p.s.

p.s. - There is one detail from the more expected glories of the evening I just can't leave out: The bathroom stalls don't have doors. Instead, you pee behind a billowing Texas or American flag. I know it's intended patriotically (the joint represented the demographics of any Republican national convention since 1960) but the irony is sweet. Is shitting in such close proximity to the stars and stripes perjury? Or is it a true-blue American act to unfurl your bowels with the sign of the Republic in your face? Let's also not forget that Texas likes to play it safe, putting her best die-hard, patriotic foot forward while still preparing for mutinous succession and considering itself its own nation, on to itself, with its own "national beer of Texas." Food for thought! Good night/morning for real this time, y'all!

Instead, picture this.

Instead, picture this.

It’s funny.

It’s never the things that I most look forward to that I want to write about, even those moments that fulfill and even exceed expectations, the ones you turn over and over again in your head, rough rock turning to skipping stones.

Instead, it’s those extraordinary moments that catch you by surprise, when you slurp air in real fast and you get hiccups that last longer than that singular, ordinary flash of magic.

Tonight, I could tell you about dancing in this dream-come-true-obsessive-list-making-tourist kind of way in THE honky-tonk bar of America, of Bourbon sweet tea, and a dancing teacher like a borderline-anorexic, older Kristen Chenoweth on the brink of a nervous breakdown, full of sexists chirps about how “you must dance with the lady to your chest to make it clear that only one person is making the decisions, and it’s not her.”

But I won’t.

Instead, picture this.

It is minutes before your new friend’s birthday.

It is now pouring with a fury reminiscent of a protest, you’re just not sure for what. 

It started off as heat lightning flashes on the drive home, but soon scattered into the real thing, thunder and all.

You wait to wish your friend happy birthday before you leave. You miss your bed, the inevitable conclusion of any excursion, big or small.

But the rain! And the thunder! And the lightning! So furious the world looks white and silver as if consumed and smudged by smoke and dust.

So you look for a trash bag in the dark pantry of a strange co-op, rumored to be filled with unfazed rats, with a strange hipster boy with a perennial smirk. (Strange, as most Austin hipsters you have encountered at parties such as this are sweetie pies!)

You finally find a sturdy, durable black garbage bag, and burst a hole for your head through it, pulling it over your coral lace vava-voom dress like a penguin’s best suit.

You clonk forward in your lovingly tattered boots, into the dark, silver night.

You are alone on the street.

Ordinarily, you wouldn’t do this. You acutely know the risks.

But it is raining! And empty! And you are free! And alone!

The city is flooding, and gushing, as if just for you, as if it trusts you to see it a bare mess, and stay anyway.

It is ripping at the seams. It cannot contain itself.

And it’s warm!

You cannot remember the last time you walked in a warm night storm.

Perhaps summer arts camp when you were 15?

It doesn’t matter.

Every summer night and dream is contained in the beautiful tearing apart of this day’s dryness.

You are in a trash bag, in a lace party dress, in well-walked boots.

You are alone, and you are glorious.  

The Kids These Days

The Kids These Days

My kids crack my heart open every day, with the picks and jacks of their voices.

And a lot of the time, it’s the absence of those same voices that does it, that most haunting kind of absence that is dually a presence.

But they also put it back together again, everyday, with those same voices and forgiving, curious eyes.

Sometimes they cannot complete their homework because they lose their one and only pencil on the bus, or they have to call the police to report things I have never seen.

But they show up anyway.

They show up, and they ask questions, and they laugh, and they smile, and they learn despite the fact that they are 12 and they already have to carry the world.

No one asked them if they could bear it. But they do.

They enjoy scavenger hunts, and scarf down ham sandwiches and Oreos and apple juice boxes from brown paper bags.

I am never bored when I am with them, and yet this work could not be more diametrically opposed to my life at college.

At school, my life is for myself alone.

My learning is for me.

The tasks at hand usually involve identifying and unraveling the most challenging and paradoxical interpretative problems I can find.

It’s never about the main idea, what the author meant. No one is ever given the benefit of the doubt. It’s always intricate, and daring, and wild, and fancy, and blind-siding.

Intellectual masturbation in a mirror with other intellectual masturbators. And it’s exciting and flattering and plenty fun.

Here, pushing my cranium to its limits no longer centers my days.

Now it’s about pushing my heart to the brink of extinction, until it feels like it will burst irreparably.

But it doesn’t.

And you go forth.

It’s no longer about being the smartest, about dismantling and wielding structures of language and logic, about winning and everyone knowing it.

It’s about making kids come alive.

It’s about plucking every string and hitting all the notes in the orchestra that is every class, until they find their instrument of choice, their singular voice, and they can play it themselves, out loud, without fear, all night long.

And in doing so, you inadvertently find your own.

Saying yes. Saying no.

Because you can, because you must.

If not you, then who?

It’s no longer about finding that microscopic insight that breaks century-old arguments.

It’s about finding that core idea, the concept you stake everything on - a lesson, a day (how much more now you understand the value of just one day), the whole wide world - and not letting go of it until it has come alive inside each and every busy, buzzing, brimming head and heart.

It’s about the basics. It’s about building the world up with them, all hands and all bricks on deck.

It’s about that one kid’s smile in recognition of the world coming into light.

It’s about simple things.

Writing your name with pride. Saying it out loud to your peers. Raising your hand, the flag of your own sovereignty.

My humanity has never been as challenged as much by anything as now, by teaching.

By this rag-tag team of twelve year olds, with their love of Selena Gomez and The Hunger Games. By their questions about pandas, and their giggles and their rapture over the mechanics of a chicken wing from the grocery store.

By having to forgive and offer, forgive and offer, again and again. 

It doesn’t matter if they don’t do your homework. If they don’t listen. If they chew bubble gum. It does, but it really doesn’t.

They are here, and that is everything. They are here, and so are you. 

Some of their questions I know how to answer. What’s the difference between a negative and a positive feedback loop?

Some I do not know how to begin to answer. I never will. How and why and how did people let the world get so messed up?

They live this question every day, and I can only open the door and call on them to ask and live it with me. 

Just in Case

Just in Case

All I really want is for my Mom to come and pull me out of the water.[1] 

Her skin speckled and smelling of coconut cream. Her arms like the Jaws of Life, the girth of the old sycamore under which I am now treading water.

I am 21, no longer 6 or 7 or so, splashing about in our backyard pool.

If I want to get out of the water, I have to pull myself out. If I am tired or cold or hungry or weary or weak or thirsty, it’s on me.

There are no clean-laundry-smelling beach towels open wide to pat you down dry and roll you into a Mama-love-taco. She does not place your strawberry face on her chest. You are not rocked back and forth under the old oak in the late afternoon quiet.

Let me make myself clear. It’s not that she no longer wants to. She would, if she could. She would, if she knew.

She would even drive to the nearest CVS to find the exact coconut lotion, and rummage in the linens closet upon her return to find the exact checkered towel – the bright, colored one you loved so much, the favorite you fought your twin sister for every summer pool party and beach day, unrelenting, the one you’d scramble to find and hoard on weekend mornings in anticipation of the possibility of its usage, before putting on your tankini while everyone else put on theirs and lathered up.

For one, you cannot call her now because you are in a nature preserve for endangered species in the Hill Country. There is no cell reception.

You know she would want to if she could, if she knew, and that is why even if you could call her, you don’t.

What would you tell her?

For starters, that you have discovered something small-beautiful-big from a new friend.

It is this, that you cannot hear yourself think if and when you wear a wide, straw-brimmed hat under a waterfall in drought season. Enough water to pound out the constant stream of consciousness, but not too much to tip over the hat that creates the echoing boom orchestra with its water-catching rim, the only sound you have ever known more powerful than that of your thoughts playing tag and running away from each other and colliding.

It is bliss, and you’ve called other things that before. You would never have needed all that talking and medicine if you could just stand under a perfectly diminished waterfall in Texas Hill Country in drought season.

After that, you would probably mention the highway of light and dust particles erect in a column between the leaf cover of the Sycamore and the water where you float below.

This would lead you to mention last night’s fireworks, and does she remember that your favorite ones have always been those she once described as champagne bubbles, the simple golden floating kind, like phoenix ash and ember? Does she know you remember, and does she?

What a silly question.

Of course she does, even if it is no longer a conscious knowing, but the deep bedrock kind the grass forgets in its greenness.

Eleven-year old girls do not easily forget when their Mother paints their loves in the language of champagne, a feat almost more spectacular than the fireworks themselves.

If there was still time, you’d mention how odd it is that no one ever talks about the after-show of the after-works, the smoke tendrils like poky dahlias dried white in the flash of a drought, cosmic spider webs, the plumes of dirty street doves, the tumbleweeds of our sky.

Unplanned and unassuming, this show even more miraculous than the first.

Same goes for the rainbow metallic spectacle of the fireworks’ reflection in the city’s skyline towers, color rolling up and down like the belly of a magical snake called from its sleep to dance.

Even though you cannot call her now, and you wouldn’t if you could, because you chose to come here, as you must, and stay, as you must, and want to, as you should, you know she knows somewhere that you are trying to feel the beauty of the dripping water in this prehistoric oyster bed and all its green trees, on the inside, trying to suck it in through your belly poking out of the water as you float.

Just in case, you write it down to find out later for sure. When the moment has passed. Just in case.

ps- Was it the mother swallows overhead, ducking in and out, coming and going, again and again, to feed their babies, as I swam and floated for no one but me?

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[1] Isn’t it a travesty that not all Mom’s are capitalized, at least almost all?!?!