Grief

I just wanted to let you know, my precious and few readers, that Cranky will be taking a break this week.

Jason's mother passed away Monday morning after her brave battle with COPD. She was a fighter until the very end.

As you can imagine, this is a hard week. I don't think I can bring the funny for a while. And when I've tried to write what I'm really feeling right now it all comes out trite and cliched, so I am going to take some time off and when I come back next week, I am sure I'll be able to put something together in Kathie's honor that befits the Cranky Librarian brand. Kathie read my blog from time to time and told Jason once, "I didn't know she was that funny. She should write a book." Coming from the matriarch of the most naturally funny people I know, that was high praise and I want to write about her in a way that will make her laugh, and make her proud.

Because behind the illness, and behind the grief we all are feeling, Kathie was a person who loved life and enjoyed every minute. She wouldn't want us to take things too seriously now.

But in my own grief, and in my worry about Jason, who is trying so hard to be a rock, I am in a very somber, humorless state of mind right now.

I will return next week, and I hope that Kathie inspires me to get my sense of humor back.

Much love,

Cranky

In Praise Of: Nurses

Many of you know that Jason's mom has been fighting COPD for years. She's been in the hospital being treated for complications of this illness since March, and yesterday things took a grim turn. I got one of "those" phone calls, the kind you don't like to get, and as I raced to the hospital I really thought it was the end.

She is, however, still with us. I don't know how things are going to end, and Jason is just dealing with it the only way any of us knows how: day by day.

As I so frequently am when someone I love is in a medical crisis, I was struck by the nurses. So today's edition of the "In Praise Of" segment honors those men and women who run the show in a hospital.

I've seen some bad nurses (and after Ainsley's birth, had one attend to me) but more often than not the nurses I've seen in action have been angels walking on earth.

When Jason and I were allowed back to see his mom, one of the nurses from the last unit she was in was with her.

"I love you," she said, patting her patient's hand. "How could I not? You're so easy to love." And then she turned away and wiped away tears.

I've always heard that nurses and doctors don't let themselves get too attached to their patients, because if they did, every day would be a day of mourning and they could never make the tough decisions. Maybe I've watched too much ER and Scrubs, but I think sometimes a personal touch from a medical professional goes a long way. Sometimes it helps to know that that person with your life in their hands is a human being.

Jason's mom's nurses care about her and love her and I know she feels that.

All of my chemo nurses were good, but I had one who was great. Her name was Fran, and she was there for that very first round when I was still high from the Ativan I was given to relax me through a bone marrow biopsy. Even though I was beyond annoying, asking her over and over again if I got my anti-nausea meds because I was too dopey to have any short-term memory, she laughed with me instead of at me. She always tried to grab my chart when I came in so that she could administer my meds. On my next-to-last appointment she took me by myself into an exam room to get my IV started because I had become a difficult stick and another nurse had tried and failed to find a good vein, making me cry for the first time during a treatment. For five minutes she worked to get a vein in my hand, both of us in silence. After she finally was in and taped me up, she threw her head back in a huge belly laugh of relief. When I looked closer, she was had tears in her eyes.

She hugged me.

"Oh, kiddo," she said. "I need a beer after that one."

"Me, too," I said. And for a few minutes we cried together. I appreciated that moment of humanity from her more than she may ever know.

From our school nurse, who patiently showed me how to give myself a shot when I needed to do that during treatment and who hunts me down every fall to give me a flu shot because she knows my immune system is blown, to the hospice nurse who showed up minutes after my father died and sat with until daylight helping us find peace, to the nurses who have cared for my mother-in-law as if she were their own mother: thank you for what you do.

Hey, Y'all! Breakfast Is On the Floor!

I want a Mother's Day do-over.

It started off great. There wasn't a cloud in the morning sky as I put my family's favorite breakfast casserole in the oven. Jason brewed a pot of my favorite coffee, and gave me his gift, which is exactly what I wanted: a navy squall jacket with the Northwestern crab boat logo on it in honor of my favorite vessel on my favorite Discovery Channel show, The Deadliest Catch. All was right with the world.

And then I made the biggest cooking error I've ever made: I tried to lift the 13 x 9 Pyrex casserole pan filled with sausage, cheese, eggs, and Crescent Roll dough (settle down; we don't eat this every day) out of the oven with just one hand.

You know where this is going, right? After about two seconds, I did, too, but was just as powerless as you are to stop it.

Because I am a moron and didn't have a mitt on my other hand, I couldn't just reach out and steady it. When the whole pan started to tip, and my wrist could no longer hold its weight, I just had to watch it all happen and get my bare feet out of the way.

The whole concoction, which with baking time had occupied a full hour of my morning, went Splat! on the floor. And the inside of the oven door.

But I gotta give props to the geniuses who developed Pyrex, because even though one side of the dish pounded my tile floor, it didn't break. So, there's that.

The casserole, alas, could not be saved. I had done a bang-up job greasing the pan, so it all slid right out onto the very unsanitary place where my feet spend most of their time.

That didn't stop Jason from considering it.

"Hey, remember that episode of Friends where they fight over the cheesecake and it ends up getting dropped on the floor in the hallway and they just go get forks and eat the top part? We could do that..."

Um, no.

So after me cleaning eggs and gooey cheese off of my oven door and the floor, Ainsley had Pop Tarts. Jason sipped coffee. I just swallowed anger and self-loathing, which are as bitter and unsatisfying as you might expect.

Later I tried to salvage the day by taking Ainsley to a Mommy-and-Me lunch at Chipotle. As we were standing in line, Ainsley tugged on my hand.

"I'm tired," she said.

There's a certain look my kid gets when she's sick. One eyelid droops and all color drains from her face. She gets a hang-dog posture that says, I give. You win, virus. Ainsley won't ever complain about a sore throat or a stomach ache, because she thinks to do so means a strep test. And if there is anything in this world that will get my kid to fight and scream like she's in mortal peril, it's the sight of a long cotton swab in the hands of a pediatric nurse.

She had this look, and she had a hot forehead. A nice Mother's Day meal was just not in our cards. Which ended up being just as well around 8pm, when Ainsley started perking up just as I had to run to the bathroom to be sick.

I've been saying I need a do-over.

Except for this:

At the peak of me realizing I had picked up some kind of bug, and feeling really sorry for myself, all three of us curled up in the living room in front of The Amazing Race season finale. Ainsley was cuddly and sweet as she watched her favorite (and only, thank goodness) reality show with us. I looked at my little family, who despite being a tad under the weather, is happy, healthy, and whole.

At that moment, I told myself to shut the heck up about a ruined breakfast, a fevered lunch, and a mild invasion of harmless viruses. So I didn't get a nice Mother's Day breakfast, so Ainsley had a fever, so my stomach felt the way it usually only does after a turn on the Tilt-a-Whirl. It was still an awesome Mother's Day, because my little brood got to spend it together. I ended the day counting my blessings instead of having another serving of self-pity.

And really, there's not much that an evening spent watching worthy reality-show contestants racing to win a million dollars won't fix.

Happy belated Mother's Day to all of you moms who read the blog. I would say I hope yours was better than mine, but mine turned out okay in the end, spilt milk (and eggs) and all.

Out of the Pencil of Ains: Mother's Day Edition

Yesterday Ainsley proudly brought home the Mother's Day gifts her class had made this week. I now have a new paperweight consisting of a Yankee Candle candle-jar top with a wad of modelling clay in the bottom, holding a spray of felt and bead flowers.

I love my paperweight, but I love the note that came with it more.

It was typed onto a little yellow slip of paper, and I am guessing the kids wrote it down and gave it to the teacher who neatly typed and edited the kids' writing. I bet it's the highlight of her year.

Ainsley's "card' went like this:

My Mother

My mother is sweet and kind. She gives me things I like. Sometimes she even gives me candy. She's the best mother I ever had.

Take that, Ainsley's other mothers! I'm the best! Woo-hoo!

And stop laughing--sometimes I am sweet and kind.

Night Driving

My mom has a boyfriend.



She has gone on dates with gentlemen in the past, but nothing serious. This time, her special man has told her he thinks he might be in love, and when Mom tried to break it off because she was afraid of a serious relationship, he sent her the sweetest little card you ever saw. So she's giving the guy a second chance.



And going out of town with him to a family reunion this weekend.



She has assured me that she has assured him there will be "no funny business". In fact, she made it clear to me that they were going to be in separate bedrooms and that she hasn't even kissed him yet.



I find this disturbing on so many levels.



The highlight, though, is a little something she said the other night when she was talking about whether or not she and this guy have a future.



For those of you who don't watch 30 Rock, there was an episode recently where Alec Baldwin's character, Jack, was arguing with his senior-citizen mother about her new boyfriend, who is technically married to someone else and thus not the type of man Jack would like his mother to date.



Jack's spit-fire mom gets defensive about what she sees as a catch and says,



"A guy like Paul, who can drive at night? You just don't say no to that!"

Jason and I cracked up at that at the time.

So, days later, I'm on the phone with mom and she's wondering where her relationship is going and whether or not she wants to have a man in her life. She really enjoys being her own woman. Plus, with this guy living 45 minutes away, it's a long-distance relationship of sorts.

"I don't know how long this thing is going to last," she said. "I mean, neither one of us drives at night."

I actually had to put the phone down for a second to laugh. Is driving at night really such a huge relationship issue to our senior citizens? How tragic. And funny.

2 Teach Is 2 Touch Lives 4 Ever

I used to have a refrigerator magnet that said, "2 Teach Is 2 Touch Lives 4 Ever", written out like a math problem. The magnet either got lost or broken years ago, and I have grown up enough since then to realize the corniness of that item and have not replaced it.

Corny or not, that sentiment is the driving force of why those of us who work in education our entire careers do it. It's not for the money (we don't make that much) or the respect (not much of that, either.) I would say that 95% of us got into teaching because we wanted to make a difference in the world, and because somewhere along the way a teacher changed the way we looked at the world and became something like a personal hero.

Which is why I am always amazed at those people who put us down.

Most days, while I am sitting at the desk directing library traffic, I pull up the online opinion pages of our local paper and read what's getting the tri-state area worked up on that particular day. I pay closest attention to any editorial piece about education, and there have been a lot this spring. Yesterday was election day in Ohio and a score of school levies were on the ballot, and in my own state there has been much discussion and debate about the changes made to our student testing and accountability system.

Somehow, teachers always get pulled in when people start posting comments. Some people say that the only reason teachers fight for levies is so that they keep getting pay increases (never mind that the teachers in most of those Ohio districts have already agreed to pay freezes for next year to help reduce costs). Some call us overpaid and say we should get the same cuts in pay and benefits, including retirement, that workers in the private sector have seen in this recession. Some say we have no right to complain or ask for anything because we only work 7 hours a day, 9 months a year. One commenter on a story about the levies today actually said, " 'Educators' are the most selfish people in the world," and more people than you would think seconded that remark.

The fact that I knew how to properly punctuate that shows that I've had some wonderful, unselfish teachers who deserved every penny they earned.

I could go on and on here about how no teacher I know, not even a lazy one, only works a 7-hour day. And how those summer "breaks" are really mandatory, unpaid vacation time during which most of us fulfill our state-mandated continuing education requirements, or teach summer school, or work on lesson plans because the curriculum is always changing. And how our salaries really don't reflect those Master's degrees we are required to get in our first years teaching on our own time and our own dime. And how, if it weren't for decent health benefits and retirement (which, by the way, have been cut in the decade-plus I've been working in education) none of the truly talented folks in the profession would be crazy enough to do this job and put up with other people's kids in the first place.

But to spend the entire blog doing that would be preaching to the choir, because so many of you are, if not teachers, then public-service or university employees who I am sure get it. And let's face it; there are some teachers out there who don't represent us so well. Who perpetuate every negative stereotype of the American teacher, who can't do, but can teach.

I would also bet my "overly generous" salary, though, that every profession has a few bad apples that, forever reason, are able to hold on to their jobs even though they wallow in mediocrity-going-on-incompetence.

For anyone who might be lurking and who might be thinking that teachers are whining and asking for money for their schools that they don't deserve, and that losing teaching positions might thin out the ranks in a desirable way, let me say a few things.

You want to know the real reason why teachers ask for levies and flood their senators' and representatives' offices with phone calls and email any time the education budget is discussed? The real reason why we sometimes picket busy intersections or descend en masse at board meetings?

Because we care about your kids more than you could ever imagine.

They may not give a darn about us; we can't reach every kid, and since we're human, our personalities and the fact that we're authority figures aren't going to exactly be endearing to every teenager. But even when we don't leave a mark on a kid, they leave something with us. I remember the names of an awful lot of my students. Some I remember because they did well, or because they let me know they appreciated what I was trying to do. Some I remember because they drove me crazy and I counted down the days until they were another teacher's problem.

But whether I meshed with the kid or not, I wanted him or her to do well. To succeed. And if I wasn't able to make that happen, I just hoped that, someday, someone would get through to that student. Or stick that kid with a big, fat, reality check.

Either way, I cared. And I still remember.

I remember the girl whose older brother had committed suicide the year before and who I was warned would never talk about it. When I asked her class to write a memoir about someone important in their life, she wrote a truthful and heartbreaking piece about her brother. And when I gave her an A as much for her bravery as for the execution, she took it home and read it to her parents, who later told me was the first time she had opened up to them about how she felt.

I remember the boy labelled as a future prison inmate who skipped class and sometimes slept when he was in class but who, when he had moments of caring about his grade, could write circles around his peers and made insightful comments about what we were reading that would have impressed a college professor. When I called his mother, hoping to light a fire under him since he had a lot of potential, she was clearly drunk or stoned and pretty much told me I was wasting my time on a lost cause. I cried when I put the phone down, and again after the last day of school that year when I heard he had dropped out. I have spent over a decade now hoping he beat the odds.

I remember the kids who have thanked me, like the girl who wrote me an email when she heard I was going through chemo saying she was student teaching in English because she wanted to be like me. I remember the kids who told me I was terrible, and who complained about me to administrators (and whose parents backed them up on those complaints.) I am grateful for kids like the former, but learned something from kids like the latter, too.

I've been out of the regular classroom for a while now, but the students still get to me. There are some students I see every day for four school years. I watch them grow up and am a witness to some of their major and minor dramas. And of course, to a small group of my library students every year, I am a teacher and a supervisor and a mentor.

If I am your kid's teacher, here's how I feel. Your child does not have my blood in his or her veins, but I care about that kid's future and whether or not he grows up to be a productive member of society in a way that's almost parental. When your daughter gives her valedictory speech at graduation and gets choked up, I will choke up, too, because I'm proud and know that she's going to make it. And if I hear that your son is going to drop out at 17, that will break my heart because I will wonder if there is more I could have done.

We fight because we care.

Maybe just because I need to hear it after all the poison I've been reading, or maybe because it's Teacher Appreciation Week, write about a teacher you had who made a difference in your life and helped you be the person you are today.

In Praise Of...Volume 1

I've been feeling grim here lately. I am sure you noticed. My posts have been a bit of a downer, I know.

So today starts a new segment I am going to try to do once a week. I shall call it "In Praise Of" and it shall honor those things that are done well. In a time when it seems like incompetence and half-assery are the norm, excellence needs to be rewarded. The news is full of failing banks, failing auto companies, and failing solutions. It would be too easy to think that no one is succeeding at anything anymore.

But there is excellence out there. I've seen it! So let's throw out some kudos, shall we?

Today I honor a true American gem. A bright spot on our dark national horizon. A product that proves that American ingenuity is alive and well.

Today's blog is in praise of...

Munchos.

Oh, do tell me you have eaten those golden crisps that somehow manage to be both intensely crispy and downright fluffy. If you don't think such a combo is possible, you must never have popped open one of those orange metallic bags of fat-fried and wholly unnatural goodness.

Ah, I'll never forget my first bag, purchased from a laundromat vending machine during my "Lost Year" in Barbourville. We were poor as the proverbial church mice, and my mother's only social life consisted of Friday night trips to the local Wash 'n' Dry. There were always enough quarters left, though, for a bag of Munchos and a can of Pepsi (not Coke back in 1984, because my main man Michael Jackson was telling me that Pepsi was the choice of a new generation.) I'm not sure why I first chose that bright orange bag over my perennial favorite, Grippo's Bar-B-Q; I guess I just needed some change with my change. But it was love at first bite.

They're not even called potato chips, though dehydrated potatoes are the first ingredient. They're "crisps" and bear little resemblance to any potato I've ever seen. In fact, they don't look like they came from anything actually found in nature. They're kinda yellow, and so thin you can see through them, and so dotted with precious little air pockets that if you hold one on your tongue, you can feel a peculiarly Rice Krispies-like snap, crackle, and pop. I imagine if you crumbled them in a bowl with milk you'd be able to hear it, too. And following them up with a dessert of Diet Coke and Mentos could possibly be lethal unless you're a really proficient burper.

They're not healthy, I'm sure, since their only tenuous link to the vegetable world is that, before being dehydrated, cut to a width that borders on one-dimensional, puffed with air, blown in cornmeal, and fried in an oil that may or may not contain one or more of a variety of oils, they were once potatoes. And their fragility makes them not suitable for packing in a standard brown-bag lunch. But as an occasional snack, best enjoyed when you don't really need to hear the TV through the snap, crackle, and pop of chewing up all those air bubbles...it don't get no better.

And they recently dropped their price to $2 a bag, and actually put this on the packaging so that stores have to play along! See, it's recession-friendly.

I still like my Grippo's with southern delicacies like the fried bologna sandwich, and I like regular Husman's or Lay's chips with my lunchtime ham and cheese. But the snack I love best comes in an orange Mylar bag and defies categorization. It is itself, and it is Munchos.

Can I get some Munchos love up in here? Anybody else a fan?