8/365 Peace be to this house

I learned of the custom when I was teaching at the school. Our former pastor, Fr. Bill, came by with a box of chalk. I was already in the west-facing classroom so it was my second year. I don't know why he didn't come by the first year. Perhaps he'd only recently become acquainted with the practice, which I cannot find any exact ethnic reference to online (and I haven't gone to try to research it elsewhere, honestly). Is it Orthodox? German? Irish? I don't know. I had never seen it done, but after that first day, I would see it on occasion driving down St. Louis streets.

Bill knocked on the doorframe and stepped into my classroom. It was the middle of the day and my homeroom class--a group of 10 boys and 2 girls--were there for math. He pardoned his interruption and handed me the box of chalk, which I thought was amusing considering how much chalk I went through in a given month as the middle school math teacher in the building. Then, without apology or explanation, he wrote this on the lintel of the door:

20 + C + M + B + 01

Which, of course, looked like an equation to me and I wasn't exactly sure what he was going for. He explained that the past Sunday had been Epiphany and this was the traditional house blessing over doors done on that day (or on the traditional day set for Epiphany, January 6). The 20 and the 01 represented the year (2001); the plus signs were crosses; the CMB were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The traditional names given to the 3 wise men, who of course are not named in the bible and aren't even numbered. But it could also stand for the Latin phrase, Christus Mansionem Benedicat, although I personally think that might be a stretch. Either way, the mark was made above my classroom door.

He did go around the hallway with his box of chalk and repeat the blessing on other doors. And I went home myself with my own chalk from the board tray, got out a ladder, and put it above my own door. I was 3 months pregnant at the time, I realize looking back now.

Rain and snow washed the chalk away after a time, although it created a new tradition for my family and I try to remember as I'm putting away Christmas, that it's time to bless the house. My classroom door, though, was indoors. The weather wasn't going to rinse off the chalk. And knowing the janitorial team, nothing else was, either. It was there the last day I worked in the building.

The school closed two years later. I don't know why I was there, but sometime a few years back before we started the process of trying to sell the building, I was up on that floor again. Some of the doors still had the blessing written above them.

Sometimes I wish our parish had a more traditional Epiphany, although our migration mass is appropriate to the theme. But it might be nice to have the announcement of the date of Easter, for instance, and a blessing of chalk for us all to take home and use to write cryptic messages above our front doors. I haven't done my door yet this year--Epiphany came with the snow and I knew it would all be washed and blown away faster than I could put it up. But I'll get it done during the next few days. A sort of ephemeral mezuzah.

41/365 Meeting Joey

"Hi, I'm Joey," she says as we're introduced in the school hallway. "Bill says we're going to be working on the garden together."

"Yeah, I'm the school liaison or something like that." I unlock my classroom door and the two of us step in. "Bill" slips away, his work done here. Joey goes over to the windows and looks down at the asphalt lot with the dead tree in the middle where there will someday be a garden.

"Well, I've been meeting a lot with the anonymous donor, you know, being on finance commission and all I know who's who." I don't know for sure if this is supposed to get me going, and if so, I don't know how, frankly. I'm not even sure whether I'm supposed to say anything. So I give a minimal response--mmm--and put my things down on my desk.

My desk. I've scrounged it from the defunct library along with a set of bookshelves. My chalkboards can hardly be called that, being nailed up plywood painted with green chalkboard paint. They will eat chalk over the course of the year and I will snatch up the room across the hall for next year faster than you can say gesundheit. But for now, I'm trying to decide how much I need to decorate for middle schoolers and wondering what this Joey wants from me.

I know her from church, meaning, I've seen her around. I don't know her. I've seen her name in the bulletin--all over the bulletin, in fact. And I know she's from California, which does not endear me to her any more than the fact that she doesn't work but also has no kids. And she's maybe 5 years my senior.

"Yeah," she keeps going, "I had my landscaper in on the first meetings. The next one is tomorrow afternoon. I'll be there, but I'll be late. I sit on a board for a women's shelter here in town and they're having a lunch meeting. But Piper will be there, and maybe even our anonymous donor. She's a real treat. She's going to hate that the school has a part in this. I was over at her house the other day. Anyway. I probably shouldn't say anything."

She turns back from the window and I'm struck by two things. First, she is very tall. Second, she is sizing me up. She is looking me up and down and at the things in the room--which aren't my things, after all, but the grungy discarded furniture and books from around the school. But this moment, I know now, defined the first entire year of our relationship. She was a tall blond Californian with insider information and leisure time, and I was a short working class brunette with second-hand ideas and a chip on my shoulder.

Oh, it was going to be GREAT.

42/365 Garden Misunderstandings (History Continues)

"I was just afraid the railroad ties would fall apart," I try to explain my negative attitude. Joey and her landscaper Piper sit on one side of the table, and I sit on the other with Martha. I know she's the anonymous donor but I understand well enough that I'm not supposed to know.

"What about concrete pavers?" Piper asks. She opens a binder and shows us options. They rather generic, without much character, but they would be sturdier. I say so.

"Ok, I'll talk to my source on those," she says, closing the binder. Martha has a worried look on her face. "Now, the fence."

We talk about the iron fence. About a gate. Yes or no to the gate. What kind of gate. Then I ask what later seems like the stupidest question:

"So are we going to have a set up like the community gardens? Are we going to lease plots to parishioners first and then open them up to the neighborhood?"

All three of them stare at me like I've just yelled, "I have rabies!"

"No, nothing like that," Martha shakes her head after she recovers from my apparently shocking question.

And then they continue as if I'm no longer there. Shunned, I listen to the discussion. Serviceberry tree or redbud? White redbud? Holly? Male and female pair? Then Piper opens her binder again and shows me the diagram for the first time. The school part is along one side. Oh. That makes sense, I guess. I process the new information and sit silently, feeling the creeping sensation of "I'm redundant at this meeting", which is a feeling I will have so many times in the years to come at the parish. But here more than ever before or after, frankly. We adjourn soon after and I head upstairs to my classroom to look out the window at the lot.

It'll be good to have the asphalt gone, I tell myself. A nice green space in the city. Not every green space has to have a use. It takes me several self-reincarnations to realize that usefulness is not the only scale upon which something should be measured. It will be good just to have it not be asphalt.

I don't know, standing there at the windowsill, that years later I'll witness Easter fires in that garden. Or that even the next year, it will become an obsession of mine and my friend Mary's, along with the library and so many other little nooks and crannies at the school. I can't know, standing there, that I'll get hot under the collar about this little lot. I don't know how it will all end. All I see right at that moment is a wasted space that's about to become a green wasted space.

But it will grow on me.

43/365 History: A Nemesis Develops

"I can't stand it," Martha whispers through her mournful hands covering her face.

"What's wrong with it?" Piper asks her. Fr. Bill and Joey sit uncomfortably in the little atrium with us. Joey's face is stern and Fr. Bill has on his priest power suit. He leans forward, gathering himself up to say something. But nothing. We wait for Martha.

"It. Looks. Like a grave."

I think about the school portion of the garden. It is somewhat grave-like, but it's October. We haven't planted there yet, for goodness sake.

"What can we do to make it better?" Fr. Bill poses. But I've had enough meetings with Martha. Nothing will make it better now. She has cried at too many meetings. I regret ever saying yes to Bill's suggestion that I join this committee.

I can tell Piper regrets more than that.

"Bridgett's right. The railroad ties would have fallen apart. Now, I'm sorry if the end result isn't exactly what you were looking for, but," she stops. There's nothing more to say. We have talked it to death. All of it. Mushroom compost and drainage and permits and every little detail has made me sick of gardens. We shouldn't still be talking about it.

"Well," Joey shrugs. "I'll buy some mums. I'll have the kids plant them and there you go."

"What exactly about mums is--" I begin but Bill catches my eye. We are done talking about this. Who cares if mums have nothing to do with education. It doesn't matter any more. Quit it.

At the next faculty meeting, Joey is there. She's there to explain the garden.

She's also there to announce that another anonymous donor has offered to buy computers for the school. And she has volunteered to help set everything up. Everything. She will do it all for us. Sr. Fern is so excited. She can't wait to announce it at the PTA.

I look across the table at Ina and Terri, two of my team teachers. I roll my eyes. I am so done with having meetings with Joey. Terri grins back at me. She has misunderstood my irritation. I ask questions. Joey can't answer them. Questions about the internet. About guidelines for use. About from where in the school day computer time will be carved. Sr. Fern's smile is fading but Joey knows how to handle me. "We're going to have a committee. You're welcome to join."

I think about what Fr. Bill said to me at the first Renew 2000 meeting. "I want to hold you and Mike safely," he said, and I didn't understand. "I don't want you two to get cynical about church, about the parish. If it's too much to be on this committee, you tell me."

At the time, it had seemed unnecessary. But not anymore. I tell Joey I'll be there. Just call me and tell me when.

46/365 History: Chatty Joey

It took me longer than it should have to realize that Terri and Joey were tight. You know, when you assume you're in on the joke and then realize you don't know what's going on? It took me until November to see it. By then the mums were planted in the garden and I was busy doing other things. I liked my classes and my job in general was invigorating. In retrospect, it was my favorite year of teaching ever.

Terri had a favorite student, and 8th grade girl in trouble, and that situation as well was closed to me. But she would leave campus to handle things about this girl, and Joey would take her class for the afternoon. That's fine, I mean, substitute teachers exist, but Joey would spend the whole time chatting with the girls and inviting other older girls back to that classroom. From my math class. At one point in early December I finally announced to my seventh and eighth graders that while Joey was a very nice fun gal, they were not going to be leaving my classroom to play. My seventh graders seemed to understand. I had the most allies in there. "I think she's kinda weird," Caitlin admitted.

My eighth graders, well, there were only 5 girls in there besides Terri's favorite. Three of them nodded at me like they knew what I meant. The other two sat quietly.

The next time Joey subbed for Terri, Terri pulled me aside before she left for court. "Kate and Polly asked if they could help Joey organize the new computer room. I figured it would be ok. I talked to Sr. Fern--here's their hall passes."

She didn't smile smugly or act like this was a victory. She just handled me. The note from Sr. Fern said that as long as the girls didn't have a test, they had her permission to help out.

It's not like I could punish Polly and Kate, either. They were both super-sharp in math, and the last three years before I arrived had been second/verse/same/as/the/first with bad math teachers teaching basic skills all year long. I had pushed them, and the seventh grade, into pre-algebra, and these two, along with another girl and two of the boys, hadn't even blinked. A's across the board. My test schedule was published at the beginning of the year: every other Friday was test day, regardless of where we were in a chapter. I couldn't fake a sudden test.

Joey didn't knock on my door and have a conference or anything--the girls were there from lunch time until dismissal. They didn't bother to shut the door. My students could see straight in.

I complained to Sr. Fern the next day. She sighed and shook her head. "They're in 8th grade," she started, I'm not sure why. Then she started again. "Joey told me they'd be setting up the computers. Was that not what they were doing?"

"They were sitting in there chatting. Joey was setting things up and the other two were entertaining her."

"Ok, then that won't happen again," she shook her head, taking a note of it. And it didn't happen again, as long as she was in town. And until Joey became a full-time volunteer computer teacher.

47/365 Teaching is Hard

After Christmas, it was announced that Joey would be teaching computers once a week to the middle school students during the wasted "library" hour. It was in fact wasted--the library had been packed up and sealed in boxes due to water damage two years before and nobody had reopened it. I tried for a while with my friend Mary to make it happen the following year but it was overwhelming. We got shelves set up and fiction sorted but got bogged down in the dewey decimal system. And chatting. But that's what happens when you have volunteers do your job.

Bingo. That's what I said. When volunteers do your jobs, you have no true way of making them do their jobs.

The younger kids' teachers contracted with Joey for computer time here and there. Sr. Bernie never brought her class. Laura down in 1st grade didn't think it was worth the trouble. So for the most part, Joey had middle school students (4th-8th).

Library hour was suddenly an extra free time if you were one of the teachers in charge of library. I had a library class for the 6th grade; Ina had it for 5th and 7th; Terri had it for 4th, and Margie had it for 8th. Free hours in a week are golden for a teacher with many preps and lots of responsibilities and not much pay. They are free, and you don't let other people infringe on them. Library was a semi-free hour. You weren't in charge of a lesson, but you did have a group of kids sitting in your room pretending to read or do homework. Most of the time for my library class I let them talk quietly if they could prove to me they were done with the homework I'd assigned. I got along with my 6th grade well enough that it was a sort of free hour. I graded papers and planned.

But now, with Joey, I had an extra free hour a week. Truly free. Ina had two. The only one who missed out was BeBe, the 7th grade homeroom teacher. We never asked her about it, though, feeling guilty that it worked out this way. She could have used another free hour, too--she was in charge of confirmation that year with the worst auxiliary bishop on earth.

I asked Joey about the arrangement, about volunteering 5 hours a week plus prep time. I didn't even do it in a saucy way. I just was curious why on earth she'd want to do this.

"These kids don't have a lot of resources at home," she replied. "They should have access to computers at school. I mean, look at this school."

I had looked. It was on the lower end of resources when it came to teaching positions I'd held. But the classes were small and we did a good job for the most part.

"And they like me," she shrugged. "It won't be hard--it's not like teaching is hard. I used to work in HR at a Silicon Valley corporation, after all."

"Yeah, well," I started, but I didn't finish. I don't like to be proven wrong. If teaching was going to be a breeze for her, that's great. If not, then I could stand there and smile later.

In January, I got my library time to myself. Joey was across the hall with the 6th grade, which included several thuggy boys. It didn't go well, frankly. These boys respected me enough (or feared me enough) that things were fine in my room, but not always on the outside. Joey also had a hard time with the seventh grade.

She stopped coming in early February. She would be there for the 4th grade, for Terri's extra break, but the rest of us were on our own. Ina got really angry--she had gotten used to two extra free hours a week. She went to Sr. Fern. I don't know how it went, but Joey would come after that, sometimes. Sr. Fern would sit in the room with her. Or Terri would. Or Joey would feign illness and not be there for a full week. She took a vacation in April and didn't show at all. I no longer counted on this unearned free time.

In April, I went down to Sr. Fern. She had mentioned at the last faculty meeting that she needed a volunteer to help with next year's middle school schedule. I was coming to volunteer. She was happy and handed over all the information.

I went home and spent a week with strips of paper on my living room floor, arranging and rearranging the schedule. And at the end of it, everyone had the same number of free hours, including computer time (library was now a thing of the past). But none of my breaks coincided with computer time. Later in the coming year, I would be very glad I did that.

51/365 MSN vs. school server

"I'm not sure MSN is our best choice," I put my fencing foil into the fray. Sr. Fern looks puzzled. What she knows about the internet can fit in a teacup. I'm not IT professional, but I am married to one. Joey is sitting across the table from me, seething. The other teachers know they're being taken along for a ride where they are only unwilling passengers. Like a carpool.

"Why not?" Sr. Fern asks.

"What sort of controls are available? I don't want to send my class into the computer room and be able to send emails to anyone about anything. Not on school time."

"Look," Joey interrupts, "It's not like these kids don't have computer access at the library, at home, all the time. They are going to do what they want to do!"

"But maybe not here," Sr. Fern says sternly. "I don't want a parent coming to me with evidence of harassment or something like that. What do you suggest?" she turns back to me. I'm ready.

"I've researched a number of email programs for schools that would be appropriate. They're free, they're completely monitored, and we can restrict them in all sorts of ways."

"But the anonymous donor really wanted to go with msn," Joey protests.

"Does msn have the capabilites I think we need?" Fern counters directly. "No? Then I think the donor will understand."

Joey stares at me, not happy. Seething, in fact. But Sr. Fern is happy and I've chalked up a stroke in the win column. "Why don't you and Joey meet after school tomorrow and set that up?"

In the computer room after school, suddenly we're best friends. Joey gets me on a computer and I find my way to the webpage.

"You know, I only picked msn because that's what we use at home," she explains.

"Sure," I say with a nod, clicking on the sign up key.

"I just, I wish you could be more appreciative of my work here."

That makes me look up.

"I've laid out a lot of money to make this work," she continues. "And I hate that you stomp all over that."

"You're the donor," I say, not a question.

"Of course I am."

This doesn't make me like her more.

"And I'm here almost every day trying to get all this to work and did you know I have rheumatoid arthritis? I'm trying to get pregnant and nothing is working and the medication I'm on I'll have to go off and this is just one more thing," she shakes her head.

I mentally erase the mark in the win column, but I don't back down on the internet usage in the school. There is common sense here, not just meanness. But I try to back down on the other stuff. For now.

53/365 History: Sabotage

"The rectory got broken into last night," Sr. Fern mentions in the faculty room, sort of off-hand, to me and a couple other teachers standing their at our mailboxes. "Somebody with a key."

"Then it's not really a break in," Ina points out.

"True, but they sabotaged a computer."

We all look at each other. I am suddenly really thankful I don't have a rectory key. I don't need that kind of heat.

"Which one?" Ina asks.

"Joey's." Sr. Fern leaves and I look at Ina.

"Joey has a computer in the rectory?"

"She has an office," Ina points out.

"Really."

"Yeah, she's a full-time volunteer over there, you know."

I sort of knew. Whatever. I put it out of my mind because it doesn't directly concern me and there is plenty going on at the moment that does. But a few weeks later I'm in the library trying to sift through non-fiction books to label when I hear a key in the door across the hall. Since it's evening and I'm there with Mary, essentially alone and defenseless, I stick my head out to see what's up. It's Joey and her husband. They're fighting about something. I duck back into the library and tell Mary I'll be right back.

"Hey Joey," I announce before I'm completely in earshot. Colin backs off. She looks at me and waves me over. Colin doesn't say anything to me but heads back down the stairs.

"I'll wait til you call," he tells her.

We go into the computer room. She dumps her armful of supplies on a table and sighs.

"Heard about the rectory," I tell her.

"Yeah. A lot of people don't like me very much." She goes over to turn on a bank of computers. "I can't figure it out. I--me and Colin--we're the top donors to this parish. I know because I'm on Finance. But then people who don't give more than $5 a week think they have a right to complain."

I almost felt bad until she said that. Always pulling rank. Not that I gave $5 a week--Mike and I did quite a bit more than that--but she shouldn't get to know, and then tell people.

"Do you know who did it?"

"I've narrowed it to Dolores or Roxanne. Maybe one of Roxanne's kids. They both have keys--had keys, that is. Bill took everybody's keys away unless they were employees."

"So you don't have a key anymore?"

"Oh, I still have a key. I'm not paid, but I'm an employee. You know, when Colin and I moved here we didn't live in the parish, but at St. John's. And I went to the priest there and asked if there was anything I could do. He shooed me off. Wait until I was here longer, that sort of thing. So we started looking around, and then we moved into the parish and when I asked Bill if there was anything I could do, well, he had plenty. I'd just had back surgery and quit my job," she trails off.

I don't say anything. I lean in the doorway watching her do something on the computer.

"We have money because we worked for it. It wasn't given to us." She must be rewinding the conversation in her head.

"Sure," I nod.

"And Roxanne. Damn it. That crazy bitch."

I sort of agree with that statement. Actually, I agree 100% but I'm not going to show my hand. Dolores is a stickier problem. I teach both their kids, and each is a piece of work in her own right, but Roxanne kind of scares me in a way that Dolores never did (and never will).

"Why do you think it was her?"

"Well, she doesn't have a key, but Dolores does. And I think they did it together. They erased all sorts of my files. Some are gone for good. And they both hate me, you know."

She leans back in her chair and beckons me over with her hand.

"I need to tell you something."

We weren't friends yet, but this was where the ice started to break.

55/365 History: the story comes out

I go over and sit next to Joey in the computer lab. She's got her feet up on the table and is leaning back in her chair. I sit down like someone come to listen to a bedtime story, anxious for what I assume will be good gossip. I am not disappointed.

"So this is why I think it was Roxanne. Before it happened, before anyone went in and erased my files, she comes up to me after daily mass and asks if she can take me out for coffee. Immediately I think this is a bad idea but I go along with her anyway. We just go down the way, she drives. And at first she's talking all about her kids and her crazy husband."

I know this family and they worry me. I teach one of the daughters and the things she says to me, I wonder if she's trying to entrap me. Sixth graders should not be suspects in espionage, but that's how I view Nellie and her family. Like they're waiting for me, or anyone, to screw up.

"And I know," she continues, "that she's not my friend. I mean, like, there's no way I can trust her or anything. I remember Terri telling me about when the teacher's union was pushing for a raise--"

"We don't have a union," I interrupt. It's one of the big scabs I pick at--the pope can write an encyclical on the dignity of work and be all about the Solidarity movement in Poland but those Catholic schoolteachers had better not form a union.

"Well, whatever it is, anyway, when that hit the news, Nellie came to school the next day and announced to Terri that her job was a vocation and she should be happy she gets paid at all. As if there's enough nuns to do this job anymore?"

I can just see Nellie pulling that kind of stunt. "So that family sat around the dinner table and listened to Karl make pronouncements about Catholic schoolteachers being greedy. Nice."

"Plus they don't tithe," she leans forward with a dirty smile. "I mean, a little bit, but--"

I must have changed the look on my face, or something, because she stops before she gives me those details.

"So anyway, we were talking at the table and suddenly she has her coffee cup in her hand midair and says, I kid you not, 'How long you been sleeping with Bill?'"

I chuckle at this. A parish can be a terrible rumor mill and this is one I'd heard before.

"Well," Joey continues, indignant, "I can assure you it isn't true."

"I believe you." I do, in fact.

"But stupid me, when she says this, I answer, 'What Bill?'"

Now I laugh out loud. "Oh, that's great."

"Yeah, sure it is. Made me look like a hooker. And her face changed, I think she wanted me to be mad, but instead I was confused."

"Took the wind out of her sails."

"Right. And she says, she says, 'Bill Spencer, who did you think I meant?' And then I'm surprised. I tell her no, no way, we're friends, sure, he eats dinner at my house a lot, but no way. I have a husband." She puts her feet down on the floor and slaps down on the table with both hands. "And that's why I think she did it."

"You know, Joey, I have to tell you, this isn't the first time I've heard this rumor."

She looks at me through narrowed eyes.

"Really," I insist.

"Ok." She takes a deep breath. "But that one--"

"No, I agree. Dolores had the keys and Roxanne is nuts. And I'm sure they're both jealous of the time you spend here."

"Colin's asked me, too," she says quietly. "But, I guess I just didn't see it."

"Bill's an easy target."

I hear the rumor again. And again. Through the year and into the next. I pretty much knew who was generating the energy behind it. Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn't. I don't have surveillance cameras or a private investigator's services at my disposal. But each time I heard it, I reminded myself of the source and reminded the person telling me of the source. And in doing so, I took a big step towards becoming an adult.

57/365 But it's not all wine and roses (history)

While I eventually came to an understanding with Joey, it wasn't that we were bestest best friends. The second autumn of the garden came along and we as a school harvested a bumper crop of tomatoes. We grew an heirloom variety of indeterminate vines and I didn't stake or cage them. Not that I hadn't intended, but my personal life kind of fell apart over the summer when I miscarried and it took a while to bounce back. In that bounce back, I had cake and coffee at Joey's house so she could tell me how sorry she was to hear I'd miscarried. She'd been trying for a while and had resorted to IVF, which had failed several times.

"I can't imagine what it would be like to get pregnant and then lose the baby," she said, and I think she meant it. I ate cake and tried not to think too much about it. I would be pregnant in October but here it was August and it was all still so bad.

But the summer drew to a close and school started up. We donated tomatoes to the food pantry. We let kids take them home. I had brief visions of the future, using produce from the garden in school lunches--nowadays this is the hip education thing to do. Back then though it seemed revolutionary.

So I walked out of school one afternoon and went around to the garden to tend things.

The school raised bed had been replaced with something from an alternate universe. The tomatoes were gone. In their place were impatiens, mums, and pansies. It must have taken someone all day to do this and yet nobody came to tell me? I stood there staring at the damned little flowers and got really angry.

I went inside to Sr. Fern. "What happened to the tomatoes? We were still harvesting--it's only late September."

"Oh," she faked surprise. "Joey told me you said it was done. There's a donor coming to look at the school this evening and she wanted it to look nice. It's only tomatoes," she said as an apology.

"Right," I snapped back. I picked up my canvas bag with the last of the tomatoes alongside my grade book and lesson plans and walked out. Coming out onto the parking lot, there was Fr. Bill walking up to go into the school.

"Why did Joey get to tear out the school garden and plant flowers?" I spit out at him. "Flowers?"

"She said the growing season was over," he repeats the same excuse. "I think some people complained that it looked messy."

"It's fall," I waved my arms the air. "Part of gardening with kids is letting things get a little messy. Plants die. But they weren't even dead!"

"Well," but he stops, for the first time in my experience, with nothing to say or to calm me down with.

"Just because she's good with ONE THING," I yell at him, pounding my fist in the air as if I were hitting a table. "It doesn't make her an expert on everything!"

He doesn't reply. I walk away from him there, not caring who saw me--dismissal time, of course, is filled with people. I get in my car just as I see her pulling up in her SUV. I don't wave back.

She comes up to my room the next day. "Hey," she interrupts class.

"Hi, Joey, I can talk to you in a minute."

"No, I just wanted to drop this off for you." I walk over to the door and she hands me a huge basket of tomatoes. A huge basket. Like, feed a family of 4 for a week kind of huge basket of tomatoes. I take it with both hands.

"I should have talked to you first," she apologizes. I nod, but I'm over being angry. "In other news," she continues more brightly, "we got a grant."

"That's great," I smile thinly. "Thanks for the tomatoes."

I take them home. There isn't a single conflict between us from then on.

80/365 History: Sophia's Baptism II

I have this baby. And I'm sick. So sick. Someone--my mother? my husband?--calls Fr. Bill and he comes to see me. I know I must be in bad shape because after he does the blessing of the sick, he stands at the foot of my bed. Staring. Nobody is asking me how the baby is (all those new mom guides warn you--after the baby is born, nobody notices you anymore, just the baby--but this isn't true for me. Everyone is staring at me).

We aren't friendly anymore at this point--when I left to have this baby, the last week of school, things went badly. That's putting it mildly. I'll blame it on me, even though I probably only hold 75% of the blame. It was a long time coming and I refused to see anything in shades of gray and then...I had too much to say.

We'd gone to lunch so I could tell him how ticked off I was. But it didn't work out that way and he wound up convincing me to consider volunteering at the school the way I'd planned--the plan was a year of volunteering a few hours a week and the next year back in the classroom. But even if I'd done the year of volunteering, the school closed the next year and I can't say I was upset.

But later, I mean, it's been almost 9 years, I softened and let it roll off my back. I survived--Joey is gone, Sr. Fern, Fr. Bill, everyone, really, except a few students and parents who adored me. I should have stayed in my classroom with my head down and did my job. I know better now.

At the moment, though, I realized I was going to have this baby baptized at the parish I no longer felt like I belonged to. I debated calling Mike's uncle and doing this down in Cairo, except my family wasn't in Cairo...I was aggravated, but we scheduled it for September 16 solidly and went with it.

144/365 On the other hand: grace

It is the daily dew and the light afternoon shower that keeps the garden of our souls growing, rather than a once-a-year downpour of grace. --Father Dominic Garramone

This quote is at the top of a blog I read, called Everyday Unitarian. I'm obviously not a Unitarian, but like I've said before, I have lots of ecumenical leanings and I like reading her reflections on faith and church (and it led me to decide to write this blog, even if just for myself, as a reflection on my own parish and its community life).

Fr. Dominic, OSB, wrote some of the first books I read by modern Benedictines. I read through (too quickly) the Rule, and I read some things about the Rule, but when I started thinking more about becoming an oblate, I found his books, and Daniel Homan, an easy gateway. Later I would read and reread Joan Chittister and Kathleen Norris and Michael Casey and lots of other folks, but Dominic was my first step.

We'd lost electricity. It was the summer of 2006 and that first night, it wasn't so bad in the house. The girls slept in the living room on the floor and Mike split the night between our house and my parents' house, just to keep things safe. I lay in my bed with a flashlight and read Bake and Be Blessed. It was like trying on a pair of jeans with a size you're hoping will fit, and then they zip up right away and don't make your rear end look too big. It was a perfect little joy of a book to read. I read the whole thing in that one setting and fell asleep convinced of what I needed to do.

There are so many good gateways to a more spiritual life. Which amuses me (or makes me shake my head ruefully) because I have a minor in Theology from a Jesuit university--my major is in elementary education, but I've taken a lot of theology. A lot more than just a minor's worth, in fact. And in high school, our junior year theology course was the study of Vatican II documents. We studied 4 of them over the course of the year. Four: Lumen Gentium, Dignitatis Humanae, Dei Verbum, and I believe the other one was Gaudium et Spes (but I had to look it up to try to guess...). For a high school theology course, that was pretty heavy. I have a lot of theology under my belt. And yet, by the time Maeve was born, I was no longer in conversation with God.

It was books like Bake and Be Blessed that put me back on that path. The Quotidian Mysteries. Benedict's Way. Simple little books that opened that door again.

180/365 Oh, that's why

When we rearranged classrooms in the school, putting the 3rd and 4th grades upstairs together and the whole middle school on the middle floor--not the greatest solution, but the best for the space we had at the time--I snatched up the old 3rd grade room for my own as quickly as I could. I was tired of the morning sun. More than that, I was tired of coming home coated in chalk dust. The new room had new boards, while mine had plywood painted with chalkboard spray paint.

I moved in during the summer, stealing good desks from classrooms where teachers had quit. I wanted all flat-top desks and good chalkboards and that was all, really. I needed no technology, no newfangled teacher's desk or chair. I always kept my desk out of the way and sat there only during quiet work time after a lesson anyway. I thought teachers who put their desks in front of the chalkboard were psychologically controlling access to information. My desk was static in a corner and children's desks moved around depending on the subject and my whimsy.

The teacher before me had put her desk in front of the north-side chalkboard. But I liked to be able to see out a window when I could. Later in the year this became valuable, to see who was walking where and what cars had pulled up in the parking lot. But that summer, I just put my desk in the southeast corner, facing west, and went home.

I always started my days early in August and September. By late April I would breeze in with the kids and fly by the seat of my pants, but I was a planner in the beginnings of years. And so I was there one morning, ready for the day at about 7. I sat at my desk and looked around the room, happy with my arrangement and my position at the school. I looked out the window and noticed something.

My view looked right into the rectory. Yeah, it was slightly frosted glass, but it was slightly frosted glass in front of a shower. And there was Fr. Bill. Getting ready for his day.

Perhaps that's why the former occupant of that room had put her desk on the north wall. I debated moving things around, but changed my mind. The shades pulled down just fine.

181/365 Drug Dealer Season

The summer when I moved into the old 3rd grade classroom, I busied myself with the library as well. I'd toyed around with it a bit during my free time the first year, usually with JD in tow that second semester. We sorted through books and cleaned stuff up and I got way too involved with that kid. He was usually skipping English, or was getting kicked out of PE. He cemented my preference for bad boys and good girls when it comes to what students I connect to best. I don't handle fast-moving girls very well, girls who know too much by the time they are 13 and often become Mean Girls in the process. And good boys, ugh, were usually such suck ups that I had flashbacks to my honor classes in high school. No. Thank. You.

But anyway, that summer, JD was gone for good and my friend Jenna and I sorted through the library and even found a book on the Dewey Decimal system, which of course was right up my alley. Sorting is one of my favorite hobbies, after all. We sat in the room, evenings when it was still light, box fan going, and became friends, really, finally. That's the summer she broke up with Graham and the summer when I learned how to be friends with other girls who aren't good at being friends with other girls.

We'd stay in the evenings until it started feeling too dicey to stay. This time of year was drug dealer season and we could set our stopwatches by the routine: honking at the end of the block, slow driving down the block, more honking outside the house, a car door, footsteps, a car door, speed away. Right outside our window. We weren't likely targets of violence (that would interfere with business, after all) but we could become collateral damage and preferred not to.

That was ten summers ago. The school is closed, the pastor is different, the street is evolving but not completely healed. The Drug House, 3535, is closed down, boarded up and empty. But I know it's not the only location. Water finds its level and drug dealers find their customers. But we're still standing there, we still process on Corpus Christi and Palm Sunday and Easter Vigil, right past the rough patch. We'll outlast them.

184/365 I'm ruined for life

It was late September and open house night. "Don't plan on seeing too many parents," Terri said cynically. I had seen it all by that point: my first year in North City, three parents came. Out in the county in the ritzy private school, all the parents came. And at the other south side Catholic school I worked at, almost all the parents came and laid too much baggage on my desk for me to handle in one night. So whatever happened, happened. I shrugged off her comment and came prepared for anything.

A few parents came in and met me. Their daughters (good girls) liked me. Super. And then there was a lull in the evening and I wondered how long I really had to stay.

An older Vietnamese man knocked on my door. I recognized Quan and his sister Phuong, both math students of mine. I got up from the student desk I was sitting in to watch the door and walked towards them. Quan hung back, Phuong stood between me and her father. She said something in Vietnamese and then gestured with an open hand towards me, saying my name.

He bowed. To me.

I had wonderful things to say about Quan and Phuong, of course, they were great students. At the end of the conference, completely translated by Phuong, I can only assume correctly, he bowed again.

"Thank you," he said.

I don't think I'll manage to teach in another school after that. The respect for teacher was so completely a part of the culture of our school, being about half Vietnamese, that there was never any question about behavior problems or who was correct. Even American families fell in line (for the most part). If I said something was so, I knew it would be dealt with. I knew I would be believed until proven wrong, instead of assumed to be a low-wage trade worker with an MRS degree.

It just doesn't exist anywhere else that I've found.

230/365 New Year

Girls go off to school today. Maeve's in kindergarten with friends from the preschool and newcomers grateful to have a spot. Sophia's in 4th grade with the same teacher and the same friends, a genealogy she can trace all the way back to kindergarten when it was just Jude, Jurni, Charu, and herself. They're 19 strong now, that oldest class (which is 4th-5th with one 6th grader). A new year but within the context of everything being familiar.

This is why I stay put. I had brand new in kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th. Ridiculous. I'd rather have them not have those worries. Ever, if I can help it.

It's a new year at church, too--well, a new season, well, a new ordinary time section. Ok, it's not new at all. But September is coming, quickly followed by October. Time to think about November ahead of time--harvest and death--and Advent. A new banner? Not sure. Thinking probably so.

With girls back in school, I can think about those things.

239/365 The Bosnians

Other parishes had them. Fr. Bill didn't understand why we didn't have them. That's how the story was trickled down to me. Why didn't our school have Bosnians? There were 35,000 Bosnians in town. Why weren't they at our school?

"Aren't they Muslim?" the second grade teacher asked flatly. True, they were, but our school was also full of Buddhists.

"Don't they live in other neighborhoods?" the eighth grade teacher asked. Also true. They were south and west of our neighborhood. The immigrants and refugees we lived by were from southeast Asia and from Africa at that point. Bosnians, like most immigrants, were settling together, just like the Italians on the Hill or the Irish in Dogtown (although as a descendant of St. Louis Irish who were too poor to move to Dogtown, this assumption grates on my nerves). The Bosnians were at other churches if they were at any Catholic churches at all. We weren't in their neighborhood and not on their radar.

But the issue was pushed. I won't say by whom because I'm not certain, but suddenly we had a Bosnian family enrolling. Yanko and Talaitha Avdo showed up on a Monday in October. They had 5 children in tow and Talaitha was very pregnant. Ben, the translator, had a grim look on his face as he helped them with enrollment forms. Three children would be attending, on full scholarship, starting that moment. Drina was in my class, a room with four girls and 9 boys. I was happy to have another girl, but worried because I already had a new girl, Minh Thu, who spoke no English. Another ESL student in a school where the ESL teacher was a waste of space was not going to go well for me, or for her.

Still, I took Drina upstairs and, through gesture and simple words, was able to get her to a desk and find some basic supplies for her, mostly pencils and some blank paper. I gave her a math textbook, which was my focus subject.

She sat quietly staring out the window during homeroom, and then I tried my best to explain that classes were going to switch. It was so much easier with Vietnamese students. Even though Minh Thu spoke almost no English and understood only a bit more, Cuong sitting next to her could at least get her to the right page in the book. Drina, I feared, was going to be lost.

Oh how lost.

240/365 Emerging Awareness

Terri and Joey stood in the hall looking worried. I let my kids out the door and down to English, welcoming in the 7th graders who were my homeroom the year before.

"The rules are long on that family," I caught Terri saying. I glanced over and she nodded for me to join them. "You have one of the Avdos in your class?" she asked.

"Yeah, Drina."

"I've got Aisha. Did Sr. Fern talk to you?"

"No--she said to come down on my break."

"Yeah...they're Muslim."

"They're Bosnian. We should have seen that one coming."

And then Terri gave me the rules. She was not to attend mass or music practice in the church, even though all the non-Catholic Christians and all the Buddhists did. She was not to go to religion class and instead would spend that time with Sr. Agneta in the ESL classroom.

"You're kidding me," I blurted out.

"Nope," they shake their heads. "And Ben, downstairs? He passed me in the hall and told me they're not even Bosnian."

"What?"

"They're Gypsies."

241/365 What?

"What do you mean they're Gypsies?" I ask with a laugh. I'm envisioning decorated wagons and violin playing 19th century men. But Terri and Joey are serious.

"Roma. Ben said they're too dark to be Bosnian."

I think about the family standing in the office doorway just a few minutes before. They did have dark complexions, but so?

"He said the language was funny, too," she adds, and this sounds more realistic. I go home that night and look up gypsies. Roma. I go to the library. I find a few children's books in Bosnian (which is essentially Serbo-Croatian but with our alphabet) and a language book on Romani. I approach Drina during math class the next week with both books. I open the Romani book and say something akin to "Do you speak Romani?"

She looks at me with a practiced blank face. Now 10 years later I look back and know what that meant. It meant "an authority figure is trying to trick me and she's not going to win."

Then I opened the children's book in Bosnian and read a bit. Her face brightened and she said something to me in Bosnian. I don't know Bosnian--I took Russian in college and so bits are similar. So I handed her the book and asked her to read some. She shook her head and put the book down.

I went over to my desk and got a pencil and paper. I wrote "Drina" on one side of the paper and the same name, in Cyrillic letters, on the other side.

"Drina," I pointed to each of them.

She shook her head.

I wrote, in both scripts, "My name is Drina."

Nothing.

I stepped out in the hall after thanking her with a smile and taking the book with me. Often right before class changes, teachers stepped out to chat a moment and catch up on what was going on with kids.

"I don't think Drina can read," I tell Cynthia, the English teacher.

"She doesn't speak English, Bridgett," she points out.

"I don't think she can read her own language," I clarify.

We both stand quietly waiting for the bell. We know this isn't a good sign, at her age, having to start from scratch.

"Let me think about it," Cynthia says finally.

242/365 Faculty Meetings are the Best!

"About the Avdos," Jane, the second grade teacher says during a pause in the faculty meeting the next week. "I have Luca in my classroom and he speaks no English, but I don't think he knows his letters or numbers, either."

I glance at Cynthia, who clears her throat. "Aisha and Drina are illiterate as well."

Sr. Fern looks alarmed and, eyes wide, signals to Terri, who shakes her head. "Yeah, we figured they probably couldn't read. Their mother can't write her own name."

"What about the father?" Jane asks.

"I think so," Terri shrugs. "I just, I wouldn't worry about it. They won't be here long."

"What does that mean?" Sr. Agneta asks, sitting up from her half-snooze on the couch.

"They're Gypsy," Terri explains. "They're just going to take what they can and then they'll be on the wind," she brushes her hand away from her in a wave. I stare at her. Jane and Cynthia stare at her. Sr. Fern stares at her.

"Look, they've been in the country, what, 18 months? And that time, they lived in New York and Drina was the only one who went to school and that was only for two months because she said that the kids were mean to her," Terri fills us in on more back story.

"Eighteen months and no English?" Jane wonders.

"It's not like the Vietnamese," Terri laughs mirthlessly. "Plus, maybe they're just playing us."

"Well, she certainly knows no English when she comes to visit me," Agneta mentions. "And she's so desperately poor. I'm thinking of doing a clothing drive for those kids."

"Yeah," I pipe up. "Why aren't they in uniform, anyway? They've been here almost a month."

"Drina said she has no clothes to wear," Agneta contradicts her previous claim of no English. No one else seems to catch this. "Such a poor sweet girl. I wish they were all like that. I think there's another one who's stealing from my room," she adds.

"Who?" Sr. Fern asks her. We're getting far afield but I'm curious what story Agneta has concocted in her head.

"I think it's That Frank," she says like it's his full name. "Every time he and Minh and Drina come up to my room, when they leave, there are things missing. Just little things, you know, change from my desk or pencils. It's not like Frank needs me anyway, he's from Liberia. They speak English there."

"I'll keep Frank during English class," Cynthia reassures her.

"Yeah, but the stealing won't stop," Terri mumbles under her breath so I can hear. "Look," she says louder, "bring her some blue pants and white shirts, maybe, but don't waste too much time on her. They'll be gone soon, trust me."