Well Hello There

“¿Qué hiciste el fin de semana pasado?”  I asked the fourth grade class.  I am back with the little ones again, all day, no more high school.

“Hice plans for our vacation,” a small boy with a largish head answered, lowering his voice an octave. 

“And I am so flipping EXCITED!”  he shrilled, his voice pitched in an Esther Merman vibrato as his eyes widened and glowed.

“Theo says to tell you he loves you and wants to know why you aren’t teaching him Spanish this year.” Emma announced, tossing her bag into the car as I picked her up from the high school, my former job, after my day at the elementary.

“Okay, next step.  After you have your hombrecito, your little man, cut him out, then you can decorate him for a minute before you attach him to your carpeta de español”.

I wandered the room as they finished up the project.  I have a few kids in this class with some pretty severe cognitive problems.  I like them.  They remind me of Emily.  One of them grabbed a peach colored crayon and began coloring in the face of his hombrecito.

“I like…this…skin….” he whispered definitively, his breath heavy, while dragging the crayon precisely across the hombrecito, though the color was a complete opposite of his own skin. 

The fire alarm went off. 

“Line up”. I instructed, forcefully.  Fire drills are normally a joke, but for some reason, with the little ones, I feel a greater sense of urgency.  The sound of the alarm is shrill, blaring.  I plug my ears while I walk with the students; it makes my teeth clatter and oddly makes me nauseas.  The worst part is the corridor right before we get to the exit.  The alarm changes to an air raid-like siren while an automated voice repeats over and over again:  “There is a fire in the building”.  I always feel a panic in that room.  I don’t know why.  I look out at the sky so that the students won’t see it in my eyes.

It is the same kind of feeling I had a couple of months ago, late in a summer night.  I was awoken by the low wail of an ambulance.  Alec was out of town.  It was a lonely sound.  I could tell the ambulance was driving slowly.  Someone was already dead in there and the horrible wagon rolled through the streets, it’s shrill yet low sound echoing through the night.   The smell of blood filled my nostrils and I felt bottomless, down in the sea like the time I floated over a coral cliff and couldn’t see what might come up at me.   Drifting, looking into an abyss. 

“Are you doing okay here?  Are you happy?” the administrator asked me.

“Yes, I really am.  It’s awesome,” I answered.

“Good.  GOOD!  Because we are so happy to have you”.

I swiveled around backward in my chair to make sure he wasn’t talking to someone else. 

I was on my way out.  Certain mornings, Alec is NOT awake and at work before me and I actually leave the house before he does.  This morning, I was on my way out.  Alec sat at his computer with his coffee, Lola halfway in his lap.   I bent down while he kissed me on the cheek goodbye, and Lola simultaneously reached up and licked my chin.

Then, the sun came out and the clouds parted as the day greeted me and whispered, “Hello, gorgeous, YOU are amazing”.