passage

“It’s the fourth quarter,” my aunt said. We had eaten pizza, and now we were sitting on family heirloom dining room chairs, around a big table.

“Death is never pretty,” my uncle said.

And that felt truthful. My sister said she regretted so much not having children.

We got updates on the addict, the pregnancies. We offered our various takes on how a moral person can live through this immoral time, speculating about how current fascism will maintain, or fall, or grow. Will we have government agencies like the CDC and the FDA? Will we conduct medical research again for the diseases that are taking us, or will science lose?

Minor confessions, major emotions.

I remembered how deep my grandma’s dying time was, how we had songs and poetry and quiet, when usually in our family it is jokes and fresh veggies and beer. and hard to get a word in edgewise.

I had two old friends on my couch. I wash the blankets and light candles and put up flowers so my home is like my great aunt and uncle’s (theirs were the dining room chairs). There were two stems of stock in a vase on the mantle, and one in the bathroom, and two in the dining room. My dining room was newly painted a strong but chalky blue, blue with only a pinch of gray, more baby than navy, a shade that loves to sit next to gold.

I listened to stories about racism, and we speculated about strict religious practices, and guessed at dates in history, a thing I like to do to remind myself I haven’t internalized the timeline on the east wall of my classroom. The timeline runs from cuneiform to now. It’s to scale.

I’ve been obsessing over my timeline because my students are doing state testing this week. They went from barely okay to completely destructive when they heard they had to stay in my room for two and a half hours. Their scores were meaningless to me, and honestly to everyone I can think of. Still, all these kids with serious behavior, emotional, and mental health problems were being trapped for hours to pay the piper of the state. I guess the state is the piper.

To distract myself, I cleaned out my cabinet of supplies, typed new labels, and tore down the old timeline. It had to be down for testing anyway. I was going to double the scale.

I’m the kind of insane who created the first version to scale.

I’m obsessed with people (including myself) knowing how much history is between cuneiform and Shakespeare, and then between Shakespeare and now.

This time 1700-2000 CE would still be way too narrow for all the events and authors.

I’m just gonna have to make a separate, exploded version, a double or triple width timeline where Amy Tan, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and the rest can live. To show how Tim O’Brien was a different life than John Steinbeck, than Walt Whitman.

I need a place where World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and Vietnam can follow one after the other. This is the sequence of sense previous generations with which I overlapped have left me.

I sat on the desk by the door and typed a transcript as one of my students went on a diatribe about slashing my tires and finding where I lived and bringing aunties and uncles there to deal with me. Anger issues, ya know.

I thought, how am I going to go to the May Day protest, my writing meeting, and my friend’s wedding party?

To soothe myself, I buy groceries.

And I break my Amazon boycott to order a marble maze. I’ve always wanted one. Maybe on these coming days when the kids can’t do anything but show up, this may engage. I tease them: “All there is to do in here is make beaded bracelets, do puzzles, play Uno or Connect 4 or dominoes, play miniature pool, draw, read, or nap.” This zero plus zero, though, equals zero in a restless mind.

I order cellophane squares, which I have made a good-faith effort to purchase elsewhere. And a can of spray paint, because when I see the spray paint locked up in a store, I immediately lose any sense of hope. I cannot find someone and ask someone to open the case.

I can do all kinds of hard things, but not this.

During my planning period, I drive to a discount store nearby. I inspect lip gloss, bras, mugs, fake plants, shower curtain rings.

World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam.

When I was in school, history stopped with Vietnam– though it had actually fully ended almost two decades before.

From what I hear, school history still stops at Vietnam.

“You’re gonna be fired. He’s gonna fire you,” another riled up student proclaims.

I bought (joyous buying! owning!) shower curtain rings that match the ones I already have, washcloths so I can have a new one every morning for a week, and a big fat bottle of body wash that was scented like heavy Chinese perfume, or what I imagine heavy Chinese perfume to smell like.

I buy a large bag of gummi bears. I return to school and offer each of my colleagues: “Bear? Bear?”

Image: Vessel in the Shape of a Bear, Roman or Byzantine, 3rd-4th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art.