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 7^th 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.