perogipoj

[perogipoj]

all this before coffee ...

Dedicated to my black sheep family, who will always be golden.

 Barbed wire, blank walls and an empty sky. Cocoa Beach.  Brevard County, FL. Jail.  Also known as SHARPS.  Tammy walked into the classroom with an air of bravado coupled with the eyes of a child. I never met a teacher before she said shyly, glancing at her handcuffs on the uncomfortable chair.  Even … I hesitated, even in school, I asked gently. I adjusted my own hips to adjust for the cold hard beneath me.  I mean, a teacher for real.  Her eyes looked down, and I implored with my eyes this time to the corrections officer to remove the handcuffs.  Her shoulder length hair was marred by black roots and mustard colored ends. There were scars on her arm from cutting.  Her teeth were perfect when she decided to smile. Opening the GRE materials, I joked that I am useless at math but fairly good at grammar.  Tammy looked beautiful.

 Some of us take many things too far.  That has seemed to be my pattern.  Even healthy habits turned into obsessions.  Jogging turned into running which became marathons and a cruel treatment of my body.  Some can run into their seventies without injury as some people live to a hundred while smoking and drinking whiskey to the end.  Mindful eating became anorexia and bulimia.  Going organic made me broke with the kombucha and hemp that flowed through my veins.  Being tidy led me to compulsive house cleaning, often with bleach scouring my hands and my eyes colored in pink tears.  Personal grooming turned to hours and dollars of hair coloring, clothes I could not afford, Botox, and breast augmentation. Wanting affirmation led to dangerous and toxic sexual situations.  

 Jaylen, I was warned, was “special.”  I would normally groan inward, used to so many parents highlighting their children as such, usually to explain poor grades.  The volunteer walked all twelve years of Jaylen, his mannerisms large and chaotic, into the room in which all toys and colors were removed.  I hate reading, he said, standing with his arms crossed in front of him like a knight.  Why? It’s stupid.  Can you read, I asked, opening the second-grade reader I was given. I don’t need to read, I can dance.

 I met The Peruvian on a last minute, pathetic online date.  I was at a job expo to acquire my first teaching job after finishing my master’s degree at a world-famous university.  I almost flunked out.  I could not focus.  I cried over social histories in German, a language I lacked grammatical skill in, dreading the meetings with just my professor and another grad student. Black tea, discussions of Marx I got lost in, his approval nodding at the stout Russian girl I already had difficulty understanding in English, never mind in German.  In college, I was stellar.  On time to each class, writing papers late into the night with a gusto of my fingers and a smile on my face.  The world looked bright. On a sweltering day with an incompressible and unimportant commencement speaker, we burnt in the sun and passed around a flask of vodka under our graduation gowns.  Life is beginning.  I held the parchment color graduation schedule. My name had a star next to it.

 I saw that Tammy was no longer shackled when she entered the gray room.  Since the week I met with her, she had elevated herself to the trusted inmates who could clean, deliver meals, and hand out the dog-eared pages of books on a squeaky cart.  So, you scored extremely high on many levels, Tammy.  Let’s take a look at the reading comprehension packet I assigned on The Scarlet Letter.  She smiled more brightly.  I pressed her for intrigue. Ma’am, she said glowing, my commissary is so lit now I don’t have to eat the garbage they give us.  They try to pass off expired food when I deliver it.  I wanted to call them out on those pistachios.  I don’t have time to answer these packets you give me. But I read the book.  What did you read, according to you?  We clasped hands.  Of course, the minster got off and Hester had to wear the giant A over her pilgrim costume.  I dipped my head. Of course.  She could read Hawthorne.  

 I will be the gladdest thing

           Under the sun!

I will touch a hundred flowers

           And not pick one.

 I will look at cliffs and clouds

           With quiet eyes,

Watch the wind bow down the grass,

           And the grass rise.

 And when the lights begin to show

           Up from the town,

I will mark which much be mine,

           And then start down.

-          Edna St. Vincent Millay  

 Jaylen came running into the room from the play center and basketball court which I assumed was a courtesy to me.  He needed to get the wiggles out.

 Nassau Point in the summer at Aunt Tillie’s, driving the Long Island Expressway until it ended to countless grey and white mottled roads.  Passing vineyards that used to be potato fields, cramming my mouth with the last bit of contraband Doritos which were called a Special Treat to nullify us on the vast expanse from New Jersey to the tiny white house.  Decorated in “Early American” with a front glass porch smelling oddly pleasant of moth balls and sunlight.  The huge lawn rolling into the bay with a dock that appeared and disappeared with the tide.  Kids took showers in the dank basement, carved out of a space teeming of a hoarder. A crusted bottle of prell shampoo and a withered sliver of ivory soap.  I met Man-Boy With Very Hairy Legs for the first and last time.  Stroking my legs up and down, he asked if I had a boyfriend.  I was ten, and smug that I could run through poison ivy and never get a rash.  Do you want to fool around, like do stuff?  He whispered into my ear everything I did not know yet.  That’s what married people do!  With his laughter, I leapt my long legs and ran, up the hill, to the driveway where my father was shucking corn.  I got away. This time.

 I was so excited to see Tammy.  But she was not in attendance.  I left the CO the beat-up copy of Antigone for her. I never saw Tammy again.  “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when his course is wrong and repairs the evil.  The only evil is pride.” This quote was for my betterment, not for Tammy’s.

 A time of reckoning, and a time of complete growth.  A time of a schedule not placed by us.  A journey into us through the connection of others, who became best friends.  Vitamin fusions, lining up for medication in ribbed short paper cups, and Group.  Totally released from responsibility, my linens and clothes were washed, returned the same afternoon in compact squares surrounded by plastic wrap.  Jokes of communal constipation. So, this is my brain mapped.  Here is what displays depression, here anxiety, this is insomnia, that part shows a lack of memory and concentration.  What is that big blue of the Pacific Ocean?  She looked at me, clicked her keyboard.  PTSD.  

 I want to draw a Parrot! P-A-R-R-O-T and speak like one! Wordless, I handed him the blue and black expo markers for the old white board.  With precision, he drew the bird.  I need more colors, he explained in one breath can I talk like a parrot.  I smiled at him at led him to his desk. Let’s try to pay attention today, and I will get you more colors and you can show me how a parrot talks. I began my lesson, and his eyes drifted into imagination.  I needed to get him more colors.  

 I told The Peruvian I was pregnant.  Now I can never afford to divorce you he muttered, enraged.  Married two months earlier, I realized our honeymoon baby was not welcome.   The protesters were angry, and I felt sick. Him on his laptop, me crying to a social worker.  Do not sedate me, I plead, I need to feel this sin.  Sliding my shoes off in the car, my trunk grinding with mountain rolls of cramps and uncontrollable sobbing coming from a divine place, I declined lunch in West Palm.  I never want to do anything fun.  Changing my pad alone in a car beneath the ceiling of the parking garage in City Place, I then tilted my head and fell asleep again.  My birthday came and went.  You didn’t remember my birthday.  With that evil glint in his eyes, he turned his head and told me that was because he did not love me.

 I purchased a ream of paper and a new box of 42 colors Crayola, legit, sharpener in the box, for Jaylen.  He immediately sat down and drew and drew.  Can we put some words to these if we use the colors you want?  He looked up at me shyly and wrote down five words from the fifth-grade reader.  How did you know that?  Easy, my Grammy teaches me.

 I did not smoke to fit in. I smoked because it felt good out in the parking lot, vying for shade, with the Tech supplying communal cigarettes and a light.  The wave went through me and my lips burned with the dirt and smoky taste.  You look like Strawberry Shortcake trying to smoke a cigarette!  My mother was a sophisticated Virginia Slims smoker, sitting on the brick steps in her tennis skirt, so beautiful, watching my brother play in the backyard waiting for my father to return from work.  I sat next to her in awe, breathing in the sprinkler water and counting its pattern, hum hum-hum-hum, hum hum-hum-hum.  

 I took a cigarette break on my Uber ride home.  I knew I would not smoke much when I got home.   However, I did not consume much except cigarettes and black coffee.  I felt Parisian.  The house got messy, and my thighs grew softer. Investing only in ponds cold cream and drugstore mascara, I laughed deeper and threw myself into work more than ever, with determined concentration, forgetting my posture, hunched over in zeal working sixty hours a week.   Anxiety attacks did not make my head and hands shake while driving. I binged watched Law and Order.  Being unhealthy never felt so healthy.  

 I called the jail to let them know I am available for other inmates if they needed me.  I went the next day to help a young man learn English as a second language. All went well until he stood up screaming asking for a guard then switching to Spanish.  

 Here is your key, you can find your mailbox in the teacher lounge.  Here is the form to join the union, Mr. Pescatelli will most certainly find you about that.  Do you know what a block schedule is?  In the morning you will be teaching Advanced Placement European History to our magnet students.  After lunch, you have sophomore World History in the fourth wing. The afternoon will have different challenges.  If you ever need assistance, security is just down the hall.  Welcome to Ft. Lauderdale High School.  Welcome to my first year of teaching.  

 …

 I met the Sophisticated Scandinavian Man in Boston in the Spring.  A PhD candidate from a social democracy intrigued me.  I was twenty-two and he was twenty-eight.  I felt like a puppy taken in from the cold.  There is a long story for this, maybe later.  The times in which he devoured me, lavished upon me, he loved a short story I wrote, “All this before coffee.”

 Sonya met me in the prison classroom.  In anticipation of a new student, I posted Jaylen’s parrots, travel posters, pictures of presidents listing their failures before they took office.  Hello, she said, reaching her cuffed wrists out to me.  I am Jaylen’s mother.

 All this before coffee.  All this after a DUI.

[perogipoj]

Drinkin’ The Kool Aid

Drinkin’ the Kool Aid

-dedicated to all misguided alternative medicine doctors, and Julie Glockenspiel, Esq., who told me teaching is a very flexible job.

 I have belonged to two cults: Essential Oil.com and Charter School, Inc.  The first one required deprogramming.  The latter I always knew was bullshit, but I was willing to be a slave for the measly paycheck.  

 I still do not understand why you need my social security number, I said, filling out an order form to purchase a small package of lavender, peppermint, and lemon essential oils. They did smell good, and I would receive a 5ml bottle of wild orange for free.  She was a good friend, however, and I wanted to support her.

 This was, however, a covert operation.

 My first day of preplanning at Charter School, Inc. started out as amazing. Incredible.  It was a luau with plenty of food and surprisingly OK weather for an August day in Florida.  Each team of teachers had its own table in the auditorium/lunchroom/facility storage/uniform exchange/recycling center multipurpose room.  Teachers are always grateful for a free meal, even if it is stale bagels and cream cheese tubs with that small pool of liquid circling the top; one can always mix that up with a spork.  I asked where the faculty lounge was.  Oh, darling, my hand patted, you are too funny.  

 It then occurred to me to look at the preplanning schedule.  In the past, I scanned to see what meetings were useless and when I could just go to my classroom to actually … preplan.  My eyes grew wide, and my feet became numb as I slid off my sketchers and sat cross legged in my chair, grabbing a handful of M&M’s.  

 Monday: AM Luau, Raffle Prizes for Summer Forum only for those who attended it for a week in July.

 Tuesday: [New Teachers Only] Absorption of our Founder’s book, “Why Life Should Not Come in the Way of Work: The Power of a Rubber Band Ball.”

 Wednesday:  Dress as your Favorite Color Rubber Band!  Mandatory delight in Charter School, Inc. Bingo and Plinko. Light refreshments, such as leftover Cheerios from last year’s after school program, will be served.  Encouraged to stay and play District Risk and try to win more students from good schools!

 Thursday: Professional development;  Word Walls, Data Binders, Interior Design of a Classroom, Which Committee you will be forced to join, Your paper limit for the copier and how to Teach with no resources, How to never Fail a student, How to Be at Three Meetings at once, Navigating the Muddy Field you have to park in.  Join us at 11:00 PM for a Domino Pizza Party and enjoy cutting your own bulletin board paper in our multipurpose room Please limit to two slices of pizza and BYOW (Bring your own water!)

 Friday: Cruise Day!  Get ready for an exotic trip!  Just like a real one, train how to wear a life preserver and survive the Journey:  Run to and from our stations at car-loop duty, lunch duty, mopping your classroom floors, carrying a 20 pound clear plastic box of standardized tests, creating a gift basket for each student to say Way to Play for the FSA!  Join us after lunch provided by yourself for a meeting with our school Guidance Counselor:  Strategies to enhance your Charter School, Inc. experience. How to Allow Alcohol to Cope.  Being OK that you Alienate your Friends and Family.

 Saturday:  Useless and discouraged, but feel free to meet with our Human Resources “man” we borrowed from The Office. Know your rights, and please use your mother’s or husband’s insurance.  

 Sunday: Let’s get rolling!  Feel free to plan for yourself on your own time.  Please contact Carl, our only facilities employee, on his beeper to open the gate.

 Merriam Webster:  Cult; great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.

 Within days, I received no fewer than ten emails from EssentialOil.com.  Congratulations on becoming a Health Advocate!  You have dedicated your life to sharing powerful essential oils with your friends and family!  

 A “healthy lifestyle” has always been my front to cover up inadequacies in my personal life and relationships.  When a good friend invited me to a pamper party, I was surprised that when entering the door, I was given an order form, and corralled into a lecture with a PowerPoint.  I made note to take the glass bottle of Perrier and head back home on a Wednesday night.  Somehow, I had managed to become a certified yoga instructor, and was interested in general, but was honestly confused.  I did not know what a pyramid scheme was.  I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  

 My “friend” sent flow charts of how much income I could accrue by only purchasing $100 worth of product each month wholesale, all the while inviting friends and family to join as it was a win-win situation.  When people balked when asked about their social security number, I glowingly explained that they can make so much income that they would be taxed, that is all.  Look at your medicine cabinet, I was trained to explain.  Everything you have is toxic.  Instead, you could purchase a kit of essential oils for $500 and responsibly cure your family from everything to the common cold, mental illness, diabetes, and cancer.  All research was conducted by the company itself.  My own friend claimed to cure her husband of thyroid cancer with frankincense and a blend of essential oils historically found obviously unsuccessful to eradicate Bubonic Plague.

 Merriam Webster:  Cult; a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator.

 Teaching is a profession, an art, and a balancing act, no matter where you teach.  Most students are remarkably similar, even if they are quite different.  Jesus said give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.  Maria Montessori wrote “the greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, ’The children are now working as if I did not exist.” The Buddha asks us for acceptance and appreciation of the present, to not seek joy, but contentment.  To me, it means work. Good work.  

 It seemed to come within weeks that I was asked to join the International Conference for Essential Oils.com. in Provo, Utah.  I had realized that I made a profit of $80.00 the entire scheme while purchasing hundreds of dollars of oils each month.  Uplines were granted ranks of precious metals and gems as they were the only ones making money, and lots of it.  

 Join us to share the incredible experience of our family and our world-changing health and wellness expo.  

 I, regrettably, cannot join, as I do not want to pay my way to Utah and all my room and board.  Out of curiosity, I watched it on YouTube.  A stadium full of mostly women, lights and music, a fervor of excitement over new products. It competed with a Superbowl half-time.  

 Teachers, after a schoolyear of exceptional work by our students and administration, we have had the most successful year ever!  Teachers are instructed to clear their calendars July 4-10 for Forum, our opportunity to meet with all the regional Charter Schools, Inc.  The bus will leave at 6:30 AM from the Manatee car loop to head to Tamarac, in the good ole’ F-L-A.  We reserved five rooms at the La Quinta at a somewhat reduced rate.  A wedding is also occurring, so please plan to pay four to a room with two double beds.  Vending machines are down the hall.  A cash bar reception will be held from 3:30 to 4:30, happy hour.  Please drink up so you Imagine that this is a good experience.  

 Mark Twain wrote that “education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.”  

 I told Charter Schools, Inc. that my daughter had an orthodontist appointment five days in a row.  I went to CVS and bought the most toxic bar of dove soap.  I finally felt clean.

[perogipoj]

all this before coffee

Dedicated to my black sheep family, who will always be golden.

 Barbed wire, blank walls and an empty sky. Cocoa Beach.  Brevard County, FL. Jail.  Also known as SHARPS.  Tammy walked into the classroom with an air of bravado coupled with the eyes of a child. I never met a teacher before she said shyly, glancing at her handcuffs on the uncomfortable chair.  Even … I hesitated, even in school, I asked gently. I adjusted my own hips to adjust for the cold hard beneath me.  I mean, a teacher for real.  Her eyes looked down, and I implored with my eyes this time to the corrections officer to remove the handcuffs.  Her shoulder length hair was marred by black roots and mustard colored ends.  There were scars on her arm from cutting.  Her teeth were perfect when she decided to smile. Opening the GRE materials, I joked that I am useless at math but fairly good at grammar.  Tammy looked beautiful.

 Some of us take many things too far.  That has seemed to be my pattern.  Even healthy habits turned into obsessions.  Jogging turned into running which became marathons and a cruel treatment of my body.  Some can run into their seventies without injury as some people live to a hundred while smoking and drinking whiskey to the end.  Mindful eating became anorexia and bulimia.  Going organic made me broke with the kombucha and hemp that flowed through my veins.  Being tidy led me to compulsive house cleaning, often with bleach scouring my hands and my eyes colored in pink tears.  Personal grooming turned to hours and dollars of hair coloring, clothes I could not afford, Botox, and breast augmentation. Wanting affirmation led to dangerous and toxic sexual situations.  

 Jaylen, I was warned, was “special.”  I would normally groan inward, used to so many parents highlighting their children as such, usually to explain poor grades.   The volunteer walked all twelve years of Jaylen, his mannerisms large and chaotic, into the room in which all toys and colors were removed.  I hate reading, he said, standing with his arms crossed in front of him like a knight.  Why? It’s stupid.  Can you read, I asked, opening the second-grade reader I was given. I don’t need to read, I can dance.

 I met The Peruvian on a last minute, pathetic online date.  I was at a job expo to acquire my first teaching job after finishing my master’s degree at a world-famous university.  I almost flunked out.  I could not focus.  I cried over social histories in German, a language I lacked grammatical skill in, dreading the meetings with just my professor and another grad student. Black tea, discussions of Marx I got lost in, his approval nodding at the stout Russian girl I already had difficulty understanding in English, never mind in German.  In college, I was stellar.  On time to each class, writing papers late into the night with a gusto of my fingers and a smile on my face.  The world looked bright. On a sweltering day with an incompressible and unimportant commencement speaker, we burnt in the sun and passed around a flask of vodka under our graduation gowns.  Life is beginning.  I held the parchment color graduation schedule. My name had a star next to it.

 I saw that Tammy was no longer shackled when she entered the gray room.  Since the week I met with her, she had elevated herself to the trusted inmates who could clean, deliver meals, and hand out the dog-eared pages of books on a squeaky cart.  So, you scored extremely high on many levels, Tammy.  Let’s take a look at the reading comprehension packet I assigned on The Scarlet Letter.  She smiled more brightly.  I pressed her for intrigue. Ma’am, she said glowing, my commissary is so lit now I don’t have to eat the garbage they give us.  They try to pass off expired food when I deliver it.  I wanted to call them out on those pistachios.  I don’t have time to answer these packets you give me. But I read the book.  What did you read, according to you?  We clasped hands.  Of course, the minster got off and Hester had to wear the giant A over her pilgrim costume.  I dipped my head. Of course.  She could read Hawthorne.  

 I will be the gladdest thing

           Under the sun!

I will touch a hundred flowers

           And not pick one.

 I will look at cliffs and clouds

           With quiet eyes,

Watch the wind bow down the grass,

           And the grass rise.

 And when the lights begin to show

           Up from the town,

I will mark which much be mine,

           And then start down.

-          Edna St. Vincent Millay  

 Jaylen came running into the room from the play center and basketball court which I assumed was a courtesy to me.  He needed to get the wiggles out.

 Nassau Point in the summer at Aunt Tillie’s, driving the Long Island Expressway until it ended to countless grey and white mottled roads.  Passing vineyards that used to be potato fields, cramming my mouth with the last bit of contraband Doritos which were called a Special Treat to nullify us on the vast expanse from New Jersey to the tiny white house.  Decorated in “Early American” with a front glass porch smelling oddly pleasant of moth balls and sunlight.  The huge lawn rolling into the bay with a dock that appeared and disappeared with the tide.  Kids took showers in the dank basement, carved out of a space teeming of a hoarder. A crusted bottle of prell shampoo and a withered sliver of ivory soap.  I met Man-Boy With Very Hairy Legs for the first and last time.  Stroking my legs up and down, he asked if I had a boyfriend.  I was ten, and smug that I could run through poison ivy and never get a rash.  Do you want to fool around, like do stuff?  He whispered into my ear everything I did not know yet.  That’s what married people do!  With his laughter, I leapt my long legs and ran, up the hill, to the driveway where my father was shucking corn.  I got away. This time.

 I was so excited to see Tammy.  But she was not in attendance.  I left the CO the beat-up copy of Antigone for her. I never saw Tammy again.  “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when his course is wrong and repairs the evil.  The only evil is pride.” This quote was for my betterment, not for Tammy’s.

 A time of reckoning, and a time of complete growth.  A time of a schedule not placed by us.  A journey into us through the connection of others, who became best friends.  Vitamin fusions, lining up for medication in ribbed short paper cups, and Group.  Totally released from responsibility, my linens and clothes were washed, returned the same afternoon in compact squares surrounded by plastic wrap.  Jokes of communal constipation. So, this is my brain mapped.  Here is what displays depression, here anxiety, this is insomnia, that part shows a lack of memory and concentration.  What is that big blue of the Pacific Ocean?  She looked at me, clicked her keyboard.  PTSD.  

 I want to draw a Parrot! P-A-R-R-O-T and speak like one! Wordless, I handed him the blue and black expo markers for the old white board.  With precision, he drew the bird.  I need more colors, he explained in one breath can I talk like a parrot.  I smiled at him at led him to his desk. Let’s try to pay attention today, and I will get you more colors and you can show me how a parrot talks. I began my lesson, and his eyes drifted into imagination.  I needed to get him more colors.  

 I told The Peruvian I was pregnant.  Now I can never afford to divorce you he muttered, enraged.  Married two months earlier, I realized our honeymoon baby was not welcome.   The protesters were angry, and I felt sick. Him on his laptop, me crying to a social worker.  Do not sedate me, I plead, I need to feel this sin.  Sliding my shoes off in the car, my trunk grinding with mountain rolls of cramps and uncontrollable sobbing coming from a divine place, I declined lunch in West Palm.  I never want to do anything fun.  Changing my pad alone in a car beneath the ceiling of the parking garage in City Place, I then tilted my head and fell asleep again.  My birthday came and went.  You didn’t remember my birthday.  With that evil glint in his eyes, he turned his head and told me that was because he did not love me.

 I purchased a ream of paper and a new box of 42 colors Crayola, legit, sharpener in the box, for Jaylen.  He immediately sat down and drew and drew.  Can we put some words to these if we use the colors you want?  He looked up at me shyly and wrote down five words from the fifth-grade reader.  How did you know that?  Easy, my Grammy teaches me.

 I did not smoke to fit in. I smoked because it felt good out in the parking lot, vying for shade, with the Tech supplying communal cigarettes and a light.  The wave went through me and my lips burned with the dirt and smoky taste.  You look like Strawberry Shortcake trying to smoke a cigarette!  My mother was a sophisticated Virginia Slims smoker, sitting on the brick steps in her tennis skirt, so beautiful, watching my brother play in the backyard waiting for my father to return from work.  I sat next to her in awe, breathing in the sprinkler water and counting its pattern, hum hum-hum-hum, hum hum-hum-hum.  

 I took a cigarette break on my Uber ride home.  I knew I would not smoke much when I got home.   However, I did not consume much except cigarettes and black coffee.  I felt Parisian.  The house got messy, and my thighs grew softer. Investing only in ponds cold cream and drugstore mascara, I laughed deeper and threw myself into work more than ever, with determined concentration, forgetting my posture, hunched over in zeal working sixty hours a week.   Anxiety attacks did not make my head and hands shake while driving. I binged watched Law and Order.  Being unhealthy never felt so healthy.  

 I called the jail to let them know I am available for other inmates if they needed me.  I went the next day to help a young man learn English as a second language. All went well until he stood up screaming asking for a guard then switching to Spanish.  

 Here is your key, you can find your mailbox in the teacher lounge.  Here is the form to join the union, Mr. Pescatelli will most certainly find you about that.  Do you know what a block schedule is?  In the morning you will be teaching Advanced Placement European History to our magnet students.  After lunch, you have sophomore World History in the fourth wing. The afternoon will have different challenges.  If you ever need assistance, security is just down the hall.  Welcome to Ft. Lauderdale High School.  Welcome to my first year of teaching.  

 …

 I met the Sophisticated Scandinavian Man in Boston in the Spring.  A PhD candidate from a social democracy intrigued me.  I was twenty-two and he was twenty-eight.  I felt like a puppy taken in from the cold.  There is a long story for this, maybe later.  The times in which he devoured me, lavished upon me, he loved a short story I wrote, “All this before coffee.”

 Sonya met me in the prison classroom.  In anticipation of a new student, I posted Jaylen’s parrots, travel posters, pictures of presidents listing their failures before they took office.  Hello, she said, reaching her cuffed wrists out to me.  I am Jaylen’s mother.

 All this before coffee.  All this after a DUI.