Sally Gerard

The Birth of Day

It was barely dawn;

a narrow band of crimson stretched across the eastern horizon.

The reflective silence in the pristine morning,

when even the Chickadee slumbers, and I knew you were there.

The glacial brilliance of a brimming moon shone in a frigid, frostbitten dark.

Steam rolling across rooftops, pooling the warmth of sleeping hearths

in an offering to the brisk delivery of day.

Sluggish shapes converging to complete a daily ritual,

awaiting the yellow buggy, which will carry them to school.

I beheld the whole scene, through the kitchen porthole,

with the ease of slippers and a steaming mug.

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My creative writing students turned in their final memoir pieces after we shared them out loud with each other while enjoying some brownies and cookies in a writer’s celebration. They absolutely blew me away with their writing, and their ability to write so deeply. I wasn’t going to share mine, but in the end, I did.

I had written alongside them, and used my own piece to model revision for them. I was not at all prepared for how I would feel when I read my piece out loud to them.

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Nor was I prepared for their reaction. They listened intently as I blustered my way through this reading. When I finished, every one of them thanked me for sharing something so difficult. These moments of grace in the classroom are a blessing. I’ll share some of what they wrote in another post.  Here is the beginning of what I wrote, dragged unwillingly from my heart:

My phone rang.

“Is this Sally?”

“Yes.”

“This is detective…”

“I’m sorry, who is this?” Rising from the table, I walked out the door of the restaurant, “I can’t hear you very well.”

“…your sister, Cathy.”

“Look, whatever you want, my sister can’t pay, so just stop sending her credit cards.”

“No Ma’am. I’m a detective and I’m calling from Beaumont. Your sister…”

My heart had sunk into my chest and it seemed to be dragging me down to the curb. The hard metal of the street sign dug into my palm where I gripped it as I slunk to sit on the cold cement. His words fogged my brain, and as he repeated them I yelled, “Who is this? Why are you telling me this? This isn’t funny. Put Cathy on the phone.”

“Ma’am your sister is dead. She was murdered yesterday afternoon. The only number we could find was your son’s. He gave me your number.”

Morgue. But morgues are for TV cop shows where they take bodies found in rivers or back alleys. Not my sister. They pull sheets back from their faces so someone can say, “Yes, that’s her. That’s my sister.” Not Cathy. She’s living near the ocean which she loves. She’s warm there and can wear shorts all year and feel the healing sun on her broken body and wounded spirit.

I pulled myself up and walked back to the window, staring in and willing my brother to look over. He saw my hand plastered to the window, shifted his head sideways in question, got to his feet saying something to the people at the table and walked outside to meet me.

I couldn’t speak, but clung to him there on the street. My head hurt. My eyes were dry, blocking the backed up tears behind a wall I don’t remember building.”

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Everyone who works at a job where they do not own the company is familiar with being evaluated. Teachers are no exception. My ‘formal’ classroom observation to continue the evaluation of the teacher me was today. I like the way my administrator operates because I’m used to him popping in to see what my classes are up to, so the formal observation is not so nerve-wracking.

In my regular English classes, we’re reading a novel, “Lies We Tell Ourselves.” It is a fictional story about the very real events ten years after the supreme court case Brown v. Board of Education which mandated the end of school segregation. It is completely outside  the experience of my students, and yet, they are feeling the similarities of their own life

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experiences. I can see it in the uncomfortable way they react to the strong language of the times and cruelty of the tormentors toward the black students just trying to go to a decent school.

Today’s writing prompt asked them to write about someone who had touched their life in some small but memorable way. I went back to that after we read about how the ten black students recited the 23rd Psalm together in whispers as they approached the angry white mob of students. We had an incredible discussion about what we do both inside and outside to make ourselves walk through terrible situations that we know we just have to get through somehow. Some of them made the connection back to that person who had touched their life and how they would just think of that situation to give them strength and courage,

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some said they would pray, some would cling to songs they knew by heart, and some just didn’t know what they would do.

One young man, who walks alone most of the time, because his anger permeates the space around him wrote: I’m just happy when anyone says hello to me. They have no idea what it means to me. He walks the path those ten black students walked every single day.

And this was observation day. That, and our new vocabulary word: remedial. Hm.