What dreams ...

 “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?”

courtesy of Bing.com

This is from Hamlet, and is one of the few lines I can remember from high school English class.  It was an enigmatic line to me then, being all of fifteen years old, and having seen little of life or death.

Now, of course, that has changed.  Life and death—those are much more real to me. 

I taught first through eighth grades over a twenty year span.  I restarted my teaching career when my youngest child began second grade.  By that time, I was almost 37 years old, with a load of life experiences in my virtual backpack that most of the younger teachers could not have had.  My first class was a fourth grade class whose teacher had to take sick-leave mid-year.  Up to the time I came, there had been eighteen different substitute teachers who went and left after one day. 

It was a rough class, a broken class.  More than that, it was a group of who felt abandoned in the one safe place where they could count on being cared for and taught what they needed to know. 

good book .

God knows what we all need, and He certainly knew what these children needed: someone to love them, to slug it through, to stay the course with them. 

To say that we endured and came out winners would be too light-hearted.  It was a struggle, almost mental hand-to-hand combat.  Each child had their own issues of pain, divorce, poverty, gang-pressure, and abandonment from home.  They needed—no, they absolutely were 

desperate for someone to hold onto and to show them the door to a better world. 

Teachers must be warriors for their students.  I was a soft mother type, who made quilts and baked brownies, who taught Sunday school and played the church piano.  But I was also a tenacious and stubborn woman, who saw into the hearts of these hurting kids.  It was a daily test for all of us, and in the end, we were drawn together.  On the last day of school, we were all teary eyed to see school end and our relationship to change. 

Months before, I had entered that classroom as their adversary, another teacher whom they thought would leave them.  My promise was that I was staying, and they were not going to be left with someone else.  I kept my promise. 

Now, I have dreams of my students, over 600 of them, in different situations with me as their teacher.  Sometimes I am driving a bus on a field trip along a crazy Bolivian mountain road.  Sometimes we are in a classroom put together in a bombed out bunker.  In other dreams, teacher friends and I are going to somewhere like Haiti to set up classes for other abandoned children. 

Dreams indeed. 

I wrote this in 2011. I had retired from teaching in 2008 and became retrospective. Missed teaching but it was time to move on.

Hard rain is gonna fall...

This is a hard song to hear with a changed view of life.

This year has a difficult year for me:

Diagnosed with Parkinson's.

A bad fall in March.

Experienced a TIA in June.

Bad blood clot in October. 

and, now

 Diagnosed with 

Heart failure.

Gilda Radner

I don't know what happens next,

while I can't know how much I can write,

I will read your posts and smile when I see your names.

And if you see thecontemplativecat in new posts, 

please check it out.

 

 

Truth is...

 

 

Truth is we did a few bits of stuff that would smash memories like these photos above. ...Truth is we were dreamers and doers.

Going down to the creek and chopping down a tree? We marched with an intent to make a log cabin. It was an innocent thing, and my brothers Robert and Bill did the chopping while my sister sat under the lean to we had made. It was good enough dwelling for the time being. 

The tree fell down after a crack and bang.

Me with sister Mary. I was almost 9 and she was 4.

In the mean time Mary and I ran back to the house and borrowed an oiled plastic table cloth to help with the decoration of the future cabin. We scurried back and secured it to the lean-to with strips of cloth torn from Bill's shirt. 

Mary and I waited and watched, I told her how we would play in the cabin.

our lean-to was classier than this
how to make a lean-to

In the meantime, while the brothers tried to drag the fallen tree to a designated building spot. It was a hard hard effort while Mary and I cheered them on.

After the attempt we decided to come back after dinner to work more.

Days, weeks passed by and when Dad asked "Has anyone seen the ax?" we looked at each other, noting that the as lay in the lean-to. After dinner, while Mom and Dad enjoyed their after meal cigarettes and coffee, Robert sprinted to the lean to and retrieved it. 

Easter 1959

Before they finished their ritual, the ax was placed in the breezeway, partially hidden by another oiled plastic tablecloth.

We never talked about it as adults even though the strong memory of the uncompleted structure lingered in our minds. It wasn't until that part of the woods was cut down by a neighbor and he talked about the tree and the lean-to which still stood protected the oiled plastic table cloth. 

Our parents were smoking and then finishing their coffee that we now adults smiled, remembering the afternoons we spent time attempting that monumental effort.

Don holding Mary, me holding Bill and Robert with cowboy hat.

Not lumberjacks, 1959

I asked my mom if she knew we were walking to the the creek like ducklings behind Robert who carried the ax with pride while the rest marched behind him. She nodded in a way that told me that she really didn't know.

Mom had seen us walking in our duckling way but didn't stop us.  

I then queried why she didn't stop us. "Mom, Robert was 9 years old carrying a large ax, I was 8, Bill was 6, and Mary was almost 5! Why, why oh why didn't you stop us?"

She didn't have an answer. Mom figured that one of us would run to get help.   

In truth, we were stupid and shouldn't have been there: ax adventure in our hearts and no common sense in our heads.

But, it was a memory of 4 children with a dream that lingered after 50 years.

front row: me, Mary and Bill in 1968.
back row: Robert, Mom and Dad