School Daze

There are some lovely little towns in Eastern Ontario. Some of them have been placed along the banks of rivers of which there are many in that part of the Province. The Ottawa and the Mississippi rivers come readily to mind. Some of the towns have fascinating histories as mill towns, small manufacturing towns, some of them purely agrarian-related, largely serving the adjacent farming communities. Some of them, like colourful, quaint Merrickville, have historical locks and docks on the Rideau River. Others, like Pakenham, have distinguishing features that are quite remarkable, like the five-span bridge, quite an engineering feat of its time, standing over the Mississippi right at the ever-raging, powerful rapids cascading downriver.

Life in these small towns carries on at a somewhat different pace than, say in Ottawa, an hour or more distant by car. And many people who live rurally drive that hour or more from where they live in these small rural communities to their workplaces in Ottawa. Some drive to Renfrew, or to Arnprior for work, and some people living in Renfrew or Arnprior or Cornwall will drive right into Ottawa, commuting that long drive back and forth, daily to their places of employment.

The children who live in those small towns attend school right where they live. Be it Almonte or Pakenham, Renfrew or Arnprior. The Upper Canada School Board has jurisdiction in part of that area, and like all school boards it is cognizant of the need of young Canadians to be educated, to be exposed, through good teaching, to all that they will require to know to go on to achieve a higher level of education and finally join the general workforce as educated adults, a credit to their society, to their country.

Many of these schools have been long established to ensure that Ontario children living in the eastern portion of the province, as elsewhere, do receive a good education. Some of them provide, in fact, an outstanding educational experience for their students, as we learn from an Ontario-based study outlining the successes or lack thereof, seen among public elementary and high schools throughout the province. Some schools, in some small towns distinguish themselves by the quality of the educational experience they offer to their charges.

And some just kind of plug along. Imagine your child attending a small school, meant to hold up to 250 students, but latterly school enrolment having gradually fallen well below the 200-student mark, classes become combined, so one teacher will provide the educational needs for split grades. It seems to work reasonably well. And there are many teachers who are innovative, patient and determined to discharge their professional obligations to their students in the best possible way.

Some of these teachers are truly leaders in their field, an inspiration to others, doing a difficult and needful job. Some teachers are truly professional in the seriousness of their regard for the students whom they teach. For others it’s just a job. They may have gone into the profession with a high-minded intent, but somehow, along the way, become dispirited and disinterested and disengaged. It does happen. It is, after all, a very high-stress profession. For which teachers in Canada unlike their counterparts in the United States, are generously compensated. Their remuneration is far higher, in recognition of what they are meant to achieve, and in recognition of the difficulties inherent in instilling a love for learning in children, and stimulating it. Or, at the very least, somehow managing not to stifle children’s natural affinity for learning.

Many succeed, some with a great deal of difficulty, and many do not. If a child is fortunate enough, he/she will experience the full range; exposure to well-intentioned but inadequate teaching methods taught by an indifferent teacher; exposure to a perennially-enthusiastic, determined and brilliant teacher who justifies her pride in her profession by discharging her obligations with flying colours. And, of course, everything in between those extremes.

For those children, in their formative years, being exposed to a teacher who is functionally incapable of managing a classroom of lively students without bullying them, without collapsing into a jelly of self-pity, without boring them with her/his personal problems, without failing to adequately ensure that children fully understand one lesson before moving on to the next, the school year can present as a total failure.

Under those circumstances, the school experience represents a tidemark of failure because the teacher has failed to guide the class toward the advances they are required to make throughout the school year. Particularly gifted children, those with a good memory, those with plenty of help from parents who have the time, the inclination, the understanding and the functional knowledge, can manage to retrieve something from the school year. But little thanks due to the teacher.

Parents have a tendency to overlook these unfortunate failures, simply because they recall their own experiences when they were young, coping with a teacher whose abilities and dedication to her task were insufficient to the job at hand. They sigh, recall that they managed to get over it and get on with their lives and trust that their children will, too. Adversity, after all, is no stranger to any of our lives. We must learn, even at a young, impressionable age -- perhaps particularly then to a degree -- that life sometimes is a struggle, just as true in the learning environment of a dysfunctional classroom, as it is later on in life when we must balance social interactions and workplace problems to find our own authentic place.

It does, however, behoove us all to give some thought to the tender sensibilities of adolescents, those children on the cusp of young adulthood, still clinging to childhood, confused by the change-over, by their hormones busy transforming them physically and confusing them psychically. They are taught -- by example, one trusts -- to respect others, to view with a certain equanimity differences between people, and to give equal weight to one another’s right to be slightly different, whether that difference manifests itself by culture, traditions, heritage, ethnicity, ideology or skin colour. Above all, they are taught to be deferential to authority, beginning with their parents, transferring to their teachers, and perhaps culminating with those who have seen far more of life than they have.

Society does have a hierarchy of respect due. In the same token, respect for the individuality of young people, their aspirations and their dignity should be reciprocated. Children are sent to school by parents anxious to ensure their children have the benefit of a decent education. There are alternate options, including home schooling, but there is no opting out of parental responsibility to have children schooled. Correspondingly, parents have a social obligation to have taught their children basic respect for others. Their children have every right to expect that they themselves will be respected.

How respectful is it of the rights of children to be schooled in a functioning environment when a teacher descends to hysterics on an ongoing basis? Accusing her class of stupidity, of failing to obey her injunctions, and treating them in the process to days surfeit with screaming and ranting at them. Collectively and singly. Take, for example, a mixed grade 7 and 8, and you have a room full of pre-teens, balanced by teen-agers. That is a potent mix. But a teacher with a calm demeanour, one imbued with emotional balance and experience in the classroom should be quite capable of influencing her class to pay attention, to settle down, and to eschew verbal outbursts.

With their own teacher continually berating them, impugning the level of their intelligence, screaming loudly for what seems to the class for hours at a time in high dudgeon over what they have collectively, or some unfortunate student singly has done to irritate the teacher, they have her example. When the teacher engages in hysterical outbursts of uncontrolled anger and bullying, how is it a surprise that the class then finds it difficult to respect her?

Of course, if they don’t respect her, they forbear to listen to her injunctions and have a tendency to ‘act out’. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And an endless circuit of dysfunctionality.

And take, for example, a principal of the school who, observing these things occurring -- particularly as this particular teacher has a pronounced tendency to send those pupils who have mightily displeased her ‘down to the office’, and occasionally to the attention of the principal, because she is incapable of dealing with them -- tries to understand what is happening. Having spoken tentatively to the teacher, and having received the information that the class is impossible, comprised of halfwits and stubbornly-raucous misfits, she decides to take a different tack.

She sets aside time from her schedule to call a conference. While the teacher takes half of the class off to gym, the principal sits down with the other half, those representing the grade 8 students. And she asks them what is going on, and why. Some of the children are silent, reluctant to say anything. A few do speak up, and relate to the principal that while it is true that some of the students are hard to handle, it’s a very few students who are actually trouble-makers. And one of them is a boy who has an anger management problem. Which the principal well knows, having integrated him into the regular stream.

The other students also know this and are careful to stay out of this boy’s way, although occasionally he will swing out in anger, usually at another boy, but occasionally at a girl. That, however, is not the problem. The problem is, one says, that their teacher cannot control her anger, lashes out at them, and upsets everyone unnecessarily. Her behaviour, one girl claims, is far worse than the obstreperous behaviour of the younger boys who are admittedly sometimes ill behaved.

The principal turns her attention to this girl, and asks her if she will elaborate. And the girl does. She speaks her mind and tells the principal that she resents the fact that the classroom is not one conducive to a good learning environment. She is aggrieved that their teacher will not control her physical outbursts which, when they occur, upset everyone. And only serve to further enrage the teacher herself. If she starts out the day in a bad mood, that mood only seems to increase in feverish accusations and screaming the rest of the day.

The principal listens, quietly, thoughtfully. And when the girl is finished, the principal turns to the others sitting there and asks what they think of what they’ve just heard. They are in complete agreement. The principal ends the session, thanks all of the students, turns to the outspoken girl and asks if she is prepared to say what she just told the principal, directly to her teacher. The girl says she is prepared to do just that.

But it never happens. Although directly after this little conference the students who were in attendance spoke among themselves about whether they would see some changes take place, and some of them thought it would happen, some thought nothing would change. The outspoken girl said she thought it wasn’t likely anything was about to change.

And she was right. And, funny thing that, although the teacher continued abusing the class, bullying them, harassing them, claiming they were idiots all, and if a student approached her to ask for help with a particular subject her reward would be a snarl that if she’d been listening adequately in the first place she wouldn’t be asking for help afterward, nothing was said to the outspoken girl.

Fact is, that outspoken girl seemed to be a favourite target of the teacher. Who would speak to the girl disparagingly of her single mother, unable to come to night-time occasions at the school. And who seemed forever openly critical of everything the girl did. Oh, not always, occasionally there was a flicker of appreciation for something the girl had done. Her marks more or less reflected her impeccable slate of completed assignments, and her interest and engagement with those school subjects she found she could relate to readily.

She hated it when the teacher became personal, remarked on things she had no right to do. It wasn’t bad when she was cited approvingly for helping a shy boy find a place for himself in the class. But when the teacher castigated her for breaking off a long-standing friendship with one of the other students, taking the other student’s side in an issue that had nothing to do with the teacher and everything to do with familial abuse which the affected girl carried over into her personal relationships with others, she took offence.

And then, wasn’t it quite amazing when, several months after that principal-student conference, the outspoken girl was called to the office and given a ‘certificate of appreciation’ for having the courage to speak up and give her version of events as they had occurred, though nothing was done to ameliorate the situation. 

 

 

Earrings

 

So, there, I got it done. Finally. I actually wanted it done last year. Not just what I got done now, but I thought it would be really different, and I wanted to get my nose pierced. I saw some girls with pierced noses, and delicate little studs in them and I thought it looked really beautiful. So that’s what I wanted. Last year. I told my mom, and she was all right with it. She said she’d look into it for me. She told me not to say anything to my grandmother, and I knew just what she meant. I mean, grandmothers are kind of old and they don’t like things that are that different. I told her anyway.

I kind of couldn’t help it. I’m just so used to telling her everything. She always listens to me. Anyway, I told her, and I knew there’d be trouble. I wasn’t even sure she was still on the line, after I told her. There was this big silence. Then she asked me why, why there, why not get my ears pierced. I didn’t want to, I told her, everyone does that, I don’t want to be like everyone else.

“You don’t? Don’t you realize that by getting your nose pierced you’ll still be like everyone else, it’s just that it’s a different group of everyone else's. You’ll be just another person with a nose piercing. It’s not all that original, you know.”

“I don’t want to be original. I want to be me. And I’m different from most of the people I know. I don’t want to do the things they do. I think I’d look just fine with a nose piercing. Mom said it was all right, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Grandma knows when she’s beat. When to give up. She’s smart in a lot of ways. She said nothing more. But she began sending me a whole lot of Internet sites with discussions on nose piercing. Some of them were from doctors and they had a lot to say about nose piercing, and a lot of it wasn’t very good. From my perspective, of course. And when I went over to visit with them during March break last year, Grandpa started in on me, while Grandma didn’t say another word.

“You’ll be labelling yourself”, he said.
“No, I won’t!”
“You will be presenting a façade that is interpreted as socially different in a not very useful way. A lot of people are put off with that kind of display of difference.”
“I am different!”
“Not in that kind of way, you’re not”, he said. “Just think about when you’re a little older and you apply for a job. Think an nose piercing will influence your selection?”
“I’ve seen girls wearing piercing and they’re working!”
“Sure, we have too. They’re all working at dead-end retail jobs. Is that what you’re anticipating for your future?”

I just hate it when they talk to me like that. If it’s all right with Mom, why do they have to interfere? I should’ve just said nothing about it, until it was over and done with. The next time they’d see me I’d be wearing a nice, neat little attractive stud in my nostril and there’d be nothing they could do about it.

Well, as it turned out, that didn’t happen, after all. Too young, all the places that do those things said. Illegal.

So, a year later, I got my ears pierced. Not the lobes, I didn’t want that. Every time I think about someone wearing hoops, I picture them getting pulled and the ears getting torn or something, it turns my stomach. I decided I’d rather have my ears pierced right at the very top. Mom said that sounded all right. Grandma wasn’t too averse to that, though true to form, she had to question me about - why there? I was pissed off.

When Mom made the appointment she was told there was an age requirement, and I was short a few months to 14. They said that would be all right, as long as she was there with me, and gave her permission. Mom told me they don’t use any kind of anaesthetic there, and they don’t use a punch, but a needle. Sounds kind of horrible, but Mom said it’s all right.

So we had the appointment, and I kind of thought maybe I’d change my mind. I knew it would hurt, there’s cartilage up there, not soft tissue like the ear lobes. That’s what Grandpa said, and I knew that, anyway. When we went into the shop and looked around it looked nice and clean and neat and there was all kinds of stuff to buy, like metal things to dangle when people got piercing on their eyebrows, or tongues (now that’s really gross), bellybutton, that kind of thing. Earrings too, lots of them.

But I’d already bought the earrings I wanted. At least Grandma did, she bought them for me, when we went to Winner’s. She kept picking out these little gold hoops even though I told her that wasn’t what I wanted. She’s really, really irritating sometimes. I saw these 14-kt-gold studs with round zircons in them. I knew they weren’t diamonds, if they were they’d cost a zillion dollars. They were on sale, and those were exactly what I wanted.

The technician who did my ears dropped the backing of one of the earrings. We looked for it, but couldn’t find it. She replaced it with a cheap one from one of her own earrings for sale, and when we got home Mom changed it into a gold backing from one of her earrings. She should’ve given us a discount off the $80 she charged, for that lost backing.

I had instructions that twice a day I had to use disinfectant on my ears, and to clean the earring posts too. I wasn’t supposed to sleep on my side for weeks. So the first night I tried to sleep on my back and couldn’t fall asleep. I tried sleeping on my front and that’s pretty impossible. It worked for maybe a half-hour and then I had to turn around on my back again. I didn’t get much sleep, believe me. Mom told me the next day that I should just go ahead and sleep on my side as usual, she doubted it would cause any problems.

And cleaning my ears? Uh-uh, not me. It’s sickening. Every time I looked at my ears I felt sick. When I saw a drop of blood on one of them, I felt like throwing up. So how’m I expected to clean them? I don’t even want to touch them, it’s gross. Mom has been cleaning my ears. And today, three days after I had them done, she took out the earrings to clean the posts, too. And then she couldn’t get them back in. She just couldn’t find the holes. I kind of panicked. And it hurt. So what happens? Jeff gave it a try and he got them back in. But it hurt, let me tell you. Mom says she’s not going to take them out again until a lot more time has passed. She said I have to turn them twice a day. I suppose I’ll eventually get around to disinfecting them myself. Not yet, though. I can’t even stand the thought of it.

First day back at school after March Break and what do you think Miss McGuire did? Her usual, of course. Nothing like 'welcome back class. I hope you had a wonderful holiday.' No, she tore right into us, calling us stupid and lazy and we didn’t even know where she was coming from. But that’s the way she is. She’s crazy, honestly. I’ve never had such an awful teacher. She does have her favourites and she goes a little lighter on them. I’m sure not one of them.

I could’ve strangled Leigh-Anne. Bad enough we’re no longer best friends. Not my fault, though. I want her to just leave me alone. I don’t need her and she doesn’t need me. Except she says she misses our friendship. She’ll say to me and to the other girls how awful it is that we’re no longer friends. Then she’ll turn around in almost the same breath and whisper to someone something about me. Right in front of me. Or she’ll be rude like you wouldn’t believe. So I just haven’t been bothering even responding to her. There’s just no point.

People just won’t leave well enough alone. They all hate her, just kind of put up with her. And they talk about her behind her back, even though they feel sorry about what happened to her. And they ask me why I decided not to be friends with her any more. I don’t say anything to them. It’s none of their business. I’ve told Brenda, but she’s not supposed to say anything to anyone, and I trust her. I don’t know why they’ve got to bug me about that. Why don’t they go ahead and befriend her if they’re so interested? When she treats them like crap they'll know for themselves.

As if that’s not bad enough; Leigh-Anne and her stupid behaviour on top of Miss McGuire’s rants... Everyone is fascinated with my earrings. All the girls want to touch them. I’m like, forget it, my ears hurt, and if you try to touch the earrings it’ll be painful. Do they care? Even though I tell them that, they go ahead and try to touch them, anyway. Morons -- really they’re stupid, some of them.

At gym, Morgan thought she was so smart, she got close enough to pull at my left ear and it hurt so badly I thought I’d cry. I told her she was an idiot. Not five minutes later she did the same thing again, with the other ear, and I swear, I almost slapped her. I should have slapped her, but I didn’t.

No, I don’t have any homework today. I’m reading this new novel by one of my favourite authors, Jodi Picoult. My Mom got it for me at Costco. I’ve got almost all of her books. She’s a great author. One of the women my Mom works with told me about her. I saw the book on her desk, and read the story synopsis and thought it sounded pretty cool. That’s what started me off on her. My grandmother ordered four of the books through Amazon. I’ve got three more left to go. 

 

 

Here I Am!

 

Here, right over here ....
Yes, that's me. You couldn't
recognize me, I know. It's
been a long time. I can hardly
recognize myself. Fact is, I
can't, really - so I don't blame
you for not seeing that old
me in the new me.

How've you been? Good,
good, nice to hear when anyone
has prospered, enjoyed life,
made a place for themselves,
found satisfaction. Me? Oh yes,
of course. I also have been
so very fortunate, indeed yes.

I cannot help but notice,
if you don't mind my
remarking on it, that you
too look quite different.

Where'd all that grey come
from? Grey hair, grey skin,
grey outlook - newly acquired.
Amazing, isn't it? This is you
and this is me? We are most
certainly not what we were.

Did we pamper ourselves,
work so assiduously to accomplish -
this? These grey, weak responses
to life? The world has gone
grey, has it not? Little wonder
we appear so wan, recalling
what once we were.

 

 

OMIGOD! Friends...!

 

That was a really, really dumb thing to do. Kind of malicious, too. That part of it doesn’t surprise me, seeing who it came from. You’d think she’d have more sense. On the other hand, no, it’s completely in character. That’s how I feel now. If you’d asked me a year ago I would have defended her. But not now. We’re in a different ball game, so to speak.

Back then, we were friends. More than that, we were best friends. And now, nothing. Not exactly nothing, she’s in my face all the time and it bugs the hell out of me. I keep telling her to just back off, leave me alone, but she just won’t. She’s a prime-time bitch, that’s what she is.

I felt really sorry for her at first. Maybe not exactly sorry, but kind of bad, you know? Like, we had a lot going together when we were friends. We could depend on one another. So I thought. Sure, she was kind of goofy sometimes, what old people call a Tom-boy, but so what? That aspect of her character was attractive to me, I liked it. She wasn’t like everyone else; she had something different about her. We did share that; we were both different. We just didn’t go with the flow, know what I mean?

Anything that’s ‘popular’, I just won’t have anything to do with it. I hate it when everyone does the same thing. People should use their individuality, we’re all different even though we’re all alike in certain ways. We should cultivate those aspects of our personalities, I think, that are unique to us. So, I liked her goofiness and we had a lot of fun together.

Right now, though, where I am at this very moment, I’ve come to a conclusion that would never have occurred to me before. Sometimes we laughed together, and sometimes it only seemed as though we were laughing in tandem. Sometimes, though I wasn’t aware of it back then, not entirely -- sometimes I laughed at her. Big difference.

Anyway, we didn’t mind being odd-couple-out, because we had one another. We had four years of being one another’s best friends. I was steadfast, more or less, though I did deviate from time to time, and hang out with some other kids, and that really pissed her off. But guess what? She did the same thing, so big deal. My Mom always said to me that I should fan out a little, get to know other girls a little more, not to judge them on surface issues. I hate to admit it, but sometimes she’s right.

The last two years, though, grades 7 and 8, we were pretty cool together. One thing I’ll never forget, when I first came to the school after we moved to the area, everyone was just too stuck-up to speak to me. She’s the only one who did. I’ll never forget that. I was so grateful to her. And even when we weren’t so close as we were later, I never forgot that about her. But a lot of things happened between then and now. Almost five years, for one thing, but a whole lot of other things, too.

No one could believe it when she told Todd that Morgan was getting ready to dump him, and then she turned around and told Morgan that Todd was getting tired of her and was ready to call it quits. I can’t understand why either of them believed her. She was just jealous of them, I guess. But if either of them had any sense they would have realized that neither of them would ever treat her as a confidant. They weren’t especially friendly with her, to begin with. Seems she planted a nasty little seed, and even though they found out later that she was lying, things were off between them.

And that was really too bad. She went around boasting to everyone about what she’d done, thought that was pretty smart. I just ignored her, didn’t say much of anything, just shrugged. She thought by doing that people would admire her, and I wondered where the hell she was coming from with that, but didn’t say anything, because that’s around the time when things began cooling off between us.

So she thought she was pretty smart, getting Todd and Morgan to break up. I thought it was cretinous, to tell the truth, because they really liked each other, they shared the same interests, they were both jocks and lived close to one another, the same neighbourhood, and they were kind of cute together, know what I mean?

So wasn’t she surprised with the reaction she got when she proudly informed everyone of what she’d done. All the girls were incensed that she’d do something like that, even the girls who didn’t like Morgan. No one would talk to her. Me, like I said, I didn’t care all that much. She and I weren’t talking much to one another, anyway. Because she’d been talking about me behind my back. When I found out I went right up to her and asked why she would say those things about me. Without batting an eyelash she just said, why not, it’s true. So what can you do about someone like that? She made her own bed, I let her lie in it. Before, I would’ve defended her, found some plausible excuse for her behaviour.

She didn’t much like it, being estranged from me, and suddenly because of her own stupidity, everyone keeping their distance from her. She became the class pariah, everyone was angry with her, the guys and the girls both. She hardly anticipated that kind of reaction to her little bit of emotional manipulation.

So she invented a story of what I can only describe as brotherly love, otherwise known as incestuous abuse, telling everyone that she was a victim, and because of her state of mind resulting from that she wasn’t herself and that accounted for what she’d done.

Of course everyone was immediately contrite, and ready to forgive her anything, as though they needed to make amends to her for behaving so coldly toward her. I know her family and I know that none of what she said actually happened. It’s just that it was the only thing she could think of that would make people feel guilty about isolating her, about blaming her for what had happened with Todd and Morgan. Even they felt horrible for her, and went out of their way to try to make her ‘feel better’ about herself.

When I told my Mom, she laughed and said sooner or later that tangled web of lies would come back to haunt her. Not that I tell my Mom all that much. Just some things, to see her reaction. I don’t always agree with her conclusions. But it’s interesting. On this occasion, there was no arguing with what she said.

I don’t, actually, myself, like to say things that aren’t really factual. If I’m really pushed into a corner I might try to pass one off, but carefully, nothing too stupid. This latest stupid stunt did the trick for me, though, and I felt it was past time to make a clean break. Not that I initiated it, I didn’t.

But that’s what catapulted me into a new set of friends, people whom I really like, though I‘d kind of given them short shrift up to now. I thought they were stuck-up, just too fixated on themselves, but I learned otherwise. It’s like my Mom said, it was about time I reached out a little more, broadened my horizons, made other contacts and friends, rather than rely on my, what she called ‘close-minded vision’ of other people based on initial impressions.

And all of a sudden I began to notice things. Of course this really has nothing much to do with my new friends, the girls that I’ve really come to appreciate. Of whom there’s one exception, who drives me absolutely insane.

There’s two Brendas, one’s now my absolute best friend, the other drives me to distraction. It’s like this kid doesn’t have an original thought in her head. She keeps pumping me for my perceptions and attitudes, and then she reflects them. My Mom tells me that's a symptom of a sincere form of flattery. Means nothing to me. I'm just irked all to hell by this kid.

She’ll say something when the group of us is together, something that sounds profound, coming from her, and I realize she’s just repeating something I said to her the day before. She follows me around like a little puppy, it’s really, really irritating. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I don’t say anything, but I can’t respect her, one little iota.

She doesn’t seem to do that with anyone else, just me. Why me? I wish she’d just kind of go away. Follow someone else. Stop cozying up to me. I don’t like it when she does that, it makes me nervous. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m just going to get so annoyed by something she does that I’ll blurt out how I feel about her. And I don’t really want to do that.

It must be awful, after all, not having the mental capacity to know what you like without asking someone else their opinion, and then repeating what they say. My Mom said it’s probably a symptom of low self-esteem, but I don’t care what it represents. It makes me nauseated, and I wish she’d just go away.

Good thing we’ve got guys around, to break the tedium of girls’ stuff. I find they’re just easier to get along with. They just take you for what you are. You don’t have to prove anything with them. And they’re a whole lot funnier, too, the way they crack jokes like it’s the most natural thing, which it should be.

Not like the girls, always looking for meaning in stupid stunts, ready to jump on someone for something said in all innocence. I guess I’m a lot more reticent with the girls than with the guys, come to think of it.

What I really meant to mention, though, is how I’ve been noticing lately how talented Corey is. Funny I never noticed before. But that guy is amazing. I’ve never seen anyone who could skateboard like he can, throw that basketball right into the hoop every blinkin' time, skate rings around all the other guys playing hockey, exhibit such grace and skill playing soccer. And he’s no dummy in class, either.

I’ve also noticed that he’s always looking at me. I guess I wouldn’t notice that if I weren’t also kind of looking at him. He’s got this cute smile when he sees me looking at him. I feel like smiling back, but I don’t.

And I wonder what he’s thinking. He’s a little more reserved than the other guys, and I like that. It’s the way I am with the girls. I’m just not a joiner, more of a loner, myself, even though I do like to be around the other kids. On my terms.

I don’t try to ingratiate myself with anyone, and they all know that. He’s cool, I like that, isn’t anxious to be on anyone’s team, seems like he’s all right with his own opinion, not caring all that much if he seems different from everyone else. That’s me, too. I make up my own mind and I don’t care what everyone else thinks.

My friends keep sending me invitations to join them on Facebook. Well, I’m not interested in that, and I know everyone’s got a Facebook account but me, but that doesn’t bother me. I just think the whole idea is kind of stupid. It’s just not what I’m interested in. I’m cool with keeping in touch with my friends, but this whole social network stuff is gross, fine for whoever likes it, but that’s just not me.

I have to admit I'm always texting my friends. We text constantly. Just something we do. I like that, because somehow it's become a part of my life, and it's fun to keep in touch, just flash one another these silly little messages back and forth. But that's different, in my opinion. Anyway, I have no intention of broadening my social networking as it were, to include another 'window of opportunity', as some of my friends say, to keep in touch.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing more and more that I’m being noticed more and more. And that’s cool. It wouldn’t be if I didn’t like whoever it was that was doing the noticing. But in this particular instance, I like that he’s sending me all those signals. I just wonder why he’s taking so long getting around to doing something concrete about it. 

 

 

The Sky's Parabola

The great parabola of this
winter sky has surrendered
to countless nights of snow
tumbling through the atmosphere
from the cover of grey clouds
unleashing their burden
on the world below.

The landscape a monochrome;
muted, yet dazzling-bright.

Trees and shrubs muffled
in a crystallized flood of
frozen moisture, standing
ghostlike and eerily mounded.
Solemnly beautiful, eye-
graspingly exquisite in bondage
to nature's winter choreograph.

The air is charged with ions
of quiet energy, as ripples
of wind bear down on the
glazed arras. Frozen pads of
snow from overhanging branches
embroidering the underling
blanket of smooth perfection.

 

Our Year In Tokyo

Tokyo is where I read ‘The Pillow Book’, ‘The Tale of the Shining Prince’, and ‘The Dream of the Red Chamber’, and where I felt the alluring mystique of the east enfold me in its gentle clasp. Camellias bloom in fall, azaleas in spring and ornamental kale is planted alongside winter sidewalks. Jungle crows caw atop the water tower in the compound where our house stood and on the metal rooftop of the house sheltered in the compound where feral cats slink along alleyways.

Initially, we lived at The Pegasus Apartments close to Aoyama dori. At night we joined throngs of pedestrians on tranquil autumn evenings. Bicycles, motorbikes, motorcycles are entrusted unlocked, to parking areas. Ancient bonsai sit on sidewalks adjacent cramped homes. At night downtown scintillates in neon blaze. Strolling broad boulevards we pass impressive hotels, the Imperial palaces and upscale shops. Deeper into the city, constricted streets force vehicles to proceed with caution. Most residents live in crammed concrete apartment blocks. Futons hang out the windows of each tiny apartment during the day creating doily-festooned facades. Firefighters garbed in white moon-man uniforms hand-pull wheeled gear into these unnamed, numbered streets when fires erupt. At intersections stand cobans, box-like structures manned by police, area maps on the walls. If in doubt, enquire.

Traffic is heavy but accidents few, car horns rarely used. When drivers stop for red lights, they turn off the ignition (a long cultural memory of WWII scarcity). Most cars are a variant of cream or white. Black cars are driven by the Yakuza, the Japanese criminal element. Japanese taxi drivers are uniformed in cap and white gloves, wielding feather dusters to flick dirt from their vehicle interiors. Should a few centimeters of snow fall in winter panic ensues, chains are fitted to tires.

Buildings under construction or renovation are enclosed in scaffolding, (far predating the West which eventually emulated them); engulfed in huge white tarps. Construction workers wear white coveralls, soft helmets and white felt boots with cleft contours resembling camels’ feet. Roadwork takes place at night, the restored surface opened to morning traffic.

Tokyoites are polite and reserved. The standard response, answering the telephone is “mushi-mushi?” No one can explain what it means. There is a collective quiet in the city, despite its size and habitation. The exception to the general hush is a melodic chime heard throughout the city at five o’clock. This is my signal to walk to a little corner store for the Maiinichi shimbun English-language newspaper. There are street vendors hawking roasted yams. Impulsively, Japanese engage westerners -- complete strangers they may come across on the street -- in public discourse, happily grasping the opportunity to practice English.

Tokyo summers are unrelentingly hot and humid. Exiting air conditioned interiors -- for those fortunate enough to own window air conditioners -- one recoils upon reaching the street as though slapped with a scalding, wet towel. Before long, drops of perspiration appear on bare arms. Every block or so throughout the city large automatic street dispensers vend hot tea, coffee or cold sport drinks.

Daily food shopping prevails. One visits the fruit- and vegetable-monger, the rice shop, teashop, fishmonger, florist, hardware merchant. Shop fronts open to the street, are shuttered at night. Since leaving Japan I’ve never tasted fruit so sweet, vegetables or fish as fresh. The bustling, expansive markets near Ueno Park offer food and clothing in bazaar-like abundance.

Tokyo boasts singular districts of shops devoted to cookware, footwear, meats, fish, books, electronics, and motorcycles. The city’s neighbourhoods resemble an assemblage of multitudinous villages. There are kissaten (coffeehouses) and soba (noodle soup) cafes; temples and shrines, parks and botanical gardens with ponds full of giant gold, silver, and orange carp.

In Yokohama we visited a doll museum. Close by we entered an antique shop and there I bought my very own Gosho Ningyo, a fat-faced, ornately dressed doll astride a hobbyhorse. Bordering the Pacific Ocean, Kamakura is a city of temples, one devoted to the Great Daibutsu, a towering bronze Buddha. Another temple is dedicated to a Buddha accredited as the protector of lost babies. Tiny replications of Yesu are placed around the temple grounds and people leave babies’ playthings and clothing in poignant remembrance of babies and infants that never progressed to childhood and maturity.

In a cupboard in our foyer a large black bag sat on the floor. For special occasions. It held some canned food, flashlights, first-aid kit, water bottles, hard hats, and candles. That was a life-preserving emergency kit in case of earthquakes. I liked to ‘forget’ its presence. And although we knew we should stand in a protected area of the house during an earthquake, somehow we never did. On those occasions when one occurred, we would sit there, facing one another, absorbed in the strangeness of the house, the ground beneath it, shaking ominously, a rattling heard from the kitchen, pictures wobbling on the walls. When, on occasion, it happened outside, it was even stranger, and we were transfixed by the sensation charging the atmosphere about us, wondering when it would stop, if it would stop, and finally it did. The earth did not open to receive us. Then we would wonder when the next one would occur. Where would we be? How long would it last? Then we forgot about it.

We joined an international travel group, Friends of the Earth; comprised mostly of Japanese, some foreigners, and traveled week-ends by bus at a gathering spot once we cleared the immense city of Tokyo itself by bus, train, or subway to visit tea plantations, traditional Ryokan (inns) and once to Hamamatsu, where the annual traditional kite festival takes place, rural communities vying against one another, manipulating giant kites, lines arrayed with knives. The winners, whose kite survives airborne, exult in their martial skills.

With that same group we traveled the coast to Okuyama, staying overnight at a Zen Buddhist temple nestled in the hills and forests outside the village. There, in the inn, bathers scrub themselves seated on little stools before entering the steaming communal bath. One sheds slippers for wooden clogs to enter the communal bathrooms, balancing over floor-level 'toilets'. We slept on futons in a tiny tatami-matted room and rose at five in the morning to take part in the morning’s Buddhist service. I thought my legs would never recover from assuming the Lotus position.

In the sprawling Temple buildings, one adjoining another, I discovered echoes of Umberto Ecco’s Name of the Rose. Following a breakfast of miso soup, rice, raw egg and chai, we wandered the Temple grounds and heard, from an embankment towering above us, a divine chorus of men’s devotional voices. As we followed a narrow dirt road toward the village, two tonsured monks in flowing robes passed in a Mercedes Benz, waving to us.

We joined Friends of the Earth and took a series of subway trains, buses and railway trains, passing outlying communities, finally reaching trailheads where our group of about a dozen dedicated mountaineers would ascend mountains to explore landscapes infinitely dissimilar to any we’d trekked before.

To again stroll Omotesando on a Sunday, or Shibuya, or Giain Higashi dori; to promenade along the Ginza, or through Ueno Park under cherry blossoms; to see the Temple of the 47 Ronin where the earth shuddered underfoot, or the Asakusa Kanon Temple by the Sumeida River where the Floating World of the Geisha once flourished - is to dream. 

 

 

The Photograph

 

 

It is a fearsomely haunted photograph. She detests it when her unwary eye lights upon it. But its removal is simply not possible. Her reaction to the photograph is utterly irrational, she knows that. With her lies the fault, not with the photograph. The photograph is one taken of her only grandchild, early in the school year, one of the many she has acquired over the years, each one representing another grade at elementary school for her now-13-year-old grandchild.

This one is different. From the moment she saw it she felt herself recoil inwardly. Outwardly it was as though nothing was amiss, she accepted it gratefully, found an appropriate frame for it, and set it beside many of the others, sitting on a small oval table. Actually the frame was somewhat inappropriate. It was far too elaborate. It celebrated a photograph that she found frightening. It awakened in her a minuscule worm of fear that wriggled along her intestines. She hoped it would never find its way to her heart.

Her heart had felt utterly broken when she’d seen that very same pose for the first time. But that was a temporary heart-break, unavoidable since most people, she was certain, likely reacted the same way. It was a piteous thing to behold that photograph, of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood with that wistful smile making an effort to appear confident. The girl/woman was not very attractive in the conventional sense; her features were too coarse. And her skin pigment, along with her features betrayed her ancestry. She was a member of a visible minority among whom there were many extraordinarily beautiful men and women.

This girl/woman had not been blessed by her particular DNA, with graceful, delicate features. The manner in which she brushed her long dark hair to a side was unusual. As was her pose, tentative and hopeful, as though she were saying ‘here I am, I trust you, I would so much like you to like me’.

Reading the newspaper accounts of what had befallen this child was painful. Reading of her parents’ anguish was dreadful. The girl had been horribly unhappy, wanting desperately to be accepted by her peers, and prepared to do just about anything for that acceptance. An acceptance that teased and eluded her. Girls can be extraordinarily cruel to one another, so much for the gentler, weaker sex. They form little cliques of privilege and exclusion.

She should know. Although she was now in her 70s, her childhood remained vivid, though tamped down deep in her memory cache. She had been an outsider, aching for acceptance. She knew she was different. She had no wish to be the same as other girls, even those she admired, for the glossy straightness of their hair, for their developed body shape so unlike her own, for their uninhibited and easy manner, also unlike hers. She was content enough with what she was, it was just that she saw no reason why she shouldn’t be accepted as she was.

But that’s the way society is; if someone is ‘different’ in any way, they’re held at arm’s length. Politely, for the most part, but pointedly excluded. But there was never anything ‘polite’ in the manner in which young girls chose to exclude those they found wanting in all the values however shallow, that they held dear. The kind of exclusion they practised was a cutting, hurtful, deliberate one. And the more one attempted to ingratiate themselves into the favour of those who shunned them, the more despised they became.

So she quite understood what had happened to that poor young girl whose photograph appeared again and again on the front pages of the newspapers when that horrible event had occurred. Gradually that same photograph began to appear progressively back into the middle, then the back of the news pages, in smaller columns as the immediate horror of her fate became assimilated into the general public’s mind as yet another misfortune occurring to yet another of society’s unfortunates.

It was only when the investigating police eventually were able to piece together all the events that had led to that girl’s grisly murder, and the principal characters involved in her death were apprehended, charged and held pending trial that the story moved from the back to the front pages again. Always accompanied by that truly pathetic photograph. A young girl with hope for the future in her eyes, belying her timid demeanour. The reader was able, if he or she wished to do so, to look long and deep at that photograph and envision what might have been on that child’s mind.

To complement the anguished story that came tumbling from her bereaved mother’s voice. Of a disturbed child who no longer took pleasure in her extended family, refused to attend family get-togethers. A child who arrived home from school dispirited, desperately unhappy, and unwilling to discuss anything with her frantic mother. A young girl torn between her parents’ heritage and culture and customs, and that which she saw around her every day of her life, in their adopted country.

A young girl alone and confused and pining for a friend to give her the emotional support she so badly needed. If there were other girls in her situation attending the same school, looking themselves for comfort and support as might have been possible, they did not manage to link together. Perhaps to do so in their thoughts might have been to doubly point out their isolation, to encourage the others who rejected them to sneer in their direction as birds of a feather flocking together in their dejected outsider status; deserving of one another.

She was well aware that she was imagining what life was like for the girl. Everything might not have been so awful for her. There might very well have been times and places in her life when she felt happy with and within herself. Not desperately caring about the impression she made on other people, not caring so deeply about what they thought of her, not investing so much of herself in yearning after being what she clearly could not be.

From the reportage, and the story that evolved of a lonely young girl and the girl’s mother’s inability to understand why her daughter was so bereaved over her status at school, this, more or less, was the tale that evolved. A girl unable to change her heritage, her genetic code that presented her as so different from all the other girls, the imprinting on her psyche from exposure to traditions that came so badly in conflict with the social ease she saw all around her, trying to mingle with girls - and with boys - her own age, but whose backgrounds were so polarized from her own.

She was seen as unattractive, clumsy, uninteresting. Simply no one they wanted to have around them. A hanger-on that turned out to be a dreadful nuisance, whom they simply could not rid themselves of. Their snubs and their indiscreet and sometimes too-pointed references to her as a dumb clown, clawed deeply into her heart, but she persevered. She was certain that with enough self-abnegation, enough forgiveness, enough demonstration of her commitment to their agenda, whatever it was, she would be accepted.

She would be content if she were to be accepted even as a fringe member of their groups; the larger one, or any of the smaller ones, the smart cliques of the beautiful, the talented, the ego-driven. Was it not ego that drove her too, to insist that she be recognized as an individual, as someone worthy of notice, as someone whose wit, weak though it seemed at times that they simply ignored her cleverness, could join them? Couldn’t they make an effort to tolerate her presence?

She was even prepared to accept that she was viewed as pathetic; if so, could they not feel some compassion for her, and on the strength of that, allow her to join them? The thought of the girl and her psychically-precarious life flooded her mind sometimes. She had thought of her often with a depth of sadness that surprised her, since she was, after all, a stranger who lived half a continent away.

But then, then came that photograph of her granddaughter. Her beautiful, vivacious, clever and gifted grandchild whose every photograph was a gift to be treasured, carefully placed in family photo albums, and within frames to grace furniture tops and the walls of her home. Each representing a different stage in her growth from babyhood to infant, to young child, then elementary school. And now, preparing to enter high school. She could hardly believe the time that had elapsed between the present and when she was in that delivery room, the obstetrician late, and the nurse refusing to believe that her daughter had already dilated.

Oddly enough her own daughter, the young woman who was then giving birth to her daughter, arrived into the world in roughly the same manner. That doctor too had arrived too late to assist at the birth. She’d been a young woman then, not quite 25, and she hadn’t found giving birth to be horribly difficult; it was a natural process, after all. When the anaesthetist arrived on the coattails of her too-late-in-arriving doctor, the man had actually wanted to administer her anaesthetic. The doctor hemmed and hawed, and examined the afterbirth. And was tight-lipped with the nurse, who had been an experienced midwife in England before emigrating to Canada, who had delivered her little girl.

The almost-too-late obstetrician who had finally arrived to see her granddaughter emerge into daylight and independent breathing had been a woman. Hardly seemed to make a difference, male or female, she thought, they were all the same.

And there was her grandchild, a tiny, skinny baby with seemingly elongated feet and fingers on her delicate hands. She weighed a bare 5.1 pounds, slightly less than her own mother had. They were not large people. The examining hospital paediatrician had accused her daughter of taking drugs, using alcohol while she was pregnant, to account for the baby’s slight weight. Neither of which had ever been used by her daughter.

And now, thirteen years later, there was her grandchild, taller than her mother, towering over her grandmother, with the full contours of an adult woman’s body. Perched on top of that body was a sometimes-child’s mind. Capable at times of surprising her, though by the acuity of her vision, her assessments of situations and peoples’ intentions. She was an emerging adult. Suffering pangs of social uncertainty. She herself was never very good at giving that kind of advice. Advice her granddaughter never sought from her mother, only her grandmother.

All those photographs over the years, of the child in various stages of development. And then that last one. It was the pose. And the hairstyle. Both of which were not typical of the girl. Why on Earth had she been posed in that manner? These photographs were all taken by professional photographers who had contracts with the school board. These photographers schooled the children in how they should pose. Never before had she been anything but proud and pleased with the result of those photographs.

Until this one. That very same pose. And so oddly, the face in the photograph, though that of her grandchild, has assumed the look of that horribly murdered girl; yet a child morphing into adulthood. She has tried, time and again, to shake sensible thoughts into her head over that photograph. She has done her best to avoid looking at it directly. Of course she could simply take the photograph away, discard it, but there is a sensibility she cannot quite identify that stops her from doing this simple act that would give her relief from her unwanted thoughts.

All the more unwanted since for the last few months she has been regaled on an almost daily basis with a litany of grievances that her grandchild reveals to her. It began with the revelations that her formerly firm bond of friendship with a young girl and fellow classmate whom she herself was fully acquainted with, had somehow gone awry. Her friend, she moaned, was behaving oddly, uncharacteristically and she couldn’t understand why.

“Well, just ask her!” was her emphatic response. It seemed reasonable enough under the circumstances; they were best friends, had been almost inseparable for years; her granddaughter had even brought her friend with her to stay over at her grandmother’s house during the summer months where she had observed the tenor of their friendship at close hand.

“I can’t!” she wailed. “She’ll just deny everything! She’ll tell me there’s nothing at all wrong. And then she’ll ask me what’s wrong with me. She does that. If I ever ask her anything she always does that. She implies that it’s all in my mind, but I know better. She’s different, kind of standoffish, I can’t understand it.”

“Friends, you know, feel comfortable in confiding in one another. If something seems to be wrong, they feel they can rely on one another. That’s what friendship is, close friendship. You have to feel confident that whatever you say to your friend will be taken seriously. You’ve got to confront her, carefully, about your observations and weigh what she says.”

“Grandma! You’re not listening to me. I might as well be talking to my mother!”

“I am listening to you. I just don’t understand how you can be such close friends for years and then suddenly claim you can’t communicate!”

“Well, that’s just it, don’t you understand? I can’t figure out why all of a sudden she’s clammed up, closed herself down, shut herself away from me.”

There was nothing she could say that helped really, because it appeared her granddaughter had already tried everything she suggested. And then, over the course of the next several months, a rapprochement appeared to have occurred; their former friendship resumed. To her questioning, her granddaughter said it just wasn’t the same. There was still something wrong, something unspoken, a quiet reserve, despite her normally ebullient friend’s welcome reversion to her previously known personality, there were times when her friend lapsed into quiet, sullen moods and then they quarrelled when she asked what was wrong, and her friend snapped back “Nothing! Leave me alone!”

Months later the brooding persona gained a victory over the normal carefree one, and once again the two girls became distant from one another. The pain in her grandchild’s voice about this reversal struck her as though she was herself experiencing the misery described to her, vibrating in the girl’s voice. Her imagination took her down the road of her granddaughter becoming depressed to the point of danger. Could she be exhibiting symptoms of mental disease brought along by this dire disappointment? Could the loss of her good friend drive her toward a dangerous loss of mental equilibrium?

She chided herself for overreacting. She knew as well as anyone how teen-age girls revelled in drama, enjoyed feeling downcast and depressed as they coped with the changes in their hormones. When she expressed her misgivings to her daughter she was rewarded with a look of disbelief flooding her daughter’s face. “I’ve told you, Mother, she’s a drama queen. She wants attention. She knows she’ll get it from you. You’ve always supported her irregardless of her behaviour. She’s selfish, thinks only of herself. I’m trying to get her to manage her emotions, to channel them into a realization that others have needs too. She has to be more empathetic toward others. She’s manipulating you, can’t you see that?”

No, she couldn’t see it. She could hear the genuine misery in her granddaughter’s voice. Heard the complaints of the confusion that the re-emergence of distance between herself and her friend had caused, and it worried her immensely. Even while she could recognize her daughter’s perspective, and admitted to herself she was likely more intelligently diagnosing the situation.

In the months that followed the emotional schism between the two girls became irreconcilable. They spoke curtly to one another, the veneer of civility barely concealing their new aversion to one another. It was clear to her, however, from the way her grandchild described their daily encounters at school, and the recounting of the cellphone text messages they sent back and forth to one another, that the other girl was also suffering.

She did her best to encourage her grandchild to be more generous to her friend, try to understand what she had suffered, in the hope that reconciliation might be possible. And her granddaughter, in a huff of self-righteousness reiterated all the times she had made the attempt, apologized, hoped that their relationship would be restored, only in the end, to be rebuffed by her friend.

“Wasn’t my fault she was raped by a family friend”, she finally said. The first time her grandchild had voiced that dreadful word, she thought her head was in a spin she might never recover from. She gagged at the very thought that her grandchild even knew what the word connoted. And that it had happened to her friend, another 13-year-old; simply untenable.

She tried to reason with her granddaughter, telling her that a horrible event like that would simply destroy a girl’s self-esteem, her very soul, alter her for life, make her incapable of having any kind of normal relationships in the future, and that she should have more compassion, be less concerned about how her friend’s coping mechanisms were impacting on her personally.

The girl was adamant. She didn’t care about the rape. It was a horrible thing to have happened to her friend, yes. But she had to get over it. She could have informed her right away, when it had happened, and she would have tried to help her. But she hadn't, she had told others first. And she refused to feel sorry for her girlfriend, that wasn’t the right thing to do, she insisted. It would only encourage her to keep feeling sorry for herself. She had to get over it, get on with life. She wanted to help her pick up the pieces, but not at the cost of helping her friend dissolve into a jelly of self-pity. She was seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis now, and that kind of professional treatment would help. So why was she continuing to be so horrible?

“Horrible? How’s she being horrible?”

“She’s rude to me. Behaving like an absolute bitch. One minute she’s my friend. And the next she’s a nasty, mean-tempered bitch. I’ve told her that I want her to stop that. She’s just not listening to me. One minute she’s saying awful things about me in class right in front of other people and embarrassing me and next thing I know she’s asking me to go out with her to help deliver papers on her route. I just don’t get it.”

And she revealed to her grandmother that she had begun writing a diary. At least that’s how it started. The entries, however, expanded, and she incorporated into those entries other peoples’ perspectives and attitudes. She ended up writing a novel, she explained. Adding to it on a daily basis. Her grandmother felt relieved. Her granddaughter, an avid reader and sometimes-writer, was engaging in a creative, cathartic act of self-discovery and self-help. She was pleased, and praised the girl.

She said how much she was interested in what she was writing, and that caused a withdrawal. What she was writing was for no one’s perusal, it was only for herself.

“Does it help?” her grandmother asked. Does it give you satisfaction to write like that?”

“Well, yes, it does. And it’s kind of interesting. I’ve been adding characters, and using their voices to give a fuller meaning, a depth to what’s happening.”

That really impressed her grandmother. She was delighted that her grandchild had chosen this kind of creative way to deal with her unhappiness over the loss of her friend. Trying, through this method of introspection and altered perspective with the use of other ‘voices’ to gain a degree of understanding of how what was occurring would represent how others felt. She felt confident that through this method, and time elapsing, her granddaughter would manage to weather this emotional storm.

Day after day the grandchild filled her grandmother in with her restive, unhappy recounting of the misery that her school day represented. Everyone in the class, including the teacher by then, knew about her friend’s dreadful misfortune and they wanted to know why the former two best friends were no longer inseparable. The questions came thick and fast: “what’s wrong between you two?” and “why aren’t you being supportive of her?” and “what’s going on, anyway, don’t you feel badly for her?” To all of which queries, her granddaughter responded simply, telling her questioners that it was a private matter.

Eventually, the grandchild asked her grandmother if she’d like to hear a few passages of what she’d written and the grandmother leapt at the opportunity to discover how her grandchild was handling her problems. There were some passages from time to time over the course of the weeks that followed that pleased the grandmother mightily. She praised her grandchild for her growing literary abilities, for her discerning mind, for her ability to grasp the issues and make sense of them.

And then, finally, came the day when her granddaughter read out to her grandmother the beginning of another chapter that read something like this: “She prepared herself for school, remembering to put together her lunch, stuck her binder with the notes she had compiled the night before, studying for a geography test into her backpack. And then, last thing, she went into her father’s cupboard, felt around on one of the top shelves for what she knew rested there, and finally the cold, hard steel slipped into her hand, and she removed it and placed it into her school bag, along with her books, her pencils and erasers, her homework from the night before. She shrugged into her winter jacket and ran out to catch her school bus.”

The grandmother felt her blood run cold. There was a silence, and she wracked her brain; what would she say? Come right out and ask why that? Point out that this could be no solution? Ask her what she had been reading of late to bring her to that kind of conclusion?

Reason prevailed. Her grandchild had no father; hers was a single-parent household. This was a child for whom physical violence was abhorrent. She had never even seen a firearm in her life, of that she was certain. This was a strictly academic exercise.

“Sounds fine, Dear”, grandmother said to granddaughter. “Good work. You’re refining your creative abilities. I’m proud of you.”