Living on the Lip of Insanity

Sloop in the sunset

That darn 99 things meme and Michael Doyle’s comment has got me thinking about the year (fall 1985 to 1986) I spent on a boat – a 75 foot, sloop rigged, Ted Hood designed motor sailor.  Well, I’ve tried to write about this and I find that I can’t write about it all at one time, but I could probably do so little by little.

When I flip through the photos in my head of the year that I spent on the s/y Jubilee VI, these are the most vivid:

Jim, Marblehead, Massachusetts and Stella the MGB.

The boatyard in Fairhaven, where we were hauled out to straighten the rudder.  It was cold, and to heat the boat we had to pump water through the system.  Imagine a big, blue fountain.

First watch 4am to 8am – seasick and salty

My friend Ellen, seaboots, and a remarkable hat that she made for me.

Bermuda
Landfall
My first solo shopping/provisioning trip

Antigua – Falmouth Harbour, goat roti, chickens in the road, Colombo’s, falling in love with a country not my own.

Green Cay between Antigua and Barbuda with Susan, an actual vacation day.

Bequia

Martinique – provisioning and traveling

Whales on the horizon; dolphins everywhere

Provisioning for the crossing to Gibraltar

Kartoffelpuffer, Norwegian feasting, Thanksgiving in 90° heat, eating local

The crossing – 19 days at sea on watch with the biggest jerk to ever sail

Solo watches in the Mediterranean

Lavagna, Italy

Lunch at the boat builder’s family trattoria in Genova – actually lunch anywhere in Italy

The three week Med cruise from hell with the family

Where are we, and how do I say please here?

Croatia and “mixed grill” – eating locally in Bosnia. “You may speak English with me.”

Things I NEVER was able to do: throw a spring/stern line and have it land on the dock first time, tie a bowline, pump the holding tanks to Øle’s satisfaction, operate the tender with confidence.

Saying goodbye on the tarmak in Dubrovnik and knowing that I was breaking someone’s heart.

Okay – that’s about twenty or more potential posts that have intensely vivid pictures associated with them from the file cabinets of my mind.  So where do I start?  I’ve tried the beginning and I always get stuck, so I’ll pick one in the middle.  If you have a request, leave me a comment, and I’ll get to that story sooner than later.

Photo by flickr member tiarescott

I’ve seen this in a few places the last few days – at Susan Sedro’s blog most recently (and she references Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog where I was immediately intimidated by his revision of it).

THE 99 THINGS MEME

Things you’ve already done: bold
Things you want to do: italicize
Things you haven’t done and don’t want to – leave in plain font

1. Started your own blog.
2. Slept under the stars.
3. Played in a band.
4. Visited Hawaii.
5. Watched a meteor shower.
6. Given more than you can afford to charity. (Heifer International)
7. Been to Disneyland/world.
8. Climbed a mountain. (how high? – I have been the to the highest point at a number of locations)
9. Held a praying mantis.
10. Sang a solo.
11. Bungee jumped.
12. Visited Paris.
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea.
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch.
15. Adopted a child. (I like Doug’s though - Adopted a pet from a shelter.)
16. Had food poisoning.
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty.
18. Grown your own vegetables.
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France.
20. Slept on an overnight train.
21. Had a pillow fight.
22. Hitch hiked.
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill.
24. Built a snow fort.
25. Held a lamb.
26. Gone skinny dipping.
27. Run a marathon.
28. Ridden a gondola in Venice.
29. Seen a total eclipse.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset.
31. Hit a home run.
32. Been on a cruise.
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person.
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors.
35. Seen an Amish community.
36. Taught yourself a new language.
37.Had enough money to be truly satisfied. (Make that, wish I could find a way to be satisfied with the money I have -  but with three daughters…)
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person.
39. Gone rock climbing.
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David in person.
41. Sung Karaoke.
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt.
43. Bought a stranger a meal in a restaurant.
44. Visited Africa.
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight.
46. Been transported in an ambulance.
47. Had your portrait painted.
48. Gone deep sea fishing.
49. Seen the Sistine chapel in person.
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling.
52. Kissed in the rain.
53. Played in the mud.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater.
55. Been in a movie. (film)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China.
57. Started a business.
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia.
60. Served at a soup kitchen.
61. Sold Girl Scout cookies.
62. Gone whale watching.
63. Gotten flowers for no reason. (also given)
64. Donated blood.
65. Gone sky diving.
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp.
67. Bounced a check.
68. Flown in a helicopter.
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy.
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial.
71. Eaten Caviar.
72. Pieced a quilt.
73. Stood in Times Square.
74. Toured the Everglades.
75. Been fired from a job.
76. Seen the Changing of the Guard in London.
77. Broken a bone.
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person.
80. Published a book.
81. Visited the Vatican.
82. Bought a brand new car.
83. Walked in Jerusalem.
84. Had your picture in the newspaper.
85. Read the entire Bible.
86. Visited the White House.
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating. (I’m going with Doug on this one – fish and bivalves are, for the purposes of this exercise – animals)
88. Had chickenpox.
89. Saved someone’s life.
90. Sat on a jury.
91. Met someone famous.
92. Joined a book club.
93. Lost a loved one.
94. Had a baby.
95. Seen the Alamo in person.
96. Swum in the Great Salt Lake.
97. Been involved in a lawsuit.
98. Owned a cell phone.
99. Been stung by a bee.

Been there done that, got the t-shirt: 55
Wish I had: 24
No desire: 20

I’d like to add two things still on my wish list:

Learned the foxtrot, waltz, and Latin salsa dances.
Learned to play the viola & fiddle

And things that aren’t there that should be:
Performed music with a group of other friends and musicians – not a band but a chorus or chamber ensemble
Taught yourself to make food you usually only eat in restaurants.

I am not a risk taker by nature.  This is all very interesting to me.  What risks have I taken?  Sailed across the Atlantic, hitchhiked to Buffalo with my boyfriend, had children as I neared 40, moved to Boston with $5 in my pocket, eaten the cookie dough with raw eggs.

There are more, but not for this space, I think.

Paul at quoteflections tagged me on this one, and it has taken me a bit of time to get to it. I created the wordle last week hoping I would get to it – here it is:

The Blog Wordle

I use Wordle in my classroom to help make abstractions more concrete.  My favorite way to do this is to ask my students to make a list of at least 10 images, ideas, themes, characters & symbols that are top of mind, right now, when they think about a text (novel, short story).  We then put them all in one long list and put the list of words (with its expected duplicate words) in a wordle and see what rises.

With Beloved

The last time I did this, a colleague was using the lab after our class, and the way she reacted to the students’ finished wordles was a little embarrassing for all concerned – she gushed about how beautiful they were, and the kids were embarrassed because for them it seemed like a fun, easy project – use the words, wordle, and your own own color/font/shape preferences to make the themes and ideas from Beloved emerge for you.  I was embarrassed by her effusiveness because it really was an exercise to help kids who are making steps every day up the abstraction ladder stay firmly on another, higher rung by reinforcing their ideas with a concrete visual not an exercise in creating something to hang on the bulletin board.  But of course, they were beautiful and hangable.

My Blog Wordle

My blog wordle reflects the focus on family and memory that I have had lately.  This is probably because of the convergence of two things in two different classes – the stories told in Beloved and the idea that there are some stories that you don’t hand down the generations with my memoir and autobiography class.  We have been unlocking stories, and those stories are finding their way here.

My principal wants me to write a piece for the Schools journal that we publish.  We have had a number of conversations this year about my advisees (all at MY request) over parental pressure and separation anxiety, binge drinking, cognitive challenges and building friendships, and asking parents to parent along with conversations about my switch to the upper school from the middle school and the knowledge that I bring about my students after having advised and taught them in seventh grade – and add to that the perspective that I bring as the mother of twin sixth  grade girls and a high school freshman.  He sees this all as a web of psychodynamic energy.  I see an enormous amount of pain.  Pain + thought and effort  = beauty.  I wish that it was as easy to create beauty out of words, connection and real anguish as  wordle can with words and abstraction.

So, to continue the meme:  I was tagged by Paul who was tagged by Andrea Hernandez.

1. Create a Wordle from your blog’s RSS feed.
2. Blog it and describe your reaction. Any surprises?
3. Tag several others to do the same.
4. Link back to the two taggers before.

I would like to tag  – Julie Squires and Antonio Viva (but it seems as though Antonio just wordled his blog, sigh).

I have been saving the last of the Wolf River Apples, carefully stored in the basement refrigerator for the holidays.  I made an apple pie at Thanksgiving using them, and the last ten pounds will be for Hanukkah applesauce.

Apples to the compost

Wolf River apples are unusual for two reasons: they are HUGE, the size of a large grapefruit, and they collapse into mush.  These are the reasons why we love them for pie; my grandmother and mother always made pie from a Yellow Transparent apple that also cooked into mush but was famous for being unbelievably sour and small as well as for turning your thumb rust colored when we peeled bushels of the things.  The Wolf River mimic the texture without needing quite so much sugar and you usually need only one or two for a pie.

For applesauce for 17 people, I peeled seven of them. I’ll make sauce again tomorrow for another party.

And My Point?

These apples connect me in a number of ways to the things that I love and respect.  I picked these apples.  I know the grower and she is a family farmer in Laport Co, IN.  We went apple picking with friends, so the memory of the day shared in the orchard is warm and joyous.  The sauce they make is part of my life and memory – Grandma’s apple creations – and Sam’s Jewish heritage and experience (one day when I had latkes cooking and applesauce made he remarked that the house smelled like his grandmother’s kitchen).  My children are a part of the picking, cooking, and eating.  We make things with our own hands.

And they hold back the cold.  All of it.  Memory, family, and the stove.

Big Chill

I should mention that it is astonishingly cold here today and yesterday.   My thermometer tells me it is -3°F, and the weather websites tell me that it feels like -17° like that makes a while lot of difference when it is so cold.  Absolute zero (0° on the Kelvin scale) means that all atomic motion ceases it is so cold – well, when it is even -3°F the motion in my house ceases for all practical purposes.  Even the dogs don’t want to go out.

We will hold back the cold, make tea, bake cookies, and celebrate the slow inexorable return of the sun.  Light two candles tonight for the children of the Maccabees, and light as many as you wish for memory and love.

Image of apple peelings by Flikr member kayepants

Exhausted??? (photo by frumbert)

I’m a sucker for tired students.  So today, when the seniors dragged themselves into class I moved the assignment from Thursday before break to the Thursday after break.

And then I let them do homework in class – Mind and Brain projects, reading for my class, working on drafts, studying for the Chem IV test, the Qualitative or the Quantitative Stats class.

I’m a sucker, but I’d rather have them not exhausted, read their rested and thoughtful writing, and live happily ever after.

I work with the United States History and the other American Literature teachers on a project that is wholly valuable, consistently maddening, and frequently time sucking.  There are definitely days when it doesn’t feel worth all the work, all the talking and thinking, all the mediating and prodding.  And then a student will remind me about why we do this.

Community Connections

We call the project Community Connections and it is the junior class community action project where we engage in major social justice issues in the city and connect those issues to the works that we read in American Lit and trends and movements in US History.  Our brain dump, The Pensieve, is where we try to capture the work of graderoom meetings and fieldwork days.

Common Air

Last year we published an anthology of student work (titled Common Air for a line from Song of Myself) from narratives collected from one of the assignments – the new chapters for the Grapes of Wrath.  They were often very good, but the work reminded me that juniors in high school are not all at the same developmental level when it comes to abstractly connecting big ideas to events or taking a small moment and seeing the universality in it.   (I posted about the process last August.)

One story in particular was troublesome.  The writer seemed not only snarky and smug, but there was not even a glimpse of empathy in his narrative for the people who are homeless (the social justice project he was working on).  I  helped him to excerpt his narrative, and the teacher that he was working with dismissed him as a privileged jerk who was more concerned about the songs on his iPod than people freezing on the streets.

And then there was Walden

by flickr member moriza

This year that same boy/child/student is in my Autobiography and Memoir class.  Last year he read On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Thoreau, and as I didn’t share that text with him I have no idea how he reacted to Thoreau’s charge that we should throw ourselves on the machine to stop it.  But this year I know what we did with Walden.  We paired it with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard) and The Sand County Almanac (Leopold) and we went to our own pond and wrote.   And then we wrote some more.  And here is what he wrote:

Henry David Thoreau chose to put himself into nature to “live off the land.”  I don’t think that is possible to achieve in the city.  This may sound a bit racy [**love this adjective], but the closest thing to Thoreau in the city is a homeless person, though they probably did not choose to put themselves on the street. They are not exactly living off of the land and in a city such as ours the living style of Thoreau would be quite impossible.

Okay, it’s not a fully formed thought yet, but what I see is this student thinking.  He’s got a “racy” thought – and I read that as an idea that to him is exciting.  He’s spontaneously making a connection between the work he did last year and the work he is doing this year.  It’s “racy” because it is unexplored for him, unusual in that it is an untested, unsupported idea.  Thoreau was living off the kindness of friends, exploring his world.  Although the need to live “deliberately” (as HDT would say) is not a choice that most homeless make; it is forced upon them.  What is most exciting here for me is that the work from last year is still present for this student, and he is still struggling to make sense of it.

The Upshot (as Leopold would say)

What do I take away from this?  Don’t give up.  Don’t stop trying to help kids find connections in their world to their work in class.  Remember that developmental abilities trump so many other factors.  They are just kids.  They know when we care about them.  This essay changed me.  The work we do is worth the frustration and effort.

Snowball snow.  Heavy and wet.  I thought as I slipped my way out to the car that Andy, the principal of our neighborhood elementary school, would hate this snow.  First snow.  Snowball snow.

My girls would love this.  But I had to drive in it.  I picked up my carpool buddy, and we headed to school, and I knew that both of us were less than thrilled about the snow.  Our AM text exchange went like this:

Me: On my way. Obtw snow.

Steve: No.

Me: Whatever

Steve: Men

Me: Flake

Our workshop day

No kids at school today, and my colleague was sorry that she couldn’t recite Mary Oliver’s First Snow to all of her classes.  So we began the workshop with her recitation:

FIRST SNOW

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain-not a single
answer has been found-
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

And so we settled into our rhetoric (not white) and I wished for flakes and men and snowballs.