The Cat and the Cardiologist or My Broken Hearted Prisoner
Our black cat, Cesario, does not care that Mr. Trump has been elected President. He wants only to go outside, to get out of the house. He has always been an outdoor cat. He wants his old life back. But we learned yesterday that he has a heart condition that requires medicine three times a day; if we let him out, we will not be able to give him the medicine. His old life is over. This morning, in the quiet dark, he prowls the house, puzzled, angry. I stroke his glossy head. He glares at me. We both know he wants to go outside. Why am I not letting him? It’s been a strange twenty-four hours—the nation, our cat, heart conditions. We have a little kitten, too, Phebe. She is also an indoor cat—too young and small to take on the world--careless, we fear. So we are keeping her in until spring. She is delighted by Cesario’s captivity, wants only to be his friend. She leaps and feints and pounces, trying to engage him. He hisses, baleful. He is so much bigger than she, yet his is afraid of her—uninterested in her joy, her innocence.
Standing in front of my girls on the stage yesterday, I read from my carefully prepared script that congratulated the winners and offered strategies to those whose hearts lay elsewhere in the election. I watched girls all day embracing, weeping, averting their eyes. I felt tired, pretending an optimism I know I must model, but one that felt strained, as if I were acting the role of Head, rather than inhabiting it.
“What’s wrong with me?” I wondered, feeling muted, drained, teary. Our college daughter phoned, shares that her Feminist Theory professor has told her students that she has spent 35 years telling classes that women matter. “Ahh,” I sighed in recognition. “Me, too.” I am not a feminist theory professor. I am the head of a girls’ school; I have spent my life in girls’ schools, been shaped by them, by the fierce and formidable women that populated them, by good and generous men who joined those women in building essay by essay, problem set by problem set, a structure that convinced me I belonged, I was good enough, I had a place at the table, and a job to do in advocating for those more vulnerable than I. I learned to lead with optimism, with my whole heart, with authenticity. I chose a life as an educator in independent schools, and, long ago, when I was a young teacher, I fretted to my department chair, Judy, that I had chosen too easy a path, that I should have stuck to my guns and returned to the New Haven public schools, where I had cut my baby teeth as a student teacher.
“Annie,” she said, looking at me directly. “There are many paths. Here, you teach the girls that will have the access and the opportunity to make change. If you are not teaching them, if you are not sharing your ideals and your insistence that they make a difference, then who will?” That was a balm. I have liked my life, felt purposeful, certain, in fact, that we, as a nation, were moving forward. Part of me knows I need time to breathe. I need some more rest—the World Series plus the election drama has wreaked havoc with my sleep. I need to figure out how to offer to my girls and faculty offer the type of hope Judy offered me long ago—when I wore Laura Ashley dresses and white tights.
Cesario crouches, ready to spring. He is bewildered, cross. And I cannot explain this change in fortunes to him in a way he can understand. He is still who he was yesterday, but not. Me, too. Sometimes, change is thrust upon us, like it or not.
Mary Catherine Bateson, Margaret Mead’s daughter, talks about composing a life. I like the idea that we get to choose, that it is not all just random; rather, we have agency. That is what I have taught the girls, always.
“You are not a tumbleweed,” I exhort to a child in my office, who has made a mistake. “You always have a choice. It’s not the mistake that matters; it’s how you move forward from it that counts.”
I have a choice about how to move forward. I had hoped for a different outcome, one that more clearly demonstrated to my girls, my brown and black girls, my gay girls, my Muslim and Jewish girls, my immigrant girls that this country was committed to them, that they would be okay. They will be okay, I hope. They are strong and capable, feisty and resilient, amazing. It is a privilege to spend my life among them. But many of them are reeling, angry, let down.
Quite a Week: Halloween, Baseball, the Election and Fall Leaves
My college daughter is not sleeping because of the election. She is worried. We are all worrying, which feels passive, hopeless. This morning, walking in the crisp November air, finally chilly enough to be familiar unlike the earlier part of the week, whose balmy temperatures made me deeply suspicious, I am thinking about the week that has passed—the longest week of teaching ever for teachers in Northeastern Ohio—and the week that is to come, the high-stakes race for President.
First there was Halloween on Monday—giddy girls in our school already sated from parties over the weekend, counting the hours until the Halloween parade and their release from school and hours of trick or treating. Ghouls and witches at our door, decorously selecting two candies from my haunted, creepy candy box. Tuesday brought the post-sugar crash and Game Six of the Series, which, with my husband and son, I attended. Wednesday brought fatigue but possibility all through the ten innings, a game that lasted so long that I, schoolteacher-headmistress, kept my son home from school on Thursday because he had had the great privilege of going to Game Seven with my sister, imported from Pennsylvania for this historic moment. They left half-way through the tenth inning, threading through the crowds and SWAT teams, reaching Shaker Heights after 2:00 a.m., while I, in Manhattan for a memorial service, crouched in my oldest daughter’s too warm apartment, watching the game on mute so as not to wake my husband. When he did wake and learn that we had tied, that there had been a rain delay, that we had lost by one run in the tenth inning, he was incredulous, a little furious that I had not woken him (I tried when we tied, but he didn’t budge). Next came Thursday with post-series let down as we all tried to keep our heads high—if we had to lose, better to lose to our Midwestern neighbors, the Cubs, another feisty, scrappy, long-deserving rival, instead of some fancy, arrogant team from one of the coasts. Then Friday, the faculty in my school boarded buses at 6:00 a.m. and headed to Columbus in the dark for a full day conference with ISACS, sessions on many topics: race, assessment, creativity, purpose. We are sated, too, like the children with their Halloween candy. A bad accident delayed our return. Wrapped in darkness once again on the trip home, we are giddy, like seventh graders, too-long cooped up in the same cramped space. And finally, the weekend, a time for recovery from this long, long week.
This morning, the sun sparkles in the autumn leaves, vibrant, like living stained glass against a blue field. I breathe in the cool air, breathe out disappointment, rusty on my tongue, privileged to live in this pugnacious town, in this Swing State, where I know my vote matters. I don’t know how Tuesday will go. As a Headmistress, I cannot put my politics on my lawn or on my Facebook feed, though all who know me will presume my loyalties—I am the Head of a girls’ school; I want my girls to know girls can do anything, be anything, including President. The Indians loss was tough to swallow, but if we need to lose the Series to have the right team win on Tuesday, it will be enough.
Labyrinth
The first day, we go, three strangers with me, up a hill, down a hill, up another slope and there it is, the young red maple aflame in the middle of a circle of stones. We find the entrance. I follow Erin, trusting her feet when I do not trust my own. On the way back out, I fumble—a stone has been moved; the path isn’t clear. She smiles, points the right direction. And, just as I am sure I have made a mistake, I emerge.
We are silent walking, our sneakers on cedar chips—red chips lining the outside circle, grey and black ones within the paths winding, guiding, circling. Today, alone, I stoop to see if the black ones are burned, testing the black against another rock gingerly to see if it can be used like a stick of charcoal, but it does not have that property. Who built this labyrinth? A grieving family, an artist? This property is full of bird-houses painted in bright colors, a destination for a mother bird’s child, seeking a home. The families making birdhouses have all lost children—their grief so palpable it feels like metal in my mouth. Would we have come to such a place had it existed when Roddy died? No. This is a different time, a different part of the country. We know more now about how to process. How to trust the labyrinth to carry us forward deep into ourselves, how to spool us back out from the center, like an Elizabethan circle dance winding into a snail whorl, then releasing.
Yesterday, Erin and I go again, silent once we are inside, lost in thought, surrendering. After, we both whisper Namaste and walk home a winding way, around the pond and over Sophia’s bridge, painted rocks winking like Easter Eggs, placed lovingly in roots and nestled into stumps. We heard last night what one grieving mother needed to do, an instruction manual of sorts for how to do grief. Here, I think of my own mother and her mother—how was it they managed to move forward, inch forward. I think of Lori and Don mourning Jess.
Today, I venture out by myself, quiet from all the stories I have heard. Arriving, I see Kate and Erin walking. It is warmer this morning. I think of the Stage Manager in Our Town, explaining at the top of Act III in the Grover’s Corners Cemetery that “an awful lot of sorrow has quieted down up here,” and I hope that that is true for those who come to Faith’s Lodge, not on a writing retreat—or on a writing retreat, that our collective sorrows can quiet down. I tilt my face to the sun, pause until the two who are walking have passed where I will enter, not wanting to interrupt their pace, but then, unexpectedly, I turn in on myself a few seconds later and there is Erin, coming in the opposite direction. She throws her arms wide and we hug, this stranger-friend I acquired Thursday. Kate and I hug next; then they leave, their voices soft, murmuring with the breeze. Reaching the center of the labyrinth, I close my eyes. Shimmer. Circles. Red. I feel as if I am teaseracting in A Wrinkle in Time. Pulsing red. Anger? Grief? I breathe. “Set down, set down”. Richard III’s Lady Anne’s words thrum in my ear. Fragments of text float up to me. “What would you do if you were not afraid?” “Nature’s first green is gold.” Mantras swirl in this place of meditation. Lady Anne again: “Set down, set down.” Set down anger, grief, sorrow, burdens, helplessness? Set down feeling silenced, helpless, caught. Set down as in record, write. Set down as in I don't need to carry such burdens, so much weight any longer. I wind, burrow, coil, curl into myself in the labyrinth, in the lodge, witnessing others' stories, griefs, losses. Listening. I listen right now. One tapping bird. A chirp behind me. Breezes rustle leaves; I listen more. There are several layers of wind, several types of rustle: grass, small trees, larger noises of wind in branches. What is louder than a rustle? Sun, so warm. I watched you rise over the steam a few hours ago, a golden band pushing up over the lake, pushing back the darkness. That's where grief lives, underground, I think. A caldera, rising when it finds an aperture, reaching up. Cheep, cheep. One bird. Another answers. Rush. Whoosh. The flutter of wings. How unlikely to be writing on my phone when a river of words has flowed from my pen during this retreat. Re. Treat. A treat offered more than once. Accept what you are offered, a birthday treat. Trick or treat. Retreat from the field. Retreat into anger, loneliness. Retreat into silence. Words loud in my head. Breathe. In. Out. Set down. Set down. Spiral out. Trust. Accept the gift, the peace, the possibility that this moment can inspire me next week, next month, next year.
Early Days
Today, I visit my daughter’s third grade class. We leave the Upper West Side in a dark, damp dawn, fueled by iced coffee, happy (finally) to find a cab and we head across town, and in through the polished wooden doors of 100 East End.
It is only the second full week of school, but the little girls clearly know what’s expected, how to come into the room, greet Ms. Orbach, deposit their “communication” folders in the blue basket in the center of the rug and read the morning message. They are switching seats today, so each girl moves her own chair to a new table. One child asks if, her tasks accomplished, she could read. Miranda gives permission, and the child she bends, bangs over her eyes, close to The Lightning Thief.
I am not in charge. In fact, I am largely invisible, which offers its own kind of pleasure. Miranda’s head teacher, Malini, is in charge, her affection for her girls and her high standards evident. I sit quietly at Miranda’s desk and enjoy watching my own daughter with twenty little girls, who have already found their way to her heart. All weekend, she shared her observations about each child, her impressions and hopes for each girl, connections she had made, worries, stories. She has fallen hard for this teaching business. In morning meeting, I am introduced, the girls’ eyes wide that Ms. Orbach has a mother. It occurs to me that her third grade and my third graders at Laurel could be penpals. “Have any of you ever been to Ohio?” I ask. Heads shake no. We have a tiny geography lesson about the Midwest. Then, Malini explains the upcoming fire drill, and I realize I should scoot out before that event, so as not to be late for a meeting down town. I leave reluctantly, trying to remember names and faces, so when Miranda calls to talk about her girls, I can bring each child to mind.
It is time-warp-ish to me to have her teaching where I taught for two decades. I went to The Chapin School when I was twenty-three one hundred years ago. I arrived on a rainy spring afternoon, mud splattering my white stockings—it was the 80’s—we wore white tights and lots of Laura Ashley dresses. Chapin gave me mentors and friends, opportunities to grow and try new things. In many ways, I came of age there before heading to Ohio to lead Laurel, a girls’ school I’ve come to love with as much devotion as I had for Chapin.
On her first day of teacher meetings, Miranda was overwhelmed to begin with—a new job in a new profession in a setting she remembered from childhood but didn’t really know. Once she arrived, she was overwhelmed at being known by so many people she could not remember—twelve years is a long time when you leave at 11—and it was not her school; it was my school, where she came often, to be sure, but still…the faces swam up, delighted to claim her, welcome her, tell her they knew her when she was a little girl, but now she is grown and her own person, not mine by association, though, of course, she is mine by association, in this school where I taught for a long time, a long time when I longed for her arrival, a long time afterwards. A long, longing time.
She has her own tidy desk in the classroom, a sure sign that her Head teacher will value her, will respect what she can bring to the third grade. She will want to be of use, will want to feel like a partner, rather than a handmaiden. She is taking in the culture, breathing it in—opening meeting in the Gordon Room—in my day, we met in the Assembly Room, but that is under construction, I understand. Once, I tell her, in 1986, we did not have lunch for a year—I think they were building the Gordon Room that year, and we had lunch in Room 26 in brown paper bags—maybe that was when they built the gym. Memory blurs. But we ate our lunches and all was well. In my school the Upper School is upside down; we are building, too, but not on such a grand scale and going both up and down in Manhattan. The cost makes me shudder, but it is different in New York. Lots is different in NY.
In these first weeks, she is tired. It is like drinking from a fire hose, I tell her, wondering how those new to my school are feeling this Monday night, their third week with the girls. Are they tired, too? I am. Every year, at the beginning, I am keyed up, happy to see the girls, weary when things are bumpy, but no longer startled—things are often bumpy at the beginning, in the middle, at the end, along the way—bumps are to be expected. I try to welcome the bumps, not fight them or pretend they’re not there. We have a girl who cannot manage her last period class—yet. I am ever optimistic. We make a plan. She needs a little more TLC just now. And we can do that; it’s within our power to do that, to accommodate, to consider what each child needs. Even Seniors are still girls, who need our help—girl-women. I think of them as young women; yet I most often call them girls. What is that? Forty-plus years in girls’ schools? Probably. Of course, some of them don’t feel like girls or women—some of them are on different journeys, hard ones—in all our schools—and they need more than a work around for math last period. I don’t always feel we have enough to offer girls whose identities feel fragile, who learn too much about families that are shattering around them, who have sick moms or dads who have lost their jobs or siblings who have other huge needs…it takes a village, really, for each one of them. Sometimes we can know what she might need; often, we can only guess.
After her first faculty meeting, Miranda wrote me. She liked what the diversity director has said. What if we were to bathe our classrooms in empathy? I Google the expression—“bathe in empathy.” I get lots of hits about empathy, but nothing with that exact phrasing. I think about the talk I gave to the Upper School ten days ago on Wednesday—about school culture in trying times with a tricky election and polarized views. I had an old talk I wrote ten years ago about my fabulous professor who had a single theme, “man’s inhumanity to man,” the opposite of empathy, I think.
This morning, watching her, I felt giddy that one of my daughters is a teacher, envious that it is all ahead of her, happy that I know the contours of the landscape she now inhabits, if not the details of her world that was once my own.
First Day Blues
This month, I start my thirty-fifth year of teaching school, my thirteenth as Head at Laurel. Over the years, I have taught English and drama, mostly, with a fair number of College Guidance classes sprinkled in. I think back over Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Ethan Frome, Tess, The Scarlet Letter, Huck, Great Expectations, Beloved, Woman Warrior, Tell the Wolves I’m Home, a lot of Shakespeare, tons of poetry, more plays and the occasional short story and essay. My new Juniors and my Sophomores at Northfield Mount Hermon in my earliest years as a teacher were indulgent, kind. A few years later at Chapin, in drama, we began always in a circle spending time getting to know each other before jumping into acting exercises. Teaching is the place I know myself best; it is like oxygen. I love leading a school, but teaching is actually where I find myself on steadiest ground, understand my purpose and my role. For me, teaching has always been a sort of second-skin.
Until last year. Last year, I taught 9th grade English as I have for the past twelve years at Laurel—and my class met last period—every day. The girls were marvelous—full of curiosity and kind with one another—mostly. They were also fried after a long day. And their teacher was not so marvelous. Too often, I was cranky and fatigued, stressed after a day of managing the day-to-day life of the school. I fell behind in my correcting too often and felt inadequate. I loved being with them, but I didn’t feel like my best English-teacher self. Turns out, I’m not at my best at 2:30 and I found myself more curt, a little less elastic in my dealings with my girls. I discovered that I would benefit from a schedule that tumbled as much as the girls would. In the fall, when we were tackling Oedipus Rex, I had the fleeting thought that I might gouge out my own eyes if I had to teach this particular tragedy again—though I love it. And, in the midst of The Odyssey, I had to resist my strong impulse to yell at Odysseus, saying, “Get a compass and get the heck home to your wife and stop sleeping with everyone in a skirt on the way.” I don’t think it’s a great sign to want to berate the Epic Hero. I have loved teaching texts I know well, but there comes a point when one needs a change.
So, I decided to step back, take a year away from the English classroom. I’ll still teach drama in the spring when the little girls and I make a play together. And, a stint of maternity-subbing has come my way, so I’ll get to teach Lifeskills to some 9th graders in the winter. But, I am already feeling sorry for myself in an unbecoming way. No one exiled me. I exiled myself, so I wouldn’t be sour and cross. This year, I’ll be able to watch more classes around the building, be able to travel a bit more to raise money for this school I love so much, be able to write at night instead of making up assessments or grading essays. But as the first day came and went and I did not meet a new crop of girls—expectant, maybe a little nervous about having the Head as their English teacher until they realized how delighted I was to be on their journey with them. I’m hoping my self-imposed sabbatical will be good for me and for the school, but I can already tell you, I think I may have blown it. Perhaps I could have taught a different tragedy, found a different epic, taught at another hour of the day. But, perhaps I’ll feel all the more joyous next year when I’m setting up my grade book and meeting a new group of girls. What a privilege it is to teach.
What I Did This Summer
· Made a pie in June so I didn’t run out of time to make a pie. Did not make another one.
· Took an on-line writing class on Scene and Summary.
· Taught an online class (Intro to Girls Schools) with a number of colleagues in the class as well as my oldest daughter, who will start her teaching career next week.
· Tried not to get stressed out about Atticus’ summer reading. Still not finished.
· Bit my tongue when a new kitten came to join our family.
· Walked almost every day.
· Wrote more than I read.
· Said goodbye to a much-loved colleague.
· Worked on my school’s Strategic Roadmap on huge post-its on our porch.
· Bought new linens and re-arranged furniture in three bedrooms in Eagles Mere.
· Backed into a boulder.
· Saw Cordelia in a ten-minute play at Williamstown—with a combined 8 hours of travel each way. Completely worthwhile.
· Listened to a great book on tape (The Gilded Hour) for hours and hours and hours back and forth on Route 80.
· Watched the light changing on the lake.
· Went canoeing exactly once.
· Went night-swimming more than once.
· Saw a falling star outside the window in the middle of the night, but forgot to lie out on the tennis court and look for meteor showers.
· Washed a great deal of china and glassware from cabinets that I suspect have not been emptied for 50 years.
· Got a new website constructed by one of my daughters!
Summer’s Lease
The crisp is less crisp two nights later; we have the last of the season’s rhubarb, brought by Kerro from his garden from Michigan, and we are ready to make Strawberry Rhubarb crisp on Sunday night until we discover one container of strawberries is moldy and the other has about eight berries in it. Improvising, which is what theatre friends do, Kerro goes out to our back steps and fills a measuring cup with blueberries, round and fat and purple, from the bushes Mom planted about ten years ago. I find some raspberries; we discover, in the back ofhe fridge, half a carton of blueberries I had bought last week—wrinkled, but in a crisp, who will care? I mix the oats and flour and brown sugar and cinnamon. We borrow vanilla extract from our neighbors, stir in melted butter. Kerro preps the berries and we bake the crisp. Before dinner, I put the metal bowl and the bottom of our immersion blender into the freezer, so after we finish the meal, I can make homemade whipped cream. It’s then that my sister announces that she loathes rhubarb and declines our offer of dessert. Her vehemence does not dim our enjoyment of our creation. As we clean up, we find a tin foil cover for the baking dish and tuck it in to the pantry fridge.
Yesterday we do jigsaw puzzles; I write a lot. In a desultory way, I begin to collect my belongings because I head back home and back to work on Wednesday. Today, my last real day of summer, Kerro leaves us for Michigan. I nurse a migraine, grumpy about my son’s undone summer reading, cross at my own grumpiness, unproductive, restless. But we walk the dogs all together—my son, husband and I. It is lovely by the lake, clear and warm, the sun golden. My mood improves. I light the citronella candles, one of my favorite rituals this summer. We eat dinner on the porch. After supper, Atticus and I settle into our cavernous porch swing; he reads The Sign of the Beaver and I read my novel, Modern Lovers. Seth jumpstarts his mini van with my car and we talk about how my battery doesn’t lose any power by helping his recharge—like candlelight, like love. It is cooler, even this early in August, so we move inside to finish up the crisp. I do the dishes and Seth warms up the crisp in cut glass bowls from my grandmother’s era. Atticus chooses mint-chip ice cream over fruit, claiming, “I’m with Aunt Lee on this one; the rhubarb is sort of overpowering,” but as I savor the mingled flavor of fruit and lemon zest and vanilla ice cream, I know I am tasting summer.