Recess

Sociologists (like my sharp fiance) have long opined that you can learn a whole lot more about someone based on what they choose to do with their leisure time than what they do to make a living. It makes a lot of sense, since our leisure time is ours alone to choose what to do with; lots of people work jobs they don't love, but why would anyone spend their free time doing stuff they didn't love?

It happens every year. School grinds to its alarming halt, graduation speeches are recited, report cards are finished, and I am free. For a couple of days I lay around and read, I go for long walks, I harvest the garden for dinnertime salads, I cruise the neighborhood streets on my bike. I flash my teeth at strangers. My wardrobe shrinks to the same few skirts and shirts piled conveniently in a corner on the floor and I lose track of when I last showered. At night I sip ginger ale (sometimes spiked with whiskey) and watch straight-to-DVD movies on Netflix and then complain with M about how they must have ran out of money halfway through filming. I don't know what time it is when I bed down, am shocked to find that it's ten thirty when I wake up. It's all quite grand.

Until I get restless. No classes to plan, no writer's salon until deep summer, no obligation greater than Pilates on Saturday morning. I sniff around and find myself at the helm of an unwieldy ship known as free time.

So what do I do? Well, other than try to write (God, I wish I could say that the bulk of my leisure time was spent writing) and sniff my luscious coconut-scented hair, my favorite way to wile away the hours is doing artistic DIY projects. I use the term artistic very loosely here; most of these projects involve little more than paint and collages of some sort. Still, few things are more satisfying than turning a beat-up chair into a funky artsy (there's that word again) sea-foam green and pink number that makes you proud every time you sit down. Or turning a boring black lap-top bag into a visual delight with strips of bright duct tape, stickers, and a cassette tape patch. Or ripping cool pictures from magazines and making an autobiographical collage (mine includes the Smurfs, a basketball, Lucky Charms, jack-o-lanterns and a burning heart).

After my summer travels, I return home with millions of receipts, ticket stubs, business cards, mini-maps, newspaper clippings, that are too significant to recycle, too unremarkable to frame. So I make collages: a giant picture frame with my Indonesia rabble and a magazine holder with my Turkish rubble. (Now I'm just itching for my next... Cuban bread box? Mexican stool? )

And so, as the longest days of the year shine their honey freedom light, I get inspired with my next project: turning our coffee table even cuter with a fresh coat of deep ocean blue paint and a decoupage of treasured artwork. Tables are perfect opportunities to make good use of those drawings and postcards and other bits of rad debris you have amassed. For me that includes a Berenstain Bears postcard, a watercolor from Thailand, a photo of a graveyard in Bulgaria, a Pretty in Pink movie jacket, a Turkish currency note and, the crown jewel, a classic Wayne Thiebaud print of pastries and a wedding cake. Now that I've done the lay-out, all that's left is to glue them down with Mod Podge, seal them with polyurethane, and voila: a one-of-a-kind coffee table that will spark conversations during evening soirees for years to come. Even better, a sweet reminder that fun and productivity can be close friends when it comes to my recess time.

What about you? What do you do with your leisure time?

Nothing But Flowers

Just back from our end of the year camping trip and feeling wiped out, worn down, aimless and excited. In years past we've camped at Lake Mendocino in a forested beach-side group camp-site that spills down into the water. The time floated dreamily by on a sea of talent show goofiness, soccer on thick green grass, and hours of splashing, canoeing, and, my favorite, swimming across the lake. I'd stay up late with the kids, playing word games around the fire-pit, warmed inside and out.

The end of the year trip was always as light and buoyant as the banana boat the kids clamored to ride over and over again, even if it meant getting thrown off in a menacing amble of sharp elbows and knees. On the third and final day I'd linger long as I could, one last swim, one last sun bath, one final dip to get cooled.... it was a wonder I'd ever leave, with a car full of girls who insisted on shouting the lyrics along to the Grease sound-track as we soared hot down highway 101. We'd stop for ice cream in Hopland; once we even pulled off the highway for a decadent float down the Russian River where it gushes green through Squaw Rock. Those were the days---when the end always came too fast, when my yearbook overflowed with long letters from dozens of students.

This year was different. The Lake Mendo group site is closed due to budget cuts, so we camped at Benbow on the Eel River, which was rocky, frigid, and definitely too shallow to tug a banana boat. Drastically fewer kids, quieter, so mellow I actually felt restless, burned by a hazy sun, swept down river by a fierce current. Too many blank pages in my yearbook, too much leftover cake from graduation. Just after the talent show, which was still goofy, still great, I felt water graze my face. We stood around the roaring bonfire and flashed stunned smiles, hastily saving the wilting books and edibles from this unexpected rainfall. I was in the tent earlier than usual, listening to the sky cry above me as kids, determined to stay up all night, murmured and chewed on candy. In the morning the gray sky warned against a swim. On the drive home, in the shade of a thick redwood grove, I listened to David Byrne sing “it was a shopping mall, now it’s all covered in daisies...” and I thought, there is no stopping time. “You got it, you got it.”

We took the two students who also live in Santa Rosa, so this year, for the first time, we didn't have to return to the community center in Sebastopol and wait for the parents to pick up their tired and dirty children. Cami and Marisa lingered at our house for over an hour after we got home. I fixed them a snack of cheese and bread and we looked at old yearbooks, marveling at the baby faces of those now grown. We all seemed too tired to say good-bye. They tinkered on the piano and surveyed my book shelves. We talked lazily about nothing in particular.

We held on tight, but inevitably the banana boat always flips. When they finally left, Cami with an old Nonesuch student who came to pick her up, Marisa on foot to catch the bus, I left the front door open, half expecting them to come right back.

School's Out

One thing I've learned: endings are almost always anti-climactic. So it's over. Now what?

On my final day of high school, Lauren, best Camel-smoking co-conspirator a girl could ask for, drove us out to the tiny Cajun town of Breaux Bridge for lemon ice-box pie at the famous Cafe Des Amis. We sat under the whir of a high-ceilinged fan and lazily ate our dessert, wondering why we didn't feel the ecstasy we were supposed to. We walked over the bridge and watched the bayou, its coffee and milk-colored waters moving so slowly it was impossible to tell which way it flowed. Summer already damp on our white uniform blouses and running shorts.

On the last day of school at Nonesuch its heavy and warm. Gray clouds hover close outside the window as my first period class scratches out their final. By afternoon, the schoolhouse smells like old slippers and forgotten sandwiches. The kids are restless and cheery, greedily spreading cream cheese on another bagel no one will finish, leaving trails of hastily graded papers in their freedom wake. I, too, feel a bit frantic, filling out report cards, slapping my red-inked enthusiasm all over their writing, made more brilliant by its sudden surrender.

Plans are corrupted. I slack on my advanced comp final, focus instead on the "final" final celebration I'll have with them. Vanilla ice cream with crushed Oreos! Then lunch-time and two realizations: these are my over-achievers, they want a challenging final! And: the ice cream never made it into the freezer as promised. Uh-oh. I cover the board with questions, assemble bowls and spoons for the soupy dessert, and in they come. Their eyes widen as they notice the board. What's all this? they ask. We thought you were gonna go easy on us, just hang out and chat. Do we really have to answer ALL those questions?! Melted ice-cream, anyone?

The air is thick with questions no one can answer. Will school open again come fall? At the end of five years, Nonesuch is a sinking ship and I can't bring myself to jump. A few of the girls linger in my classroom, and we talk about Israel, blue eye shadow, books. I don't leave school until the kids are all loaded in the van, lumbering down the hill, over the bridge, and up Bones Road one final time.

Feeling Fine

On this lazy Saturday morning, here's why:

1. Only one more week of teaching. Endings come so fast, and by my very nature I do not like them. But I do like summer. Last night as M and I strolled downtown for some Puerto Rican cuisine, we were surrounded by adolescent merrymaking (beeping horns, deep-throated yells) and realized that Santa Rosa high school had just celebrated their graduation. Youth glowed all around us.

I remembered singing Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" with my best friend Lauren as we cruised out of our own graduation, 13 years ago, giddy with freedom and possibility. Bittersweet joy welled up inside of me. I confronted my own impending ending, my fifth graduation as a Nonesuch teacher, letting go another crop of kids I've come to love. And just as that reality hit, I saw a graduate lingering in a parking lot with his mom, looking bored and friendless. It just broke my heart. But who knows what life will bring him?

2. After days and days of being betrayed by the sky, dumping out-of-season rain from thick gloomy clouds, the sun is finally shining.

3. Free Mind Media, the anarchist info center/lending library is closing its doors because they can't pay their rent. There is nothing happy about this, especially since more than ever people need access to alternative ideas. The bright side? I got to prowl through shelves and boxes plucking books, zines, and all manner of inspiring reading material. Nothing feeds me like reading, not even that warm nutmeg French toast digesting in my belly.

4. I feel so loved. My fiancé spontaneously cooked dinner for me and my girlfriends the other night. He served us champagne and picked a garden-fresh salad, then whisked the plates away and gave us space to chatter and laugh and have our sweet girl time.

5. There is nothing that I absolutely have to do today. And a long weekend unfurls...

I Like Anything

Imagine if everyone, every day, looked in the mirror and said I can do anything good.

Seriously, I am not a you tube boob, but I cannot stop watching this video!

It makes me feel joy all over. You won't regret it, I promise.

No Writer Is An Island (In Praise of the Archipelago)

Writing is necessarily a solitary activity, since only the communication from your brain to your fingers can result in the magical string of words you bead together on the page. I've always viewed my writing as something I suffer through alone, triumph in alone, read aloud to cringe at the corniness, alone.

But increasingly I realize that any form of expression--be it basketball or baking--naturally unites people in an inescapable hive of sorts. All these bees, buzzing about the same thing. Honey potential.

For three years now I've been part of a monthly writer's salon with two dear writer friends. We spill our writing guts to each other and we listen. I never finish things, except blogs that nobody reads, I moan, and they nod, they validate and empathize and suggest.

We much on corn chips and spit salsa when we laugh. They read my latest essay about Jesus, the one I've been hanging my head over, and they say, Jess, I love this opening description, I sunk into the story like teeth into cake. And I give myself some credit for creating something that someone else enjoyed. They suggest that I thread one storyline into another, and something clicks, the insight I've been searching for, and that night I confront the keyboard without fear. Thanks to them, I've progressed from someone who wants to write, to someone who actually does it.

Last Saturday I went to a workshop run by two talented writers (Petals and Bones, look into it) that brought together eight people so excited about writing that we ran feverishly over time. We responded to prompts on the fly, my hand awkwardly clutching the pen, no time to wonder how silly my sentences, how raw my emotion. When I read it aloud, people listened and made comments. I thrilled at hearing other people recite their lovely sentences, so different from my own. After three hours of this, we were all glowing.

As I read Ariel Gore's "How to become a famous writer before you're dead" I realize, too, that I am part of a larger community of writers who do not know me and who I may never meet. But so what? I just found out that Ariel Gore starting publishing in Sonoma County Women's Voices, which is the local newspaper I co-edited when I first moved out here, nearly seven years ago! It's also the place I first published my writing. Just like that, I feel a kinship, a sense of hope. Maybe all of our lives are sewn with similar thread; its all about how we weave them.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can probe into many writers' lives. I can admire their work, draw inspiration from them, and smile with pride when they suggest that I start a blog. Check, I've already got one. (Now how do I get folks--other than my writers' salon--to read it?)

I'm a writer, I think, just like them. For don't I, too, offer up the words, and then let them go?

Blues on the Rez

I cried when it was time to leave. I didn't want to go. It felt tragic, like a broken promise, like a birthday cake smashed on the kitchen floor.

For the past four days I'd been here, on this plot of dry red land, and I'd come to know it intimately. The forgotten tricycle underneath the only tree, the modest home whose walls I'd helped to pound into dust, the shed I'd helped to nail into life, the trash-strewn desert wash, the cars parked for eternity. It was my first time on reservation land, here in the Navajo nation of northwestern New Mexico.

At first it appeared sparse and quiet, the workmen shy and unorganized. I'd looked at my students (four girls, four boys) and at M (fiancé, co-teacher, co-chaperone) and sighed: this is going to be one of those community service project trips that benefits us more than them, I'd thought. We're the white burden. They don't even want us here, there doesn't seem to be enough to do, and if there is one thing I really can't stand, it's not having enough to do.

Shows what I know. The spirit of a place takes time to emerge. When I silence my mind is when the life around me has the chance to wiggle into being.

Our second day on the rez threw things into sharp relief. I saw the shy workmen smiling, appreciating our eager teenage boys doing the man dance. I looked into the great grandmother's eyes (the owner of the house that we were helping to remodel) and saw the fear of her home being torn apart, her vital energy as she instructed me with hand gestures how to box her numerous nonstick pans. I couldn't understand why she had me sweeping the dirt outside until her sister explained, we are cleaning it, getting rid of the old dirt. I smelled the wood-stove and felt the wind nag at my sunburn. I dug and smashed and hauled and packed and nailed and devoured a turkey and cheese sandwich at lunchtime. I spotted a giant black beetle crawling through the wash.

On the third day we met Kaylee, great granddaughter, infused with the playful exuberance of a three year-old life. Her cheeks were soft and spongy, black curls and sporadic teeth and fierce eyes and her whole being sent a postcard straight to my heart. When she saw what we had done to the house, she exclaimed, Grandma's house is broken! She hated the sound of the saw cutting up wood, loved the stray puppy tied to an old truck-bed.

On our final day I sat inside with her, munching fresh hot fry-bread dusted with salt. She peacefully nursed her bottle of milk and I took stock of the house I'd been sweating in, the house I'd never see again: magazine cut-outs of Twilight on the wall, buckets of lard on the counter, an old metal school locker tucked into the corner.

Some weeks roll by with nothing much to distinguish them from the next. Our week in New Mexico caught sparks that cling to me like tumbleweeds:

There were the trains, graffiti-bitten and noiseless, dutiful veins pumping America's consumerist blood.

There was the sun-bleached Cafe sign on the side of the highway, eerily familiar.

There was the sage-sprinkled desert floor.

There was Pancho, aka "the stare master," always laughing, always looking, hardly working.

There was the broken pottery (probably from Wal-Mart, we joked), sole survivor of the charred remnants of a night bruised with alcohol.

There was Sylvia, who hid beer in her jacket and said I love you guys, I love you, as M and I dropped her off halfway to town.

There was the sound of nothing.

There was the night we all stayed up talking, about everything, opinions bumping elbows with emotions, tiredness forgotten.

There were the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic charity, housing us in their cottages, stocked with plenty of soda and butterscotch pudding.

There was Sister Andrea with the small body and big eyes, who took her vows 55 years ago, a reminder to the kids that religion isn't all bad.

There were the prairie dogs sniffing the air and guarding their holes.

There was the pool in Needles, perfectly cool after a nine hour car ride (that included a dash into the Grand Canyon).

There was reality TV in the hotel room to remind me why TV makes us dumb, and why I still crave its absurdity.

And there was Kaylee, who clung to me and said you stay here, as I hugged her good-bye, not sad for her but sad for me, for my own return to life as I know it.