No Teachers, No Pirate

Well, the news on the island is interesting, to say the least. The first thing that happened didn’t happen—to me at least. Sometime after midnight yesterday, we got hit with an earthquake of 6.5 on what used to be called the Richter magnitude scale. And why, by the way, did we have to get rid of Richter and instill somebody whose name my aged brain will probably never learn? Doesn’t seem right….

Well, the quake happened although it didn’t, since neither Mr. Fernández nor I felt it. There have been, however, 224 aftershocks—also undetectable—including a quake of 4.16 today.

OK, the island is rattling around in the Caribbean. Anything else?

Well, the teachers are on strike, and The New Day has this to say:

No hay clase en ninguna escuela del país

Right—no classes in any school of the island. But using impeccable logic, the superintendent of our schools pointed out that just because the teachers, in many cases, stayed home resting (well, wouldn’t you, if you were a teacher?)—it doesn’t mean that they supported the strike.

In fairness, he may be right—there’s a lot of anger floating down the school hallways and—now—out onto the picket lines. And most parents kept their kids at home, fearing perhaps that there would be reprisals if they showed up with their kids. Who knows?

The New Day also reports that the principle of one school arrived to find the gates padlocked, and not having keys, she summoned the police, who arrived and said no way—they weren’t going to cut the lock. So—resourceful lady—she summoned a private security guard, who went at the gates with something or other, and who succeeded in not so much felling the gate as siding it. But as you can see below, the principle as well as some cafeteria workers succeeded in hopping into the school grounds. Oh, and you should definitely watch the clip, because where else will you see a true, Puerto Rican protest? (You can watch the video here.)

It took some getting used to, but I now love it. Whereas furious workers in Northern climates march silently with signs, what do we do? We’re out there with all the parranda stuff, the tambourine, the little wooden sticks, the güiro—a dried gourd that gets scratched. And everybody is out there dancing and singing—which has to be done, to keep the ánimo up. Very important, the ánimo….

At any rate, the teachers declared that the principle had treasoned (well, computer, había traicionado—what are you going to do with it?) them and they were deceptioned (works in Spanish!).

“Traición, traición cruzaste el portón”, “Tú me dices que me apoyas y te metes en la escuela”, le cantaban a la directora escolar.

(“Treason, treason, you crossed the gate,” “You tell me you support me and you put yourself in the school,” they were singing to the school principle.)

Well, the governor has just announced that only 12 percent of the teachers showed up to teach today, while only 178 students showed up to learn. And so it will be tomorrow, since the strike is 48 hours, unless, of course, it isn’t. One doesn’t know, and that’s how it is in the tropics. See?

In the meantime, where’s everybody’s favorite pirate, Carlos Laster? Because this gentleman makes his living—as much as he does—by dressing up as a pirate and walking the streets. And very fetching he is, as you can see below….

Nor does Carlos ever, ever ask for money, when—as very frequently they do—the boat people flood our streets (we’re a cruise ship hub—and tourists periodically invade the old city and stand with their mouths agape on sidewalks for hours at a time. Therefore you walk between the parked cars and the passing cars—at least you hope they’re passing…..)

Now where was I?

Oh, tourists—they like to have their picture taken with a pirate, wouldn’t you? And Carlos graciously agrees, and then takes his hat off, bows, and states, “donations are greatly appreciated.” This isn’t soliciting, it’s just asking for a donation—anybody can see that.

Anybody but Matos, the guard up at the Federal Fort, El Morro; Matos got it into his head that Carlos was on Federal ground—absolutely ridiculous—and that he was soliciting—poppycock. So Matos grabbed Carlos by the cape—what pirate doesn’t have a cape?—and dragged him onto Federal grounds. Then Matos pulled out his gun and told Carlos he was being cited for soliciting and resisting arrest. Then he interrogated Carlos for half and hour, and essentially forced him to sign the citations. (Carlos—not the wisest move….) So yesterday Carlos went to court, and did he have a lawyer? Of course not, what pirate has a lawyer?

“We’ve absolutely got to bake a cake with a file in it,” I’m telling Lady, the owner of the café where I work (dear Readers, the street outside my house has been redone and is finished, so what new ways have they dreamed up to create noise and confusion? Well, they decided to renovate the building across the street—so the jackhammers moved back in, and go off merrily at 6AM….)

“We could get all the poets together from poetry night and go to the Federal Jail,” said Lady.

“We could storm it, just like the Bastille,” I say.

We’re both totally into it, and Mendoza-who-is-not-Montalvo (though he pretended to be for months) joins us.

“Where’s Carlos,” we asked.

But nobody knows. Can it be that he’s been…

…pirated away?

Maya

Who knows why it happened, and anyway, it’s probably not important that it did; any proper Buddhist would term it maya, or illusion.

It could have been the cello, which after five years of not playing, I have started again to play. After three days, I’m an eighth of where I was, five years ago, at my height. I am, however, also eight times better than I was in the first five minutes of getting back to playing.

And it feels good, you know. For many years, the instrument was a battlefield, a thirty-year war in which I struggled to wrench the sounds that I heard in my head out from the cello. In the process, I attacked myself savagely; I screamed insults at myself; I raged and at one point began biting my left arm in frustration. Predictably, it took a physical toll—I began holding my breath until I began panting. My shoulders were permanently tense; my neck ached.

I gave up playing; I went back to it. The day came when I knew: my dream of being a professional musician was over.

What had happened? I choked consistently in three or four auditions. And yes—it was the classic choke. I didn’t play badly—I played horrifically, unimaginably badly. Think a fifth grader with about a year of practice behind him….

After the auditions, I would come home and play perfectly the piece I had massacred hours before. And it lead to a lot of cognitive dissonance—what the hell was I doing? Did I want to fail? Didn’t I believe in myself? Was I sabotaging myself out of guilt? If so, what was I feeling guilty about? Had I not resolved being gay?

Yes, that was how extreme the thinking went. Things about which I have little interest—teaching, for example—I do quite well. The one passion in my life? I fucked up.

It hurt, I stopped playing. Then, a nice lady called me up, announced herself as a neighbor and a pianist, and suggested that we get together and make music. We did, and for years we played every week. We had a tradition: every New Year’s Day, we played the three Bach cello / piano sonatas.

And I healed. I began to look at myself mechanistically, to see that I react with a full fight / flight reaction to the least stimulus. In short, my body, those bad days of the auditions, was flooding and flooded with cortisone and adrenalin at such levels that nobody could have performed.

What does a conservatory teach you? To play, yes, but also to compete. And I had forgone the conservatory—choosing to study privately. So I was an excellent player and a terrible competitor.

OK, maybe what happened this morning—this bit of maya—was because of the cello. Or maybe it was seeing the book in my hands. For the proof of the soft cover edition of Iguanas arrived yesterday, and it looks great.

Or maybe it was what I wrote to José, a man who does me the courtesy of reading this blog and commenting through Facebook. I had written, in response to his comment, that I had great respect for people who devote their lives to religion, and all the questions that implies. ‘Was that true,’ I wondered? Did I mean that?

Well, if I’m a hypocrite, I’m at least a consistent hypocrite. I thought about the acolyte I had seen when I took a three-day retreat in a Catholic monastery in Chicago. He was, frankly, a stunningly beautiful man in his early twenties; I admit frankly that I chose my pew especially to gaze on him, which I may have done rather too obviously.

The fruit, of course, is much juicier for being forbidden—but I think there was something more. This man was giving up what I had or could have, and what I took almost for granted: a home, a spouse, children, sex, and love. In the process, he would wrestle with himself, struggle, doubt, despair, and…what? Because nothing is guaranteed—Mother Teresa, for thirty years before her death, felt the presence of God very little. She was spiritually dry, and also spiritually thirsting. Who knew where, spiritually or psychically, my beautiful acolyte would be, at the end of his life? As bad as failing to become a musician was, wouldn’t it be infinitely worse to fail as a religious? Weren’t the stakes enormously higher?

So I looked at this beautiful man, and offered up a little atheist prayer, feeling a bit guilty as I did. I would hate to tar him with my brush…. 

But mostly, I think the morning maya was because of what happened last year, or a year and a half ago. That’s when I leapt off the existential edge and went into a fall, trusting as hard as the acolyte trusted that there would be celestial arms to catch me. I went willingly crazy—I faced myself and my demons. Or rather, my particular demon—a harsh, hypercritical self who relentlessly raged at myself, who sniped at every effort I ventured on, who lashed me mercifully.

Which is how I experienced him, that first Sunday of Holy Week of 2011 (I didn’t, by the way, know at the time that it was Holy Week). I was at El Morro, I was a slave, I was Christ, and I was walking to Golgotha. And the centurion behind me was a fierce wind, and the Brahms Piano Concerto Number One was the lash.

The week that followed was exhausting. I went into complete Buddhist awareness. In the process, everything that I had done automatically left me—and had to be relearned. I taught myself how to do a copy and paste, how to enter my name and password to the gmail account with the fewest movements of my fingers, how to wash dishes using the least water. Every action I did was scrutinized, analyzed, rethought and retaught.

In short, I was intensely focused on doing everything with complete consciousness. In the process, I learned that I had become the master, the man who was lashing the slave at El Morro. And I was teaching him, and he was learning, and he didn’t need the whip. He was loving, and I was loving, and he needed someone to teach him to do things—like wash dishes or play the cello—and I knew how to do those things. And I had berated him for decades for not being able to do what I hadn’t taught him to do.

Everything shifted. There is a very talented guy who can play the cello and write books. For that to happen, someone has to feed him and clean him and pay the bills and do…well, adult stuff.

And I answer to someone else, whom I call Domine, since that was the name he gave me, or rather blew at me, that day at El Morro. And the wind changed, and I learned to love that too. My biggest fear was hurricanes….

Well, today a tropical storm is scheduled to hit, but what do I care? I’ll just close the windows, and anyway it was a quiet morning, so why not walk to El Morro? It’ll look good, with the glowering sky behind it.

And that’s when the maya hit—in the opening Kyrie Eleison of the Biber Mass that was soaring in my ears as I walked again to the fortress. As much as I had been whipped, those 18 months before—now I was walking joyfully, ecstatically to my home, my fortress. I was sobbing and tourists were passing and trumpets were blaring and the sky indeed was glowering, and I was parading—victorious—to the fortress that awaited me and sheltered me and welcomed me. The music ended three feet from the door; I took the last steps in silence. 

“Can you take care of that?” he said a couple of weeks ago, after he had remarked that he missed playing.

“Sure,” I said, and took the cello to get fixed.

So now it’s back, and he’s playing again.

“Great,” I tell him.

“Beautiful,” I say.

And what does he say to me?

“Thanks.”

To the dungeon with Friends

So when did it start?  I wrote yesterday about the importance of routine, of structure. And then the day I had planned for myself fell completely apart. I did something I rarely do…

Cleaned the house!

And I am horrified to state that I’ve barely begun. This despite devoting three hours to the task.

Today, I woke, did the trot, and came back home. With only an hour before my class at eleven, I decided not to write, but to read the newspaper. Had a good class—during which, incidentally, the office ghost (yes, I’m serious, there is one…) opened the door of the conference room we were using—came home and went to eat and write a post.

What did I do? Wasted an hour and a half talking to the owner and an acquaintance from years back.

Felt annoyed and ungrounded. I also remembered something that had troubled me about yesterday’s post.

It’s not either / or but and / both.

I had compared, yesterday, depression to diabetes, and suggested that urging Pablo to think positively was like urging a diabetic to lower his blood sugar.

And I believe that.

I also think that to leave one familiar but dangerous place and venture to another unknown but better place takes real work.

I know, because I did this, the computer tells me, in the last week of February.

Readers of Iguanas will know that I lost my mind in December after a bad experience with an antidepressant. In the last week of February, I willed myself to allow something / someone to replay, really, relive the experience. I consented to a couple weeks of emotional maelstrom, going from terror to hysteria to wild fits of laughter to elation; someone had their finger on the emotional fast forward button.

Was it an existential edge? A mystical experience? A spiritual journey?

I knew two things. I had to fight as hard as I could, and trust with utterly no reason to think I wasn’t willing myself into madness.

And I wrote like crazy.

This is what I wrote, on a Wednesday, the third day of that week. (By the way, I just thought—is that true? Did I remember correctly, that the 29^th of February was a Wednesday? Well, I just checked. Yes.) 

Even now, I find it chilling.

To the Dungeon with Friends

It took me perhaps thirty seconds to type the words above.

Why?

Because I am relearning everything.

It’s like being a stroke patient.

OK—here’s the process that you know so well, and I don’t.

First—assuming that you have opened the program Word (I didn’t, I did PowerPoint first) you must make a decision. Save As or not? Then you must move the cursor. Your finger must be on the touch pad. You must move it slowly to the top left of the screen, where there is….

Hey, let’s see what is that thing called? The Office Button? Whatever it is, I really hate it. It’s about as stupid as Peruvian furniture with all of those damn curlicues.

STOP!

“You got distracted. Return to your task. Where is your finger? What were you trying to do?”

“Save a document, Sir.”

“Then what do you need to do?”

So enters the first of the friends, Susan, who writes, “how are you doing?” This, for Susan, is an unusual phrase. Or perhaps not. The phrase of hers that most sticks in my mind is “you are observing fear like a cultural anthropologist. That’s a mystic.” Oh, and “Bach when I can’t think, Beethoven when I’m….”

Emotionally troubled? Confused? Can’t remember the exact word.

Also got distracted.

So it might have been Susan, who stuck her finger on the iPod today, and pressed the Bach violin partitas. I’m relearning my mind as well—I don’t know anything.

Well, to be digressive (and I certainly am these days, or have I just noticed it?) the lady who’s playing, Lucy Van Dael, well, may not be quite a lady. She takes those things on, grabs the sheets of music and throws them into her violin and then she roars. She’s a beast, and like a beast, can also be tender. Think licking her cub….

And she must have wanted out of her cage really bad, because even though she started decently with the first movement of the D minor partita, she growled and then attacked the chaconne.

So we’re off, it’s raining a bit, and I do my rain walk. I walk all the streets of the city, and if it rains, well, there’s usually a balcony.

Rain holds off, but that demon who has snatched Bach and put him in her paws is now flailing him in her mouth. Or rather, she’s extracting every last drop of blood and savoring it.

So am I.

And we’re three streets up, she and I, and I turn the corner, and that magical moment in the chaconne arrives.

Right—just as I turn the corner.

So who’s playing?

Well, we go on, if it’s we, and get to the next corner. I’ve passed Mona’s house, who’s moved but is still there, and I wonder about the music we played together and where that went and then I turn the corner—corner again, written through tears—and I stop and think…

‘God I miss it!”

Playing.

Most, the feeling after playing.

I’m in tears, and once again, by the sea.

I’m close to one fort whose door I have petitioned and moving to the second fort, whose door I have pounded.

Enter Margaret, whose words have resonated as much as Susan’s. “You fearlessly break down the barriers between reality and what we don’t see or refuse to see….” As well as “has it ever occurred to you that you are too hard on yourself?”

Well, I or the violinist am or are walking to the fort. And I’m remembering yesterday, with my students.

They are, of course, teaching me more than I they. And I had told them yesterday.

Particularly interesting because I had struggled to be mindful all day before leaving like mad (as in insane.) And then arrived to face the most challenging student of my 20-year career.

I charge the law firm 30 dollars an hour. For this student, the rate should be 300. But who should bill whom?

“You passed the test,” I say, as the class concluded. 

She had told me how to make blood sausage.

Also, she had told me what teaching is. Not that I didn’t know—I often say, “I don’t teach, I observe learning….”

Just had never done it.

And this girl is Harvard.

The next class—equally good, though much easier. Then, from the struggle of the learning or the teaching (don’t know which way I mean that) I went to plead exhaustion from my third student.

Who tells me that she’s busy—can’t take class.

I’m punchy, and I have the silliest conversation in the world, or my world at least. Actually, there are three of us, because the secretary is a yard away, giggling and smiling at the insaneness of it all. (I wrote inaneness, computer corrected to insaneness—you choose….)

“I do hope that secretary doesn’t know English,” I say, knowing that she does. And then, leaving….

“I don’t think I know your name…”

She tells me, and I tell her…

“I’ll forget, you know….”

She nods, and I leave and go to the bathroom.

The door slams and I think “SHIT! MINDFULNESS!!!”

And I am laughing hysterically. And then I remember the bathroom at Wal-Mart, where I, so depressed, had thought, ‘they’ll have come get me…’

That thought does not help.

Or does it? 

For I am laughing so hard that truly….

OK, breathe, concentrate, locate my hand, reach for the doorknob, open the door, feel the motion of air brush across hand, exit.

And BAM!

I’ve slammed the goddamn door again!

Well, go out the door that says Pull and which in fact I push (though I did get out) and I am laughing as hard as the Buddha who sits on my desk. Fortunately, just as silently.

Or loudly.

I don’t know.

Nobody looked funny at me….

‘So what is it about bathrooms, Marc,’ I think, as the lioness chews her Bach. At this point, I’ve gotten to the second fort. I decide, yeah—I’ll go there.

It had been the scene for which I replayed the scariest moment of my recent life.

Oh, and Margaret had that day pressed Brahms, Piano Concerto Number One.

“Porn music” I had thought, starting out that day.

“Another one of my fuckers” I had snarled, getting to Cristo Street.

“On the fucking way to Golgatha,” I had raged, walking the path to El Morro.

And I am being flailed.

By the wind—my worst fear is hurricanes.

By the music, which has become a chain.

It is a brutal SM scene, this trudge to the gate of the dungeon, and two people—slaves as well as I—are in front of me. I drop my sunglasses and am whipped, lashed. And I later will write…

“FUCKING A!  I’ll finally see blood!”

But that’s after the fact, because I am told to go, to approach, and…

…to follow the slaves ahead of me.

They cross the moat.

I cross the moat.

They touch the door.

I form a fist and pound on it.

Or not. Because the “I” is not there, it’s the HE.

“Fucker thinks he did it!”

Now a fucker as well as a slave.

“Turned the fucker around and walked him over the moat,” I write later.

And the slave is walked and then he whimpers, “how did I get through  it?”

BECAUSE I AWAYS PULL YOU BACK, FUCKER! I GOT YOU THROUGH IT! I CALLED RAF! I MADE YOU SIT AND WAIT!! I PULLED YOU OUT OF THE TRAFFIC!

“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

And we’re down by the gate to the city, and the slave is taken out of the Old City, and the second movement starts.

The slave thinks of Brahms, thinks he wrote it after his mother died. Slave thinks of Pergolesi, and the Stabat Mater.

“Yeah, yeah—fucking bitches.”

Says the Master.

Slave sees cats, a lady feeding them, goes back, gives her money. Sees a sign. Donaciones aceptadas.

“Fucker thinks he did it. Needs these fucking signs. Thinks they’re coincidences.”

Slave walks on. Thinks “HE could throw me in the sea, and I would die in water, not traffic.”

Answer:

“COULD!”

Slave is told to go home and write the experience.

He puts his fingers on the keyboard and accepts dictation.

And is ordered to send it to Taí.

As he has been ordered to write this.

And send it to you.

“Yes, Sir!”

That said, it was no surprise, this morning, as the Lioness strolled through the jungle of Bach, that I said …

“Yes, Sir!”

Had to do it because HE had told me, yesterday, right after trying to leave the law firm, that he was a teacher. And his classroom had been the grocery store, at which merry Puerto Ricans playing in the fields of the lord stroll leisurely to the altar, place their hosts and receive salvation. They leave, having been fed.

As did I—for the first time in 20 years.

Or ever?

“Passed the test, Fucker!”

“Yes, sir!”

He takes me home, orders me to lie next to his chair, and lights a cigar.

As he takes me to the door, this morning. The door he pounds.

“What will I do?” I think.

I caress it.

And see an egret, which is Franny, and start to cry.

“I put him through so much shit,” he’s crying.

Teachers / Masters cry too.

“I didn’t know. I just about killed the music in him. All those years when he struggled and fought and bit himself—no, not fair, I bit him oh FUCK!!! What have I done?”

He’s weeping as hard as I was laughing yesterday, and somehow he gets out the door too. He hears, “you were learning too.”

The Lioness?

No.

The egret?

That’s how I’m doing, Susan.

Who?

‘It was,’ I thought, ‘living in a state of fear.’

That amused me, so I played with it. Was it a fly-over state? If so, were there people who simply don’t fly over it—who never know fear? Do some people come—maybe to go to the University of Fear—and then go off somewhere else?

Don’t know. What I do know is that yesterday, I visited it. And what a subtle place it was: things appearing that I’d not seen, sizes of objects changing around, interactions skewing slightly.

I came home and wrote about it, and felt a little better. I sent it to Taí, who politely said it was disjointed. I worked hard—doing a post, then rewriting a section of Iguanas. The Zanas were giving me problems—what to do with them? 

The trouble was I wanted to put in more pictures of them than I had of other friends—just as dear, just as devoted. And Franny wouldn’t have liked that. Well, I solved it, but it took me two hours.

Let me state it simply—my abstract from the thesis of UF:

I feared I was losing my mind again, and that I would become a chronic nutcase, always moving in and out of insanity.

And it did look to be the case. Even the things that could be explained were inexplicable. The post I had written, that disjointed thing? Somehow, it had been sent without the ending. 

Speaking of deletions, I did something in a document, and poof—it was gone. I panic and call Taí, who tells there is an “undo” button I click. 

And how many times have I clicked the “undo” button in my life?

My finding in the thesis: my fear was making everything worse.

Well, I’m going out on a limb today, and let the gods be tempted.

I graduated.

And have just done—actually for the first time in my life—commencement.

The first step came at the supermarket, where I stood with my good recyclable bag. The nice cashier, with whom I always speak Spanish, sees my bag, looks away, and then puts an item in a plastic bag.

“I’m crazy,” he says.

In English.

“No, you’re not,” I say.

I don’t have to explain, do I?

Half an hour later, the sun is setting, and illuminates a quite dead bougainvillea. Rather, it irradiates it, and it is now gold. 

I mean real gold. 

Think wedding bands.

And I do not think this is crazy. I know other people do. I know that I can live in their world.

I just have another passport.

Or diploma?

I smile and play Sudoku. And I decide to cheat—which is possible, electronically. The Sudoku is on my iPad, and any wrong number is immediately rejected. The device makes a disgusted sound, and the wrong is counted against you. It adds a new dimension to the game. Oh, you get a score, too.

Well, that’s useful, because I have been testing my mind. Can I still think? Is the logical component still there?

First cheat—and the number sits placidly on the screen. Second cheat—the same. I cheat four times, and yes…

‘Ah, the Puerto Rican God,’ I think. ‘She’s not subtle….’

Nor was she today, at commencement.

Starting my walk, I realize: I’m tired of chamber music, and am definitely not into lieder. I play the only symphony on my iPod.

Beethoven’s Fifth.

And as much as people sniff at it, I love it. More, it has come into my life always at crucial moments. 

So we’re off, Beethoven and I, and we’re walking by the sea. And the Puerto Rican God has provided quite a nice setting. The sky is dark, there is a storm at sea, the waves are high.

Contrasting nicely with the tenderness of the work. Because it is tender. Wistful. Wondering…

And it begins to rain and I am getting wet and I return home.

And the third movement is ending, and I think of the story, probably untrue, of the little boy.

He’s hearing that moment at a concert, and turns to an old man and says “I’m afraid.” The old man takes his hand.

And then the fourth movement crashes in and I step from the area of partial visibility of the sea to open visibility and…

(I can barely go on…)

There is an enormous wave assaulting the stone wall of the fortress that guards the city. And I say…

“STOP IT!”

To the Puerto Rican God.

I walk home, the music joyful until at last I am yards from the entrance to the city. I glance to my right, and see a sturdy wooden door. ‘I’ve not touched the door,’ I think (my homage to Franny)—and dismiss the idea as ridiculous. But I do, anyway.

And somebody gives me the diploma.

Who?  

Damn

I took the usual walk today, and all was OK. There were no iguanas doing anything irregular (for us, I mean) and the Old City was filled with tourists (also behaving, in their fashion). “Curious,” I thought, “I could fit into that group.” And indeed I could—even the tour guide was a gringa.

But why should I think that?

OK, up to El Morro and all was well except that I didn’t just touch the door, as I do in homage to Franny. Instead, I just walked in.

Well, maybe it was the pain in my hip, which of course might have distracted me. Hips, you all remember, playing a big part in those last days….

Right, so I walk down to inspect the ceiba trees (that’s silk cotton to you) and they seem bigger. Well, I do know that trees grow, but that much in two days? That’s when I saw them last.

Hip still hurts and I rest for a bit, and see a cat in a tree. ‘Oh, Cloudy,’ I think. That was my mother’s cat, and yes, the tree cat did resemble Cloudy….

Now I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before, and that’s pretty interesting. What were they? Can’t remember now.

There was a very big caterpillar, brightly striped with black and yellow. They hang out on the frangipani bushes, and do some real damage. But why was it so big. Why had the ceiba tree been so big.

“Damn,” I say, again invoking Franny. She used it, though judiciously. “Am I becoming the worst of gay men—a size queen?”

So I walk past the governor’s mansion and see that traffic has stopped. The governor, or his wife, or maybe just the hairdresser (out to get some goo), is leaving. This requires stopped cars, four cops, and two huge SUVS, with blue lights flashing. I see nothing remarkable in this. Why?

Go home and do the emails—my normal thing. But it seems that the computer, with whom I’m normally on good terms, is doing funny things.

Errrrr… or I?

Well the photo I was trying to save posed a problem. Raf’s family—where do I put them? I consider, briefly, putting them in the folder labeled “birds”—no disrespect here, it’s where I put a lot of stuff I don’t know what to do with. If I’m just gonna use an image once, that’s where it goes.

Why do I do that?

And why birds?

And just now, Raf calls, and says simply “I can’t log in.” I’m completely stumped. His silence tells me he’s stumped—by me.   

We figure it out. I had mailed him, ten minutes before starting this post, the family photo. He was supposed to enter the site of his mother’s alma mater, log in, and upload the photo.

Shouldn’t I have known that?

Hip hurts, and I think of Franny, and how, really…  It was never good again. The hip, I mean. Do I need to specify that?

Don’t know if I’m clear.

And then I think of her, how she stopped walking and began to, well, shuffle. And she was never again, I think, free of her hip.  

She always knew it was there. It was hurting or aching or just there.  

And then I think, well, that’s just like my mind. I went crazy. There were park rangers doing manhunts for me.

I’ll never use my mind as I used it, unthinkingly, before. 

Also like my mom….

“I’m falling down the rabbit hole,” she had written.

Made us cry….

And I have written, too. Is it catharsis, people ask? Well if it was, or if it was supposed to be, it didn’t work.

Her hip.

Her mind.

Is this my rabbit hole?

Damn!

Three Failures and a Chair in a Tree

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I was saying on my morning walk, as I peered at the ocean roiling below El Morro. But I could equally have said…

“…what is the correct understanding?”

For I had completely bombed in my classes yesterday, after an interesting day of failure on Sunday.

OK, I now drop the ironic tone of previous posts. Anything—until further notice—comes from the gut, not the mind.

I have never wanted to be a teacher—I’ve told you that, right?—and I have never taken it much seriously. I do show up on time. I am as groomed as I get. But beyond that, I don’t do much. I observe the students, just as I observe the iguanas.

But on Sunday—that would be the day before yesterday—I had written a post about failure. And had had a successful day studying it. Then, it was time to work.

OK—the worst task first. I attacked the kitty litter boxes, and thought while doing so that the wash was next. But there’s a rule —self-imposed, but still a rule—in the house that one cannot proceed from one room to another without carrying something (generally, dirty ashtrays or coffee cups). It’s a big house; it’s the only way….

In this case, it was not a dirty ashtray but a dirty sex toy. NO, not my sex toy but the cat’s. Yes I provide them, although I do not GIVE them. I quite properly deposit my dirty underpants in the laundry basket. Smith, the cat, retrieves them (it?) and moves to the most public area of the house, always on a rug. There he proceeds to….

….I’ll not say. But I can only say that he makes a quite distinctive sound as he goes about it, and that, of course, prompts me to shout…

“FOR GOD’S SAKES! YOU ARE SICK AND DISGUSTING! PUT THAT FILTHY SEX TOY AWAY, OR AT LEAST DO IT IN PRIVATE!”

Words, I realized a week ago, that my new neighbor must have heard, as she was smoking a cigarette on her balcony. (It’s Old San Juan, remember? All the doors are open here….) She gave me, well, a special look hours later on the street….

Still thinking somewhat about the wash, I then went to address a few words (why bother? guess it’s just habit) to the cat.

Right. He was in the bedroom where, well, the bed was unmade.

OK, did that, and then saw—you’re not forgetting the wash, are you?—a book on the floor. Well, that’s not right, I thought, as I frequently do. I picked it up and headed to…

You get my drift?

I did eventually do the laundry, some hours later. But observing as I was the trifling failures in my most proximate agenda, I had quite a successful day. Things got done—they often don’t.

Buoyed by all this, I got right down to work, the next day, writing an assignment for the students. It’s something I never do. Worse, is was on conditionals, something I like, and which can be fun. And should be—I generally sing “Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner!” Unbelievably, everybody in Puerto Rico knows it, though of course in Spanish. So we sing it (in both languages) and go on from there….

In this I am bested by former co-worker, a Spanish teacher who taught the gringos to sing ojalá que llueva café, café AND made them dance to it. Alas, it was in the days before YouTube—she’d be famous, or at least viral, by now.

But no—I had to prepare. All for my students….

The look on their faces still pains me. They didn’t understand.

What were they doing wrong? How could they fail me, their teacher?

I did the only thing possible.

“Would you please,” I said in my most teacherly tone (and yes, computer, teacherly is a word—stop with that damn squiggle) “do exactly what I do?” I then held the accursed assignment high in the air, turned it face down…

…and slammed it on the table.

“I think I’ll not charge for this class,” I said, “although in fact there is something to be learned here….”

We went on to discuss failure—how it teaches you so much more than success, and how prevalent and necessary it is in nature.

They thought I was nuts, of course….

Well they’re probably right.

And it reminded me of my two other failures, as a teacher. The first, years ago, in my earliest attempt at teaching. Three teenage boys, three books on the table. A nervous and novice teacher.

Fatally, the books were…

… Jane Eyre

For boys? For Puerto Rican boys? Look, it was a setup, I now see, but I only made it worse. Now, I might possibly be able to do something with it. (“OK, it’s crap—we all know that….”)

Second failure—in my first week teaching at Wal-Mart. I was hardly inexperienced, and they certainly knew me, and how I taught. Was it the life size portraits there in the building of Sam Walton, staring down—looking so much like Jack, on his most dispirited day?

And now a third failure.

OK, so now we’re at today. I get up, I take my walk, I touch the portal of El Morro (and no, I don’t know why, I just have to), I turn back and see…

…a white plastic chair stuck firmly in an almond tree. (Yes, we have almond trees in Puerto Rico—they’re just not the same. Get it?)

The image stays with me for the rest of the walk—two Beethoven quartets long (my current metric, as we said in Wal-Mart). It’s with me now. Nor do I know why….

Perhaps because it was an amazement, an undoubted success. No one, I hope, had a work order to put a white resin chair in an almond tree (which, speaking of colors, turn an amazing russet at this time of year). Nor—no offense intended, my Puerto Rican audience—would it ever have been executed . Or so well, at least.

And no, no one had cared—not the tree, not the chair. Certainly not the municipal government. Perhaps it was the wind that blew the chair into the tree. More likely, it was the students from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas nearby who had, on a whim, placed it there. Maybe—ah, that’s it!—it was art. But nobody had cared.

Or they had, in a careless way. And so….

“Teach me to care, and not to care,” I think. And then wonder…

…Is that the correct understanding?