Teenage Preview

To get to our room, we have to walk through Henry's. In the beginning, I'd tiptoe to bed and shush Jared, not wanting to wake the baby. Recently, I've started leaning over his crib for a minute before crossing the threshold to bed. In doing this, I've discovered something. He's so big! My little boy looks huge and long and HUGE in his crib. Henry will be two in five days. I'm not sure how this is possible because I still remember rocking in the rocking chair at my grandma's house while the contractions rippled through my big belly. And now I can barely carry my 30+lb boy in my arms.

Henry's birthdays make me miss my parents. Even though last year we had a fun party for him and lots of family and friends came out to celebrate. And I'm sure this year we'll do something relaxed involving a dinosaur/bus/Elmo/gorilla cake and lots of cousins. And Henry will have a great time again and laugh and smear his face with frosting. And he'll be excited about being able to rip wrapping paper and having everyone clap for him. But on that day, I will miss them even more than on others.

I don't think I'm even missing them for him. To him, they are here every day. In photos on the fridge. In memories of visits. In the clothes he wears from Nona. In the rocks he got from Bumpie. They are just outside the door, coming in at any moment. He would be excited to see them, but he also knows them so well that he probably wouldn't be surprised. They are Nona and Bumpie and we talk about them all the time.

I miss them as my parents. Maybe his birthdays remind me that I am their child. Unlike Henry, I know the difference between Mom and Dad within driving distance and not. I know that when they are close, my appreciation of them ebbs and flows, but when we are apart, at times it feels more like an ocean with a tide perpetually out.

And now I have 32 more children in my life. Teenagers, slightly different from my toddler, but not much. And when they ask me for advice or for permission or just talk, my head first goes to, "As a parent..." but I don't say this to them. I just sympathize with their parents at home, worrying from a distance, not able to peak over their cribs at night.  And after especially long/difficult/tiring/frustrating/attitude-filled conversations with teenage girls, I call my parents and I wonder if after we hang up and they head to bed, do they whisper in the Alaska dark about all the long/difficult/tiring/frustrating/attitude-filled conversations they had with me and I imagine all the long/difficult/tiring/frustrating/attitude-filled conversations I will have with Henry. This is good practice, but I still may call in Nona and Bumpie, the big guns, to take on some of those future conversations for me.

Candsassles

I spent yesterday following Henry around a sunny beach while he sat, chest-deep, in low tide while giggling at clumpy wet sand sticking to his hands and attempted to confiscate other children's sand toys from beside carefully built castles. When the tide came in, his cousins and friends attempted to keep the water out. They dug a hole and used the sand to build a squat wall, barracaded by newly-bought boogie boards. One girl laid down in the water and held out her arms against a wave, shouting to her friends, "I can't hold it off!" in desperate panic. They scrambled and shoveled and shouted orders and updates at each other. Henry ran around dumping out their buckets and pushing over the rainbow-colored boards. He fell asleep in the car before it was even out of the parking lot.

Yesterday felt like long, prosey paragraphs, even while it was happening. Today was more like snippets of action.

Today:

• Henry greeted the girls with: "nǐ hǎo" (pronounced knee-how).
• I was quickly trained on how to drive the 14-passenger bus and am now an authorized driver for MCI.
• We organized three trips to Walmart and the students shopped like next week was Armageddon rather than the start of school.
• A girl brought us presents from China and then told me she had bad news for me, following with, "I was so excited to give you these things that I locked my keys in my room."
• A 17-year-old girl asked me why she couldn't go spend the weekend with a 24-year-old boy in Portland. (She wouldn't tell me his actual age, saying it was "a secret" but that's my best guess)
• A girl asked me to switch roommates and I had to explain why we didn't put her with her best friend.
• The godmother of the Brazlian girl scratched Darby's chin through the rip in our screen door, the rip caused by Henry's tiny fingers and big head.
• The cafeteria used their two-day old cookies to make ice cream sandwiches.
• A co-worker and I decided to go to Oliver Garden tomorrow after we drop the kids off at the mall. I'm pretty sure there's still the neverending pasta bowl. Yum.
• Henry learned the word sandcastles, although intially called them candsassles.
• I walked up and down three flights of stairs over fifteen times. Once while carrying a mini-fridge.

Dragonflies

Great Moose Lake (Hartland, ME)

Today was our all-staff training day. I've already gone to three-ish days of residence staff training and wasn't sure what this one was going to be. It ended being a greeting by the headmaster celebrating accomplishments; an introduction of all new staff with a round of a applause for each of us; a discussion on this year's school theme of "kindness" and what that means for our school community; and a trip to a camp on a lake with a barbecue, paddleboats and fun people.

In the morning, after the welcome, I sat at a table with an English teacher, two academic counselors, a Humanities teacher, a member of the maintenance crew, a guy from IT and the new Mandarin teacher (none of whom I knew) and we talked about whether or not we were a kind group of adults and what we would do if we saw/heard students being mean. Then our small groups disbanded and we returned to the big group to meld about our smaller discussions. We talked about the need to model kindness and demonstrate reconciliation. We talked about bullying. We talked about being assertive rather than aggressive; standing up, not rolling over. And throughout this, people threw out funny comments or laughed when someone said something too true. The headmaster talked about his "Courtesy Rage" - the anger that boils when people don't acknowledge doors being held for them and giving the polite hand flip when a driver lets you cross the street or pull out in front of them. "I have that, too!" I told Jared as we walked back the dorm. "I know," he said.

We hopped on a school bus and drove twenty minutes to Hartland where another staff person has a couple camps (translations: any home located on a lake that is not their primary home (can be mansion or cabins - they all = camps)) on a hill of property - see picture above for her view. We ate barbecued chicken, pasta salad, watermelon, hot dogs, potato chips and all that good stuff. We took pictures with our staff (see below). People played horseshoes, volleyball, bacci ball, canoeing, kayaking, swimming and fishing. The headmaster threw the football with a guy from maintenance and an honors teacher. And after I forced Jared to inhale his chicken, we went on the paddleboat.

I rolled up my corduroys, we strapped on the life vests, and pumped our feet until we were beyond the fishermen and swimmers. The water was still and pulled our plastic boat around in drunken circles. We whispered about the morning and looked back at the 100 or so people playing on the shore. "This is our job," I said and Jared smiled at me. A dragonfly buzzed past my cheeks and landed on the skin of Jared's knee, poised in the air to begin peddling again. It's body was about an inch long with wings that would have reached across my hand. It whittled its leg across the other leg, with feelers twitching in the barely wind.

"This has never happened," I whispered. "This is crazy."

Jared moved his knee, pushing in circles as the water gushed under our boat. The dragonfly stayed on him, a sentinel on the tip of his knee. It stayed there for at least three minutes, which is a long time when you are paying attention to stillness. We paddled back and when we were half-way there, another dragonfly landed on my knee.

"Can you believe this??" I almost shouted.
"Henry would love this," Jared said.

So I googled dragonfly when I got home. They have to symbolize something. Everything symbolizes something. On a Pagan/Wicca page, it says: For the AmerIndians, dragonflies are symbols of change, communication from the elemental world and messages of enlightenment and wisdom.

I'll take it.

Jared's Advancement Office Team



My Alumni Hall Team

Cattail snow

On Monday, it was the kind of sticky heat that wakes you up. I would have liked to shower (although why bother with the humidity) and I would have liked to sleep in, but with both of those options off the table I slathered Henry in sunscreen (and me, too) and headed out with Darby with the goal of not being inside. On the way to Manson Park, we stopped by his cousins' house to see if anyone wanted to come with us. We picked up three more kids and a bucket of plastic trucks and tried to the take the shadiest route to the park. The sun was so bright and hot the skin on my feet felt scretched like it was cooking in my flip flops.

I let Henry out of the stroller once we were well into the grassy area and he walked over to Andrew (his only boy cousin, four months older than Henry) and said, "Andrew, hand." For twenty feet or so, they walked hand-in-hand although when I tried to take a picture with my phone, they'd fold into each other or break apart momentarily when one or the other would see a cool leaf or stick so every picture looked like one was about to shove the other or that that had just happened. 

We made our way to the biggest tree in the park. A tree that looks like one from a children’s book – thick, ropey trunk with wide-reaching branches swooping down like an umbrella with mossy grass underneath that probably never feels completely dry. I parked the stroller and sat on the only midly-graffitied metal bench. After ambling trips to the slide, swings and monkey bars, we all returned to the tree. Ava (8) and Noley (5), an honorary cousin, skipped towards the hidden mini-pond to gather cattails, calling them corn dogs. Once they had a few in each hand, they ran back and started pinching them apart, scattering the hairy, feathered dandelion fuzz over a patch in the grass. They said they were making a snow bath for the boys (Andrew and Henry). Meanwhile, Henry and Andrew pushed dump trucks and Elmo racecars and rounded trains through the tufts of grass, grinding soft almost mud into the plastic wheels.

Once Ava and Noley’d created enough of a ground cover, they invited the boys over.
“Come take a bath,” they coaxed them. “C’mon, Henry. C’mon Andrew,” they trilled. Andrew did not fall for this. He sidestepped to the other side of the tree, peaking around from behind the trunk. Henry was intrigued and went to them, dropping the yellow and green trucks from his hands.

“Snow!” he cried like he’d played in it before, and he reached his hands out to grab the fluff. He stood in front of them while they blew cattail snow in his hair and face, blinking his eyes fast when a feather caught in his eyelashes. Andrew inched closer, but wanted nothing to do with the “snow.” Henry sat in it. Then laid down. He had it up his back and in his shorts. Andrew, watching from behind the tree, shook his head at Henry being silly. Ava was giggling and Noley was enjoying being one of the big kids for a change. Henry was laughing his chortling Henry laugh that makes people in restaurants turn and smile. Watching him having the purest form of fun with the white light of the sun heating the grass outside of the tree’s shade, I kept thinking, this is why we moved here.

The Girls

My first group of dorm students arrived today. There are five so far. All of them are from China and range in age from 15 - 19. Most of them have American names they've chosen for themselves which sound nothing like their Chinese names and make me feel guilty for being relieved to be able to pronounce them. There are two more coming in the middle of the night.

The first girl, Ellie*, came around 11am with her brother, who's also an MCI student. She is full of questions, knocking softly on my screen door seven times already:
"Where do I get water?"
"Where do I wash my clothes?"
"Do you have caesars?" My mind went to the pizza and the salad and the palace before finally landing on the cutting instrument.

By the time the second, Lily, arrived, Ellie was chomping at the bit to talk with someone her own age. She was in Lily's room before I could call to introduce her. Lily is much quieter, with cheetah print wedges and a denim dress and thick-rimmed black glasses. I can tell I will wish I could dress like her.

Susie came with her aunt and uncle, backing their SUV up to the front door. Her uncle politely, but protectively, asked lots of questions and programmed my phone number (the duty phone number) into his phone. They wanted to know if they could buy Susie a mini-fridge for her room and her aunt translated how to use a washing machine, explaining Susie has never been away from home and will need a lot of help from me.

Donna and Nancy came together right before dinner, befriending each other on the bus from the airport. They are the youngest, 15 and 16, respectively. When I told them the bus was leaving for Walmart in five minutes, they jumped up and started running their fingers through their hair.

I'm amazed by these girls already. I can't imagine going to high school in another country.

Before I sat down to write this, I dug a stack of CDs from my still unpacked suitcase, discovering several from my junior year (college) in Florence. Before I left that year, I had my brother burn two discs for me (it used to be a lot harder to do :)). They became infamously known as CD1 and CD2 and for years after - I'm realizing now it's been 12 years since I lived in Italy!!! - any one of those songs could transport me to my pensione room above Piazza Santa Maria Novella. My roommate and I (and several others) had the playlists memorized. There is Bjork, Britney Spears, Ani DiFranco, BBMak, Counting Crows, Phil Collins, U2, Fiona Apple, Squeeze, REM, Tom Petty, Trisha Yearwood, Rusted Root and others.

This is the music I listened to when I rode trains to visit cities with museums whose art I was studying. This is the music I listend to when I wrote papers on college-ruled sheets in trains coming back from those cities, wearing the same sweater and pants I'd worn all weekend. This is music I listened to in my strange, hotel-dorm bed with its royal blue down comforter underneath my collage of American things and people on the corkboard over my bed. This is the music I listened to when all I wanted to do was call my mother to fly to Florence and take me home. This is the music I listened to when I dragged bags of clothes to the Lavanderias and drank a glass of wine from the bar across the street while my denim skirt and t-shirts dried.

I try to put myself back there - excited, nervous, terrified, giddy, confused, sad - when the girls come to ask questions. I think Ellie with her questions will be a leader in the group, clarifying and translating for her more timid friends. I try to listen to what they are really asking for and answer those questions, too, so they don't have to ask. I tell them over and over to come to me any time. I'll listen to their music and I'll know these songs that may seem like just stuff on the radio will be future, transformative, 3-minute explosions of memories.

*I changed their names yet again. :)