No Halloween

The kids at my school cannot wear masks or makeup or costumes on Halloween, and the teachers are loathe to celebrate it, also. The reason for this is “a safety issue,” and that is probably correct. On regular school days at our school, days that are not a beloved holiday, students are not allowed to wear hats, hoodies (sweatshirts with hoods), or anything other than their school uniform. The school uniform is a pale blue oxford shirt (either long or short sleeved) and khaki colored pants. Students are not allowed to wear anything over their uniforms, nor are they allowed to wear leggings (if they wear short pants), or pants with elastic at the ankles, or vests or sweaters or coats over their shirts. They are also not allowed to wear colored wrist bands or bandanas (do-rags), or anything else that might betray a gang affiliation.

My school has an extremely diverse student population which includes mostly African Americans but also Hispanics, Latinos, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Africans (from the continent, not America), South Americans (from many different countries), many European immigrants, and, yes, Euro Americans (white students). The most recent statistic at our school says we have something in the neighborhood of 22 languages spoken at our school, though Spanish is the most common non-English language, followed by French. Even so, most of the students are African American, and most of them were born and live right here in the city, where they will most likely spend their entire lives (according to statistics).

The “safety issue” at our school is gang activity, of course. Students bring all of the problems they face at home and on the streets right into the school with them every day, where the school administration works tirelessly to bar any and all activity that might interfere with learning. This is much easier said than done, and the methods used (while quite effective, actually) create an atmosphere at our school that much resembles prison, for both teachers and students. The reason for the ban against gang colors is to reduce the possibility of signaling to gang members within the school and to redirect focus back toward learning. The reason for no hoodies is that security cameras do no good if the perpetrator of a crime can conceal his or her identity by hiding his face inside a hood.

Which brings me back to why our students cannot wear Halloween costumes—they could be even more effective in concealing the identity of someone perpetrating a crime. So on the off chance that a few ne’er-do-well students may choose to participate in some shenanigans on Halloween, the entire student body of around 1800 students must suffer Halloween without costumes. This cheerless mood also carries over to cover “no parties” at our school. There is basically no celebrating of any kind.

The general philosophy is that these kids need rigorous discipline in order to achieve academically. It is generally (and somewhat accurately) assumed that the majority of the students come from undisciplined environments in which they have not been pushed to achieve, and that it is our responsibility to push them.

This is my first year teaching art in high school, and it has been quite an experience so far. I’ve only been at it for two months and during the first few weeks of school I was pretty sure that I hated it and was going to quit. The kids are challenging, and working in this kind of restricted environment does not make me feel safer, but rather more frustrated. I’ll let you off the hook: I now know that I love what I do and the kids that I teach, and if I were to go to a different school in a different district I might have an easier job and a nicer environment but I would be haunted by the students I left behind, and I might not have the awesome support that I get from my principals.

Right now my focus is on becoming a better teacher. At the moment I can tell that I will be great at it some day, but presently I feel lucky if I’m merely good at it more than half the time. The other half of the time is the experimenting and floundering that I do while learning how to be a good teacher. Most days are an uphill struggle to get my students to learn something, to want to learn something. Most days I’m figuring out what works and what doesn’t and trying not to waste too much time on the things that I find do not work.

The kids at my school are tough, but I love them. They are different than any kids I’ve ever been around before. I have read the statistics on urban schools and the challenges faced by teachers in these districts, but the challenges I face are nothing compared to the challenges that my students face every day. I have to remind myself of that every minute of every day. Then I have to force myself to forget it so that I can do the things that are necessary to get them to learn. So much of “the challenges they face” are things that, while real, become excuses for failure and for not even trying in the first place. Many of the kids are extremely invested in their perception of their lot in life. They are invested in being misunderstood. This is an urban mindset that is complicated by the natural tendency to be misunderstood that is inherent in the teenager. To allow a white schoolteacher to convince them that they can be something different, achieve something different would mean selling out in some way. It would mean that they don’t know themselves, their situation, their options, or their own potential as well as they think they do. It would mean that they could hope for something better. It would mean that they would be wrong about the allure of easy money on the street.

“Get money” is a phrase I hear over and over during the day at my school. These kids are obsessed by it. And at the expense of offending someone or sounding racist I’ll make a clarification: it is the African American kids who use this phrase. The Latino/Hispanic/Mexican-American kids at my school are just as likely to be involved in gangs as the African American kids; and any of the other kids from a multitude of other cultures (including my own) are also just as likely to get involved in gangs. But to deny that there are major cultural differences among these groups is to ignore reality. They are all similar in many ways, but they are also very dissimilar in the ways that they approach a variety of problems in life. They are also very prejudiced against each other. I hear racial slurs made by kids from one group against kids in another group and vice versa all day long every day. I am constantly working to raise my own cultural consciousness as well as that of my students. On most days I feel I am coming to understand them better, but my feeling is that most of them are driving the trenches between them deeper—it’s hard to tell, really, if anything I say or do gets through to them, and I may never know for sure.

Anyway, about “get money.” Most of the kids at my school are extremely poor, so it is easy to see how alluring a promise of easy money can be to them. That is the appeal of gangs. Not only do they promise these kids a family that they may not have, but they promise easy money. A couple of weeks ago there was a spike in crime in the cultural district of our city. The new gang initiation for young potential members is to run up to people on the street and snatch their cell phones out of their hands and run away. It’s like Oliver Twist in Baltimore. There’s a whole network of young crime “families” taking in these cast-offs, providing them with acceptance in exchange for a little petty crime. It’s easy to see the appeal of that. If you have no family of your own, or if your family is unavailable for whatever reason, and you have no money, and you have to take care of yourself, why not do these things for a “family” that apparently cares for you?

Another phrase that I hear over and over at my school throughout the day is “that’s my father” or “that’s my son.” I haven’t been there long enough to know whether these are direct references to gang relationships, but that’s what I suspect they are. In a world where the average life-expectancy of the African American male is about 25, a sixteen-year-old taking in a fourteen-year-old and calling him “son” can have great appeal for the fourteen-year-old who has no father (and statistically about 85% of these young men have no father at home).

The girls have just as many problems, and they are easy to guess. We have a daycare in our school, if that gives you an idea of the kinds of problems these girls have. We also have a health clinic that dispenses condoms and other birth control, as well as providing other basic school-related health care services. It is directly across the hall from the daycare center. One of my more on-the-ball senior girls astutely observed one day: “That’s working out real well, isn’t it?” She was being ironic, of course, referring to the fact that birth control is available directly across from the daycare center, but most of the girls are opting for involuntary parenthood rather than being seen going into the student health center. While I must be asked a hundred times a day for a pass to go to the health center for an aspirin, evidently not as many students are going there for birth control counseling as need to.

Of course, it is likely that not all of the sexual activity is voluntary. In the same way that gangs protect young men who perform duties for the “family,” I assume that young women are afforded certain protections for their involvement as well. I do not pretend to understand how all of this works, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to draw a few conclusions. Because of my heightened awareness of the gang activity at my school I have selected “The Wire” to be the next series I rent from Netflix. I never would have guessed that I would have to watch a crime drama to get to know my students better. This ain’t no “Beverly Hills 90120” for sure (to coin the vernacular of my students).

Real Christians - They Forgive

I read this article on CNN.com and was moved to tears. The Amish demonstrate the love of Jesus through their actions. Check it out and be encouraged:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-04-amish-shooting_x.htm

Ambitious Spiders on the C and O Canal

As an amendment to my second installment of “Baltimore Adventure” I want to give a little flora and fauna report. This weekend I am at my dad’s place in Cumberland, Maryland. Cumberland is the terminus of the C and O Canal Tow Path (C and O for Chesapeake and Ohio). This canal has not been in use for some many decades, and for a long time the tow path still existed but was in a state of disrepair. But in recent years the C and O Canal Tow Path was made a National Historic Park, and the trails and historic sites along the way have been restored and maintained for hikers, bicyclers and horse riders. The tow path is 184.5 miles long, starting in Harper’s Ferry (near Washington D.C.) and ending in Cumberland. One could hike or ride the entire distance of it, and a boy scout troop from Cumberland did just that this last week. Jonathan and I have set a goal to walk/bike the entire length of it in sections (this section one weekend, that section another weekend, and so on); but we would also like to take a week or so and do the entire length at one time at some point. A small tourist industry has built up around the restoration of the tow path, and there are accommodations along the full length of the path at reasonable intervals, so we wouldn’t even have to camp out if we didn’t want to; although there are great camping areas all along the way.

Yesterday I started at Canal Place in Cumberland (a restored train station, where you can take a ride on an old steam locomotive to Frostburg and back) and walked along the tow path for about a mile and then turned around (it was about noon, it was hot, the humidity was about 70%, and there was no shade along this stretch). This morning I started at the North Branch junction and walked about two miles to a steam pump ruin (about two miles) and then turned around and walked back. That part of the tow path is shady the entire way, and it was wonderful! (I didn’t take any pictures because I didn’t want to carry anything with me.) There was a hiker/biker camping area near the North Branch junction, and there were a couple of bikers camping there (sleeping) when I walked out. On my way back they were up having their breakfast. It was very enticing—I am really looking forward to being able to do that! It’s not Montana, but it’s green and it is beautiful and peaceful.

One thing that is really odd about the green places / trails I’ve found out here is that there are hardly any people on them. Unlike Bozeman, where any trail you choose nowadays (whether in town or in the mountains) is practically a backcountry freeway of human foot traffic, I very rarely pass people on these trails. On the busiest trail day so far I passed about 5 people total during a one hour walk. I’ve been out at all times of day (morning, evening, midday) and this doesn’t seem to change. So, while the east coast is just brimming with people in general, getting off the beaten path to these little green spaces is a true respite, because hardly anyone takes advantage of them. That’s unfortunate, really, because people are not availing themselves of these wonderful outdoor resources; but it means more open space and quiet for me, so I’m not complaining.

So…..you’re probably wondering what “ambitious spiders” (from the subject line, above) have to do with anything. This morning my feet hit the tow path at 7:05, and I was the first person out on that stretch of the trail. The trail itself is about 8 feet wide (wide enough for a wagon, though in the days when the tow path was used wagons did not pull the canal boats—one mule led by a man pulled them). Then there are about two to three feet of grass or brush to each side of the path and then lots of trees. In two separate places within the two mile stretch of trail that I was walking, I walked right through a spider web that had been constructed right in the middle of the path, at just about face level (I’m about 5’7” tall, so that would be MY face level). After I did that twice I actually started looking for the things. On the way back I saw several more and managed to avoid them. These spider webs were only about a foot in diameter and the spiders that were hanging out in them were pretty small (between a half inch and an inch in diameter, including legs). The strands that were holding that one foot medallion of spider web in the middle of the trail were easily ten feet long, strung from each of what would be four corners of the web, if a web had corners. These little spiders must build and rebuild their webs a dozen or more times a day as they are torn down by hikers and bikers walking/riding through them. My active imagination could envision these ambitious little spiders seeing hikers and bikers going by and thinking what a big meal they would have if they could trap one of those!

If you want to know more about the C and O Canal Tow Path, go to http://www.nps.gov/choh/. You’ll find a map at this link: http://www.nps.gov/carto/PDF/CHOHmap1.pdf (be aware that the map is arranged for convenient viewing, which means the Mason Dixon Line is to your right—if you were looking at a North-oriented map the Mason Dixon line would be at the top of the page). Enjoy.

Shirley, and Kids Who Talk

What a difference a week makes! Shirley is back on the road with a new water pump and a new wiring harness. She still needs a bit more TLC, but she pulled through and lived to tell the tale and will likely not leave me stranded on the side of the road in the city somewhere. And now I have a Volvo mechanic who has recommended a repair and maintenance schedule for Ol’ Shirley, so I don’t feel panicky and desperate about having a reliable vehicle anymore. I highly recommend Danneman Auto (http://www.dannemanauto.com) if you are having car trouble in the Baltimore area.

I also received a teaching placement on Friday! I’ll be teaching Art in grades K-12 at Patterson High School which is in the Greek Town section of Baltimore City (southeast corner, just north the Fort McHenry Tunnel, just east of the Inner Harbor, for those of you who like to use Earth Google and/or Mapquest, and are actually interested enough to look it up). Get this: I was at my interview yesterday with the Assistant Principal and the other Art Teacher, and when they saw on my resume that I have a masters in Native American Studies they got all excited and asked me if I had any idea that they have a very large group of Native American students at that school. I replied that I knew that there are NA students in the district, because all of the federal Indian service agencies are in the D.C. / Baltimore area. They said that the ratio is a LOT higher at Patterson because a large group of Lumbee people (tribe in North Carolina: http://www.lumbeetribe.com) relocated to that part of Baltimore a long time ago and stayed, and all of the kids go to Patterson. Weirdly, I learned about the Lumbee relocation in my masters program, but had no idea what schools the kids attended, or that they were all at one school. What do you suppose the odds are that the only person of all the BCTR residents with a MA in NAS would end up getting placed (coincidentally) at the school with all the Lumbee kids? Truth truly is stranger than fiction. I can’t think of a more perfect fit for me! Looks like that masters in NAS will be useful after all.

Yesterday I also found out that the Baltimore City School District managed to negotiate a pay increase for teachers, so I will be making $3,000 more per year than I thought I would be when I entered this program. They also negotiated a mandatory 5% annual pay increase in that deal. Sweet. J

And just when you might think that those are enough serendipities for one person in one week...This morning I got a call from the Art Teacher who was at my interview yesterday. She called to tell me that the art teacher who I am replacing has been renting a little house that she owns less than a mile from the school at which I will be teaching. The reason I am replacing that other art teacher is because she and her husband are moving to upstate New York to be closer to family (they’re having a baby soon), so the rental will be available around Labor Day (which is precisely when I will need to have found a place). She asked me if I had found a permanent place to live and if and (if not) would I be interested in renting it. The price is great for the city, the location is within walking distance of my job, the neighborhood is a great working-class neighborhood (Greek Town) with easy access to all of the neat stuff in Baltimore City (i.e., the Inner Harbor, just west of there), and a convenient distance to the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus (where I take my education courses two nights a week—part of the program I was hired through), and she doesn’t mind that I have two dogs. So of course I said I’LL TAKE IT! I’m not completely stupid, though—I’m going to do a drive-by tomorrow and then go look at the inside on Monday evening. If everything is hunky dory I’ll sign a lease and rent it.

As for my training and student teaching placement for the summer….I have to spend two and a half hours every morning in another teacher’s classroom observing and teaching for part of the time as part of my accelerated teacher certification training. My placement is at Maree Ferring Elementary School in Brooklyn, MD, which is just south of the Inner Harbor. The site coordinator for the summer school (sort of like a principal, but she’s not the principal—she just supervises the teachers who are teaching summer school at that location, but who usually teach at other schools during the regular school year) informed us at our initial orientation that Brooklyn is known as “the West Virginia of Baltimore.” For those of you who are not familiar with West Virginia and its associated stereotypes let me tell you that that is an insult to West Virginia and an insult to the residents of Brooklyn. She’s referring to the West Virginia stereotype of hillbilly inbreeding (which is JUST a stereotype).

The teacher I have been placed with is awesome! She is a terrific teacher and was hired and trained through the same program (Baltimore City Teaching Residency, AKA BCTR) that I am working through. I am working in a class with 1^st graders who are going into 2^nd grade but are a little behind where they need to be and are in summer school as a sort of bridge program, to get them up to speed for second grade. There are also a few 2^nd graders who were held back and are in summer school for the same reason—to get them up to speed so they have a better chance of not being held back for a second time. For the first two days of my summer school placement I worked with two boys who the teacher called “non-readers.” Their reading skills are about Kindergarten level for one kid, and pre-kindergarten for the other. After just one day of working with the two of them I got to watch their reading improve! Very exciting! It made me feel like I might really be a teacher after all.

On the third day, the summer school site coordinator came into the classroom while the teacher was working with a small group on an activity, and while I and the other student teacher placed in that class were working with two smaller groups on sentence writing skills. The site coordinator explained that she had placed the little boy she had in tow in the wrong classroom (where he had been for three days) and she had only noticed just a few minutes before bringing him to our class that he should have been in our class. Then she explained to the teacher that he would cause no trouble for the teacher, and that he didn’t even talk. “He doesn’t talk at all. You’ll talk to him but he won’t talk to you and he won’t talk to the other kids. He won’t cause any trouble.” He had not spoken a single word in the three days of summer school, and evidently had a history of not speaking prior to the beginning of summer school (though I have no idea for how long). What she said and the way she said it caused me to assume that he must either be actually mute or had an emotional disorder that prevented him from talking.

After the site coordinator left, the teacher of this class brought the boy over to my table and explained that since we were nearly finished with our activity he did not have to do it. He could color one of the coloring pages that she had provided the other kids as a reward for finishing their assignments, just so he would have time to settle into a new class. Then she planned to work on getting him caught up with the other kids the next day. I welcomed him to the table and asked him if he would like to color. He nodded yes. I asked him if he would like to pick out a coloring page and he nodded yes. I got him some crayons and he started coloring. I continued working with my other two students while he colored his page. I asked him if he had everything he needed and he nodded yes. I purposefully only asked him yes or no questions so he would not feel pressured to talk to me, and so he could respond just by nodding or shaking his head. I do not have it in me to not encourage a child, so every couple of minutes I would say something like, “You’re doing a great job on that picture. I can tell you’re a really great artist.” Or, “I like the colors you chose for that part of the picture.” Just anything I could say to encourage him and let him know he was.

After about ten minutes of this, all of the sudden he looked at me and said, “Don’t look at my picture until I’m done.” He smiled—he wanted to surprise us with what he was coloring. Inside my head I was hollering with excitement, “OH MY GOD, HE TALKED!” But what I said was, “OK—You just let us know when you’re ready.” I kept helping my other student, and every few minutes would say “Just let us know when you’re ready. We can’t wait to see what you’re doing!” He finished the picture and showed it to us and started another one, talking to us conversationally all the while he worked on the second one. At that point my other student said to me, “HEY! That lady said he couldn’t talk! But he’s talking.” Kids never miss a thing.

WOW! That was EXCITING! Later that day, in my training session with the other teaching residents our facilitator asked if anyone had anything to share from our morning of student teaching. So I told the story I just told you. From behind me one of my colleagues said, “Was that [and she named the student]?” I answered that it was. She said, “Oh my God! He was in our class for three days and we couldn’t get him to say one word. It says in his student record that he simply doesn’t talk. How did you do it?”

I honestly don’t know how I did it. I just made him feel welcome, let him know I was interested in him, I didn’t talk down to him, and I let him come around in his own time. As it turned out, “his own time” was in the range of 10-15 minutes. I was as shocked as anyone that he chose to talk to me.

This week ended on a decidedly calm and satisfying note. My car is fixed. My permanent teaching placement is secured. A convenient and affordable place to live has emerged. And it looks like I actually CAN teach! Life is good! I am still sort of amazed at how everything not only came together just swell, but it all came together as if the whole thing was tailor made for me—art teaching job that makes my MA in Native American Studies downright useful, at a high school in a neat part of town, with a practically built-in place to live within walking distance for the right price. It’s enough to make a person believe in the invisible guiding hand of God (which I do, anyway; although for a while there I was inclined to think that he was distracted or something…). At the very least it is encouraging and thought provoking, and I am enjoying the way everything is coming together. And I’m not so stressed out, now—I think I might be actually be able to get through this week on a little less adrenaline.

Hopefully, all of my future installments will be as happy as this one. If they aren’t I promise I’ll at least make them entertaining. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the ride.

Made it to Baltimore

Well, I made it. After three 12-14 hour days of driving, a broken muffler, and a busted water pump Shirley (my 1982 Volvo, dubbed “slowly but Shirley” by Sarah) and I limped into Cumberland, Maryland on Friday, June 30^th. I found a place to fix my muffler (which I had already paid $200.00 in Bozeman to have replaced, but the guy who did it—someone I had never used before, and if I could remember his name or the name of his shop I’d tell you to never go there—welded the new assembly to a rusty flange, so of course it broke off after 2500 miles and had to be reattached). The same guy that fixed my muffler problem in Cumberland also informed me that my slow coolant leak was due to the fact that my water pump was on it’s way to the bone yard. Cumberland is in the Allegany mountains, which is part of the Appalachian chain, and is home to untold numbers of mechanics who either won’t or don’t know how to work on foreign cars (because, I suppose, only Pinkos and Commies would do that—it’s un-American, I guess). I had to put about 4 gallons of antifreeze in my trunk to stay ahead of my leak, cross my fingers, and hope that it would be easier to find some Pinko Commie Volvo mechanics in Baltimore who could fix my car.

Guess What? There are TWO, count ‘em, TWO Volvo repair places in the entire Baltimore metropolitan area. There is ONE, exactly ONE Volvo dealership in the Baltimore metropolitan area. HA! I guess those Cumberland mechanics told ME a thing or two! Crimony! Well, lucky for me one of the Volvo repair places could actually get me in on Monday. So, I rented a car, dropped it off there this morning, and will HOPE that they can actually get it fixed on Monday and I can have my car back so that I can get to work next week in my own vehicle. I’ll let you know in my next dispatch if the repair place I took it to is any good. If not, I’ll let you know what kind of all-American car I’m driving at that time, because I’ll have to get something different if the Volvo thing doesn’t work out.

Regardless of the challenges finding a Volvo mechanic, I’ve had a reasonably pleasant introduction to my new home. Everything has gone pretty well with the new teaching thing. I’ve been officially accepted into the Master of Science in Educational Studies in Art Education program at Johns Hopkins, so I’m working on my second masters now (and my last—if I have to do more school I’ll just do a doctorate next time). I’m on a track to graduate in May 2008.

Also, my experience with the Baltimore City Teaching Residency people and the Baltimore City Public Schools people has been extremely positive. They have demonstrated a high level of commitment to making sure that all of us are settling in, getting our bearings, and get a placement in the Fall. They gave us some final statistics on this year’s teaching cohort that was hired through the BCTR program: out of 2000 applicants only 280 people received offers and only 244 of us accepted—a highly selective process, despite the fact that they are still about 500 teachers short this year in this district; they are desperate enough to hire any warm bodies that show up, but they didn’t do that—comforting. My only complaint so far is that we (the summer cohort) don’t know when we will get paid for this summer training institute. That is separate from our regular teaching salary (which begins on August 21) and is provided through a special funding source, so the plan for dispersal of the funds was still being discussed up through the day before we all arrived. This, of course, makes all of us nervous since we were all broke upon arrival, after having moved across the country to get here. And believe it or not I do NOT win the award for having moved the farthest to get here—there are a couple of people from Oregon, two from Colorado, some from Florida (of course the Oregonians are the only ones who beat me out of the booby prize for greatest distance).

Today I got up at 6:30am after getting my first full eight hours of sleep in about a month and a half. I made some coffee and sat down with the Baltimore phone book (which is about 3 inches thick, and not one of those ¾ size things we had in Bozeman) and let my fingers do the walking through the “Automobile—Repair and Service” section for about an hour, looking for my new Volvo mechanic. Having found one, checked it out on the internet (www.dannemanauto.com), had the dumb luck of actually talking to the owner on a Saturday morning (when they are actually closed), arranged for the Enterprise rental car people to pick me up at the Volvo mechanic’s place and fix me up with a car, I headed down there. This place is in the corridor between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., which is about 30 or so miles south of where I live (at about 10:00 0’Clock on the Baltimore dial, just outside the beltway). The only other thing I absolutely had to do today was to go to Occupational Medical Services and have my TB test area looked at (all of us in this BCTR training cohort had to have physicals, pee in a cup, and get tested for TB on Thursday). I had to be there between 2:00-3:00pm other test would be invalid. By the time I had dropped off my car and picked up the rental it was only 12:30pm, which meant I had about 2 hours to kill before having to show up at the TB test place.

Now for semi-fun stuff (there hasn’t been any outright fun stuff yet—too much stress between the move and the car problems)….

The Baltimore Inner Harbor is on the southern edge of the city, and close to where I had to go for this TB test thing. So I decided to have lunch in the Inner Harbor to kill time. It was beautiful day to be outside, and my humble little seafood lunch was delicious! It was overcast, but not raining; warm, but not hot; breezy and pleasant. The temperature was in the high seventies and the humidity was pretty low for here. Aaaaaahhhhh. I sat on a second floor balcony terrace in the La Tasca restaurant, right in front of the U.S.S. Constellation (a Civil War era Frigate) looking out over the harbor at the National Aquarium and Fort McHenry. There were lots and lots of people out enjoying the day. Go to http://www.ceilon.com/baltimore_1.php to see the pictures I took from where I was sitting. It was a nice reprieve from the chaos of car trouble.

Then, after my visit to the clinic where I found out (of course) that I do not have TB, I decided to check out a park that is just a few miles from where I am staying this summer. On my way back home I stopped at Soldier’s Delight Natural Environment Area: http://www.dnr.state.md.us/publiclands/central/soldiers.html. It is a state park which has about seven miles of hiking trails. Beautiful! And a nice reprieve from the city. You can see pictures of the area from my hike on the same web page where you found my pictures of the Inner Harbor: http://www.ceilon.com/baltimore_1.php. If you look really close, you’ll see a deer in the last picture of the woods. I kept hearing animals crashing through the woods and assumed that they were deer (although they could have been black bears—there are lots of them out here, and I saw two little piles of bear scat that were probably left on the trail this morning). Sure enough, on my last leg of the hike I looked up and there was a deer standing there looking at me; so I took a picture. The deer was still standing there looking at me when I walked around the bend.

So far so good, really, although I’m completely saturated with new everything and I’m maxed out. Everything is new, nothing is familiar, and I miss my husband and daughter and dogs and friends and church. But I’m doing OK and I’ve already made a lot of new friends through the program that I’m in. Baltimore is a really friendly city—surprisingly enough it is the kind of place where strangers strike up conversations on the street; something that has happened to me several times already. I think this is going to be the most challenging job I’ve ever had, and the hardest good year I’ve ever been through. But I’m sure I’ll be fine, and I’m looking forward to it and I like it here so far. Please think happy thoughts for me, keep me (and Shirley) in your prayers, and send all the positive energy you can in my direction—I’ll need it more as the school year progresses!

Reaping the Winter Harvest

When people ask me why I believe in God, I never really know what they are expecting me to tell them. So I tell them a story about how offering to cut the pastor’s hair for free brought three special kids into my life. I don’t think there is any easy way to explain faith to a skeptic; but I think it is very easy to share stories and let the stories do the work of faith in people.

Throughout the past year I found myself telling this particular story over and over again to people who were experiencing a crisis of faith or going through some sort of difficult time. I didn’t really know what to do for them, so I told them this story. Every time I told it, the person seemed to feel better afterward (though the story usually made them cry) and they thanked me for sharing it. It occurred to me that more people might benefit from hearing this story.

I can’t take credit for anything that happened, except that occasionally I was paying attention long enough to notice God doing something really cool. In those moments I was able to catch glimpses of a story that is much bigger than my own.

There are any number of places I could have chosen to begin telling this story, because there are several little stories running through the main one and they all overlap a bit. So, I’ll start in the place that seems the most logical to me, though it’s not necessarily the beginning.

Just a week before her twentieth birthday, my daughter caught a flight to the Virgin Islands She was tired of winter and tired of college, so she moved to a warm and sunny place to figure out what to do next. St. Croix is roughly thirty five hundred miles from where I am in Montana, and the distance between us has been a great source of anxiety for me ever since she got on the plane to go. What if something happens to her? What if she runs out of money? What if there’s a hurricane? What if….? Mothers never run out of what-ifs. For the longest time after she left I would wake up in the middle of the night, terror-stricken for no good reason at the thought of her being so far away. At those times I would feel a gentle prodding to pray for her and for myself, since that was really all I could do, as well as the most I could do. This worked a lot better in the long run than I thought it would when I began the exercise. Each time it happened, as I prayed myself through it, releasing my daughter into God’s hands, I felt myself becoming less anxious and eventually fell back asleep. Those midnight exercises in letting go helped me eventually realize I really had no more control over the outcome of my daughter’s life when she was right here in town than I do now that she lives so far away. Through that process I learned to pray more and worry less, and to release my daughter’s fate to the only force that could affect it. and stayed.

Six months after that, the company I was working for had a round of layoffs, which I managed to survive. But the reason I had come to work for this company two years earlier was that after having been self-employed for nine years, a regular salary and benefits seemed like a comfortable security blanket. When the layoffs happened I realized the security had been nothing more than a happy illusion. My husband and I agreed that if I were going to live in fear of losing my job, I might as well be self-employed again. We decided I would go back to hairdressing, build a clientele, and work toward that end. That plan also afforded me a more flexible schedule that would allow me to finish my teaching certificate and attend graduate school.

The first salon I went to didn’t work out. But while I was there I made a friend. She was a regular weekly client of one of my coworkers. I got to know her during that time and looked forward to her weekly shampoo-and-style. I ultimately left that salon and went into business for myself, and was sad at the thought of not seeing my salon friend once a week anymore. Before I had a chance to miss her, however, we were reunited in the next scene of this story.

About that same time, my husband and I became dissatisfied with the church we had been going to. After having attended two small churches in a row that each experienced a rift within the congregation resulting in a mass exodus, I built a spreadsheet that contained a list of twenty-or-so churches we would spend an indefinite period of time visiting until we found one that was right for us.

That is how we found ourselves at the church we now attend, attempting to check off our list a church neither of us thought would pass muster. We were attending our obligatory first service at the first church on our list, fully intending to move on to the next church on the list the following weekend. It just didn’t seem possible that we would find the right church on the first try. As of this writing we have been members of that church for nearly two years. We never visited any of the other churches on the list, because we both felt we had “come home” that Sunday; and we have felt that way every Sunday since then.

Perhaps one of the contributing factors to that homey feeling was that the friend I had made at the salon I had just quit working in was there on our first visit. She greeted me with a hug and a kiss, and we wondered at this coincidence that had put us there together at that particular place and time. As it turns out, she has been a member of that church for somewhere in the neighborhood of forty years. Sometime after that, her regular hairdresser moved away and she became my client. I have had the privilege of seeing her every week, twice a week, for nearly the last two years. Looking back, I think it is ironic how often we call providential events “coincidence.”

On our first Sunday at that church nearly two years ago, three significant things happened, though I didn’t recognize them as such at the time. The first one has already been mentioned: my friend and hairdressing client was there to greet me on our first visit.

The second significant thing that happened was that the pastor thanked the congregation for all they had been doing for he and his wife. By way of explanation for folks like my husband and myself who were just visiting that day, he mentioned that she was dying of cancer. How odd, I thought at the time, that we should get full disclosure on the most important thing going on in the pastor’s life during our first visit to this church. Of course, it wasn’t odd at all because significant event number two would make sense in the big scheme of things later.

The third significant thing that happened that Sunday was that the pastor announced during the sermon how much he hates getting his hair cut. Lest you think this extremely odd, please understand that this information was not included in the announcements, but was used somehow as a sermon illustration (the subject of which I have long since forgotten). The reasons he gave for hating to get haircuts included: 1) he hates small-talk; and 2) he hates telling people that he is a pastor, because this admission invites a response informing him of everything that is wrong with Christianity and Christians (as if he doesn’t already know). He proceeded to tell the story of how he had gotten his hair cut very recently (which is probably how this material made into the sermon). He walked into the mall and went into a “walk-ins welcome” hair salon where he was paired up with an available hairdresser.

“So, what do you do?” she asked him, presumably as an icebreaker.

“I’m a shoe salesman,” he replied.

Proving his point that small-talk in a beauty salon is nothing less than torturous for him, she responded, “That sounds really boring,” and it just got worse from there.

Meanwhile, I heard a little “uh-oh” being whispered in the nether regions of my mind. At the last two churches I had attended, I had cut the pastor’s hair, only to find myself in an uncomfortable position later when we moved on to another church. At this pastor’s declaration that he hates getting his hair cut, I found myself internally shouting, “I am NOT cutting this guy’s hair!” Here I was on my first visit to a church that earlier I had thought we most likely would not be visiting a second time, and already I was faced with a pastor who clearly needed a good hairdresser.

“NO! I won’t do it!” I shouted inside my head. We were only visiting, for heaven’s sake! We would probably never see this guy again.

Over the next seven months the pastor reiterated his loathing of haircuts and beauty salons for a total of three times. I privately took the third “haircut lament” as a divine directive and offered to cut his hair for free. I sent him an email that said something like this:

I hardly know you but I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse. You have mentioned several times during sermons how much you hate to get your hair cut, primarily because you don’t like small-talk and you don’t like revealing that you are a pastor. I am a hairdresser (among other things), I also do not like small talk, and I already know you’re a pastor. During my tenure at my last two churches, I cut the pastor’s hair for free. I’d like to do the same for you if you will let me. I could guarantee you a fantastic haircut and you could talk about books, movies, Shakespeare and baseball (or nothing) to your heart’s content.

He emailed me back and accepted, but told me it would be a while before he took me up on the offer, since his last haircut was way too short.

The end of October of that same year found me costumed as the fortune-teller at our annual Pumpkin Carving Festival. The irony of me portraying the fortune-teller but having no idea what would be heading my way in just a few short months is not lost on me now. At that event, the pastor came up to me (still not having had his hair cut yet) and said, “I have a business proposition for you.” He asked if I would be willing to cut his wife’s hair. I told him I would love to, and we made the arrangements. He told me there was no way she would let me cut her hair for free, and if I wouldn’t charge her she wouldn’t let me do it. I agreed to this condition and she came to see me at the salon the next week, accompanied by a friend from church.

I had never met the pastor’s wife before. She was a friendly and endearing woman, and we had a great time. After she left that day, I found myself reflecting on something she had said—the doctors had pretty much given her about three months to live about six months ago, so she believed she was living on borrowed time. I tried to balance that brutal truth with the fact that I had just met a wonderful woman with whom I would never be able to develop any kind of meaningful friendship because of the reality of her impending death. I was extremely sad knowing I would not get to know her better.

About a month and a half later, I was sitting in what had become my usual place on Sunday mornings at 8:30am. Just as it had happened on my first visit to what had become “our church,” on this day three significant things happened. The first two things happened in close succession during the announcements: the pastor’s wife was in the hospital, and so was the husband of my salon friend. I leaned over to my husband and said, “Let’s go to the hospital after church and see if she needs anything.” I was referring to my salon friend—I didn’t know her husband, but I was sure she could use the support. He nodded his agreement. I really had no intention of visiting the pastor’s wife in the hospital, because I sensed she was a very private person and I had only met her once. Deciding this, I refocused my attention on the church service.

The third significant thing occurred during the scripture reading. A girl named Mirra, a member of our church youth group, was reading the scripture before the sermon. The passage was fairly long and she was reading very fast. She stumbled a few times and finally lost her place. After pausing for a brief moment she announced into the microphone, “Crap! I lost my place!” The pastor was sitting behind the pulpit. He calmly got up, looked over her shoulder, pointed to the place where she left off, and then sat back down. Mirra resumed and continued the reading without further incident and sat down with the rest of the congregation.

One of the classes I had just finished that semester as part of my teacher certification program was “Teaching Content Reading Strategies.” What Mirra had just done from the pulpit is called “fake reading,” and is not a reading disorder, but something that we all do from time to time. I had never met Mirra before and had no idea who she was before this happened. To my distraction during the sermon, I was plotting ways I could introduce myself to her and ask if she would be willing to work with me so I could practice the skills I had just learned that semester about overcoming fake reading. I never did sort out exactly how to do that without it sounding like, “You’re reading really stinks; let me help you,” so I abandoned the idea a bit regretfully and refocused on the sermon. As I would later learn, Mirra has no problems with reading whatsoever; she was just nervous. But that incident framed her in my mind for what would happen the next day.

The service ended and my husband and I headed up to the hospital. When we got there we discovered we had just missed my salon friend who had been there all night and had just gone home to change her clothes. We visited with her children for a few minutes and made to leave.

As we were heading back down the hallway, as an afterthought I wondered if the pastor’s wife was receiving visitors. We were already there, after all; it couldn’t hurt to ask. Though I had already decided an hour earlier that she probably wasn’t, I stopped at the nurses’ station and asked.

“Well, who are you?” the nurse demanded in a voice and with an expression that suggested that the answer would most definitely be “no.”

I told her who I was and she said she would go ask the pastor’s wife if she wanted to see me, looking very skeptical as she said so. Not a half a minute later the nurse emerged with a smile on her face saying that yes, she would like to see me. I sent my husband down the hall to a waiting area, and I went in to see the pastor’s wife.

Again we had a great visit. The weight of the reality that every moment with her was a stolen one settled on me as I realized afterward that there would not likely be very many more visits with her in my future. I cried all the way home thinking about a friendship I would never have with a woman I hardly knew.

At the end of the next day, I got the news that the pastor’s wife had passed away that morning. After I hung up the phone, I sat there and had a good cry for about five minutes. Again I found it curious that the death of a woman I barely knew could affect me so powerfully. I pulled myself together and called a friend from church, the one who had brought the pastor’s wife to her haircut at my salon just a month earlier.

Before I had a chance to tell her why I had called she said, “O good. The pastor must have gotten a hold of you.” I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about, that I just called to see if she needed anything, and asked why the pastor was supposed to have called me. She said that the day before, when the pastor’s wife realized that she wasn’t going to be around much longer, she began making a list of last-minute things she had thought of that she wanted to take care of, “…and you were on the list,” she said. I didn’t know what to say. How odd that I had gone to see her only as an afterthought the day before she died, and somehow I ended up on her last minute “to-do” list.

“Me? What was I doing on her list?” I wondered aloud.

“Well, do you know Mirra Halpern?” was her reply.

Things were getting weirder by the minute. I explained to her that, no, I did not know Mirra, but told her about my response to Mirra’s “fake reading” incident from the pulpit the day before.

“My goodness, that is weird,” she said. She then explained that the reason I was on the pastor’s wife’s to-do list is that she wanted me to do something for Mirra. Mirra was a senior in high school at that time and would be graduating at the end of the school year. She was someone the pastor’s wife had a real heart for and felt could use some feminine attention. She wanted to give me some money to hold as credit for Mirra to come into the salon and have her hair cut, colored, styled for the prom, etc. I told her of course I would do it, and I would match the gift. I called Mirra the next day and told her the pastor’s wife had left her a gift, and made arrangements with her to come into the salon for a consultation.

Mirra’s grandmother also goes to our church (but I didn’t know her before these events took place). When she found out Mirra was coming to see me, she asked if Mirra’s younger brother, Ewan, could come along and get his hair cut also. So when Mirra came in for her consultation (the week after the pastor’s wife’s memorial service), I met Ewan also. A few weeks later I met Ilana, their sister, and have been cutting her hair as well. Shortly thereafter, their grandmother became a regular haircut client, followed by many other people from the church.

Shortly after his wife’s memorial service, the pastor finally came in for his first haircut since my initial offer. It was a quiet visit, needless to say, but pleasant (and I think he liked his haircut). As he was putting on his jacket and was about to walk out the door, he turned to me and said, “So, do you know Mirra’s story?” I did not.

He proceeded to tell me that Mirra’s mother has a congenital brain disorder that eventually kills its victims. Mirra’s mom had been suffering from the symptoms of the disease for about ten years, and in the process had undergone a personality change that left her practically unrecognizable to the people who love her. At the time he told me this story, she was in a convalescent hospital, where she remains to this day.

“So, she doesn’t have a mother,” I said.

“No, she doesn’t.”

We said goodbye and he left. I watched him walk down the steps, out of the salon, onto the sidewalk and out of sight. I was still thinking about what he had just told me and suddenly all of the events of the previous year made sense, back to my first day at our church, and even before that to when I decided to return to hairdressing, finish my teaching certificate, and go to graduate school; and even further back to the time when my daughter left for the Virgin Islands.

If my husband and I hadn’t become dissatisfied with our former church, we would never have left it and ended up at the one we are attending now, where I found my friend from the salon, met the pastor, and learned of his loathing for haircuts. If I hadn’t quit my corporate job and returned to hairdressing, I would never have met my friend from the salon; and if I hadn’t met her, I would never have visited the pastor’s wife in the hospital on the day before she died. If I hadn’t offered to cut the pastor’s hair, I would never have met his wife in the first place. And if I hadn’t visited the pastor’s wife in the hospital on the day before she died, I would never have met the Halpern kids.

As I stood there in the salon, thinking about my daughter, the pastor, his wife, and the Halpern kids, though it wasn’t audible I “heard” God saying to me, “Someone has been praying for the Halpern kids just as you have been praying for your daughter. You do what you can for these kids and trust me to take care of your daughter.” The answer to my prayer for my own daughter was the answer to someone else’s prayer for the Halpern kids. I just stood there until it got dark, thinking about that, and finally closed up the salon and went home.

For the next several months, I spent a lot of time getting to know the Halpern kids. Before long they started coming over to my house every Friday night for pizza and movies, and by the end of February our routine was established. About that time, the pastor came into the salon for his third haircut. As he was leaving, he said to me, “Are you sure I can’t pay you for this? I just really feel like I should.”

“There is no way I will let you pay me, because I get far more out of this than you do,” I answered.

“Now, I find that really hard to believe,” he said.

“Let me tell you a story….” I said; and I proceeded to connect the dots of this meandering story, beginning with my offer to cut his hair for free and how that led to me being blessed by the Halpern kids.

Today I am in my usual Sunday morning place with my husband. It has been exactly one year since I sat in this very spot on this very pew and learned that the husband of my salon friend and the wife of the pastor were in the hospital. It was also a year ago today that I saw Mirra for the first time. Today, as usual, my husband is sitting to my left, but things look a little different than they did last year—Ewan is sitting to my right, as he has taken to doing in the last few months. He is writing on the bulletin, as I do every Sunday. I am taking notes on the pastor’s sermon, but Ewan is taking notes on me.

As I look over Ewan’s shoulder, God reminds me that the seemingly coincidental events of the past two years have not been a coincidence at all. The Halpern kids are a permanent fixture in my life now. I do their hair, help them with their homework, harass them when their grades are not as good as they could be, and have them over to my house every Friday for pizza and movies. Their grandmother and I plot together concerning their birthday and Christmas presents, prom dresses and homecoming dances, and all of the other things that go with shepherding three teenagers. I think of them as my kids, though I am an extremely poor stand-in for their mother. I hope they think of me as their friend.

When I think of how sad I was when the pastor’s wife died that I didn’t have an opportunity to get to know her better, I have to laugh now. I doubt I could know her any better if she had not died, and we had spent the last year or so in constant conversation. There is not a day that goes by without me realizing I am in partnership with her concerning these kids. Reflecting on this, I am reminded of something Jesus said:

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12:24-25, Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. )

Perhaps the pastor’s wife knew that planting her life as a seed would bear excellent fruit, or maybe she didn’t. Either way, the result was the same: fruit manifested in the lives of the Halpern kids that we all get to enjoy. It is my hope that we will continue the cycle started by the pastor’s wife, that we would keep finding ways to give ourselves away, and that we will plant our lives as seeds, as she did.

I think the pastor is satisfied with his haircuts, and I’m pretty sure he’s happy that we don’t small talk. But I’m even more certain that it doesn’t really matter. If I hadn’t offered to cut his hair, none of this would ever have happened. Sometimes I wonder what other remarkable things might have happened if I had made the offer the first time he mentioned how much he hates haircuts, instead of waiting for him to say it for the third time. I’ll never know.

As I sit in my usual Sunday morning place, writing on my church bulletin, watching Ewan sitting next to me and doing the same, God reminds me that there are no coincidences. The wonderful reality for me and for all of us is that God hears our prayers. He moves in our lives and is with us every minute, whether we choose to recognize it or not. I am grateful for the occasional glimpses I am afforded to see Him moving in my life, and I am grateful for the opportunity to be reaping the winter harvest sown by the pastor’s wife.

Native American Thanksgiving

"...but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing."

"It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all..."

(To find out who made those statements, read this article at http://www.purewatergazette.net/nativeamericanthanksgiving.htm)

Ever since I took my first Native American Studies course, I have wondered how I should feel about celebrating Thanksgiving. Many Native Americans don't celebrate it, because they feel that celebrating it could be interpreted as an indication that they are "thankful" for all of the negative things that have happened to them as peoples since the Pilgrims arrived on the North American continent, roughly 400 hundred years ago. As non-Indian children in school we usually learn the standard story about the first Thanksgiving, and celebrate it as a most glorious event. And while what we are taught about that event is mostly true, it is what we are not taught about what happened to Indigenous North American peoples in the ensuing centuries that causes us to miss the reason(s) that Native Americans might not be so keen on the holiday.

I still celebrate Thanksgiving, even as a graduate student in the MSU Native American Studies department; because to me the holiday is not about celebrating that specific historical event. For me, Thanksgiving has become a celebration of all of the things that I have to be thankful for, and there are many. Despite this, I do not begrudge my Native American friends the right to ignore the holiday if they so desire.

This semester I am teaching NAS-100 (Introduction to Native American Studies). One of my students found this article on the internet and posted it to the online discussion group that I set up for my class. It is by far the most succinct, least angry article on the subject that I have read to date. It touched my heart, because as I read it I was reminded of the Christian charity (love) that was shared on that first Thanksgiving. But read the article, because you may be surprised to find out from what direction that Christian charity was flowing: from the Wampanoag people to the Pilgrims.

Over the next 4 centuries, many Native American tribes extended similar charity to settlers, only to have the favor returned in decidedly un-Christian ways by the citizens and government of a so-called Christian country. I have linked to this article here because I see it as a great reminder to all of those of us who call ourselves Christians that the evidence of our Christianity comes from our behavior towards other human beings, not from the names we give ourselves. If it is true that "they will know [we] are Christians by [our] love for one another," then we need to work harder at showing that love, I think.

This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for many, many things. But mostly I give thanks to Native American scholars, teachers, writers, activists, filmmakers, and friends who work so hard at making sure the complete and true versions of history are told. When we ignore what they are trying to teach us, we lose out.

So, enjoy your turkey dinner, the gatherings of friends and families, and say an extra prayer that all of us will show the kind of Christian charity to our neighbors that the Wampanoags showed to the Pilgrims.

Happy Thanksgiving.