Dining with Squirrels

Last week at Oakdale Elementary was Teacher Appreciation Week and the PTO hosted a Poetry Contest.  I got to watch my son tackle a challenge with such relentless determination that it made me wonder: Why Not The Same For Using A Fork?

Anyway, the kids were invited to write a poem about teachers and staff at Oakdale and there would be winners in 3 categories:  K-2, 3-4 and grade 5.  Each student was promised a candy bar just for entering and still Lucy dismissed the invitation, which made me realize there would be no poem from Lucy.  Not ever.  But Ben spent 5 days with a pencil and paper in his hand, wrestling with his opus, and Karl and I had a BLAST.

Ben decided he want to write a haiku about his first and second grade teacher, Mrs. Haan.  They studied haiku during a unit on Japan last year, so this is not as geeky as it sounds.  I looked up the rules of haiku on the internet, the most basic of which are three lines and syllables in a 5-7-5 pattern.  I asked Ben what his first line would be and he immediatly said “Graceful as a dove.”  Excuse me while I have a moment.

Mrs. Haan really is graceful as a dove.  She projects such an essence of grace and calm and peace — it’s very good second-grade-teacher stuff.  So, that was Ben’s first line.

The second line was more of a challenge.  Karl and I were both English majors and Ben indulged us a quite a bit as we explained active vs. passive verbs and talked about making every word count.  We shot questions back and forth about what Mrs. Haan is like in class [“does she have a great sense of humor?” Ben, very seriously:  “No.”], what are his favorite things about her class, and what about her manner in class makes her so wonderful.  After much editing [oh, Mommy loved it], Ben found his next 7 syllables.

Then we spent an evening and afternoon pushing around that last line.  My experience as a writer is that the best stuff just pops out.  I know that’s probably sacrilegious and lots of writerly gurus will roll their baggy eyes at me, but honestly, sometimes I feel like the words come when the words are ready and I can feel when they’re just right.  Not all words, just some. They weren’t coming for Ben and I knew I had to help him birth them without writing them myself [“A true gift from God”?  “My other mother”?].  I asked Ben what he would say to Mrs. Haan if it was the last day of school.  Ben has been in Mrs. Haan’s class for almost two years now.  Next year, he makes the big move to a 3/4 classroom and, not insignificantly, the year after that Oakdale will be closed.  More on that later.

What would you say to Mrs. Haan on the last day of school?  Ben answered me without a pause.  He answered me with five syllables.  The best stuff just popped out.  And on Friday, as I was preparing to serve hot lunch, the principal announced the winners over the intercom and Ben won.  I clapped a bit and smiled at my fellow server, but inside I was fist-pumping and jumping and screaming and behaving quite indecorously.  A pile of gold couldn’t have made me happier.

Here is Ben’s Haiku for Mrs. Haan:

Graceful as a dove
Caring for me and my class
I wish I could stay

Oh, he also won ten dollars.  It’s been a great week.

Lucy lost a front tooth today.  We’ve been waiting.  Her two top front ones had taken a sort of grayish cast the last few weeks, clearly dying, but not ready to cast off.  When she loped down the hill from the school doors, she looked shockingly different to me.  Old.

For the record, I do not collect owls.  The iron owls on my sideboard, the ceramic owl on my kitchen sill, the owl journal propped against the bulletin board — these are not a collection. They are a random confluence of owls.  Which I may curate.  By myself.

I make this clear because where one or two owls are gathered, danger lurks.  Soon you may find yourself awash in owls, porcelain, pottery, leather, macrame, puffy paint, glass, earrings, pots, plates, and posters.  It could get ugly.  I have an assemblage of tea cups that came to me all at once and present the loveliest picture of tea cupage.  I now keep them high on a shelf in the corner of my living room behind the couch where no one can admire them because very soon after their arrival I found myself the recipient of more tea cups, none of which had a word to say to the initial crew.  They ended up stuffed in amongst the books until our bookshelves looked like an English tea shop.  At which point I got rid of a whole lot of them.  It had to be done.

We have a doctor friend who loves pigs.  This is fine and well.  Pigs are, I’ve heard, very clean creatures with a fine sense of how a sty should really look.  Our friend’s house is, you’ll pardon, littered with pigs.  She must have quite the bedside manner, and her home bears witness of thanks for that in every corner.  And really these hundreds of pigs are quite charming, but I do wonder if she every feels like posting a Lot on Ebay.

So I do not collect owls.  Natasha has taken to thrifting really stunning owl items and displaying them prominently about her house, lying in wait for my exclamation — “oh my WORD, that’s a cute owl” — whereupon she reminds me, mournfully,  “But you don’t collect owls.”  She’s quite a riot, that Natasha.  And don’t think I didn’t notice that both she and Melissa gave me an owl item for Christmas:  Melissa, the very charming owl journal and Natasha an owl t-shirt that says “Hoo’s your momma?”  Their blantant disregard for my wishes is really quite touching.  Don’t the rest of you get any ideas though.  Because I do not collect owls.

I do have a collection though.  It’s really the perfect collection:  deeply  meaningful, easy to store, and free.  I collect barrettes.  The cheap plastic kind you can buy at Meijer $1.99 for 20.  The kind that African-American girls wear at the end of so many pigtails or braids like the most charming, lively hat.

I started collecting barrettes when the kids were little and we spent some of every sunny day at a park.  I’m not the kind of mother who runs about and makes up lovely games for children at the park.  That’s why we’re at the park after all.  With swings and slides and such.  I would use my time to stare blankly about, thinking thoughts.  You know, thoughts.  And one day my eye caught on a spark of pastel among the mulch, like a Jordan Almond in among the walnuts. My first barrette.  I can’t remember which one it was, but I was so delighted that I called to the kids to share it.  And their magpie natures were ignited.  We found four or five more on that trip to the park, each one a different design or color.

This became a custom.  The kids and I would inspect each playground we went to.  There are lots of African American families between our neighborhood and  the kids’ school and our favorite local playgrounds never failed to turn up a treasure.  Heads ducked, eyes scanning the ground, we’d look for the glint of color among the brown, casting aside bits of balloon, chips bags, cracked lighters, ragged ponytail holders, waiting for that flower or butterfly or bunny shape in some Carribean shade of pink or green.  Shouts of delight for every single one, especially if we’d never seen one like it before.  Like the hot pink poodle.  Or the black flower.  Or the one that says “Jesus Loves You.”   I’d take them home, throw them in the dishwasher, and then display them on the kitchen window sill until I had so many I had to put them in a jam jar.  Now I’ve got them in an industrial-sized mayo jar and I think at last count we had over 160.  Lucy took them to 100’s day in kindergarten last year and had to leave a large batch at home [collections had to number 100 of course].

And this is what makes those barrettes so meaningful for me:  my kids are collecting barrettes for me.  It’s my collection.  Somehow, they never co-opted it.  Every single time  they found a barrette, they ran it over to me in triumph:  “For your collection, Mom!”  I’ll never forget the first time Ben came home from school, dug in his pocket, and pulled out a barrette: “Look Mom, I found it on the playground for you.”  Both Ben and Lucy have done that more than once, and sometimes they’ll present me with one and say “This is from Vera!”  or “Noah found this for you!”  My kids’ friends are sending me little offerings.  You can imagine this makes me puddle about on the floor.  I was once explaining this to a group of mothers gathered on a playground and one of the mothers said “Gross.”  You can imagine she and I never struck up a friendship.

We don’t do as much barrette hunting as we used to of course.  With both kids in school, our playground time is limited and, as the kids have become independent, we don’t need to find a playground quite as desperately as we used to.  Lucy rides her bike around the block by herself now and Ben can bike around the school with a friend as long they check in after every lap.  This huge jar of barrettes is teeming with memories now, fleeting ones.  Very bittersweet. I’m puddling again.

So, I’m a collector of barrettes only.  They have to be plastic, they can be broken and dirty, they must be found.  I prefer those offered by children. If you find one in the shape of an owl, I promise it will find a place of honor.