Tomorrow is the official last day of school. I recorded the 4th/5th grade class singing their favorite songs this afternoon, so that they could have a CD to keep and remember the year.
If you click here, you can download the mp3 of them singing Love Potion Number Nine.
12-Squared wrestling in guitar class.
My son, 12, has a girlfriend. She, too, is 12, and is in my guitar class, so I know her well. She's a great girl - eccentric, bohemian, smart, a great sense of humor. They sit on the school wall during break, one iPod between them, one earbud in her right ear, his left. It's cute! It's scary! My older kids didn't find puppy love until they were older, until they hit their later teens.
The school is holding an end-of-the-year dance next week for the 7th and 8th grade. 12-squared ('cause like Brangelina and other celebrity couples these two need their own label) are attending together - and by this I mean meeting each other at the dance. Of course I volunteered to chaperone the event! I'm grateful Mr. 12 tells me these things, isn't afraid to hide his infatuation. But it scares me, bad. He shaved for the first time this morning, shaved his peach fuzz. He considers himself 13, 14 like the other kids in his grade. Skipping a grade, his natural height, his "maturity" (if one can call it that, ha ha) - it all adds up to a boy older than his years. And, as is the way with these junior-high things, Ms. 12 is the definite instigator. You know how it goes...
So. Should I be as terrified as I am?
My son, 12, found out today that he won an essay competition sponsored by Outward Bound! He gets an all-expense paid (including airfare and hiking boots and supplies) 10-day Outward Bound adventure in the Maryland Wilderness this summer!
He will be in a group of other Expeditionary Learning School students, and will get to participate in a high ropes course, backpacking through the wild, rock climbing, community service, leadership training, and learning navigation skills. He is so excited and I am proud of him.
I love my boys' school and the opportunities the teachers and administration give students to become fully realized beings.
I knew he was entering the competition, but he didn't let me read his essay. I still have no idea what he said!
Mr. 12 and Jerry the Bunny labor over a 500-piece puzzle!
I met a scientist. He stood in line at Wal-Mart yesterday, both arms balancing an overstuffed hand basket filled with Twinkies, Sara Lee pound cake, two Hungry Man dinners - Salisbury Steak and Chicken Cacciatore, a gallon of store-brand whole milk, a clear plastic box filled with butterless croissants. I looked at my own push basket. A dozen free-range eggs, six lemons, two bunches of cilantro, five pounds of whole wheat flour, a box of pressed soy, broccoli, a carton of organic lowfat milk.
"Heh. You must be one of those vegetarians."
He leered at my basket, as if it sprouted canteloupe breasts. He held his goods close, but his girth prevented his nose from inhaling the imprinted cardboard housing his treats.
"I just try to eat low on the food chain. I have kids. I have to teach them how to eat."
The woman in front of me turned around, stared at my sparse goods, then moved her purse, her torso, so I couldn't measure her motherhood. Her toddler shifted in the grocery cart seat, tried to lurch and grab a candy bar. She screamed when her mom slapped her wrist, her yellow-ribboned ponytail cracking like thunder. I tried not to wince at my self-righteous words. I wished I kept quiet, just laughed at the man with the heart attack horn of plenty instead of handing him a shopping list of the ways I think I'm better.
"What the hell is a person like you doing here?"
The man laughed as he spoke. His groceries rose and fell with the shake of his belly. I knew what he meant, knew the Wal-Mart stocked tofu for the short list of people like me, people who came to this cattle-fed quadrant of New Mexico to escape the smog and traffic of Calfornia.
"I like it here. I sell Avon. I'm a mom. I'm single. Where else should I live?"
He laughed. He liked my answer, and his cheeks echoed red like a school girl, as if somehow I told him those secret dirty thoughts I only dared uncork late at night when my boys slept under heavy blankets.
"I teach astronomy at the university. I wasn't planning on shopping, but I can't stop thinking about what's out there. I mean Out There. You know? Some of my colleages think there may be as many as sixty-five Earth-like planets for every basic star we've found. If this ratio holds, we're talking sixty-seven billion habitable planets in our galaxy. One galaxy. One galaxy in a sea of countless."
I imagined it as his groceries jiggled. A tide of intelligence, as if every calorie in his basket was a planet, he was a sun, he was his own galaxy, a black hole at the center, a black hole munching Twinkies, gulping statistics, swallowing us whole, us whole.
"Huh. Sixty-seven billion?" I did a quick calculation. "At current population levels, that's about fifteen planets each for every man, woman and child living today."
The cashier started to ring my goods, my bunches of wilted cilantro carelessly shoved into a cheap plastic bag, my tofu, my hormone-free milk.
"Yeah," he answered. "Talk about vacation potential."
We laughed. I paid. I carried three bags and the knowledge we might be alone in the ways we understand life, but for all our smarts and commerce we're still insignificant. Just a few hours later I sat in a school room with four middle-school students. They rested guitars on their lap, just like me, and we played one chord after another in a rhythm that echoed a song they loved, a song riddled with illicit words, a song by a band called Limp Bizkit.
"Hey, Ms. Jaworski!"
The tall eighth-grader with the kewpie doll hair and misleading angelic expression paused, three stiff fingers pressed into the neck of his instrument.
"Are you going to get in trouble for teaching us this song? Our other music teacher makes us play baby songs, even though the stuff we like is just as easy."
I tried not to smile. I knew Mrs. Baca, the woman with the short frizzy hair who wore sensible brown sweaters over khaki slacks, who taught them old school rock like the Beatles and The Doors. Kewpie Boy didn't know she passed them sure teen-aged terror, a cocktail of indecency and lust, songs that made her own teacher cringe decades ago. She didn't care what songs I brought to class.
The songs don't really change, I thought. It's all promise of sex, rage against authority. I wore safety pins along the bottom of my ripped shirts at his age. I shaved my hair into a mohawk, let my parents hate what I had become. I worshiped The Clash, The Sex Pistols. This is nothing new.
"Well, Henry, I'm going to tell you something I learned today."
He leaned close, as if my booming voice was meant just for him, not the entire room.
"There might be sixty-seven billion habitable planets in our galaxy alone. That's fifteen planets for every man, woman and child. I bet that any intelligent life on those planets has their own music, and I bet their teenagers think their music is the coolest and the best. It's nature, Henry. As you pass out of childhood you need to shake off all that uncertainty with music, with words you think might give you power. We all do it. Mrs. Baca did it, too, and those songs she teachers you are just as wild. Listen beyond the melody, listen to those words."
Henry shook his head. He kept his fingers clamped into a C chord, and I could see the edges of his finger pads grow red from the pressure.
"Nah. I don't believe that shit."
He paused, waited to see if I would reprimand him, if I would react. I didn't move.
"No such thing as aliens. Even here in New Mexico. Heh."
The boy in the back rustled. He held his guitar on lap, too, but spent class pretending to play. He wore a mud-splattered black baseball cap over unruly black hair, black dirty shirt over frayed jeans - a loner, heavy with limbs that hated excise, heavy with some kind of invisible pain. He sat afraid, still, not yet knowing his hands could caress music from a hunk of wood and six strings.
"Henry, haven't you read Bradbury? Martian Chronicles?"
The boy kept his head down. I had to strain to hear him.
"Henry, we are the aliens."
I nodded, yeah, strummed the first line of our song, and as we slowly pounded through verse, through chorus, five students stomping feet, trying desperately to look detached, cool, my heart knew that lonely boy was right.
My son, 12, invited six friends to attend his birthday party. I made the invitations, hand-wrote Who, What, When, Where, Why, Pizza and Cake! I added careful script, respondez, s'il vous plait, our house number, and an assortment of goofy monkey stickers. 12 stuffed the invites in his backpack last week and hauled them to school.
Yesterday morning I cornered 12. I had to look up to see his eyes.
"Well, how many kids are showing up? Do you know? Did you give out the invitations? No one called to RSVP!"
12 shrugged his shoulders. He ran one hand through his thick hair.
"Mom, don't worry. I've got it covered."
He ran his hand through his hair again, and I caught a flash of something vague - amusement? chagrin? confusion?
"Mom, c'mon! We gotta pick up Robert!"
I remembered 12's enigmatic expression as 12, his younger brother 9, and 12's two best friends rocked Silva Bowl's center lane, rolling cool spare after strike. 12 used his birthday gift - a custom ball I ordered during after Holiday sale craziness, complete with his name and the Star Trek logo. I let the other boys borrow my own ball, a deep purple number sprinkled with inlaid sparkles, two comets chasing the finger holes. I sat a careful distance from them, didn't want to be the Old Maid, raise eyebrows when the humor inevitably turned blue. The boys seemed to use some kind of special ritual involving the Chicken Dance and a complicated series of hand motions each time one stepped up to the line. The bowling alley's track lighting ricocheted off the chrome ball return, off the gyrating boys, giving their actions the look of a bad junior high dance team on Mars.
What the hell did he mean, 'I've got it covered?' Is anyone gonna show up to the party tonight?
I thought about the vat of pizza dough slowly rising in the fridge, the mounds of cheese I shredded, the chocolate cake I frosted the night before, the lemon cake I drizzled with a tangy glaze before the clock struck five, while I stood on the cool kitchen tiles, feet bare, too tired to rummage for my slippers.
Well, we'll just have leftovers.
We arrived back home an hour before the party started. 12 and his friends tumbled downstairs to play air hockey, and 9 donned an apron ("Tender, Succulent, Aged to Perfection - and the BBQ ain't bad either!). I pulled out my pizza pans and 9 went to work. He added a dollop of olive oil to each pan, then spread it in a thin layer with his bare hands. I washed the morning dishes as he worked. He sprinkled cornmeal over the oil, then set the pans aside. The apron fell below his knees. Cornmeal bits flew into his hair as he wiped his hands together.
Ring!
The doorbell! I yelled for 12 to come upstairs, greet his minions. I expected the early bird to be the bad luck boy with the perpetual drippy nose that lives around the corner. But the cold air blew in another boy, then a girl, then a boy, a boy, a boy, a girl. All six at once!
Wow. Well that's that! Everyone's here!
The swarm didn't notice me, dove in regiment to the basement, discarding scarves, hats, mittens and boots in the process. The dog and the pot-bellied pig ran, too, but aimed for my bedroom, away from the fray. I tossed in a couple of rawhide bones and locked the door. 9 rolled his eyes.
"Teenagers," he muttered. He grabbed a hunk of dough and began to pull it, flatten it, form it into a perfect flat circle.
Ring!
12 ran to the door before I could reach. He flung it wide, let the four degrees mingle with our sixty-five, and another flood of classmates poured into the livingroom. Seven, eight, nine, ten.... I lost count, just knew that I better assist 9 with those pizzas!
All told we had 19 guests, and 9 and I built up some arm muscle manipulating the dough. Somewhere around the hour mark, half-way through the festivities, a crash followed by screams echoed up the stairs!
"Ms. Jaworski! Ms. Jaworski! 12 fell through the window!"
I flew downstairs, hands covered in suds, to see a heap of teenagers giggling on the floor, my son with bloody arm above head, and the small ground-level window punched out into the snow. I still don't know what happened. They didn't offer, and I didn't ask. I stuck bits of bandage and cotton along 12's right arm, right fingers, and cleaned up the mess best I could. I cut a piece of cardboard to fit the window and fastened it with duct tape. 12 looked sheepish and I noticed how the party girls shook back their hair and looked at him with new respect.
It's morning, the boys trodded off to school, I still have a hell of a mess to clean, and 12 is going to have a hell of a time holding pen against paper. The moments before he escaped I grabbed him by the good arm and pointed to his shirt.
"Hey! That's the same shirt you wore yesterday. It's dirty, 12, plus look at all the blood on it! Go back to your room and put on something fresh!"
"Mom! I don't have time, gotta run, bye!"
He grabbed his down jacket and ran to chase his brother.
I've got your number, kid. I know you want to impress whoever didn't show up last night with wild party stories.
After an unexpected blizzard and a little reworking of time and date, today is 12's birthday party! Instead of sledding - it's a cool -4 degrees outside at the moment - we are headed with two additional boys to Santa Fe for a several hour session of bowling. 12's additional friends arrive at the homestead tonight at 6 for pizza and cake and the good goddess knows what else.
(You may remember the time I tried to sell Avon during Men's Bowling League...)
I spent the last hour fumbling through kitchen, bathroom, boys' bedrooms with an almost empty spray bottle of green cleaner in one hand, dirty rag in the other. The boys attempted some kind of half-hearted attempt to appease me. They carried laundry to the basement under one arm. The dog chased them, I followed the dog, my dishpan hands snatching dropped socks and underwear at each step.
I'm catching my breath. The wall behind me sports a large rectangular opening. My home's intestines spill forth - an intersection of pipe and energy line. I want to cover it, cover the cracks along the outside walls that give the stucco the appearance of a rippled beige Mexican wedding cookie in this snow.
When I lived in Southern California such things mattered, the things involving surface, veneer. I find my synapses in that traffic at times, Los Angeles traffic, smog thoughts. None of it makes sense on these streets. The only cars that wait are those of ranchers at Malette's Feed and Grain. I wait there some mornings, buy a bale or two of alfalfa for the bunnies, share a cup of coffee half-filled with the dulce de leche you make by boiling cans of sweetened condensed milk. That sugar fills our veins, somehow fills the cracks that spider across everyone's home.
Here's the recipe I use to make dulce de leche. It's the same recipe everyone in town uses, and I learned it from old Mrs. Gallegos one morning after I dropped off two bottles of Skin So Soft. Really, nothing else in life is this simple, this delicious. Just be sure to keep the can covered with water, less you risk a kitchen explosion!
As Mrs. Gallegos said as she spooned a healthy dollop of dulce de leche into two ceramic mugs, then poured strong pinon coffe, "It's that hidden sweetness inside, Birdie, that lightens the black."
Mrs. Gallegos' Dulce de Leche
Ingredients:
1 can sweetened condensed milk
Method:
Peel the label off of the can of condensed milk. Place the can at the bottom of a heavy pot. Pour water into the pan until it reaches two inches above the can. Put the pot on a stove and turn up the heat.
Let the pot and can simmer for three hours. Watch that pot! You may need to add additional water if it starts running low.
Let the can cool, open, enjoy! You can spoon the dulce de leche over ice cream, into coffee, or just eat it out of the can with a spoon. Yummy!
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I posted these links of my recent stories of the past week or two at Beauty Dish, but I should have posted them here, this being my clearing house, so to speak, of stories. You've already read all this stuff, but I'm sticking the list for those who might stumble across this site, and for those whose newsletters were jumbled:
10 Easy Ways to be an Environmentally-Friendly Avon Lady
Derek Jeter almost got me arrested for postal terrorism
Out with the Old, In with the Cold (I take the Polar Bear Plunge!
Have a wondrous MLK day, wherever you are, whatever you do!
I posted a little story at BlogHer today in honor of 11's birthday eve. You guys know the story I share there - well, I'm sure Shrexy remembers it!
The stroke of my boy's midnight
Happy Birthday Eve, 11!
I didn't realize I was this stylish!
I dare ya try to art wedgie THAT!
It's Winter Solstice! What's a neo-Druid to do? Visit StoneFridge outside of Santa Fe, of course!
I'm taking the boys - if we can forge the blizzard-crusted roads - to see this monstrosity of refuse.
Report to follow...
