We Sing For You A Happy Christmas
It started as it usually does – coffee hastily imbibed, a
quick scan of email, same with voicemail, mental checkdown of the tasks for the
day, arrival in the cafeteria to monitor the breakfast and get the general
pulse of things. It was the second day of our kindness spirit week and students
were festooned in all manner of super hero garb. The warning bell rang and I
made my way to the office where one of my crew was to meet me. It was his day
to read the morning thought, and we arrived at exactly the same time. He looked
nervous. “I am so excited you’re here to do this!” I beamed at him, and with a
whisper, “because between you and me, I get nervous talking into that thing.
I’m glad you’re the brave one today!” A smile spread across his face and he
drew a deep breath as I pushed the Big Red Button of the P.A. system. “Today’s
kindness theme is: ‘I’ll be your superhero. I will stand up with you against
bullying.’” The words rolled off of his tongue naturally. He read the rest of
the thought beautifully, poignantly, and with inflection at all the right
parts. And with just a couple of nervous coughs.
And later, later. Sometimes it’s exactly like that scene in
the second to last Harry Potter movie, when Harry and Dumbledore are in the
ocean cave trying to retrieve the locket. It’s when Harry is desperately trying
to get water for Dumbledore to drink, and he has no other option but to break
the eerie surface of the lake. A million hands rise out of it toward him –
searching, grabbing, seeking, all of them wanting wanting wanting.
Overwhelming. In the midst of an afternoon exactly like that I caught sight of
eyes that carried an urgency, and something told me Drop Everything and Meet
Right Now, and so we met. Sometimes it’s possible to just feel so incredibly
inadequate and untrained and all you can rely on is “it’s not your fault.” And
“there are a lot of things that are going to happen between now and the Next
Time You Feel Normal, and every time you tell me that you need me between here
and there, I will be right by your side.” And to mean it, really.
Of course the day ends with my favorite (we are not supposed
to have favorites) and with such a mature tone of urgency he tells me, “Ms. J,
they are having a problem. And I told them that you can help. And I can help
too, and I will be here with them.” It’s a little seed that you plant and you
just hope with such a gentle supplication that it will take root. We are both
intently looking at the boy with the deep, intense brown eyes, sitting across
the table. He has always reminded me of my nephew. He wants to make sure I
won’t tell anyone about our conversation (I tell him the exceptions) and I
brace myself for the worst. “This is going to sound weird,” I nod in solidarity
and he continues. “I’m probably going to talk in metaphors, because I think
it’s easiest to understand that way,” he is in the 7th grade. “I’ve
always thought that life is like water. It’s just there,” he looks across my
office, as if to signify proximity, “and you can look at it – admire it, maybe
dip your toe in it – but there is always the risk that you’ll get in too deep.
That you’ll drown.” We fall into a wormhole of adolescence and development and
the half-boy and how even as adults you can’t always trust your friends and so
the point is the point is to find
that voice inside yourself that you know is authentically you. That you can
trust implicitly. And how this is exactly
what growing up is, and you just simply can’t rush it. Because really, we
hone ourselves along the journey. Is there even a destination?
Home, and Rachmaninoff, and how my rat rod
4runner handles so well in the snow. A mirror, and not a sponge. And to never
run out of seeds.
