5-10-08
I have been working in my classroom for three days now. I feel like I’ve been there for years. These students are so wonderful I can’t even explain it to you. They are finishing their final project, a memoir. As third graders you wouldn’t expect much from their writing, maybe the occasional gem. But these kids are amazing. They see through all of the crap in the world and write what they see; they tell it like it is. Of the twenty students three are writing about suicides that have happened recently in their family and several others are writing about deaths. I can’t imagine being in third grade and having to live with all of this and go to school and do homework.

One boy found out that I have no cousins and told me that he would be my cousin. The next day he asked me if he was weird. He said that nobody likes him and he has no friends. It broke my heart. He’s probably my favorite in the class and it physically hurts me to hear that from him. I just want to take him away from all of the crap in his life and give him the encouragement that he needs but I can’t. For him to succeed he is going to have to get through all of this and learn to stand on his own and that just kills me. I want to protect all of these kids from the things they have to deal with.

We drove around this weekend. Today we went to a Sioux pottery place, Custer State Park, and Deadwood. I took Benedryl this morning and functioned in a haze, light-headed with buzzing in my ears. I fell asleep on the way to Deadwood and woke up in the middle of the Black Hills. I saw snow dusting the ground, red dirt spilling into red mud, pine trees rising up until the hills turned black. The road wound around following a river and each turn brought us to a different section, more memory photographs. I didn’t want to take out my camera because I didn’t want to miss seeing the magic of it with my eyes. You don’t get the same gut-wrenching vision through the lens of a camera.

I’m just going to leave with the final lines of a third grade memoir about a great-grandmother’s death. She said, “My grandmother was sweet like honey and warm like chicken soup. I will love you forever.” How is that not poetry?

5-11-08
The Badlands. The rock behemoths lie on the ground, gently striped, waiting to shake their craggy shoulders and rise with elbows outstretched. They are from an alien land, gorgeous with shadows playing across the features of old wrinkled and timeless ancestral beings.

I can’t describe their beauty or their hold over me.

Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse are man made wonders that don’t hold a candle to this natural creation in front of me.