Whooo. Running a blood vessel-expanding 102 degrees right now, that would be 111 with the heat index. And 89 degrees with the AC working its hardest if you're at my house. That crazy insulation thing I should really look into. So I came to work, but after getting the window unit going for an hour, it's still 92 here in my classroom.
Three new cockroaches have left their carcasses in the room for me to find. It's apparantly a game the collective is playing with me. Just when I think it's safe, I come around a desk and "AAAIIIEE!" another corpse makes me jump. The rest of them snicker behind the walls - "Ahhh, did you see the vertical she got on Fred? Tee hee!" Not that I'm a whus - played with tarantulas, had a scorpion in my bed once (okay - I screamed like a girl for that one...) but dang, these Carr Building roaches are HUGE. You could saddle up those suckers and ride 'em to town.
Oiii, there's a live one. 'Scuse me a moment. My apologies to PETA.
That guy was not skittering on the shadowed edges, he was walking towards me in bright light. While I appreciate an outgoing personality as much as the next person, I don't so much care for it in my cockroaches. My apologies also to Peter Ratcliff - I used your 8th grade graduation certificate you left to kill him. Along with a piece of gneiss. He was big.
("Gneiss"? Pronounced "nice," it's a stripey rock made of metamorphosed granite. In my class we don't take gneiss for granite, Hee. Get it?)
Honestly, my building looks pretty rough on paper. Well, rough period. But it has its plusses. Sometimes the glass falls out when you open the windows, but at least you can open them. Most modern school windows are screwed shut. I'm a big fan of fresh air. And that pesky lead paint? Only on the window ledges and outsides of the windows. Most of the asbestos was removed in the last few years, and they've stopped buffing the asbestos tiles on my floor. The asbestos tiles actually seem to last longer and are better looking than the vinyl ones, and they are supposed to be safe if they are waxed and uncracked. Which is -mostly- the case. We cultured 5 species of mold on the foreign language hall, and we watched the growth of a GIANORMOUS mushroom from the baseboards down there - you cannot beat this building for teaching environmental science.
I seriously will miss it when we move to the new building next year. My current room is huge, lots of natural light, great view of the Xtreme 4-square games at lunch, the smell of Chinese food wafting from further downtown...not quite as nice as the tangy sweet smell of freshly curing tobacco that used to come from the warehouses across the street, but I'm showing my age there.
The tobacco industry has gone belly up in Durham and the Liggett & Myers warehouses are now chic little condos for Duke students. We're getting all urban renewally down here. The Lucky Strikes complex is now an amazing multi-use zone with pubs and apartments and stores right across from the Durham Bulls ballpark. And best of all we now have TWO Locopops. Got a love a town with a store entirely devoted to creating the wackiest flavors of popsicle and providing them at reasonable prices to an adoring public. I highly recommend the White Chocolate Lemon Peppermint.
Still, the best part of Durham has to be 9th Street. On the same little strip, you can find a tattoo parlor (Dogstar Tattoo "Tipping makes it hurt less."), a toy store where you can get handmade anything and there's distinct lack of plastic marketing crap (Playhouse), a biker bar (Charlie's) , and independent bookshop (The Regulator), homemade gelato, (Francesca's) a place to buy wind up sushi (Vaguely Reminiscent), and a smoke-free locals bar with some of the best burgers you've ever let drip down your wrist, (Dain's). No cookie cutter house or people - Old West Durham is Hispanic, Black, White, grad students, wealthy empty nesters, young families, gay families, young professionals, possums, racoons,...run across a few snakes, too. My house is a candidate for Extreme Makeover, but there is no way I'm moving. Sorry, Mom.
I really should do this filing. Let me see, I have about, seven feet of stacks left to go. No, I mean, about 2.1 meters. Or maybe I should go home and check on the cats. Or their ashes.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Biking with the dead
My sympathies for the mob – there is no easy way to discretely get rid of a body. Wanting to respect his wishes, but not be charged with felonious disposal of human remains, I rented a bike and took Uncle Ford for a trip all over the island looking or just the right spot. What a cool little place. More art than you can shake a stick at, if that’s what you like to do with art, and an amazing Portuguese bakery. Not having any luck finding an attractive but deserted spot, I called a friend of his who lived on the island and she said he loved Beech Forest and Race Point on the far end of the island, so off I went.
They have beautiful bike trails there. Ponds and trees, then dunes and high downhill-velocity hills. But no good spots with an ocean view. I was sure that just around the corner would be a good location, no, maybe the next one. Optimism can be curse sometimes. An hour and a bit later, I get to the end point of the Cape, climb the huge dune…and the beach is packed with people. Arg. Can’t cross the dunes either as it is a restricted area. But there was a little boardwalk that deadended at the old lifesaving station behind the dunes. Protected, pretty, discreet…I set to saying my final goodbyes. Well, mostly goodbye. Got him all over my hands and you don’t just wash your uncle down the sink, so I went to the ocean and finished with a sort’ve burial at sea.
It’s a pretty place and I know he loved it – I think he would be happy. And happy that I got a chance to see a place he loved.
Got back to the harbor just in time to catch the ferry back to Boston. Got a little fresh air and settled in to read.
Found a good book in the airport, Two Years Before the Mast., the journal of a Harvard student who left school in 1833, to sail around Cape Horn. There are all these great novels I never read as a kid because, based on the books selected by my English teachers, all great works of literature had to be mind-numbingly depressing.
Joseph Conrad – excellent writer, but did the man never go to his happy place?
Why are there no required reading list that involve sunshine and butterflies? Sure, you need a little conflict, a few epiphanies, some person growth, but let a character have the reward of happy ending for all that work, fer crissakes. More kids would read if the definition of classic involved something other than making you want to open a vein.
If someone is actually reading this and knows an exception to this rule, great! Post the title – maybe we create a new course offering,” Great Literature Without Prozac,” or something like that.
Okay, in the spirit of full disclosure, while I am an enthusiastic science teacher who loves her subject, I do also have certification to teach middle grades English, and did it one year. I taught Shakespeare to 50 eleven year olds, half of whom were on Ritalin and one was as sociopath who tried to kill his father that year. We staged the scenes they didn’t understand. You haven’t seen funny until you’ve seen Hamlet acted out by a bunch of ADHD preadolescents. Actually, it was one of my funniest years teaching, other than the death threats, of course.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, er, ferry…
The gentleman across from me noticed what I was reading asked if I had seen the movie made of it with Stuart Granger. This started a wonderful conversation with him and his wife, who it turns out were Cuban. They were as delightful a couple as you could ever meet. They had come to Boston from Miami to spend some time with their recently engaged daughter and future son-in-law.We talked and laughed about politics, religion, education, children, retirement programs, all kinds of things. We only spent an hour and half together and likely we’ll never see each other again, but something about connecting with strangers just makes you feel better about people in general. Like you may be surrounded by strangers, but behind the otherness is a lot of sameness.
Made my connection to the bus to take me up to Portsmouth to meet family I never knew I had before Uncle Ford died.
They have beautiful bike trails there. Ponds and trees, then dunes and high downhill-velocity hills. But no good spots with an ocean view. I was sure that just around the corner would be a good location, no, maybe the next one. Optimism can be curse sometimes. An hour and a bit later, I get to the end point of the Cape, climb the huge dune…and the beach is packed with people. Arg. Can’t cross the dunes either as it is a restricted area. But there was a little boardwalk that deadended at the old lifesaving station behind the dunes. Protected, pretty, discreet…I set to saying my final goodbyes. Well, mostly goodbye. Got him all over my hands and you don’t just wash your uncle down the sink, so I went to the ocean and finished with a sort’ve burial at sea.
It’s a pretty place and I know he loved it – I think he would be happy. And happy that I got a chance to see a place he loved.
Got back to the harbor just in time to catch the ferry back to Boston. Got a little fresh air and settled in to read.
Found a good book in the airport, Two Years Before the Mast., the journal of a Harvard student who left school in 1833, to sail around Cape Horn. There are all these great novels I never read as a kid because, based on the books selected by my English teachers, all great works of literature had to be mind-numbingly depressing.
Joseph Conrad – excellent writer, but did the man never go to his happy place?
Why are there no required reading list that involve sunshine and butterflies? Sure, you need a little conflict, a few epiphanies, some person growth, but let a character have the reward of happy ending for all that work, fer crissakes. More kids would read if the definition of classic involved something other than making you want to open a vein.
If someone is actually reading this and knows an exception to this rule, great! Post the title – maybe we create a new course offering,” Great Literature Without Prozac,” or something like that.
Okay, in the spirit of full disclosure, while I am an enthusiastic science teacher who loves her subject, I do also have certification to teach middle grades English, and did it one year. I taught Shakespeare to 50 eleven year olds, half of whom were on Ritalin and one was as sociopath who tried to kill his father that year. We staged the scenes they didn’t understand. You haven’t seen funny until you’ve seen Hamlet acted out by a bunch of ADHD preadolescents. Actually, it was one of my funniest years teaching, other than the death threats, of course.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, er, ferry…
The gentleman across from me noticed what I was reading asked if I had seen the movie made of it with Stuart Granger. This started a wonderful conversation with him and his wife, who it turns out were Cuban. They were as delightful a couple as you could ever meet. They had come to Boston from Miami to spend some time with their recently engaged daughter and future son-in-law.We talked and laughed about politics, religion, education, children, retirement programs, all kinds of things. We only spent an hour and half together and likely we’ll never see each other again, but something about connecting with strangers just makes you feel better about people in general. Like you may be surrounded by strangers, but behind the otherness is a lot of sameness.
Made my connection to the bus to take me up to Portsmouth to meet family I never knew I had before Uncle Ford died.
Ashes and Airports
Glad to see you. Not that I’m not enjoying my flight delays, but it’s good to have company.
Truthfully, it’s not all that bad. Think about it: when else in western culture are people required to do nothing but just …be? It’s like enforced Buddhism.
While not being enlightened enough to find my personal Nirvana at gate 18, I did find a decent glass of scotch and some wicked good onion rings.
Why am I here? This trip, this blog, and the onion ring+scotch queesiness all have their genesis in death.
(“Notice how the author juxtaposes beginnings and endings…” Great word, juxtaposes. Makes you sound like you know something. In grad school the makes-you-sound-like-you-know-something word was “modality.” You always had to sprinkle a few modalities bacon bits on your papers to ensure a good grade.)
My uncle, Ford LeMay, died suddenly this year. We had just talked on the phone a couple of days before then I get a voice mail from the coroner’s office in Charleston asking if a know a Hanford LeMay. Bam. I really loved my Uncle. Not that he wasn’t totally a character, but everybody needs a crazy uncle. And my uncle was the kind you could tell anything to and you knew he wouldn’t tell mom, or try to lecture you, or tell you what to do. He just listened and loved you.
I was 17 when he showed me what New York City was all about. Not the traditional see the Statue of Liberty tour, mind you, but a gay man’s guide to cool places. We had dinner in Greenwich Village and I remember commenting that the waiter was really cute. Without missing a beat, he raised an eyebrow in a comical leer and said yes he is. Then we both cracked up. Nothing like hitting on the same guy as your uncle. He loved to set propriety on its ear, yet also was the perfect New England gentleman. He had a large family of friends who loved him dearly in Charleston where he later lived.
A month before he died, we talked about final wishes and he said he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the middle of Provincetown, Massachussetts. “Isn’t that illegal, in a public place?” I asked. He said that as he would be dead it would bother him much. So I am headed to Commercial Street, so that Uncle Ford can have one final act of living (er ,dying) exactly as he wanted, propriety be damned.
Truthfully, it’s not all that bad. Think about it: when else in western culture are people required to do nothing but just …be? It’s like enforced Buddhism.
While not being enlightened enough to find my personal Nirvana at gate 18, I did find a decent glass of scotch and some wicked good onion rings.
Why am I here? This trip, this blog, and the onion ring+scotch queesiness all have their genesis in death.
(“Notice how the author juxtaposes beginnings and endings…” Great word, juxtaposes. Makes you sound like you know something. In grad school the makes-you-sound-like-you-know-something word was “modality.” You always had to sprinkle a few modalities bacon bits on your papers to ensure a good grade.)
My uncle, Ford LeMay, died suddenly this year. We had just talked on the phone a couple of days before then I get a voice mail from the coroner’s office in Charleston asking if a know a Hanford LeMay. Bam. I really loved my Uncle. Not that he wasn’t totally a character, but everybody needs a crazy uncle. And my uncle was the kind you could tell anything to and you knew he wouldn’t tell mom, or try to lecture you, or tell you what to do. He just listened and loved you.
I was 17 when he showed me what New York City was all about. Not the traditional see the Statue of Liberty tour, mind you, but a gay man’s guide to cool places. We had dinner in Greenwich Village and I remember commenting that the waiter was really cute. Without missing a beat, he raised an eyebrow in a comical leer and said yes he is. Then we both cracked up. Nothing like hitting on the same guy as your uncle. He loved to set propriety on its ear, yet also was the perfect New England gentleman. He had a large family of friends who loved him dearly in Charleston where he later lived.
A month before he died, we talked about final wishes and he said he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the middle of Provincetown, Massachussetts. “Isn’t that illegal, in a public place?” I asked. He said that as he would be dead it would bother him much. So I am headed to Commercial Street, so that Uncle Ford can have one final act of living (er ,dying) exactly as he wanted, propriety be damned.
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