My close friend of nearly 25 years told her daughter, casually, while she was on the phone with me, "pack your suitcase within reason." The child is 8.
Within reason. That would have had no meaning to me at 8. My mother would have had to have given me an amount. The concept of what was reasonable in contemporary society, or by adult standards, would have been alien to me. That there was such a thing as "reasonable concepts" about how big your suitcase should be would have floored me. I think I might have started to realize, way too early, that society was judging me much more than I knew and I would have hidden underneath the bed while I was still thin enough to do so. Good thing that we didn't really go on vacations back then, and, if we did (I can't remember when the fatal day was that we began those awful bus pilgrimages to Loch Sheldrake), my mother did all the packing. Had she left it up to me, I'd've packed three t-shirts, two pairs of jeans, a book, my baseball glove, my softball, my baseball, a couple of pairs of underwear, an entire drawer of baseball cards and my sneakers. No shorts. I hated my shorts.
But, while I was reminiscing about a younger, more American-goofy me, apparently my friend's daughter was divining outfits for breakfast, lunch and dinner to go in said luggage. Something about scarves or some other -- I don't know the word. I don't use the word. Those things that go with your clothes. I don't carry one. I don't wear one around my neck. I generally have nothing hanging from my ears and what I have on my hands are the ring I gave Karen and a ring resembling the one a director friend and mentor named Tom Neumiller wore all the time that I wear in his memory.
Accessories. I'm much better with that word when it relates to people who've assisted in crimes.
My friend's daughter spends her entire schoolday in silence. It's called "Selective Mutism". She whispers to one teacher and one highly educated paraprofessional with intense sympathy that fate was lucky to have them meet. Otherwise, nothing. She does her work. But, she's beautifully invisible. A brightly coordinated Bartleby the Scrivener. She will not talk directly to most of her fellow students. She will whisper to the paraprofessional who will pass the words along. But she is adamant. Her mother tells me that she has plans to make friends with select students. She whispers to some of them. Slowly she hopes that as she whispers to them, she will become comfortable with them and they her. And eventually, they will become friends. That's the plan. All within a reasonable amount of time.
I spent the second grade in total silence and I loved it. But I had talked in years before. (I don't remember if I talked to my friends at recess and at lunch. I just didn't participate in class. I wrote everything to the teacher in my homework and classwork. I remember the delighted look on her face when she got my work.) This was a choice to save my energies for my writing. I felt ashamed somehow by the previous years. As I get older, I find myself longing more and more for silence. There seems to be less judgement in it and more opportunities to reflect and actually say what I mean. One long-time friend actually told me that I don't really say anything when I speak, which is why she always talks over me, and another friend texts me almost exclusively because she says that I don't really listen otherwise and that I don't really focus. Maybe the writing for me is like packing that bag, I can work and work it through on my own until it is "reasonable," plucking through the words myself until they are just right. I take between 20 minutes to an hour to send off emails because I revise and revise them, from long explanations with jokes and stories I had hoped to tell the person, each time, asking myself if the person
really needs to know that piece of information, will he or she really find that amusing, relevant, important. What was once a page is usually four or five lines by the time I'm done. Some of my friends require that the email just be the subject line and one line more and that's tough, but I can do it. Who am I to demand more than this, if that their necessary limit? It's reasonable. It's just work and I'm not afraid of work and neither is my friend's 8 year old daughter.
What I'm afraid of is finding myself unprepared because there is no exit or back-up strategy if you fail -- she knows this, too. No one can translate what you didn't whisper to the one person you trusted and if you don't do your homework then you have no proof that you understood anything. You're dependent on very few people and that makes school a kind of burden. Fashion just involves you and your clothes which is quite a relief.
It's all the things you can't control that lead to mushy answers that I think are probably what make us both clam up. So many questions people ask not only have no one answer and no right answer, but absolutely no measurable or reasonable answer. A principal asked me how I prepare for my classes. The truth is, it depends on 1) if I know what I'll be teaching because sometimes I don't know. 2) What he means by prepare? I do some of it all the time. I buy books as I see them and I start preparing as I get my books. Sometimes I have no idea what I'm teaching until I walk into the building. Sometimes it becomes clear to me that everything I prepared should be thrown out. And I always re-do everything anyway. I am always re-doing. Re-touching. Adding. I collect materials all the time. I keep going and going. Nothing has stayed exactly the same. I have a mainstay of materials, but I keep adding. Mulch. It's not a simple answer. And I don't have one answer.
I can see why my friend's daughter focuses on what to wear. Clothing can be a comfort and a decision that is a matter of one's own taste. There need be no shame in it.
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