My morning routine includes reading the New York Times online, doing my e-mail and trying to write. These days, I skim the day's headlines or even avoid reading the news altogether. For a liberal, it has been a brutal winter. The gloom of an Oregon sky has been compounded by three wars, Republican depredation of any program designed to help the socially vulnerable, and locally, squeezing of kids into fewer schools and larger classrooms. I wonder when free market, consumer America will wake up and realize we are quickly consuming ourselves and all we need to be holding dear.
Clare is getting out her journal. Her mother is “on the streets.” As Clare once wrote, her mother chose her friends over her family. Clare and her two sisters are being raised by a single father. He's a good man, but the first thing I discovered in my teaching meetings with this eleven year old is she is the one taking care of herself. At first, she'd be just getting up as I walked in the door at 11 a.m. Yes, teens do sleep late. I can't seem to divorce my mothering instincts, however, from my teaching. So I encouraged Clare to get up earlier and have breakfast. This home teaching job, I find, is much more than the imparting of book learning.
I ask Clare to write about her sisters, her grandmother, and, finally about herself and her life. We're inching our way towards describing her mother. Clare has a life-affirming, intrinsic wisdom that unexpectedly blurbs out at me in her simple, thoughtful word choices. She's slow as molasses when I ask her questions about the reading. But her answers belie the richness at the bottom of the vat.
We are reading a favorite of my daughter's at Clare's age, Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons. I chose it because the story centers around a young teen girl whose on a journey to find her having-left-home mother. It's about finding the puzzle pieces of loss.
On this particular morning, my head is swirling with the losses of lives both on domestic and foreign soil. I conclude my dad was right: It is a painful jungle out here in the world. The chapter Clare and I are reading is about Pandora. After discussing how Pandora was given a box she wasn't suppose to open, the assignment is to draw this box.
Clare loves to draw, and eagerly gets out her colored pencils. She reminds me of my once pre-teen daughter, in the way young eyes open to new ways of seeing. Clare sketches a three-dimensional rectangular shape and then streams the contents up and out of this box like escaping rays of sunlight. For, of course, who could resist opening a forbidden gift and Pandora does. All evil is then supposed to flood the earth. Clare's box has pests and cancer, pain and sadness on the rays, but she also has larger ribbons of love and hope. My heavy heart lifts as I watch this precious child shine a light on my day.
This is the essence of Pandora's story. There is greed and cruelty; there is violence and darkness. But here is eleven year old Clare, a motherless child, with a life-term illness. In truth, she is parentless, for she cooks dinner, meets her younger sister at the school bus stop, and fills many other functions one usually sees done by adults. Here in the sharp, steady lines being drawn by her small graceful hands emanates the hope and love. And my hope and love is attached to hers.
My students, my grounded, kind daughter and husband, my friends and the caring strangers I meet make me believe that though we have currently unleashed tremendously irrational, anti-social forces within these United States and abroad upon the beloved earth, we also can find resilient goodness. Thank you Clare for being my gift. You are the present that needs to be opened and nurtured for all to see.
(c) 2011
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