FIELD NOTES: Of a different sort....

Shutting Out Joy Prolongs Despair 

     Singular snowflakes fell in playful flurry, red cardinals fluffed up at the feeder and the school hallways smelled cookie-sweet. It had happened to Scrooge and George Bailey and The Grinch. No matter how they tried to suppress, ignore or squelch goodwill, it still came back to the surface.
     Although I have always been able to find roses among thorns, it has been more challenging here, near Newtown, Connecticut, being a teacher of young children. Just before Christmas break, the Mayan calendar threatened and closed school a day too early. We were cheated further. And we continue to cheat ourselves.  
     I recently had to call a neighbor and because my number was unknown to their caller ID, the phone was answered with a relay of whispered “who-is-its?” It struck me. Is this a side effect of technology? Are we now conditioned to be suspicious of any ringing phone or doorbell because it must be pre-screened? I am not criticizing. I am in the mix. I am Pavlov’s dog. 
     It is no longer possible to walk into work and exchange pleasantries or selectively share information because thanks to social media, we all know what we’ve been doing on the weekend. It is deflating to regularly be answered with ‘yeah, I already know that’. Are we evolving into people with strong fingers, but weak voices? Do we constantly want the ‘next big thing’ because we cheat ourselves out of those small, daily discoveries? Do we have so much information about each other that we really don’t know ourselves at all? Have we turned into the ubiquitous car alarm that is so commonplace no one pays attention to it anymore?
     In fact, after Newtown, I can’t walk into my workplace any more. I arrived early for a staff security meeting with officials from the town police department to which I had been invited, but since I am employed by an outside education agency, I cannot be issued a key card. There is a buzzer and a security camera. I buzzed three times. I knocked. I watched other school employees proceed to the library for the meeting, but they weren’t authorized to let me in even though I have been affiliated with the school in some manner since 1993. I understood, but it also struck me that if I had anger issues…or an undetected mental condition…or a sledge hammer or…a gun…on that day…I still could have gotten in quicker.
    I’ll absorb as much technology as my aging brain can handle. I wouldn’t go back to my days of pounding a Smith-Corona, toting around a hefty dictionary and getting paper cuts in the library card catalogs. That was the ‘old normal’. But the ‘new normal’ needs more than the random acts of kindness that most editors and commentators have been wishing us for the New Year. I am not a fan of that catchphrase, though I appreciate its sentiment, because I should like to see it refined. As most people around here, I have been asking myself why. Not only why do bad things happen, but why do good things happen, too. What motivates my kindness?
     It has been acknowledged that giving makes us feel good about ourselves. Nothing wrong with that. They need. We give. They get. We glow. A happy cycle revolves. But I have been wondering about more. It’s almost time for Turbo Tax. What happens when I check off that I donated to NPR, the local emergency services, the library and Goodwill, among others? Should acts of kindness be random? I won’t take up space with a recitation from Dictionary.com on the many uses of the word random, but the Slang section is food for thought if you’re interested. My wish for the New Year and beyond, are the dictionary antonyms for random: constant and conscious.
     By profession, I am a teacher, but I write more as a student than as an educator because I am grateful for what I have learned from those I have met along the way. In one of my early office jobs, I thought one woman aggressive, overtly ambitious and curt. When I learned she had a non-life-threatening medical condition that was inconvenient and sometimes painful, it improved my demeanor and hers as well. I never pre-judged again. As a young working wife and mother, I did a lot of housekeeping and anticipated compliments. You can guess that did not happen, but when I looked at it differently, my satisfaction improved. I take my shoes off when I walk in the door and enjoy clean floors for yoga and large art projects, so I reasoned to take pleasure in cleaning the floor for me. If there were residual benefits for my family, then all the better. I was no longer doing it for them, I was doing it for us. My mood lightened, as it does to this day, when I mop.
    Yes, conscious acts of kindness. Conscious that I am doing it for the greater good and for unanticipated return. And I do mean unanticipated, from me to you to the guy next door to the cable company to Congress. No tax deduction, no cup of coffee, no name in the church bulletin or on a plaque, no brownie points, no votes, no pork, no dividends or personal profits, not even so much as a thank you from my spouse. I may in fact get all these things – they are pretty little trimmings that do make life more pleasant - but do not let that be my unconscious motivation or cause for my disappointment or my deposit of guilt. And the nastier someone is to me, I will be all the kinder back. Maybe they are having a bad day. Maybe they will pay it forward. Maybe they have a gun.

FIELD NOTES: Terrifyingly beautiful...

A perfect 10 day...no one available...or awake!...so jumped in the car myself...went to my favorite nearby beach...Silver Sands State Park...80 degrees on sand/in surf...low tide...full sandbar out to Charles Island...treasure hunters on a Sunday afternoon...all before the opening of a new school year...teachers, coaches, grandparents surround me...a coconut-scented breeze swirls their memoirs and hopes around me...anniversary of strong woman names Katrina/Irene/Victoria(my mother's death)...the summer day I have been wanting?...and...the last?...or...full circle...

FIELD NOTES: The eye is sometimes the lens best suited for the subject…

Sunday morning musing

…and so it goes for spiders in the night. Charlotte has become our nightly fascination and has even found converts among us. I discovered my daughter (who is ‘grossed out’ by bugs of any sort) trying to best me with her camera shots, but joined me in stronger appreciation for professional nature photographers instead. She also called out the window one afternoon when I drove into the driveway that it was alright to use the front door because the web had blown away. I sensed that we both felt some sort of remorseful gladness. We don’t really ‘like’ spiders; small spiders tend to get squished when they appear in the bed or bath, but Charlotte is BIG. She is big in more ways than one. Initial suggestions were made to perhaps relocate her so we could actually use our new front door, but the nightly lantern, the gutter and close proximity to the garden seems to be an ideal encampment. Wanting to spread appreciation, the teacher in me called the little neighbor boy over to see The Great Web that had stayed intact for most of Wednesday. He was properly fascinated and returned later with a friend…(Ah, a taste of the old days!...B.C. - before computers - when every kid was an entrepreneur by ‘charging admission’ to anything that constituted a ‘show’). So as we continue to use the garage or back door, kudos to Charlotte for her tour de force; it was difficult to use the front entry on a summer’s night anyway because the screen door is usually loaded with moths, Japanese beetles and the like. I counted twelve ‘packets’ in her web last night and watched as more unfortunates careened into the sticky trap for the love of lamplight…Love is blind?

FIELD NOTES: Special soil...

The day of the funeral

We are thankful for the sun today even though its rays are not rays, but icicles. As we drive up the long cemetery road in the black limo, there are sailors frozen in the landscape reminding me of the little sailor from my parents’ 1945 wedding cake top that I used to play with. I wonder if the bugler standing next to the flag pole will get his lips stuck to his instrument. I see four more in a line over the horizon readying their rifles. It is not the part of nature I seek to observe, but it will be observed none the less. As we calculate how we will navigate the frozen ground from the car to the green carpet, my mother worries that my father would not have liked putting us all out like this on a January day, but I want to see the flag on his casket and the marker on his grave because, even though only a fraction of the world knew this man in his eighty-eight years, it will be made known to the entire world that he was a veteran of the Second World War…and that says a lot….

Not that I didn’t know it before, but with my father’s passing, it comes to my forefront that being a teacher (in any capacity) is the greatest service there is. As the Chinese Taoist philosopher, Lao Tzu puts it: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” In my experience as a Head Start preschool teacher, I can say with certainty that any child would be lucky to have a father like mine who is capable of preparing you for the world, who questions you, but lets you question him as well, who warns you of mistakes, but lets you make them on your own anyway, who doesn’t give you answers, but tells you where you can look them up. It’s astonishing how much he taught me and, I suppose, I have to give credit to his generation – the one that came out of a great depression and war - as well as the immigrant community he grew up in that never whined because they knew about bootstraps, the horns of bulls, where the buck was supposed to stop and that the impossible just takes a little longer. I hugged and kissed him, but he was not a “hand holding” type. I knew he was telling me he loved me when he asked how the car was and if the outside faucets were turned off for winter and if the mortgage was being kept up-to-date and when he fixed my appliances. It is a fact that he did not get everything he wanted; most of the “luck” he was allotted at birth went to the coin toss that took him to the gedunk for ice cream instead of putting him in the path of the torpedo that struck the USS North Carolina. In his retirement we sometimes ribbed him by calling him an “old fart” or a “stick in the mud” as he confined his world to clipping coupons, tracking down senior discounts and broken things to repair, doing crossword puzzles (in ink!) and watching the UCONN Huskies on TV…or Animal Planet…or Suze Orman. But we knew from his stories (the ones he was willing to tell) that he had had his fill of “adventures”…and that there was too much plastic in the world because it was harder for him to repair things now…I don’t quite know what he is doing in heaven, because there can’t be much to “fix” up there, but I know when it’s my turn to go through those pearly gates, they will be swinging smoothly, evenly and with nary a squeak.

We stand like tents in a downpour – holding up unless the sides are touched – but... Taps must be played, the rifles fired, the flag folded with mechanical protocol and placed in my mother’s hands along with the eight shells that were just fired. As cold as it is, as hard as it seems, there is an affirming landscape that presses our feet to the ground. I recall telling a young Ugandan student of mine who was relating a Sponge Bob cartoon segment to me, that Sponge Bob doesn’t get hurt when he falls down because he is not made of flesh and bones as we are. “Well, we are made of soil. Not what you see here,” he said in his accented English as he gestured with a sweep of his hand and a finger point to the air, “but special soil. From Heaven.”

Death is Nothing At All by Henry Scott Holland: Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room, I am I and you are you, Whatever we were to each other, that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name, Speak to me in the easy way which you always used, Put no difference in your tone, Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow, Laugh as we always laughed, At the little jokes we enjoyed together. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, Without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant, It is the same that it ever was. There is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind, Because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, Somewhere very near, Just around the corner, all is well.

Kucinskas Family Tree Online