Too Absent Herald

I haven’t been drinking as much coffee (or beer) as I expected I would before this vacation began. Nor have I worked enough on grading papers, fixing my grade book for the Area Office folks who keep promising us that they will visit–a “walk through,” it’s called, where they poke their heads in to make sure that all the Word Wall words are properly color-coded (Language Arts words are yellow, and Math words are blue. Didn’t know that, did you?).

I haven’t done any arts and crafts or writing, either. I haven’t been taking time to watch the sky at dusk like I promised myself I would.

I have only today looked at a couple of news websites for information about the tsunami–partly to get a list of places my students might want to look when class starts up on the 3rd.

They are poets, my students. For example: we wrote some poems the day before vacation, and Nancy rhymed “porridge” with “courage”. Taylor rhymed “cold” and “souls”. Nandkumari wrote a four-stanza masterpiece about freedom–stanza one: five lines about a bird and a leopard. Stanza two: five lines about flying and running fast. Stanza three: four shorter lines about imagination and feeling. Stanza five: two very short lines, a declarative sentence punctuating the whole thing.

First-year teachers can get weepy about the kids, and I do sometimes. These poems make me well up. We watched Supersize Me tonight and when someone mentioned in the film the growing number of kids in this country with cirrhosis I thought of William, whose family is from Guatemala and whose second-favorite place to eat is Taco Bell. I think of plantains and bright birds, and then I think of a president who for three days can’t bring himself to say anything about the tsunami. Probably not malice. Just indifference. Regardless, doesn’t it make you just a little sad? That it’s apparently ok to not care so much? Certainly there are reasons to remain quiet, calculations to be made as the leader of the free world about what to say publicly and to whom and for what purpose. When one speaks for 280 million souls one must of course be circumspect and not loose with one’s language or one’s heart. Certainly condolences cannot be handed out at the drop of a hat.

How far away must one live until he is no longer a neighbor? Water is an incompressible fluid, and a small ripple of the tsunami registered on the West Coast of North America. That is not metaphor.

I spent this afternoon napping, warm and dry on our new couch, curled up with my wife and my cat. Life is pretty good sometimes, and I am really not feeling at all guilty for enjoying my nap, or the feeling that I am doing some small thing right and that fortune smiles broadly upon me that I am not weeping over the bodies or the memories of my children on a beach in Aceh.

There are things we can do nothing about. Or nothing until after the fact. But after the fact, we have the choice to make new facts, to decide to do things that make the world better or make it worse than it would otherwise be. I remember watching the Newshour back in ‘96. It was the first go-round for the Russians in Chechnya (for that decade anyway), and there was a short interview with a Russian soldier. As I remember it, he was deserting the army, and the interview took place in an open boxcar of a north-bound train. Maybe I am way off on the setting, but his words I remember quite clearly. “–And here it is New Year’s, supposedly the most peaceful holiday of the year. But it’s just an imaginary boundary, like the boundaries in the human heart, the boundaries that keep us apart…” and then he turned to watch the land pass by in a blur.

It’s late. There are many people in the world who are grieving tonight. I hope that in 2005, you find something to do that makes the world–your world, our world–better. Just a little. Happy New Year.

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