During the school year, by May I was usually already fantasizing about my summer break: the great intellectual projects I would be working on, (this summer I think I’ll reread Shakespeare, or study the War of 1812, or write a book, or learn Sanskrit) and mentally listing the dozens of house projects (gutters, refinish the porch, hang doors, paint the entire house, lift it off its foundations with my bare hands, the usual) or vowing to get in shape (maybe I can run a marathon, which usually by August would be downgraded to, I might be able to run around the block.) Into this mental frenzy was interlaced the requirements of my kids in the summer (take the boy to day camp, take the girl everywhere within a 400-square mile area least once to play music.).
My wife told me to relax, but I felt guilty because she was at work and I wasn’t. “How are you?” she’d ask, during a lunchtime call, and I’d rattle off a spastic litany of tasks I had completed, had planned out, and was about to begin, along with minor injuries sustained in the process. There’d be a brief silence, and then she, ever wise, would say, “You need to chill.”
My sister-in-law, and mother-in-law, as veteran teachers, became my role models and sanity checks. Covered with sawdust, an unopened new history of the Spanish-American War on the kitchen table, stuffing two crackers with cheese in my mouth to serve as lunch, a partly-hung door blocking the hallway and one eye on the clock because it was almost time to get my son from half-day music camp, I would get a call from my sister-in-law, looking for my wife, maybe planning one of our vacations out west.
“So, what’s up?” I’d ask her. “Oh not much,” she’d say, an icon of calm after 17 summers off. “I was reading the New Yorker. Maybe later I’ll bake some cookies.” My mother in law, a retired veteran of 35 years teaching high school French, might call, also looking for my wife. I’d tell her what I was doing, and she’d say “Relax, sweetie, you've earned a rest.”
But after working continuously since the age of 12, when I started pulling weeds at a ranch down the street, I had huge trouble with that concept. Ranch hand (read stable cleaner), paper boy, sailboat delivery crew, busboy, dishwasher, ice cream parlor counter guy, lifeguard, library assistant, writer, editor, archaeology assistant (digger and sifter), copywriter, boatyard worker, help desk technician, middle manager, teaching aide, tutor, coach, licensed teacher, always something. But teacher, that was only job on my life list that came with a 10-week vacation.
And it messed with my mind. I knew I needed the time off, felt as though by June 15th every year, wonderful as my work is and however much I love my students, that my soul had been beaten with a rubber hose, in a small room, under the dim light of a single bulb.
I would go out in public after 9 am everyday, and once in line at the coffee shop, remembering that I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, wonder if the baristas thought I was unemployed. I started wearing a t-shirt I bought when I was getting my license, the name of my university and School of Education written proudly across it. (See, I’m not a lazy bum, I’m a teacher.) Sometimes I would carry the teacher’s edition of my algebra or science textbooks with me, and display it spine side out at my coffee shop table as I read something else entirely. (Usually it wasn’t Shakespeare or the history of medieval ship design. It was usually some beat-up old used copy of a military science fiction series, or a windsurfing magazine.)
I’d go to pick my son or daughter up at whatever camp or activity they were signed up for, and there were two different looks I’d get. The mid-day Look, at the back door of the Children’s Museum, or Chamber Music Camp, or the Children’s Theater came from either the moms, roughly the same age as me (either perfect hair, yoga clothes and mat, clean SUV; or harried, many young children, dirty mini-van) or the summer nanny (college girl with hair in ponytail). It was a quick assessment (he’s a middle aged, off-white Male, 6’2”, unshaven, dressed like a 25-year-old surfer in shorts and Hawaiian shirt, driving a small, dirty Toyota with roof racks: is he a creepy predator?) No, probably not, he’s carrying a copy of Hamlet. Though he hasn’t read it, apparently, the receipt is still hanging out.
The afternoon pickup looks came from Dad, in a pressed collared shirt, summer weight slacks, dress shoes with tassels, who also gave me the Look (same thing basically, although with the added certainty that though I wasn’t a child molester, because I wasn’t leaning on a white conversion van, I was definitely an unemployed left-wing intellectual, because of the Hamlet, which he had been forced to read at the U, and which irritated him because the language didn’t make any sense). Dad managed the Look, even as he stayed on a conference call, kissed his child, and handed them into the Lexus. Fine multi-tasking.
This sixth summer, though, I think I have finally come to peace with it all. I have a very long list of house projects I have just scratched the surface of, I have actually read Hamlet, (and some bad military SF) I am learning to cook, and when I get the Look at the back door of the Children’s Theater I take my sunglasses off and look back, and smile.
Now they look away. Maybe it’s the ever-increasing grey in my hair, the lines around the corners of my eyes, or just something in my glance that says, “You try teaching Earth Science to thirty 8th grade boys for nine months as your school cuts its budget, lays off teachers, tries to deal with No Child Left Behind, and then talk to me.” I think what I would see in my eyes is the tiniest, dimmest echo of something you’d see in the eyes of a kid walked around Fallujah with the Marine Corps, an ER nurse, or steelworkers who walk the high iron.
I don’t put myself in the class of those people, who become heroes just by surviving, but teachers survive, too, 185 days at a time, one school year at a time, and blessed be, one summer at a time as well. I may not be entirely guilt-free, but as a Catholic, I don’t think I’d be entirely comfortable with that. In the meantime, I think I’ll go ignore the back porch refinishing another day, maybe read a little, defrost a chicken to cook later, and, whoa, look at the time, I need to go to pick up the boy from Children’s Theater.
