January lettuce

January lettuce, from the garden.

Yesterday marked the last day of the darkest 6 weeks of the year.

The cold snap wounded the rosemary bush, but enough of the lettuce hung on in the cold frames to share with friends tonight. Winter around here is hard on all of us, but the light is returning to put the pieces back together again.

Halfway between the solstice and Imolc, back into November light. 

And we're still here.

Solstice salad

Late autumn sunset on the Delaware Bay

I do not do well with the shorter days. Chances are, you feel the same.

Despite bathing in the glow of electric light, the sun still matters physiologically and psychologically (and that great gray area between). And it has been disappearing slowly for several months now.

Lettuce in the cold frame.

With less sun I grow more tired and less food.

I cannot control the sun, but turns out a lot of plants are tougher than I realized. With no help, the parsley, arugula, and Brussels sprouts are doing just fine through the dying sun. They're taking things a little slower, of course, but there's pretty good advice for all of us with the dying light.

I've got lettuce and baby kale tucked in the cold frames I made back when I had a bit more energy, and even a very determined bean plant that's plastered itself along the cold frame window.

So last night we ate from a mid-December garden.

"And it was very good."

My children's backyard

I can see the now brown hops flowers hanging off the bine just outside the window. Just past that are the remnants horseradish leaves that stood like peacock feathers just  a couple of months ago in a garden bordered by a pond dug by my daughter. Just beyond that, at the edge of the yard, stands a pine pirate ship, the deck now covered with a velvet green carpet of moss.

The long shadows of the Christmas sun cast a dreamlike spell over the backyard where children laughed, pulled radishes from the ground, bled, launched rockets, ran through a tiny plot of cornstalks. They lived here once.

View from my window, this morning.

No one else can see this at this moment, not without sitting in this spot, not without knowing this spot's history.

For all the hype of shared lives and common culture, we all live in separate universes. How we choose to live and share in this universe matters, but it is ours so long as we choose to live in it, until, of course, we die.

***

Words and myths allow us to share common themes, a vital piece of who we are, but words and myths are pointless if we do not know (and trust) our own universes.

I can tell you where basil grows best, where the bodies of past pets rest, where the random crocus will erupt through the ground in 6 weeks, where the brown snakes hibernate, where Orion will rise tonight.

This fella guards the pond dug by my daughter.

There is some comfort in science, in that the stories of the natural world it tells in my universe will be predictably true in yours. There is some comfort in great fiction, where the characters created in the minds of others mirror the hopes and fears I feel in mine.

Delaware Bay, Jersey side

We all share the great mystery, this edge of knowing life, the abyss of facing death, and our shared thoughts keep us comfortable so long as we do not wander too far from the crowd, too far from the shared abstract ideas that make the mystery bearable.

I teach. It pays reasonably well, I enjoy it, and it turns out I'm reasonably good at it, together sufficient reasons to keep doing it.

But that's not why I teach--I teach because I want every child to know the universe that belongs to her, the one that surrounds her at this moment, wherever she happens to be. I want him to touch the mud, smell the earthy air after a spring storm, know that what he sees, at that moment, matters as much as the abstract ideas pontificated by the adults who hope to mold him.

What I do in the classroom only matters as far as what the child does outside of it for her self. Not for me, not for her family, not for her town or country or even the WTO.

Not "for herself" in the selfish sense--our consumer culture will push her hard to do just that. I mean for her self, the only person who knows what she knows, and only she can know how best to live her life.

I have faith that all of us want the same things when we pay attention to who we are.

12:30 A.M

Yep, the annual winter solstice news--the tinge of sadness I felt late June now reflects back as a tige of joy.
The sun is dead. Long live the sun.

12:30 A.M. tonight the sun will stand still for an instant, shift its mass^*, and head back north.

6 months ago, when we sat on the opposite side of the sun, I celebrated the summer solstice, a joy tinged with the weight of knowing the sun would start its slow, long course southward.

Winter is just beginning, and winters can be brutal here. The light, however is returning.

When I was a child, winter meant cold, summer heat. I did not, could not, grasp why the elders got so excited late December, at the cusp of winter, when we faced long wintry days.

I get it now.

***

I stood outside last night in the chill with my youngest, now a quarter century old, watching our shadow drift across the moon, a wavering copper-gold washing in from the moon's left.

My mom used to tell me she could see me as an infant even as I stood before her as a man. I laughed, of course. I am big--over 200# big.

I get it now.

***

I still give tests, more out of habit than sense now. Performance on science tests a few days before the Christmas break follow a predictable pattern, and my students did not fail to fail.

We do a lot of things because we do them. If mastery's the goal, then a class average of low 70's with a bell-shaped curve, a science teacher's dream a generation ago, marks my failure.

On my board today two-foot numbers announced the time of the solstice--12:30 A.M. Solstice literally means the sun stands still.

Very few students notice how far the sun has shifted since class started just 3 1/2 months ago. There's no need. Food comes in boxes, heat in radiators. The whole world of technique is magic to them.

In Ireland this morning, the sun rose, as it has, as it will. A shaft of sunlight flashed through a chamber in Newgrange built thousands of years ago, before the Great Pyramids, before the Celts arrived, before Stone Henge.

We will not study this in science, nor will our students study this in history class. We will create a class ready for the 21st century, for the abstract, for a culture that confuses bank profits with economy.

***

If children owned the winter solstice, the dying light, knowing what waits for each of us before a 100 winter solstices pass, would they come to school?

Would you?

I believe schools can be worth the time children invest in them. I am not convinced we're there yet.

At least not as long as I keep practicing education as religion, using a script written generations before me.



*The sun may indeed change direction if we use Earth as the reference point, but "shifted its mass" is, of course, incorrect, since it implies uneven forces were applied to it. Since I have yet to find a better explanation for "mass" beyond "the amount of inertia stuff has," even a poetic license does not give me permission to spew such nonsense.

Dark

Last week of the sinking sun.


The Earth hurtles closer to the sun, but my little piece of paradise edges more and more oblique to the sun, our source of light, of life. We're in the dark season.

***

The bell still rings at 7:45 in the morning. It's not a bell anymore, but we still call it that. I blew a conch shell as the bell sounded, an old shell that has been around the science wing for years. My students were as amazed by the loud bellowing of the conch shell as I am by their iPhones.

The conch was once alive. It no longer is. Neither is obvious to most of us scurrying under the fluorescent hum of December lights.

***

We're studying photosynthesis now, my absolute favorite subject in biology, except maybe quahogs, which aren't part of the curriculum.

Things are not connecting as well as I'd like, but they rarely do in mid-December. The trees are bare at the moment. We could take a lesson from them--not much happening under the sky when the sun fades away.

ATP synthase. Chemiosmosis. Electron transport chain. I mention the words, knowing that they will roll off my students cerebra as water rolls off a leaf. And that's fine with me.

Everything that burns easily in my classroom does so because of the grace of plants, capturing the energy sent forth by our sun. The plants in the back of the room continue to grow under our fluorescent lamps, trapping any carbon dioxide that wander too close to their chloroplasts, carbon dioxide that arose from the deepest cells of the few animals in the classroom.

Most of the mammals in the area are biding their time, waiting for the sun to hold still in the sky, waiting for it to turn back northward again.

The plants remind me that our breath is real, that what was once part of me is now part of another living being, communion in the classroom.

The sun hardly gets the attention it once did. Not one child in my classroom is the child of a farmer. Not one child in my classroom depends on any harvest within a hundred miles of home.

Every child, though, plants a seed. Every child is reminded what their ancestors knew. A few of them realize what has been lost. Not many, but enough.

It's the enough that carries me through the winter solstice.

Photos by us.

Lunar (yawn) eclipse

In a few moments the Earth's shadow will start to creep across the full moon. While it gives the science news folks something to squawk about, and they do, I suspect events like this turn more than a few children off to astronomy.

Oh, it makes for a nice rusty moon (blood red's a bit of hyperbole), but it takes a bit of time to develop, and shoving children out the door into the chilly December night to see a moon that still looks like a moon hardly sparks a lifelong love of the skies.

A passing meteor might, though....

***

Here's a piece of astronomical news I can chew on. The sun sets a few seconds later today than it did yesterday. We have less sunlight today than yesterday, and will until the solstice on the 22nd, but the sunsets are hanging around 4:29 P.M. in these parts, and won't get any earlier.

It's a nice little puzzle for those who think they get the seasons, an amalgam of our elliptical orbit, our artificial noon, and our fixation on a day exactly 24 hours long. They're not, at least not if you use the sun as your guide.

If you spend most of your time indoors however, and have not noticed the lengthening shadows and the sinking noon sun, then dwelling on why the sun sets earlier today than it will tomorrow becomes a mere mental gymnastic, performed to amuse oneself or others like a dog-and-pony show.

The few kids that do notice these things are often the same kids who crash and burn in high school. If a child even notices these things, what adults around her could even begin to answer them?

***

The sun is never directly overhead here in New Jersey, full moons do not cause aberrant behavior, and the Earth is not farther away from the sun during winters here (it's actually closest in January). That surprises many adults, some who are licensed to teach.

It took me several years of teaching to realize how deeply "science" myths are entrenched in the sulci of our students. What we think is true frames how we perceive the world, literally shaping our reality.

Every minute a child spends under fluorescent lights, every moment she stares at a monitor, every iTune song that threads through her auditory cortex distracts a child from the finite time she has to develop a true relationship with the natural world. 

Science is based on observable phenomena of the natural world. If we want to create more scientists, we need to nourish our children's connection to the rhythms of the natural world. The spectacle of reddish moon once every couple of years makes for good copy, but cannot replace the rhythms of its phases.

Dear public school teachers,
Stop making stuff up,
kthnks

Lunar eclipse sequence from BBC news. 

The woodcut is from The Book of the Moon website.

Blue oyster cultch revisited

Someone stumbled on this old post yesterday, and kindly commented. 
As we celebrate Dr. King's birthday today, it seemed like a good one to repeat....


Organizations love mottoes and mission statements and other sorts of committee-speak that expend lots of time and energy that might actually be used for, say, teaching.

Committees drink lots of coffee, committees fill appointment calendars, committees eventually compromise on some pablum. I never expect committees to spew anything resembling wisdom.

I teach at Bloomfield High. I live in Bloomfield. I grow vegetables in Bloomfield. I scan its skies through the urban glow to see miracles above me. We don't have a ton of money, but we have stoops and more than a few stay at home parents. Many of our children here will work in the family business whatever that may be--painting, masonry, landscaping, plumbing.

While the glorified among us search for bodies to fill the elite skilled positions in life, towns like Bloomfield continue to provide a sturdy class of citizens ready to roll up their sleeves, lend a hand, make a community work. We've got real bakeries, real pizza, real craftsmen (and craftswomen) and real stoops.

The motto for our school district reflects committee-speak:

Educating the Leaders of Tomorrow

Few folks buy it. While Bloomfield has produced a few leaders, even our town's namesake, General Joseph Bloomfield, did not actually live here.

Still, we're not a town of followers either. Connie Francis lived here, Tony Soprano died here, and Sarah Vaughn is buried here. We're Norman Rockwellville with an edge. It's a great place to rear edgy children.

The town supports its schools.

Let me say that again. Bloomfield, a decent but not particularly wealthy town, supports its schools. We pay taxes. We go to the school plays, the games, the art shows. Most of our local taxes go to support our schools, and most adults in town do not have kids in school.

We are not unique that way.

Our high school, however, has its own motto. I'm not sure it's the official town creed, but it's how we live.

So, Mr. Arne Duncan, let me toss my high school's motto your way, a motto painted boldly on a wall next to our arts atrium on the second floor, a wall painted by students on a weekend.

In three words it captures our town, and I think most of the nation not warped by the Wall Street madness that infects so much of our public life today.

Learn to live!

It's right up there, big as day. It's not "Learn to work!" or "Learn to follow!" or "Learn to do Algebra 2! or "Learn to kick India's ass!"

Learn to live.

***

Next week is the HSPA testing. This week the state (again) changed its mind on the curriculum. I can't really blame them--they're trying to train students for corporate jobs that don't yet exist.

When I left school today, a few dozen students were going through our musical's dress rehearsal. A dozen more young women played basketball in front of a hundred or so locals watching our kids in our gymnasium, paid for by us.

A dozen more kids were selling pretzels and candy for the Key Club, money ultimately donated to several local causes involving local people.

Here's a list of companies and foundations not giving us money:

Gates Foundation.

Walton Foundation.

Bruhn-Morris Family Foundation.

Capital One

Cartier

City First Bank

Comcast Cable

Donatelli & Klein

Graham Fund

Hattie M. Strong Foundation

Marpat Foundation

National Geographic

National Home Library Foundation

Payless ShoeSource Foundation

Radio One

The Sallie Mae Fund

Susan W. Agger Family Fund of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region

Target Stores

The Washington Post Educational Foundation

Learn to live.

***

If I wasn't under the NCLB gun to get my kids through the HSPA, here's a lesson I might teach my lambs--the history of oystering in the United States.

We all have property rights independent of whatever patch of land the few of us might be lucky enough to own.

We all own a piece of public land, the commons. We all have a stake in the "public trust doctrine"--we, as citizens, have rights allowing us to gain access to water and land that we do not individually own.

I can gather oysters on the Delaware Bay without interference (beyond applying for a license and spitting out $10). Without the public trust doctrine, I am nothing more than a pirate (which would be way cool, of course).

I have this right because a few folks braver than me fought on the Mullica River back in 1907. Two hundred or so oystermen fought against the few who were among the privileged.

You won't read about this in any high school history textbook. You won't read much about the coal wars fought by miners, or Tom the Tinkerer (Whiskey Rebellion). Kids learn about the Boston Tea Party without grasping its anti-corporate thrust.

A child can go through school in Jersey without learning a thing about how to get an oyster just a few miles away from her classroom while being forced to learn the quadratic equation if she wants to earn a diploma.

Oystering melds biology and history and craftsmanship and industrial arts and nutrition and, perhaps most important, citizenship. The story reminds us how we, as American citizens, serve as the foundation of the Great Experiment.

HSPA won't test this. It's not in the biology curriculum. It's not in the history curriculum. It's not in the industrial arts curriculum.

Still, it matters. And I teach in a town that still recognizes this.

***

Oysters live on oyster beds. They cannot live on bare sand or mud--they'd suffocate.

When I pull a few oysters off a bed, I just about always pull a few off that are too small too eat. Oysters wrap themselves around each other, and pulling one involves pulling several.

When I get a handful of oysters, I break off the small ones and toss them back to the bed. Oysters pile on top of oysters which pile on top of oysters.

The cultch is the pile of shells and debris that allow oysters to continue to reproduce. Oysters need hard surfaces, oysters need calcium. When I toss my tiny oysters back, I am helping the community to survive.

I cannot oyster on Sundays, but I usually return to the beds anyway, to toss back the shells of the oysters I ate the day before.

I could throw them in the garbage. A truck comes by every week to pick up most anything I want to throw away.

My oysters were alive Friday. I killed them Saturday. On Sunday, I return the shells to the bed. The flesh of the oysters is a true gift, unearned.

I was born in America yesterday. I reap the benefits today. I hope to give back to the children what I have enjoyed. Living in America, our America, is a true gift, unearned.

The least I can do is prepare the bed for future generations.

My bias is, obviously, oysters. The American story can be told by weavers, by farmers, by miners, by carpenters, told by soldiers.

Our story is local.
Our story is real.
Our story matters.

I do not recognize the American Diploma Project as citizens, despite the name; I do not recognize multinational corporations as American; I do not believe that CEOs of multinationals have my town's interests at heart.

I cannot think globally. No one can. It's a lie. I can imagine a village here, a city there, but imagining a global village is like imagining a million deaths--both become abstract piles of numbers . I can imagine, however, a single child dying. We all can. We're human.

Get your butt outside, get to know your neighbors. Get involved with your school district's curriculum.

I'll take care of the oyster cultch. You take care of what matters in your neighborhood.

And if you think your neighbor is worthy of teaching your children your local history, get involved in education.

ATT isn't going to take care of you when you're old or ill, but your neighbor will.

Photo by Leslie.

Late December on the beach

A late December walk on the beach, feet exposed to sand and snow and sea, fixes just about anything.

I found a live pipefish on the edge of the sea today. I tossed the writhing critter back into the surf, saw its silhouette in a wave just before it broke, swimming along the surface, then saw it no more.

Every walk on the beach is different, every walk reveals something new, every walk renews the human animal that houses my mind, that is my mind.

There is nothing abstract about a tiny fish tossed at your feet on a December beach. No truths to be revealed, no alliances to build, no money spent.

Just a fish on the wet sand, now cupped in my hands, now swimming in the crystal green crest of a wave highlighted by a late December sun, then nothing.

I have never seen a bored child by the ocean's edge.

How do I bring that back to class?

Both pictures ours, taken today, the shell on the Atlantic, the setting sun on the Delaware Bay.

The fire within

I warmed myself up tonight, shoveling snow off a patch of concrete. Orion, lying awkwardly on his back, shivered above as he aimed his bow at Taurus snorting high in the southeastern sky. On my way back in, I grabbed a handful of Brussels sprouts, plucked off the plant now surrounded by snow.

Winter is here, as good a reason as any to talk about our inner fire.

***

I love blasting my propane torch, flashing flame on steel faucets, a blush of condensation dulling the metal, water from fire. (Yep, a lit propane torch emits water--go ahead, check for yourself.)

Electrons trapped in high energy states tumble into the welcoming arms of oxygen, screaming with delight, releasing light and heat as they settle into their pajamas, ready for rest.

Yes, of course, I broke a few rules there. And, yes, of course, it's not quite accurate.

It's closer than you might realize.

***

Our cells need oxygen gas for one reason only--to accept electrons released from food as they travel down their energy gradients, settling into basal states of energy.

The oxygen accept the electrons (and associated protons) to form water. This happens in the innermost regions of our mitochondria, ancient critters subsumed by our forbears.

When you get down to it, we really don't need oxygen at all. Our mitochondrial slaves need it. If a cell doesn't have mitochondria, it has no need for oxygen.

Our red blood cells, designed to carry oxygen, use none of it themselves. They have no mitochondria, no need for oxygen. That's why you can keep RBC's packed in plastic bags waiting to be transfused.

***

Mitochondria are organelles, membrane wrapped particles in your cells that help convert food into a useful form of energy called ATP. Think of ATP as cash energy--no matter where you need a shot of energy in a cell, ATP can provide it.

(ATP works by adding instability to compounds--it's like when your crazy Aunt Margarita crashes onto the Thanksgiving table. Things are going to happen.....)

Mitochondria have their own DNA, most closely related to bacteria than to you. They reproduce on their own. They are an ancient life form that have been coexisting with larger cells for a long, long time.

This is so freaky I don't think it registers with most of my students. Mitochondria allow us to "burn" food down to carbon dioxide and water, releasing the energy caught by chloroplasts in plants.

***

What is fire? What happens to the fuel, to the oxygen?

Most adults here cannot answer this question, and it's pointless if your goal is to make money or get the girl or glom power.

Children love the question, and I doubt most ever get a decent answer. Heck, I know my students don't.

We teach chemistry as if it was handed down by Moses himself, the 10 Commandments in one hand, the Periodic Table of Elements in the other. I show them over and over and over again that water comes from a flame, and few can remember this two minutes after the demo is done.

***

Oxygen gas gets to your mitochondria by bouncing randomly around the inside of a cell. Since most of our cells burn a lot of food, their oxygen concentration is low relative to the fluid bathing them.

Just as fart molecules bumble their way across the room to embarrass their producer, oxygen molecules bounce around inside cells until they wander into a mitochondrion.

Red blood cells carry the oxygen molecules through our vessels, and they get dumped off where the oxygen concentration is lowest, needed only by the mitochondria, to produce the ATP needed to keep us alive.

This all happens very, very fast.

How fast? Cyanide blocks electrons from reaching oxygen inside the mitochondria. killing within minutes.

No oxygen, no fire, no life.

I have felt bodies quickly cool moments after death, no longer warmed by the trillions of mitochondrial furnaces within.

The shot of Orion is by John Gauvreau found at NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day."

Mitochondrion photo from Allen L. Bell, Ph.D, UNE COM here.

Yuletide daphnia

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

Jane Kenyon, from "Happiness"

Daphnia!

My glass kettle of pond water sits on the windowsill, where it has for years. Were I an empiricist, I'd have deduced years ago that life springs spontaneously from water and light. Thankfully, I'm a 21st century mythologist, and glibly accept what others tell me.

It's the secret to success in my field.

***

It's easy to get cranky during Christmas. We have words, which tailor our memories, and our culture focuses on what we don't. Our economy depends on this.

We run and run and run and run and run, chasing what?

If we cannot grasp the cycles at the solstice, we are lost.
If we cannot feel the daylight shift, shadows changing, we are lost.
If we cannot take the time to share our stories with our families, with others, we are lost.

I saw an exuberant daphnia swim as the setting sun shed a ray through the tank. I waited a minute, then another. Another daphnia.

In a week or two, I may have hundreds, or thousands.

***

Daphnia can reproduce without sex. When life's fine, the females can clone themselves in a reproductive frenzy.

When things get a little tougher, the males appear. Sex begets variety. When things are good again, the males die out. Males are more trouble than they're worth when things are good.

This all happens in a 5 gallon tank that's been sitting on my sill for years.

I don't know what kind of lessons this teaches, but it does make Wall Street seem a bit silly.

***

I teach for a lot of reasons, and many of them are important, I think hope, but the primary reason I teach is pure selfishness.

How much time do you spend with young adults?

They're energetic, bright, skeptical, bundles of joy. That they continue to come to school, every day, no matter what nonsense awaits them, speaks to their optimism.

I'm no Pollyanna. Pediatrics teaches even the giddiest docs that much of life is phenomenally unfair. You try pumping adriamycin, big red, into the veins of a child, knowing you're destroying much of a child in hopes of destroying all of a tumor. I know what it is to kill hope. I left medicine, but the shadows of dead and dying children have not left me.

Still, my students skirt around ideas like daphnia in the solstice sunlight.

None of us knows why we like to dance anymore than the daphnia I watch jitterbugging in the dusk's light. Few of us dare ask. Fewer dare dance.

Humans have celebrated the return of the light for thousands of years.

Take a few moments to watch a starling, a squirrel, a sparrow, a daphnia. We share the same chemistry, the same dependence on light, and (I suspect) the same joy. Let the lights and the music and the joy wash over you.

Happy First Day of Winter. Merry Yule! The crocuses will be breaking through the earth in two months.

Until then, I'll share my joy with the daphnia and anything else that has a beating heart.

Photo from the Daphnia Genetics Consortium, Indiana University

6:38 P.M.

6:38 P.M. here--the sun stood still, shifted its mass^*, and headed back north.

6 months ago, when we sat on the opposite side of the sun, I celebrated the summer solstice, a joy tinged with the weight of knowing the sun would start its slow, long course southward.

Winter is only hours old, and winters can be brutal here. The light, however is returning.

When I was a child, winter meant cold, summer heat. I did not, could not, grasp why the elders got so excited late December, at the cusp of winter, when we faced long wintry days.

I get it now.

***

I stood outside last night in the chill with my youngest, now a quarter century old, watching our shadow drift across the moon, a wavering copper-gold washing in from the moon's left.

My mom used to tell me she could see me as an infant even as I stood before her as a man. I laughed, of course. I am big--over 200# big.

I get it now.

***

I still give tests, more out of habit than sense now. Performance on science tests a few days before the Christmas break follow a predictable pattern, and my students did not fail to fail.

We do a lot of things because we do them. If mastery's the goal, then a class average of low 70's with a bell-shaped curve, a science teacher's dream a generation ago, marks my failure.

On my board today two-foot numbers announced the time of the solstice--6:38 P.M. Solstice literally means the sun stands still.

Very few students notice how far the sun has shifted since class started just 3 1/2 months ago. There's no need. Food comes in boxes, heat in radiators. The whole world of technique is magic to them.

In Ireland this morning, the sun rose, as it has, as it will. A shaft of sunlight flashed through a chamber in Newgrange built thousands of years ago, before the Great Pyramids, before the Celts arrived, before Stone Henge.

We will not study this in science, nor will our students study this in history class. We will create a class ready for the 21st century, for the abstract, for a culture that confuses bank profits with economy.

***

If children owned the winter solstice, the dying light, knowing what waits for each of us before a 100 winter solstices pass, would they come to school?

Would you?

I believe schools can be worth the time children invest in them. I am not convinced we're there yet.

At least not as long as I keep practicing education as religion, using a script written generations before me.



*The sun may indeed change direction if we use Earth as the reference point, but "shifted its mass" is, of course, incorrect, since it implies uneven forces were applied to it. Since I have yet to find a better explanation for "mass" beyond "the amount of inertia stuff has," even a poetic license does not give me permission to spew such nonsense.

Quahogs in winter

The water is cool now, 42° F.

I sit in my warm home, the Christmas tree lit, with various sea ornaments hung from the balsam tree. Sharks, shells, crabby crustaceans, dolphins, and even penguins swim through the fir green branches

Outside my quahogs sit in Richardson Sound, dormant now, waiting for the sun to return, to warm up the shallow waters that feed the back bay mud.

Last week I cast into a strong breeze, the waves crashing on the beach, the foam rising to my feet.

One bump, no fish. The steel skies would have shamed El Greco with their beauty. The breakers glowed against the gray water. No one else was on the beach. No one.

The sand pipers skittered about my feet, ignoring my presence, glomming what few calories they could on the cold edge of the sea. A loon surfaced, glanced my way, then glooped back under the gray water.

***

The quahogs are home, as they will always be. A clam might move a few feet here, a few feet there, maybe an inch or two for every year of its long, long life.

We struggle against deadlines, we eat food from fields we cannot imagine, we drive using sunlight caught millions of years ago, and we race across time chasing time.


And my clams rest in the mud, eating, growing, being, in the dark mud inches below the cold bay floor.



One day I will eat my last quahog. The great mystery, one too nebulous to discuss in polite company, is this--why is there a last one?

Have I already eaten it?

Above is the Lady Mary, a local scallop boat that sank under mysterious circumstances March 24, 2009, killing 6 scallopers, possibly hit by a passing freighter. That's me just under the bow.

The Lady Mary now rests on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, 200 feet of water over her. Scallops still appear in the market, every day. The names of the fallen fishermen will be carved in the Fisherman's Memorial, overlooking the harbor, where they will join too many others.

***

Dinner tonight helps me claw through the winter dark. Pesto made from basil picked months ago, Brussels sprouts just picked last week.

I want to live like the clam, resting in the rich muddy bottom, eating by the grace of the sea, by the Grace of God. The tide rises, the tide falls--my faith straining every few hours as the whole sea slips away, twice a day.

Like the clam, I have faith the sun will rise tomorrow, as it has, and that I will be here to see it. Unlike the clam, though, I do not have the sense to slow down with the dying light.

The pictured quahogs were harvested in November, along with the tomatoes.
Leslie took the picture of the Lady Mary in port. The other was taken by Bradley Sheard, found in The Star-Ledger

Dying light

I tossed some metal into the Atlantic surf for about an hour today. The sun has settled low in the south. Gashes of December light broke through the wintry gray clouds. Even the midday shadows are long now.

The chilly brine bathed my feet as I cast. It may be time for boots.



The sun sets at 4:29 PM today, as early as it will for the year. The shortest day arrives in a couple of weeks.

I pulled the last tomato off the vine today, tinged pink on dull green. It froze last night, and had the consistency of pumpkin pulp. I spit most of it out, and tossed the rest back in the garden.

We're down to kale and Brussels sprouts now, then we are done.

***

I pray the sun comes back.

But just in case it doesn't, the prayer is one of thanks, for what was.
I am seeing Galway Kinnell again in just a few days.

Last time I saw him, he was the age I am now. He wrote of love, and loss, and timelessness.
Now he is three decades older, as I am, and he still writes of love, and loss, and timelessness.

He reminds those of us getting through life that there is no "through." Talking to his young daughter Maud, he talks to all of us:

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

If I keep thinking of cycles and orbits and tides and the spin of electrons in invisible particles, if I keep chanting about redox equations and hydrolysis and the Gibbs free energy in the classroom, I miss what is herenow.

I tried to capture a December rose in the fading light with a camera, to share. But I can no more share this than share time itself.

Galway reminds me of this every time I read or hear his words.

He knows, he knows, and yet he writes of what we cannot believe.

We all make the same mistake, we all "commit...the error of thinking, one day all this will only be a memory."

***

Leslie worries that I might someday wander around barefoot too long on the beach, in the snow. She's right to worry, of course. I can get distracted outdoors long enough for incipient ice crystals to tear open my cells with their intricate patterns.

I don't need to worry yet. The water temperature is still in the high 40's--my feet feel warm when washed by the sea when the air is as chilly as it is today.

Back inside, I worry about what might have been. When I am outside, there is no "what might have been." Just sound and light and smell and touch.

I'm not sure ""Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight" would have made much sense to me the last time I saw Galway Kinnell read, decades ago, shortly before I held my own child in my arms, before the filament of life passed from me and Leslie to two lovely people who, should our prayers be answered, breathe long after we're dead.

It makes sense now.

The lines by Galway Kinnell come from "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight," from The Book of Nightmares.

The widening gyre

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, from "The Second Coming"

The dark days. Again.

My imagination fails me, as it will, surrounded by human light, human sounds, human smells. I cannot remember the smell of honeysuckle or the soft glow of lightning bugs or the warmth that wrapped around me in early summer.

I keep a small jar of rich soil dug from my compost pile on my desk in school. Now and then, in the middle of class, I take a whiff. The children see my joy I get from the earthy aroma.

My lambs know by December that I want them to have happy, useful lives. They know I want this for every one of them.

Why else bother teaching?

***

Thomas Jefferson got the tone just right when he penned "the pursuit of happiness." It is not an idle phrase, though it does sound a bit embarrassing in context of the modern classroom, the modern office, the modern mall.

Jefferson lived before we learned how to distract ourselves with twisted visions of immortality. We have become our own gods. Mortal illness comes as a surprise, dismissed as an inconvenience. Our cultural psychosis belittles those among us who dare to expose our mortality--if they only believed hard enough, they would be cured.

Ironically, the generation closest to achieving immortality is least equipped to deal with it. Time spent on-line chasing zombies or aliens or a Nazi nation long since quelled hardly seems worth all the fuss.

We no longer seek a life worth living. We'd just rather avoid death.

Death is inevitable. Pursuing happiness is not.

***

I sound sanctimonious. Would I drink from the Fountain of Youth? Of course, and for the wrong reasons.

I want to see what happens next, I want to breathe the air of a thousand Junes, I want, I want, and I want some more, and I miss the moment, this moment, the only moment that has ever existed. My fear of what awaits robs me of the joy of the present.

***

Yesterday one of my students came running up to me with a pot of tiny basil plants she had sowed a few weeks before.

"Smell it! Smell it!"

I did. And I glowed. Growing a plant in a classroom fits in the curriculum. A child sharing her joy at its sensuousness is not.

The seed, no larger than the head of a pin, darker than a cloudy December night, grew in a pot of peat. Shiny green leaves erupted from the seeds, now effusively shedding aromatic molecules that made me grin in December.

Something from nothing, at least nothing we could see. The poets have something to say, but so do the biologists. The aroma released from the leafs was made of carbon captured from the breaths of the same student clutching the pot.

If you've never sown a seed before, this is a big deal. If you've sown seeds for much of your life, it's still a big deal.

A hundred years from now, the human world may be very different, but seeds will still grow when planted.

***

None of us know what this world is all about. A few among us will tell you to live a certain way in order to reach worlds that no one has seen. A few among us will tell our children to live a certain way to strengthen abstract concepts like country, or economy, or success.

Success is a slippery word, but happiness is not. You know when you're happy, even when you're not sure how you got there.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--how many of these fit into your district's curriculum? How many fit in your classroom?

If we continue to raise our kids for a better economy, a better nation, a better world while neglecting their inalienable right to their pursuit of happiness, we risk the "blood-dimmed tide" Yeats spoke of.

Happiness is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.
Mortality is not happenstance, nor is it trivial.

Why did you walk into your classroom today? Did you give your lambs at least as good as reason?

Photos are mine, and yours (CC, yadda yadda)....