What do you call this country? What do you call this town?

              This morning, we teachers were tasked with meeting in the canteen with students whose instructors were out today. One of them was Protestant; the other four Catholic—which broadly represents the proportion in Derry/Londonderry. The boy were all pals. They’d tease each other, as they did me by asking what do you call this city, what do you call this country. But they said it didn’t matter to them much, the way it fiercely continued to do for their grandparents.

              Yet, when I probed further, they made clear there were neighborhoods they couldn’t without getting beat up. Well, this is what I want to know about, I said to them: What does it mean that you can call each other pals but can’t necessarily walk together into the same neighborhoods?

              The answer isn’t top of the mind. I’ve been asking many students why they’re here, in a religiously integrated school. Students rarely present this as a philosophical or political choice. Some had siblings here, or find it close to home; also, there’s no entrance test. One left St. Mary’s because it was too judge-y. Too judge-y? "It’s an all girls’ school,” a boy said, as if that explained it.

              Later, we heard more: Young People Leading Change brought us onto the open floor of the theater, where we first played mix-and-mingle games with the juniors (the young ones), and later engaged in the serious conversations with the older students, serving in many ways the same purpose. In these dialogues, which included discussions of identity, drug use, racism, and the police (a good segue for me to tell students that our visit to the police tomorrow couldn’t possibly happen tomorrow because of the shooting of an officer while he was coaching children in Omagh), the Oakgrove students and the Roosevelt students were separated to decide what they wanted to tell the other group about where you live. The older students described continued self-policing in communities by paramilitaries knee-capping drug dealers and “pedos,” and also continued separations and tension of religion.

              In the evening, we walked to the cultural center and crashed an Irish folk dancing class, outnumbering them with our students and the three Oakgrove kids who tagged along. They patiently taught us a couple steps and let us join for twenty minutes before we walked home, full of fiddle.

              Before that, some of the sixth form had joined us before dinner at a men’s homeless shelter, where some remained up to fifteen years, well past the statutory two allowed in public shelters. James, the man running the place, left us with these thoughts: If you put kindness out into the world, even if you don’t always get it back—if you’re open, and honest, you may not be able to help everyone or be thanked for what you do, but you can have a life you believe in.

West Belfast.

February 20, 2023

              Today we were led around West Belfast and heard from a panel of former paramilitaries and British police. In Shankill, Mark, a 24 year veteran of the British army, led us through the loyalist, unionist side of the wall; he handed us off across the gates to the nationalist, republican Falls Road side to Pader, who’d been 16 years imprisoned for killing an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. At Tar Anall in the Conway Mill, we sat around a panel made up of Noel, a gunman for the Ulster Volunteer Force who also went to Long Kesh for murder; Lee, a veteran of British infantry who’d served two tours in Northern Ireland at checkpoints and watchtowers; and Michael, now of Sinn Fein and formerly of the Irish Republican Army, who spent another 16 years at Long Kesh for murder.

              Mark presented an unapologetic, severe argument for British Northern Ireland: to reunify Northern Ireland, the IRA was willing to destroy its economy, its buildings, its morale, its grandmamas, kiddies and babies, and the murderers and terrorists—responsible for specific, knowable deaths and horrors—are now in Stormont, in charge; meanwhile, the Brits of Northern Ireland only ever wanted to keep homes and people safe. In a few months, the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement will arrive, and, he asked, what has it brought us?

              He came by his bitterness honestly—both his father and brother murdered, and his own body the target of three killing attempts, resulting in a seven month coma, prosthetics, and the loss of two toes. Mark succeeded in driving home the question that Alice later asked Pader, our IRA tour guide: is the violence endured by civilians seen as justified? Why can’t we reconcile? Mark says, beating his head: the memories. Beating his chest: the heartache.

              The most powerful and undeniable thing Mark described was that wall and its effects: On one side, 100% of the people are Protestant; on the other, 100% Catholic. Not a single Catholic on the Protestant side, he claimed, and not a Protestant to be found among the other. Everyone locked in by the wall, everyone locked out, the gates slamming shut every night at nine. Each side has its own shops, its own schools and nurseries, its own churches and even its own buses. Before 1969, Mark said, we shared drinks, friendships, and handshakes. Now there’s the wall, seven kilometers long and three meters thick, its first brick laid in 1971. And has it fixed anything? No, we just keep building it higher. First in ’93, and then, the Good Friday Agreement, did it mean the wall could come down? No, in 1998, they just raised it higher. The children are playing in their own playgrounds and taking lessons in their own schools. The kiddies aren’t playing, nor praying, nor eating, or learning together. The next generation is already locked in.

             The idea of separateness is incredibly vivid. And when he toured us through the central blocks of Shankill Road, its angry murals a little like the martyrs’ row on the other side but also bellowing in its thick-font accusations (“PROBABLY THE UK’S WORST EVER PRIME MINISTER AND HIS CABAL IN THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY,” “SINN FEIN/IRA VERSUS ISIS,” “SINN FEIN/IRA’S SLAUGHTER,” “CHILDREN MURDERED BY SINN FEIN,” “30 YEARS OF INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER BY THE SO-CALLED NON-SECTARIAN IRISH FREEDOM FIGHTERS”), I thought very much of those children raised here in their segregated homes, shopping and walking all their young lives through the vitriol of victimization.

              Mark walked us through the gates that would close at night and open at seven each morning and took us to Pader. Mark wanted us to face the full impact of the horrors he described in the tradition of a fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian, and he had the desired effect, leaving us unable to make eye contact with another human being. That’s how Pader found us, long faces, cast down.

              Pader provided not only a contrast in perspectives but demeanor, giving nods to us and laughing, and calling out to all the passersby. Haven’t seen you in a bit, Pader. Yeah, cuz’ I’ve been avoidin’ ya! Heya, Pader? How are ya? Magic, Patrick. Magic. Just telling them all about how ya fucked the British all on yer own.

              But the things Pader was describing were dead serious, too. The contrasts he provided to Mark’s story were several. First, he and other nationalists were insistent that their argument was not about religion but colonialist occupation. We saw this in the murals up and down Falls road—images touching on Palestinian plight, American civil rights and South African anti-apartheid heroes, Cuban revolutionaries, and many other peoples rising up against post-colonial structures. Second, he and other nationalists shared the argument that they were fighting back against the most sophisticated government and military in the world, and as such, violent acts were acts of war and political in nature.

              We would hear from Duncan Morrow of Ulster University the next day, who would describe it this way: Each side says, We can’t trust the other. Here’s the proof: Awful things They did to us. And here are heroic things we did to defend ourselves: no recognition that their awful acts and our heroic acts are the same—you did it because you believed what you were fighting was much worse.

              We left the separated tours for an integrated panel discussion with Michael, Noel, and Lee.

              Michael Culbert was a distinguished, good looking man with deep laugh lines who now works with Sinn Fein and engages others in dialogue and reconciliation. Also he’s a man who, while working as a social worker during the day, directed violence and destruction, and continues to hold sway now. And as truly appreciative and respecting he was of Noel and Lee, Michael—or Mickey as the other men called him—he seemed to suggest peace was a strategy rather than a driving principle. When Alice asked the men if they had any regrets, Michael said in a line to which students would return again and again, “I regret that I got caught.” At the time, we laughed: he had told so many jokes, was so kindly teasing of Noel and Lee. But he wasn’t laughing when he said it. He said, I’m sad for the families of the British forces I killed, but I have no regret for taking part in the anticolonial struggle. Then he went back to joking: I regret that Henry VIII went and got that divorce, is what I regret.

              Noel was a diminutive, sweet looking man who was described by another this way. Lovely man. Lovely. Brutal murderer. This article about Noel is eye-opening and made me think again and again of Sayre and Noel joyfully talking about their passion as footballers. Noel’s path from bitter violence to mentor of peace was long and hard won, and now he questions the very meaning of Britishness.

              Lee was a working class British soldier who served terms in Northern Ireland and programmed to follow orders and to see the entire Catholic civilian population as IRA and as the guilty enemy. During the cease fire of 1994, he started reading again and reacted strongly to British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling’s phrase “acceptable level of violence” in Northern Ireland. A road through heroin, homelessness, and history (that is, a PhD in American history) brought him to work like these panel discussions, to unravel people’s narratives of conflict.

              The three men said some common things: Peace is the way forward, and no one wants to go back to the violence. The real issue is not religion, but economic opportunity. If they’d replaced the factory at Mackey’s with a university, as once was maybe going to happen, rather than a wall, if someone had invested and provided both educational and economic opportunities rather than spending all that money on the Titanic Museum, what might have happened for these two communities? 

Belfast Castle

 Belfast Castle

              We are now sitting together, in chairs and on the floor in the Fishwick Room of the Belfast Castle, a place that has had several incarnations starting in the 12^th century and that passed through various barons and lords and all this implies, but now seems, by its stackable convention-style chairs, to serve as a wedding and conference center of sorts. No historical tours today—just a hike up Cavehill and a lunch on a bluff overlooking Belfast Harbor and the estuary of the River Lagan, the yellow cranes Samson and Goliath nestled below.

              While some of the students on the hike looked sadly at their white shoes getting spattered in the wet Irish mud, the arrival at the cave of Cavehill was joyous, students facing the basalt cliffs in one direction, and the rolling hill that drops away to the view of the trees and water below in the other. Several bouldered up to the mouth of the cave while we cheered them on; and then we ate lunch up the layered slope, a terraced garden of us planted with the sacks of sandwiches, Toto crisps, and Double Decker candy bars the hostel prepared for us.

  

              This morning was also a jubilant group exertion for students who joined me on a run to the Titanic museum, stopping at churches and public art and a vivid sunrise just behind the twin cranes we were to see again from above. 

              Yesterday at tea time, Janine, Barbara, and I sat before a large window at the Ulster Museum, a wall separating us from the others. Janine marveled at the way Michael so happily communed with the students, at which point I became hyperaware of that wall and sought to come out from behind it.

              I joined the students just as Michael was explaining the tech metaphor of bug-versus-feature, and then gave an example that was its own provocation to interrogate the culture at Roosevelt High School: before we left, a couple students vandalized the room of a gay teacher with clear homophobic and misogynistic intent. We discussed with urgency and heat, but over an intimate table and cups of tea, so different from a classroom with its power dynamics and captive assembly.

              One of the important things about a trip like this is the way it changes the texture of relationships between younger adults and the older ones. As I was discussing with Chloe and Makayla earlier in the morning, there’s now such competition for university admissions and scholarship money—thus for the accolades of pedigreed programs and sports clubs as well as upmarket course titles—grades necessarily supersede curiosity and learning. Chloe was surprised that teachers notice and are saddened by students immersed in an unreflecting grind. But it grieves us. And no small result of this grind is that teachers are more gatekeeper than fellow learner, fellow citizen.

              Here in our travels, where we eat at tables together, wait on buses together, walk the streets and trails, lounge on stones and chairs together, we weave casually in and out of conversations about the world that affect us all as well as the school and classrooms that are a deep common experience. The falling barrier is an entry into adulthood—fellowship and the ability to approach authority, and no less our shared responsibility to unfinished communal existence.

              In the Fishwick Room, we reflect on what we’ve observed in Northern Ireland so far. Taylor and Halle remark how little they’ve seen of the unionist-nationalist tensions. But Barbara reports how women on our train ride told her it’s time to move forward, move forward, move forward: perhaps we don’t know what we see (or don’t) as new visitors to a place, but perhaps, too, there’s much hidden in the attempt to move on. Barbara later will tell the story of a cab driver who, when hearing why we are here, says, You want the Irish history? I’ll tell you the history. Stop studying it! In a few hours, we will discuss this over dinner: how do divided peoples in a nation steeped in trauma begin to heal? Might it, in fact, need a can’t-we-all-just-get-along moment before honestly acknowledging and addressing pain?

              Below us, about forty men and women in their forties to seventies have gathered for traditional Irish dancing while we, upstairs, go around the room with our solemn thoughts, reels and jigs vibrating the floor. In a moment, we will go downstairs and then be beckoned into the ballroom to watch. A man will tell Sayre and Steffi about the couples and pairs dancing, about the steps and history; we will think about what it means to have Irish dancing in what was many times a lord's manor house. For the few minutes at the wall of the ballroom, taking in this unexpected, rousing gift, we will smile and lightly stomp along.

Easing in to understanding: Northern Ireland

 February 18, 2023

              Students appreciate the light start to our experience with Northern Ireland: while they’ve been looking forward to corporeally engaging the history and tension we’ve studied, I know there’s no small trepidation for the emotionality and weight to come.

              We therefore enjoyed the festive shopping at St. George’s Market, Maddie sharing a crepe stuffed with cream and chocolate, Abbey happily taking the tags off a woolen scarf; and later, in the Ulster Museum, students were wowed by the layers of exhibits: first history and natural history, and then geology, and elements, and biology, and fashion, and art--studying the effects Rembrandt etchings proudly displayed bore out on Irish and Northern Irish artists that followed, or learning that the fierce dragons of straw suspended atop the five-story atrium had been fashioned by the museum’s resident basket weaver, or hearing the facts Eddie knew of the massive Irish wolfhound encased in plexiglass on the ground floor. They enjoyed the grand ceilings in the rotunda of City Hall and its careful exhibits of city history.

              Students also were glad to acclimate to some of the small cultural details without the full weight of the troubled history, like which way to look when crossing a street and which side to travel on a sidewalk, and the difference between a cuppa (mug with tea bag) and proper tea (brewed loose), and odd old sayings, like the one that describes a dreamer as a head full of sweetie mice, or the absurd detail that the harp on the Irish flag points a direction opposite that of the iconic harp on a pint of Guinness, Guinness having trademarked the logo first. It’s a no-worries culture, or so we’ve seen.

              And yet, there have been signs of the tensions always at hand. As one side said, We have a shared past, but we don’t have a shared memory. We saw this in the dozen Union Jack flags raised above the City Hall fence over card tables with small posters, and saw it again in numerous murals and partisan  posters throughout our walks. We heard it in small moments, as when Janine was inquiring about a bus and was asking about Londonderry—a guess based on the man’s name and geography—and he responded, Never heard of it, and then told her, when she re-oriented to the nationalist name Derry, Yes, we’re the smart ones. We heard it again when the hosteler last night said he was surprised an American school came to this city to learn more about the history of Ireland, whoops, I mean Belfast. It was even there in the blackboard used in an episode of Derry Girls, when it was a funny-ha that Catholic students and Protestant students were brought together, first to come up with the differences between them and then the similarities, but there was only room for the difference.

              City Hall judiciously addressed the city’s storied tensions by avoiding a couple decades in the late twentieth century but pointing to roots of division. And the Ulster Museum had a direct exhibit about the Troubles, spanning many rooms and many more feelings.

              Belfast is a city with familiar weather, language, and shops. But we sense something all around us.

A link to an album of this trip is attached here.

Belfast hostel takeover

              I am in Northern Ireland for the first time, arriving a few hours ago in Belfast on a train from Dublin. Makayla says we maybe should have let the people with fewer and smaller bags load the train ahead of us, because, there we were, a gaggle of Americans gumming it up as we waited one by one to haul our big American bags and stuffed packs into the passenger car and lift forty to fifty pounds airborne into the overhead shelf above our heads while conductors whistled helplessly outside behind us. I joined three students on the floor at the back when there weren’t enough seats.

              We had flown overnight and chased the sun to a very early sunrise, though some of us slept. I was grumpy for a while because I felt like someone kept jabbing my seat. When I was able to turn around, I said, Hello! I just wanted to tell you that solitaire might not be as solitary as you think! I did sleep for a couple hours myself.

              The two blocks walk from the train to the hostel was dark and rainy. I sat at a table with four of our girls at dinner a few minutes later, our bags stowed in a luggage room until we finished, then given pizza squares and the smallest salad you ever saw. And then we were surprised when another course came out, huge burgers in loaves of their own and a bin of chips for each of us—and yet another one of those microscopic salads.

              We had two hours at the train station in Dublin. I played guitar by our bags while students wandered and I made sure to keep my case shut so police and guards would know I wasn’t busking but just busy being American. The walk from where the airport shuttle dropped us and the train station put us almost at the door of the hotel I’d stayed with Frankie, Kent, and Emily almost a dozen years ago, and a 15 minute walk from the station took me to the Spire and the General Post Office, famously occupied in 1916 by Republicans in what would soon lead to the independence of Ireland and the Troubles after that. But first, we had our first real encounter with Ireland when Janine forlornly faced a broken escalator at Dublin’s train depot: men took the suitcases from Janine and Barbara and carried them up the steps for them with a “No worries” fare-thee-well.

              It is now 2:18 pm in Seattle, and almost time for bed checks here in Belfast. We'd hoped to be knocked out by the not sleeping, and so, to quickly adjust, but I feel ready to go.

A link to an album of this trip is attached here.

Martin Luther King's nonviolence reconsidered

               Today is Martin Luther King Day. On my run this morning, I listened to a discussion between NYTimes writer and podcaster Ezra Klein and Brandon Terry, a professor at Harvard and co-editor of a book of essays on King--To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. From Dr. Terry’s first explanations, I was jarred by his ways of considering King’s use and purposes of nonviolence, and heard reflected back to me the romanticized, anodyne vision most often taught, and also taught by me. By the time I was returning from my run, I was also making some connections to the last book I read, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and the dangers of violence, not to immediate means to political ends, but to both lasting ends and enduring individual dignity.

              Dr. Terry begins his interview by saying we don’t actually read Martin Luther King, who has written five books in addition to his countless speeches: America celebrates King as hero but also marginalizes his ideas. We teach King as a unifier, as a leader wanting us to rise up to America’s ideals, and to progress, therefore, to who we were already becoming: this is essentially a conservative view that challenges little and proposes nothing new to the American vision and applauds King as an organizer and inspirer rather than a demanding critical intellect.

              Terry and Klein’s discussion of King and nonviolence has my head spinning. Dr. Terry distinguishes between nonviolence as strategy and nonviolence as principle, and suggests that both King and Gandhi’s philosophies of nonviolence are both misunderstood. King spoke of direct action, not of passive resistance, and he thought of it in aggressive terms. Dr. Terry suggests that King believed doing nothing was the worst choice, and that violent action was better for community and soul than passivity, but that peaceful direct action—refusing to participate and standing in the way of unjust and inequitable practices—was best of all for the dignity of activists and for the long term goals of community and movement. Either Klein or Terry mentioned that we tend to see King’s nonviolent principles as a political strategy—create the kind of drama, or tension, as King called it in the jail letter, that draws televised attention, and then allow viewers to observe the savagery of the state on the peaceful such that a frowning national pity swells. This is what I had been teaching as well. But Dr. Terry says that the nonviolence is much more deeply considered: committing violence degrades personal dignity, and, when it succeeds, recreates division and perpetuates continued resentment. Nonviolence is more than strategy or principle.

              As a teacher preparing to send half a class to South Africa and half to Northern Ireland in a month from today, and thinking about apartheid in one place and partition in the other—and the actions needed for change amidst generationally deep community divisions in both places—King’s thoughtfulness about the means of activism is clarifying.

              In South Africa, Nelson Mandela after transitioning from prisoner to president pointedly allowed many whites to continue in their governmental roles; President Mandela committed not to Africa for Africans but to a Rainbow Nation. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, meanwhile, grounded a process of Truth and Reconciliation in a concept of ubuntu—a person is a person through other people—justice itself relied on recognizing the humanity of neighbors, those victimized and those harboring guilt. Both the Rainbow Nation and the TRC had their failures and limits. But both considered dignity for the lasting changes sought.

              Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, the provos of the Irish Republican Army used fear and chaos as the means available to end British occupation. In Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, two IRA foot-soldiers reveal in tapes secreted away in Boston College their sense of betrayal when their former friend and direct commander in the IRA Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin both denies his involvement and, for these two, worse, helps engineer the Good Friday Agreement of 1998: they “had set bombs and robbed banks and seen friends die and nearly died [themselves], in the expectation that these violent exertions would finally achieve the national liberation for which generations of [their families] had fought” (253). The book captures these two growing increasingly bitter and alone and twisted by drugs or drink, broken of body and dignity.

              Listening to Dr. Terry describe King’s considered thoughtfulness about nonviolence, I was struck by how it applied to what I just read: violence was an obvious poison to the paramilitaries described in Say Nothing, a poison they readily accepted because they viewed themselves as tools of a movement to a better future. But in Northern Ireland’s careful and recent peace, bitterness, tension, and distrust remains.

              Humanity, and not “winning,” is the prize.

Classroom Systems of Support

              Most of this year, teaching has been vastly improved from the last: Students have now had a year back in school, which blunts their hair-trigger anxieties and sensitivities and provides some nuance back to their social-media narrowed points-of-view; and the ninth graders now have had an actual year of middle school and so have already learned to stay in the room and mostly not climb on each other; and I’ve started the year without a mask, which allows me back my laughter and delight in social relations as well as my vocal and facial expressiveness, all of which turn out to be helpful in teaching; plus I’ve quit chairing the English department, all of which allow me to focus squarely on my professional goal for 2022-2023—to enjoy teaching again.

              But this last Wednesday called everything back.

              The week before Christmas break is always bananas, and my History partner and I had split our block in half, guiding 32 ninth graders to choose reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names in fourth period and 32 in fifth to choose Angie’s Thomas’s The Hate U Give. All students seemed happy with the resulting groups—fourth period more scholarly (post-colonial novel with nightly content warnings) and fifth period more fun (YA novel, please). Students this week had started literary analysis essay work, and by Wednesday, were gathering textual support for chosen questions and developed claims.

              But my point isn’t about these students or what happened fifth period, because the damage I’m trying to describe happens later, when, in a faculty meeting, our principal asserts the importance of restorative justice over models of disciplinary punishment, and I agree with her, but my heart has fallen so low that when Stephanie gets home I can’t bring myself to look at her and in a few hours we go to sleep, and I hold on to the feeling panting inside me.

              Fifth period started with a teacher chasing a student into the classroom because the kid was flying through the hallways and “could have hurt someone.” My ninth grader sat regally in his assigned seat and said, I don’t care. This had me jumping up and calling out, “That’s not how you talk to another human being,” and the child again said, I don’t care: he’s old. Thus began a class that would involve a two hour shelter-in-place because an Airsoft gun had been spotted on campus.

              What occurred during those two hours recalled 2021’s October 13^th testing day, for which I was asked along with the Social Studies department chair to come up with a plan to occupy all ninth and tenth graders for three and a half hours while upperclassmen took tests, and all ninth graders were placed in windowless test-noncompliant science rooms: for three of those hours, my charges were tolerably engaged; but at the 200^th minute mark, admin was looking for me because the Juniors needed more time with the PSAT and can we hold the ninth graders now until one o’clock; but the five hours on stools in an airless room without lunch turned out to be too much for the 14 year-olds, and rotating classes through the gym, which was the ad hoc solution involving two to three hundred crazed hungry kids in a single room until only ten minutes were left of the school day, turned out to be too much for the teachers as well, who helplessly watched the mad, thunderous chaos with both horror and absolute lethargy.

              This year, though, as I said, has been much improved. Still, fifth period last Wednesday reminded me of that very worst day of my very worst year. Many in the YA group treated our evidence search-time lightly. A few students needed help to refine their argument claims, but during the shelter-in-place, the number of others bugging or blurting or on a phone or in the wrong place or even on the floor meant I wasn’t much help with intellectual refinement. And then a student had an allergic reaction to something from lunch, and I had to coordinate care from my locked classroom. Then the phone rang because the principal was calling and I couldn’t get to the phone and a student I was calling to grab the line didn’t know I was talking to him. Then security came to my room for a kid whose name he didn’t have, and because the nurse told me to expect security, I sent him off with the allergic girl who was then returned a few minutes later as the wrong person.

              There were a few more rounds of this—the phone ringing, security knocking, emails misleading, the allergy girl not dying—as minutes ticked past the end of class and towards the end of day, and students finally started to understand that I wouldn’t let them leave even then, not until we received the all-clear. When we were told just before the bell that students could indeed leave—don’t linger, leave campus immediately—kids piled across snack wrappers and cockeyed desks and a few overturned chairs. The one moment of quiet during those hours was after a knock on our door when two grim, fully armed policemen entered and called for my running kid and, sternly, for his backpack. The gun, we thought as he grabbed his pack: the gun was here in the room all along. But then the kid was returned fifteen minutes later and told the class staring at him to fuck off.

              Fifth period, what turned out to be my last class of the day, was a long, enervating and discouraging experience. But it was recoverable. The final two days of the week were fine.

              What ultimately poisoned the week was not the anarchic shelter-in-place but the bimonthly faculty meeting, wherein our principal answered concerns about students roaming the halls and hanging out undisturbed every period in the lunchroom with a message I do approve: It’s not right nor is it practical to respond to students traumatized by school with punishment. We need to respond instead with respect, love, and support. And right now, she said, we’re working on our systems of support, which include reaching out to the community, reaching out to parents, reaching out to partners, and building our bridges so that we can respond person-to-person and react with care rather than anger and exclusion: Students will not be disciplined, therefore, unless students are committing crime.

              It wasn’t until the next day that I realized why I was so burnt not just by the day but her words, why I was so emptied out I couldn’t look at Stephanie when she asked me about my day.

              I agreed with our principal.

              But on Wednesday, students and one in particular needed more from me than I was giving, and my calls for help have remained, unsurprisingly and as ever, unanswered and unacknowledged. I didn’t need the running kid disciplined; but the promise of the described person-to-person exploratory dialogue, or at least an email to me in response to my own, would have been useful.

              I agreed with our principal. And yet the words made me feel terribly, terribly alone.

Room 1211

              Everything smelled yellow. The cancer had spread to Mom’s liver, so that’s maybe what I sensed: her skin was sallow. But hovering above the sharpness of hospital bleach and bedsheets, there was also a softer smell, something heavy and warm and unpleasant that spread everywhere in the room.

              My sister was the one who found Mom seizing in her bedroom where Mom had spent much of the past couple months—and Lauren who called 911. Six days later, I drove Lauren, my father, and Wendy back to the hospital at two in the morning. We traveled in silence; I stayed to the speed limit on the empty streets over Capitol Hill—no reason left to rush—street lamps throwing a faded brown onto the trees and houses around them.

              There were times in the hospital when Mom was conscious and lucid, and many more when she slept; other times, she bucked in a frenzy of pain, and a few times Mom spoke to us a strange, twisted language that made us all laugh. The trick was to run enough morphine to ease the pain but drop it back to return her to us. We called this dial-a-Myrna. But like so much of the week, it felt like the choice between love and death.

              Mom wore a blue gown with little gold patterns. The oncology wing was on the top floor, and the window of 1211 gave an expansive view of the Seattle’s thicket of buildings against the gray arm of Puget Sound. Mom had so many visitors every day, so it was good the other bed in her room was empty and people could sit there. Otherwise, we just had a low-slung pleather chair sunk further under the weight of a thousand wretched bedside visitors, its two arms, hard and wooden.

              Mostly we would talk to each other in the room and leave Mom out of it, not worried about our laughter louder than anything else on the floor—the black humor of Mom’s body and likely death—laughing at Mom waking up and telling Lauren to go out and play with the bananas, laughing because good friends were sitting together and this is what they did, hands on each other’s backs.

              We saved serious talk for the waiting room and once, the conference room the floor below because Mom had written a living will that made no sense: Directives to physicians usually advise a team in the event of a stopped heart to please allow the signatory to pass quietly. But Mom’s demanded the violence of all measures, surely to burst her cancer-ridden organs in the process. Even success was an absurdity in such a body. But then Louise slammed the table with her open palm. You don't know, Louise had said. You don't know what it was like: You weren't there. You weren't there when Myrna and I sat in the dark theater and watched the movie Dad, where a son came to visit his father every day and told him stories and fed him ice cream and revived him from death; you weren't there when Myrna made me promise… PROMISE! she said. Promise that you will do that for me, that you will come every day. But Myrna... PROMISE! Promise, Louise: Promise me that you will visit every day and feed me ice cream and read me stories. But Myrna, it's different, you have cancer. PROMISE! she had said.

              And I was remembering Mom, her chin up and grinning, a white button blouse with green paisleys over breasts still there and her glasses dark from the sun pouring into our living room, chanting a camp song about backdoor trots: “Diarrhea. Unh! Why were you born. Unh! Death, destruction, and despair. People dying everywhere. Diarrhea. Unh! Why were you born. Unh!” I was remembering Mom folding Lauren into a hug, remembering the feel of the hug myself, like her whole body was a smile.

              In the hospital, I couldn’t do much for Mom, but I could feed her crushed ice. She ate very little and couldn’t really drink, and her throat was scratchy and dry like a cat’s. The ice machine down the hall would grind the ice with satisfying viciousness.

              I could smell decay from her pores.

              For the flake of ice on her lips, I took the cloth from the bedside table. Gently wiped her mouth. Watched her chest rise and fall with her breaths. Felt my own lungs empty and fill.

Prom 2022

May 22, 2022

Dear friends,

              I send this album as my way of delivering photos I promised. Feel free to download and add as whimsy moves you until next Sunday, when I’ll remove sharing.

              Last night was such a joy! You were lively and loving and beautiful, and it was an absolute triumph—more than just climbing the tower of a Senior year. I’ve known some of you your every year at Roosevelt (Francoise, Kyle, Rona, Seraphina, Sofia), and others of you I’ve come to know and admire and adore over these last two very hard and strange years; but on this side of the era, Ms. Plesha and I agreed that last night, last night made us feel truly better about what has been so hard a year: you were dancing right on the top of it and embracing this good, good community you have made, and we felt utterly fortunate to be there as witnesses and guides and whatever else comes of our time together.

              But last night also had such a bittersweet sting for me: A couple weeks ago, Maisie performed her last with an orchestra to which all three of our daughters devoted time and pride: our family has reached its end there. Here we are now in the fast march of these culminating rites, joyous, hard-won, which will include more concerts and the last day of school and graduation (of course) and finally the day Maisie leaves for the big life she owns beyond us. Prom was the second of these celebrations—Maisie poised and beautiful and surrounded by friends—and I was proud, happy, but so sad too, full of love for Maisie, and love for you all.

              So here is a congratulations to you, and a hug to go. We’re in it now, everyone, and I’m with you in this delirious tumult of transition—in the excitement, the trepidation, and the love that comes in the final appreciation and grasping tight to the friendship, knowledge, experience, community, and routines of daily kindnesses and small mutual joys you’ve intricately grown in this ending time, this ending place.

              It was a joy to be with you last night, and I write to you with

love,

David Grosskopf

Back to full classes, full schedules

                I am so full, being back in the room with live students again—building upon the energy of conversations, refining ideas in the back-and-forth of group dialogues, humming with the frenetic goof and teenage verve that had, for the last year and a half, been flattened and muted on isolated black Zoom cells. I know none of us is as safe as we’d been when spread out across the city; I know some struggle to mask their beaks and noses seem suddenly indecent; and I know that no students in my crowded room have the short yard of distance the CDC hopes they’ll keep for safety. But for the first time in a while, there is a buzz of teenage nervousness and joy.

               I’ve loved that. And yet, my colleagues and I are exhausted. It’s hard to quantify all that’s involved in this, because some things are small, like trying to hear and be heard and understood through a mask and over the drone of our filtered fans and street noises of open windows, straining to communicate emotion, excitement, and interest when faces are hidden: we must work harder to amplify our sound, our clarity, our energy, and fall hard at the end of the end of it.

               Some things are not small at all:

               Student trauma and isolation over the quarantine reverberate back now in anxiety, tremendous sensitivity in feeling, difficulty sustaining attention, and most of all, a huge hunger for connection, so when a teacher is on, with our own strained emotionality and sense of precarious safety, that’s a lot to absorb, feed, or fend off.

               Students’ acute outrage and demand for equity and justice, and the language and routines that reflect them, guided by a year and a half of all discourse mediated through Tik Tok and Instagram, I embrace gently through careful discussions about how we hold discussions. It’s meaningful, tender work, and in student sincerity and hunger, I give my own vulnerability and heart.

               That’s not nothing. But the day is long.