nightmares are relative, i suppose

Ask nearly any teacher about the teacher dreams. Their eyes will grow wide, and they'll nod slowly. They will recount the nightmares: Their classroom disappears. They are unprepared. They lose their lesson plans. They are possibly unclad. T–, their honorary student-from-hell, is—somehow—the principal. Their third period class pulls off a coup d'etat.

The nightmares often appear in August. Perhaps it is the moan of school buses, shuddering past the house on practice runs. Or the prodigious advertisements for mechanical pencils and Mead notebooks and My Little Pony Trapper Keepers. Something slips into the subconscious and worries the pedagogical nerves.

The nightmares lay in wait. I shouldn't have been surprised when they appeared last month, even after two years away from the classroom. Relax, I said, banishing visions of T– and gum-slathered desks. There's no school for you this year.

But that was before the brouhaha over the President's speech, which he will be delivering tomorrow to students across the country. I'll be heading to a nearby school, for one big voyeuristic round of watching-the-students-watch-the-speech. The brouhaha is a story for another day; tonight I'll dream of English class and brown bag lunches, not-so-secretly delighted that even this year, I get to go back to school.

day laborer

in memory of last year's labors...

Konstantinos found me before I found him; that is, his camera lens captured the sky above my profile as I leaned against the Coney Island pier. He was, he told me a few minutes later, testing out the capabilities of his new camera, a Nikon whose exact model now eludes me—an unfortunate fact, since its night-light capability was surprisingly superior for such a small camera. He’d just picked up the camera at a flea shop and he made me guess how much he paid. I overestimated.

I suspect that the $300 camera held some pictures of me; I had watched out the corner of my eye as he captured the Coney Island skyline: the languid Ferris wheel, spooling on its endless spindle, the lights, blinking and burning, the Cyclone as it shrieked and rattled its wooden slats. The lens tilted slightly in my direction, and, while flattered, I wondered at a man, alone, slightly plump, with hair glistening and receding like a coastline, who would take pictures of anonymous women. He smiled and asked me to take his picture.

heartland

Saint Peter, population 10,000, home to Gustavus Adolphus, a Lutheran college whose salivatory namesake was the king of Sweden at about the same time Shakespeare was jiggling bellies and piercing lovesick hearts. Gustavus Adolphus (the king, not the college) raised his only surviving child, a daughter, as a boy, and took efforts to guarantee her succession to the throne, a move that was remarkably prescient, or perhaps just realistic, seeing as it was a habit of kings to bloody themselves in battle, as Christina’s did, in honor of their Protestant faith (and burgeoning economy), dying when she was six and leaving her to in charge of the third largest nation in Europe. She ruled for ten years; her first duty that of receiving the Russian embassy, no small task, considering her age and the fact that her mother was so distraught over Adolphus’s death that she would not allow his body to be interred, rather preferring to visit his open casket every day for nearly eighteen months. Eventually, Adolphus’s daughter secretly converted to Catholicism, abdicated the throne to her cousin, and moved to Italy.