed me his RVs, too."

(RV = Rules Violation. This kid is so polite and conscientious that he couldn't earn an RV if he tried. But he asked me to write him up one day, and I did. The infractions included "Imitating a seal" and "Calling for human justice." He was super-stoked to show his dad.)

"Aww, that's really nice," I answered, feeling a little warmer.

"He always talks about how much fun you have in class. 'And then we fell apart laughing.' That's how he describes it: fell apart laughing."

"Mostly him. All I have to do is say, 'Good morning,' and he's laughing on the floor!"

"Well, he's crazy about you. We're always hearing about English class. It's so nice to finally meet you."

---

As I write this, he and my 8th grade girl are sitting on beanbags, on opposite sides of the room, competing to see who will finish Anne Frank first. Every ten minutes or so, he'll peek over the desks and call, "What page are you on now? Seriously? Crikey! How do you read so fast?!"

Sometimes I wonder how much good it does, these simple things like beanbags and reading time, and I have to remember: Don't overestimate.

And don't underestimate, either.

A Collection of Quotes, Old and New

8th grader, before Christmas break

Him: "Do I need to keep these papers?"
Me: "Well, not unless you really want to."
"But I don't need them for the final, right?"
"Nope. Your project is your final."
"I'm gonna burn them!"
"You're going to make a Christmas bonfire with your papers?"
"Yes! They will warm me!"
"Ah, first they warmed your brain, and now they'll warm your body."
He pauses. "I'm not so sure about that first one." 

A few minutes pass. He returns.

"Am I going to need this?" He holds up a book report book cover.
"Well, are you the kind of person who likes to hang onto things for memories?"
Thoughtful pause. "You know, in a few years, this could be worth a couple million."

---

Same Boy: "I don't know what to write about. I don't know what the author was trying to say."

Me: "Well, pick on aspect of what she's talking about. Like Sameness. What are some problems that might occur if everyone was the same? Imagine if every boy in this school had the same name as you, looked exactly the same as you."

Boy: "It'd be a good-looking school!"

---

After I mentioned that I couldn't leave them unsupervised in origami class

Boy 1: "It's okay, Ms. Carlson. You can leave, and we'll just fold."
Leprechaun: "Each other!"

---

When a hundred unattached grammar pages fell out of my book

Leprechaun: "These books are really old!"
Me: "They're not so old. They're only from...1990."
Leprechaun: "Our textbook is 21! It could get married if it found a nice vocab book!"

---

During a particularly hungry morning

Boy 1: "We should put a huge bookshelf in here--to put food on!"
Leprechaun: "A fridge?"

---

As I walked up the stairs, holding a piece of cake from another staff member's birthday surprise
Boy 1: "It's your birthday?"
Leprechaun: "Happy birthday! He'll give you a hug, and I'll hold your cake!"

---

As I explained that their usernames for the bibliography-generating site should probably just be their first and last names, so they're easier to remember

Leprechaun: "Can I be prettypinkprincess?"
Boy: "Can I be handsomeunicorn?!"

Welcome to March, courtesy of eDreams

First, they wouldn't let me book the plane tickets, so I had to call the credit card company and assure them that it's really me making those fraudulent charges. That was going well, until we got to the part where the travel agency charged me three times for service fees on a reservation that never actually went through.

So I called them. "My reservation is still pending, but you charged me the service fees anyway. Is there a way I can get that refunded?"

"What is your reservation number?"

"I was not given one, since the reservation is still pending."

"Miss, you wait. You have to wait." And then, happy, flighty music. Call waiting. Okay, so she was being literal. After a minute of looping synthesizer: "Miss, do you have your confirmation number?"

Was she giving me time to find my non-existent reservation number? I mentioned again that I had none and that the reservation was still pending. And added this: "I am not wondering about the reservation but about the three credit card charges."

So she asked for my email address, found the reservation, and informed me that it was still pending. Yes, thank you. Now, about the charges?

"Miss, you need to wait. Your reservation confirmation will be there. You just need to wait."

"No, I understand that. I am not calling about the pending reservation. I am calling because I was charged for three service fees on that reservation."

"You have to wait! Just wait."

"What about the--"

"Just wait. Your reservation confirmation will be in your email."

"I understand that. I am not calling about my reservation. I am calling about the three service charges I got while trying to make that reservation. My bank is telling me that you charged me three times for using your site, even though the reservation is pending."

"You need to wait. Your reservation will be confirmed."

"I. Understand. That. Will the extra charges be able to be refunded?"

"You need to wait. They take money out, put it out, take it out again."

Um, what?! "Um, what?"

"They take it out, put it in, take it out, put it in. You have to wait."

"So...I need to wait to see if I have really gotten charged or not?"

"You need to wait. Your reservation will be there in twelve hours."

"I believe my reservation was cancelled, so I am actually wondering about the service fees and whether they can be refunded."

"Take it out, put it in. You need to wait, Miss. Your reservation will be there."

Well, thanks for that fabulous customer service. There comes a point when I need to be more bold and just hang up the phone, but I hate conflict and always end up exceeding that point by ten minutes. I finally just thanked her, hung up, and redialed--this time, reaching a man who was slightly more coherent. And then we all did the eDreams Hokey Pokey: You put the money in, you put the money out, you put the money in, and you call your bank again.

Well, it's funnier today than it was yesterday. So much can be solved by a good cry.