I sat on the floor with Hagan and Miles. We rolled balls. We played with puzzles. Hagan did the talking. There was much of it. Miles did the staring, unsure of this stranger but intrigued perhaps by the faces and sounds I made.
When it was time to go, I leaned over to stand up and groaned with the unfolding and straightening that came with slowly realigning vertically. Stiff muscles. Sore back. Old man complaints.
Rachel laughed. I think she thought the groans were a joke.
It started innocently enough. A typical distant-family-shows-up visit with the young kids staring at the loud intruders warily. But sitting on the floor helped, as did playing with the puppets and rolling the green ball, which Miles enjoyed immensely. And there was the talking globe where Hagan pointed out India to me. (A fascinating random choice of country to point out, methinks.)
So there we are sitting on the carpet putting the last of the puzzle pieces together and reminding each other that Richmond is the capital of Virginia, when Hagan walks up and plants himself in front of me. He looks me in the eyes and begins to recite … he begins to call out … he names the major moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede…, one in rapid succession after the other. Then having evidently caught himself, he returns to the inner solar system and calls out Phoebe and Deimos. “Mars,” his dad points out. “Of course, Mars!” I say. Then Hagan continues. Without catching a breath, Hagan flys quickly by Saturn, calling out Enceladus, and on to Uranus’ Oberon, Titania, Ariel. And then to Triton. “Of course, Neptune!” I say. “Ah yes, Neptune,” his dad says.
An astronomer in the making.
The 100+ weather seems to have finally passed. This weekend we sat on the bench in the morning and drank our coffee and enjoyed the chill. And a chill it was when I jumped into the outdoor pool at the YMCA this afternoon. It had, after all, only climbed into the low 90s.
But then there was the Montreal morning commute weather report on Friday. My French listening skills are getting better. I can mostly follow what Veronique is saying, and what she said clearly mentioned it getting down to zero (Celsius) overnight. Ok, so I guess that is a chill.
Every morning when we go outside, we check the birdbath that’s on the ground under the Lantana to see if the toad is there. Usually it isn’t. Today it was.
I almost didn’t notice it. The water had nearly evaporated. There were soggy leaves and a couple stones in the bottom, and a very shallow puddle of water. And there in the water was the head of a toad.
A say “head” because at first I saw nothing but its head a soggy wrinkled leaf. But the leaf was no leaf. The toad had flattened itself so that it could lie submerged in that meager puddle.
I slowly walked to the water barrels and got some rainwater to raise the water level slightly, standing as far back as I could and then retreating to the bench. The toad’s eyes glistened. It puffed up and moved around. It wiped its face and wiggled, as I sat still to watch what happened.
Here is what happened.
Class was over. It had been a weird day with the students mostly taking a standardized test on their laptops. Many finished early at which point it was free time. Now that the bell was about to ring, many of them were lined up at the door, something I don’t usually allow, but then today had been a weird day.
K stood at the far end of the whiteboard with a friend. Over the past weeks, they have been adding characters to a menagerie that I’ve left alone. There were 14 of them, and they were adding a 15th.
One glance, and I suspected what they were up to. They saw me watching them, and they giggled before returned to their task.
So what do you think they were up to?
Parents started coming into the classroom at 5:30. I showed them around the room, although there’s not much to see. We talked about the curriculum, although the notes are underwhelming. They signed in. Most hung around for five or ten minutes and then went to the next teacher.
One family came in with siblings. The mother wagged a finger at a younger one as he grabbed a marker and feigned writing on the whiteboard. I smiled at him.
“That’s ok,” I said. “Go ahead.”
I figured he’d draw pictures. Instead, he turned to me and said that he could give me a math problem I couldn’t solve.
“Ok,” I said.
Math has never been a competition for me. I’ve always been most interested in organizing the work and been slow at the actual numbers. Indeed a first grade report card that I once saw safely archived in a folder my father kept in his file cabinet in the basement observed that “David is not good with his math facts.” But how can you deny a kid who’s excited about hard math problems?
“What’s the problem?” I asked him.
The brother started writing numbers on the board — a multiplication problem. Then he turned and handed me the marker.
I rewrote his figures, lining up the places, drawing a straight black line underneath. I began multiplying and carrying digits. I intentionally did it quickly, speaking aloud to narrate what I was doing. As I went, I found myself writing carried digits on top of the carried digits from the last pass, but I kept on racing through until the problem was done.
“There,” I said, pointing to the number below the straight black line. I pushed the cap on the marker and set it down. “Let’s see if I got it right.”
The brother reached for his sister’s phone. I handed him a calculator which she helped him with. He punched in the numbers, and then he held up the result with a wide grin on his face.
The lights in the room flickered, and sparks fell from above. The ceiling began to race upwards and the walls press inwards, the room becoming a tiny square cylinder enclosing me. It was hot and smoke began streaming in through the door. The lights flashed again and then went out. The floor shook and a deep voice rumbled from the darkness overhead.
“Y o u g o t t h e p r o b l e m w r o n g . . .”
The brother jumped with glee. The parents said, “Ohh…”
The next morning some honors students came into my classroom.
“Mr. Hasan,” they said. “Coach Henry says he solved a math problem that you couldn’t solve.”
The floor shook slightly. The booming voice echoed in my head.
“Y o u g o t t h e p r o b l e m w r o n g . . .”
“You know,” I said, “I think I know the problem he’s talking about.”
I walked to the board and wrote it out.
“That’s the problem!” one of them said, evidently amazed that I was able to recall it exactly. (How could I not?) The booming voice echoed again.
“Y o u g o t t h e p r o b l e m w r o n g . . .”
“Yes,” I confessed. “I got it wrong.” It was pointless to explain that my carried digits got confused, so I just left it at that.
“Let me see if I can do it,” one of the students asked. She needed some help to remember such a rudimentary skill, but after a while she got it.
“Yep, that’s it,” I said. “That’s the problem I couldn’t solve last night.”
Coach Henry has good cause to gloat. But oh my gosh, what do those parents think!?
The floor shook one last time.
There was a different theme every day before the Homecoming game. One day was Dress Like Your Bestie. The next was Dress Like Barbie. On Friday, students were asked to dress like teachers and teachers like students.
The week before, after the announcements, I told 2nd period that I’d be wearing a midriff on Friday — against dress code, very much like a student. The students laughed.
“Just kidding,” I quickly followed-up. “The last thing any of you want to see is my midsection.”
Friday came. I hadn’t dressed up all week. I have no clothes to dress like my fair and industrious bestie. And there’s no pink in my closet (or hers, as far as I know). When Friday came, I just had on another plaid collared shirt and some khakis.
We were discussing horizontal compressions. As I was cautioning them about the reciprocal of B, one of the girls raised her hand meekly. I made my way to her as I was talking and then asked, “What’s up?”
“It’s your…,” she whispered politely. “Um… your shirt button…”
I reached down to find a button unbuttoned and my belly exposed. She might have been whispering, but everyone heard. They watched to see my reaction. I just buttoned it shut and continued warning them about B.
Then I said, “Looks like I wore a midriff, anyway. I told you you didn’t want to see it!”
After eighth period at the end of the day, two familiar faces from last year appeared the doorway.
“Mr. Hasan!” Brandon said.
He was wearing a plaid shirt and khaki pants. Although he didn’t wear glasses last year, now he had wire-rimmed glasses on. His hair was parted differently — on the side. And the collar of his shirt was fastened with a bow tie. Eloy was standing next to him holding his phone.
“I’m dressed like Mr. Hasan, Mr. Hasan!” Brandon said.
“Like me?” I objected. “But… but I don’t wear a bow tie.”
“The yearbook wants to take a picture. Is that ok?”
Eloy was raising his phone.
“Ok,” I said. “Sure. Go ahead.”
I put my arm on Brandon’s shoulder and we stood there in our plaid shirts and khakis and wire-rimmed glasses and smiled for Eloy as he captured it for posterity.
It was the first full week of school. The seating chart was finally stabilizing. I was slowly beginning to associate names with faces. The students were beginning to get used to my sound effects. After one of the morning classes, Elizabeth came up to me as the others were leaving the room.
“Mister,” she said. “Do you live alone?”
Um. Ok.
“No,” I said. “I live with my wife and our little dog.”
“That’s good,” she said. “You’re too nice to live alone.”
Her friend behind her asked, “What kind of dog do you have?”
It was the end of the last period of the Friday of the fourth week of school. We were done with the lesson, and the bell was about to ring. I was salvaging some plastic bottles from the garbage can and putting them into my recycle box.
“Mister?” Ida said. She sits at the table closest to the garbage can, so it was easy to hear her over the late Friday hubbub.
“Yes?”
“Do you color your hair?”
I laughed.
“Well what do you think?” I asked, running my fingers through my bangs. She didn’t answer.
“I don’t color my hair,” I said.
There was murmuring in the classroom.
The morning sun rose gradually and the shadows crept along the ground as morning gave way to another hot summer day. Shadows of low hanging Fall Asters danced on the rocks. Dappled circles of sunshine fell on the ground. Lesser Goldfinches sang in the canopy of the Lacy Oak.
I watched a Spiny Lizard walk across the mulch, dashing a few inches and then stopping, doing a few pushups and then turning its head to inspect me sitting in the shade in a chair. It was no larger than a child’s little finger, no larger than the sticks of mulch over which it dashed. It would stare at me for long moments and then proceed further only to stop again to look back.
It came, after a while, to a blue-gray granite rock we collected in Michigan a few years ago and then to white-yellow limestone nearby. It hopped on top and looked back, sitting on the rocks in the sun for a long time, eventually turning away and moving into shade. I only moved to sip my now-cold coffee. This evidently was not alarming to the lizard who proceeded on whatever mission it was on before I had arrived.
No larger than a child’s little finger. No larger that the sticks on the ground. The lizard then disappeared into the undergrowth.
From the margins of the pond in back, there comes this.
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License