Skip to main content

courage & wisdom


The other day I found this bookmark and pin in with a bag of vintage zippers I'd bought for 99 cents at Goodwill a year or so ago. The zippers I've since sold on ebay for no more than I paid for them, but I kept the pin and the bookmark. I've always rather liked the message in the serenity prayer. Serenity has yet to come to me, but those kids Paul and Lisa give me gifts of courage and wisdom every day.

Courage

Paul and I sit side by side in the sandbox. Sometimes we sit in the sand but more often he sits in a white plastic Adirondack chair and I sit in a blue classroom chair. We sit with our backs to the parking lot so we can look out over the playground. The rest of the kids play. We talk.

"What do you want to talk about?" Paul asks.

"Let's talk about rocks," I answer.

"No, let's talk about squirrels."

"OK," I say, thinking of something I learned in a workshop a few weeks ago. Why do kids ask you questions? Because they want to hear you talk. So I talk. "When I lived in Illinois," I begin, "we had a big maple tree in the front yard. One spring a mommy squirrel came to live in the tree and pretty soon she had three baby squirrels. And the baby squirrels would come out in the yard and run around and play and they were really fun to watch."

"Now it's my turn," Paul says. "I have a squirrel at home. His name is Rocky and he plays in the yard. Now it's your turn."

"Do you know about that squirrel named Rocky who has a friend named Bullwinkle?"

"No. Let's talk about parrots."

"OK. Once I went to a pet store that had a parrot who was born in 1915. His name was Birdo and he was really grouchy and he bit you if you got too close to him."

"Now it's my turn. I have a parrot at home. His name is Rocko. He bites."

"Yeah?"

We sit and watch the other children build sandcastles and dig tunnels, pretending to be Tinkerbell and Wendy and Peter Pan. Paul says, "I have an elephant at my home. His name is Rocko."

"I have an elephant at my home, too," I say. "His name is Financial Crisis."

Wisdom

I fasten the pin to my Tshirt before school on Monday morning. I'm still feeling overwhelmed, under-rested from the weekend. Lisa zigzags out onto the playground. She's got a distinctive, ramshackle run. She hugs my knees and I kneel to talk to her.

She fingers the butterfly near my collar. "Your pin sure is beautiful, isn't it?"

"Thank you," I say. "I like it too."

She hugs me again. When she lets go and zigzags away, I hear a sound like coins hitting the concrete. When I look down, I see the pin and its clasp there on the ground. I'm muttering to myself as I pick them up, investigate the clasp, discover it's completely useless, but try to pin the butterfly back to my shirt anyway. That's when I discover the little hole there in my t-shirt---one of my favorites, the pink one with the brown marbling---and I say, "Oh, great!" in that sarcastic voice even a three-year-old can recognize.

"What'sa matter, Miss Becky?" Lisa says.

"Oh, my pin left a hole in my favorite t-shirt." I'm practically whining.

"That's OK, Miss Becky," Lisa says, dancing away. "You can still be people's teacher."

Comments

Ana said…
Great to hear from you again... and what a fabulous job you do capturing these moments in time that others just walk on past.
Your elephant made me laugh out loud... Your wit floors me.

Popular posts from this blog

memory

wedding gift

On Saturday Dave's cousin Traci is getting married. At the last minute we decided to fly to Ames for the wedding and to see everyone who will be in attendance there. At the last minute, I decided to crochet a throw as a wedding gift. I just finished. The colors in this first picture are true; the other two pictures were taken with flash so the colors look brighter than they really are. I started last Monday night with 7 skeins of Lion Brand Chenille Thick and Quick in Periwinkle. It's 72 single crochet in the back loop only for as many rows as you want. Then single crochet around in a contrasting color. I chose Wine. I bought the yarn at Big Lots for half the retail price. It's long and skinny but very texturally appealing. Though all skeins were of the same dye lot, you can see that the top and bottom skein are definitely different, not so much in color as in texture. It's pure dumb luck that they ended up at the top and bottom. It's not perfect, but neither is mar
Jack doesn't have many "activities." I don't relish the thought of driving him to soccer, piano lessons, gymnastics, tae kwon do, KidzArt, swim team, T-ball, so on, and so forth. Not to say that I don't recognize the value of these activities, but I witness firsthand the toll a full schedule takes on little ones. On Monday nights Jack and his cousin participate in Young Champions of America Karate, which is more about learning discipline, respect, and self defense than it is about martial arts. Recently we've picked up a new activity, which is also about learning discipline, respect, and creativity: Tucson Lego Club. He was invited to join by Nathan and Lucas, friends from church who also attended the preschool a few years ahead of Jack. Here he sits between them, at a table surrounded by 6 other boys, each of them building a lavish Lego creation. Members spend an hour building and fraternizing, sometimes more fraternizing than building, but at the end of the