PLAYING TOURIST AT HOME

I love Boston. It’s no secret that I’m generally not a fan of cities: crowds, confusion, traffic, noise, pollution, mayhem, plus I lack any sense of direction whatsoever so I am constantly lost. Boston, however, isn’t like most cities, and thank goodness for it.

It’s fun to be as local as a non-city resident can be. It’s fun to help out-of-towners navigate the streets and the bars and the different parts of town. No T stop directly at Quincy Market? No problem. There are at least three stops directly accessible. Want to go to Seaport? You’ll have to hoof it or rent a bike because there are zero T stops directly there. Oh, don’t even suggest the make-believe silver line that has a stop there – locals know the silver line is a mere ghost story.

One thing I’ve never done is the Duck Tour. It seems counter-intuitive to do something that takes me around to all the places I know, but it also seems like someone who has lived around Boston for as long as I have should’ve taken at least one tourist-type mad-cap adventure. So, I do.

Unfortunately for our guide, who has the stage-name Justine Time and wears a lovely Fascinator on her head, one of my equally-local friends on this tour and I sit in the front two seats. We didn’t pick those seats; they were our ticket assignments. We add comments quietly, which Justine Time overhears. Yes, James Otis was struck dead by lightning . . . standing in his front doorway, we believe. Yes, this is almost where the Boston Massacre happened. . . but now it’s a major traffic intersection. Bunker Hill – or, perhaps, Breed’s Hill. Hey, it’s the bridge in the opening scene from Boondock Saints. Silly commentary, really.

In the end, we drag our out-of-town friends to some local touristy places and make sure there are a couple of lobster rolls at the end of the trip. It feels good to be a tourist in my home city. It’s familiar and comforting. For someone with zero sense of direction, I like to know where my roots grow because it’s home, and I won’t ever be directionless.

I CAN BREATHE AGAIN

What a year. What a damn year. If there is such a thing as a balanced universe, I will not have to teach in pandemic mode next fall. 

So far we have been able to remove our masks for the last two days of school, which have been teachers only in attendance. We have also been instructed to leave maps of our rooms for September, meaning I probably won’t be rolling a cart madly from uniformly-set-up room to uniformly-set-up room.

I took some of my end-of-year time to do two important things for my own mental health: I cleared off my mobile teaching cart, and I moved furniture back to where it belongs.

Oh, sure, the furniture thing is physically unnecessary because the janitorial staff will be taking everything out to wax floors, anyway. However, moving the furniture back to the way it looked on March 13, 2020, the day we locked up our schools for the pandemic, has been mentally rewarding. I don’t simply want to go back to a school of normalcy; I wanted to leave a school of normalcy, as well.

If my teacher cart is still there in the fall in my room, taunting me and mocking me, and, if I am not using it for teaching room to room, I may store books on it. I may turn it into some kind of bizarre shrine. I may use it for demolition derby demonstrations.

I am stepping away from supervisory duties. I say that out loud and in print so no one, not even me-myself-and-I, can talk me into reneging on my extra-curricular resignation. I believe that I have at least one more career in me before I keel over and croak, and being someone’s boss is not it, hence why I always stopped at “assistant manager.” I like the paperwork, the details, the balancing, the minutiae no one else cares to do; I hate the directing and monitoring. If I could just be Leadership Paper-Pusher, I’d stay on forever.  

Well, except for the summer work. I am taking this summer off from school work and pouring my heart into plotting my next career move.

What a year. What a damn year.  Finally, after fifteen-plus months, I (literally) can breathe again. 

TLC AND ALCOHOL: WHAT THEY REALLY MEAN TO ME

What a year. What a fucking year.  What a fucking ridiculous, insane year.

I have one week left of the academic year, and today I visited two different stores (a wine-specific favorite and a local packie) to prep and fortify myself for the final slide.

The school district for which I work did not go remote this year. Teachers have worked full-on since the beginning of September, taking only an occasional snow day or pre-holiday as a “remote” day. Otherwise, we have had students in front of us since the very beginning, teaching hybrid and teaching “live” kiddos all at the same time.

Curriculum has been altered, teaching methodologies scrapped, and technology embraced to the point of folly since Google Classroom crashed several times during the school day over the past ten months. The twist to that is that while Google Classroom was crashing and burning, Google itself shared outage maps of its own worthless product’s inability to effectively maintain its own integrity.

At least the situational idiocy allowed me to cover irony as a literary device.

Now, with three teaching days plus two teacher-mandated days left in this 2020-2021 Pandemic Teaching Year from Hell, I have decided to acknowledge my inner alcoholic. I won’t deny that many a mimosa was sipped at an ungodly hour over the weekends, and that many a gin and tonic found its way into my clenched fists long before dinner reached the table.

So, over this summer break, I am going to give my brain and liver some TLC, ignore requests from school administration to continue my leadership role, and fly low, very low, under the radar of extra work. Last summer was a working summer, and I’m not doing that this time.

July and August are mine, all mine.

I may still be old and gray in September, but, with any luck at all, I will at least be alive and standing when the new school year starts.

IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN

T’was weeks before summer
And look was has fallen:
Everything’s covered in
Spring-laden pollen.
 
My house and my porch,
My car and my seat,
I’m covered with pollen from
Forehead to feet.
 
My once-black sedan
No longer is seen.
When I look for my car,
I now search for green.
 

The pile of minutiae
Upon my porch floor
Contains a few leaflets
And green crap galore.
 
My nose, how it runs.
My throat, how it scratches.
We try to fight pollen –
We batten the hatches.
 
Opening windows?
Ridiculous bust!
Right through the screens
Creeps that ominous dust.
 
The car wash is busy.
We’re all trying to clear
Inches of pollen
From front hood to rear.
 
Waves of green pollen
Bring me to my knees
As I fight with my sinuses:
“Please, nose, don’t sneeze!”
 
But I hear Spring exclaim
As it gusts out of glee:
“I’ll green ya next year,
That’s my guarantee!”