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Here I am

The Metaphorical Man

With words meaning me

The best that I can

My mentor’s Will Jumper

A high-jumping man

A poet that’s poet-y-er

Than poets can stand

I smash words together

And do it real soon

And when I get going

A cow jumps the moon

I string stanzas together

Like glimmering pearls

And crimes against poesy

My behavior unfurls

So now we take stock

Of the things you can stand

In the words of a poet

Metaphorical Man

I like this subtly beautiful portrait. I used a photo of a little girl to base it on, and the eyes are slightly more crooked here than in the model, though I basically traced them. But faces that are too perfect do not seem real. This Egyptian Princess is so real she can talk to me.

I get down for diabetic reasons. Cold, wet weather doesn’t help either. But I am a veteran in the war against depression.

I have a hundred and one tricks for avoiding a fall into the dark blue depths of the tiger traps of self-loathing and bummed-out-and-perpetually-in-bed depression.

Radasha, my faun, makes fun of me relentlessly when I am depressed. Being able to laugh at myself is a defense against the dark arts. Eating chocolate can help too. And sleeping is useful if you can avoid too much of it.

I talk to other imaginary friends when I am depressed and have the blues too. I have an imaginary granddaughter who is very playful and makes me laugh. I have to remember, though, why Susu is only an imaginary granddaughter, and avoid dwelling on the tragedy of the situation. She’s precious, even if thoughts of her origin are traumatic.

I also have a real daughter still living at home with us. She’s an artist and writer too. Her ambition is to be a cartoonist. Talking to her about such things brings me joy.

I have also often used music as a way to conquer the blues. But November is a blue month. I listen to sad Classical music like Barber’s Adagio for Strings in November.

Do you remember… that time in November…

Yes, sad songs, sad music. It’s difficult to explain how that can help the November blues. But it can. I wrote a book about it called Sing Sad Songs. Sweet, sad songs recall lost love. And lost love is sad. But it is better to recall than seasons without love.

November is a blue month. And blue is a good color… if you don’t let it overwhelm you.

Samantha and her talking cat are ready for their big night flight.

Digital Samantha and her digitally talking cat.

It was in her head to go in a Shirley Temple costume. But she didn’t need a costume. She could go as Shirley with only her own face as a disguise.

I drew this while looking in a mirror in 1980.

This is the digital version I turned that pencil art into rather than using ink as I used to do.

This is an even younger me with a magic hat on.

This is my personal conception of David Copperfield after reading it in grad school in 1980.

Pumpkin season is here again, and it is a little bit cooler than it was when repeated temperatures of 108 degrees Fahrenheit and above made us think Summer had turned into Fire Season. Pleasanter than expected when the Fall sneaks in just before the holiday of the Day of the Dead.

I have determined to do a little holiday-themed artwork as we cruise into the celebration of the Feast of All Souls at the finale of October.

I confess that the dark parts of my soul include more than five dollops of Surrealism.

To be fair, when teachers like me say something like that, a clueless liberal-minded comment that reveals fatal levels of idealism, morality, and even faith in God, we are really saying that there is a way to reach every kid and make a difference for them… if only we are given the tools, the time, and a decent amount of incentive. To go in front of a hostile audience five, six, or seven times a day, up to thirty of them in a classroom made for twenty, and teach them something worth learning requires an unquestioning belief in miracles and a foolish notion that somehow goodness and light always win out. And often they do. But exceptions prove the rule… And the need for rules. Because there are some very bad kids in this world.

The first hour of the first day of my very first year as a gringo teacher in a mostly Spanish-speaking junior high school in deep South Texas contained two eighth-grade boys who would die violently from gunshots.

Osvaldo “Ocho” Sotello put a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger after finally getting released from prison after serving five years of a sentence for armed robbery. He was guilty of that crime and many others he was never caught doing. But he was put in prison at eighteen, and repeatedly raped by other members of the Mexican Mafia because he had given himself teardrop tattoos by his right eye and had never killed anyone to earn that gang sign.

And Lorenzo “El Loco Talan” Marquez would die in a hail of bullets from the guns of rival drug dealers on the streets of Encinal, Texas. His family watched in horror as it happened. Neither of the names I gave those boys in this essay are their real names. But the gang names are real. And their life outcomes are real. And I even had to teach the son of El Talan when he reached eighth grade.

Both of those boys are proof of the idea that there really are bad kids out there. Evil kids even. But those two boys were both sixteen in the eighth grade because they failed seventh grade twice and had been “placed” in the eighth grade especially to welcome me into the jolly world of classroom management and discipline. Those were tough kids. They refused to do anything I asked of them.

They were disrespectful to me in both Spanish and English. And I am grateful for their tutoring of me in a wide range of profanity and swear words in Spanish. At one point, walking them back to class from another campus after lunch, El Talan picked up a metal fence post and was going to use it on me like a club because I tried to hurry them up and interfered with their plans to ditch afternoon classes.

Some kids are bad kids because they have been mishandled, mistreated, and misunderstood by all of their parents, relatives, teachers, coaches, and classmates before you even meet them for the first time. Their paths are already set in stone. Fossilized footprints made rock-hard-certain a million years before they should’ve been set in stone. I had no chance to make any improvements to them.

Another bad kid I had my very first year of teaching was not really named Alonzo Angel Diablo (but certainly should’ve been named that.)

Alonzo was the older cousin of a kid in that class, Fernando, whom I really liked and tried hard to help through two years in the eighth grade. But Alonzo was definitely too old and set in his criminal ways to be reached. Alonzo’s problem was that he was a gay young man living in a Catholic/Hispanic culture that actively persecuted gays. His own family had disowned him and treated him like a criminal. So, he was one. I had to get him expelled from school by reporting him for threatening the life of another student. Prior to that incident, the boy had harassed me at the Halloween Carnival (a fund-raising event that the Baptist Church later made us rename the Harvest Festival.) He forced Fernando to sexually proposition me, and when I rebuffed that nonsense, he offered to do it himself. It would lead to a later discussion in which he revealed to me his sexual orientation and asked me for forgiveness. He was relentlessly bad. But he later contacted me as an adult and thanked me for being his teacher. I never taught him anything, but it was important to him to show me that he had a job and had achieved adulthood without further violence or jail time. If he’s still making his way in this world more honestly than he did before, I am happy for him. But It was all his own doing. I could do nothing for him as a teacher.

There very definitely are bad kids. But they are not all irredeemable. And I know conservatives and Old School types would prefer that we just throw all of them in jail to rot forever. I, however, like to think there is still room in this world for stupid liberal notions of making kids less bad through education, patience, and the Grace of God.