Don't Forget the Substitutes

I had to do a half day in 1st grade up the street. I felt like I could do it, I had alot of creek riding lately, alotta puppy time, still swimming even though it's getting the last sputtering October time coldish, my mom is weird but manageable. 

So I leave my regular life and go to where I have to act normal in front of other people and try and not cuss and do a responsible job.

There's a little quiet girl in this class named Vera. She's a mouse with short hair and big kind of malnourished eyes. She's not malnourished, she's just in the middle of her best years. Takes alot out of you. She shows me her wiggly tooth. I have to bend down like a giant looking at microscopic Jack on the beanstalk. She's the smallest bean. Her tooth is even tinier. I forget what it's like to be amazed by the world. Vera's showing me. Vera is such a weird name. Who looks at a newborn baby's face in the fresh hospital blanket and says yes. Let's call her Vera.

Then there's Luther. I think he was wearing girl's baby leggings. He still talks like he's an embryo. He shows me the meandering fish in their tank, it's blue and flowy. He explains with his big moon face  her doesn't like loud noises. Her likes quiet. Then he tells me her name is Cyan. Like the blue. His name seems like he'd grow up to be a beefy bouncer in a New England seaside rough neighborhood bar. But this Luther is a flower who grows in a monastery courtyard. No monks are even looking at him and he's the best one.

The teacher had to go to a wedding of a male cousin who gained a hundred pounds after his mom left his dad because she decided she might like women. I guess his mom's feelings for women translated into a bunch of quarter pounders with cheese for him. Anyway he was marrying some girl in Diamond Bar which sounds nicer than the traffic it takes to get there, and the teacher was kind of excited to see who his mother was bringing to the wedding. She had gotten married again. But not to a woman. Just a regular guy. So she's a liar. 

So the teacher leaves and the kids are cutting out pinatas and gluing frills on them which they also have to cut out. There are maybe 25 kids in the class and I want to hear every kid who tugs on me to tell me one of their secrets because everything a six year old says is never a waste of time. Even though I feel frail and every time they talk I lose one percent of my overall personal battery power. One kid hands me a book and says This is Shyla's book she got hit in the face with a ball. I have to act like I know what that means but I assume Shyla is at the nurse's office, so I tell another kid to put the book on Shyla's desk since I don't know where it is. There are two boys I would marry without even asking for my parents' blessing, Mauricio and Josecruz. I hope they actually marry each other, they could open a mechanic shop and it would be the cleanest place stocked with kind hard workers. They are eager, gentle and have very concise haircuts and a gentle cheek. I'm sure they have good moms. You can see it through their skin.

A kid I wish would fall into a tractor and die is Isaiah. I wish in fact that he is run over by a combine before he falls into the tractor. He takes the lid off the trashcan and wears it as a hat. He doesn't walk anywhere, he hurls himself. He can't walk a straight line without slamming into someone and then saying he never did it. There is also Lucas who is twice the size of all the other kids in the room, like God was pinching off kids making them like vienna sausage size and then slammed his thumb with a hammer and it swelled up to earth sized and he just shrugged and made that one Lucas. He's not fat, he's just huge and his handwriting is terrible. It's like he's writing with his hands taped together AND in oven mitts.

The deepest sorrow is Simeon, who keeps asking me can you help me cut this when I'm helping another kid with something else and I know I shouldn't be helping him cut, because cutting is what he's learning and also we don't need to make a perfect pinata, we just have to make a pinata by cutting the best you can. He asks me a few times and I tell him he can do it and I see that this isn't going to end well and then yep after a minute he THROWS the scissors and I admonish him and then he THROWS the scissors again almost hitting Amanda in the face which wouldn't be so bad because Amanda is going to be working at her husband's vending machine company eventually. But Simeon COULD NOT HANDLE CUTTING THE PINATA and he starts wailing. I act angry and tell him we can't throw scissors and I usher him to a side table and say put your head down and he cries so long he cries an ocean and I say in my mind

I feel the same way Simeon

We are one

Pinatas are the worst

He cries until ten minutes before the bell rings. I admire his commitment to feeling every inch of anguish. Other kids like Large Lucas who have earphones on while they do their computer on the chromebook at their desk at full volume in their ears, Lucas pulls one earphone off and says it's hard to do this when he's crying so loud and I just look at him like yeah. That's life buddy

Then Charlotte and Athena are so excited because they get to make a one second announcement over the loudspeaker in the office and I forget what that's like, or I miss having the kids little when I felt all the things they felt, when they got to be special and do a fun thing in school where they were in charge of something. Like Eli tells me (he looks like a blonde keebler elf) he explains the named popsicle sticks in the paper pockets on the wall and how when someone is absent from the job chart then the people who are substitutes get to do their job so don't forget the substitutes he says cause we get to do any  job 

I forget what it's like to be 6 so I am glad that Vera and Luther and Mauricio try to nudge me back on the boat. They are throwing me a heavy rope and it's kind of scratchy. It will take the whole class to pull me in and I'm a pretty good swimmer. Plus I've been swimming the other way. Just to stay alive.

I leave with two free apples and a package of tea and a piece of pizza from the teacher's cultural awareness snack lunch. I leave with their faces and their heads coming up to my bellybutton and I go back to my life on the couch with my mom edging away from the earth over there in her chair and all alone. Dementia leaves you stranded while holding on, or is that life, just some days are light and some days are sorrow. Two hours with kids is better if it's just one hour maybe at this point. My saturation level is pretty immediate, 25 energetic faces are a kick in the pants to someone who shares most days with Gunsmoke and dementia. I give all I have. 

You know when you feel like it's just not enough.

So I look at farmhouses in Maine and I go outside to pet the horses and I reassemble myself back into my regular job here at home, and I am thankful for teachers who don't have to go to weddings of fat traumatized cousins very often since I feel full just doing this.  

But I am grateful for Vera and Luther, and their eyes looking up at me.