Maybe no pictures on this entry, unless I can find an appropriate one.
I was riding back this morning on the big yellow school bus, after the third overnight retreat with high school students in a month. The first one, just a month ago, saw me going up into the Laurentian mountains for the first time – not as awesome as the Rockies, nor as imposing as the Adirondacks or Appalachians, but mountains nonetheless, and so somewhat familiar. Over the last month, I’ve got to see the leaves change (on a fourth trip “up north”, for that purpose, when they were really in just-post-crimson gloriosity), walk through frost enough for Tony the Tiger if not for the grass to snap protest under my shoes, and see the yellow Tishrei moon rise waning above a lake over which a lone heron had earlier described a long, slow, graceful line. And all of those visits, oddly enough, involved interactions with teens.
I work at a high school, although not as much with the students (albeit enough to have R., today, who decided that it was fine to drop his pants in the hallway to change for football because “everyone does it”, tell me that it wasn’t fair for me to ask him to come to the HS vice principal’s office since I hadn’t previously warned him, and wasn’t Judaism all about getting a second chance?), and the force of accepting this job has begun to hit me hard. I had a much easier time with my little brother in his “difficult years” by telling people that he had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with one of their own, although I was pleasantly surprised when they returned him a few years earlier than I had expected they would. And I watch my friends who have “older” children (i.e., teenage ones, some of whom I’ve known long enough to also know that I have stories that I will never tell about them in public) refrain with great forbearance from throttling them in their little green alien states, howsoever deserving I might believe them to be.
But the majesty of a forest woven like a brilliant carpet is not the right comparison with a room of 120 ninth graders – or even, for that matter, 25 of them, or a dorm full of them who are (supposed to be) “sleeping”. Maybe a hurricane. Or, more innocuously, a snowstorm, with ever-jumping spinning whorls of sharp icy moments that, taken individually, are marvels of crystalline beauty. It’s hard for me to understand whether they are normal people who have short attention spans, or children in growing-up (and certainly generally tall) bodies, or aliens – but in a group, they are entirely new a thing. They are an orchard of white apple blossoms, ablazed with fuzzy honey bees, with no single space to rest your attention or direct a thought, so all ashift underfoot. Ask them to pay attention – you have ten seconds. Ask them to be quiet to watch a movie – and you have ten minutes. Bladder control seems to be on a one-minute clock, so that for my crotchety grup teacher mind, I have to remember that just because fifteen kids want to go to the bathroom during a ten-minute program, they’re not all one kid. And still, the sparks of future beings becoming are like the crocus greens piercing the sleepy brown, sometimes still white.
And I try to remember what it was to be 15, 14, 13: not just what I did, but what it felt like, how it was, and I am in awe of how much they have to teach me. In addition to my hope that the aliens will bring them all back some day, and that I’ll be here for them to come back to visit and say, “Hey, are you still here?” and that I will still be learning, while they have long left school.
