Item: Yesterday, there were multitudinous fraudulent charges made using my credit card number.  (Not the card, which was on my person).  What charges alerted the imposter-detecting algorithm elves at Citibank to the crime?  X-box.  Lots of X-box things.  I take a certain amount of vaguely defined satisfaction from this.

Item/Background information:  Today is Day 1 of the state standardized test (TAKS) at school.  The level of security and dire punishments surrounding the test are akin to those regarding nuclear secrets, and tensions run accordingly high. In fact, there is actual legislature on the Texas law books against teachers thought to be tampering with the test – a felony!  The thought that you can go to TAKS jail reminds me strongly of the old recurring anxiety dream I used to have at MGH about going to a special hospital jail for filling Medicare forms out incorrectly.

subtopic: That space in my brain parts where most people store salient information such as: Where My Car Keys Are and You Will Need Your Wallet Today and Every Day is mostly taken up by crucial information about the wives and offspring of Henry VIII.

/resume item: Since I was super anxious about doing something wrong during testing that would cause me to get fired, I a) forgot my keys and had to borrow from other teachers, then b) discovered that I had left them ON TOP OF MY CAR in the parking lot. c) I forgot my wallet, and thus had no lunch money.

Item: After the test, I met with my first period class.  We are currently reading in Alice in Wonderland.  Some of them love it, some of them hate it, and some positively revel in the delirious cheesiness of the puns.

The little angels  greeted with me with a special water bottle.  They’d decorated it with a handwritten label saying “DRINK ME”.

“What’s this?” I ask.

(the kids look at me with innocent blinky eyes)

“Maybe if you drink this, you’ll get taller, like Alice”.  they say.

(steam out of the ears, shaking of tiny fist, squeal of disbelief, etc. etc.)

“You don’t have a leg to stand on! I’m at least three inches taller than you!”

“Yeah, but I’m only in the seventh grade so I might still grow.”

item: Despite this, and because I’m a nice, kind, sweet, sweet, lady, I take them outside to play croquet.  (Every year, when we get to the chapter about Alice playing croquet with the Queen of Hearts with flamingos and hedgehogs the kids get completely confused because they’ve never seen the game).

I’m standing around, giving instructions and whatnot, occasionally slapping my legs.  (“It’s so early for mosquitoes” I thought to myself.).  Then I progress from slapping to hopping a little bit, and just as I was opening my mouth to ask if anyone else was getting bitten, one of my students turns to me, wide-eyed, and says “Ms. Plainy, you’re standing in an antpile”.  Friends, it wasn’t an anthill, it was a fire-ant hill, easily three feet across.

I yelped and hopped and became suddenly aware of the swarm going up my ankles.  I gave a live-action illustration of the phrase ants in your pants.  I don’t think any of those kids will ever forget the sight (at least, that’s what they told me  At least it wasn’t like the incident with the mechanical bull, when they took video and immediately posted them to youtube).  After shedding my shoes and socks and getting someone to watch my class, I high-tailed it to the nurse’s office.   I hadn’t been there since I stapled my hand several weeks ago, but she greeted me thusly:

“Hello, Ms. Plainy, what have you done now?”.

Epilogue: I took a croquet mallet to that fire-anthill.  It was a satisfying, but ultimately fruitless endeavour, and also not the best example I’ve ever set.

This is from a book I bought yesterday about the history of the phone book.

This is from Mark Twain’s Christmas greeting, published in the Boston Globe in 1890:

“It is my heart warm and world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.”

Phil: Cats, mostly.

That exchange leaped out at me while watching Modern Family (ep. Mother Tucker) the other day on Hulu.  I adore that show, but I don’t love the smart sister/dumb sister routine.

Today on my way into the coffee shop I picked up Age of Wonders from the backseat of my car, where it’s been lurking balefully for months.  Result? I haven’t touched any of the grading that needs to be finished before I sleep tonight, and I only made a small dent into writing a personal statement.

Although you may deny it, I’m pretty sure this book was written mostly for me.  I’m pretty sure I may be the only person to do a tiny fist pump of joy when I saw the review – Sir Joseph Banks!  Mungo Park!  Those two names alone made my heart beat like a tiny sparrow, because I knew it means a John Ledyard reference somewhere (yup- pg. 212).

I read a few chapters only – I’m about halfway through the book – but came across some of the delightful sort of gems that I love.

Here are two anecdotes that I loved:

1. One of the more prominent balloonists during the hot-air balloon mania that swept France and England in the 18th century was a baker in the town of Oxford named James Sadler.  He was a quiet, married guy with kids but at age 31 became swept up with a passion for aerostation and turned the backroom of his bakery into a workshop.  He lost many of his scientific instruments in a treacherous flight, but Samuel Johnson -at the very end of his life – gave him a hugely expensive baromenter.  Sadler kept it and used it for decades.  Evidently Samuel Johnson was not a big proponent of hot-air balloons, which were once a huge mania in France and England.  I love the idea of the quiet baker beginning a wild venture in his thirties, but the gift from Johnson is especially wonderful because he didn’t care for ballooning at all – he thought it was all show and no science.

2. In reading about astronomer William Herschel and his famed forty-foot goliath of a telescope, I loved to see that among the many luminaries who traipsed out to see it during construction was our own John Adams.  He came unannounced and had an intense debate with the scientist on the theological implications of the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  Do such intellectually engaged politicians exist anymore?

What really caught my interest, though, was talk of Teh Ladies.

First, ladies prominent in the life of Sir Joseph Banks, and second, Caroline Herschel. If I was the fiction writing sort, I know exactly who I’d write a novel about.

To begin with, Banks.  He first came to my attention years ago when I read Caroline Alexander’s excellent Bounty.  That was a pivotal book for me in a couple of ways – it simultaneous capped a lifelong fascination that begin with my first reading of Mutiny on the Bounty, and opened the door to the flood of naval exploration books I read in the Unemployment Time, which culminated in the Summer of John Ledyard.  Alexander put him on my radar, but it turns out that if you read anything at all about science or exploration during the mid 1700s to the early 1800s, his name is inevitable.

Banks sailed on the first great voyage of Captain Cook as a young man.  That voyage, and especially the time he spent in Tahiti, fundamentally changed his outlook on life and pointed his life on a much different path than might have been expected for a moneyed young country gentleman.  He would go on to transform Kew Gardens and become the president of the Royal Society.  He was especially good at spotting talented, and cultivated innumerable scientific projects and expeditions.  It was he who sent Lt. Bligh on his ill-fated breadfruit voyage to Tahiti, and who sent Ledyard to his ill-fated voyage of discovery to Africa.  (sidenote#1: Banks, Bligh and Ledyard all sailed with Cpt. Cook, but none of them on the same voyage) . (sidenote#2: that makes it sound like he sent everyone to ignominious fates, but it really was just those two.  and maybe a few others.  *sigh*).

Anyway, before his voyage with Cook, when Banks was still a young man, he had an unofficial understanding with a young woman named Harriet Blosset.

Yeeeeesh.

I spent so much time on sidenotes that my coffee shop is closing.  Will continue later.

Still: online, especially, I self-censor quite a bit. It’s taken the fun out of some of my favorite social network-y things to do, not because I would say or do anything vulgar, but because I must always be Ms. Plainy rather than just plainy.    Like everyone else, I also hesitate before putting anything too personal on there, because I don’t want colleagues, students, or parents knowing every thought in my head. And what’s the fun in writing a watered down version of everything?

HOWEVER.

I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind a tiny bit, and blog more.  Anybody who is really searching hard can find this blog and piece together who I am, and some of my students are very determined.  Still, I feel that I’ve made taken reasonable (if not air-tight) measures to try and keep my online-self as un-easily google-able as I can.

Mostly, I’m developing a contradictory resentment to how controlled and public our lives are becoming.  Border crossings to visit my family have become wildly unpleasant, the new airport security measures seem creepy, and my mother is on facebook.  It would seem to follow that these sorts of things would make me want to protect my privacy even more, but I don’t like how often I am censoring myself *in my own mind*.  It’s creepy.

So.

On to the post:

As per usual, I’m suffering from a general malaise.  Maybe the reason I like nineteenth century literature so much is because mental distress is described in such a satisfyingly familiar way.  I’ve got ennui, I feel a malaise, I’ve had a terrible case of fin-du-siecle for the last ten years.  How else to describe these fits of restless melancholia that come on me every so often?  Granted, without these moments of restlessness and dissatisfaction, I would never do anything interesting – they are the root of everything I’ve ever applied for, every trip I’ve ever gone on, every major life decision.

Sometimes I’ll decide to do something and endlessly chew over it and mull and brood over it (grad school).  Sometimes I’ll just leap.  Actually, I leap into things quite a bit.

The worst part is that I *know* the recipe for unhappiness, and I still fall into with depressing regularity.  Or rather, I know what the recipe for happiness is, but I still avoid it.

These are things that keep me happy:

1. Visits with friends.  It’s essential.

2. Creating something.  I do this less and less every year.

3. Exercising and eating right.  Duh.

4. Reading interesting things.  I read all the time for work,  but that’s not the same thing.

The song is called Rogaciano El Huapanguero (Rogaciano the Huapango singer – huapango is a kind of song); but Rogaciano’s name never appears in the song itself.  Rather, it’s a lament for his death, and in the song he is called the “trovero” (troubadour) and the “pregonero” (from the latin, praeco, roughly, town crier).  Not only do the words illustrate the importance of the singer as a chronicler and news-giver (and the direct link of the these old sones to a bardic tradition, but the placement of his name in the title and of his role within the song always implied to me that the lament is less about the loss of the individual (Rogaciano) and more about the loss of a vital role in the community (the bard).

The line with my student’s name is beautifully consonant: “La Azucena y La Cecilia lloran lloran sin consuelo” (Azucena and Cecilia weep, weep, inconsolably – I’m clearly not a good poetic translator).  The names of the mourners evoke both death (azucena means Lily) and music (St. Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians).  At least, that’s what  my subjective ears hear- an argument could be made that marigolds are  more symbolic of death in Mexico, and lillies more traditionally associated with purity).

I get  caught up in the language of grief in the song – the countryside itself is in mourning, “La huasteca esta de luto”; even the sugar cane mill mourns and sighs with each turn, “El trapiche está de duelo/Y suspira en cada vuelta“.

Itunes only has the Linda Rondstadt version – good enough, but not as haunting as the Lola Beltran version playing in my head.

A frustrating youtube search yields seemingly every one of Lola’s rancheras except Rogaciano.  It does turn up a charming video of a very young Lola singing La Cigarra in one of her movies:

Originally sung by Jorge Negrete, it’s a huapango (maybe once upon a time Rogaciano sang it), and in a different way, it’s also about death:

Ya no me cantes cigarra
Que acabe tu sonsonete
Que tu canto aquí en el alma
Como un puñal se me mete
Sabiendo que cuando cantas
Pregonado vas tu muerte.

She begs the cigarra (cicada) to stop singing.  It’s too painful to hear – a stab to her soul – (“…aqui en el alma/Como un puñal se me mete) because she knows that the cicada announces its own death with the song (“pregonando vas tu muerte”). At the key change, she begins to meditate on the profundity of her unhappiness – she asks a sailor if there’s any color in the depths of the ocean as black as her sorrow- and on the elusiveness of love – a wounded dove bemoans about unrequited love.

Here’s a second video of the same song with terrible sound quality, but irresistible because of the Scarlett-worthy hoopskirt and majestic hand gestures:

In the end, she reconsiders the song of the cicada as an exhortation to live fully rather than as a harbinger of death.

Bajo la sombra de un árbol
Y al compás de mi guitarra
Canto alegre este huapango
Porque la vida se acaba
Y quiero morir cantando
Como muere la cigarra.

She happily sings her huapango under the shade of a tree, and wishes to die singing her song, like the cicada. I love the sentiment, but the metaphor of the brief and musical life of the cicada isn’t at all fitting for Bueli, who died quietly at 99.

Youtube also keeps insisting that what I *really* want from Lola is Cucurrucu Paloma.

I can offer no resistance to either the song (if you’ve lived with me for any amount of time, I’m sure you’ve been forced to myriad versions of it ad infinitum), or the sparkly grande dame herself.  However, this is a favorite of mine, not Bueli’s, who may have liked it or just found it maudlin (I’ll have to ask Mom).

One cliché yields another, and it’s a short path from Cucurrucucu to La Llorona.

From the same concert:

Again, this is an iconic song and a perennial favorite of mine, and I think someone once told me that Bueli’s husband- my abuelo Exiquio liked it- but I never once heard Bueli express an interest in the song.  Since she was neither sentimental nor mystic, it’s another inappropriate sentiment.

Of course, I just can’t think of La Llorona without thinking of the incomparable Chavela Vargas.  A video search from her yielded this fairly incredible (and simple) version of “No Volvere” (roughly, “I’m Not Coming Back”).

It’s plenty sad and there’s crying aplenty – tears of rage and memorably, a flood – swollen river of tears the singer will drown the memory of the lover in, (mi llanto ha formado/Un arroyo de olvido anegado/Donde yo tu recuredo ahogare) - but it’s a song about lost love, rather than death.  I

t’s also an indication that my search for the right song, long since evolved from just the namesake of my student to the right tribute for Bueli- has gone off the rails.  Bueli will rain down lightning bolts on my head just for including Chavela Vargas (a hard-drinking, hard-living lesbian), anywhere near thoughts of her, a lifelong (and devout) Methodist.

The truth is, all of the songs are wrong, and I reach an impasse. Suddenly: an insight.  It’s obvious to see Bueli’s influence in our shared commonalities: teaching, an insatiable love of history and literatury, rampant Euro-philia.  Although she spent her first years (during revolution, that inspiration for a thousand corridos) on a ranch in the desert, she is no more of the ranch than I perceive myself to be of the sprawling suburb I grew up in.  These rancheras, which she may or may not have liked, are not something we share.  Rather, my lifelong love of these old songs comes not only from hours spent on roadtrips listening to my parents tapes, but from a desire for a connection with the grandparents I never met, especially my abuelo Exiquio and (from the other side of the family) my abuela Mercedes.  Exiquio was an outdoorsy man and a lifelong whistler of tunes; his marriage to Bueli was a case of “opposites attract”.

The right music reveals itself in an anecdote Mom told me on the long drive down to Piedras.  I’ve always been more or less familiar with how my grandparents met, but I didn’t know that there was a rival and suitor before Exiquio.  This must have been in the late teens or early twenties – this young man would visit her at her parents house, and she would sit at the piano and play Schubert’s Serenade.  And there it is: that’s the song that Bueli would have loved as a tribute.  That’s the  song that expresses a poignance that I’m too clumsy to articulate.

So, here’s the song for my Abuelita.

IMG_4623

Originally uploaded by plainy

My grandmother died this weekend. She was 99 years old, and sharp to the very end. When I last saw her in November, she was drilling me about my classroom and sharing advice and experience from her lengthy teaching career.

This picture is from five years ago. While I was going through pictures of her, the youngest of the whole family piped in that in almost every picture, she’s got a book in her hand. I’ve started zooming in on the titles, and I’m newly amazed. This particular stack of books has two by Jan Karon, the chronicles of Marco Polo, a photo album and a coffee table book about Italy. I remember distinctly that outside next to a different chair is the Harry Potter that had just come out. We only had one copy between us on that visit and we keep slyly sneaking away with it. I think she saw herself as Dumbledore.

Bueli was born in 1911 in Allende, Coahuila, and still had memories to share about the Mexican Revolution when the local paper interviewed her about it recently for the upcoming centennial of the Revolution.

I’m back at work! The last three summers have all been lovely and delightful in different ways, but this one was the best so far. It feels strange to be back at school, but I’m grateful we get a week without kids to adjust to the workaday world. I can’t believe how much less work than my classwork all summer, but I suppose that’s also because classes haven’t started yet.

Today was convocation, which I typically abhor. It’s a giant pep rally (complete with marching band and cheerleaders) in a giant basketball gym. All the secondary teachers are there, seated in a giant checkerboard of colorful school t-shirts (ours is dark blue). A DJ plays obnoxiously loud music while teachers clap and dance in place – last year there was a congo line- and make noise with the novelty items that are passed out (this year, inexplicably, inflatable giant hammers).

i dislike these kinds of events for the following reasons:
1. I think these kinds of shenanigans infantilize the profession.
2. schlock: pleh
3. I’m cranky

Not surprisingly in a profession in which self-help books are used for professional development and sappy hollywood movies are used as case study examples (I was once forced to spend an entire afternoon studying this: http://www.tnt.tv/title/?oid=633246 ), the keynote event is usually a motivational/inspirational speaker.
Nobody likes to sit next to me, because I just make sarcastic comments under my breath the whole time, and stubbornly refuse to be moved to tears by exhortations of “real talk” and “remembering the children”.

This year’s guy: an actual scholar (talking to teachers! will wonders never cease!) with intelligent things to say. I liked him. My cold stone heart was even….inspired.

1. Miraculously did wake up to alarm, despite sleep deprivation.

2. Discovered that alarm had been set (by me) one hour late. Result: bus to NH (to get picked up by Kim Roseberry long gone.

3. Next plan: 10 am bus to Concord.  Brightside: The bus at 8 am takes two hours, but the 10 am bus is only one hour!

4. Consulted handy handy iphone app for bus schedule from Watertown – Bos.

5. Information from app conflicts with information from paper brochure schedule.  Decision: trust the Technology

6. Begin walking.

7. Shake tiny fist at Bus 70 as it passes me by two minutes later.  Curses!  Verdict: paper schedule was correct. Glass Half Full: I learn a Valuable Lesson

8. Convince cab driver to pick me up in addition to his scheduled passenger pick up, a little old russian lady on her way to Temple.

9. Enjoy genuinely beautiful scenic tour of Alston, Brighton, Brookline, Backbay, and Storrow Drive.  Feel the wind in my hair, enjoy a blue sky and feel that the comfortable warmth of the day foretells a delightful weekend.

10.  Listen to the hilarious exchanges of the russian dame calling several places and insisting that they meet her at her destination with a cab voucher.  Each of these conversations involve alot of repetition and insistence, and last at least four minutes.  The first two are wrong numbers.  The last one is the right number; it only lasts about a minute.  Is it wrong that her russian accent makes it sound hilarious to me?

11. Notice as the russian lady gets (and is immediately met at the door with a waiting voucher) how happy and dressed up she is. It’s probably her big outing every week, and her accessories are impeccably chosen.  This makes me happy.

12. Muse with the cab driver over the beauty of Quebec, the general goodness of the Montreal Jazz festival (verdict: good), the Difficulty of Teenagers and whether or not we would ever move to a foreign place, sight unseen, to do a helping-people job.  (conclusions: He would go only after visiting once or twice to get a sense of the place, and for a finite amount of time, say 3-5 years.  I would go for less time but could theoretically go sight unseen.  Neither of us made immediate plans to either gain a practical skill or move).

13. Arrive at bus station, just in time.

14. Leave brand new iphone in the cab.

15. Swept by a montage of images and realizations:

a. I remember the cab number because of the russian lady’s voucher shenanigans, but I never noticed the cab company’s name or phone      number

b. brief flash of every phone I’ve ever dropped, drowned, run over, and left behind.

c. swift calculation: I can stay on this street corner and hope he’ll come back, but I’ll miss the bus and set off a chain of missed connections that will cause me to miss the entire, carefully choreographed, Vermont weekend.  Starting with: now I don’t have Kim’s phone number.

16. Experience all Kubler-Ross stages of grief, especially shame.  Is shame one of the stages?

17. Remember why, for the last many years, I have not allowed myself to buy anything other than cheap phones and five dollar sunglasses.

18. Become certain that cab driver, who seems a decent sort, will call someone in the phones’ contact list and a reunion will occur in the future.  Dwell on this idea until it becomes as fact as my mind; a certainty that the Decency of the Human Spirit will trump Depressingly Consistent Self-Induced Scrape.

19.  Buy bus ticket to NH.  (observation: it’s half of the price of the cab ride).  Downside: it arrives 25 minutes after the advertised schedule, and there is no way to contact Kim.  Upside: the best wifi I’ve ever experienced on a bus.

Conclusion: It’s going to be a Beautiful Day.

After that I thought, what the hell, and eschewed the T in favor of walking the rest of the way down Mass. Ave, muttering and gesticulating all the way.

Or maybe it means I just have a lot of work to do this morning.