The Darndest Things

When I was little and I would wake up in the middle of the night, if I had kicked my blankets off I would do this weird thing. I would try and fall asleep without putting the blanket back on. I had woken up because I was cold and couldn't find it, but would try and hold out for as long as possible.

I would imagine that I was homeless and didn't have a blanket.

But it never became a game of how long could I hold out. It was my way of attempting to really understand and comprehend what it would be like to be without a home. I had trouble grasping how difficult it would be, and whenever I caved and pulled my blankets back up under my chin I would solemnly put out good thoughts to all of those sleeping in the night without Little Mermaid sheets. Because it was hard.

Twisted logic and I'm not sure where it came from. I had never seen a homeless person in my rural town. No where in my memory can I recall some movie or show that I remember decidedly acknowledging, "There is a hobo."
The closest I got to the poverty line would be those starving children in China who really needed me to eat my green beans and peas. But starving didn't mean your Grandma couldn't quilt you a blanket.

Funny how now I can't think back and figure out why I did it. I have no idea, honestly beyond considering that my empathetic streak ran exponentially with my baby teeth. I learned in high school biology class that there is a hormonal difference between adult and children's brains. Maybe I've switched to adult brain now and will be forever lost to my inner child.
Though...I still giggle when I hear the word duty, I think it's safe to assume that's not the reason entirely. Hehe. Doody.

But kid brain logic is a warped one. I like it though. It's simple and deep and not yet jaded.
I tutor now. Did I mention that?

I've got three kids and they're...great. They have all got their issues, but I'd fight anyone who says that they're not worth it.

One boy, his story is a laundry list of wrong. When your teacher picks on a student, you know something isn't going right in his life. But we get along well enough. He's only gone catatonic once and we could deal.

He hates reading though, but every hateful thought against reading is made up for in a love of Math and Wrestling. This kid knows more about times tables and Randy Orten than I'll ever have the pleasure, or desire, to experience.

He has an attendance problem though. Mentally and physically. This a boy who can leave his body quicker than you can say boo. When things are going wrong, he shuts down. So I feel accomplished when we read something together and he tries to start a dialogue. Before though, we just had trouble getting him into the classroom until I set up a sticker system. Stickers are like crack to kids. They'll do anything for it. Even attend tutoring.

For every tutoring session he attends, he gets a sticker. For five stickers, he gets a prize. We had settled on a bouncy ball.

In the third session I brought in a book on fish. Sharks, moray eels, puffer fish, we learned about them all. Then we decided which were the deadliest and which we'd like as pets. (I chose the shark, and he suggested I make a moat outside my house so he could guard it.) We spent the remaining time making play-doh fish and chatting...a first for us both.

On our walk back to the classroom, discussing our favorite pizza toppings, he started to lag behind me. "Do you think...I could keep this book", he motioned to my fish book. Unfortunately it's a library book so I had to say no.
"Do you think if I get all my stickers that instead of a ball, I could maybe have a book?" Now that he started it was a floodgate opening.
"It could be about fish," he went on, "or wrestling...or stuff. I could tell you where to find a good book. Especially ones about wrestling."

Kid logic. I would buy you a library little man.

Still give you the bouncy ball, too.

My Strange Addiction and Other Stories I keep to myself

I don't have a smart phone. No Android or iPhone7 or whatever. (Really no iAnythings, actually.) What can I say? I'm a minimalist.

The phone I do have though, I've had for a while now. From time to time I flip through my contacts and reorganize them. Normally this is done during a period of time where I am waiting in some exotic place like the DMV but since everyone else has their heads in their laps, I feel outed if I were to just looked around. The lone prairie dog with its head up, vulnerable to predators. Or to direct eye contact with the weird guy sitting across from you on the bus.

  The contacts within my contact list are kept pretty tight. If I don't call you within a few months, I'll delete your number. Excluded from this rule are family and all-night delivery places, for obvious reasons of obligation and deliciousness, respectfully. There is one other number that I've held onto for a few years now. Even after I got my phone wet and had to switch out the contacts to a new one, I chose to hang onto one Ann Arbor area code number that I have listed.

The number belongs to a girl I met a long while back here on campus. I saw fliers for some student group, I didn't really pay attention to which one, that was having a free yoga night and immediately I had my namaste on and was out the door. The tricky thing about free yoga is it can be a gamble. Free can mean you get what you pay for, or that it consists of the best things in life. I've gone to yoga nights that I'm not proud of, including the Gamma Alpha Delta Zeta Beta-whatever free yoga night that consisted of two hundred (I kid you not.) sorority girls squashed into one of the universities largest ballrooms.

Thankfully, this was not put on by a sorority, but a smaller student group. It was not in a ballroom, but a classroom of the School of Social Work where the desks had be slid to one end of the room to make space for the fifteen or so of us who sat patiently on our mats for the instructor to arrive.

This would turn out to be the first and only yoga class I've attended where the instructor encouraged us to laugh, to sing along with the blaring music, to vocalize our breathing. It was incredibly different from what I knew, the room was humming with our life. The instructor actually came along with us, pushing and pulling and pressing us into the postures. She didn't know us, yet she cared enough to notice what we hadn't about our own bodies. I could hear the girl next to me audibly sigh as the instructor helped contort her into a posture I had never even seen before.
I was shaking when we finished, too exhausted to get up from my mat and too content to want to. I finally began to notice the girl next to me, the one who had earlier been the human pretzel on the floor.

I had never been approached by anyone before in my college career. Especially anyone like her. Now she was far from resembling a pretzel and much closer to resembling a Vogue fashion spread. Blond, incredibly tall, and proportionately model-thin, she smiled and I was thoroughly dazzled by the way her face seemed to glow. She scooted over to me and introduced herself. It turns out she was the president of the student group and I was a new face.  

She remarked that it seemed like I really needed this session, and I might have snorted a little. My first few months of college had been rough. Cancer, culture shock, and vast feelings of isolation where the first three things I could tick off of my head. Of course, I didn't say that. Those are things to which we normally keep to ourselves. 

Funny how one's definition of normal is subjective.

After our conversation trailed off, I began to roll up my mat and make my way to the water cooler and the buffet table in the back. I didn't see her step to the front of the classroom and thank everyone for coming and inviting them to grab some food.

I turned around just in time as she began to formally introduce herself as a recovering heroin addict, five years clean. She started the group four years ago to reach out to other college students dealing with the same problems she had after she was kicked out of her home and fired from her modeling job. She still got into U of M when she applied, a feat for anyone, but a huge leap when you have to reveal you have had priors concerning drug possession and dealing to one of the schools in the country that prides itself on its rejection rate. The Leaders and the Best and whatnot.
She finally set up a support group, and started to break down some monster barriers and preconceptions about addiction.  A true force. Now, five years later, she was telling her story to us, to me, the newbie, and I was floored.

She invited anyone to share their story, some did. Most didn't, myself included. And we ate and finished up the night with her telling us all to judge a little less tomorrow. Smile to the person sitting next to you on the bus and never assume any one's story for your own.

I hadn't exactly expected it. I mean, the flier was just about free yoga; I hadn't actually thought of looking up the student group. Oddly enough, I wasn't wigged out at all. These people were present, laughing and approachable. God, they were more normal than most of the other kids in my classes. The first group of people I'd met and thought, "Yeah, I'd be friends with them."

As I was walking out, she came up to me again, thanked me again, and gave me her number on a sheet of paper. "For anything," she said.

I never actually called her. I programmed her into my phone, more for a comfort measure than anything. On and off I went to the other meetings they had. I never said anything, but I enjoyed the feeling of connectedness more than I would have liked to admit. She eventually graduated, moved off to Colorado, and the meetings stopped.

Now I'm finishing up here too. It's been over two years since I've gone to a Student's Anonymous meeting, I'm feeling better about being here, but now I've got to leave again and I'm sick of people telling me I should go teach, into the Peace Corps, or something else that fits a nice mold that I am the wrong shape for.

I kind of wish I could dial up that number in my phone and get an answer.