A Moment of Gratitude

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Last night was one of those evenings with a gentle breeze and the temps in the low eighties. The sun had disappeared in the west, but you could still see traces of the red rocks outlining the Eastern horizon and it all felt a bit magical and mysterious.

     Steve and I started to turn on the news but decided all of those images of an upcoming election and a war where children were dying would ruin the evening. Perhaps that is why we decided to eat on the patio at a nearby restaurant. Even though they had discontinued the meatloaf.  We ordered one glass of red wine to share. We do that more and more all the time, but somehow, I drink most of it. Then we ordered cheeseburgers stacked four inches high because, we joked, it was the closest thing to meatloaf.

     As we waited a young, blond mop-haired boy sitting at the table in front of us caught our attention. He couldn’t stop moving with arms flying in all directions like a windmill. In all fairness, no two-year-old can sit quietly at a restaurant unless you have an iPad or cell phone that can stream Coco Mellon or Paw Patrol. To the mother’s credit there were no electronic devices being deployed as babysitters. Instead, the boy was jiggling around, entertaining his doting and graying grandparents who sat across from him. From my sidewise view, the mother was doing her best to interest the boy in eating what might have been chicken nuggets. She would spear a bit of a chicken with her fork and try to lower it into her son’s mouth. All the while he sat peering up into her eyes and like a baby bird awaiting feeding, he would chirp, “Peez. Peez. Peez.”

     This routine worked for a time, perhaps until the mother got caught in a conversation with the grandma. Then suddenly the boy stood up on his seat and introduced the diners to another word in his limited vocabulary. “Poopy! Poopy!” he called out loudly. From across the patio, a wave of smiles could be seen as eyes darted to the child in distress.

     Like a fireman hearing the alarm, the mother bolted from her seat and as she did her bright blue billowy shirt caught the breeze and seemed to float with her. As gracefully as possible, she pulled her young son off his chair and tugged him inside the restaurant. At the same time the grandma at their table caught my eye and winked at me with that universal signal that often passes from one grandmother to another.

     The room was strangely quiet as we finished our burgers and chatted about our upcoming hike. But soon enough our little prince bounded back through the patio door, one hand secured by his mother’s hand. As he waved at his granddad, he shouted across the room, “Poopy okay!” And he laughed the joyous, infecious laugh of a child. This time many of the diners laughed with him. We were caught up in the beauty of the evening and the charm of an innocent child. Cocooned in the love of others.

     While an election looms large, and there are many children suffering across the country and the world, and it is often hard to bear, at that one moment everything in my world felt right—and a wave of gratitude swept through me.

I wish you many moments of gratitude.

Hope

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Once Upon a Time by Hannah Jayne

     Once upon a time I was a 14-year-old girl in a training bra and a spiral perm, screaming my guts out at a one-inch-tall singer in rhinestones and a backward baseball cap. He was a New Kid on the Block, and I was one of 63,000 girls teeming with hormones and Aussie Scrunch Spray, and absolutely certain that he could hear me, would sweep me from my nosebleed seat and fall madly and deeply in love with me. It didn’t matter that I was 14 and cried whenever I spent the weekend away from my family, and he was essentially a grown man.

      It didn’t matter that I was a cheerleader who never missed practice, and he was a performer at the absolute height of his career, who couldn’t leave his hotel room without a hoard of bodyguards who navigated their way through squealing teens with long, prodding fingers and Sharpie markers. I had absolute faith and hope and the fearlessness that comes from naivety and unbridled teenage passion.

     Once upon a time I was a forty-eight-year-old woman with one and a-half breasts and what remained of my ponytail, screaming my guts out at a singer in rhinestones and a backwards baseball cap. He was taller now, six inches at least because I wasn’t 14 anymore and could afford better seats, but he was still a New Kid and the crowd was still full of girls—women now, but still screaming fervently and when he said, “Are you ready to go again?” I screamed along with them because in that moment, I could be hopeful and naïve and fervent too, and I was ready to go again, to have a go at being silly and hopeful and borderline 14.

     “Are you ready to go again?” I’m still 48. The concert is over, though I can still hear the screams, and I blasted the music in my car the whole way here and maybe pretended that I was going on tour with the New Kids, even though I desperately love my husband and cry if I have to leave my baby for two days. My heart was thundering in my throat like I was the one about to go onstage, like I was about to be ogled by thousands of screaming fans instead of one kindly mammogram tech with a sad smile on her face.

     “Are you ready to go again?” Once upon a time I screamed a resounding yes and now I wanted to scream “no, no, I’m not ready to go again. I’ll never be ready to go again” but here it was, possibly, cancer in my lap a second time and the teenage angst and passion, and certainty and naivety was gone, and I so desperately wanted to reach for it again. I so needed to be that hopeful teenager yet again, so I sent a message into the universe, into the ether, to my favorite New Kid in his rhinestones and backward hat, desperate to touch a little bit of that hopeful magic. I waited for the mammogram tech to reconfigure this and scrunch a little of that, swallowing down the lump in my throat until the machine pinged and my phone did, too—praying hands in my in-box, from my favorite New Kid on the Block.  I am hopeful still.

About the Author:   Hannah Jayne decided to be an author in the second grade. She couldn’t spell and had terrible ideas, but she kept at it. Many (many) years—and nearly twenty books, and one breast cancer diagnosis—later, she gets to live her dream and mainly does it in her pajamas. She lives with her rock-star husband, their 8-year-old daughter, and 1 very persnickety cat in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is always on the lookout for a juicy mystery, an exciting story, or a great adventure.  Learn more at https://www.hannah-jayne.com/

A Spark of Creativity

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When I was a young reading teacher, I struggled to understand why my student Buddy hated to read. A walking cloud of dust, Buddy usually wore a dirt-colored tee shirt smeared with grease marks from the many oil changes he did after school daily in a local garage. Buddy was in school to collect a diploma, and he desperately wanted it. But if he couldn’t pass the required reading test, he could not graduate. I, too, wanted Buddy to graduate. But I wanted more. I wanted him to discover the magic of books. My curiosity began to gnaw at me. How could I make that happen?

In a spark of creativity my curiosity drove me to write the story of a fictional Buddy, a student who would mirror the inner turmoil of one of my nonreaders. What made him tick? Where did he work? What car did he rev up in parking lot after school each day?  What music was blaring from his radio? What is the cartoon he kept drawing all over his notebook?

Buddy, the character, began to pour out in a short story, “Buddy and Me.” I began to see inside of this imaginary student. Suddenly I had a new understanding of who he was. Destitute. Sometimes hungry.  Taunted by a brash gang of boys in the parking lot. Happy to end his day at a local garage where he changed oil filters in cars because it steadied him and gave him some spending money. Secretly he did read, but his reading was largely limited to Car and Drive magazine. Possibly Garfield cartoon books.

“Buddy and Me” was the first story I ever published in a teen magazine. Of course this is not what is important. In hindsight I see what matters is that my curiosity, sparked by my creativity, drove me forward to research, study, and write the story of a genuine nonreader, and in the process, I came to see the world through the lens of students like the real Buddy. Disadvantaged students who had an uphill battle when they crossed the threshold into any class. In truth, this writing made me a better teacher. Maybe a better person.

What about the real Buddy?  He learned to find main ideas in passages, and he became good at summarizing stories, especially if it was about cars. These skills helped him pass the required reading graduation test.  While I know Buddy graduated, I cannot remember if he finished reading a book.

But thanks to adolescent writers who became big when I was teaching, many of our nonreaders became genuine readers in high school. Like most reading teachers, I read dozens of young adult books in search of the right stories for my students, and my bet is that I probably handed a copy of S. E Hinton’s The Outsiders to Buddy. If I did, I believe he would have liked it. Why?  Because it is a timeless story that was real for Buddy. Like Ponyboy, Buddy came from a parentless family and had a gang of close-knit friends like the Greasers. Like Ponyboy, Buddy’s friends were mocked in the lunchroom and sometimes attacked behind school dumpsters or in parking lots at night by the wealthier kids. And like Ponyboy, Buddy had suffered painful losses. I have never forgotten when Buddy told our class about how his best friend had been shot and killed at a party. Accidently.

In writing this blog, I realize how important my nonreaders were to me. I learned to understand those who struggled with learning. Those who often came to school hungry. Those who came from homes where reading was not a high priority and those who would need to make a living without a degree. Those with one or no parent. I learned to care about their struggle and to respect them. I learned to advocate for public education for all, and I have always voted with them in mind.

Each story, each experience we have makes us. In writing them we have a chance to see what we have learned. Maybe we can even find a bit of understanding or wisdom to carry forward. I am grateful for the sparks of creativity that ignite my writing and for the unexpected learning that often comes of finding our stories.

May your creativity spark your stories.