ring around the rosy
pocket full of posies
ashes ashes
we all fall down
I felt such depression last week. I had forgotten how heavy it is. Though I was there to see and be with kind and generous people, for some reason it was there that the weight collapsed on me. Sometimes it does. Just part of the human experience.
I sat and wrote a poem in the bar before I finished my wine. I rarely try to drink and write. It only results in me thinking I am a genius when I am definitely not.
The poem helped.
At dinner, I chatted with fellow teachers: two community college teachers, an elementary teacher, and a high school teacher. Their news is heavy: in the small town too far from Kansas City to be a suburb, they are so desperate for teachers that they are legally allowed to hire people they used to refuse to let sub. Those people teach third grade. The woman I spoke with said she was allowed to retire, take her pension, and then immediately be rehired at her current salary, taking salary and pension at the same time.
At the community college, they don’t know how they will keep teaching. So many of the humanities teachers have been fired, what happens when they need them? So many international students, who are a huge contributor to college budgets, are worrying about leaving China (in particular) to come to the U.S. Our higher education system requires international students to fund it.
I mention school meetings I’ve attended where the agenda seems to be, bully people into quitting if they won’t toe the line. How is the attitude in American schools still so ragingly anti-teacher when no one is coming?
I guess it’s probably like being mean to your mom becuase you know she’ll always love you.
But public schools aren’t your mom.
My last morning in Boonville, I walk to the bridge. Booville still has an old bridge, but it no longer raises and lowers. You get halfway across, and the rest of the bridge sticks up straight, saying, no. A dad and a little boy are looking at the Missouri. The dad is explaining currents, and floods.
I look at the river, but I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Oh, I’m looking to New Orleans. I’m looking at Mark Twain. (Though he was strictly speaking Mississippi.)
My go-to flip flops start to wear a red stripe on my foot. How do your trusty shoes sometimes go wrong? I remember on the way to Rome, shoes I had worn for a long time suddenly and viciously attacked the top of my foot. A change in humidity? A change in gait, unnoticed?
Here it is again. Later I gently push on a blister on the inside of each foot. The fluid beneath mesmerizes me. So delicate.
I visit the history museum. They have a lot of the usual tools you can’t tell what they’re for. They explain that the railroad MKT gave the nearby trail its name. Missouri/Kansas/Texas. Oklahoma is left out because it had no name other than Indian Territory, aka Land We Haven’t Yet Officially Stolen.
They have a model railroad with a painted background that is heartily amateur. I hear a little boy saying, “You need a quarter.” “I don’t have a quarter,” a grandma says. For some reason, I have so much change my billfold is heavy. I walk over with a quarter. “You get five minutes for a quarter,” the boy tells me. “Cool,” I say.
I walk through a drive-through ATM to assure myself I have calculated my funds right. I play a game with myself, trying to keep as much money as possible in savings until I get paid again. This can cause problems. But I’m very happy to have a savings account again. There have been times….
On my way back to my car, I go past the courthouse. I had forgotten, there are protests today. There are protests most Saturdays, or Sundays, some Wednesdays. I haven’t been able to go to one for a while: a birthday dinner, the Boonville trip, a float trip. But I can take a photo, and then walk over and thank the crowd of maybe 25 people. “I love your skirt!” someone says. It’s a canary yellow, searing the eyes on a rainy day.
Image: The Island Bee, from “Picture Poesies” after George John Pinwell, engraver
Dalziel Brothers, 1867.
Going On 