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?

---

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

Mother Plucker

Mother Plucker

This is the name of one of the many absurdly and equally inventive, caloric and delicious donut offerings at “Gourdough’s - Big. Fat. Donuts.” here in Austin, Texas.

I personally opted for their Miss Shortcake this morning, a golden-orb-fried-miracle dolloped in perfectly balanced cream cheese frosting and Texas-red strawberries.

It is important to note that this came after a morning of free paddle boarding in Lady Bird Lake, a misnomer, since it’s really a river.

And what a river!

Standing in the middle of this green river, surrounded by trees the lushest I have seen since I lived in Wales, in the middle of the fastest growing city in America. 158 people move here each day. 

Skyscrapers rising in a rush behind me.

Other early Sunday morning revelers surround me, rowing and paddling and kayaking and running with their dogs, making the most of this rare wet grey summer morning, although they’d probably have come out anyway, as Austinites seem to take pride in ignoring excruciating weather.

Freeways loop and cross over our heads and the river and her trees. Never have I seen concrete and bark and water look so natural and peaceful side by side.

My friend Emily, a biologist and devotee of rivers far and wide, found turtles sunbathing on the banks. I encountered a father and his toddler toe-head daughter perched on the front of his yellow kayak, paddling slowly down the river.

The park also has trails along the river and through the entirety of the city for miles, green and deep and meandering.

We found a bench in a bend in the river amid the forest path. And then we got the fluffiest, softest donuts in a parking lot across the river.

I think these bits and pieces are reasons why the saying “Don’t mess with Texas” is true afterall.

Not because of the guns or vigilantes or heat or holy rollers. But because of the equally extreme magic that can be found in parking lots and holes in the wall and free, quiet paths along the water. It’s hard to argue with free rivers and donuts in parking lots on a Sunday morning.

I feel this fried goodness seeping into my staunchly Californian veins, the body that always remembers the direction of the Pacific. And it scares me. I could get used to big clouds and big heaping portions and big blue skies and even a sun that feels larger than before.

Did I mention that from my bed you can see the Capitol building, the Don’t-mess-with-Texas one that is the only state Capitol building to say f@#$ you to the national Capitol by being taller? I was doing lesson plans on my bed looking at the dome while Wendy Davis redefined what “Don’t Mess With Texas” means earlier this week in the coolest filibuster ever. When have filibustering and pink running shoes ever gone together before?

I wish I had been there, but my kids! Grading and lesson plans on you-name-it . . .

And on Friday night, after I gorged on forementioned tortilla chips and nutella, I got in my friend’s Jeep and drove with her and a bunch of our friends to San Antonio.

We saw the Alamo and the river walk, but the true reason for our 3-hour roundtrip driving adventure in an air conditioning-less car was to go to Helotes outside the city proper to listen to Green River Ordinance at the John T. Floore Country Store.

I agreed to go along, because why not? Little did I know that this was the honky tonk bar immortalized in Willie Nelson’s song “Shotgun Willie,” considered his ‘birth place’ and frequented by Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, and Lyle Lovett among many others. I trusted my wonderful new friend Emily’s music taste and her enthusiasm for this band I had never heard of.

And anyway, who doesn’t want to drive on a highway in Texas with new friends one summer Friday night after a long week, bulleting into the impossibly green countryside to hear beautiful music for the first time?

Speaking of the lush countryside, it brought me back to driving in Uganda three summers ago. Except for the sprawling, excessive car dealerships every few miles or so, they look so similar, green and shrubby and flat and extending far, far, far.

What I found in Helotes was so real it was unreal. I landed in Footloose, which I had always assumed was a Hollywood exaggeration. But the metal bull sculpture outside the liquor store and the sign proclaiming the “World’s Best Homemade Tamales Bread Sausage Country Butter Eggs Everything Nearly” and the girls walking in the middle of the street under the live oaks in short jean shorts and cowgirl boots were inarguably real.

Inside, the ceiling of the John T. Floor Country Store is decorated in sixty years of anti-taxation signs, hanging cowboy boots and twinkly lights.

For twenty bucks, five of us devoured platters of brisket, pulled pork, bread, pickles, sausage and pork tamales outside on picnic tables near live oak trees and a stage painted with the Texas flag.

The wonderful-wonderful band started (look them up!) and we sipped margaritas in plastic cups as they dedicated songs to the Marines and talked of singing to them at a BBQ for 1500 on a naval ship near Bahrain. A marine in the audience introduced himself and everyone cheered, hollering America-proud slogans I had never heard before. And perhaps I won’t ever hear again, which says a lot since I’m pretty fond of this country as liberal Californians go.

After the magical-magical music stopped, we went outside and watched taut, tan men in tight, white t-shirts, Wrangler jeans, and cowboy boots approach girls in boots and dresses with the sleeves pulled down over their shoulders. They talked and mingled as they sat on picnic tables in gendered clusters. Some spat chewing tobacco into empty plastic margarita cups.

The next band started with a song about women going down on men in fields all night long: “We got a spot beneath a cottonwood tree/And she knows what she's gonna do to me.”

The crowd cheered. We left.

We drove back to Austin and talked about our gods. The entire time it was over 100 degrees. And I came home and went to bed in my 70 degree room.

These are just bits and pieces of my weekend. Just bits and pieces of Texas. My descriptions feel acutely incompetent, but they are all I have to offer you to get a taste of this place.

Moral of the story: Don’t mess with Texas, Mother Plucker!

ps- I forgot to mention what the Mother Plucker involves! Spicy fried chicken smothered in honey butter. . . on top of a freshly fried donut.

Salty Revelations

Salty Revelations

Oh boy.

I think I might have jinxed my students with yesterday’s blissful posting.

It turns out that every 12-year-old soul-puppy-dog-angel has an inner hyena that tends to be brought out by 106 degree weather.

I’m not kidding: 12 year olds capable of imagining social welfare vending machines for high-density homeless areas stocked full of water, medication, blankets and non-perishable food on the first day of class are also capable of stealing purple markers from each other, calling teachers monstrous expletives, and doing some hard core public footsy in the front row of your lesson on the respiratory system.

All of this probably sounds to you like not a big deal, the typical junior high fare. I know. I saw much worse in my own middle school days. I should not have been so naïve, bracing myself for these moments from the beginning.

But I did. And then they showed up, smart and eager and gentle and strong all at the same time, little grown-ups already jaded and yet hopeful still.

And all of my preparatory anticipation of the certain lows vanished in their giggles about the word ‘bowels’ and in their awe that a Mexican man, someone who looks like them, invented the color television.

In such wonder, it is hard to remember the pettiness that exists side by side with revelation. Most of the time, I think our comprehension of them depends on the other, in this co-dependent, two-sided-coin miracle of human resilience.

I hope I feel that way again tomorrow.

 p.s. - This revelation led me in a moment of post-work exasperation to discover the joy of nutella on salty tortilla chips. Forget the pretzels. This will change your life.

What Wise Old Women Know

What Wise Old Women Know

Become a teacher of 12 year olds, and you will finally understand what it feels like to be Taylor Swift.

They will braid your hair by the fountain at pick-up, early in the morning, coming from every corner of the city to learn, yawning but braiding intricately and laughing anyway, while you wait for the other learners who travel even further to get to you.

You will think your outfit is normal, not fit for the Celebrity theme of the day, satisfied with your spirited contribution of the leopard print toga and your dark eye shadow-whiskers, the ones that wouldn’t come off and smeared all over your pillow case, the day before on Animal Day.

But that’s not enough for them. They will look at you early in the morning light of Texas you are so unaccustomed to, already close to 90 degrees, and they will find the Taylor Swift within you.

They’ll braid your hair more intricately and gently and impossibly than anyone ever has, their small hands like prehistoric creatures in rapturous flight. They’ll touch your thick, curly hair and you’ll explain your Jewish heritage.

They don’t care that you aren’t wearing red lipstick. Or that you can’t sing. Or that you are 5’2” tall and far from glamorous, instead groggy and thinking about how to best explain the structure of bone the next day with cups, garbage bags and Twizzlers.

They do not notice the pizza grease stain on your long, grey Gap skirt, the one you wear to Orthodox sites and teaching because it is that modest. And you forget about it too, lost in their joy of finding Taylor Swift and asking for her autograph.

Later at lunch, when it is time for all the more obviously dressed-up teachers to take a picture, you do not join them. You have forgotten after a lesson on bowels and bronchi that you are, in fact, after all, although you didn’t know it, the one and only Taylor Swift.

They notice. You do not realize this at the time, but they do.

Right before dismissal, the officially dressed-up teachers go up to the stage at the front of the auditorium to introduce their celebrity selves. At first you do not join them, but then again, you cannot argue with twenty 12 year olds.

Life-lesson learned: Don’t even bother. They are more often right than wrong anyway.

So you go up to join the mass of impressively costumed colleagues. You wait ‘til the end to announce your Taylor-ness. Finally, when you do, you ramble on about how you did not intend to be Taylor Swift, but that your kids showed you that, in fact, you were Taylor all along.

At this, two of your favorite kids smack their foreheads and shake their heads side to side with the vigor of Michael Jackson back-up dancers, horrified that you let the world know you were not always the one and only Taylor Swift.

They do not look like 12 year old Bieber fans; They look like perfectly wise old women, the kind you saw when you yourself were also 12, when you lived in Italy and visited Sicily, the ones who sold fish out by the church, their ancient faces poised against marble and newspaper, gold crosses and black dresses and stockings, talking, talking, talking, shaking and nodding, coming closer to eternity than you have ever known. They shake their heads as they discuss their grandson’s inability to marry, and they keep the whole world pinned up and clean like fresh laundry.

Your beautiful girls shake and smack, shake and smack. You know they are thinking, How could she be so stupid!

They do not yet know that even more than being their Taylor Swift, you love being their Ms. Hannah.

In fact, you have never loved your name so much as now, carried by their soft voices in a caramel chorus.

You have revealed to the world you are Ms. Hannah, not Taylor, but they cheer anyway. And as you descend the stage and move back to join them, their Ms. Hannah! How could you! is perhaps the most beautiful thing you have ever heard.