Every student in this country has started back to school by now. The other day, a boy in my daughter’s math class announced that, two full weeks in, they had completed exactly 5.5% of the school year.

This was not excellent news to Emma. She wasn’t sure that 5.5% was worth registering.

Nearly three weeks ago now, I visited her school with her at student orientation. With five minutes to pass between classes–threading our way in and out of buildings, up and down stairs–we sat in each of her classrooms for ten. Her teachers met us at their doors, encouraged us to take copies of the neatly stacked hand-outs. And in what must have felt to them like a hot second, they explained the scope and sequence of their courses, their methods of teaching and evaluation, and briefly listed (if we would be so kind) those extras we could provide that might be handy over the course of the upcoming year: whiteboard markers, boxes of tissues, hand sanitizer.

None of them knew that I have been a teacher, but like every parent in that room, I’m sure, I was interested in how my child would do in that class. I wondered if the methods employed would work for her unique mind, her way of perceiving the world. And, as a teacher, I had that other perspective: knowing what it feels like to greet student and parent alike for the first time. Knowing that I would be navigating relationships with both, listening carefully to both. Seeking to know each student insofar as he would allow it, as was appropriate. Seeking to like each one. Knowing that my standards were high and earnestly believing that my students could and would get there, that it was my job to give them everything they needed to reach those goals.

Emma’s 5.5% has been well worth her time already. I hear it in the way she talks about her classes: the experiments, the discussions. On the way to school this morning, she was telling me about parent functions in math; last night before bed she was discussing Malcolm Gladwell and rhetorical analysis. She likes each of her classes; she likes her teachers very much.

***

Once, years ago, I saw a comment about teachers on Facebook that saddened me. It was made by a mother of grown children, each of whom had been educated through college and perhaps beyond. She was complaining about teachers asking for pay raises. Why did they need to ask for more, she wondered aloud on social media. They only work nine months a year. They get the entire summer off.

I didn’t reply, but if I had, I might have said something about the work a teacher does around the edges of her day, those hours when she’s not required to be in her classroom. I spent hours and hours at planning and grading when I was a teacher. After an eight-hour day at school, I easily and often put in two to four additional hours of work at home, especially in my earliest years of teaching.

Listening to my daughter’s teachers talk about the upcoming school year, I had a difficult time assessing the value of their expertise. This one has a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a Master’s in teaching. She will conduct her students in performing experiments that will help them draw conclusions about acids and bases, and she will–at the same time–ensure that none of them blows himself up, or his neighbor, or school property.

When you are a teacher– I wanted to say to this Facebook remark– you don’t work with your colleagues. You almost never see them. You work instead with people who are vastly younger than yourself in age and experience, vulnerable people, people who are not in charge of their own lives and so sometimes (often?) are victims of poverty or anger, who are trying to understand the world while you are trying to teach them the beauties of a sonnet.

Please put a price tag on that and then pay the teacher accordingly. Or give her the summer off. Or both.

***

Every year I was teaching, my husband would compose a list of “class rules” and write it on a white board in my classroom. This is fall, 2007. Sorry for the flash. Again, 2007.

Of course I realize, too, that some people are terrible teachers, that they entered their profession in error or that, over the course of years, they have become calloused or embittered to the point that it might be best for them to stop teaching altogether. But that doesn’t happen because teaching is easy. That’s never why.

***

A teacher is a person with two loves: her subject and her students. They vie for dominance within her, and she is at her best when their marriage erupts in the classroom: when her delight in a sonnet equals her delight in her students discovering the same.

This doesn’t happen every day. It can’t.

And the most difficult part of a teacher’s job is when he is altogether unable to enjoy the thing he loves in deference to loving his students. They present with needs, difficulties, challenges, issues (or essays) that he must give his full attention while his love of sonnets molders behind the classroom door.

And that is part of the job.

***

My very favorite teacher helped me learn to write. I can’t say he taught me: like the best teachers, he understood that the best learning was a process of discovery. But he provided the insights and the examples, and he made me write. And then he only gave me praise when I wrote well.

He was an excellent teacher, and in what I consider to be among the best of the essay-ish things I have ever written, I recounted his excellence and my blundering foolishness in the face of it, and my regret.

He was a teacher, but he was also a writer– and it was his love of good writing that equipped him to teach me. No doubt it was also his hours spent evaluating my writing and that of others that prevented his getting more writing done. I wish I could thank him for that.

But there is this: he has released a book. Or rather, a book of his writing has been released (ugh, passive voice–he would have hated that), compiled and edited in the years since his death by his colleague and another of my favorite teachers, Dr. Gloria Stansberry.

Fragments is a collection of Bill Donnelly’s short stories–some fiction, some not–that showcase his love of language. He taught me to love the dictionary, and this book demonstrates that he loved it too–for all the wonder and surprise a rightly chosen word can deliver.

He was a brave writer, unafraid to experiment with writing–and this is what he encouraged us to do, so many years ago now, in his Advanced Writing class.

I think he knew what I have learned: that writing is always a risk; that you never show up to the task alone, despite how solitary you are; and that perseverance just might produce quality. So it’s always best to try.

He said, “Fragments are not the enemy. I like fragmentary sentences, vivid imagery, humor, weird repetition and variation, sound effects, contentious dialogue, electrifying facts, surprise.”

I did not know him well, but I can vouch that the above is true. It describes not just the way he wrote; it was the way he taught.

The book is titled Fragments because, I think, of his avowed love for them. But the book is fragmentary too: pieces of a life.

And that’s the thing I like best about the book: I can hear his voice as I read. No matter which story, it is Bill Donnelly’s voice reading it aloud. He is perched on a desk at the front of the room, his long legs bent in front of him. He is sucking his cheeks, he is pausing, he is enunciating the words exactly so. And I am riveted, listening, hearing not just the words but their sounds, not just their sounds but their rhythms–and finding my own voice because he shared his so generously. I am sitting there listening, and I am learning how to write.

I received my copy of the book a few months ago, but I’m writing about it today to celebrate. The book itself is a few months old, and today my novel celebrates one year since its release. I guess one could call it my book’s birthday.

So this is another gesture of gratitude to Dr. Donnelly, who above all others, helped me find my voice as a writer– or who, at the very least, most emboldened me to try. It is the page, after all, that teaches us to write. But Dr. Donnelly provided me immeasurable help.

Once more, Dr. Donnelly: thank you.

William Francis Donnelly, III    1935-2015

Fragments is available here. 

The post Of Teachers and Why We Love Them, My Favorite One, and Two Birthdays appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother:

“(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence because I think it loses meaning. Thoughts?”

Thoughts. Immediate: to swings, and how I love to go up in them.

How do you like to go up in a swing/Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the loveliest thing/ever a child can do!

I’m thinking of the time I learned to pump the swing myself. We were visiting my grandmother in Florida, and my older sister and I were taken by the hand by our father and walked rapidly (my father always walks rapidly) down a sidewalk that had, to one side, a tall white fence. Over the top of the fence we could see lemon trees, and my father sang us a song about them as we went.

Lemon tree, very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet. But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

And this was Very Funny, because my father loves lemons.

We arrived at a park, and my father pushed us on the swings, and then he explained how one leans on a swing and pushes one’s legs out and back again. Suddenly I had learned to pump the swing with my legs, and I could swing on my own.

How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue?

I pushed William on a swing when he was barely old enough to sit upright. Everett, too. And when Emma turned one, we bought her a baby swing for the swing-set in the back yard. I remember her blond hair, so fine and straight, swaying back and forth from its pigtail above her grinning face.

The mother: “I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the cadence.” Thoughts?

Yes, to the mornings my children and I sat around our kitchen table eating breakfast and reciting poetry. It was my way of packing in a few elements of school before they had a chance to realize it: a Bible story, a picture study, a poem over pancakes and in our pajamas.

Among the many, we learned Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” “The Wind,” and “The Swing.”

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” I think my children wanted to know if they were, too.

Thoughts?

Yes, to grading papers at my desk when teaching high school, typing paragraphs of encouragement about supporting arguments and placing commas inside (INSIDE) the quotation marks, and wishing from time to time that these students had spent a small corner of their childhoods reciting poetry–and many of them had. Because you can teach a person how to shape an argument, how to develop said argument over a series of paragraphs, how to enfold supporting evidence via quote or paraphrase into one’s sentences. But by the time one is in high school, it might be too late or insupportable to teach the value of rhythm, the power of varied sentence length, the priceless weight of emphasis and inflection, the music of our spoken–or written–words.

The mother: “I think it loses its meaning.”

Can it?

Up in the air and over the wall/till I can see so wide/Rivers and trees and cattle and all/Over the countryside.

I can imagine the daughter standing at the corner of the sofa, reciting. Or seated at the table, head bent over her coloring, reciting. UP in the AIR and Over the WALL till I can SEE so WIDE.

What is the rhythm of this poem if not Stevenson swinging himself? Back and forth, back and forth. The daughter may be sitting at the table, colored pencil in hand, but the words she is saying are motion, and they are moving her back and forth with the poet himself, with all children anywhere ever who have sometime swung on a swing.

Till I look down on the garden green/Down on the roof so brown

Stevenson’s poem will lose its meaning only when there are no longer children outside because they’ve all turned to their iPhones, when all the swings sit idle, when the rushing breeze and flying force born of a child’s volition loses all power to answer.

Up in the air I go flying again/Up in the air and down!

“Thoughts?”

Yes. That surely some of the meaning is lost on the daughter, for whom swinging in this way is so close–for now–to her everyday experience. For her, for now, this mother is doing everything right: getting this poem in the child’s head. It’s Stevenson’s cadence that will keep it there, and so she’ll be saying it in her head for years to come.

And someday she‘ll be pushing her little one on the swing and admiring how the breeze pushes that one sweet curl back and forth, and she’ll mindlessly start saying the poem to her curly-headed cherub. And suddenly the poem’s meaning will bring happy tears to her eyes, just because the realization is so sweet, and she’ll know for the first time that her mother gave her that poem–a gift– years ago, and she’s only just opening it now.

“Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Yes. We think so. Scotland is small enough. How many Stevensons can there be?

“Mom, are we related to Robert Louis Stevenson?”

Sure. Why not?

The post Two Questions appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking spots in the senior lot. Would they vie for a spot when they are seniors, and Katherine’s someday first car being a motor home. They did not talk about classmates, about other students, although the conversation sometimes goes this way. Because what is high school–around coursework and extracurricular everything– but a time in close proximity to people who are and are not like you, the joys and challenges this brings?

The girls’ school sits in a beautiful block of our city, one whose approach is filled with small and charming houses, sidewalks, tall trees. The school itself is a sprawling, seven-building affair, lined with trees but leaving little room for lawn, except in front of the middle school. On Thursday morning, I saw and heard something I’d never noticed before: that lawn filled with students literally at play.

I was, of course, driving. The car-line and commuter traffic is considerable here. I couldn’t pay close attention to these middle-schoolers on the lawn. But Katherine explained that this was a privilege granted to students who maintained grades to a certain standard, and by evidence of their apparent enjoyment, this seemed a worthwhile reward.

I tried to watch them–impossible–as I drove past. What they were busy at, if everyone was included. Who was engaged, how they were playing. And if anyone–isn’t there always someone who does?–stood or sat alone.

If I look for the source of this impulse, probable causes assert themselves one after the other. When I taught school–so recently, so long ago–I made it my business to like every one of my students. Because we learn better, don’t we?, from the people who earnestly like us for who we are. When I think of my own children at school–long ago or now–and the pain I feel at their potential isolation. When I think of seventh grade and how I hoped to have someone to sit with at lunch. Or when I hear (rare, once?) the story from my father, brilliant but not athletic as a child, who stood against the brick wall of his school during gym class, enduring.

I tried to get a clear look at the middle schoolers, but they moved like leaves blown over the lawn, and I didn’t know any of them.

Thursday morning was beautiful. The morning light slanted in its warm way through the buildings and the trees. I pulled up to the drop-off point, and like a fool I said to the girls as they got out of the car that every one of them is precious. All the students in the school are precious, I said, even the one who makes you cry in math. Because on the second day of school this year a boy in someone’s math class made her cry. We are not naming names.

The girls are not sure they agree with me when it comes to who is precious and who isn’t, and they said so as they hurried out of the car, pulling their backpacks behind them, slamming the doors.

I proceeded, slowly, through the line.

It was September. It is still September, and it’s not fall yet, not quite autumn if you’re going by the calendar that marks the solstice and equinox. When I was teaching and the school calendar all too soon eclipsed what was left of summer, I insisted on the equinox, if only to myself, and that fall didn’t arrive until September 21st.

It goes too fast: this life, these days. Unless you are in high school. Or middle school, which may be worse.

It was still summer on that warm Thursday morning, as I proceeded in the burnished morning light through the car lines. The trees were still green: the decorative pear by the high school’s front entrance, the crepe myrtle in bloom.

Then I drove under the live oaks. A wind gusted, and leaves like amber blades spun down and cut the air. Emma and Katherine were out of the car; they had gone their separate ways, but for a few moments still in the car line, I was driving next to Emma and watching her in my way. She did not look at me, already focused on the day ahead, already at school. But I watched her as I slowly pulled past, saw her beautiful blonde hair and watched as she was enveloped into the school.

The post Morning Drop-Off appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It was a while ago now that he came in to the kitchen and stood next to me where I was stirring something on the stove.

“Mom,” he said, “there are things about me that you don’t know.”

“You’re right,” I said.

He might have been nine or ten years old.  I wondered at the time if he was harboring secrets. He had a fancy place to keep his money: a modified cardboard box labeled “Secret Agent!” in slanty, exciting letters, like something out of a comic book. It had a complication of flaps that closed over a plastic dial for which one had to know the combination. Everett had set the combination himself, and here his money was secreted away, where only he could get at it.

I appreciated that. 
Still do.

Nonetheless, I pondered his statement to me for quite awhile. Was it that he was hiding something– or was it that he had just come to realize, awakening slowly into himself, that he was and is his very own person, unique and complete, no matter how close our family might be? 

It’s fascinating– this whole parenting thing. We crow over them when they are newborn: they are our very own. So much to delight in, be proud of, even put on display. Darling nose! toes! Look at that hair! When William was a few months old, I caught myself being surprised when seeing a baby younger than my own. A younger baby? They are making those? I had had the Very Last One, you see. He was the Final Word on babies. The baby mold was broken. Why would you bother– why would anyone bother– having any more?

A friend confided years later how she felt when toting her newborn to church for the first time, glowing with motherly pride: “See what I made!” she was thinking– but only half-way.

Right?

We know when they arrive, of course, that they will grow up into themselves. That they are– even at the start– people, whole and entire, singular beings who are to be respected.

And we treat them as such– while we also change their diapers and bathe them, discipline them and decorate their bedrooms, choose their clothing and their playmates. Maybe even write blog posts or Facebook updates about them.

Until we can’t. Because they have become more of themselves than they used to be… or something.

When he turned nine or ten, I created a collage of fun pictures of Everett to put on my blog– a celebration of his life and year for the friends and family who aren’t local. It was adorable, but Everett put the kaibosh on it. “Don’t post that,” he said. 

I deleted it. I was disappointed, of course, but it was the only thing to do.

We have rules about privacy in our house. All of the kids have it. But when it comes to Facebook, email, websites, texting– all of it is Fair Game. We can see it, we can read it. We will pry into their private affairs.

Because for the time being, it’s our job (still) to protect them. We’ve got to know what’s going on. While they are still here, under this roof, we have a job to do.

It would be dishonoring to them if we were to fail to do it.

Still, there are things about each of them that we don’t know. Things we won’t know, the amount of which will increase over time.

This is as it should be. 


Today Everett is in Washington, D.C. with his class from Trinity School. It’s the 8th grade trip, a culmination of two years of American history study, and a last hurrah for these students who, in a few weeks, will many of them go their separate ways.

Everett is very definitely going to be going his separate way– to a public school along with several hundred other freshmen, none of whom are from his school, none of whom he knows. Yet.

He was really looking forward to this D.C. trip, and especially excited about the Air and Space Museum. He brought extra money for this, because he was told he could experience the flight simulator there and he’s all about that.

He’s experienced these days with flight simulators. Most of his “screen time” consists of practicing with them. He navigates his course from places like New York to Tanzania, or he plots a route from Juneau to Fairbanks. Just yesterday afternoon he was landing a helicopter in Guam. He wants to be a bush pilot. He wants to join the Coast Guard. He knows more about the physics of operating a helicopter than I will ever care to know– but he has also promised, someday, to give me a ride in one. Which will no doubt terrify me.

He doesn’t like to talk about it– and I respect that– but I don’t think these are easy days for Everett. For a child born of this mother, change comes lined with sadness. I don’t know how he’s thinking about all that lies ahead. I know from experience that he can’t know how the new school will shortly feel like home; how the difficulty of this transition, in retrospect, will surprise him; how good all (most, anyway) that awaits him will almost certainly be. 

We are believing and trusting God that this will be the case.

Everett chooses to navigate this kind of thing– for the most part– in the quiet of his own mind. Which is fine.

But I’m thinking that I know something about Everett that he doesn’t know: that he is built more for adventure than he thinks he is. That he is equipped with so many gifts and the grace to grow into a new thing. That the life that is his own, that is unfolding sometimes before he is quite ready for it to do so, is going to be so exciting. 

And already is.




Post script: This blog post was written with the acknowledgement and expressed consent of Everett.

The post Boy appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Or we ride roller coasters.

That’s what I did yesterday, anyway. I drove Everett and a group of band-buddies up to Kings Dominion in Virginia for a band competition. It was a 2+ hour drive up there (for much of which the middle-school men in my vehicle wisely slept), then the set-up for competition, then the competition itself (2 songs, and they were excellent. They earned a high “Excellent” rating, in fact!)– all of it over by noon.

And then the amusement park was ours.

As chaperone, it was my charge to escort my small group of students through the park until our meet-up time at 6 p.m. I didn’t want to be a burden. I certainly didn’t want to slow anyone down. And I didn’t want my sensitive and considerate son to feel any hesitation about riding exactly what he wanted to ride.

I told him I would ride anything he did– and he seemed pleased.

No biggie. That was my thought. I’ve ridden tons of roller coasters in my life. I love roller coasters. At least, I want to be the kind of mother– er, person– who loves roller coasters. This was going to be awesome. It would be so fun.

So why not, right? Why not start with this one: Mom, this one’s so cool (he’s been to this park before, but I haven’t), and it’s inside.

An indoor roller coaster. Yes, cool. I rode Space Mountain at Disney World in 11th grade and I was pretty sure I mostly loved it. And so we entered the waiting line.

It wasn’t long, but it was fairly dark. And it was long enough to get me thinking. I mean, up to this point, I had just been busy mentally with the demands of getting the boys where they needed to be and doing so on time. The whole amusement-park-rest-of-the-day thing hadn’t entirely registered.

Here’s the thing: you shouldn’t be thinking in an amusement park. You really, really shouldn’t. The name tells you that much: “a-muse” means, literally, “without thought.”

But what I was thinking in that line was that this was going to be a scary ride. A scary, high-velocity, flip-my-body-in-ways-unnatural-to-man ride. And when we got to the end of the line, where you get to watch several train-loads of cars load their passengers, I became more certain of this fact.

What else can one make of the warnings, of the careful self-buckling, followed by the professional-amusement-park-worker individual-checking-of-the-seat-belts of every single passenger in that train?

We got in. We buckled up. And in the blast-off beginning, identified on the Kings Dominion website as “one of the most exciting accelerations” in roller coaster riding (not the slow and clanking ascension I had been expecting), I shut my eyes.

This ride lasts one minute and five seconds and moves at 54 miles per hour, facts I would not have done well knowing in advance. I don’t know what I held on to, but I know I held on tightly. Next to me, Everett laughed and shouted. He exclaimed that it was awesome. I saw a flash of light and metal through almost squeezed-shut lids and squeezed them shut again. I concentrated on breathing through my nose.

The boys loved the ride, of course. They talked about it in animated excitement as we made our way back into daylight, describing things I had experienced and vaguely remembered, underscoring what the website claims about this ride: that people “rave about the inversions.”

My quiet confession to Everett– the bit about the eyes-closed thing– was met with disappointment.  “Mom, you’ve got to keep your eyes open next time, okay?”

Only a fool would say okay to that. Which is what I went on to do. This day was about Everett, after all.

(I will add here that, for the remainder of the day, the boys had a collective uncertainty about what that ride was called. Some of them called it Area 51, others claimed it was called Bureau of Paranormal Activity. On the website I discovered its true identity: Flight of Fear.)

Next on the list was The Intimidator, “the tallest, fastest, most thrilling roller coaster on the East Coast.” It is 305 feet at its highest point, and its first drop (which hits immediately after you’ve reached that 305 foot height, which you’ve done slowly and in the open air with nothing but some sort of padded brace holding you in place and from which you can see– on a clear day, which this was– 18 miles of gorgeous Virginian landscape but which you aren’t really able to admire or even quite pay any attention to because your heart doesn’t belong in your mouth but surprise! there it is anyway) finds you plummeting towards earth at an 85-degree angle. This ride has you going 90 miles per hour, careening over steep hills and through sudden twists and also upside-down. It lasts for three very long minutes, and Everett and his friends loved it.

Quietly, I said to him, “It’s just that generally speaking I lead a quiet life.”

And he said, so understandingly, “You’re a writer,” as we made our way to the Anaconda.

The thing about the Anaconda is that it has, famously, an underwater tunnel. Everett commented that he never remembers the tunnel, and so we made a pact that this time we would pay attention to it. Even if it was quick, we would be sure to notice the underwater tunnel.

Meanwhile, we had a line to wait in, during which time we chatted and moved along and talked about the last roller coaster. During which I also reflected on a sign at The Intimidator that warned potential riders of the necessity of stable physical and emotional health and promised the experience of G-forces (and negative G-forces) on the body.

Negative G-forces. That’s what’s known as “air-time,” when one goes over a bump on one’s bicycle, say, or over a drop after a little hill in the car. But the negative G-force on the Intimidator was that feeling of being lifted from my seat, that very brief but entirely engaging sensation that I was leaving all that was secure in this life and about to be flung head-long into the stratosphere. It was what had me considering (remember, this is an “a-muse-ment” park) what God intended for us to do with our bodies and our understanding of physics and how this was Almost Certainly Not It.

Still, as we strapped ourselves in, Everett and I promised that we would remember the tunnel.

The Anaconda lasts for a whopping one minute and fifty seconds. The tunnel doesn’t show up until very nearly the end, and I’m sure I would have remembered it but for the fact that it is immediately followed by a 360-degree vertical loop that simultaneously erases one’s short-term memory.

We exited the ride and confessed to one another that we had forgotten to remember the tunnel. I also noticed (privately) that I was less trembly, inside and out, than I had been.

Which might have been why I suggested the Drop Tower for our next ride. It certrainly looked thrilling (it has a “High Thrill” rating on the website as opposed to “Aggressive Thrill,” which is what all the aforementioned ones share), but also relatively passive. I had been on the Demon Drop years ago at Cedar Point, which differed at least in this: the Demon Drop is an enclosed ride. But what difference could that make?

So once again I found myself strapping myself in, which was always a bit unsettling. Sometimes the buckle wouldn’t come together immediately– the strap was too short, or something– and a rising panic would ensue: I can’t get this! I can’t get this! What if I failed to close the buckle and the professionals decided not to help and we went shooting off anyway?

But every time– Every Time– I managed to close the buckle. And Every Time the friendly amusement-park-worker checked my belt and that of everyone else.

Phew.

And also, just a little bit, shouldn’t that make us a little bit nervous– that they even have to check the belts at all?

I digress.

The Drop Tower starts off pleasantly enough. There you sit in the warm sunshine, legs dangling, the padded brace resting over your shoulders and holding you securely in. You wait, squinting, dangling, chuckling with Everett who sits fearless beside you.

And then up you go. The waiting crowd recedes, disappears. You forget they ever existed. You forget everything other than the tops of the Virginian trees which are now so far below you, and the fact that this ride takes you up 27 stories (and you are still rising), and that you will shortly be plummeting at 72 miles per hour.

You consider taking a look down, but that seems unwise, as who wants to see one’s entire digestive tract dangling between one’s dangling ankles? And next will come the drop, which seems potentially worse, somehow, than the climb, but also infinitely more terrible than the waiting, the idle sitting that you do for maybe eternal split-seconds at that 27-story height.

Thinking– irresistable and pointless– is Such A Bad Idea.

You resort to earlier practices: you close your eyes. The wind that comes of such a rapid descent, that is all you know of this terrifying plunge, is absolutely unbelievable.

Then: terra firma. Two of the finest Latin words in the English language.

There now. Was that so bad?

We rode two other rides: a roller coaster for which you stand up the entire time (because, really, why not?) and a lovely little “high” not “aggressive thrill” coaster called Stunt Coaster, which I wish I could ride again and again and again. It was That Fun.

It was after leaving Stunt Coaster that I saw the woman’s t-shirt. She was probably in her fifties, leaving the same ride I was leaving, surrounded by a bunch of kids. The back of her shirt said: “Y.O.L.O,” and under that, for those of us requiring the interpretation: “You Only Live Once.”

Which might have been why, without knowing it, I was on those rides in the first place. Because I’ll only live once, and I will always be Everett’s only mother, and I’ll only have this once-more chance to be his driver and chaperone for his middle school’s band trip to Kings Dominion. Next year he’ll be in high school.

The second time (yes, there was a second time. Are you proud of me?) we rode The Intimidator, it was so much better than the first. I had been informed that the squinty-open-eyed approach I had taken during the first 300-foot climb was not good enough, and so this time I kept my eyes wide for the entirety of that ascent. Which Was Terrifying. And I kept my eyes open for the rest of it, too.

As on all the rides, Everett whooped and hollered and exclaimed that all of it was awesome– but he wants to be an airplane pilot. He wants to fly into the Alaskan bush. I, on the other hand, am a mother and a writer. I take deep pleasure in a cup of tea and a good pen. I find parenting to be Absolutely Breathtaking. Still, I shouted some on The Intimidator that time, and I laughed some, too.

At the end of that ride, the exit funnels everyone through a little gift shop, and the counter features screens of photographs taken on the ride you’ve just left. We found ourselves readily enough: three boys in their school colors, their faces plastered by the wind, hands raised, grins wild.

And there was me, next to Everett, holding for dear life to those padded braces over my shoulders. You can see my collar bones clearly and the strain in my windpipe, of all things. But, unlike the first picture, after our first ride on The Intimidator (the one in which my eyes are closed and I look mostly unconscious but for that strain in my throat), my eyes are wind-swept but open, and really, I think you can detect a little smile.

The post Y.O.L.O. appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I love those. Writing is, after all, what I am (mostly) to be doing with my time now that I am not teaching all day. And the one item on my calendar was a pleasant one, too: lunch with Emily. I was looking forward to the delicious food and delightful company, which would serve simultaneously as a break from my productive focus.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Maybe a little too good. Ah, the life of a writer. I’m still pinching myself. My arms are black and blue.

So when the phone ran mid-morning to notify me that I had an unanticipated errand (“Mom, it’s me, Emma”–I love how she still identifies herself to me on the phone, as if I wouldn’t know, as if I wouldn’t recognize her voice among others in a million phone calls–“I’m really sorry but I left my PE and volleyball stuff at home”), it was no problem.

“No problem,” I said, and already I knew what I would do, and I did it: ran immediately up to her room and secured her packed bag and put it in the car. The place where I was to meet Emily was already halfway to the school. I didn’t mind in the least just driving that little extra distance.

In truth, I hadn’t really gotten any writing done before lunch. The laundry assserted itself (ah, the stink of soccer socks), as did the breakfast dishes. But it was okay. I was all jaunty cheerfulness. I still had the whole afternoon. And lunch with Emily was just as I knew it would be, and then I made the errand to the school.

It took seconds to drop off the bag, seconds to chat with the secretary at the desk, the one whose son I taught six years ago and whose daughter I taught last year. We only talked for seconds, I’m sure of it.

And it could only have been a matter of minutes that I chatted with Rita and John, who sat together at a picnic table watching over their fourth-grade students at play in the woods and creekbed. I could have just gone straight to my car, but there those two sat together. John had taught both Everett and Emma, and Rita had been a source of sweet friendship over all my six years at the school. How could I not just stop by for a minute and ask them how their year has begun and tell them that I miss seeing them, miss being among those wonderful colleagues? And besides, it wasn’t so hot or so humid outside as it felt in the car, and there was a little breeze, and it was so good to see them. But I only stayed a few minutes.

I couldn’t have been thirty seconds off school property when my cell phone rang. “Mom, it’s me, Emma,” who went on to educate me in the insufficienies of her gym bag which, while packed with volleyball and PE stuff, hadn’t quite been packed All The Way, which mattered. It mattered that she didn’t have gym shoes, for instance, or a shirt to wear.

What’s a mom to do?

I know, I know. Make her suffer. Make her sit out her PE class, and also her volleyball practice, and simultaneously make her learn her lesson.

“I’m so sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.” She had said that. She said it several times, and even if she hadn’t, there’s a grace period, isn’t there? There’s the first few weeks of school wherein we relearn some things (like practice your instrument before dinner, and pack your bookbag before bed, and make sure you have everything you might possibly need today Before We Leave the House). And this is her first time at having to change for PE, and her first after-school sport. There is a grace period.

Which meant that I didn’t fuss at her on the phone. And I went home and then back to school– easily 25 minutes. And chatted just a few seconds– just a very few– with another secretary while I was there for that second drop-off, a secretary whose son I taught this past year. I wasn’t at the school for any time at all.

But by the time I got home, I had an hour before I had to leave again, this time for the meet/game/match events, the ones that would have me gone for Hours.

And that’s how a day goes, folks, right? We only get 24 hours. And we sleep, if we’re lucky, for a good number of them.

I didn’t get any writing done at all yesterday.

But I did make it to the meet/game/match, and I did (as ever) delight in watching my children (are they still children?) and my former students put their all into their work and joy, and I did take a few pictures.

When we got home at 7:30, I had a dinner plan. The kids started their homework, the meal would be ready soon. We would eat together and they would finish that homework, and they would be in bed in good time. And then I would steal an hour–just an hour– to get some writing done.

“Uh, Mom?” It was Everett, standing in the living room, idle.

It had been his first cross country meet, and the run had asked a lot of him. He had done very well and should be proud (I am), but the last leg of the course had seen him running full throttle, and afterward he was sucking air. It took him awhile to recover, and then we were off to the soccer game. So he couldn’t be blamed, could he, for leaving his backpack under that tree there, the one just beyond the tennis courts on the fields behind Durham Academy?

And so Everett and I got back in the car and drove to Durham Academy, which is almost just as far as driving to the school.

Fourth trip in a day.

Everett apologized several times, of course. The backpack wasn’t there, of course. The custodial staff didn’t know its whereabouts; neither could they point us to the lost-and-found, which likely would have been locked up anyway.

But the evening was pleasant enough. The air had cooled. It was nice to be just the two of us, walking over the damp grass where, only a few hours before, Everett and so many others had run their hearts out. A year ago, after a day of teaching, I would have been too tired for this. I would have been too tired for the meet/game/match. I would have had to send Bill on this unresolved errand.

We drove home, making a plan to leave early tomorrow and make a stop at Durham Academy. We drove home, and I reassured Everett that his teachers would understand, and that it wouldn’t kill him to take a few zeros for homework. We drove home, and Everett suggested we call his coach, who kindly told us that he had the backpack and that he had tried to let us know in all manner of ways– but we had been busy with the game/meet events, and so had missed his messages.

We drove home, and we admired the sunset, which was the kind with lots of clouds and the sunlight breaking over the edges, liquid gold in places where we shouldn’t expect to find it.

The post Mother appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Last night was Will’s first soccer game of the school year. It’s still more than a week before the first day of school, but soccer has been underway for a while now. Yesterday’s game felt familiar: the boys tore up the field and all of us parents sat on the sidelines, growing damp and agitated in the August swelter and the intensity of the game.

This week has seen another first: Will driving me to soccer practice—or, rather, Will driving himself to soccer practice with me coming along for the ride. Such is the demand of his learner’s permit, and I obediently comply, texting in the passenger’s seat like a teenager and occasionally fussing with the radio.

Firsts are, typically and understandably, active things, things one does rather than doesn’t. First step, first kiss, first day of school. The inevitability of the latter has recently made itself known at our house. It looms in the piles of school supplies, in the boys’ fresh haircuts, in the list of things yet to do.

In consequence, I almost missed the first that is today. It’s a rare inactive first, a not doing rather than a doing, and it is quietly changing my life: I am not at school today.

Today is the back-to-work day at our school, the day when the returning teachers Must Absolutely Be There, a day of meetings long and short, and the beginning of the preparation for the Beginning. This day has always been every bit of enormous for me, marking a necessary shift in focus from my life at home to my life at school. It introduces lesson plans and class lists, and it presages piles of papers—my primary reading material over the next nine months.

It also means the renewed fellowship of faculty, that low and constant rhythm that serves as support to our work; and it promises the students– those worlds of effort and ideas that somehow become, over those months, a new world of shared laughter and deep mutual regard.

This is the first day in six years that this is not my first day.

Instead I am at home and will be for a while, the first time since Emma was born that I will not be teaching, the first time not homeschooling, the first time not in graduate school.

What in this world will I do?

Laundry. And cleaning. And laundry. And driving. And watching kids’ games, and shuttling kids to lessons. And laundry.

And reading things Just Because I Want To.

And writing. Oh My Yes. Lots and Lots of Writing.

I Can’t Wait.

The post A First Sentence appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I have some boxes to check: we get a list at the end of the year– things to do before we go. Clean out cupboards, remove all food. Count and organize your books, wipe down your boards.

The last days have been busy: signing yearbooks, saying farewells, administering exams all week. I had two parties for students at my house, delightful and exhausting in their turn.

Then last night was the senior banquet, and this morning was graduation. I teared up more than once: why are beginnings also always an end? I drove home to remove my party dress and earrings and be a Saturday mom once more.

And there they are again: the leaves all over everything. The trees have put on their party clothes, and the humidity swells the space between them. Yesterday’s thunderstorm has given way, so it seems, to clouds and blue, and Bill already has ribs on the smoker.

It isn’t quite here, but it is Very Nearly Almost. Three more teacher workdays, one small mountain, a faculty meeting or two.

But when I took off my heels this early afternoon, I tied the ankle-bracelet on anyway– the one made of hemp and blue beads, the one Emma brought me from the Carolina shore, the one I will wear all summer.

The post Harbinger appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Most of the time I am up before light, anyway. I make breakfast and bed in the dark. I fold laundry as sleep sits in the back of my brain. I start another load in the cottoned quiet of a silent house.

By the time we leave, we can just begin to see it: the greyness of the new day, sometimes shot through with the early sun. At the traffic light, sometimes I wonder who it is that decides today we’ll have clouds pink just here at their underbellies and gold all around the edges. Or rain.

And then the building takes me in.

Fluorescent light is good for grading papers– and assigning them, for that matter. It is fine for laughing with students, or guiding one through his persuasive argument. It works well for epic heroes and similes, for new vocabulary words and sharpened pencils. I am at ease in its hum and the clock’s ticking, background noise for my head bent over a lesson plan, a stack of papers, a recommendation letter or a student’s heartache.

I confess to forgetting about it in there.

But like so much mercy, it waits. And how? Bottomless blue in the vault of heaven, or cottoned over with white and grey. Striations locked immobile behind a vellum of racing clouds. A storm suspended in steely blue. A solitary hawk, circling. Sky and cloud conspire: they are a net, a scrim, a gauntlet for the light.

And the light is grey, glowering behind a wall of grey cloud. Or the light is bright and uninhibited. Or it has seized the cloud with golden fingers, has wrapped itself around, sends couriers to clasp the flats of leaves, the hoods of cars, the green (such green!) of pine needles. It sidles sideways, licks, paints, sings, sighs, declares with quiet heart that it is Here.

Still here. Still here at the close of a day, at the close of a week. Still here to gloss the trees, to warm the pavement, to pry with nimble fingers at Wonder, sealed up inside my mind.

The post Sky appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

These were the instructions as written (by a student) on the white board in my clasroom last Friday. We had all heard the forecasts (“wintry mix” to start at 9 p.m. on Friday night, accumulation of up to twelve inches by Saturday night), but in these parts, one simply doesn’t know what to believe. As soon as you head to the store to buy your extra gallon of milk, the sky clears. But fail to fill the tank with gas, and you’re likely to get an ice storm that knocks out the power for three to five days and you’re making oatmeal in the fireplace.

I knew the one about wearing pajamas inside-out. The children and I tried it once last year, to no avail. But can you blame us for trying? We all want snow– at least once– every winter, and a snow day? Oh My, Yes.

So when on Friday night the flakes started to fall, we could barely contain our excitement. And when, after our two outings that evening, the car and the roads were coated with a fine, white film, we were More Than Hopeful. And when Saturday dawned, grey of sky and white of ground with a fine mist of snow still steadily falling, we were Overjoyed. Winter, at last.

But let’s be frank: if those “steps” (incantations?) above don’t make it abundantly obvious, what the kids are after is a Snow Day, a day when, by the will of the Divine and the warnings of forecasters, by the wisdom of the governor and the benevolence of a headmaster, School Is Cancelled. And this was why Friday’s snowfall seemed just the littlest bit off, just a wee bit cruel. Snow. On a Friday. What’s the good in that??

Make no mistake: my children enjoyed it. They were out once, twice, three times on Saturday, at least twice on Sunday. The sleds made countless trips down the hill, the clothes made countless cycles through the dryer, the kettle sang countless songs over cocoa. We had more snow on Saturday and sunshine on Sunday, and all the world glittered in its transformation.

But snow falls like this so rarely in North Carolina. This latest storm rivals only one other in my memory: the blizzard of 2000, when we gained 24 inches overnight and were absolutely housebound for a week. Okay, yes, we could get out of the house, but not out of the driveway. We only have something like three snowplows for the tri-city area (or so the rumor goes); we are Absolutely Unprepared for this kind of weather– because we so rarely need to be.

So this makes the case for the snow day, doesn’t it? Our chances of a snow day are Oh, So Slim because those are the same chances for a snow fall at all. So doesn’t it seem like it’s maybe okay– just once in a while– to actually get a snow day?

And then, on Sunday afternoon, the news: school closed on Monday. Oh bliss! Oh joy! The snowplows just couldn’t make it to everyone; the salt isn’t nearly enough; the overnight freeze would make travel Absolutely Unsafe.

And so today it was more sledding and more relaxing. I spent much of the day (truth be told) working on school work at my kitchen table, but all the while aware of the sun glinting off the snow, of the joyous cries of my children and the noisy scrape of their sleds as they went shooting down the hill.

Yes, it was a good work day, and now I am armed and ready. My students and I are on the cusp of our study of the Greeks. Socrates awaits us, as does Oedipus Rex! Time escapes us, we have too much to lose. I, for one, am poised to retake my classroom even as the piles of white snow disappear into the asphalt and the creeks outside run with water.

Which explains my disappointment when, tonight at about 8:30, we learned that our school, like all the other schools in the area, is once again cancelled for tomorrow. We’re supposed to get some icy rain overnight and into the morning, and enough ice remains on enough of the roads as it is that we just can’t risk sending everyone to school. What a disappointment.

Maybe tomorrow, after the snow melts (?), I’ll ask the kids to get the carrots off the lawn. Or maybe we’ll wait until Wednesday.

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