again

Well, here we are again, relearning that the United States is not immune to strong man appeals.

I don’t like learning this.

The day after the election was a doozy for me: our class fish died, and when I went to pick up my anxiety meds, I pulled out and another car hit me.

Happily, the man driving the car got out and said, “Are you okay?” and I said yes. And then we looked at our cars and he said, “Are you okay?” And then he said, “Let’s not worry about it.” His car wasn’t mint, and mine had only some streaks on the bumper. “Thank you, thank you,” I said. “It’s been a rough day.”

“Oh? How has it been rough?” he asked. Because he was black, I felt safe to say, “We elected a racist lunatic as president,” and then I felt bad putting that on him. But he had asked.

I cried.

Last time DT was elected, I couldn’t cry for at least six months. Not about anything.

This time, helpfully, I cried all the way home.

Our class fish: in the morning, my student A looked in on Sully. He was lying on the bottom of the tank, but then again, he’d been pretty inactive this year in general. I was frequently looking at him and wondering if he was dead.

In the afternoon, A came up to look at Sully again. I again got out the net to rouse him.

He was not to be roused.

I had only two students that hour, both doing credit recovery in my room, and I led both of them to the teacher bathroom. The boy-type student, R, stood right on the threshold and said, “This is as far as I should go,” and I nodded.

“Does someone want to say a few words?” I asked. A loves animals, and had regularly checked on Sully. R hadn’t seemed to pay the fish much attention. But at the burial (at sea), R said, “He brought people a lot of joy.”

Today we commemorate Sully every hour by playing a Boyz II Men song. Sometimes “End of the Road,” sometimes “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye.”

So far I’ve had my sophomores, who were deeply disregulated yesterday. Yesterday the notion that I had work for them to do was OFFENSIVE.

Today I felt softer because of everything big and emotional that had happened. The kids good-naturedly spoke well of Sully, and joked about funereal rituals. A kid asked me if I would make a program for Sully’s funeral so that he could put it on his wall.

I recognized when my first class fish died that the funeral of a small pet (or a plant, or a stuffed animal) is one way we practice our grief traditions and processing skills. It’s serious, but it’s not. It’s sad, and we all joke about it.

I put up a photo of Sully, which had previously been used for the Employee of the Month display. (He was employee of the month every month from last January until this month.) I took three notecards and on each I wrote one letter, R, I, P.

The sophomores who I had been overwhelmingly frustrated with yesterday read peacefully today, a chapter about a boy who asks his grandma for money to join a theater club, and then ends up giving the money to his mom to make rent.

I’m kind of all right.