Dots

One of the first things I bought for my classroom many years ago was a poster.  It was a banner, really, broken up into three sections.   When placed together, its bright yellow letters shouted out to the reader this one very important idea:   “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story.”  It was a logical poster, I thought, to hang above a whiteboard in an English class full of adolescents, and for many years I thought about it quite rarely.

As May days arrived, the banner came down from the wall.  The Augusts rolled on, and the banner went back up.  Each year it became more and more tattered.  I found myself pausing each new season a little longer than the last, rereading the words, reevaluating the message.

           

 “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story.”

           

 “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story?”

           

 Sometimes I wondered.

           

 Over the years, classrooms changed, textbooks were replaced, and the students, dozens and then hundreds, walked in and out the door.

            

"You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story” the banner told me each and every day.

             

Seriously?

            

 But still the banner went up.

            

 People in my life grew old and they died.  Relationships ended.  Friends moved away.  Vast historical forces clattered us all around like Yahtzee dice and tumbled us out onto cold kitchen tables.

“You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story.”

             

It began to sound a little trite.

            

A year ago this month I moved from the junior high, where I had taught for a dozen years, to the high school.  I packed many things into tight boxes and moved most of my stuff across the road.  The banner stayed behind.

             

When it came time to decorate my new room, some of my old posters went up on the wall.  Some of the posters I inherited joined them.  As I decorated my new room, rummaging through boxes and folders filled with over a decade’s worth of stuff, a lone piece of paper fell out onto the floor.  It was white printer paper with dozens and dozens of multicolored dots etched upon it in colored pencil.  It was vibrant in its simplicity, and it was a gift.

             

Many years before, a student had created these dots and offered them to me during an extraordinary difficult time in her life.  This individual had created this color, had brought this very simple beauty into the world when most of us would have simply stayed in bed.  To an outside observer, it must have seemed one of the grayest seasons in her relatively young life.

             

Regardless, she colored those dots.  She chose those various shades, and then she shared them.  That, to me, was a tremendous example of free will.  That piece of paper, which I have since taped onto a background of blue, greets me each morning as I walk into my classroom.  Those colors remind me that I have the privilege of deciding how I interact with the world and how I view the world, not vice versa.  Those dots often shame me when I am reminded that though I have never dealt with the kind of turmoil she survived, I am rarely as pleasant a person as she was on even her worst day.

           

 I no longer put up a banner in my room that tells readers “You Are the Author of Your Own Life Story,” because I no longer think it is true.  Certainly we get editorial input into our lives and some people take tremendous advantage of that gift, but at the end of the day, there are a multitude of literary elements we must simply accept: certain characters, particular settings, major plot developments.  If I have learned anything from my own children, however, or anything from that former student, it is that we do get to fill our pages with whatever color we want.

           

“Why did God make hiccups?”

Our four-year-old daughter had asked a number of similar questions that morning.  This question, though, asked as we made our trek across the Mississippi River and down onto the St. Louis riverfront, proved particularly relevant.  She asked it between hiccups.  She needed to know.

We started by explaining the mechanics behind the hiccupping process, but that wasn’t really her question, was it?  She didn’t want to know what caused hiccups, or how they worked.  Her question was much more theological in nature.  Why would God, who seemed to be a pretty nice guy, considering all the ponies she had to play with, allow someone as nice as her to be encumbered with an annoyance like hiccups?

I told her that was a really good question, and that we would have to think about it, which, of course, meant that we really didn’t know either.

Regardless, we were in St. Louis that bright summer morning not to ponder the mysteries of the universe but instead to take our children to the Gateway Arch.  They are both still at that precious age when almost anything can seem remarkably interesting, and so visiting the actual tallest monument on Earth seemed an easy sell.  We would travel to the top, take some pictures, and then go to every child’s favorite vacation spot:  the hotel swimming pool.

Simple.  An easy overnight excursion guaranteed to create lasting memories.  The weather was gorgeous, we easily found a parking spot, and that moment in which they found themselves suddenly beneath the 630-foot-tall behemoth provided a lovely little picture.

As we found our place in line, I thought back to former Arch visits and remembered it was the first major public place I had visited in the days immediately following 9/11.  At the time I was flabbergasted by the intense amount of security.  Metal detectors just to go inside?  What was the world coming to?  Now, though, twelve years later, the process of popping our belongings into a plastic basket before walking through those metal detectors seemed an entirely acceptable annoyance.  A hiccup, if you will, in an otherwise smooth entrance.

As many know, the ride to the top of the Arch is a great way to test one’s level of claustrophobia.  The so-called elevator, which is designed to fit two people and comes equipped with five seats, resembles little more than a giant dinosaur egg.  Eight elevators make the trek up the north leg while another eight travel the south leg.  This means that with both trams running about eighty people are ascending the structure at once, which is designed to accommodate about thirty people.

The real problem, though, with climbing the Arch is that things do not improve at the top.  Now instead of being stuck in an egg with four other people you are stuck in a bow-shaped room with nearly a hundred.  Granted, this room does come equipped with miniature windows, but since these are positioned 63 stories above the earth they mostly just reinforce the fact that you are bad at making decisions. 

Needless to say, we did not argue with the person who told us that in order to use the next available tram going down we would need to sit with both children on our laps.  This seemed another very minor hiccup in our quest to avoid hyperventilation.

Once grounded, we rode the Metrolink to City Garden, about eight blocks west of the riverfront.  As its name implies, City Garden has vegetation, but it also showcases giant modern sculptures and a set of wading pools.  The kids loved it, scampering around from one fountain to the next.  Our son, as is his custom and despite our constant vigilance, loved it so much that he chose to drink the water, which is not filtered. 

Fortunately, many of the germs he ingested ended up on his pillow, pajamas, and hotel room floor around three the next morning.  Yet another minor but rather disgusting hiccup in our overall trip.

The biggest hiccup, though, came that afternoon when it occurred to me that I was no longer carrying our camera.  As is my custom and despite my wife’s constant vigilance, I had left it sitting someplace where it did not belong, the eastbound Metrolink train.

After two hours of trying to find it, we began to accept the likelihood that the camera was gone.  Losing the merchandise itself was bad enough, but the truly uncomfortable aspect was that some stranger had access to hundreds of our pictures, many of which had not been uploaded and were thus lost for good.

Finally, though, after making contact with an operator, we were told that the camera had actually been found and was waiting for us at the East St. Louis depot.  Despite the rural myth that cities are cesspools of degenerate behavior, a kind soul had turned in the camera. Tragedy diverted; hiccups gone.

So, why does God make hiccups?  Why all the little and large annoyances that make our days less than smooth?  Perhaps they are God’s reminders to appreciate all the places we can go without metal detectors, to accept that we share the world with 7 billion other people, and to pay more attention to what we put in our mouths.  Perhaps they are reminders to hold onto our valuables and to appreciate all the honest people in the world.

These are all answers, in a sense, to our daughter’s initial question.  However, she is four, and therefore has moved onto her next concern:  why did God make germs?  We told her to go ask her little brother.