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.

Time spent teaching is never lost.

I spent an hour in a 9th grade classroom yesterday. The first time in nearly five years.

This was at a public school, Durham School of the Arts downtown. The place where my daughter now spends her days, where my middle son used to spend his. And we’ve lived in Durham for nearly-ever: I’ve driven past that school hundreds of times.

But yesterday was my first time teaching there, and this as a one-time guest. Fifty minutes with a creative writing class. Thirty-one students. Poetry and prose and metaphor packed between the bells.

***

I’ve taught in public and private schools, many years ago and only five years ago. The schools had different philosophies and perhaps some of them were better formed than others. But yesterday I realized again how much they are the same, whether I’m in a public middle-and-high school in the Pittsburgh suburbs or a shanty school with a corrugated roof in Nairobi’s Korogocho slum: Here the students sit, and here sits or stands the teacher.

And Then What?

It’s the Then What that interests me.

***

Yesterday it was metaphors and extended ones. It was listening for the metaphor in Cory Fry’s current song Underground and then discovering the weight of the metaphors in a clever poem by Sylvia Plath.

As teacher, one can’t be in a hurry with these things. To rip the thread from the spool is to leave your students abandoned, distracted, unlearned or annoyed. You have to tease it out, to let them talk to you. Good teaching is, I’ve learned, so much less my telling them things and so much more their telling me. 

Which was why I loved it yesterday when Aaman said he thought Fry’s underground was a mine, and why I reveled in Lorin’s observation of the “percussive influence” in the song. Why I loved that Emerson declared they could do without songs about love, thank you very much, and that Katherine noticed the nine syllables in Plath’s poem aligned neatly with the nine months of pregnancy.

And when they realized, as a class, that the poet was talking about pregnancy in the first place, we had that sonic boom of revelation that many teachers live for: the metaphoric light bulb, the newborn understanding, the thing I was always after for my students–no matter where I taught–when each one or even one of them says: I See.

***

I miss teaching.

***

But yesterday was fifty minutes. It was an island of time. It was a window the students let me climb through, unburdened by a week’s load of lesson plans or papers to grade or the learning modifications that require a lesson’s reconstruction. It was without obligatory phone calls to parents or tardy slips, without concerns because this student isn’t paying attention or asks to leave the room too much. It was without getting up too early or deciding (again) what to wear (the students pay attention to these things: “Mrs. Stevenson, you wore those shoes with that shirt last week.” Good lord).

Yesterday was a song, a poem, a paragraph from Fitzgerald. And then the bell.

***

I think any scholar of the New Testament is supposed to love Peter the most. Aren’t we supposed to love Peter? What with his foolhardy faith and his big mouth, his walking on water and his, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life” (John 6:68).

And I love Peter. I do.

But I love John the Baptist the best, I think. He was raised in the church, so to speak. Reared believing, like me. He leaped in his mother’s womb when he heard Mary’s voice, and He knew the Messiah on sight: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” (Matthew 3:14).

And when his disciples grew anxious because people were all going to this Jesus fellow to be baptized, he understood–didn’t he?–where exactly he fit in the scheme of things: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30).

It’s a good thing to know what one is called to, or not. To know that your time is up, your job is finished, that someone else can absolutely do the job just as well as you can, perhaps (so likely) better.

It was right and good for me to leave teaching when I did. And I miss it still. Which is fine.

***

The best moment for me with John the Baptist is when he was in prison for speaking the truth. He’d been in there for a long time, and I’m pretty sure he knew–he was no fool; he knew the temperament of the Galilean rulers–this would not end well.

He sent a message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3).

John. Prophet. Believer. Cousin of Christ. Asking whether Jesus was the Messiah.

***

John teaches me this: It’s okay to ask. It’s okay–years out, even five of them–to wonder about His work in your life. It’s okay to miss what He’s shut the door on. And it’s okay to be overjoyed in the life you currently have, to see the goodness and the blessing and the labor of it, and to still love the thing you once did. To wait in hope for the next thing, to work hard at the thing you are doing, and to remember with inexpressible sweetness what it was to be with your students–your students–all those days, all those times, before.

It’s okay to ask, says the imprisoned John, as long–always, always–as He is the One you go to with the questions, and then you stay put for the answers, even if He seems quiet for a long time.

He is always good, and He is always true. And the poetry of that right there is enough.

***

 “And Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me.”          Matthew 11:4-6

The post It’s Okay to Ask 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.

I am sick. So sick. On a weekend.

It started at about 11 on Friday night, not long after the last of my 9th grade students left our house and our end-of-year party, the party during which 22 out of 26 of them, the three seniors who crashed it, and I and my three children played Ghost-in-the-Graveyard. I haven’t played that in So Long, and it was So Fun.

But the all-over aching started at about 11 or so, and the vomiting at around 3. That part didn’t last long, but it was just as bad as I remember it.

On Saturday morning I thought that, with the help of a few Advil, I’d be fine.

Not So.

So here we are, day 2, and I am heavy with that all-over ache, warding off nausea with a weak arm and my second glass of ginger-ale. I’ve managed some laundry and the house is, surprisingly and after Friday night, in good order.

But weekends are for more than this. They are for recovery: from the loss of sleep all week, catching up on grading, family time, time to Think.

Instead my sleep is pocked with bad and vivid dreams and too much wakefulness. I’ve graded two papers but am wondering if, my mind hazy, those grades are fair. I watch my children from the vantage of the couch or the bed, too tired even to read to them. And all my thoughts are sad.

The coming weeks will be busy, So Busy: writing exams and teaching reviews and grading, grading, grading; the senior class trip to NYC which I’m so looking forward to but which will mean missing Emma Grace’s dance recital and a weekend with my family; more exams and more grading and then the grades themselves will be due; our first-ever graduation and all the celebrations and busy-ness and joy and yet-unrealized sadness that will come with that.

Here, from the vantage point of my bed, with my knees aching and my back aching and my head aching, ungraded papers at my side, nothing looks good. Summer is coming, I know, and with it the celebration of our 20th anniversary, time with family, time to write, and a family-of-five trip to France.

But now, right now, the mountain between now and then looms, and I’m only standing at the foot of it, too weak to begin the climb.

These words, though, are good: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Indeed.

The post Mountain appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

As I told you last time, O Reader, the week was going to be an intense one, and this proved to be every bit true. I haven’t been home before ten p.m. since time out of mind (though I’m pretty sure I got home before that on Tuesday), and the days themselves have been frought with bought time– two extra school-time hours granted for rehearsal, treks back and forth from the school to the performance cite and then home again, props carefully counted and then gone missing, last-minute run-throughs and lines that were just too hard and a pretty certain sense that, despite all our work and preparation, we just hadn’t had enough time. On Monday morning we all found ourselves longing for the end of the week, for the last line delivered on Saturday night, for the cast party that would ensue at Champps restaurant. We all wanted it to be Over.

Time is a strange thing, don’t you think so, Reader? Time and, while we’re at it, Life. How is it that these two basic elements go, for the most part, utterly unmarked? I mean, we name it with dates and times, count hours and minutes– but to what end? We swim in Time and Life like fish in water, taking them (mostly) completely for granted. Yes, we are living– and what’s for dinner? Yes, time is flying– which means it’s time to be thinking about Christmas. There isn’t Time– and Life is too big– to reflect on things.

This is certainly– especially lately– my experience.

I had been noticing, however and lately, North Carolina’s failure (once again) to please me on the weather front. It’s a common refrain with me. October acted Way Too Much like June for my taste. We did have some chilly days, and the nights definitely became colder. But for all this, things remained relatively green– an affront to my sensibilities that I, for obvious reasons, didn’t make time to complain about.

The trees are not supposed to be green in October. I don’t care what you say. October is The Month for the color to come, for the hillsides to be set on fire, for the light to fall– unhindered by humidity– on the flats and edges of leaves all gold and red and orange. What I found instead (so disappointing), was Mostly Green, and the occasional tree that reminded me somehow of something standing over a drain: leaves around me had chlorophyll valves that had decidedly been shut off; their green had seeped and seeped away; their sere leaves now flapped in lifeless dun and grey.

Autumn, for all its beauty, is a kind of death, yes? Take the beauty away and one wonders if it’s worth it.

Yes, last Sunday’s leaves were still mostly green. Is it always like this, I wondered? Does the color change come in November here? Despite my fourteen years of living in the South, my plumb-line for the seasons is set by Northern expectations.

Then Monday came with grey and rainy skies. It was Cold. And Tuesday dawned the same way. But the weather cleared on Tuesday afternoon, and I was in rehearsal until after dark. It was Wednesday that presented me with the change: color, color, color. The maple trees that line our backyard and, for nearly three seasons of the year, screen us from some neighbors, had turned their vibrant yellow. I remembered how it always is with those trees: in the early morning, when the sky takes on some light, they have a fierce glow about them so that, from the corner of your eye, you might be fooled into thinking that a bonfire burned back there, or the lights that surround a football field.

I didn’t really have time to take notice of the change, of course. I wasn’t outdoors much, for starters, but I did enjoy the leaves on my way to school in the mornings, and I did like to watch them (when I had time to look) from the windows of the school building. I didn’t see them on my way home again because my way home was– all week– after dark.

But this morning– this morning that feels so new and fresh and unhemmed– I sat with my cup of tea at the kitchen table and looked and looked out the window. The play, after an opening night that was, for all of us, somewhat of a Disappointment, went so well last night. So Well. The audience laughed in all the right places; they listened attentively enough to catch the many things that we all thought were So Funny; they laughed long enough that I rued my failure to teach my actors to wait (Wait!) until the laughter died down to say more. And my actors! Oh my. Last night they had a ball, and they ad-libbed, and they knew they had done an excellent job. It was worth it. Absolutely.

My face hurt from smiling so hard.

And this morning I didn’t go to church at all, but allowed myself to sleep as I needed to, so that I wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table with the tea until very nearly 10:30. Already the maple trees have put on their lacey dresses: the neighbor’s house between the trees begins to emerge. Occasional little gusts sent down their scattering of leaves and I saw that the lawn is covered.

Already? Already? Do we get only this week of vibrant color? If things proceed at this rate, the leaves will all be down by Wednesday, and I will study instead the architecture of the trees, the light along the bare branches.

It’s odd, perhaps, that we mark Life by Time. Maybe we’ve got that wrong. Maybe these months and weeks are an inappropriate standard that skew our perceptions and have us looking at the Wrong Thing.

Because this morning– this nameless, dateless morning– I watched some leaves take their only journey downward. I delighted in my daughter’s “tucking-in” of the kittens on her bed. I listened to Everett describe his planned invention of a diver’s glass-bottomed boat. And last night I watched my actors find out what they are capable of.

It is all Incredibly Beautiful.

The post Nameless, Dateless appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Tonight things will be different.

Tonight I am not making a salt and flour map of the Roman Empire (ca. 1 AD) with William. We did that last night, and were up until 10:15 together working on it, pushing the salty dough into all those dents and dimples around the Black and Mediterranean Seas.

Tonight I am not writing an ad lib script for the courtroom scene in The Merchant of Venice. That’s what I did last night, after the salt and flour map, after William went to bed. Yes last night I sat on my bed and created for my students a selection of lines they might say as the attending crowd in that famous courtroom scene, the one in which Shylock demands his pound of flesh and Portia reminds him that “the quality of mercy is not strained.” The (almost) entire class is on stage for this scene, and they must needs be acting, which in their case means responding to the words of the principal speakers. But they were having trouble coming up with things to say, so I wrote out some possibilities. It worked well in rehearsal today.

Tonight I am not at book club, eating raspberry chocolate cheesecake and discussing the differences between the book Children of Men and the film of the same title. I am not there, because that was Monday, I am not enjoying the company of Beth or Carolyn or Daun or, this time, Alison, our guest book-club-attendee. And so I am not getting home at 11:30 p.m.

I am also not reading Joseph and His Brothers. No. I have been devoting Serious Hours of my evenings to that task over the last few weeks, and I have finally finished. I am a better person for it, but more on that in another post.

I am not sewing a costume for Junius Brutus, and this because I failed to bring home my sewing machine from school today. I lent it to the school for the middle grades life skills course at the beginning of the semester, and I keep forgetting to bring it home. Which just goes to show how much sewing I do on a regular basis. But Will needs the Junius Brutus costume for Friday, so you can bet I’ll be doing some sewing tomorrow. Not tonight.

And I am not running a dress rehearsal for The Merchant of Venice. That’s tomorrow night, beginning at 6 p.m. It is the fourth quarter project for my humanities class, and we’re working ourselves toward frenzy getting ready.

Nor am I on-hand for my own directorial debut, which will be our performance of the play on Friday night. I’ll be there at 6 p.m. for that, too, and I expect that the cast party will keep me out late into the night.

No, tonight I am not doing any of these things. Instead, I am posting this, and then I am going to bed.

I am Not Sorry In The Least.

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