Memories of first year teaching

My first year teaching I was hired where I student taught.  I was 22 years old and brand new to teaching and fifth grade. I had a lot to learn. Along the way, I met Bobbi Jo, the school secretary at the school I taught at.

I am From (inspired by George Ella Lyon)

I am From (inspired by George Ella Lyon: http://georgeellalyon.com/where.html)

I am from several places: Alaska, California, and Texas. This first poem is about California.

I am from ragged coastlines–from the edge of the world with no visible boundaries to the west, to looking off into Mexico to the south.

I am from the multicultural mecca of San Diego and learning to speak Spanish without a gringa accent

from exotic foods, sun-dried tomatoes, seafood rather than meat.
I am from granola girls and surfer boys, from peace out and what’s up dude.

I am from cool and frigid cold water–swimming laps in outdoor pools nightly, to swimming past my head in choppy water, feet entangled seaweed in  in oceans up and down the coast: Imperial Beach to Santa Barbara.

I’m from the glamour of blonde highlights, from microdermabrasion, eyebrow waxes, and shopping at Gamma Gamma for doc martin’s.

I am from an adolescence of punk rock fashion, multi-colored hair, ripped stockings, and a permanent pout.

I am from memorizing lyrics of the album liners from my vinyl record collection.

I am from Reagan-Thatcher cold war years, emerging technologies, record players, and typewriters.

I’m from 100’s of weekends at the San Diego Zoo, wanting to be a zoologist or at least an anthropologist, thinking one day I would be like my heroine Jane Goodall.

I’m from trips through the Mojave desert to see my dad–inland towards the mountains and solitude.

I am from a bedroom full of books in my youth; I am from immersion in Latin American fiction, Russian novellas, stacks of poetry both read and written, journals of endless thoughts and ruminations, and an inclination towards studying ideas.

I am from this place I left behind–without tears and with no regrets.

Those Waves Crashing Over Your Head: Memories of Guys

Tom

Tom was the only boy I can I ever really loved in my life. Black hair, blue eyes, I thought we would never be apart. Those good times didn’t last. In high school he was obsessed with the JFK assassination and the many conspiracy theories that surrounded it; he carefully nailed pictures and photos of Lee Harvey Oswald and photos of Kennedy to his bedroom wall in high school. When I was 19, I would stare at Zapruder film stills, him with his arms around me, telling me how we’d love each other when we were old and gray, holding hands in our rocking chairs.

We spent our weekends together for three years—in used bookstores, watching classic movies, walking around dingy parts of San Diego, foreign films in La Jolla, used bookstores downtown and on Adams avenue, bright pink milkshakes in Korean restaurants in O.B., picnics in Presidio Park, just the two of us feeding each other brownies, just hanging out. Such strong emotion. I went to the only dance in high school I ever attended–prom–with him and afterwards we spent time watching Depeche Mode 101 at his house. I still dream of him, spending time in that room, in that house that I will never visit again in my life.

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Even though we lived on the Southern California coast from 1984-2000, I rarely went to the beach. Each time I did, it was usually associated with strong emotion or a powerful event. I actually knew another Tom very briefly. He was super cute, brunette, strong arms, bright eyes. We went to Ellwood Beach in Santa Babara, drifting further out where the waves swept you off the sand. The water was surprisingly warm and enveloped your whole body. He held me in his strong arms, safe, happily alone in the world together, in the middle of the ocean and gave me a big, soft kiss. ran his hands through my wet auburn hair, he tasted like there was no one else; we were weightless. But it was fleeting, just a moment in time.

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Victor was a surfer, a real one. Driving in his truck, sitting with the sun shining on us both, shortly after I met him when I was 23, he told me “I’m 29, going on 19.” He told me what it was to surf, to feel the waves crashing over your head, over your whole body, sometimes a powerful one plunging both you and your board to the bottom of the ocean.

Later, when he broke up with me, and I was a wreck, I thought of a Buddhist saying that I found in an old book on the 25 cent rack at the Tierrasanta Library and cannot find anywhere since. I cried into the ocean. It did not overflow.

From “Lonely is an Eyesore”: This Mortal Coil “Acid, Bitter and Sad”

Climbing the Mountain to Mt. Calvary

“Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow rooms….”–William Wordsworth

I wanted to think for a bit about Mt. Calvary, the Anglican monastery on the top of a mountain in Santa Barbara. Someone also asked me to write about it. It’s here: http://www.mount-calvary.org/. Because it burned to the ground very recently, I will have to write about it in past tense.

My sister first invited me to go visit Mount Calvary. We were both attending St. Michael’s Episcopal church and someone there told her about a peaceful place to go for a silent retreat. We ended up going together for silent retreats often after that.

One didn’t get to there easily. The other-worldly retreat center was located up Mountain Drive. If you started your journey at the Santa Barbara Mission, and meandered cautiously up some narrow two-lane roads with sheer drop-offs, you would eventually get there. Amy, my twin sister, and I nearly always walked because we had no car. Arriving hot and sweaty, we did a working retreat.

Upon arrival, you enter the pale blue, unlocked double doors and found your way to the check in area, relieved to be in a place so unusual that there is a rule against talking at certain times. We usually went straight to our little room and slept in a half-awake sleep, but so weary of the world that it’s like entering some kind of void where nothing matters but closing one’s eyes and resting. The purpose of the silence after meals until morning, or, all the time if one so chooses is to intentionally relieve the stress that small talk and forced conversation sometimes imposes. When we awoke we drifted into the kitchen for meals or into the chapel for the rituals of the Order of the Holy Cross. stand-sit-kneel, etc.

The monks gave cheery sermons, quoted Emily Dickinson, read, socialized at meals, rolled out the t.v. to watch Rosanne occasionally, and worked. One of the monks, Brother Roy, made calligraphy cards. My favorite was one that said “Joy is the human spirit fully alive”.

In the small room that allowed us rest from life, and the well-stocked libraries, my sister and I had a respite. Making our way home afterwards, we hoped to keep Mt. Calvary in our hearts and minds until our next visit.

Sanvean (I am your shadow) – Lisa Gerrard

Back to the Far North to the Gray House

My mom and I were walking across the dark parking lot from Barnes and Noble, me clutching my bag containing Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style–maybe I will master punctuation yet–and discussing self-defense tactics on the way. She told me about a time when we were little, living in poverty, in a dilapidated shack in North Pole, Alaska. Amy and I were about four at the time and she said we had to park a ways away from the house itself because the car would get stuck in the mud and snow and dirt, etc. So, we three would traipse this distance and one day, or night, she said she encountered two “characters” on the journey home. Someone advised her to put her hand in her pocket so they would think it was a gun. She said it worked like a charm and they never bothered us.

This is one of my earliest memories. The old Gray House was quite the eyesore–a little tiny speck of a thing set amidst the woods of the greater slums of North Pole. There were no resources nearby to speak of. My grandparents lived in their own 1-bedroom house about a mile away with blankets nailed to the wall for insulation and fluorescent track lighting across the living room ceiling with a string you pulled to turn on the lights. At least we had running water; they had none. My grandma bathed at my aunt’s house and hauled her drinking water in big jugs from the North Pole Fire Station, or, from the running creek at a nearby town called Fox.There were two beds in the living room and a painting in the hall of a man with about 16 heads that one of my aunt’s ex-boyfriend made while tripping on something, so the story went. An old rotary phone was at the end of one couch and for fun we would listen in on the party line; everyone shared it with about eight others around there in the late 70’s. The walls were lined with framed photographs of my grandpa polar bear hunting, standing on top of carved out skins, pictures of my aunt and uncle. These were family photos that said “We’re proud to be Alaskans and this is what we do.” There were two photos that had stories behind them. the first was my aunt who was 15 or so and had shot a polar bear. Supposedly, my grandpa booted her out of the cessna while the bear was charging and threw the gun out after her and it was trial-by-fire. The other story is the photo of my uncle sitting on the jawbone of a whale–as large as a big park bench. The caption on the postcard version said’ Mark Muktuk, as Eskimo boys like to do, sits on the jawbone of a whale and gazes out at the Alaskan midnight sun.” When my grandpa flew out to the Bush, they said his name was Muktuk so the native boys would play with him. So they say.

I often stared at the huge crack in the linoleum-lined floor in the kitchen. It looked like it was going to cave into the basement. My grandpa would say, “When you grow up learn how to be a carpenter and come back and fix my house.”

The Gray House, where we lived, had two small bedrooms, just big enough to contain beds in each of them and not much more. Out back, there was a place to pick berries in the summertime with those long hours of fine daylight. I remember, 1978, my dad watching Spiderman on television, eating cereal for dinner, his feet propped up on the coffeetable–the same coffeetable my sister and I would prop up on the couch and slide down for entertainment.

Many years later, we saw a brown bear lumbering along the highway about two blocks from my grandma’s house.

We burst into her front door, “Elaine! Elaine! We saw a brown bear down by the 76 gas station!”

“Oh, my, it was probably just a big dog.” She grinned as she prepared a big ol’ bowl of ice cream for my sister and I. That was no dog and she knew what kind of place she lived in so I always wondered why she said that.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/86939739@N00/8381464/in/photostream/

Dream Journal

Two recurring dreams:

Last night, and many previous nights before that, I am running away from abductors. I am furiously trying to pack a suitcase but not everything I have in the closet will fit into it. I have to hide in the closet because “they” are looking for “us” (myself and two others–don’t know who they are, really). The suitcase on wheels with my things is vital, though. I pack it, repack it, pile things on top and finally make a run for it, as if I’m changing planes with no time to spare at DFW. Where I’m at actually looks like my old condo in Austin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/86939739@N00/.  I think I’m upstairs in the office in this dream–in the closet.

Dream #2 that I wish I would have more often. I am in a large, expansive house. It’s usually so big I have to spend some time exploring all that it has to offer. It has big windows where I can see something clearly. Sometimes I see the ocean waves or other times I’m a in tall high-rise condo where I can see the urban cityscape. Whatever it is that I see, I always feel quite peaceful and ok on my own. I like thse dreams. Maybe they’ll visit me tonight.

Writing Ideas

It is said we keep revisiting the same few themes in our life when we look back across it. Most of my writing ideas come from places and people.  I’ll start with a list of ideas-this being just a starter list, of course, with ongoing ideas added to it along the way.

1. Places are important to me. My sister and I lived in Santa Barbara for about six years. During those six years, I encountered many interesting people, including the monks at Mt. Calvary and the nuns at St. Mary’s convent behind the Mission downtown. About a month ago,  Mt. Calvary burned to the ground and was a total loss. I want to write about my memories there.

2. The Mojave Desert where my dad lived. This was a strange kind of wasteland that we visited on occasion, driving into the darkness of night, visiting our biological father intermittantly when we lived in San Diego. People said going inland to the desert was a spiritual journey, but for me it was more like spiritual chaos. I do believe that at night, and in solitude, the world does seem more poetic and somehow mystical, and yet, some places should just never be inhabited.

3.  Certain people strike me as worth writing about as a character sketch or a vignette. I think fondly of a childhood friend, Simona. She was a fiery Italian girl who went to Catholic school and lived in the same condo community  as us in suburban San Diego.

4.  The 80’s themselves are a great setting for stories that are quasi-true and looking for a “retro” time and place that most people from Gen. X can relate to

5. Growing up in Alaska….

Tomboy
For a while, I was a tomboy growing up. Even now, I have short hair. Not counting the “bad mullet years” from age 6-9, around age 10 I was a serious tomboy. I wore jeans, flannel shirts, a cap on my head, and I changed my name to “Joe”, a boy’s name. I had skinned knees, courdory pants, and a toothy grin. I’m not sure I ever quit being a tomboy on the inside, but around age 13 I started wearing a lot of makeup. Heavy black eye makeup, pale ivory foundation slapped on like war paint, blush, pink eyeshadow, and lipstick. Now I have the same makeup routine, but maybe a little less eyeliner. How does one go from tomboy to girly-girl? I’m not sure. Maybe heavy doses of MTV and Madonna, too much Sassy magazine and gazing at posters of Robert Smith and Martin Gore, who both wore black eyeliner and lipstick.
I wonder what it would be like to be a Bhuddist nun and shave my head and wear no makeup at all. Would that make me more “myself”? What is it about makeup that makes one feel more complete? It must be something biological or is it about “beauty”?

Other writing ideas: San Diego in general, La Jolla, Alaskan childhood (Kodiak, North Pole, Anchorage), Texas.

Everyone has a story

This blog is inspired by several important events. Writing is healthy, a way to find one’s identity, to write to know oneself, and to explore ideas. Literacy scholars–and Janet Emig in particular, discuss the idea of “writing to learn”. I am at a juncture in my life–a crossroads in identity–where I need to start to document my thoughts and make sense of where I’ve been and where I’m going. In a new town, single, and about to attempt to climb the academic career ladder, I am a blank slate. It’s time to get some words on the page. I also teach an online Master’s level course called “The Writing Process” where I encourage (read: “require”) my students to write daily for 30 minutes. I need to practice what I preach so this blog will serve that purpose for daily free-writes. Finally, as a researcher, I use narrative analysis to examine the stories of people’s lives–of literacy lives and lives in general. I need to start examining my own stories if I expect to have some insight into other people’s stories.