owp05

Dear Kids

To My Elementary School Resource Room Students

Dear Kids,

    I hope you’re having a good summer; I am. On the Monday after school got out, I started school again. This time, I’m the student. You may think that going to school in the summer isn’t fun. Fun is riding bikes with friends, playing with pets, or going to Splash. I agree; those things are fun. But learning is fun, too. It’s even more fun when it’s about something you like. I’m in a class about teaching writing – and about making writing more fun for you. Teaching and you, those are two things I like.

Gramma

    Gramma wasn’t one of those Norman Rockwell types. You know, the little plump ones with the gray hair wisping angelically from those little buns on top of their heads. The ones in sensible calico aprons over flower-print dresses with necklines edged in eyelet and who smell faintly of violets, lilacs, or sometimes roses. The ones who, seemingly effortlessly, produce sheets full of cookies, mostly chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin, then serve them up with fresh cold milk from a blue earthenware pitcher. No. Gramma was nearly six feet tall in her stocking feet, though she often wore three-inch heels when she needed to dress up. She was slender, always wore lipstick, and her thick silver hair, once blonde, was cut to enhance its natural waves and frame her eyes. She wore levis before denim was fashionable, only for practicality, but nevertheless emphasizing her long, lean legs. Her waist was likewise slender, often encircled by a silver concha belt. You would have described her, Sarah, as a handsome woman, rather than pretty, and she exuded a no-nonsense competence.

Vignette

October 1993

We see them sitting next to each another, holding hands without speaking while a swarm of fellow travelers buzzes about them, rushing toward destinations neither chosen nor desired. The two women are forty-something, we think, indistinguishable from other travelers except for the cape of intimacy that shields them for these few moments. One is darker, thinner, taller, younger. Looking more closely, we can see in their faces a likeness that is more a familiarity than an actual resemblance.

Beginnings

    It's a hot day, dry and dusty as every September in Colton, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert about halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. I'm wearing new shoes. They're Buster Brown's because I have something called "fallen arches," but I don't know what fell because my feet look just like always. Anyway, when we went to the shoe store, I had to put on shoes and stand on a step that was inside a funny machine: like a box. My mom and the man at the shoe store looked through a tube, and they said they could see right through the tops of the shoes and through my socks right down to the bones of my feet. They said that was the best way to be sure the shoes fit right. When I asked if I could see, too, they said, "No, only grownups." I like the smell of the tissue paper in the shoebox; the paper in my patent leater Easter shoes smells better, though, like candy and flowers mixed together.