We are the Gators; That is Our Name

We Are the Gators: That is Our Name

The sweet moment of District Championship!

No one would call me a sporty.  As a girl, I played compulsory field hockey, softball and lacrosse.  In all cases, I was afraid of the ball, the last chosen for a team, and a slow runner who wheezed.  I would daydream, hoping not to have to do anything.  I could neither catch nor bat nor dribble with any skill. 

My emergence as a sports fan began with heading a girls’ school in Ohio.  I know the research.  Most female CEO’s played a team sport.  Athletics matter for girls.  As the Head, it was important for me to show up at sporting events, to cheer on the girls, to chat with parents.  Early in my headship, on the soccer field, I screamed, “We love you, Laurel.” 

My Admissions Director pulled me aside and said, “You can’t say that.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s just not how we cheer,” he offered kindly.

The next day, girls stopped me in the hall to thank me for coming.  “We knew it was you,” a player smiled, “because you are the only one who would say you love us.”

It became my signature cheer.  I am, to my knowledge, the only person who hollers, “We love you, Laurel.”  My husband has grown used to this expression of my loyalty and my pride in our girls.  My adolescent son rolls his eyes.  Parents of players smile indulgently.  I have been a head for a long time.

Once I arrived at a playoff game wearing the colors of the opposing team.  I invested in more green and white clothes, our colors, and acquired a set of green and white pompoms. My enthusiasm grew.

Our athletic fields, bordered by woods, are gorgeous in spring and late summer and fall. I try to get to several games in each sport every season.  When the girls wear helmets and mouth guards, it’s hard for me to make out individual players.  Across the field, one ponytail can resemble another. I hate it when either side takes a knee, meaning that a player is hurt. I am not their mom, but in those moments, worry clogs my throat as if I am.  I’m not great a tennis spectator because you have to be quiet, and golf matches often happens at a more distant location where loud fans are not encouraged.  The softball and lacrosse seasons are brief because the spring is notoriously muddy and wet in Northeastern Ohio.  Track and cross country are more individual and require a significant time commitment.  Swimming is very exciting at the end of the season when our girls often go to compete at States, but the pool tends to be loud and hot, and, in their caps, it is, again, hard for me to tell who’s who.  In the fall, our un-airconditioned gym can be uncomfortably hot, but I love watching the fast pace of volleyball, the way the team works together. 

I’m not sure when basketball claimed my heart.  One year, I taught a lot of the JV players in my 9th grade English class, so I got in the habit of dropping in to watch a little bit of a home game before I left for the day.  Soon, our son, a Middle Schooler, was practicing with the Varsity girls; he became a mascot of sorts, forming deep friendships with kind, older girls, keeping the books for some games, wearing the official team coaching polo.  Before long, my husband was a fixture at every game, sitting in the last row of the bleachers, next to a former coach and our Athletic Director, cheering on our Laurel Gators.  And this year, unless I was traveling, I did not miss a home game.

“Why was that a foul?” I’d ask and someone nearby would explain.  I learned more about the game, more about how each girl played. 

Our team was on fire, winning continuously.  They are fast and aggressive and fabulous.  The twins, Juniors, have a twin language on the court, passing to where one understands the other twin will arrive. They are remarkable, scoring and rebounding and making the game appear effortless. G., a four-year senior, has come into her own as a leader with confidence and skill.  Anna, recovering from a torn ACL, was a steady, kind leader.  Terrific newcomers in ninth grade have added speed and skill.  As the season proceeded, the team attracted attention from the press.  We believed we might have a shot at States.

We won Districts and headed to regionals, winning the first play off in a nail biter.  I told our Upper School we needed to learn real cheers.  “De-fense, de-fense” was not enough.  They rose to the challenge.  The parents had created a Gator Clap.  Each play-off game had a theme—a white out, a green out, wear your favorite athletic jersey.  A school-wide search ensued for our Gator mascot costume.  The whole school was energized, excited.  We practiced our fight song, “We are the gators; that is our name.” We felt buoyed by our team.  Everybody loves a winning team.  The little girls were thrilled, “Will you be at the game, Ms. Klotz?” they asked in the halls.

“Of course,” I smiled.

When several Upper School girls arrived in my office, wanting to know if we could have the day off when we went to States, I cautioned them not to get ahead of themselves.

“We’ve got plans,” I reassured them, imaginging a school-wide pep rally, the possibility of canceling school to take them all to States, “but remember Zeus,” I chided.  “He’ll zap us with a thunderbolt if we are too prideful.”  I tamped down their pride and my own; I was afraid to want the win as much as I did.  I allowed them to order an inflatable gator to wear at the game since we couldn’t turn up the real one.  When some Juniors told me in horror that they had learned the other team had a racist mascot, I counseled them to focus on supporting our team, to rise above, to cheer on our players.  And they did, two bus fulls of fans—hollering cheers right till the bitter end. 

On Friday night, our ebullience popped like a bunch of helium balloons, green and white tattered bits abandoned on a wet pavement.  We lost by four.  Our shots didn’t go in. Theirs did.  We played great defense, but our high scoring players didn’t score.  One of the twins fouled out.  We trailed by more points than we had all season and we couldn’t get it back.  Nerves?  An off night?  Hard to know. Our girls were grim, determined.  They played fiercely till the end.  I was proud of them and heartbroken for them and for the rest of the girls who cheered them on with vigor.  I felt sad for the players’ parents and coaches and for my son, who, in a play that night and unable to see the game, wept when he heard the news.  We came so close.  And then It was over.  The other fans were terrible—parents and children.  I have never heard such rudeness.    I try to remember that they wanted it as much as we did.  But somehow, it was worse to lose to nasty people.

On the snowy drive home, I tried not to see the girls’ sad faces.  We are the feisty underdog in Cleveland, rich in love, but never arrogant.  We had pinned our hopes on our basketball team.  The loss felt bitter.  My dreams that night were full of the Corona virus and shots that wobbled on the rim and did not go in.  I could hear those ugly fans screaming at the refs.  I saw myself screaming at the men behind us in the stands, “Behave yourselves; these are young women.”  I saw myself hugging hordes of weeping girls and then pushing them away, bewildered, for fear that I was contagious.  I knew, in real life last night, to keep my chin up, not to rebuke the opposing fans, to smile and hug my brave and brilliant players, who fought so hard.  But waking this morning, tears leaked from my eyes.

“What is this?” I asked myself.  One team loses.  That’s the way it goes. Yet our meteoric rise had felt symbolic, a good omen, a rallying point, a source of pride. Like the flat ginger ale in a glass by my bed, all of that joyous energy leaked away in the last quarter. I was helpless as our glory dissolved. Of course, we’ll bounce back.  We always do.  We’re resilient.  The team is young.  And yet…

I am not an athlete, merely a devoted and devastated fan, acknowledging how sad I feel for my girls and my school.   

100 Years of Making Plays at 100 East End

One hundred years of girls on stage.  Amazing. For weeks, I have been thinking about Drama Club, about Oreos and sandwiches on Saturdays, about our tech week dinners—the one Rasha’s mother made for us when we did Antigone.  I’ve thought about the girls, who are now women, from whom I learned so much, about big risks and vulnerability and inhabiting other worlds.  I’ve thought about costumes and heightened language and vulnerability and risk.

Nineteen of those years are stitched through me—just as we stitched our enormous quilt for Threads!  Many productions happened in the Assembly Room and the last several, joyfully, in the Black Box, which was really blue, at least, at first. 

For me, the drama club productions—an interschool play or musical in the fall and a Chapin-only production in February—were the times I felt I could really teach acting because we rehearsed three times a week—Monday. Wednesday and Friday and for three Saturdays before each show. (Never on Tuesday, so the actors could be part of Dance Club!) While my “half-credit” classes and full drama classes were wonderful, they met only 45 minutes; it was in rehearsal, in tech weeks, that real breakthroughs happened.  And, I had many girls for five years—starting in eighth grade; they grew up doing plays, mentored by older girls and then becoming mentors. They were formidable. How I love them.

When I arrived at Chapin in the fall of 1984, all drama was in the hands of Janet Walker, whose husband was the long-serving music teacher, Charles Walker; they retired at the end of the year, and Mrs. Berendsen asked if I could “take on the drama program, in an interim way.”  Of course, I said yes, and, after that, I would teach both drama and English for many years, directing two shows a year and overseeing the girls’ direction of one acts in the spring. 

For seventeen years, we asked for a lighting grid in the assembly room—on every budget every year, and finally, finally, one was installed.  We were a team—Seth and I—because before Jeremiah or Luc, there were no tech directors. There was Seth, then Seth and Kevin Holly, our first part-time TD, who worked at Riverdale, and the team of amazing NYU women I assembled to design because I wanted the girls to see women lighting, set and costume designers.  Caty Maxey, Rhonda Roper, Theresa Squire, Christy Irish, and our dear friend, Joan Racho—these were talented women who were willing to teach and work alongside the girls at load-in and strike—both required always for the full cast. They knew how to make magic on a shoestring; we were very frugal. We did make posters and buttons--the girls wore the buttons advertising the shows on their skirts or backpacks--and the posters, often, were lovely.

If a play happened on stage, we could pull the curtain and leave the set, but if we performed on the floor, which we often did, given the limits of a shallow proscenium and no wing space, the set had to be struck each night and re-set.  Everyone had a job, and knew exactly what she was supposed to do. After tech-Saturdays, with lunches from Coleman’s thanks to Nancy’s generous aunt, we would walk the Assembly Room barefoot, making sure we hadn’t missed a pin or a nail, so the Middle School girls would be safe in dance class on Monday morning. Tom Palermo was our great friend and advocate, letting us into the building on weekends to finish a tricky project, helping when the fog machine continuously set off the smoke detectors during tech for the Scottish Play, shaking his head at the girls learning to set up and take down our fancy Wenger risers, shaking his head some more as Seth utilized every inch of space underneath the Assembly Room stage to store platforms. 

Over time, our department grew.  Laurie Gruhn was with me from the start; Martha Hirschman, Patti Norchi, Sarah Rutledge supported the musicals!  Mike Calderone and Julia Heaton and Beatrice Cody all joined the drama department and began to direct, so I no longer did every show. 

I have enough memories for a long memoir, but share only a few.  Apologies for all the great moments I forgot to include and all the girls.  Write to me and remind me! I may not have the order right--Seth has an enormous box of videos and photographs that we intended to go through to share with you, but we ran out of time--perhaps for the 125th celebration!!

My first big production:  Jill Kamin on Roller Skates as Hamlet in R and G are Dead; Lizzy Bruce and Lisa Stevens in matching swirling capes; Tia Fuhrman as Claudius.  The players doing remarkable ensemble work, popping out of the trap on the floor of the assembly room stage.

For Threads, the first play the girls and I wrote, we laid out our enormous quilt on the floor of the Assembly Room, set up lights along the fabric, and quilted the top layer, the batting and the back, using embroidery floss because it was so big.  Each girl had made her own quilt square. “How hard could it be?” I remember thinking, “to put together a quilt?”. The girls and I made a play about pioneer women going West because they wanted to wear long dresses; Eliza led the way; Sisi in yellow calico as Grace Vitengruber; the staging for the trial came to me in a dream; the girls thought I had lost it.

The House of Bernarda Alba  Remarkable Rachel, singing opera—against her will—during rehearsal as Bernarda with Minnie and Sisi and Eliza and Katrina and Christina—we made the set like a birdcage with Rodrigo guitar in the background. 

Wild fabric costumes for The Tempest, Jessica as Prospero and Sasha as a most winsome and ferocious Caliban.  

Stage Door—a costume parade and a box set in the Assembly Room!  The girls said to me, “Ms. K., let us play the boys. We’d wear the clothes better, anyway!”  And they did. What a fun one this was. Many of the dresses we bought at a vintage shop in Pennsylvania formed the basis of our costume collection for years.

Antigone—striking the set every night and repainting the marble; Alixa making elaborate braided hair dos inspired by Greek vases at the Met, Barbara’s little brother coming to rehearsals, working on lines during the tenth grade trip at Frost Valley, beautiful dyed costumes.

Godspell—an interschool musical with Reminiscence overalls and a jungle gym, a misplaced mink coat in the audience on closing night.

Working—also a musical with a silver scaffold set with a Tylenol bottle left on stage on opening night; Hugo so ill at intermission, but determined to finish the show.

Galatea—another show we wrote ourselves, largely in my apartment.  It was inspired by Ladies’ Magazines, circa 1914. . Barbara, Nicky, Angela, Alixa, Heidi were the staff of the magazine, Galatea, all attired in Edwardian costumes.  Allison Chang kept it all organized. A tiny version of the poster hangs by my bed here in Ohio--Alixa drew our magazine cover!

Pippin—replacing the boys who lacked commitment with Nora Zimmett as Pippin!  Lauren Willig as Charlemagne in gold painted football pads.

Anything Goes—telling the accompanist he had to play with BOTH hands on the keyboards.

Caroline and Joanna and Georgia and the racist characterization of the two Chinese characters that led us to a new chapter about equity and inclusion in our plays.

The Scottish Play—stained glass window costumes, Nora’s Lady M on the balcony of the Assembly Room; setting off smoke detectors with the fog—Kristen Kenny’s amazing work and Clelia’s Macduff and their great fight.

Revolution!  One of our most ambitious productions, the third  play we wrote from scratch was inspired by the girls’ interest in an etching in their history book of women—fishwives and prostitutes—marching on Versailles.  We turned the Assembly Room into Paris—the stage—and Versailles—the windows facing the building next door filled with enormous vases full of flowers and sprayed with something to prevent the audience from seeing into the neighbors’ windows.  Exquisite performances and amazing writing: Lucy, Alexandra, EB, Georgia, Lily, Nancy, Caroline, Janet, Sabina, Martha, the Kent sisters, and ANF keeping it all running. We alternated between Paris and Versailles trying to imagine how the women in both settings felt.  And we had a spy plot! Alixa came back to help us with the costumes. 

Twelfth Night  Our first production in the Black Box with gorgeous drops painted by Theresa—set in the 1920’s—hilarious Martha Roberts, swinging from a pole as Sir Toby; EB as Malvolio in yellow stockings, Georgia as Viola, Lili as Maria, Laura as the Priest and elegant Lucy as Olivia. 

Johnny Belinda  Polly popping popcorn on cue was one of Seth’s greatest triumphs!  The beautiful signed Lords’ Prayer—Georgette and Lili and Amy Boyle sharing the role of Belinda with Georgia as the hateful villain.

Peter Pan Lili playing the guitar; Georgette as Smee in a boat that moved across the Black Box floor; Justine as Tink in a tutu, wildly ill on Saturday night, but determined to go on, Amy Boyle as Tiger Lily, Elizabeth Grant as Wendy, Hana, too, but I can’t remember if she was Mr. Banks or a brother--and Emily Meisler in footie pajamas as Michael!.  Julia directed this one, but I loved it. Tender but not saccharine. 

To Kill a Mockingbird  I’ve written a whole essay about this production, but will say that it stands in my memory as remarkable.  We used the rehearsal process to consider questions of race and class at Chapin. Sharing out narrations, we used Lee’s language to make Maycomb, Alabama in the Black Box,.  We had three Scouts--Hajera, Lindsay Thomas and Jennica with Jenny Lancaster as Atticus and Chris Diggs as Jem with Jennica as Mrs. Dubose—illness struck during production, so we had great understudies take on roles!  The current Broadway production is spectacular, but ours, in the shadow of 9/11 was rich in love. Our own little girls, Miranda and Cordelia, watched every tech rehearsal and every performance from the catwalk. It was during this show that I famously said, “If I ever had a boy baby, I would name him Atticus.”  Little did we know...

Hamlet The Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Met inspired the look and feel of this production, also in the Black Box. We explored ideas about power and corruption and personal responsibility.  Georgette was Gertrude; Jennica was Hamlet; Jenny was Old Hamlet; Sophie was Ophelia; Abby was Claudius; Lindsey was Laertes--it was a hugely strong ensemble. I think of our audacity in producing Hamlet and then think, “Why not?”  It’s a play that speaks to adolescent grief, to culture, to questions about authority.  

Great Expectations  My last show and a tricky one because of all the scene changes that Georgina, thankfully, ran. We returned to the Assembly Room because we needed more space!

To put all my love and even a quarter of my memories  into words reminds me of what a privilege it was to teach drama at Chapin for almost two decades.  I wish I could be with you for this celebration, but I know we can’t always go home again. When I think about all these plays, all these girls we loved so much who peopled our lives--because it was very much a family affair--I remember what it felt like to stand in a circle before opening night, to count the cast down into character, to hug each one, to remind them that “It’s a play, not a work,” and “No matter what happens, deal with it,” and to tell them to “Light up the Sky!”  

I wish the Drama Club a wonderful Centennial.

Making Memories: Some Thoughts about Disney World as a Long Weekend Approaches

Reposting a version from almost a year ago. Thinking of families who might head to see The Mouse this upcoming long weekend or over Spring Break or ever…

Time and Money  Disney World is not an inexpensive way to spend time, and when you spend roughly two hours of standing in line in the sun—no, Fast Pass did not work for us--for a ride that lasts roughly 5 minutes, I begin to question my sanity.

 A Stroller is Key  Once we took our two daughters—perhaps ages 4 and 6—to the Magic Kingdom.  We had four adults plus a stroller.  That was about the right kid to adult ratio, and the stroller was key for holding all the stuff—sweatshirts, discarded but needed later; water bottles, snacks, large stuffed animals, the obligatory mouse ears—where else beyond Disney World would one ever wear such ears?  This time, I wish there for strollers for grownups.  The number of steps I walked—cause for jubilation in some circumstances—made my bad knee ache.  It’s a walking destination—no question.

 Stuff Envy  When we toured the West Coast some years ago in an RV, I discovered an RV subculture of items that I had never even considered—cool hanging lights, a tiny fence for your seven tiny Chihuahuas to lounge outside the RV on a tiny patch of turf, various exotic grilling items.  I longed for stuff I had no use for beyond the week spent in the RV.  So, it is with Disney World—see note above concerning ears and a weird yearning for a Mickey t-shirt.  I squash the longing by buying a pair of socks—the last pair I bought is one of my favorite pairs of socks.  I looked upon the new socks as a worthy investment.

 Food is Love  Tiny waffles shaped like Mickey adorn the over-priced breakfast buffet.  They are cute.  Very cute.  But no breakfast buffet was ever worth $29.  I resist the urge to tell my son and our exchange student to eat more, to put extra tiny chocolate croissants in their pockets to eat throughout the day. 

 Sociology  It’s hard not to encounter WDW as a huge sociological experiment.  After all, there you are, surrounded by many, many other people.  The outfits, the little girls in costume, the multi-generational families—it is some kind of cross section of affluent and largely white America.  And the place is clean.  Very, very clean with flowerbeds meticulously maintained.  It’s a gigantic stage set, but we all participate cheerfully in sustaining the illusion. We want to believe in make believe—for the children?  Maybe.  But I think some piece of the grownups there crave magic, too, crave happy endings and manicured order. Disney World meets some need or it wouldn’t have lines that curve round and round filled with cheerful people playing Head’s Up on their phones with strangers. Oh, those aren’t strangers after all.  It’s my son and our Turkish exchange student, Melis, playing with strangers.  I sort of love that!

 Hospitality  People who work at Disney are well-trained in the whole customer service mentality.  No one is snarky or barks at you or glares—in other expensive venues, snottiness is often de rigeur, but not at Disney World—the cashiers, the ticket takers, the waiters, the people tidying the restrooms—all are preternaturally cheerful, but it’s a nice thing.  Slightly creepy, but very nice. 

 Culture  We went to Disney World this March because we were already in Florida visiting relatives, and because we knew our son would enjoy being the expert tour guide for our exchange student.  I could manage two days of extreme heat, extreme lines, and extreme expense.  But here’s what I don’t get.  People return to Disney over and over again.  It’s as if by visiting Epcot, they feel they don’t need to go to any other real countries.  This puzzles me.  Epcot is lovely—beautifully designed in terms of offering mini-countries.  But they are not the real countries. 

 Entitlement  I’m back to money.  Sparkly tiny purple glitter back packs cost $95.  $30 gets you Minnie ears on a headband with a polka dot bow.  The aforementioned breakfast buffets.  The expensive hotel rooms at the Swan—this time we needed two.  The last time we stayed over—one night about eight years ago—we stuffed our family of five and two friends into one bedroom, but decorum required a separate bedroom for our exchange student.  I wanted the Mickey ice cream bar—it’s just a popsicle, but whenever I thought about buying it, I thought about how ridiculous it is to pay that kind of money for a popsicle and I resisted.  What could I bring my students?  I have twenty in my English class.  What could I bring them that would not break the bank?  I finally settled on tiny Japanese erasers shaped like animals—six per pack for $6.75—basically a dollar per eraser—and it felt like a bargain.  People bring huge families and stay in the Disney resorts and eat there…the cost boggles me.

 Comparisons to other Families  You can’t help it. Sometimes, your family looks so good by comparison.  Sometimes, you want a chasm to open and swallow you whole.  Your parenting is on display in front of millions of strangers with their own family dramas.  It’s a great “judge not lest you be judged” setting. 

 Pool  It was lovely.  I wish we had spent more time in it. 

 Being Present  Too absorbed in sensory overload, I almost missed the best moments.  At Epcot, my son and I ate dinner together the first night, traveling from one food stand to the next, a race before they closed, sharing a dish.  “We’re eating around the world,” he explained.  And it was fun.  We stood on a low wall and watched the fireworks.  “The blue ones are the most expensive,” I told him, his eyes glowing as we gazed up at the bright dark sky.  Later, walking out of the park, we admired some sparkly bits in the sidewalk.  A tiny girl in a stroller next to us noticed the shining dots just as we did.  “I like the sparkles,” she cooed.  Me, too.  “I saw fireworks tonight and they were all diamonds and I think some of them fell down from the sky and landed here.”  Her mother told her how clever she was.  I looked at my son, walking next to me, now taller than I.  For a moment, I let my churlishness subside, my worry about money, about privilege, about long lines and heat.  I looked at my son, at the little girl rolling past us in the warm dark evening.  “I think you’re right,” I said out loud to her.  She grinned.  My son, who hates when I speak to strangers, squeezed my hand.  Making memories.  They know how to do it.

Gird the Cats!

This year’s holiday battle cry in our home was, “Gird the cats,” a malapropism that stuck.  Beginning on December 20th, we hosted our daughter’s rescue dog, Artemis or Artie, who, anxious in new situations, was not a fan of our menagerie. Cordelia was afraid that, upon meeting one of our pets, Artemis would eat it for lunch—or dinner or breakfast.   The three dogs and the fish were easy to contain behind the kitchen door.  The cats, however, roam free throughout our house, and we worried about Artemis’s delicate nerves, not to mention the potential sacrifice of one of the metaphorical nine lives of one of our three cats.

“Are the cats girded?” we asked one another. Initially, whoever started the expression combined guard and herd, but the term caught on in our family.

“Could you gird the cats?”  someone hollered down the stairs. “Have we ungirded the cats?” we’d ask hours after we had contained them in a room.  Or the simple command, by text:  Gird.

After a week or so of assiduous girding, we grew lax.  One morning Artemis encountered our small calico, Phoebe, on the stairs.  No harm ensued. Phoebe gracefully leapt down the steps.  Artemis hardly noticed her. A few days later, we allowed Artie to pass through the front hall while black Tonio hid, undetected, beneath a chair.  While our dogs definitely knew there was a stranger in the house, the cats seemed unconcerned.

We embraced various forms of the verb, to gird.  We made it our own, introduced it into the lexicon of our family.  Early in the New Year, Seth sent us the etymology of the verb to gird, which derives from the ancient custom of girding one’s loins, as in cinching or wrapping a piece of fabric tightly around the mid-section in order to make flowing robes less dangerous in battle.  In more modern times, the connotation of girding one’s loins has come to mean to prepare oneself for a difficult situation, to get ready.  The idea of actually girdling the cats or trying to do so made me laugh.  They are their own creatures, alternately friendly and ferocious.  Over the holiday, they allowed themselves to be picked up docilely or scratched ferociously.  While Cordelia worried that Artemis might munch a cat, I worried that one of the cats would take Artemis down. 

Artemis lived in Cordelia’s bedroom, crated when we needed to be downstairs.  She may look ferocious, but is a love, pacing and whining when Atticus, our son, her primary care taker during Cordelia’s vist to her beau in Montana, left the room.  One day, I surrendered to a migraine and lay on Cordelia’s bed, Artie my faithful companion. Thinking about what she endured before Cordelia and Cole gave her her forever home makes me sad.  She is afraid of wind, pigeons, people, squirrels, snow, the inflatables on our front yard, loud noises, strangers, and, sometimes, people she knows—if only briefly.  But, she is a good dog, rich in love and kisses, delighted to have scratches and much larger than our little three.   It was fun having a canine houseguest, though I felt sorry that she couldn’t mingle with the rest of us downstairs and worried, always, about her wellbeing and the wellbeing of the cats. 

The other night, the black cat, Tonio, and the grey cat, Sebastian, did not come in when Seth gave the dogs their evening walk.  It is Sebastian’s practice to walk the circle with Seth and the three dogs, to use the dog door if necessary to come back into the house, to curl up on a coat or in a shoe cubby or on a dog bed.  Tonio never walks the whole way, but recently, both of them have been inside long before bedtime.  Phoebe, the little calico, never goes outside.  10:00 p.m. came, then 11:00.  I called and called.  Tonio often comes when he is called.  Finally, Seth put his clothes back on, went downstairs and walked and called.  He returned, cat-less.  As he was ready to give up, he turned around and saw both cats.  Had they come in and he hadn’t noticed?  Had they been there all along?  No matter.  They were safe.  We could sleep. 

And now, Cordelia and Cole are gone, Artie in her crate, looking dolefully out the back window as Cordelia and Cole make their way back to Manhattan.  The cats seem to have taken their departure calmly.  Tonio is sleeping on my bed.  Phoebe is sleeping on my freshly laundered pile of black slacks.  And Sebastian is in the kitchen with the dogs, sleeping in their bed.  Let’s be clear who is in charge in this family. 

Happy 2020.

Old Enough to Know

Fifty-nine for a week, and I keep hearing my father’s voice reminding me that I am old enough to know better.  Here, as we approach the end of the decade, are some of the things I know I am old enough to know.

 I am old enough to know:

That, as my mother used to say, things often do look better in the morning.

That dishes will not wash themselves.

Wet towels, left on bathroom floors, have a tendency to reproduce.

That the end of December can feel melancholy.

That the pleasure of gifts lies more in giving than in receiving.

That Christmas without a small child in the house feels smaller, somehow.

That busy is not the same as purposeful.

That no one can ever really understand another person’s marriage or relationship.

That keeping my mouth shut is often the best choice, especially during large family gatherings.

That the smell of coffee brewing cheers the house.

That my gas fire, even if largely placebo, still pleases me.

That the hour before everyone awakes—even the pets—is my hour for writing and thinking.

That scrolling Facebook can lead to feelings of loneliness, and self-control is required to move onto something more productive. 

That white mint chocolate chip ice cream is not as good as green mint chocolate chip ice cream.

That I do better early in the morning than late at night.

That my birthday might be more fun if it were at another time of year.

That rejections of essays mean that I’m submitting essays.

That I am a cheap date; half a glass of wine and I am sleepy, and New Year’s Eve is a dumb holiday.

That any leftover, kept more than 3 days in the fridge, will lose whatever appeal it once had.

That living in clutter overwhelms me.

That sometimes, though I fear conflict, given time, things work out.

That it is more fun to look forward to a holiday than to recover from it.

That wet shower curtains touching wet skin is unpleasant.

That it is more fun to make a meal than to clean it up.

That the holidays make me miss my parents even though they have both been gone almost a decade.

That odd snippets of memory float up from childhood when we are engaged in our own family celebrations.

That lighting Hanukah candles is one of my favorite rituals.

But the sight of menorahs covered in wax several days later is slightly dispiriting, and the thought of washing them all and putting them away until next year—plus the Christmas ornaments—is daunting.

That it’s not so easy for adult children to come back home and it is not so easy for their mother when they leave. 

That I have more books to read than uninterrupted time to read.

That resolutions enrage me because I feel so angry at myself when I don’t live up to them. So this year, heading into the new decade, I won’t have any and will practice compassion for all I may not accomplish. 

The Time is Out of Joint

 One too warm September afternoon, I take refuge in the air-conditioned mall.  As I hand over my credit card, my phone vibrates.

“Mom, where are you? Firemen are in our house.” 

What?  In fact, I’m shopping.  I’m playing hooky from my life, taking advantage of a small break as the over-scheduled headmistress of an all-girls school on a Friday afternoon.  I am buying an over-priced Eileen Fisher outfit, my son and husband having headed to Michigan for the weekend. I’m alone.

I urge the saleswoman to simply throw the clothes into my arms,  imagining flames shooting up, gray plumes of acrid smoke spiraling from the slate roof. Our Tudor-esque house was built in 1929 by alumnae for their beloved headmistress. Now, I’m the headmistress. I love our house, love the way it restores me each weekend after long days of meetings and conflicts and the inevitable challenges of life as the leader of any school.  The house holds us safe within its sturdy walls, a fortress, a messy sanctuary. I do not want the firemen to chop down our arched front door—like a hobbit door, the children say. I dash to the car, drive an interminable six minutes.

Three fire engines greet me parked at the curb at the edge of our lawn  I whisk out of the car, race through the back door, where our neighbor, Heather, is graciously accompanying the firemen.  My quick-thinking husband had phoned her as I drove home.  Our alarm is blaring: squawk, squawk.  It’s too loud, relentless.  I try to reset it, but the code doesn’t take. Unconcerned, the firemen ask where the smoke detectors are. I point up; we are standing underneath one outside the basement door.  

“Any others?”  I do not know.  I feel guilty, like a bad mother.  I have raised a son and two daughters in this house.  I ought to know.

After a brief lecture on clutter, the firemen depart and Heather leaves with them.  The alarm continues to screech.  I walk the first floor, unsettled. In the living room, a table’s polished surface is sprinkled with water.  Did a fireman rest an extinguisher on the table? I look up.  Two long cracks stripe the plaster ceiling.  Like tiny clear teeth, water droplets form along the fissures, dripping onto the table, onto the rug.  “Aha!” I say aloud.  Not fire.  Water.  How did water trip the alarm system?  

A few hours later, I sit alone in the den. Our grown daughters now live in Manhattan; my son and husband are in Ann Arbor for a football game.  In Shaker Heights, it’s just me.  The last decade and a half swivel in my memory as I listen to Ken, the plumber, and a maintenance man from school move furniture, shake out drop cloths. I remember my son in footy pajamas at the top of the stairs, each elegant daughter descending the staircase for prom. I conjure our elaborate Christmas display, see us lighting the menorahs in the living room window. I lose myself in times past, helpless to fix whatever is awry.  There is no action to take, just an odd sense of being alone, of casting on memories of our family’s life is this beloved space over many years. Though my lap is empty, in my mind, I am knitting row after row of recollection.  I shudder at today’s close call, think about how much worse it could have been. I am frightened by what did not happen.  Fire would have been irrevocable.

I hear the plumber intone, “We need to go in.”  Plaster rains down. I calculate how much all this will cost the school—fixing the leak, fixing the plaster. I put a photograph of the gaping ceiling wound on Facebook; friends commiserate. It’s just a leak, inconvenient, not fatal. The school was built the year my mother was born; I used to tease that older ladies—schools, women—were slow to reveal their secrets, but both needed loving maintenance, occasional restoration. My mother is gone now.  The school and the house endure, their structure sturdier than my mortal mother.

A week later, on Friday the 13th, my husband and I go to a play. With a pop and flash, the power fails—in the theatre and in the region. We wait a few minutes. Should we go or should we stay? Finally, we decide to leave.  On the drive home, lightning flashes, strobe-like.  Sirens wail. The streets have flooded--gushing brown rivers of deep water. Tree limbs tumble, jagged, across streets--a disco gone off the rails. A microburst.  At home, our son is glad of our early return. One cat is dripping by the back door.  We are reunited. Only the next day do we understand the vast destruction in our neighborhood, how lucky we were to be unscathed.  Again, I shudder, contemplating what could have been, grateful.

Meanwhile, our house reveals more leaks.  More holes are cut.  The insides come out—ancient corroded pipes, lathe, plaster. Dining room furniture is shoved against the wall underneath my great-grandmother’s portrait. Huge sheets of plastic taped to the walls of the dining and living rooms rustle and dance, billowing ghosts. We camp out in the family room, laughing at the ways in which chaos closes in on us.  In the midst of this madness, my husband has surgery, gets a new shoulder, begins to heal.

Houses can be fixed. Eventually, all will be whole again. Families are harder to repair. Last month, I visited the cemetery of the church where we grew up—my sister and I—thinking about our parents and our long dead brother.  It’s death I fear the most. Those ruptures cannot be mended; their aftermaths spool out forever.

In my new navy Eileen Fisher outfit, I consider climate change, the destruction of the microburst, our house, families, choices we have and those that are thrust upon us. Shakespeare used foul weather to signal chaos— happenings in the external world mirrored disorder in society in his plays. Our house is crumbling. The world is off its axis. Global warning? How safe are we?  

Light Up the Sky!

Light Up the Sky

Tonight, our son has his first opening night in a high school play, Galileo.  I’m on the East Coast for work and will miss his performance, but I will be there tomorrow and Saturday and Sunday.  As I woke in an unfamiliar bed in a lovely inn this morning, I remembered the sense of excitement I always felt the morning before we opened a play—equal measures of anticipation and butterflies.

“When I was your age,” I told my son yesterday, “During tech week, I just wanted school to be over to get to rehearsal?  Do you feel like that?”

 We were packing up the make up we had staggered into CVS at 10:00 the night before: foundation, eye shadow, neutral lipsticks. I had forgotten he would need make up.

“I guess.  Sort of,” he offered. 

Our children do not always do what we love.  My daughters were gymnasts.  My son played soccer.  But theatre is in the center of the Venn diagram of our family’s overlapping interests.  Atticus’ opening night brings my own time on stage flooding back.

In First Grade I starred as Chicken Little, sporting a bright yellow ensemble, replete with tail feathers, maybe a headpiece?  I skittered onto the stage of the assembly room to announce, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling…”  Who knew I had been type cast, worrying as natural to me as breathing?  Often, I think Chicken Little and Cassandra on the ramparts of Troy are the same character, doomed to speak a truth no one wants to hear. It was good training for being a mother, a headmistress.  No matter.  From that moment, my truth was theatre.

In the summer, I went to the playhouse in Eagles Mere, watching shows again and again, thrilled to play a little blind girl in The Miracle Worker and a little no-neck monster in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  My imagination was my super power.  I lived to read and act and imagine.

In third grade, I was costumed as Sara Noble and memorized a monologue to share during my second grade teacher’s graduate school class.  My calico dress had a red and white sprig.  I carried a basket.  I felt so proud and pleased to be asked. I have no memory of my performance, but I had a clear speaking voice and was loud enough to be easily heard. In fifth grade, I lay on a construction paper beach as Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins—by vote of the class—an odd way to cast a play. 

I love, loved, am still in love with, will always love make believe. I keep a finger puppet in my purse—a wizard dog.  You never know when some pretend play will be necessary.  I whip it out frequently on planes to quiet querulous passengers—usually children. Theatre is make-believe. I found my place there.

In the fall of tenth grade, a wise English teacher sent me to audition for Our Town at Haverford, the boys’ school my brother had gone to before he left for boarding school, before he died in a car accident in early August before he was to have gone off to college. That play confirmed my path, let me grieve because Thornton Wilder wrote a play that allowed me to begin to process my grief.

In high school, our plays were more sophisticated—real sets and costumes and lights—bright fresnels and lekos making us squint as we looked out at the audience.  I was in productions at Agnes Irwin, my own all girls’ school, but there were more plays to be in at the two all boys’ schools. Soon, I was never not in a show—a habit that led to procrastination in terms of schoolwork, but a hunger that needed to be fed, that kept me moving forward. 

I loved the process—repeated show to show, the traditions, the sense of community, the tolerance of big emotions.  First, auditions, then clumsy read-throughs, rehearsals when we might see a glimmer of what the performance could be, a surprising run through that went well, a dress rehearsal that suggested doom.  Tech Week nights were long and thrilling—we ate Oreos and Tony’s cheesesteaks—meat and onions and ketchup on long greasy buns.  We fretted occasionally about homework left undone as we lurched towards a show that would make us proud, but we were deep in, fully committed, determined to make a great play.  At home, I would wash off my stage makeup—or I wouldn’t because I liked how it made me look—mysterious, not like myself--and I’d fall into bed, deeply satisfied. 

I specialized in old ladies.  “You’re a character actress,” Mr. Worth at the boys’ school told me once, not unkindly, but not the identity I would have chosen. What ugly duckling doesn’t yearn to be the ingénue?   I felt real envy that lovely Julie played Emily in Our Town, while I played the Woman in the Balcony.  She had a love scene with Doug.  I grew to have Doug’s friendship.  In The Mousetrap, Doug gently murdered me, Mrs. Boyle, an annoying guest, several nights in a row.  I wore a yellow wig as the owner of the carousel in Carousel and cackled at dreamy John Langfitt, but his character, Billy Bigelow, loved Julie Jordan—tall, gorgeous Tracey, one of my classmates.  

In that hideous straw colored wig, I heard my father whisper, “Where’s Ann?” from his seat in the front row.  My mother lent anything—props, furniture—to our theatrical endeavors.  Once, when the lights went up, my father, who had been traveling, breathed too loudly: “It’s our living room.”  And it was—sofa, end tables, grandfather clock, oriental carpet, waste basket.  I loved my mother’s generosity, her easy banter with the boys who came to load—ever so gently—our furniture into a pick-up truck.  Her generosity made me indispensable.  I loved that, too.  As Seniors, Corky and I played the two murdering sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace, running up a flight of stairs where the boys on the crew painted a warning up the steps, visible to us but invisible to the audience: WALLS WET—DON’T TOUCH.

I loved the costumes, the faint smell of perspiration clinging to the rack, a combination of old, formerly worn items mixed with baby powder and deodorant.  I could always find the missing suspenders, the errant bow tie, the slip that had fallen off its hanger.  I could sew a little, too, so I was the one to put a button back on or mend a tear. 

Before You-Tube, I learned to do age makeup from a book, blending shadows and drawing lines with eyebrow pencils to create the valleys and contours I now possess. I arranged countless pompadours, buns, twists—ironic since my own  hair is rarely styled.  I could age a classmate’s head with baby power and spray dye.  The faucets in the boys’ school gymnasium—our backstage--ran only cold water. My face felt stretched across my bones under the cold wet sponge thick with pancake make up—those round cakes were made by Ben Nye, and you had to wet the sponge the soften the cake to spread the foundation across your face. I filled my make up box—originally my brother’s red tackle box, left unclaimed in his empty room—with lipsticks and pots of cream shadow and tiny sponges.  I knew never to share mascara!  A tiny brass crane—no more than 2 inches tall—found its way to the bottom of the box—and is still there, I suspect.  A talisman whose origins are unknown.  My fingers caressed it before each performance.  The box and the heron must still be in Eagles Mere in our barn, my brother’s name, James R. Klotz, embossed in white letters on a black plastic strip.

“Five minutes,” the stage manager would call.

“Thank you, five,” we’d chorus, making our way to the wings, waiting for “Places,” for the lights to dim to black and then come up, listening to the hummed rustle of the audience begin to quiet, squinting up at the bright grid, so excited to share our work, hoping all the cues would happen as required. After, hugging in triumph, we’d drive to cast parties, where parents seemed oblivious to the keg in the front yard, the cloying smell of weed.  Because my brother had died, I was the squeaky-clean, designated driver, the one who cleaned up, kept the rest of them safe, welcomed entirely by this tribe but never pressured to indulge.  They all knew my story.  Boys who take big risks end up dead.  I took risks only on stage.

I remembered the feeling of sleeping late on Sunday morning after the last performance, stretching languorously, feeling dejected and mournful, already focused on anticipating the next production. 

Junior year, my heart broke when, during auditions for Charley’s Aunt—my beloved Doug’s last play—the director asked me to come down from the stage and sent Laura up.  He switched some others, too, and eventually said, “You are looking at the cast.”  I was in the audience, not onstage.  Even as I fled the basement, not wanting everyone to see me cry, I knew this was a cruel way to cast a play.  As I pulled out of the boys’ school’s driveway, Doug flagged me down.

“Ansky,” he said softly, “It’s my last show.  I thought you’d be in it with--I mean, I just assumed—promise me, you’ll work on it?” 

Ansky.  That was his name for me.  I melted, instantly agreeing to stage manage, ending up with 37 stitches down the side of my nose, thanks to a nail in a piece of errant scenery. And because of that accident, when Doug asked what he could do for me, I took advantage of my huge pressure bandage at the cast party I had refused to miss to ask him to take me to my prom. Packing up the contents of my mother’s house, years ago, in my old room, I found all of my programs in a box, signed with the effusions that characterize theatre kids and withered rose petals, lovingly pressed between black and white publicity shots of various productions. 

Theatre gave me purpose, gave me a home, a path through all the feelings no one could talk about in our family.  The summer after Junior year, I went to Carnegie-Mellon to study theatre:  voice and movement and script analysis.  I was thirsty, insatiable to learn all I could.  But when, at summer’s end, they offered me a place in the freshman class, I turned it down.  I could not imagine missing my senior year, leaving home—and that choice, I suspect, was the first hint that I wasn’t meant to be an actor.  I didn’t want it enough, to the exclusion of every other interest.

Even after Charley’s Aunt, there were more plays: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead where I played the Player.  In college, my Lady Bracknell was reviewed as possessing the quality of flat ginger ale, a review so stinging I recall it forty years later.  I played Aunt Ev in The Miracle Worker and that brought me Seth, so, though the part stunk, the outcome was worthwhile. 

But it was in college that the real miracle happened.  I discovered that I was a director.  Only now at 58, am I approaching the age of the roles I was born to play—but to shape the experience—from auditions to strike—was the right role for me.  I discovered how much I loved collaborating with a team of designers, setting the vision, planning rehearsals, cajoling actors into taking risks, finding truth, building trust.  Before we were even married, Seth and I made a summer program for high school actors—and we ran it for 27 summers.  It was a glorious long run.  I learned I was an acting teacher, able to help my students unlock the truth and vulnerability I found it hard to access on my own.  I went from being backstage, shivering in the wings, my fingers tingling, to being front of house, notebook perched on a music stand with a blue gel dimming the clip light attached to the stand, waiting, holding my breath, so awed by the bravery of the young people on the stage. 

Then that chapter ended, too.  I became a headmistress, no longer a drama teacher. My daughters, students in the school I led, made it clear they didn’t want me near the theatre. I could watch—from a distance.  Miranda became an extraordinarily competent stage manager.  Cordelia appeared luminous as Jo in Little Women, Cassandra in Trojan Women, in play after play in college. She pursues her career as an actor every day. 

And tonight, Atticus will appear as Cosimo deMedici in Brecht’s Galileo.  My only job was to bring a case of water and some snacks to their Sunday rehearsal.  I will sit in the audience and watch, holding my breath that all goes well for him.  I will remember, too, the girl I was a long time ago, who lived from play to play

 . 

My drama self pushes against all the other roles I play.  Each spring, I make a play with the little girls in my school, a different iteration of my director self, but not a bad one.  They get costumes, but no make up.

“Light up the sky!” I say to every cast in my care.  If I squint, I imagine I can still see the fleshy streaks of make up left on the sink in the Haverford School dressing room.  I wipe it up with a scrap of toilet paper, tidy the bobby pins, and turn out the light.  I carry that girl—that useful girl—with me every day.   

“To Learn, to Lead, to Live a Legacy”

Two weeks ago, I was welcomed back to my alma mater, The Agnes Irwin School, in Rosemont, PA, to give a keynote address as the school celebrated its 150th birthday on Founder’s Day.  It was one of the greatest honors of my life—a life that has been shaped by girls’ schools.  I was a “lifer” at AIS, spending thirteen years in an environment that taught me how to think and write and question and how to lead.  There, I learned that what I thought was more important than what I looked like and my opinions had worth. I learned to “stand up and be counted” (though I did not meet the headmistress who told her girls that until later in my career).  As I prepared for my talk, I counted up my years spent in girls’ schools: thirteen years at AIS, 20 years at a girls’ school in Manhattan, and fifteen years at Laurel, the school I am privileged to lead. That’s forty-eight of my fifty-eight years on earth.  I have drunk the Kool-Aid of girls’ schools. Girls’ schools are in my DNA. At an all-girls’ school, it’s not equal opportunity for girls, it’s every opportunity for girls.  

Gazing out at the whole school—assembled on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in their uniforms—blue and gold as it has always been--I saw a group of unfamiliar girls and young women. Yet they were instantly recognizable.  Before me floated my Laurel girls, their plaid skirts and jumpers in different hues, the beloved faces swimming up. I saw my own two daughters, girls’ school alumnae. I saw every girl in a girls’ school and felt the privilege and the weight of tradition and innovation in the air. From the corner of my eye, I imagined I had conjured my grandmother as a girl, her hair in a pompadour, her skirts to her ankle, learning and studying with the AIS’ founder’s sister, the second headmistress.  And I saw myself, too, as a girl—wide-eyed, curious, expectant in a cable knit sweater and clogs, certain that I was being prepared to change the world. It was humbling to consider how best to inspire this gorgeous, brilliant group.  

The spine of my talk was the life of the school’s founder, Agnes Irwin.  I spent the summer reading up on her, trying to imagine what she would want me to say to “her” girls.  A formidable woman—well ahead of her time—she established and ran the school, served as the first Dean of Radcliffe College, maintained devoted relationships throughout her life, read voraciously, and considered herself a life-long student.  Miss Agnes led by example, striving to learn and to accept challenges throughout her life. She was a tremendous role model. Recently, a colleague shared with me that the level of learning in a school for children can never exceed the level of learning for the faculty. Miss Agnes never stopped learning.  

Among the girls sat the faculty, thoughtful, smart, deeply committed professionals.  When I blinked, in their place, I saw my own teachers—majestic in memory. My teachers inspired me, invested in me, reminded me of my worth, urged me to use my voice for good.  During my speech, I spoke the names of those teachers I loved—not because many in the room would recognize them, but because I wanted to honor them, to thank them for all they had given.  In girls’ schools, faculty design extraordinary experiences for girls, asking them to think critically, to detect bias, to express their authentic selves, to stretch, to grow, to risk—it is hard work; most of our teachers are undercompensated.  They show up and offer their minds and their love to our girls. Our girls’ school faculties are exceptional. 

The mission statement at Irwin’s is “To learn, to lead, and to live a legacy.” At first, it puzzled me. I thought the “live” was a typo.  Aren’t we supposed to leave a legacy? “Live” was correct. So, I mulled over what it means to live our legacy, to be conscious of the example we set as we are setting it.  Does it mean we are aware that actions have consequences? Does it mean that we are living not only for ourselves but for others? I was overjoyed to be in the company of the Head of the School, a colleague I cherish, who is, I think, living her legacy in her gracious, wise leadership of this school that we both love.

The weekend was glorious.  We celebrated Miss Agnes in style.  I greeted old friends, struggled to connect names to faces, smiled a lot, enjoyed being a demi-celebrity who did not have to make a single decision all weekend or be in charge of anyone or anything.  I returned home to Laurel, so appreciative of my colleagues. A few days ago, I learned of the death of one of the great luminaries in girls’ school, Burch Ford. Her death was not a surprise; she had been ill for a number of years, but knowing that she was gone saddened me.  I began to think about the other women who have walked before me and beside me, guiding me, challenging me, lifting me up: Agnes Irwin, Anne Lenox, Martha Goppelt, Meg Donnelly, Millie Berendsen, Blair Stambaugh, Stephanie Balmer, Sue Bosland, Penny Evins, Julia Heaton, Yanni Hill Gill, Kathryn Purcell, Wanda Holland Green, Wendy Hill.  Yesterday, still aglow from my time at Agnes Irwin, I read an essay written by another school head I admire, Kathie Jamieson. She characterized our roles as heads of school as being the “encourager-in chief.”  

That term feels apt.  It is our job to inspire, to encourage, to offer a word, a smile, a hand. Miss Agnes Irwin was stern, forbidding even.  Her standards were high, yet her girls and faculty sought to please her, to win her affection and respect. As I consider her legacy and my own, I think about the opportunity I have to live my legacy, to encourage, to take the time to show a girl that I see her, that I know she is trying her hardest, to take the time to reassure a parent that all will be well, to tell a faculty member I appreciate how hard she is working and how effective she is.  

To be chosen to lead a school is a remarkable privilege and obligation.  I grew up with the mantra, “of those to whom much is given, much is expected.” Returning to, AIS meant swimming with ghosts--my childhood self, my mother and grandmother, other formidable relatives who expected me to use my gifts for good.  Agnes Irwin took attendance at the end of the day and asked each of her students, “What good did you do today?” It’s a big question, a reckoning centered in character and generosity. Thinking about my own mentors and the faculty and staff and girls in my school as well as the children and adults in other great girls’ schools, I am filled with awe and humility.  How lucky I am to live among girls, lifted up by exceptional educators who lived their legacies.

AVK and the No Good, Very Bad, Terrible, Rotten Night

Right before dinner, Atticus asks me to grab his phone upstairs.  Foolishly, I leave everything out and return to the kitchen to discover Diva, our blind rescue dog, standing on the table, having devoured the sliced Porquetta I have proudly served. I yell at her.  She does not get off the table; there are too many dishes for her to find her way.  Atticus or Seth lifts her down.  I weep in frustration, wanting to slam doors and make a dramatic exit from dinner. 

I go back to my real life tomorrow, and the combination of vertigo—a new and unwelcome development—a summer of almost no writing, nursing Seth with his knee replacement, pork-eating dogs, and the idea that my holiday—such as it was—is over—makes me feel sorry for myself and then embarrassed that I am.  More pork sliced, we sit and I fuss at Atticus about his table manners for no reason except that I have veered out of control, so why not scold my son for slurping his noodles? I glare at Seth, who eats calmly, sipping dandelion wine that our friend, Andrea, gave him today for his persistent knee pain.  Atticus refuses the pork, saying he does not like its texture.  Then, he storms from the kitchen because of my correspondence with his soccer coach about pre-season.  I envy his pique and his escape, chewing mechanically, not even tasting my little pork roast.  I feel jagged, full of frayed edges. The storm I drove through this afternoon has settled inside of me, grey clouds lowering, rain pouring so fast I cannot see clearly in between the wiper swipes. It is not a great dinner. 

I take the blueberry peach crisp I’ve made from the oven and set it on the stove. Crashing around the kitchen, I bang pot lids because I can.  I will be the thunder. The crisp starts to bubble.  I have placed it on a burner that is still on.  I hate electric stoves. Upstairs, I pick up more dog poop—it has been raining for much of the afternoon and the dogs refused to go out.  Grim, I flush it and direct a few invectives at the dogs.  I drag my suitcase from a closet and lay it on a bed in a room no one is sleeping in. In the kitchen again, I toss the remaining pork—it has bad karma now.

“Why are you so angry?” Seth asks, helping me with the dishes..

Why am I so angry?

I have no answer.  I feel teary and bleary and childish, gripped in a fit of temper that holds me in its teeth.  How can I be a writer when I am not writing?  How can I lead a school when perennial challenges feel bigger than I am?  How can I plan Miranda’s wedding in this house when it would take me a decade to Marie Kondo it to my satisfaction? How can I face Seth’s next surgery in September when everyone says the recovery for a shoulder is much worse than a knee?  How can I leave Eagles Mere before I’ve seen the bald eagle, who perches in a dead tree on our side of the lake.  Each day, I promise myself I’ll remember to walk down in the afternoon to watch for him, and today it is pouring. 

“We have left undone those things we ought to have done.”  The words of this prayer I say each summer Sunday float up.

I don't like endings much.  And I don’t care for early August, and while we’re at it, I don’t like driving in the rain or the smell of cat food or dog poop in the upstairs bedrooms or the endless piles of dishes and laundry and leftovers.  I don’t like having my in-box cluttered or having the knot hole in the ceiling above my bed spin as I lie there and try to breathe through the vertigo. I don’t like that my sit-up regime lasted only until the vertigo began, with nothing to show for those two weeks of discipline.  I don’t like that piles of unread books reproach me.  And, as long as I am wallowing, I don’t like the obligation I feel to be positive, to look for solutions, to stay optimistic.  That’s my role in our family, in my life.  Moms and leaders can’t just give into self-indulgent temper—very often.

I want to feel like curdled milk, like the wet spot on the new rug that tells me Diva has found a way around going outside. 

“I’m going to my sister’s,” I spit at Seth.

“Okay,” he answers.

I walk toward the lake, mad that the days have grown shorter without my noticing and that the sky is already dark, the air cooler.

I climb my sister’s front steps, open the door and settle into a chair, listening to my niece read bedtime stories to my great-niece.  My wise sister reminds me I am juggling a lot, that it’s okay to vent. 

“I am venting to you and to Meg,” I bleat.

My sister relaxes back into the sofa. She knows how to offer refuge, how to make silence a comforter.  She doesn’t flood people with words as I do. I find a Kleenex, sniff, sip some wine, feel tears wet on my cheek.

“The fact is that I have no more to juggle than most women, and I feel so steeped in privilege that I feel wildly guilty for feeling anything other than grateful for the circumstances of my life. Self-pity is so unbecoming,” I think inside my squally self, and in my sister’s non-judgmental calm, my rage begins to melt. 

Often I tell teary girls in the school I lead, “Have your feelings.  They’re just feelings.  They will move and change.  No harm will come to you by feeling angry or stuck or helpless or mad or jealous or envious or spiteful.  It’s like the children’s book, Going on a Bear Hunt.  You can’t go under it; you can’t go over it. You just have to go through it.  All of it.”

Time to take my own medicine.  Summer is ending.  I am mad because of all I wanted to do that I haven’t done.  Mad I forgot to watch fireflies, mad not to have seen enough hummingbirds or to have de-cluttered the front hall.  Mad that my flip flops are wet through. Mad that the dogs will never really be housebroken.  Mad that people who are fifteen will sometimes be mad at their mothers—with good reason.  I walk up the hill in the damp dark, the silvery puddles reflecting street lamps. The lights on the first floor of our house glow golden against the dark wood walls, welcoming me home.  Seth is watching a movie.  Atticus returns, carrying our old gray cat.  We eat some blueberry peach crisp.  We watch the debate, candidates interrupting each other, preening like annoying birds, women being cut off.  I allow myself to feel worried, anxious, mad about the world.  Nothing bad happens. A little later, we go up to bed.  On the spool bed that was my grandmother’s, I prop myself up on pillows—a stranger at the Ben Franklin suggested it might help with the vertigo.  My yoga teacher daughter would not approve; she has taught me to sleep flat.  But up on the pillows, nothing spins. It’s okay to accept help from time to time. I sleep. 

The Guest Book--Sarah Blake's and Our Own

Some books shake us, make us tremble, hold us in their fierce grip, force a reckoning.  I finish Sarah Blake’s The Guest Book on the settee of our wide porch on this brilliant July day facing the lake that feels like a part of me, like a muscle or a bone or a ligament that connects one part of me to another.  I loved this story and the writing, which is breathtaking, and the hurts and secrets and linen closet in an island cottage full of the detritus of generations. It is a New York story, an island in Maine story—those are not my plot lines.  We do not have lobster much in Eagles Mere.  And yet.  And yet, I recognize the people--the women playing particular roles, the summer rituals persisting from one generation to the next, the water—for us, a lake, not the ocean. I recognize Evie’s fierce desire to protect a house, to claim it as a part of my identity, to keep it safe for children my children have not yet had.  I recognize her reluctance to be practical or to share, the pull a place can have.

Reg and Len are outsiders, and I recognize them, too, as I consider the ways in which we exclude and include in this house, in this town, in our family, in our country—different versions of a history that feels too familiar.

“I never need to write my own memoir about Eagles Mere,” I tell my sister.  “Sarah Blake has already written it much better than I ever could.” I am melancholy, sad to have missed the opportunity to write such a luminous novel.

“But you will write your own story, our story” my sister offers, just as if she were giving me a hand up as we used to scramble up the steep incline from a hike to Haystacks.  There she stands, smiling--my older sister, the image of our mother, elegant and confident, more certain of herself than I have ever known her.  She lives here all the time, not just summers. We have changed, the two of us, shifted the way we interact. It’s as if, when our mother died, we realized it was time to lay down squabbling that had comfortably defined our dynamic, separated by seven years. Without our mother as referee, we realized we had been on the same side all along, tucked into our pew at church each Sunday, our mother in between us in the prayers. She is here in birdsong, in the doe that steps neatly into my sister’s yard this morning as I print a document, in the hummingbirds that visit our feeders, in the glorious mountain sunsets..  Our mother did not like to referee.  We, my sister and I, are conscious of how lucky we are to have each other, to have this place we love, this place that connects us to our past and future.

We are here, all of us, in Eagles Mere, generations of ghosts knocking about, contentedly and less contentedly, in this house, on this lake. Our brother.  Our mother’s brothers. Our grandparents.  Our children, my sister’s grand children. We are all here walking to the Sweet Shop for ice cream cones—mint chocolate chip. We are playing Pinball, ping pong, tennis, breathing in the smell of ashes in the fire place, walking softly on the emerald moss along the Laurel Path, the sound of the water lapping at the dock in the fog.  “Mist before seven; clear by eleven,” intones my sister, her voice an echo of our mother’s.

On the way into the house to write this at my mother’s desk, which was once my brother’s desk, I stop at Grannie’s desk—even my children who never knew their great-grandmother—call it Grannie’s desk. The green leather guestbook lies on the ancient blotter underneath the Book of Common Prayer that I, by accident, purloined from our church last week and must return tomorrow.  In between the guest book—my mother’s quavery hand unmistakable in blue Flair, noting who came and went each season—are four hankies I am pressing like flowers I used to press with Mommy to make books each summer.  Carefully, I would glue the pressed flowers or feathers to construction paper, and together, we would label each page and attach the pages with brass brads she always seemed to have a store of.  If I look hard enough, I would not be surprised to come upon those little albums tucked into a drawer or shelved between books no one has opened for fifty years.  And a trove of brads, themselves, may lurk in an unopened drawer. 

This summer, we have had three bedrooms painted, have thrown away a lot of old clothes, have swept and dusted and arranged for new carpet to be installed and to fix the pinball machine. Our daughter will be married here next summer, thirty-five Augusts after her father and I were married here.  What to keep and what to toss?  I am in the middle, looking forward and back, full of love.

And when I am tired of ministering to this old house, there is the porch waiting full of rockers and a settee and a hammock, and a book like The Guest House, which makes me weep and murmur, “I know them. I know them all.”

Circles of Life

We have moved the mama American Black duck and her ten ducklings to our outdoor campus.  I am trying not to think about foxes and other predators now that the family has been relocated.  If the mother hadn’t made her nest in a courtyard before Easter; if we hadn’t watched her lay her eggs--two or three a day until she had a full clutch; if we hadn’t watched her sit on her eggs once all were laid for several weeks; if we hadn’t had a DuckCam that showed us the tiny ones breaking out of their shells on May 18th; if we hadn’t raced to school on Sunday night to see the ducklings emerging from underneath their mother like tiny dancers from underneath Mother Ginger’s skirts in The Nutcracker-- tiny blazons of yellow fluff blooming on each small damp duckling chest; if we hadn’t cooed and oohed facing the courtyard, behind the glass, so as not to disturb them, then we wouldn’t have been so enchanted by a this maladaptive mom, who landed in the Early Learners courtyard by accident.  A cement enclosure full of toddler slides and trikes, it is fully enclosed—no way in except by air—no way out except through a door.  But she came and built a nest and we kept all the children out of the courtyard while she sat on her eggs.  The teachers made a calendar and we marked off the days--about four weeks.  Once the babies arrived, we were all besotted--the whole school--from toddlers to faculty and parents.  On our last day of English class, I took my ninth graders to see the ducklings--a field trip, I explained, to the Pre-Primary wing.  We stood and gazed, transfixed as the two day old ducklings bobbled around near their mother, already bigger it seemed to me, more confident, their dark feathers glossier.  And then, by Tuesday morning, they were gone, mother netted by a naturalist, babies rounded up, transported to our outdoor campus.  The naturalist deposited them near a pond, where their arrival was heralded with delight by more pre-schoolers who go to school on that campus.  The children stayed back to offer privacy, as the mother leapt into the pond and the ducklings swam behind her, like the chunky beads toddlers first learn to string at uncertain intervals.  And all those reasons are why I am trying not to think about predators and feel reproached when my son scoffs, “Mom, I know all about the circle of life.  I’ve seen The Lion King.”  I am grateful when he turns up Beyonce’s Halo too loud on the radio to chase away my worry..

This circle of life happens each spring in my house and in my school.  The cats, it seems, kill chipmunks almost every day, small limbs strewn on the driveway or left at the back door, or, worst of all, carried inside by one of our dogs.  It is a gruesome habit.  I understand that cats kill. I have explained to the cats that I value their love and do not need their gifts.  Still, they kill.  I avert my eyes, call my son or husband to removed the mangled bits.  Though I am brave, I do not feel equal to chipmunk guts every morning.  There are no cats at our Butler campus, but there are coyotes and raccoons and maybe other creatures, who would cheerfully chomp a baby duck. 

 And then--quite unlike ducks in one way, there is sex trafficking—or, more specifically, the efforts the high school girls in the school I lead have taken to end human trafficking.  Last week, I watched a theatre piece they created with our drama teacher, a brilliant woman I have known since she was not much older than the high school students she teaches.  No Voice, No Choice was a piece of Testimony Theatre, devised by the group to give life to the words of a real person--in this case, a woman who was trafficked, who fought years of addiction and homelessness and assault, and who is a beacon of hope and practical support to others who face perilous cycles—circles again. The girls had met her through a parent in our school, had interviewed her and listened to her story and learned about all aspects of human trafficking as part of a class in Testimony Theatre that ran all year.  I watched the show, absorbed by the commitment the girls showed. Around me, audience members wept.  As the choir joined the ensemble to sing an arrangement of We Shall Overcome and Lean on Me, I felt my eyes well, but it was not until the show ended that I wept when I saw the woman who had inspired this piece embracing the girls who had breathed life into her story.  She cried.  They cried. I cried. I cried because the arts are transformative.  I cried because this group of girls will have an awareness of the issue of human trafficking for the rest of their lives—with a face they recall of a woman whose dignity and presence and generosity moved them.  

I cried because it is my privilege to lead a school where such work happens.  I cried because not every adult and high school student in our school could see this production, and it is too close to the end of the school year to stage again.  I cried for all the girls and boys, black, white, Latinx, Asian, straight, gay, wealthy, poor who could be vulnerable and preyed upon by unscrupulous, abusive, manipulative people—and I can not only not save them, but I might not even know who is a victim and who is a perpetrator.   I cried because this is what I want for all of my girls—to be affected, to fight against injustice, to use their gifts for good. But it is not always easy to raise one’s voice, to know how to make a difference.  Some of our efforts are clumsy or hurtful or ineffective.

So I cried, too, for those ducklings—vulnerable in the natural world—where they ought to be, but like the children in the theatre piece—so exposed to dangers.  It is a time of year that is full of feeling, tears dropping like the fall of pale pink blossoms from our crabapple trees, a dusting of pink snow on the walk that will blow away in a few more days.

The girls have finished the school year. Fourth and eighth and twelfth graders moved up and on to another chapter.  My own son has capped off his Middle School years and will be delivered, in the fall, to high school. Our exchange student returned home to Turkey a week ago, and my husband got a new knee last Monday.

 Circles. This growing up and letting go and starting over journey feels so near in the spring.  It is a waterwheel, circling, lifting the water, turning and letting the water spill.  The unknown future that spools out, that cannot be known or reeled back in.  Unlike my son, I’m not finished reflecting on this cycle, even when its complexities challenge me, frighten me. Simba and Nala are celluloid; their story ends and the credits roll, popcorn spilled across the movie theatre floor.  I, stopped at a traffic light, look at my son, think about change and circles and what it means to be alive and vulnerable.

The Myth of Sisyphus or the Hot Mess Express

a little found poem based on the words of the wonderful women at The Heads Network Leadership Seminar at my own Alma Mater, Agnes Irwin.

Right before I left, the rain was coming, so I made preparations.

I inspected my new house, the one we thought was once big enough

Like my job that was once,

like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right,

But I may have outgrown both house and job.

What could this new chapter be?

I’ve come here to Rosemont to look to the future

My future.

Me: caretaker and mother and school leader and teacher and jack of all trades and the one who gets the job done—

Me, who keeps pushing boulders up endless hills,

who comforts the sick

and kisses the boo-boos

and manages everything with my lopsided grin.

“Do not pass this way again,” the policeman said to my black staff—

What kind of messages do we send? 

Old ones of exclusion, racism, “You do not belong.”

But we do, all of us.

I’ve come to this gorgeous school to remember, to imagine, to foresee, to dream big, but

Nothing is clear yet.

I can’t see my future.

The crystal ball feels cloudy.

But to prepare to see it,

to come to this conference,

I

Moved 60 clay oil lamps out of the way

Kissed my puppy on the forehead

Didn’t kiss my toddler, who was mercifully sleeping,

Caught the dog, offered the job,

Fixed myself up,

Picked out my daughter’s outfits because my husband doesn’t trust himself

And I don’t trust him either.

I left sub plans for conjugating verb forms,

Repotted my plants,

Watched the pre-K mermaid show.

I scooted around on my new scooter—40 is the new 20, right?

The right age to scoot!

Scoot around, scoot into a new school?  A new role?  Maybe.

I pranced around.

Watched Nature Cats,

Consulted my bishop,

Crowned Mrs. Lynch the Duchess of Rosemont,

Confirmed that Grand-friends really is a word—sort of,

Tried to watch the Warriors Game,

Was directed in a play by a bossy senior,

Told my spouse to bring back vegemite,

Adjudicated a debate between Daniel Tiger and the Prince of Egypt

Talked to the school attorney about an employee who is leaving badly.

Smug, we know none in this room would ever leave badly. 

I suggested oblique memes were not an appropriate campaign strategy, though

    Since we see it, we can be it—no, that’s not right

I sent an email to launch a network

Feared I might conflate three quick emails—I should not write three quick emails--

Read an email about Game of Thrones from a first grade parent,

Sent a disappointing email--

Detentions are coming for the chrome books left behind.

Tried to delete the email I sent by accident--

And then another one.  Sigh.

I listened to a Kindergartener read Scooby Doo Bakes a Cake with hard words like Zoiks and Jeepers!

Helped my Uber driver find my house—what was that about?

Drank my coffee alone in the car,

Sat in a very small plane on a tarmac, waiting.

My husband lied to me.

We waited to drop fuel because the plane weighed too much

What exactly is it that I am waiting for?

Just tell me, but until I have clarity, I

Celebrated my new role, was just appointed to a new job.

Went to a baby shower.

All these changes.

I’m excited, I’m terrified.

What am I afraid of?

Will I be bullied by these strange women into considering a chapter I fear considering.

Very likely. 

I started to cry and then got it together.

Of course you did. 

My state, Tennessee, ranks 49th out of 50 in status of women

Ladies, we have some work to do.

Please go to school today and make good choices, dear.

Like wearing underpants—hooray!

Do you think Mommy could do that job?

Mommy has goals and aspirations, too.

Why, yes, she does. 

I don’t even remember what I was doing.

It was so early.

It was too late.

I may have packed too many shoes.

I listened to a petition that suggests we use cameras to catch litterers and then throw them out of school.

While I was here, they had a tornado.

My dress flew over my head.

I snuck out on my Great Sloth’s Rumpus in the Rainforest

Backed out of my office to avoid the conversation about inviting parents on trips

Frantically texted my idea in the shower--

No, no—not in the shower—the idea I had in the shower, but I might text from the shower—if I could.

Because I do so much.

I am like a waiter from a cartoon, the plates piled in a pyramid above my head.

I don’t drop one—ever—though there is no such thing as balance.

I am sure-footed, mountain goats look to me for inspiration.

And now all these women,

these heads,

tall and small, gracious and graceful,

who make me guffaw,

are dressed up like fortune tellers--bright earrings and shawls--

To tell me they see this vision of me—a new version, new vision,

New possibility.

A long time ago, a mentor or guide

Took a bet on my future

So do we, by your sides.

Some thoughts about Disney World

Time and Money  Disney World is not an inexpensive way to spend time, and when you spend roughly two hours of standing in line in the sun—no, Fast Pass did not work for us--for a ride that lasts roughly 5 minute ride, I begin to question my sanity.

A Stroller is Key  Once we took our two daughters—perhaps ages 4 and 6—to the Magic Kingdom.  We had four adults plus a stroller.  That was about the right kid to adult ratio, and the stroller was key for holding all the stuff—sweatshirts, discarded but needed later; water bottles, snacks, large stuffed animals, the obligatory mouse ears—where else beyond Disney World would one ever wear such ears?  This time, I wish there for strollers for grown ups.  The number of steps I walked—cause for jubilation in some circumstances—made my bad knee ache.  It’s a walking destination—no question.

Stuff Envy  When we toured the West Coast some years ago in an RV, I discovered an RV subculture of items that I had never even considered—cool hanging lights, a tiny fence for your seven tiny Chihuahuas to lounge outside the RV on a tiny patch of turf, various exotic grilling items.  I longed for stuff I had no use for beyond the week spent in the RV.  So it is with Disney World—see note above concerning ears and a weird yearning for a Mickey t-shirt.  I squash the longing by buying a pair of socks—the last pair I bought is one of my favorite pairs of socks.  I looked upon the new socks as a worthy investment.

Food is Love  Tiny waffles shaped like Mickey adorn the over-priced breakfast buffet.  They are cute.  Very cute.  But no breakfast buffet was ever worth $29.  I resist the urge to tell my son and our exchange student to eat more, to put extra tiny chocolate croissants in their pockets to eat throughout the day. 

Sociology  It’s hard not to encounter WDW as a huge sociological experiment.  After all, there you are, surrounded by many, many other people.  The outfits, the little girls in costume, the multi-generational families—it is some kind of cross section of affluent and largely white America.  And the place is clean.  Very, very clean with flowerbeds meticulously maintained.  It’s a gigantic stage set, but we all participate cheerfully in sustaining an illusion. We want to believe in make believe—for the children?  Maybe.  But I think some piece of the grown ups there crave magic, too, crave happy endings and manicured order. Disney World meets some needs or it wouldn’t have lines that curve round and round filled with cheerful people playing Head’s Up on their phones with strangers.

Hospitality  People who work at Disney are well-trained in the whole customer service mentality.  No one is snarky or barks at you or glares—in other expensive venues, snottiness is often de rigeur, but not at Disney World—the cashiers, the ticket takers, the waiters, the people tidying the restrooms—all are preternaturally cheerful, but it’s a nice thing.  Slightly creepy, but very nice. 

Culture  We went to Disney World this March because we were already in Florida visiting relatives, and because we knew our son would enjoy being the expert tour guide for our exchange student.  I could manage two days of extreme heat, extreme lines, and extreme expense.  But here’s what I don’t get.  People return to Disney over and over again.  It’s as if by visiting Epcot, they feel they don’t need to go to any other real countries.  This puzzles me.  Epcot is lovely—beautifully designed in terms of offering mini-countries.  But they are not the real countries. 

Entitlement  I’m back to money.  Sparkly tiny purple glitter back packs cost $95.  $30 gets you Minnie ears on a headband with a polka dot bow.  The aforementioned breakfast buffets.  The expensive hotel rooms at the Swan—this time we needed two.  The last time we stayed over—one night about eight years ago—we stuffed our family of five and two friends into one bedroom, but decorum required a separate bedroom for our exchange student.  I wanted the Mickey ice cream bar—it’s just a popsicle, but whenever I thought about buying it, I thought about how ridiculous it is to pay that kind of money for a popsicle and I resisted.  What could I bring my students?  I have twenty in my English class.  What could I bring them that would not break the bank?  I finally settled on tiny Japanese erasers shaped like animals—six per pack for $6.75—basically a dollar per eraser—and it felt like a bargain.  People bring huge families and stay in the Disney resorts and eat there…the cost boggles me.

Comparisons to other Families  You can’t help it. Sometimes, your family looks so good by comparison.  Sometimes, you want a chasm to open and swallow you whole.  Your parenting is on display in front of millions of strangers with their own family dramas.  It’s a great “judge not lest you be judged” setting. 

Pool  It was lovely.  I wish we had spent more time in it. 

Being Present  Too absorbed in sensory overload, I almost missed the best moments.  At Epcot, my son and I ate dinner together the first night, traveling from one food stand to the next before they closed, sharing a dish.  “We’re eating around the world,” he explained.  And it was fun.  We stood on a low wall and watched the fireworks.  “The blue ones are the most expensive,” I told him, his eyes glowing as we gazed up at the bright dark sky.  Later, walking out of the park, we admired some sparkly bits in the sidewalk.  A tiny girl in a stroller next to us noticed the shining dots just as we did.  “I like the sparkles,” she cooed.  Me, too.  “I saw fireworks tonight and they were all diamonds and I think some of them fell down from the sky and landed here.”  Her mother told her how clever she was.  I looked at my son, walking next to me, now taller than I.  For a moment, I let my churlishness subside, my worry about money, about privilege, about long lines and heat.  I looked at my son, at the little girl rolling past us in the warm dark evening.  “I think you’re right,” I said out loud to her.  She grinned.  My son, who hates when I speak to strangers, squeezed my hand.  Making memories.  They know how to do it.

Facing the Day

5:30 I hit snooze, shutting out the day, turning off obligations.

5:42 Seth’s lineament, smeared on his shoulder, wakes my nose.  He smells like a Bengal Spice tea bag, pungent. Would that it offered some relief.  Other mornings, the sound of his Hypervolt massager, shooting heat and vibrations into his broken joint, rouses me.

 5:45 I stumble to the bathroom.  Snow again. I like the frost traced at the top corner of the mullioned window in our upstairs hall. 

5:52  Mouth minty, robed and slipper-ed, I test for pain, placing my right foot down the first step, left foot meeting it, like a bulky toddler.  The flight is long. My slag glass lamp glows from the dining room, where Seth has put it on a timer, so I do not fall.  Angry, my knee protests.  I lean on the bannister, feeling older than 58.  When did I stop trusting my body?

5:55  The cats, like creatures in a flipbook, streak by, hungry. 

5:56  I push the swinging door into the kitchen, my right hand pressing on the light.  Diva, always the first dog awake, blinks, stumpy tail waggling, her left eye newly cloudy.  I open the back door, the cold barging in.  Maisie uncurls from her bed on my coat, yips, squeezes her tall skinniness out the dog door.  Sclepi, our original rescue dog, waits to emerge from her bed until breakfast has been served.

6:00  I drop a pinch of flakes into Shark’s tank, pull open the tabs of three cans of wet cat food, dump the gelatinous fishbits into bowls. Rinse, recycle tins.

6:04 I measure three scoops of dog food into their bowls, fill their water bowl, spill coffee beans into the grinder.  I press the grinder with my palm, feeling vibrations.  I add water to the pot, turn it on. Wait.

6:14  Next, I empty the dishwasher. Why do I hate sorting silverware? I water the paper white bulbs set in low glass vases, the pebbles shiny once the water hits them.  They are spicy, too, but different from Seth’s shoulder or the smell of the ground coffee.  I rinse the cat food from the sink, pour the oatmeal into the saucepan, set the timer. I stir between words, watch light begin the sneak underneath the edge of dark out the East-facing kitchen window. 

6:10 The carafe full enough, I whisk it out and fill my mug—risk taker, aren’t I?  Once I dump in the half and half, I carry the cup, my phone, my journal to the family room, to my chair.  Morning words, by hand, in that chair.  I wrap routine around me like a quilt.

6:16  Ding. The timer bleats.  Oatmeal requires stirring.  Without a timer, I forget and feel furious when the burning smell reaches me, so, resolved, I set the timer for five minutes, maybe six, trading interruptions of my thoughts for acrid frustration and a pot’s ruination.

.

6:22  I write again, check my email check, check the weather. 

6: 28 Check the oatmeal. Turn it off.  Relief.

6:30  I plan my English class, think about the lesson, cruise through Facebook, organize the day, get distracted and open up a piece of writing I had set aside.

7:03  Chagrinned, I hobble upstairs, late again, wake our son, our exchange daughter, my suffering husband, dress myself and choose my earrings, comb my hair, descend again.

7:25 Make our breakfasts: oatmeal, toast, another swig of coffee, cut bananas, blueberries, all these tasks, this elaborate choreography before we even leave the house.   

7:45  Late and cross, I let my tension spill onto them all—dogs, cats, fish, husband, children.  Coats, mittens, hats, boots, lanyards.  We manage, finally, to leave the house.  To start the day.  

Headlines: The Hummingbird as Warrior: Evolution of a Fierce and Furious Beak and Congresswomen Wearing White

a piece inspired by my recent on-line writing class in which we were asked to write something inspired by recent headlines!

Traveling, I often feel encased in bubble wrap, as if, despite a glimpse of the snowy Connecticut hills that remind me I’ve traveled East, I could be anywhere, and this time, in the airports—Cleveland-Hartford-Hartford-Dulles-Cleveland—I do not see any television monitors, do not hear the news.  My husband, chiding, occasionally inquires, “You getting your news from Facebook again?”  Sometimes, I am.  In the  airport, right before I need to board my flight,I look up headlines just to see what is going on in the world. I read about hummingbirds--iridescent warriors, evolving to exist—like mothers, I think, snapping shut my laptop, like all women.  We must evolve, keep pace, adapt.  This morning, my Twitter feed is full of women in white, congresswomen in protest, nodding, in solidarity, to the suffragettes, who insisted that women be permitted to vote.  Flawed, those suffragettes, certainly—mostly white and wealthy, they were not “intersectional,” did not even know what that word meant, but they refused to be ignored.  But women of all classes did own white shirtwaists—there’s that, at least. Those feisty women made the world—men—take notice.  They were the kind of indomitable visionaries who started schools like the one I lead.  They were not nothing.  And I wake, feeling cautiously optimistic about evolution, about change.  I am afraid to read much more about hummingbirds because I adore them and maybe, after reading the whole article, I would hate or fear them.  It’s not very brave to stop reading, to get my news from headlines and pictures.  Some days, though, waking up in unfamiliar hotel rooms that smell musty and make me feel as if I am floating, untethered, it is my own best evolutionary—read, survival—practice. Did I pack anything white? 

A Meditation on Hankies

Those who know me well know that, by any measure, I am a lousy housekeeper.  And I am a lover of handkerchiefs, small white squares that I wear daily, tucked into the stretchy band of my Mickey Mouse watch.

Tonight, I am thinking of Margaret, who kept the house that I grew up in clean and tidy.  I see her in our kitchen, ironing deftly, the smell of starch and warm cotton familiar, homey, collars and sleeves giving up their wrinkles at her expert hands.

Margaret Grace McShane Tate ironed with confidence, skill, certainty.  I admired her brisk, confident movements.  She never seemed annoyed by my chatter.

Ironing eludes me.  It seems I put more wrinkles into garments than I take out.   Except for hankies.

My friend, Diane, a colleague from my New York school, ironed her Laura Ashley blouses for fun.  Fun?  I cannot imagine.

The snow day allows me to make soup—a domestic talent I do possess—and catch up on the hankies.  I bring the pile of clean, crumpled hankies up from the basement, clear a space on the counter, plug in the iron, douse the hankies with water to dampen them, lay dishtowel on the counter, find the spray starch and begin.

I can just manage ironing a square.  Spritz, spritz, run the iron round the corners, fold in half, iron down the fold, fold again, finish off the quarter.  Add to the damp finished stack.

My mother always had a hankie up her sleeve or in her purse.  When she died, I took a pile from her drawer; they smelled like her.

Now, I search for them at antique fairs in the summer, at flea markets. I like white ones the most, with a lace edge, but nothing too fancy because I use them—not to blow my nose, of course, but to wipe my leaking left eye. 

The eye doctor says it’s an allergy and the allergist says it’s an eye problem, but it runs, all seasons, and hankies are gentler than Kleenex.

When Jane died last summer, Maggie laid some costume jewelry, scarves and hankies out in the bedroom.  I tucked several hankies into my bag, bringing a little bit of Brooklyn Jane home to Ohio.

In my mother’s dresser, made from the doors of the Baldwin Locomotive Company her grandfather ran, I’ve devoted a whole drawer to my hankies.

They could do with sorting.

Some are too fragile for every day use, the fine cotton full of holes, but it’s hard for me to toss them, so they remain at the back of the drawer. 

Several have ink stains on them, proof that they occasionally end up in the bottom of my book-bag, in close proximity to an uncapped pen.

After the white ones, ones with red edges are my favorites.  The loud floral ones get neglected, left in the drawer, pristine.

When one of my girls gets married—one of my students—and I am invited to the wedding, I give her a bride’s hankie.  They are harder to find these days, very expensive and ornate.

Some I own are still stitched onto the cardboard backing that held them. I think about old general stores whose unsold stock was bought up and spread across the country.

 My sister gave me a set of white hankies stitched with metallic thread, unused, on our wedding day.  I used my nail scissors to cut one from its cardboard, slid it gently from underneath a ribbon. I suspect it was as old as the dress I wore, my grandmother’s dress, from 1912.

The little girls at school always ask why I have a tissue at my wrist.  I explain about handkerchiefs.

Friends who know me well know of my collection, my obsession, and sometimes give me lovely new additions. Sara sent me two this week; she had found them cleaning out her father’s house. They are both Liberty prints, never taken from their plastic. I adore them.

Now, if I appear without one, colleagues ask about their absence.  Habit carries with it expectation.  Hence, the need to iron. 

My husband finds my handkerchiefs littered about the house; I take them off when I am cooking or when I get home.  They exasperate him.

Sometimes, I wear the same one two days in a row, if I haven’t used it for my eye.

Occasionally, I’ll lend one to a crying child—or grown up.

I was particularly close to my younger daughter’s class; for their graduation, I went on E-bay and found lots and lots of hankies.  I laundered them and ironed them and gave each girl her own. 

We bought an old treadle sewing machine once, and in one of the drawers, nestled several hankies.  Who owned them? What had her life been like?

The other day, Emily, my massage therapist, returned one to me that I had left behind.  I was so glad not to have realized its loss before it came back to me.

Mrs. Shihadeh in Eagles Mere had a tiny shop, and when I was a little girl, sometimes we bought hankies there—ones with cats or ducks or bunnies on them, mostly. 

In Europe, linen stores still sell hankies, arranged in long, flat drawers.  I bought one in Bruges when I was fourteen.  It’s scratchy.

When did women start carrying hankies and when did they stop?  It’s an affectation, I know, an anachronistic touch, but I like it, like this way of reaching back into the past.

If I ever go to Ireland, I will look for a handkerchief and wear it at my wrist and think about Margaret, who kept our house clean, who loved me, and whose ironing inspires me still.

Kaleidescope

1.     Mary Poppins is the first movie I remember.  I was not yet four in spring of 1964.  Running through the living room, we jounced Mother’s prized Lowestoft bowl off edge of her desk.  It shattered.  Biting back rage and sorrow, she commanded our father take us to the movies, a rare treat laced with shame. Last Thursday, I watch Emily Blount, chic and fiercer than Julie Andrews, returning, but I was really in our playroom, the LP spinning on my record player.  I am singing every lyric of the real version, playing every role. “Supercaligfragilistic, feed the birds, if you want this choice position, Sister Suffragette.”  It is a memory medley. In fourth grade, I played Mrs. Banks in our class play. 

2.     The damp Amazon package—dropped in the rain’s path--contains Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy—a present to me from me, an post-Christmas indulgence.  Cordelia auditions as Jo the other day; it was six years ago she played Jo, staggering her father and me, weeping in the back of the theatre, with her power.  In the playroom, once I had read Little Women and Little Men, I pretended to be Jo, too.  All my life, I’ve wanted to be Jo March.  I have a Madame Alexander Jo doll on a shelf in my office.  Is 58 too old for dolls?  I think not.

3.  My son, my Atticus, and Melis, our exchange daughter from Turkey, give me a giant stuffed sloth for my pre-Christmas birthday.  I name him Stanisloth.  Everything leads back to plays and books. He is draped on a table outside of my office for little girls to hug as they pass. 

4. I never wanted to be Atticus Finch, but how I adored him.  “If I ever have a boy baby,” I tell our TKAM cast in the Chapin Black Box, I would name him Atticus.  The girls scoff.  “You’re not having any more babies, Ms. K,” they smile. Three years later, our Atticus arrives, a son with a name to live up to.

5.     A spoonful of sugar.  I am trying not to eat sugar for a whole month.  

6.  In the film, the children fight over their mother’s Royal Doulton bowl and break it. They, too, go on an adventure, but with Lin Manuel, not with my dad.

7.   First day of the new semester. Sleet beats the slate roof.  We wish for real snow, not frozen rain.  “Do we go to school in snow? Melis asks, plaintive. 

8.  Beyond the mullioned windows, lights twinkle in the wet dark.  They glow, chase—blue, red, green, white, purple.  Deflated inflatables litter the yard like Act V of Hamlet, red plastic oozing, wrinkled, across the lawn.

9.  Seth’s lights spangle the ceiling of our bedroom, gliding like the glass shards in a kaleidoscope--dancing, shifting, shimmering.

10. In some light, I imagine I see our son’s upper lip shaded with the faintest outline of a mustache.  He was born after we left New York, another chapter in our lives.

11. Mary Poppins, Jo March, Atticus Finch.  Teachers.  Wise adults. Idols, who endure, undiminished. (I sneer at Go Tell a Watchman.)  Don’t we deserve heroes? Some days, fiction feels sturdier than friendship.

12.  I sauté brussel sprouts and spill tears into the pan.  Two funerals and a friend in trouble.  Some days are hard. 

Beyond Number

Here is a list of the things I wish I had thought to count over this fleeting Christmas Season, weeks full of family and feelings and the need to prepare meals and wrap packages and try to keep chaos at bay and keep people happy and, and, and…Anticipation, someone told me, is 9/10 of delight.  We build up this season, this holiday, and then, whoosh, it is finished, leaving only the obligations of the New Year and a large number of ungraded 9th grade English exams. Here’s to algorithms that solve for love and longing and to family and to moments that are too brief and math facts that defy memorization and to resolutions that inspire rather than punish and to moments of calm in a sea of drama that allow tired mother/writers to collect their thoughts. Here is a list of all I didn’t count:

The number of times I loaded and emptied the dishwasher and the number of dishes washed.

The number of pots of coffee made and drank—thank you, new Cuisinart Coffee Maker.

The number of clementines or “oh, my darlings” as Kerro calls them, peeled and eaten. They remind me of my father-in-law, a December treat we all enjoy.

The number of presents wrapped and the number of times I lost the end of the Scotch Tape until I bought two new dispensers at Target.

The number of emergency runs to Target or CVS or the supermarket.

The number of bags of trash filled with recycling—wrapping paper, cardboard, bottles, carry out containers that make me worry about our own family’s impact on the environment.

The number of twinkle lights Seth puts up—only because an alum told me her father keeps track.

The number of pine needles that dropped off our Douglas fir Christmas tree each day--a tree that suffered from male pattern baldness upon arriving in our living room.

The number of times someone shouted, “Hello, Mr. Christmas!” to the mechanism Seth has to turn on the lights on the tree.

The number of ornaments we did not put up because this was a “less is more” holiday, due to injuries and lack of time.

The number of times I caught the little cat drinking water out of the bowl in which paper white narcissus bulbs were nestled—and the number of times I refilled the water.

The number of times I was glad we hadn’t set up the crèche because of my mistrust of that same small cat.

The number of times my husband sighed or groaned in pain and my increasingly limited repertoire of helpful things to say in response to his agony.

The number of socks given and received by family members as gifts.

The number of times I thought, “I should write about that,” but forgot to write down what that was.

The number of cans of cat food dispensed each day to three hungry, yet finicky, cats.

The number of pieces of kibble that fell on the ground when I dropped the container of dry cat food, most of which were devoured by the grateful dogs.

The number of times anyone volunteered to take the three dogs for a walk—were there any?

The number of times I wished for a quiet moment to watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season Two.

The number of times I watched our son being patient and kind and helpful and was slightly awed by his capacity to switch between sulking teen and gracious human in a heartbeat.

The number of miles between Shaker Heights and Manhattan.

The extraordinary number of bizarre decorations at Stan Hywett Hall.

The amount of joy brought to us all by Cordelia’s gift of a Hypervolt. which we have all applied to every muscle we possess.

The number of times I wished I could talk to my mom on Christmas Day.

The number of times I admired another family’s holiday card and longed to be the kind of well-organized family that still produced one.

The number of times I rued the mess in our house and the impossibility of ever containing the piles.

The moments of swift conflagration between family members followed rapidly by moments of generosity and forgiveness.

The moments of wonder that passed without my pausing to breathe them in.

The number of times memories of other Christmases floated up.

The number of suitcases and bags, packed, unpacked, repacked and moved across several states.

The number of times a child told me to “Calm down,” which made me feel significantly less calm.

The number of moments I have already forgotten that I wish I had recorded.

Leap and the Net Will Appear

In the school I lead, finals are approaching for the Upper School.  Girls are feverishly organizing their binders, generating study guides, scheduling review sessions, worrying.  Their anxiety is palpable; these are smart girls, highly motivated.  They want to do well.  I’ve been impressed by the generosity of our 9th graders, who routinely share quizlets they’ve created with one another as study aids. 

“What makes this so hard?” I ask my English class.  “What’s the worst that could happen?” 

“This counts, Ms. Klotz.  If you bomb an exam, it wrecks your average.  And then, you can’t ever fix it.”

 Absolutes.  Adolescents specialize in absolutes.  One failure has irrevocable implications.  One bad test and the goose is cooked.  No college.  No career.  No personal fulfillment. None of that is true, but the fear persists at mythic dimensions for these terrific and terrified girls. 

 We are trapped in old systems that pretend regurgitation is synonymous with rigor.

How can we promote risk-taking and creativity and relevance when traditional methods of assessment are so slow to change in school?

 Years ago, my friend Jane and I invented a project for American Lit.  We asked each of our tenth graders to present a “Song of Myself” inspired by Walt Whitman or a “Letter to the World” inspired by Emily Dickinson to the whole class.  The assignment was ungraded.  Girls offered poetry, art work, journal entries, reflections, monologues, music, dance, collages over the two nights we spent on a tenth grade retreat that February.  Jane took us all outside, put on her ice skates, and skated her Song of Herself on the frozen pond, snow glittering in the dark.  Almost thirty years later, I can feel the current that evening generated among us.  We learned with our girls and from them.  Their work showed their understanding of the themes that characterize American Literature.  They had thought deeply about self-expression, about being true to themselves, about what was important to reveal.  The space was trusting, supportive.  We felt responsible to one another, as if something almost sacred happened in the circle we had created on the floor of the lounge at Frost Valley.  On the end of year course evaluations when I asked what assignment had been most challenging and most fulfilling, every girl cited the Song of Myself.  No grade. 

 I have spent much of my career seeking those moments when learning feels relevant, important, essential.   How can girls show me what they know in ways that feel authentic?  What happens if we don't use grades as sticks to beat children with, if we take away points all together?  Standards-based grading, which, I am pleased to say, has some traction in our school, is one path.  Narrative comments that offer constructive feedback about what to do differently on the next assignment is another. I fear that our girls work terribly hard, but they often work wrong.  They study and study, with no sense of whether or not they’ve actually learned what they need to learn.  They’re less confident good at predicting the questions they might be asked and weaving together key concepts.  They get overwhelmed by their “high stakes” panic and forget that a test is an opportunity to compete, to win—with the same ferocity they show, regularly, on the athletic field. 

 What is good about this annual drama the opportunity for reflection it offers those of us who lead schools.  It’s past time to reinvent the 19th c. model of “school as factory” that too many of us grew up with—short periods, few opportunities for deep learning, for choice, for risk, for relevance.  I glory that I lead a distinguished school at this very moment; now is the time to leap and trust that what we know girls need will serve them well.  Leap and the net will appear, a friend of mine used to tell me. Those of us who care about kids and education must be resolute, must keep pushing for real change.  We all--parents, teachers, and school leaders--want the best for our girls.  We must support one another and leap!

Just Stuff: Letter to a New School Administrator Right Before a Holiday

“I’m not sure I can do this,” you text late on a cold Thursday night.  “I’m not sure it’s sustainable.”

I call you right away; we talk through the challenges of a hard week, the intensity of mid-winter in Independent Schools.  By morning, you are feeling slightly restored. 

But I can’t sleep, thinking about how to help you know how good you are at running a division, at meeting the needs of the girls, the faculty, the parents.  It may be you are too good, entirely empathetic, at your own expense.  You tell me you have never cried before about work, and I think about all the times I have cried because of work, because of how inadequate I felt, how ill-equipped and inexperienced I felt about how to face a situation, find a path. 

I’d lie in our bed in Manhattan, my husband fast asleep and cry because I didn’t know how to manage, what to do, because I felt like an impostor, because a child in my care at school was too sick or sad or lonely or a colleague was infuriating or a parent was too hard on a girl and I couldn’t protect her.  I did not believe I would ever feel equal to the work, worried it would consume me at the expense of my own children, but what else could I do?  I am a teacher.  And that meant, in order to make more money, I took on more responsibilities in my school.  Eventually, I became a Head of School.  I remember very little of those first few years of headship, except crying while my husband slept. 

Once, early on, I told him, “I can’t do this.  I don’t know how.”  I bleated, quivering, awake this time, not restored by sleep.  My mother always counseled that things looked better in the morning, but this time they were as bleak as they had been the night before. 

“So, are you a quitter?” my kind husband asked.

I bristled.  I am anything but a quitter, often to my peril.  I never give up on anyone, anything.  He knew that.  How dare he accuse me of being a quitter.

“Of course not,” I retorted, still crying.

“Then get dressed and go to work and figure it out.  Ask some people to help you. It’s just stuff.”

It is just stuff.  Sometimes, mountains and mountains of stuff.  We feel an urgency to respond, to provide solutions, to meet every need, and then we are depleted, fragile, frustrated.  So sustainability is the right goal.  I look at the ways we raise the girls in our school.  We preach resilience all day long.  We have to be purposeful in practicing the components of resilience for ourselves.  If we want to be strong, durable school leaders, we must walk the walk.  That means taking ourselves out of the game from time to time, knowing when we need to vent or kick a problem upstairs or remind ourselves that a lot of the urgency we feel is because others want us to feel that urgency.  One of my mantras is that it will all be there tomorrow.  What really matters?  In the tsunami of minutiae, we get to decide.  Not everything is a capital letter crisis, but there are days that feel that way. I liken it to be trapped on a wonky escalator.  I can’t get off.  But, most always, we can.

We can always look at how to organize the work, but a weird thing will also happen.  You will keep going, buoyed by people who love you.  The rhythm of the year will become more familiar, not easier, but less like your calendar is living you instead of the other way around.  Or, like me, goaded slightly from my self-pitying puddle by my husband who knew that all he had to do to move me from paralysis was to taunt me with my greatest fear—that I might give up—which, in a slightly unbecoming way galvanized me, you will find a path forward. 

You’ve got this.  We can whittle the job into smaller bites, remind you of the high regard the faculty hold you in, the affection girls have for you, the trust parents are developing in you. I remind you that there is nothing wrong or weak when you ask for help or feel overwhelmed—it’s a fact—the work is overwhelming.  Hard.  Frustrating.  Some days, hopeless.  But most of the time, it’s just stuff. 

And, I was thinking in the middle of the night, that sometime down the line, you will offer your own version of this to a younger, less seasoned administrator.  Pass it on.  My job is to care for you so you can care for lots of people who benefit from your care.  Put your away message up for the weekend.  It will all be there on Monday.  And take a real break over vacation.  It helps.