"Shit that hurts, shit that hurts, shit that hurts...." I mumbled over and over again, hopping away on my other foot, knowing full and well I had broken another bone.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I pushed my cart full of Spanish-English dictionaries through the school, regretting that I had designed such an elaborate, cart-requiring activity on a day when I could hardly walk. My toe had doubled in size and turned a variety of reds, blues and purples both on top of the toe, under the toe and over the top of my foot. I was wincing and my lower back was starting to hurt. A weird sheen of sweat was covering my face and neck. I worried that I was beginning to smell.
"Jay wrote this," the cranky, anti-social child said, rising up in front of me in the middle of a lesson. A tiny, folded triangular piece of paper was in his hand.
"Did he give it to you?"
"No. I asked him if I could read it".
I opened the note.
"Eat my shit" was written clearly and boldly in the middle.
Nice.
"Here they are," my niece announced, handing me her pair of Creepers. I had borrowed them the last time I broke my foot and they are actually some of the best shoes around for stabilizing fucked up bones.
"Just wipe that fake blood of the white part" she continued, plopping the shoes into my hands.
Our school has grown wildly in a short period of time, requiring the construction of an additional building that is attached to the main building by stairways and covered walkways. Unfortunately, accessing the additional building with a cart requires rolling said cart out of the front door and down the sidewalk in front of the school, re-entering the campus and pushing the beast up a ramp.
A torrential rain storm was occurring.
There was no way I was rolling a cart filled with materials through a lightening storm and instead parked it at the bottom of a covered stairwell. I entered my class and a couple of boys volunteered to walk down the stairs and each retrieve a box of dictionaries. I began my class.
As I proceeded, I began to wonder where the boys were. Ten minutes had passed for a trip that takes maybe two minutes. I sent a girl to check on them.
"They're not there" she informed me, returning to the classroom.
I sent her to check again and saw her walking with a teacher toward a room that was a flight up from where the boys had gone to get the dictionaries.
Suddenly, the boys came into view, pushing the cart up a ramp through the outdoor walkway, wet papers flying everywhere.
I was speechless.
"How, wha....." I sputtered.
"Why is this here?"
"We thought you wanted it!"
"What....wait, how did you get it here? Where has the cart been?"
"Well first, we pushed it back into the building. Then, we rolled past the front desk to the other side of the school and took the elevator upstairs. Then, we rolled around the second floor....."
"But, how did you get the cart back down to the gym area?" This cart is no small cart. The damn thing is like five feet tall and was loaded down with like forty pounds of teaching shit.
"We carried it!"
"Down a flight of stairs?"
"Yeah, and then we pushed it outside, around the building, up the ramp...."
"Why would you think I would ask that of you?"
They stared back at me blankly.
"I, I, I don't know what to say. You have no idea how to follow directions, but I applaud your problem solving abilities. Um, thank you for your diligance and determination to get that cart in here".
I looked out through the pouring rain.
How the hell was I going to get it back to the main building?
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