All…

All went well. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.

Grace in Small Things – 216

• The fact that when we need good energy sent our way, we have all of you good people to turn to. Please send healing thought energy in Sylvain’s direction tomorrow (Monday). We are in London for 2 days for another lithotripsy.
• I don’t presume to have any clue whether the four people arrested are guilty or innocent (that has to be determined in a court of law), but it is so heartening to see that animals and their suffering matter enough to take people away in handcuffs.
• Empress of Dirt has the BEST links. Check out this story.
• Lemon mushroom risotto with Romano cheese. Oh!
• All the beautiful red-tailed hawks we saw on our drive to London. (Ontario, of course. Not England.)

Grace in Small Things – 214 and 215

• A wonderful dinner with my sweetheart at Eden Trattoria Corso Italia while we allowed time for rush hour traffic to clear up before heading home from Toronto yesterday. My Caprese salad was amazing, with baby spinach mixed in with the basil.
• Holding hands.
• A long soak in the tub with drops of lavender and jasmine essential oils.
• My bed
• Waking up in a sunshine-filled room instead of a dark one.
• Having sweet surprises in among the month’s worth of unopened mail, like a thank-you note from a fellow blogger. She included a ticket to the King Tut exhibit that is good through April. This gives me a great excuse for a visit back to the Big Smoke. Thank you, S!
• Receiving a touching email from a friend.
• Having a new issue of Shambhala Sun waiting for me. What a fantastic publication. I eat up every article.
• Cooking my own food in my own kitchen and eating it off a gleaming white IKEA plate while sitting by a window with a view of water. Oh, it is so nice to be home.
• Being able to fit back into some corduroys I bought last year. I think I’ve shed 5 lbs–partly due to the grueling practicum and partly due to my commitment on Melissa’s blog to abstain from elevators and escalators for a month.

Second Practicum

I’m back and hope to return soon to a state of normal. I want to sleep 7 to 8 hours a night again instead of five. I want to visit your blogs again, and respond to your comments and emails. I want a massage.

My second practicum was not like my first. The week of practice teaching I did at the end of Part I of the course was with a class of Level Three LINC students. From the very first time my mentor sat me down after the school day to give me feedback, I heard almost nothing but praise, though the kudos were interspersed with a couple of gentle suggestions on how to make my already amazing teaching even better. At the end of that week, she gave me the third of three possible grades: Unacceptable, Pass, Pass with Distinction.

Wanting to give myself a bit more of a challenge, I volunteered to do my second practicum with Level One students. I had heard stories of how many LINC teachers there are out there who refuse to teach that level, or who–if forced to rotate into that level every few months–hate it and/or cannot hack it. It takes a very special type to teach this level well. With my mind on future job interviews,  I wanted to know if I am one of those who has what it takes to teach Level One. It would be a nice feather for my hat to be able to tell a prospective employer, “Oh, and by the way, I can teach One.”

By day two of my practicum, I was questioning my sanity. What WAS I thinking?  Paired with the difficulty of teaching this level was the fact that the mentor teachers are asked to raise the bar on those of us who have already been through one practicum. My mentor took her job very seriously.

My first mentor had come to trust me enough by day three that she was leaving the classroom to do her one-on-one testing. This woman, on the other hand, sat and made notes the entire time. She brought my attention to every area where I could possibly have done things more effectively.

One thing I found very difficult was designing a lesson that would challenge them just enough without leaving them feeling discouraged. The goal was to find that perfect balance: you want to give them exercises at which they can succeed, especially early in the lesson, but you don’t want to give them material that is too easy. They will get bored, lose interest, speed through it too quickly. Adding to the trickiness of this was the fact that my class was effectively multi-level. One of the eleven student was clearly ready to move onto Level Two in a couple of weeks, while three students had been allowed to join the class that week and had no idea what was going on around them. I had to make sure the lessons had some value for the newcomers while having many aspects challenging enough for the highest achievers.

The other daunting and time-consuming thing for a brand new teacher is finding a variety of ways to present material. In our course, we learn a few of the tried and true activities, like jig-saw text (students must put words or sentences in the correct order), blank-fill exercises, circle the whatever, find the error, chain drill. We also learn how to lead a few of the games that most ESL teachers use: Bingo, tic-tac-toe on the blackboard, twenty questions, and so on. But you definitely don’t get your bag of tricks full enough for a week of teaching two lessons a day without re-using some templates a few times through the week.

I had even been proactive enough to have filled a two-page table in Word with game ideas I’d collected from ESL websites over a two-month period. Yet  on those nights when I needed a game for the following day’s afternoon activity, I found myself scrolling through the whole list and coming up empty handed. None of the games would work with Level Ones, who just don’t know enough words to convey any but the most basic ideas. To give you an idea of their language level, if someone was going to be absent, she might say to me, “Me 10:30 doctor.”  We mostly communicated through gesture and the commonest of nouns.

When I did a lesson on pronunciation of vowels, I wrote on the board “a e i o u.” I then pointed to the Columbian student and said,” Spanish has 5 vowels. One letter (hold up one finger), one sound (touch ear).” English has 5 letters, 12 sounds.” I wrote the number 12 on the board and pointed to my ear again. Even the new student from China who couldn’t yet tell me her street address followed that lesson.  We practiced lax and tense vowels that day using minimal pairs: ship/sheep, bet/bait, pull/pool.  I passed out rubber bands, which we stretched out while saying the tense vowels (sheep, bait, pool).

My mentor was hard on me, but in the end it is a good thing that she made me dig deep.

I went into the practicum “knowing” that I am literal minded, detail oriented and sometimes too formulaic in my way of learning, teaching, thinking. By “knowing,” I mean that I have been told, it has been pointed out to me and I believe it. But knowing is one thing. Being able to address it is another. She was able to show me how these quirks come out in my teaching and how I could be more effective in the classroom if I can break through these mental molds of mine before they become habits. I don’t want to fossilize before I’ve even begun and just say, “Oh, that’s my teaching style.” She showed me how much the students could benefit if I can sometimes pull my head up out of the land of details and see the big picture…get my head out of the formula to see why the formula was put there in the first place.

I’ll give you an example.

To check our answers on one activity where students had just put some sentences in order, I asked the students to come put the right answers on the board. I did that because I wanted to inject some physical movement into our morning, get their blood flowing, and let everyone see as we corrected them. We did that with five sentences. “She is kind.” “He is a mail carrier,” etc.

Then we put five questions in order using the little bits of coloured paper I had cut up the night before. “Is he a mail carrier?” “Is she kind?”

My mentor challenged me on why I had them come to the board. My answer, “just to change it up,” wasn’t a good one. She wanted me to realize that coming up to the board is time-consuming, so you only want to do it that way when there is a reason, one that has value for the students. Otherwise you are using up time that could better be used on a phase of the lesson where you might run short of time.

She had me think hard about every single choice I made in that same way. If we took up the answers one by one, she pointed out that we could have checked those answers chorally. Why? Because by walking around the class, I could have seen that almost everyone had the answers right. It was an easy exercise for them. No need to go around the room. You’re taking time away from the last part of the lesson, which is the most valuable part–the production phase when they actually use the new language to communicate freely with you and one another.

In another instance she pointed out that by walking around and looking at their papers, I could have seen that they all had the right answers. No need to waste time taking that one up at all. Just say, “I see you all have gotten these all right, so let’s move on.”

My head was stuck in formulas. You hand out a worksheet, you check it (with a partner, with the class). She was trying to pull me out into reality. Stay tuned into the students. What is really happening and what are the implications for how you conduct the rest of the lesson? Can you veer from the formula now, given what is happening? Should you? Must you?

My first mentor had praised me for being “very flexible” and present. This mentor was able to show me where I was not present, not tuned into what was really happening.

With this kind of guidance, I was able to push myself every night to address her new concerns. By Friday, I felt like I’d been through teaching boot camp. Though on day one I had not even liked her very much, by the end of the week I felt grateful to her for taking her role so seriously and pushing me so hard. Had she not been so conscientious, I would not have gotten a fraction of the benefit from that experience.

It was hard, and I’m glad it’s over. But I’m also really glad I chose a tough assignment and had a strict task master.

Grace in Small Things – 212, 213

• One more sleep in TO, one more day of practicum.
• The mentor and I are warming up to one another. I’m getting used to her critiquing style, and I sense she is beginning to respect and trust me a bit more than she did on day one.
• I love my students, even though they have only been “mine” for a week.
• I am learning so much and getting better at this with each passing day.
• I can draw. I’m so grateful for that skill.
• More lovely weather! Today was misty and a bit rainy, but not cold.
• The way one very shy new students looks over at me and smiles. She has a very rough home situation and I wish I could adopt her.
• Getting to say, “See you tomorrow” to Sylvain on the phone just now.
• Having the most lovely conversation today at lunch with a woman from Sri Lanka. She uses almost no verbs, yet I understood everything she wanted to convey for 15 straight minutes. That is called having fluency without accuracy. I learned that back home, her garden was overflowing with bananas, mangoes, limes and lemons. She had fresh eggs every day and anytime she wanted a coconut, it was just a matter of sending someone up the tree. She is not very impressed with the freshness of produce in Canadian grocery stores.
• The fact that I can mix full sentences and sentence fragments on my GiST lists, and nobody can stop me. It’s called blogland poetic license. Ha!

Back to work!

Grace in Small Things – 210, 211

• The beautiful faces of my students. I know I shouldn’t, but I already have a favourite. Maybe I am just a sucker for big, black eyes.
• Power naps.
• The way joy swells up inside me when a student succeeds on a task that earlier in the day or week was not possible for her.
• Burt’s Bees replenishing lip balm with pomegranate oil.
• Purell in the tiny travel bottle. So far I’ve been exposed to sick classmates, sick house mates, sick host mom, sick practicum mentor, sick students and goodness knows what all on the subway and bus poles, straps and buttons. I don’t know if I can credit my obsessive hand-santizing or my guardian angels or both, but I have not fallen prey to any invading organisms yet. Touch wood. (But not wood anyone else has been touching.) Just let those bugs stay away two more days, please.
• Misty and overcast but still very pleasant November weather.
• Knowing your blogs are not going anywhere, nor are the emails in my inbox. They will still be there when I am through with this frenzied week.
• Seeing that my students enjoyed the game I led them through this afternoon. There was much hilarity, a welcome break from seriousness and brows furrowed in concentration.
• That somehow, only heaven knows how, I felt fresh this morning and got a burst of energy that lasted all day–in spite of having gotten only 5.5 hours of sleep.
• The thoughtful conversation I overheard on the subway about the movie “Precious.” I think that the women discussing the film were social workers in training and their prof.

Walk in the Light

The best laid plans of mice and men…

I spent all that time on Saturday and Sunday creating my first lesson plan with all its graphics and worksheets, only to have to redo much of it tonight after today’s talk with my mentor. That sucks because I had hoped to have tonight to prepare Wednesday’s lesson. This means that instead of being a day ahead on every lesson, I am now down to having only the night before to get everything created and executed for the following day. I’ve already used up my buffer day. Grrr.

One of these days, when and if I’m ever a real teacher, I am going to do as I see the other real teachers doing and grab a lot of stuff already prepared out of books. But for the practicum, we aren’t really supposed to cut corners like that. We are supposed to create our own materials. This is one time when I wish I could lock my inner perfectionist in the closet and get on with things. SIGH.

Well, the good news is that I am done with tomorrow’s prep, though it took me from 3:30 till now, and can go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Tomorrow night I probably won’t be able to say the same. But hey, it’s only one week of my life and one of the five days is already behind me.

=============

This morning something so bizarre happened, I can’t even put it into words.

I had hoped to be showered so very early that I could be in and out of the kitchen for my oatmeal before host mom even arrived on the scene. I failed by ten minutes, though, and paid for it dearly.  I don’t want to say right now what the exchange was exactly, but I can tell you that it left me feeling violated. It also caused me to boot up my laptop a) to check Snopes.com to see if this person was just spreading a grotesque urban legend and b) to search for someone to whom I could vent and unload some of the toxic nastiness that had just been unloaded on me.  The first email in my inbox was from my mom, who is also one of my best friends. So she was the lucky recipient of my brief rant.

I might blog in detail about this exchange later, just to get advice from you on how I should have handled it. But tonight I must make this brief and get to sleep.

Blessedly, the second email was from my new friend and former classmate R, whose words you can see in the comments on my post Impermanence (Anicca).

Can you imagine how those words lifted me from the toxic cloud I had moments before been trying to claw my way out of? They did. They made me beam and remember who I am. To remember who I am was something I desperately needed at that moment.

Then I thought about what another friend wrote to me not too long ago:

I experience “light” when I am with you. It is a lightness of spirit and,
when you smile, a brilliance. It’s a most welcome thing, Grace.
Thank you for blessing the world, me, with your light.

Light or The Light is one of the central theme of Quakerism. Instead of saying, “I’ll pray for him,” many Friends would say, “I’ll hold him in the Light.” We are asked to see that of God in everyone. One of my favourite Quaker songs is this one.

I pulled myself together and stepped into the image my two friends had painted for me of myself.

As the subway train nears the end of my commute, it surfaces from underground for about a mile. As the train and I came up out of the dark, cool earth, a blinding sun–low over the horizon–assaulted my eyes like a million angels with blaring trumpets, refusing to be ignored. I let the rays bathe my face as the train carried me to my destination.

* = GiST 209

Grace in Small Things – 208

• Ear plugs.
• Five more sleeps in Toronto!
• Taking good care of myself and preparing for the non-stop intensity of the practicum by stocking up on snacks for energy. Clementines, almonds, green tea, dark chocolate will go with me everywhere I go this week.
• Thanks to pacing myself and getting a lot done yesterday and today, I can go to sleep by ten tonight. I want to start the week fresh and awake.
• The sunshine, the green velvet couch, the woman whose hands shake, the tea cups, the bulletin board, the black squirrel, the silence, the ministry, the tears that coursed down my cheeks, and everything else that Quaker Meeting gave me today.

Good-Bye and Thank You, Toronto Monthly Meeting

Today I rose with purpose. I did not want to miss my third and last visit to the Toronto Quaker Meeting after noticing last week how much it lifted my spirits to go there, how it fed me enough energy to stave off my regular homestay funk for the rest of the day–and into the next day, as well.

The concentric circles of chairs are set up in a room that is all glass from floor to ceiling on one whole side. It’s almost like worshiping out of doors.

Before dropping in on this Meeting, I had experienced two other monthly meetings. I was a regular attender in Little Rock for about three years and for a little while in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. I have also visited the Fayetteville, Arkansas Monthly Meeting, and have been on weekend retreats or Quarterly Meetings where members of monthly meetings from surrounding states come together for three days, sleeping in cabins in a state park. The normal practice for involving children in Meeting–at least in each of these meetings that I have experienced–is for a First Day School to be offered at least one First Day (Sunday) per month. Before the parent or First Day School teacher takes the little ones off to another room, however, the children are encouraged to sit in silence with the group for as long as they want. In other words, until they start to squirm. In this way, children are allowed to start with perhaps 5 minutes of Meeting for Worship, which gradually lengthens as they grow older. By the time the child is twelve or thirteen, she may be joining Meeting for the full hour.

This morning one worshiper was accompanied by his two children. The younger of the two was delighted to recently have become very mobile in an upright way and was exercising this new ability in a state of sheer glee. Father sat in silence, older sibling sat in silence. Toddler ran full tilt toward the plate glass window separating us from the back garden, giggled as she slammed palms first against the window, then turned and ran back to her dad.

Dad allowed her to do this. When she put her arms up to be held, he held her on his lap. She was able to “do” the silent sitting for about 10 seconds at a time. Then she would squirm back down and repeat her rush at the glass doors, occasionally punctuating her voyage with “gah” or “daaaah!”  She seemed quite pleased with herself and not the least bit bothered by the fact that she was the only moving being in the room, the only being in the room emitting any noise whatsoever.

I wondered what she thought of this strange room full of people who all sat perfectly still and quiet. Mustn’t that have struck her as odd, since the world was normally full of people smiling at her, cooing at her, clapping and laughing at her antics and achievements?

After about seven minutes of this, dad decided it was time for her and older sibling to go to the children’s room. This inspired the first spoken ministry of the hour. A silver-haired woman to my left stood to say, “before the little one goes…” and expressed how wonderful it had been to watch her. It brings us all back to the basics, to where we all started, she said. Thank you for that, she added, sitting back down.

The silence was pierced three or four more times during the hour, each bit of spontaneous spoken ministry sandwiched between stretches of silence.

After Meeting, we all congregated in the sitting room with its beautiful, recently recovered old sofas and armchairs with tea and cookies. One woman about my mother’s age said to the toddler’s dad what I wish I’d been able to articulate as well: she expressed thanks for the child’s ministry.

Ministry.

That is exactly what it had been. Not a distraction. Not something to be squelched or reigned in. Not a reason to chastise the child or hush her.

Ministry.

I will miss my Sunday morning outings to be among people who think like that.

Second Practicum

Well, this is it…the home stretch.

Today I got up not too early, but early enough to finish up a lesson plan so I could carry it with me on my flash drive when I went to Quaker Meeting, then stop off at Kinko’s on the way back to print out big colour flash cards for Tuesday’s lesson.

The class in which I am doing my second practicum is more challenging than had anticipated. I knew I was biting off a lot when I chose to teach a level one. I also knew I was making things more difficult for myself than they needed to be when I chose the Scarborough site with its hour-long commute over the North York site, where I did my first practicum. But I wanted to get a taste of each of my school’s three locations.

This class is going to test my mettle in a couple of other ways. One of the bane’s of an ESL teacher’s existence is the dreaded multi-level class. Even though this class has only been going for a couple of months, there is a vast gulf between the level of the strongest student and that of the weakest. The weakest student is new AND cannot be present in the afternoons. My mentor tells me that many classes end with her in tears. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t understand a single thing going on around her. Fortunately, her first language is one of the ones that I speak, and I’ve got the mentor’s permission to whisper a few helpful things in that language when it might help her along.

I wonder why LINC coordinators allow students to join mid-session like that, especially if they have absolutely no English yet. Why do that to the student or the teacher?

The strongest student is someone who has been here many years, including some years spent working in a factory here. I’m not sure how she qualified for the class, unless through a relative. In any case, her accuracy is very low (she doesn’t use the correct forms), but she is quite chatty and can make herself well understood. Example: “Sri Lanka me work cow chicken cow.” ME: “You had a farm?” Student: “Yes, farm.” ME: “What happened to the farm when you moved here?” Student: “Sister.” ME: “Your sister took over the farm?”  Student: “Yes, yes.”

Anyway, it’s showtime, folks.  I feel about as ready as I ever will.

Grace in Small Things – 207

• Getting up early to work on the lesson plans for my practicum. I got lots done.
• Going to give blood and…drum roll, please…being allowed to donate. Yay!  No more anemia, thanks to the little green iron tablets my doc prescribed six weeks ago.
• A mild if overcast day. I brought a wool toque with me to Toronto but haven’t had to wear it at all yet.
• Six more sleeps till hugs and kisses…and being able to sleep in my own bed again.
• Receiving a hand-written note from a beloved friend. Snail mail rocks.

Grace in Small Things – 206

• Rising early, walking to the bus stop through streets still wet with rain.
• The orange flowers still blooming in one of the yards I pass on my way to the bus stop.
• Hearing some Persian words come out of one student’s mouth when she was on the phone with a family member. Hey, wait a second, I thought. There are no Iranians in this class. I got her to show me on the world map where she is from: Tajikistan. She told me that she does speak a version of Persian, but doesn’t write it in Arabic script! She picked up a piece of chalk (it was break time) and wrote her name for me in her script. I took the chalk and wrote her name again as it would be written in Iran.  You learn something new every day.
• Sitting in a cozy cafe for an hour with one of my dearest friends. Email, letters, phones are okay…but there is no substitute for being able to look into a friend’s eyes.
• Long, tight hugs.

Energy In, Energy Out, Energy …

Since it takes an hour for me to get to my practicum site (bus + loooooooooooong suuuuuuubway ride + bus), I was out the door by seven this morning. It is now after eight p.m. and I am plum tuckered out.

Looking back on my day, what is most salient is the flow and flux of energy. Some activities drained me a little, some a lot. Other events and exchanges pumped me up, some way up. It went like this:

• Up before anyone else in the house for a peppermint shower = energy in.
• Being trapped in the kitchen with host mom while I ate my oatmeal, listening to her whinge and gripe about the latest thing one of the students has done to cost her money (broke a light switch) =  energy OUT. Way out.  Toxic, toxic person. And toxic behaviour pattern of mine–to sit and allow the toxicity in. I need better boundary skills.
• Observing the class I’m going to be teaching next week = energy out. Yeah, I know. It surprised me, too. It was the opposite during my first practicum. But this class holds the energy of stagnation, frustration and blockage. Watching it drag on was taxing.
• Meeting my dear friend K from Waterloo = ENERGY IN! Big time. Being with someone I love, with whom I can be 100% myself, to whom I can say anything… yeah. Energy in. We hug spontaneously, reach out to touch one another, share secrets, cry. Anything goes.
• Talking to my classmate R on the phone = energy IN. She is one of those rare souls who recognizes (and cares about) a rare soul. It feels good to be recognized, and I think it feels good for her, too.
• Checking email and finding that the teacher has finished marking another one of my assignments. Reading her comments = energy IN. I became absolutely bouyant, as light as a dandelion seed after reading her words. She is a prof who does not dole out words of approbation liberally, so even the tiniest praise from her puts me on cloud nine. She used the adjective “lucid” to describe one of my arguments. I think I’ll get that on a tee shirt.
• Skyping with my sweetie and talking about our respective days = energy in.

So that was interesting…watching myself fading and wilting at one point in the day, then watching how another type of interaction or surrounding brought me right back to life.

I recognize that being in this bedroom is heavily oppressive and saps almost all my creativity and energy for school work. Since a lot hinges on how much preparing I can accomplish this weekend, I am going to experiment with taking my laptop into the kitchen and/or to the nearby library branch.

I am reminded of the time my good friend, who was struggling to write a dissertation, asked me if I thought place mattered. She had proposed to her therapist that she might have more success and progress more quickly on the thesis if she moved out of her small apartment and found an airier, sunnier place to live and write. I told her that I most certainly did think that writer’s block could be linked in part to the space in which she was attempting to write.

What drains away your energy? What recharges you?

Grace in Small Things – 204, 205

• All your comments and the love that I felt pouring forth from them. Thank you!!! :)
• These two young people. They paced themselves well and saved up for a burst of energy at the end. Aren’t they lovely?
• Green tea to wake up my brain so I can work on another assignment.
• The nice comment I got from the admin assistant yesterday about my marks when she pulled my file for me.
• The zingy, refreshing peppermint castile soap I got at Grass*Roots yesterday to refill my pump bottle. Wow, it’s very minty…and it doubles as a very nice shampoo!
• Spending time after supper last night helping G with English. He had talked a kind librarian out of an old copy of Utne Reader and was going through it with a highlighter to learn new words. Now that’s my kind of English lesson. We started with how to pronounce Utne. It rhymes with chutney. Ok, for those of you who mispronounce chutney, that’s an /ʌ/ as in BUT, not an /uw/ as in lute.
• Getting hugs last night, and not being the only one who was on the verge of tears.
• Hearing very briefly from my darling today that his consult in London went well and he’s feeling confident.
• Getting excited about tomorrow, which is when I meet my (second) practicum mentor for the first time. I will sit in on her class just to get a feel for where she’s at with the students.
• The possibility of a visit with a dear friend tomorrow evening, too!

Is It So Bad to be Sad?

This morning I sat at the big desk in my room (which was once a dining table) and worked on one of the final assignments, stopping frequently to look out the window at the sparrows that flit to and from the feeder next door. I could hear host mom puttering around in the kitchen. Laundry was flapping wildly on the clothesline. Over a period of three hours I did manage to finish writing my half-page to one-page essay answers to each of six opinion questions. Without printing it out for a final proofreading, I emailed it to E, the administrative assistant who date stamps all assignments before printing them off for the teacher to mark.  At this point I’m less concerned with perfection and more interested in getting one more assignment off my plate. With that one finished, I’ve just three to go.

Today I had a date to meet my classmate R an hour and a half before our last night class so we could go over her poem together. It’s about Toronto and it’s in Farsi. I’ve spent hours over the past weeks penciling in the English translation of as many words as I could find on Farsidic.com in wee tiny writing between the lines.

We agreed on 4:15 at the Green Beanery since the night module starts at six.  I wanted to drop by the school before the administrative assistant went home for the day so I could take a look at my marked grammar test–see what I got wrong so I’d know what to bone up on. I also needed to get my soft soap pump container refilled at GrassRoots, so I left the homestay house a couple of hours before I was to meet R.

Since my practicum is in Scarborough, today was my last time to take the subway to Bathurst Station.

Everything felt a bit sad.

I know.  I know all that stuff about flowers dying. We suffer not because things are impermanent, but because we fall into the trap of attachment.

I did become attached.

These fourteen weeks, separated by a 7-week break, have comprised one of the sweetest periods of my life. It has been like being a school girl again. It has been like an escape from the real world, that world I had to enter after I graduated university over 20 years ago. Ever since getting my B.A., with the exception of a few months after moving to Canada and a few months after moving to Windsor, I’ve been gainfully employed. And those two periods of unemployment were no vacation; I was desperately looking for work.

For two decades I’ve either been working really hard (keeners don’t know any other way to work) or have been stressing out about not having a job.  Once in those 20 years I took a two-week vacation. All my other vacations were shorter than that.  And typical of the overly conscientious, I often gave my coworkers and supervisor a number where I could be reached while on holidays…just in case a problem arose that only I could solve.

Now this!

It’s been like being allowed to step off the merry-go-round for four whole months. If I tune out the sound of my savings account going “sluuuuurp,” there’s no stress to speak of.  I haven’t even had to go grocery shopping or do any cooking during this second half of the course.  All I’ve had to do is get up out of bed in the morning, pick out something to wear, gather my books and go learn from 10:30 to 4:45.  Learn and bond with my lovely classmates and see movies.

Heaven.

I stood in the lobby of the coffee shop waiting for R.  Miss Manners says that waiting for someone twenty minutes is good etiquette. You’re not obligated to wait any longer than that when someone is late.  I waited thirty minutes. Thirty five.  Had it been almost anyone else, I might have gotten irked and left, figuring I’d been stood up or forgotten about. But not R.  She was either sick at the last minute or something had happened beyond her control. I decided to take a table, order something and read the paper.

She arrived at a little before five looking mortified. The southbound yellow line had broken down and passengers were loaded onto shuttle buses. She had left home at 3:15 just to ensure she would not be late for our meeting, then that happend. I reassured her that I’d been fine and was just glad she wasn’t sick.

“Relax,” I said. “Take a minute to calm down. It’s okay.”

Once she’d gotten her 15 apologies out of her system, we read her poem. She had written it out for me very clearly since I can’t decipher quickly-written Persian script, only careful printing that resembles what I learned in my primer.  It took us the whole hour to go through the pronunciation and meaning of each of ten stanzas, but it was worth it.  The metaphors made me smile, playful lines made me laugh softly. In the end she was disappointed that we had no time left over for me to recite it for her. She loves my accent, she says!

The poem has a sad ending. It is about the wind here, about being in Toronto and far from ones homeland, far from ones mother.

The teacher got us involved in a fun activity, so class went quickly.

I was acutely aware of all the things I was doing for the last time.  I wanted to go around and bid every silly thing farewell.

Good-bye, old tea kettle that takes four minutes to boil.

Good-bye, musty old school building with cracks in the ceiling.

So long, narrow little bathroom where the people coming out of the stalls have to make sure nobody is standing at the sink before they open the door.

I’m going to miss you.

Yes, I got attached.

Attachment is the root of our suffering.

We don’t suffer because things are impermanent. We suffer because we fall under a spell of believing them to be permanent.

But you know what? Though my eyes were leaking tonight, I was not suffering. There was sweetness to my sadness. I was sad because I had allowed myself to love. To fall in love.

With the cracked ceilings. With the tea kettle.  With all those precious rituals that wove continuity through the days: tea break at 11:45, playing Take Two at the lunch table with P and E, tearing the crossword puzzle off the back page of the Metro newspaper for J at my table. Every day we did the same things in the same way, constructing for ourselves familiarity from routine.

I’m going to miss the way we helped each other. Fed each other.

I’m going to miss subway tokens.

And pigeons on the platform looking for crumbs in the cracks between the tiles. (How DO they get down there and how DO they get back outside again when they want to?)

Of course you know that there’s not anything especially lovable about THAT tea kettle, that fire escape, that orange extension cord. It’s the associations I have with these objects. They are the objects from the physical world with which I will always associate this time of my life… like a certain scent you associate with your third grade teacher, or with summers at the cottage, or with your grandfather.

Instead of smells, I have a kettle. A staircase. The particular linoleum pattern that I will never see anywhere else ever again.

Is this suffering? Or is this engaging in life? Tasting? Allowing myself to love?

Grace in Small Things – 203

• Receiving an email from the prof to say I got 97% on the last exam I handed in. See, I do more than just go to movies!
• Sparrows on the window ledge finding the pieces of nuts I spead out there for them.
• A day so fine that I was able to sit in the garden with just a sweater for a wrap.
• Eggplant for dinner. Delicious!
• This. What a great idea.

The Monkey on My Back

Yes, I admit it. I’m a filmoholic. A movie addict. I can’t stop. Even though I’m supposed to be watching every penny and only spending on the absolutely essential right now… I can’t stop.

Today was Two Twonie Tuesday at the Rainbow. Any movie for $4. I saw The Men Who Stare at Goats.

As I was going in to update my films database (which I built in MS Access to keep track of what I’ve seen and what I thought of it), I realized how very many films I’ve seen already in 2009, most of them with Sylvain:

• Il y’a longtemps que je t’aime
• The Hangover (that one was his idea, trust me)
• Capitalism: A Love Story
• Adam
• Pontypool
• 500 Days of Summer
• The Girlfriend Experience
• The Informant!
• Inglourious Basterds
• Moon
• Anvil! The Story of Anvil
• Julie & Julia (twice)
• A Serious Man
• The Stoning of Soraya M
• Pirate Radio
• Cairo Time
• Bright Star
• The Men Who Stare at Goats

That’s a lot of movie watching in one year. And I’m not done yet! Precious opens later this month.

I look at it this way: as vices go, movies are a pretty tame and harmless addiction. These days I don’t have any hobbies that cost money, like sewing or quilting, painting or pottery. Getting out of the apartment and into a movie house helps keep me sane, and going to one film is a lot cheaper than a session with an analyst–even when you include the cost of a small popcorn. ;)

Movies by Myself and the Rose Beret Woman on the Subway

There is something delicious about sneaking out of the house after dark to see a movie by myself.

I love moving with purpose through the streets under lamp light, walking briskly, having somewhere to be. I love the smell of the night air. I love being on the bus at night, wondering where all the other riders are going to and coming from.

At the old Bloor Cinema with its art deco architecture still in tact, I choose a seat in the front third of the seating area, just to the left of centre. It’s not a movie house habit of mine. I sometimes sit in the very back, sometimes on the right. Once I sat in the first row just to see what it felt like to prop my feet on the stage as the kids were doing.

I’m early and didn’t bring a puzzle; in any case the lighting is too dim for reading. To pass the time, I study my surroundings. Are the curtains really madder-red or are the lights that shine on them from the stage just making them look red?

As I sit waiting for the feature to begin (Cairo Time with Patricia Clarkson), I study the people around me. I make up stories about them, or have little fantasies that I knew them in other lifetimes.

The man one row up, late 50s, greying beard and coke-bottle-bottom glasses? In another life, he and I were married. On the wall of his study, collections of South American insects were framed behind glass, largest beetle on the top left, on the bottom right a gnat barely large enough to bear the slender pin. On Sundays we attended free lectures at the university. He liked to wear my underthings.

The man three seats to my right? We dated once, though only that once. Mutual friends set us up. We still say hello when we see each other at the farmer’s market. He was a bit too devoted to his restored 1962 Lotus for my comfort. I sensed I would always be number two. Seeing who he’s with tonight, I imagine I wasn’t quite pretty enough for his taste. My, she has a long neck.

The Russian couple behind me? That’s Eva and Viktor. They were my neighbours across the back fence. I allowed him to prune the branches of the apple tree that extended into their yard after he complained about leaves blowing into their pool. To keep the peace, you know. They gave me a decent bottle of port one Christmas. In the summer, if they left their windows open, I could hear her practicing the cello. She’s not bad. They have a Siamese cat named Baudelaire who isn’t allowed outside.

Same row, but to my left, there’s a woman in her mid-thirties with her thick, unruly black hair pulled back with a red velvet ribbon. In another life, we were friends, having met in a pottery class. Every time she has me over, she serves something cinnamon. The last time I was with her we sat at her Formica and chrome kitchen table. There was a juice glass in the middle of the table serving as vase for a sprig of rosemary and cutting from the tea rose bush in her garden. I admired the arrangement so much that she let me take it home.  I rode home on the subway clutching my fragrant little still life, enjoying the stares this attracted from strangers.

=============

The movie was flawless. Oh, Patricia Clarkson just sizzles. Did you see her and Peter Dinklage in The Station Agent? I had to see that twice.

There were not many people on the subway platform at nine on a Monday night. A small Chinese woman in a rose-coloured knit beret approached a tall, portly young man in a black leather coat to ask him something, but her limited English only allowed for pointing at the piece of paper in her hand.

It was clear from her pantomime that she wanted to know if she was on the right platform. He told her she was in the right place, which she didn’t understand. “Stay here,” he said, pointing to the spot where she should stay, and walked on down the corridor.

When I smiled in her direction, she presented the same piece of paper to me, pointed to the words “Islington Station” and asked me something in her own language, again pantomiming and pointing to the track and down the tunnel from which the next train would emerge.

“Yes, stay with me,” I said, pointing to her and then to me and nodding a lot. “Three minutes,” I added, pointing to my watch and holding up three fingers.

“Ah, ah, ah,” she said, smiling. She sat down to wait.

When the train came, again she asked me something in her language and pointed to her paper and then to the train.

“Yes, come on, I’ll show you on the map,” I said, motioning for her to go through the doors.

She started to take a seat. I pointed to the route map above the opposite door. She saw what I was doing. Standing on tip toes, I managed to touch the word “Islington” at the far west end of the green line.

“Ah, ah, ah,” she said, nodding, then asked me another question in what was probably Mandarin. Assuming she had asked where we were or how many stops that was, I pointed to Bathurst Station. She then counted–in her strange tongue–all the stations between where we were and her stop.  I counted them, too.

“Twelve,” I said.  She repeated the number in her language. I held up ten fingers then two. She nodded and smiled, and sat back down facing the map.

I took a seat not too far away and watched her as she studied the map above the door. After we passed Christie, she looked over at me and I held up ten fingers then one. She smiled.

After we passed Ossington, I held up ten fingers. She smiled again.

When I got off at Dufferin, I said good-bye and “nine more,” holding up nine fingers.

“Sank you!” she said, smiling.

“You’re welcome,” I said, smiling back.

I want to do that for the rest of my life.

Grace in Small Things – 202

• A brown-skinned, large man dressed as Santa playing the oboe for spare change in an underground passage.
• The exotic birds that have been sighted in Ontario recently due to strange weather patterns…maybe not so good for the sulphur-bellied flycatcher and phainopepla, but exciting for local birders.
• The black squirrel I can spy on from the bedroom window. She likes basking in the sun belly-down on the black vinyl cover that is draped over the neighbour’s barbeque.
• Being in a gathering–like Quaker Meeting yesterday–where I’m offered soup and need not ask if there’s meat in it. There won’t be.
• That The Swell Season has a new CD out.

Persimmons and Pillows and GiST 201

The Friends Meeting House is so welcoming. As you walk up the path, a tame black squirrel stands on hind legs and sniffs the air as if to say, “Whadja bring me?” The enormous bay window, the sill brimming with jade plants, mother-in-law tongues, aloes, and bougainvilleas, seems to barely separate the office from the outdoors.

A middle-aged fellow is dismounting his bicycle and unstrapping his helmet as I let myself in.

I hang up my jacket and take a squirt of sanitizing gel, return the clerk’s hands-together bow that has replaced handshakes this flu season, and enter the meeting room where the chairs are arranged in concentric circles. I sit and settle down, gazing about the room at those already sitting in silence. There’s a grey-haired woman with peace sign earrings. She is silent. There’s a lanky young red-haired man in green. He is silent, too.

It occurs to me now how much this feeds me…to be in the company of smart, socially conscious people who gather for an hour to share silence.

More people arrive, entering the silent circle with reverence, much the way I approach a labyrinth.

One slight woman whose turquoise turtleneck sweater nearly swallows her enters the room gingerly, her hands still lightly pressed together. She looks like a praying mantis walking on lily pads.

About 20 minutes into the hour of quiet waiting, the first spoken ministry is delivered by a man one row ahead and five chairs to my right. He stands and says that this morning he was at the mental health facility where it was his turn to lead a worship service. He told us of a woman who paced nervously and asked him with some urgency if he could make her delusions go away. Would he pray for her, she asked. Would they ever go away, she asked. Why would God let her suffer this way, she asked.

His talk that morning had been from Matthew 7:7.

“We are all called,” he said. Not to say that we will have the answers, but we are each called to answer the door to the other, to acknowledge the other person’s humanity.

After Meeting, I made my way back to the subway station and to the St. Lawrence Market area for a movie at the Rainbow. I had to step over little folding chairs that lined the parade route. When I got out, the parade was about to end. I’ll have to explore the Market another day, since crossing the street to get there would have entailed sneaking between the bagpipers, horses, and a giant float shaped like a teddy bear. So it was back to the subway for me.  Fortunately, I move faster than 10,000 families with folding chairs, strollers and kids in tow.

• after Meeting for Worship, in the gathering room where I ate a bowl of soup: the way the sunlight played off the red and gold brocade pillows on the moss-green velvet chesterfield
• Inside the lobby of the Rainbow is a community piano. Anyone who knows how to play is welcome to sit down and play it.
• Staying all through the credits at the end of the movie as dozens of 60s album covers were flashed on the screen while I said to myself, “I had that one…and THAT one…hey, my brother had that one….
• When I got home, Y was boiling chestnuts and H was cutting up the persimmons they’d gotten in China Town today. They shared both with the rest of us.
• Oh, autumn!