A Good Word

Here is a word that someone spoke aloud to me yesterday: repose. What a beautiful and evocative word—one whose sound immediately conveys a sense of it that can actually be felt. This morning I looked up the definitions for it in The American Heritage College Dictionary, something I always do with words that strike me (I get a little sad at the thought of all the people—especially younger ones—who do not know the pleasure and value of looking up a word and savoring all its meanings and nuances). The definitions listed for both the noun and verb forms of the word are as follows:

1. The act of resting or the state of being at rest.
2. Freedom from worry; peace of mind.
3. Calmness; tranquility
4. to lay oneself down
5. to rest or relax oneself
6. to lie at rest
7. to place trust in (stemming from the Latin root “repos,” meaning “to put away”)

Hearing this word and reading its definitions are like a little clarion bell going off in my mind and heart, because “repose” is what I am so often longing for and what I so often struggle (and fail) to achieve. At the risk of alienating readers who work traditional jobs, I am on my summer break from teaching right now, and, as I find it to be every summer, I am engaged in a kind of battle. It is a wonderful and extraordinary blessing to have eight weeks of not having to work (and it is eight weeks, not twelve as so many people mistakenly believe—I work until late June and start my preparation for the coming year in late August). Not many adults have two full months of free time, so I truly do appreciate what a fantastic luxury that is.

There is a difficult aspect of it, however, at least for me. I like structure and I like routine, and when I’m not working, structure and routine are out the window, and the endless possibilities of what I can do with all this free time become somewhat overwhelming. I have so much time, I think to myself, that I should be able to do EVERYTHING. I should be able to clean and organize my entire house and garage, I should be able to e-mail everyone back immediately, I should be able to get together with every friend I have, I should be able to travel, I should be able to write every day, I should be able to read lots of books, I should be able to play the piano regularly again, I should be able to stay on top of the weeds in the garden, I should be able to have all the minor repairs on the house done that I’ve ignored all year, I should be able to go to museums and concerts, I should be able to exercise every day, I should be able to cook healthy meals for myself, I should be able to watch all the movies in my Netflix queue, and so on and so forth.

Last Friday, I sat in my living room and read a novel for nearly three hours. When I had finished the last page and closed the book, I slowly became aware of the dimming light outside and, after a moment of dazed disorientation, sprang out of the armchair I was sitting in. I looked at the clock, and my heart fluttered with a kind of panic. It was nearly 7:00! And all I had done that day was return a shirt to Old Navy, meet a friend for lunch, buy groceries at Trader Joe’s and read! That’s it! What about cleaning the bathroom? Putting away my laundry? E-mailing my friends back? Prepping for my trip to Boston? The list I had made that morning had less than half its items crossed off. I paced up and down the hallway and around my dining room for a few anxious minutes, trying to decide which task I could squeeze in before eating dinner, and all my enjoyment in reading evaporated. I could relax and enjoy myself only as long as I wasn’t aware of it, as long as I was completely caught up in whatever I was reading or watching on TV. But those experiences really weren’t that enjoyable or relaxing because the moment I became “aware” again, I was filled with guilt and anxiety.

Which is why I’m so attracted to the word and idea of “repose.” Repose implies rest with awareness. Repose implies pleasure in and appreciation of that rest. Repose implies mindfulness and intentionality with a freedom from "shoulds." Repose implies a deliberate putting away of tasks and their accompanying guilt and anxiety, which is very different from mere escape. Escaping is not rest or tranquility—escape is fleeing. I have been escaping instead of reposing whenever I’ve been engaged in “relaxing” activities. The result is that the wolves are still always at my door, circling and snarling and ready to bite me the minute I poke my head outside. Repose, on the other hand, flings the door wide, commands the snapping wolves firmly, “Be still!”, walks out to the grassy hillside, and lays down in the sunshine, basking in the warmth with a heart full of gladness.

Gratitude and the Stomach Flu

This past Sunday morning, I woke up with the stomach flu. It was actually one of those situations where I knew something was wrong even before I was fully awake, and once I had woken up completely, my body began the many-houred ordeal of ridding itself of every particle of food and ounce of liquid I had ingested over the last 24 hours. I won’t go into too much detail, but let’s just say it’s going to be a long time before I eat cheesy nachos again.

With this onset came a radical change in my perspective and what was important to me. Just the day before, I had made a long list of plans for the coming week, which included all kinds of cleaning and organizing projects, errands to run, things to read, e-mails to send, people to get together with, etc. By 10:00 am Sunday morning, my biggest goal was to make it from my bathroom floor to the sink and then back to my bed. It took several minutes of prepping myself—of visualizing the route, of short panting breaths and, I’m embarrassed to admit, a few pitiful moans—and then I did it. As I was washing my hands and rinsing out my mouth, my vision started fading to black and a roaring filled my ears. Having passed out while sick in the past, I knew the signs and began a quick stagger to my bed, which I flung myself at just as the blackness and roaring overtook me. Seconds later, it began to recede, and I slowly became aware of a number of things. I became aware of the softness of my bed under my sprawled limbs, of the bright sunlight filtering through the curtains of my window, and the cheerful chirps of birds breakfasting in the yard outside. And I was suddenly filled with the most profound gratitude for the comfort and encouragement of those things.

My incapacitated physical state magnified even the very smallest elements into the greatest and most wonderful luxuries to me. For example, how wonderful that cell phones exist and I could actually have a phone in bed with me and reach numerous people at the touch of a button without even sitting up. How wonderful that I had a CD player nearby with a remote control. As my fever kicked in, I closed my eyes in relief from the cooling breeze that wafted down from my ceiling fan. Who invented ceiling fans anyway? Fantastic. Genius. And buckets. Buckets are amazing.

I also spent a fair amount of time marveling at the beauty of friends who will go to the grocery store and buy Gatorade and soda crackers (thanks, Diana) and leave them on your front porch and talk to you on the phone from your own front porch because you’re too weak to get to the front door to let them in. And neighbors who will roll out your brimming garbage cans for trash collection the next day and put them neatly back. And, after a few more hours had passed and I was finally able to retrieve the grocery bag off the front porch, the indescribable sweetness of those first few sips of Fruit Punch Gatorade and lime seltzer over ice that I was able to swallow and keep down (don’t ask my why this combo worked—it just did).

On day two, I graduated to gratitude and joy at being able to take a short shower (oh, what bliss to wash my hair!), eat soda crackers and soup, and swallow an ibuprofen to help the backache my fever was causing. I could sit up! I could enjoy watching TV! It was great.

By day three, the fever and nausea had gone completely, and I was left with only an overwhelming fatigue and a lack of appetite. I found myself restless and anxious as I lay on the couch watching TV. My mind raced with all the things I needed to do, and I began to grow impatient and frustrated with my lack of energy and all the time I was wasting. As I turned off the TV in petulant disgust and railed against my situation, I suddenly realized that not only had the fever and nausea gone away, but so had my gratitude. The more “well” I was becoming, the more I was taking for granted, and the more I was able to do, the more ungrateful and demanding I was becoming.

Last week, while having dinner at a friend’s, I had told her about my experience attending my niece’s recent singing competition. Towards the end of the concert, the host had briefly interviewed last year’s youth winner, a bubbly, vivacious teen who was very obviously eager to witness for Christ. I smiled indulgently along with the rest of the audience at her comments until she got to the part where she gushed about the opportunity she’d had to open for Randy Travis during his local concert, and how that “totally was the work of Jesus Christ.” At this, I couldn’t resist leaning over to my sister-in-law and whispering, “That’s so awesome that Jesus got her Randy Travis! Think he could score me a couple of Coldplay tickets?” After sharing this anecdote with my friend, we began to talk about what exactly the difference was between a Vending Machine God mentality and a genuine gratitude for every good gift, and the conclusion we came to was that the difference lay in the definition of “good gift.” A good gift, my friend pointed out, could be humility or patience. It could be the strength to endure a terrible loss. It might be something we want, but often it is something we don't want, want being irrelevant to need.

A good gift can be the stomach flu.

I definitely have no wish to revisit that experience anytime soon, but I realize that it literally stopped me in a way I needed to be stopped. It forced me to live entirely in the present moment and to be aware of and grateful for the ways in which my most basic needs were met and cared for, the ways these needs are met and cared for on an hourly and daily basis that I never give a second thought to and that I take for granted in the worst of ways—by being completely oblivious to them.

As day three taught me, it is all too easy to lose perspective, to forget what you’ve just experienced, and to slide back into old habits and ways of thinking. The activity and busyness of my days are slowly ramping up again, and I know I’ll lose my way again. Probably by this afternoon. But for the moment, I am grateful once again—that I have a Father who gives good gifts, gifts that shake me up now and then and get me to stop and pay attention in spite of myself.

A Little Love for the Pinto

I remember when my family first got our hatchback Pinto. It was light blue and had a kind of shimmering glamour to it when my dad pulled into the driveway with it for the first time. This was in the days before Pintos became something of a joke, before the whole scandal of them exploding if rear-ended or whatever story of malfunction it was that later dogged them came out. This was when one of the characters in Charlie’s Angels—the one played by Cheryl Ladd, I think—actually drove a white Pinto in the show, and it looked cool and normal and not dated. Anyway, my dad bought this blue Pinto with its silver trim and navy blue interior, and we all came out in the driveway and circled it like tourists at an exhibition, ooohing and aaahhing before taking turns climbing into it. Seeing as there were six of us in total and this was a hatchback Pinto, we had to take turns. It was our “second car,” mainly for my dad to drive to work, and he parked it on the right side of the driveway so that our “family car,” the burgundy, boat-like Chevy Impala that my mother drove and used to shuttle us to swimming and piano lessons, could back out of the garage. I remember delicately fingering the shiny silver emblem of the horse galloping on the back of the car, thinking that that made the car even more special and beautiful—they decorated it with a horse! Kind of like the way I would put stickers of my favorite animals and cartoon characters on things I owned as a way to spruce them up, only fancier. It wasn’t until a number of years later that I actually made the connection between the silver horse and the fact that the car was a Pinto. Up until then, that was just another interesting and nonsensical word to me, like all car names were. Of course, I felt a little stupid when I learned that a pinto was a type of horse and that an impala was a horned animal that lived in Africa, but how was I supposed to know? I lived in Southern California suburbia and was still learning addition and subtraction when that car came into our lives.

Anyways, that Pinto was great, and we loved it like it was a new member of the family. We’d help my dad wash it on the weekends, all of us dipping our sponges into buckets of soapy water and vigorously scrubbing whatever section we had been assigned to. Because I was the youngest (and smallest), I ended up with the lower parts of the car—everything below the silver trim. As I squatted down, looking up occasionally to cry out against an older sibling for dripping on me, there was such a satisfaction in sudsing away the layer of dirt splatter kicked up by the wheels and seeing the pearly light blue emerge like new again.

But the best thing about the Pinto was the hatchback area—the open space behind the cramped back seats with the scratchy navy carpet material stretched over the bump of the spare tire nestled underneath. If we bent our legs (our kneecaps making faint smudges as they rubbed the glass), two of us—maybe even three if it was me and my equally tiny girlfriends—could lie on our backs in that space while my dad drove us around. We’d stare up through the glass, with its thin orange defroster lines running across it, and watch the clouds and blue sky and the sudden appearance of leafy trees or telephone lines pass over us like it was some kind of magic show put on specifically for our benefit. And whenever we’d happen upon an empty residential street, my dad would weave the car back and forth, back and forth, in sudden swinging turns that would fling us from side to side, and we’d roll and bump against each other, shrieking with laughter.

That same Pinto became something of an embarrassment in my teen years. The shine had begun to dull, Charlie’s Angels was no longer on the air, and it was just this car that my family had had for a million years (my economizing parents tended to keep all of their cars long past the decade mark) and that had been demoted to the car my siblings learned to drive in and were allowed to use for local outings and errands. My last clear memory of riding in it was on a hot summer day when I was in high school. I don’t remember what the occasion was, but for some reason I needed to go up to the Fullerton/Brea area and my brother had to drive me. And I remember that I had to be dressed up, which made the heat of the day even more miserable, as dressed up in those days meant a slip and nylons. Driving on the freeway was no longer an option in the Pinto, so my brother drove us on city streets, the main one to our destination being State College Boulevard. We did all right with all the short stop and go sections, but there is a stretch of State College that is just one giant hill, where everyone revs up and just goes for it. My brother pulled over to the far right lane and switched off the air-conditioning, but that didn’t do much good. The engine strained and huffed like some ancient beast dragging a load of rocks, and the car shook and shuddered, but even with all of that, we were only going about 24 miles an hour. Cars in the other lanes zoomed past us, and the ones in our own lane edged up to our bumper aggressively before losing patience and accelerating around us. “Can’t you go any faster?” I snapped at my brother, mortified. “I’m already pressing the gas pedal as far as it goes,” my brother snapped back. We watched a few more cars zoom past us, taking in their drivers’ dirty looks, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we were laughing like a couple of lunatics. Our slow, sweaty chug up that endless hill on Sate College in our poor, wheezing Pinto had become the funniest thing ever.

The Pinto didn’t last much longer after that ride. Wanting something more reliable (and freeway-viable) for his work commute, my father went out and bought a new type of car called a Toyota Camry. We had the oohing and aahing session in the driveway once again, while the Pinto skulked under the tree on the street in front of our house. My father sold the Pinto to some guy for a few hundred dollars shortly afterwards, most likely for parts. And while it’s probably silly to get sentimental about that old car, I wish I’d given it a pat goodbye. It sure was a good little pony, and it sure gave us some good times.

Poem for Pentecost

He defeated death—
astonishing and irrevocable act—
and that is that.

But still,
there are all those years for us
of blundering and confusion,
of woundings both willful and unknowing,
of the slow boil of vanity and pride
under the thin veneer of righteousness,
of the easy slide into distraction
and the dulling weight of despair —
all of us forgetful in a careless instant
of what was finished for eternity.

And so,
“I will ask the Father,
and he will give you another Helper,
who will teach you all things
and bring to your remembrance
all that I have said to you.”
Such perfect wisdom,
such depth of kindness,
such magnitude of grace
in that bequeathing.

Help is needed.
Help is provided.

Other Lives

Not too long ago, I received an e-mail inviting me to join something called “LinkedIn.” For those of you who have never heard of it, it’s kind of like Facebook or Friendster or one of those other types of online networking communities I have done my best to avoid over the years, only LinkedIn is for professional connections—a way to expand business contacts, recommend services, and perhaps even find employment. You can connect with people who work in your same field, who graduated from your college or university, and so on and so forth. I was “invited” by a client for whom I had done some copywriting in the past, and I clicked on the link, filled out a basic profile, and proceeded not to think anything more about it unless someone else from the site invited me to be one of their connections. Many people on the site have 70, 80 or even well over 100 connections. I have four. That gives you an idea of the kind of use I get out of it.

In fact, while others are utilizing this site to expand their professional horizons and market themselves to the masses, my one use—if you can even call it that—was to springboard off of it into an existential crisis. This came about when I received a message (via the site) from a former Wellesley friend. Wellesley has a long tradition of connecting upperclasswomen to incoming first years, and N, as I’ll refer to her, was my “little sister.” Many times these connections don’t last for long, but N and I were faithful in adhering to the traditions of Flower Sunday, hoop-rolling, and the periodic lunch together. We also saw each other frequently in the music department, which was her major and my almost minor and place of employment during my four college years. I lost touch with her in the years after my graduation, and perusing her page in the present, I was pleased and excited to see that she had not only gotten her Ph.D in music after all (something her parents were strongly opposed to when we were still in college), but that she is now a professor of music at a university.

While on her page, I noticed that—unlike me—N had a large number of connections, so I clicked on that link to see what other old Wellesley acquaintances I might come across. There turned out to be quite a few, and after my initial gladness at seeing all the familiar names and the interest of finding out what they were all up to these days, I began to notice something—namely, that one after the other had a Ph.D and were also professors, or maybe they had an M.F.A. and were writers in residence at some university or other, or were professional musicians, or had research fellowships or held some such other position that reeked of prestige. It was like reading an extended version of our alumnae magazine, only I personally knew (or had known) all of the people detailed on the page. I had been in class with these women at one point. I had taken exams with them, agonized over papers, critiqued their manuscripts, and received their critiques of my own. I had eaten meals with them and played Pictionary with them during slow shifts in the music library. They had all seemed just like me, and yet now, laid out in an online profile, they all seemed so much better than me, so much more accomplished. They had gone on to attain the highest levels of education at top universities, won prestigious awards, and were now professors and writers and musicians. They weren’t wannabes but the real things—the things we had all dreamed about and talked about and stewed in the potential of when we were in college.

And, so, the existential crisis. That mean and insidious voice that murmurs, “and what have you done with your life?” Reason kicks in, of course, and another voice pipes up to say that I have done just fine with my life, thank you very much. That I may not have gone to an Ivy League for graduate school, but I was able to pay the tuition to the state university where I got my M.A. in full and learned a great deal while I was at it. That I have a secure job with a good salary and benefits. That I am doing something meaningful on a daily basis, influencing and helping to shape the lives and educations of hundreds of students. That in moving back to California I was able to be close to my mother and help take care of her when she was sick and dying. And on and on. But I think underlying all those statements of affirmation about the choices I’ve made and the things I’ve done is the shadow of all the things I chose against and all the things I haven’t done, and moments like this can make that shadow loom large.

What if I hadn’t moved back home after college? What if I had gone to a big-name university for graduate school? What if I had been more ambitious and less fearful and pushed myself harder? And on the other end of things, being single and childless in my mid-30s, there are always those other questions that are all some form of “what if I’d done things differently?” and worse—“should I have done things differently?” I think we all have those questions from time to time in some form or other. Some of my “successful” classmates probably do. The same probably goes for some of my happily married with beautiful children friends. The particular types of questions and the degree of doubt may vary, and for some the positives of their current lives outweigh the uncertainty of those shadowy other lives. But they are still there—all those other lives we could have lived.

Part of me feels guilty for indulging in such pointless wonderings. So many people in this world have no choice in their lives. They are born, they live, and they die constrained by poverty or violence or some other form of oppression and enslavement. So I recognize that such existential angst is quite a luxury. Having all these choices and options is an almost embarrassing bounty of blessings. But recognizing that doesn’t make the struggle and doubt go away any more than knowing about children starving in Africa made my reluctance to eat vegetables go away when I was a little girl.

When you’re young it’s a wonderful thing to dream about all the possible lives you could have—all the things you can do and be and experience. It all seems possible and even plausible. At this time of year, when I look at my seniors who are on the verge of graduating, who are on the cusp of their adult lives, shining with promise and potential, I always feel a piercing sense of nostalgia. I remember being in that position myself so clearly. I remember feeling such a strong sense of something coming, something wonderful that was just around the corner (what could it be?). And, fortunately, while that anticipation and excitement hasn’t resulted in my being shot by someone named Chino (all of that being a reference to Tony’s beginning song and ultimate fate in West Side Story, in case you’re wondering), it has resulted in these periods of uneasiness and doubt, and even the occasional sense of letdown. Is this as good as it gets? Is there another life I could have chosen that would have been better? Is there something else I should be choosing now?

I am not ungrateful for the life I have. I understand and accept why I made many of the choices I’ve made and the direction they’ve taken me, and on a lot of days—maybe even most—I really like my life. It’s a good life. But I think there will always be some sense of those other lives rising up to haunt me from time to time, and as long as I have choices and dream of possibilities (though those seem to get narrower with each passing year), I don’t know how to make them go away. The one, it seems, comes with the other.

Stuff

I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff lately. When I say “stuff,” I am not speaking metaphorically but literally—as in physical stuff: clothes, shoes, dishes, dish towels, jewelry, letters, books, photos, and so on. Having decided not to travel anywhere this spring break, I focused instead on going through some of the accumulation in my house—the bulging closets and dresser drawers, the cabinets and cupboards. Most of the accumulation is made up of my own things, but some of it is still left from my mother and from our family having lived here for nearly 25 years. The other stuff I was dealing with was my grandparents’ belongings. Now that my grandfather has died and my grandmother is no longer living in their condo, my aunt is preparing to sell it. She invited me to go take a look around and see if there was anything I’d like to keep.

A friend of mine is going through a similar process. Her husband died of brain cancer two and a half years ago, and now she is selling the home she and her husband raised their sons in. Both of us have a strong desire to reduce clutter, simplify, and move forward in our lives, and yet this process of excavating, sorting, and bringing to a close past lives is painful and complicated. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of people dismiss physical goods as “just stuff” and tout the superior value of simplicity and the present moment. These people have no trouble throwing things away. In many respects, I admire this attitude and ability to quickly and efficiently dispose of clutter. There is a cleanness in this lack of sentimentality. But for many of us, stuff isn’t just stuff in and of itself—it is a representation or connection to something or someone, and that is what we have difficulty throwing away or carting off to the thrift store.

This becomes even more difficult and complicated when the person the stuff is connected to is no longer with us, and if the life the stuff had a context in no longer exists. When I talked to my friend, she shared her struggle about what to do with a drawer full of peignoir sets. They had all been gifts from her husband and she had only worn them for him and enjoyed them in the context of her relationship with him. What should she do with them now? She recognized that there was no point in keeping them (nor was it possible, given the limited space she would have after moving), but how could she just throw away his gifts of love to her? I suggested she keep a representative one and get rid of the rest. She agreed that this was a good compromise, and we resolved that issue on a practical level. But in having to decide the fate of those peignoirs, she was having to face the reality that the life those peignoirs existed in is over, and that she will never wear them for the man who bought them for her again. And that is a reality she has to confront over and over again with each drawer and closet and cupboard.

Earlier this week, I opened a drawer in my own house and found it full of catalogs, brochures, and pages torn out of decorating magazines. I also found dozens of white notepad sheets covered in my mother’s scrawling handwriting with ideas about window treatments, flower arrangements, bathroom configurations, and so on. In the year before she got sick, my mother had begun planning major renovations and decorating changes to the house. The physical layout and décor were still left over from the 70s and our years of family life, and now that my siblings and I were all grown and moved out, my mother was excited to change things into a more updated house that she and my father could enjoy during his retirement years. Obsessive planner and resource-gatherer that my mother was, she filled that very large and deep drawer to the point that I had trouble opening it. On the practical front, of course I was going to empty the drawer and throw the stuff away. It was pointless to keep all of that when there was no longer any context or use for it. My mother is gone, I now own the house, and I have already renovated and decorated it to my own taste. But before I could throw it away, I had to look at it all. I had to read all her notes and scribbles and consider the fabric swatches she had collected. I had to sit with all my mother’s dreams for her house and her life with my father and the visiting grandchildren and mourn that they would never come to pass. And then, after saving a few sample notes, I threw it away and cleared the space for the things of my current life.

At my grandparents’ condo, I got stuck on a drawer full of tacky plastic placemats. There is no way I’d ever use those placemats in my own house, and I knew it would be ridiculous to bring them home and fill up cupboard space with them. But I had to spend some time just looking at those placemats and remembering all the times I ate KFC dinners off of them as a child visiting with my family for the day. Attached to those placemats was the memory of swimming in the pool at their clubhouse (they lived in a retirement community), of watching my dad and grandpa in friendly but intense ping pong matches, and of sitting on their scratchy olive green sofa reading while the adults talked. Those placemats brought those memories flooding back, vivid and strong. What happens when the placemats are gone? When the whole condo is gone?

Getting rid of stuff is painful and scary because it feels like getting rid of connections to the past, to memories, and, most of all, to people. And yet, to be completely honest, there’s a way in which all that stuff is kind of a drag. It can weigh you down, and it can be a time and energy-consuming pain in the ass to have to deal with. So there is a bright side to this. While the mining and excavating is painful, and it’s exhausting hauling up all those stores of memories and grief and disposing of all the garbage bags and bulky items and papers to be shredded, there is space and lightness afterwards. There is a making way for other things, for the hope and freedom and joy in life that we may not quite believe in yet but are making ourselves ready to receive.

Maybe A Few Should Be Left Behind

Most of the time, I enjoy being a teacher for all of the meaningful and noble reasons that one would normally associate with teaching: inspiring and shaping young minds, guiding students in developing skills that will help them become better citizens of tomorrow, the creativity and diversity that each day brings, and my own passion for the subject matter. But there are also those days when I enjoy teaching simply for the opportunity to laugh at the unintentionally hilarious ignorance of my students. This might make me sound petty and cruel, but try grading hundreds of high school essays week after week and you’ll soon discover that it’s either laugh yourself silly or cry with despair as you realize that these people will someday be in charge of taking care of you when you are old and weak and in your most helpless phase of life.

All of the following excerpts are from essays my sophomore students wrote during first semester. The ones having to do with historical figures came from a standardized essay prompt they had to answer for a quarterly benchmark. It asked them to write about someone important they had studied in school. The rest are from a random hodgepodge of essays and timed writings I’ve had my students write throughout the semester. I couldn’t resist adding my own parenthetical comments for some of them.

Enjoy your own petty and cruel laughter:

1. One person I studied this year was Napoleon Buenoparte. (This would be Napoleon Bonaparte’s nicer Spanish cousin)

2. Some people believe Che Guevara was a diptator. (Apparently, these people thought he was ruthless but also a little on the dumb side)

3. The persons in history did many things from inventions to dance moves. (This student went on to write about Eli Whitney. If the Cotton Gin were a dance move, I imagine it would be something along the lines of The Sprinkler or The Lawn Mower.)

4. Martin Luther King Jr. did not agree with how black people were being treated back then in his time. He decided to free the black slaves and give them the same rights just like everyone else. (This student probably also thinks that Harriet Tubman wouldn't give up her seat on the bus)

5. Magellan is my favorite because he was the first dude to sail around the world successfully. (He also found some sweet surfing spots)

6. It was really hard for him because the town made him their escape goat. (He wasn't very fast with someone on his back, but he did well enough.)

7. Those were the days when you had to use a Bowen arrow. (Because the Bowen Company makes the BEST arrows)

8. We had to get up at the crack of don. (Because no matter how early we set our alarms, our plumber roommate Don always got up first)

9. He got in trouble for using fowl language. (Apparently, some people find pigeon coos and starling warbles offensive)

10. Charles Lindbergh was a very brave man. He was married and had kids. (Actually, this kid may be pretty smart)

The rest defy snarky comments:

11. I once read in junior high a biography about Albert Einstein. I read it in math class. It was either put it down and do math homework or read about Einstein, so I read about him.

12. Thomas Jefferson is one of the most interesting figures of the American Revolution. Without him and a couple more people the country would not be the same.

13. When he was a little boy he had a new red bike, which was his pride possession.

14. Well, I wrote a report on a man named Cesar Chavez, who was a boxer in a small town.

15. My father is special enough to study. The reason why is because he does certain things that is not normal for a personal to do. For example, he can do a handstand on his forearms and walk for a long time without feeling pain.

16. This is why I remember John Locke so well. Well, that and all his great ideas that really made today happen.

17. A person I have studied about in school is Bill Gates. He invented Microsoft Word. It is helpful for students now that he made it because we use it for school. I don’t remember much about him, but it was a good idea to do this.

18. A famous person who I learned about this year is a king of England named Henry III. He was a ruler who wanted a son to take his throne. So he got married. When his wife failed to give him a son, he divorced her. So he got married again. But this time she failed, but instead of divorcing her, he had her head cut off. He did this now. After about six wifes, he realized that he loved these women for all the wrong reasons. So then he ended up dying.

19. Thomas Edison is an important person to study because before him there was no light.

20. Thanks to Johnny Appleseed, we have apple flavored & inspired food & desserts. We have: apple sauce, apple sider, apple pie, apple cake, & apple juice. So every time I eat an apple pie or climb a tree for an apple, I say thank you Johnny.

21. Beatrice ear-dropped on their conversation in the garden.

22. Good and evil are totally different from one another.