(Not Quite) Silver Spoons

The new in-sink-erator really works. Found out the hard way tonight when my grandmother’s metal measuring spoons took a few turns in the jaws of death and ended as a mangled mess. Kind of how my day went as a whole: a jumbled twist of metal. Just another thing to add to the garbage pile, I thought, as I saw the dents where the ONE TABLESPOON used to be.

I always thought of her when I used those spoons, measuring out salad dressing or vanilla for cookie dough or liquid ibuprofen when the pharmacy spoon went missing. And in my kitchen I drifted back to my days as a girl (funny that a cheap set of spoons could spawn a time machine.) But with the magic spoons I remembered the tapioca pudding and homemade soups and the way she ate peanut butter straight from the jar.

They were plenty older than I, and tonight was just their time I suppose. They were a connection, however tenuous, to a woman I loved so much and who has been gone way too long. She died when I was in eighth grade, twenty-five years ago. This year marks the silver anniversary of her leaving.

I’m not sure how she packed so much love and so many lessons into such a short amount of time with me, (although maybe I teach eighth grade in some vain attempt to re-create the life I knew when she last walked this earth.) And I am sometimes amazed that she has stayed so vividly in my head all these years.

But those brief moments with her measuring spoons kept her alive somehow (yes I know that Prufrock would rather they be coffee spoons that were measuring a LIFE, but a little baking powder in a warm cookie counts pretty well too.)

And it will take more than the death of the spoons to kill the lessons inside me. She taught me to love books, to read voraciously, to hunger for mysteries. I’ve already passed on THAT lesson to my own daughter, the kind of girl who falls asleep with the book on her head or hides under the covers to finish a chapter.

She taught me kindness, to accept people and see the best in them, no matter what their lot in life. She loved them equally: the young man who cut her grass, the neighbor lady across the fence, and even those who did her wrong. She had her moments of fire, but mostly she shared her faith and friendship under the pear tree at the end of her lane.

My grandma instilled in me a sense of duty, demanded that we work first and play second. We woke up at the crack of dawn, drank coffee (mostly warm milk for me), cleaned the house, set the stew on for dinner, and then changed back into our pajamas around three in the afternoon for reading and eating and Wheel of Fortune. We each had our own couch. That is my kind of living.

And the lessons have stayed. Just today in class I was recounting her words when my students were whining about taking notes: Work first, and play later. And yesterday I was admonishing my son to be nice, (yes even to the girls.) The lessons in reading and writing come easily. I pass them without thinking. And I just this minute remembered she did a stint as a reporter before her familial roles began. I can channel her muse as I begin the school newspaper this year.

The measuring spoons are toast, no trade in value for that kind of metal. But my grandma and I are going for another twenty-five years. We’ll ditch the spoons and measure the smiles, the hugs, the good reads, and the good friends. Even if we have to do it in a strange past and future realm.

A Million Ways to Die

It could be dramatic. And traumatic. You could be a twenty-five year old doctor’s son, out for an end-of-summer fling, and be bludgeoned to death in someone else’s fit of rage. Or you could be a sweet six-year old child on your way home from fireworks, killed by a teen in a pick-up truck going one hundred miles an hour. You could be a fun-loving adventurer who has traveled the world, and die on a dock after diving into a Michigan lake. But then again, you might be resuscitated and live to tell the tale after all.

It could be quiet. And gentle. (Though Dylan Thomas would beg to differ.) You might slip away during Jeopardy one evening after five years of pain. Or fall sleep on your tummy in the crib with your lovey and never wake up.

You could drink yourself dead or walk in front of a train. You could fight heroically and rage against the disease, only to wither eventually. You could clutch your chest at the end of 26.2 and hit the ground before you ever receive your medal. You could go to work one day and get hit by a plane at your desk. Or free fall with a crumbling building and America’s innocence.

Yep, there are a million ways to die.

But me? I am more concerned with finding a million ways to live. Henry David said it best: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Discovering life instead of killing time? Sounds like a plan. Time will kill ME eventually. So heading to the woods and sucking the marrow out of life as Thoreau advocates sounds like the way I’d like to live. There are worse things than physical death. So many people have given up already, just going through the motions without a spark or a dream or a thrill.

It reminds me of The Princess Bride and Miracle Max who resuscitates Westley when he is only “mostly dead.” I don’t want to live my life mostly dead, just waiting for the Grim Reaper to take shape and shuffle me out stage left.

Breathing deeply, chasing my dreams, running through the woods, sucking marrow, teaching, writing, mothering, laughing: these are for me. I want to live, and not, when my number is called, find out that I had been mostly dead all along.

Of Helicopters and Leeches

In fifteen plus years of teaching, I thought I had seen it all. I’ve watched a young man screaming at his dad in front of me at conferences. I have withstood the onslaught of a lawyerly mother trying to win a few more points for her daughter. I’ve had a student stand up in the middle of class to swear at me and ensure at highest decibel that everybody in the room hated me. I’ve thrown a few erasers, received a few crank calls, and have managed to sneak in a little Thoreau and sentence structure amid the cacophony of teen noise in front of me each day.

For the past handful of years I have been teaching junior high students, a strange world in which the players are facing major life issues like peer pressure, drugs, and identity, but who also vie for smelly stickers on their spelling tests. (A dichotomy I have yet to understand.) They still have trouble tying their shoes and bringing a pencil to class, but they are faced with decisions with social media or with controlled and uncontrolled substances that could literally ruin their lives. Or worse.

Despite my colorful past in the classroom, I have just recently begun to think that the world has gone mad: specifically the world of parents. I see it in my classroom and in my school and the schools of my friends. This world is changing fast and I don’t know how to hold on. Yes, I do believe that the majority of parents are sane, loving and appropriate, but I fear the pendulum is currently swinging slightly toward the crazy.

The term helicopter parent has been bandied around for the last several years and I do think it is an appropriate concept for the parents I see habitually running lunch up to kids that have forgotten them or hand-picking sports teams and friends. (There is a fine line between lovingly helping a kid out once in a true emergency and becoming an enabler.)

But it’s getting worse. I’d like to coin a new phrase: Leech Parent. More and more, I am seeing students who are having the life sucked out of them by parents who make every decision at every moment. Yes, there was a time for that, and I believe it ended when the kid’s diaper-wearing days ended.

Parents are doing homework for kids, picking out kid’s clothes, making the lunches and choosing the activities. And worse, they are calling the other moms to solve playground problems and calling teachers to defend the little ones from responsibility. Whether they are trying to live vicariously through their children or think they are “helping” by dictating every move, the Leech Parent causes some problems.

I give an open assignment and a student can write or speak about anything in the universe, and I get a blank stare because her parent has always made every choice and she has no idea what she feels passionately about. Or a student gets in a prickly situation and can’t handle himself because his parents always bailed him out. (Of course with the advent of cell phones, said parents can be there in a jiffy to continue the bailing).

I just worry about a society where the young are not taught to think and reason, where there are no consequences to actions, where kids are not allowed to feel uncomfortable or disciplined. Yes I want my children to enjoy life, but some of the best lessons come from mistakes made and consequences rendered. How will children learn this if never forced to choose, or lose?!

I know that I am a little more on the free-range side of parenting. My first and third graders make their own lunches (and my FOUR year old makes my husband’s so he doesn’t feel left out.) I let my kids ride their bikes down the street unaccompanied and expect them to remember their own backpacks and clean their own rooms and choose their own friends. I stay out of the way, not because I don’t love them immensely, but because I do.

As a mother, I feel I should be the soft place to land, the one at home with the band-aids and the hugs after a hard day. Unfortunately, some families don’t even NEED band-aids anymore because the children are never allowed the slightest bump in the road. (And the irony: the parents don't realize that the wounds from the leech marks will need far more than band-aids.)

And for my classroom and our future in this country, this makes me very nervous.