Cheer Up, Jeeze

Cheer UP, Jeeze! That's what I said to myself yesterday after realizing what I wrote on the two days before  this.I swear, you’d just be crazy all the time if you didn’t have other people to pull you back into Normal. I picture the lone ant blundering off without a mission, feeble feelers waving as his companions march along together cheerfully, bending now and then to lift the dead ones off for burial. Solidarity!The point is, I felt pretty bleak Monday morning and so wrote that dismal limerick.Even on Tuesday I had little to offer but mopey sheets of 'sensitive wallpaper' as Garrison Keillor calls most  introspective writing.Hmmm, well OK maybe it wasn’t ALL  mopey. There were those high school girls hoisting their skirts up and me telling myself that sure, I worked out every day when in truth what I mostly did was sitting OUTSIDE the health club in y car reading and looking at the sky.But mostly, it was like this: Two days, two downer posts.Then in came a comment to the blog written by a reader named Chris N. plucked out 15 words from that 50 word limerick to show me what I had done. Here’s what he said:

Motivation and discipline are interesting. I’m starting to realize that a big part of both of them is visualizing the positive future benefits of the discipline in the here and now, and putting aside the visualization of the negative experiences of the discipline itself. So put the “dark”, “chill”, “summon the will”, “quit”, “bleak”, “rock”, “push it on back up the hill” and all those other downers in a tidy pile on the side of the road, say goodbye to them, and write a limerick full of positive images of where you will be after you got up early, did what needed to get done, and then are enjoying where it got you!

He was so right . My spirits shot up  like mercury in a dog days' thermometer from that point on.I couldn't call up the wit to write the cheery limerick he suggested, but here’s one by my old student Bill, someone I haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter took office, but who feels to me now as if the two of us are still in each other’s daily lives, every Fourth Period in a that sunny top-floor  classroom with its big old windows that rattled in the wind.

Yes it’s true, it’s a morning to shiver,Time to rise and to stand and deliver,Pushing boulders up hillMay be wearisome, still,It beats eagles consuming your liver.

"It could always be worse, he added. "You could be Prometheus," he added.Prometheus! Who stole not cookies but fire from the gods and got punished every day by having his liver plucked out by crows - only then it regenerated itself every night! A good one! So now I feel much better.

He Licks the Kids

THIS is why you can never let your guard down: because the world will see you for the numbskull you are. This is also why I spend at least the first 48 hours of any vacation working. I just feel like How can I  just....‘let go’ when so much of what I put out in the world goes before me carrying a sign reading “An Idiot Did This”?I let my guard down so much the other night I never gave a final edit to what I had written to post here yesterday which turned out to be sheer gobbledygook, with dropped words, extra words, wordy words. And to make matters worse by the time I woke at 6am and saw it on my Blackberry – I'd scheduled it to go up onto the Web at 4am – our Internet had gone down, thanks to a string of wild country rainstorms that tossed buckets of rain right through the screens and onto all our floors. It's OK now but I couldn’t fix any of the mistakes until 1pm, so there they all stood showing the world my true colors and reminding me of all those other times: the time I walked into my Fifth Grade classroom with the back of my skirt tucked into my underpants; the time I wrote an email seriously slamming someone and then sent it to that someone by mistake; the time in the airport bathroom I saw myself trying to fold a few squares of toilet paper into my wallet and realized too late that I’d just flushed a fistful of dollars.I know I should just let go more and learn to laugh at myself - but then I remember that letter of reference I once wrote for someone under my supervision now in search of a teaching job. I've always been a terrible typist and this was back in the days before computers so there it stood: “He licks the kids and the kids lick him.” What can we say about a dope like this except 'Send her away even longer and hope she grows a brain'?

Sad Weirdo

What a sad weirdo I am. All day today vacation or not I’ve been reading Tracy Kidder on Haiti,  Jonathan Kozol on the Shame of the Nation and Sylvia Plath on the thinly fictionalized thoughts of an author who before her 31st birthday have will put her head in the oven, all the while trying to figure out if Abe is secretly dead and our niece Joanie who is caring for him at home is just afraid to tell us. The coyotes are everywhere, like the squeegee guys in Manhattan in the Years Before Giuliani.Abe’s sister was killed by coyotes, I know she was. One minute she was lying on the sunny patio and the next she was gone for good, and she never went anywhere, knowing well that her fleet-of-foot days were far behind her. The coyotes are just part of our lives now even in winte; last month three of them went right up onto our neighbors porch to bully and taunt their two dogs safe behind the family room windows.I couldn’t sleep in this vacation bed last night, for worry about  many things (and maybe partly because I’d just watched all two hours and 25 minutes of the movie  2012 in which the earth’s crust spills down into the void like brownie mix dumped from the pan just five minutes into the bake cycle. ) Anyway  I woke thinking mostly of Abe. I had told  Joanie last night  in a frantic text that really he won’t eat at all unless you pat him on the head with the same encouraging firmness his mamma used to use licking him to get him to nurse.  But then about three hours ago came this picture of our nice old boy in my sunny home office, as dazzled by the strong New England light as I am dazzled by its even stronger version down here by the Mexican border.