March 26, 2015

Mother gone 41 years.
  
Evening– home, stupid with exhaustion.

The stock positions I sold in order to pay off 62 and buy 51 left me–and this never once crossed my mind– owing my first whopping capital gains tax to the IRS.

Swam this morning farther than I have since Boy Scouts. Perhaps this contributes to my exhaustion. It felt good. I could have swam farther, maybe. It was hours before dawn and I had the pool to myself, and the effect was rather mystical.

A wasp fluttered against the ceiling of my classroom this AM, and the 300 pound Bohemian in the back row started and flinched and kept his eyes glued on it in infantile panic.
    “Dr, there’s a wasp up against the ceiling.”
    “I see there is.”
    “I haven’t got my epi-pen.”
    “The wasp is twenty feet away and showing no interest in you at all.”
    But his anxiety captured everyone’s interest, and I couldn’t say anything about the Victorians that would get past twenty pairs of eyes glues to a creature weighing not half an ounce minding her own business on the ceiling.
    “It’s a wasp,” says I. “You’ve seen a wasp before. If this is going to fill you with dread, please leave the room.” Goliath the Fretful would not turn his attention away from the wasp, and the more fantastical his anxiety became, the angrier I became. Finally he did leave, looking pale and sick; rather than being sympathetic I was furious. He was no more likely to be stung by that wasp than I was to be bitten by a wolverine. The young have never been encouraged to get beyond their immediate perceptions, never asked to correct them, never expected to transcend them however wasteful or delusional. We are sent letters asking for accommodations to be made for people who would be incalculably better off if accommodations had stopped in the fifth grade.
    In the afternoon, one student (the one who always asks the question I just answered at length, the one who always mentions half way through the lesson that he forgot his book) interpreted the production of a scene from a play to be a halting, mumbling, almost unbelievably incompetent (and un-rehearsed) reading of a lengthy monolog from Life is a Dream. People don’t KNOW what they’re doing? He really had no idea how different (and worse) his approach was from everyone else’s? He was the LAST TO GO, and had fourteen better examples to learn from. It was past time for me to get home this evening.






Last night I became a Shaker.


Between last night and this morning the yard erupted with violets.

Talked with my warrior-saint in South Africa this morning.