Worst Teacher Ever

When I got out of the Navy after my enlistment ended on July 17th, 1998, I was excited about the prospect of going back to college. When the Fall semester began in September of that year, I had already enrolled again at Valdosta State University, ready to finish the English degree I had abandoned four years earlier only a couple of semesters short of graduating. Thankful to be back in school, I threw myself into my studies and made straight A's in college for the first time ever. Two semesters later, I had completed my English degree, but then had to decide what to do with it. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but also wished to pay my bills. With that in mind, I decided to give teaching a shot.

In my family, especially among the women, teaching has certainly been the profession of choice. My mother, both of my aunts, my grandmothers on both sides, and my sister all became teachers. So it didn't seem much of a stretch for me to become one as well. In hindsight, maybe I put a little too much stock in the power of genes. I should have thought more about my personality in comparison to the average teacher. I have never been accused of being an extrovert, and teaching is probably one of the most extroverted professions out there. On top of that, I decided to pursue secondary education rather than middle school or elementary thinking that although the students would be more challenging, the subject matter would also be more stimulating.

In spite of the fact that the idea of teaching terrified me from the beginning, I ignored my doubts, and pursued the teaching ed classes I needed with abandon. I made A's in all of them, but none, as far as I could tell, had much to do with actually teaching. They tended to address the theories of teaching, but little about what the profession would involve from a practical standpoint. I impressed my adviser, a little old lady named Dr. Strickland, so thoroughly with my top notch grades that she went well out of her way to help me get a teaching job at a large high school in Thomasville, GA almost as soon as I'd earned my teaching certificate. She was a well known figure in the area, and her shining recommendation to the school principal basically got me hired before I even interviewed.

I accepted the job even though I still had little confidence that I could actually do it. I even expressed my reservations to Dr. Strickland in an email a few weeks before the school year began. I told her that I knew there was a lot of difference between taking classes about how to teach and actually teaching, and that I was concerned about my ability to project lessons to students in the way that teachers are supposed to. She pooh-poohed my doubts and told me I was one of the best students she'd had come through her program, and that she believed I would make an outstanding teacher.

I tried to take heart in her confidence in me. I decorated my classroom to make it seem like a spirited and positive place in the days before the kids came. I made an outline of what I planned to teach throughout the school year. I read a large portion of the text book and brainstormed about creative ways I might present the material to my classes. I was assigned three "intermediate" tenth grade classes and two "basic" ninth grade ones. The intermediates were considered to be on the vocational track, and the basics were considered to be a step above special ed. The three tenth grade classes had about 25-30 students while the two ninth grade ones had about 15 apiece.

From the very first day, I knew I was in over my head. I remember standing in front of them doing my best to hide my nervousness, and trying to keep my voice from shaking. Nervous sweat rolled from my underarms. One of the students was moved to ask me, "Are you shy, Mr. Parramore?" "No, of course not, I lied."

I expected the kids to be loud and rowdy, but the extent of their loudness and rowdiness took me entirely off guard. The first few days, I naively allowed them to sit where they wanted in my class, thinking that happy students would be productive as well. But it quickly became obvious that this was a bad idea. They all sat next to their friends and made my classes their personal social hour. On the third day, I had them sit in alphabetical order, and they responded with hostility. Every time I turned my back, one would move back to the seat he or she preferred. I quickly grew tired of telling them to return to their assigned seats over and over, but didn't want to be the kind of teacher who spent all his class time haranguing students about their behavior. I tried my best to explain why a seating chart was necessary, and asked them to please work with me, but it was obvious they didn't care to listen to reason. They just wanted to sit next to their friends and have a good time.

From there, things only deteriorated. It seemed that the harder I tried to take control of my classroom, the more determined they became to prevent it. Their level of learning seemed as bad as their behavior. Their writing skills seemed more on par with fifth or sixth graders than ninth and tenth. There were a few who were barely literate. I felt that to teach them anything I would have to go back to very basic rules of writing and grammar. The only problem with that was that I was helpless to get them to listen to anything I said. Although it seemed a hopeless struggle, I toiled from the time I got up until the time I went to bed every day, and the weekends were spent grading papers that seemed to multiply in front of me.

To say they were disinterested in my class would be an understatement. Whether they made an A or an F on a paper seemed to hardly matter. I would overhear them talking about parties they were going to over the weekend and all the gossip about what so-and-so was doing with someone's boyfriend/girlfriend. I had at least three female students who missed time due to being pregnant. When they returned to school, they came armed with pictures of their newborn and any semblance of class would be impossible until all my students had properly oohed and ahhed over them. I also had a group of African-American boys in my third period class who would break out in spontaneous rap songs, and girls who thought nothing of making cell phone class. My fourth period featured a group of boys who specialized in shouting curse words when my back was turned and making high pitched animal sounds.

It seemed I spent half my class time telling students to stay in their desks and otherwise attempting to correct their behavior. I tried making behavioral contracts, giving detention to misbehaving kids,shaming them into behaving more respectfully, sending them to the office, even talking to them one on one after class on occasion. But nothing worked. My classes were a zoo, and unfortunately I wasn't some character out of Lean on Me or Stand and Deliver who possessed the power to change their ways.

I felt I had made a horrible mistake in my choice of profession, and began to dread the coming of every school day as if it were an impending appointment with a medieval torture device. When Dr. Strickland came to observe me about twelve weeks into the school year, I knew it was going to be a disaster, and that there was nothing to be done but grin and bear it. It went as badly as I'd feared. Dr. Strickland, myself, the assistant principal, and Mrs. Lewis, my so-called mentor teacher, who seemed to be wholly indifferent to my struggles, all met with me. The consensus of the meeting was that in an effort to gain control of my classroom, I would read some books about classroom discipline and management, observe some other teachers during my planning period, and begin wearing a tie to work so the kids might see me as more of an authority figure. I agreed to do all of these things, but knew it wouldn't help. My problem was not a lack of knowledge, but an inability to apply it. 

I did everything they asked, but nothing changed. I knew by Christmas break that there was no way I was coming back for another year even in the unlikely event they asked me to. Until then, I had worked myself to exhaustion to achieve nothing but futility. I stayed at the school until five or five thirty on many afternoons trying to plan things so they might go better the next day, and then went home to grade papers. During the Christmas break, I decided to change tactics. I would leave school as soon as possible in the afternoons, and not do a shred of grading after work. What I didn't finish grading would just have to go in the trash. I decided if I was going to endure a torture chamber for seven and a half hours a day, I would enjoy my life otherwise.

So that's what I did. I began a pretty strenuous workout routine no doubt partly fueled by my frustrations at work, and enjoyed it to the hilt. The second half of the year went slightly better simply because I'd taken the pressure off myself. The kids were still just as bad, but I began the policy of simply kicking them out of the classroom if they became disruptive. I knew sending them to the office did no good because they were sent right back with a note saying they'd been seen without any word of action taken. I decided to have no tolerance for behavior I didn't care for. It might not have been the best plan, but it was all I could think of, and it seemed to actually help.

I knew by the way the administration completely ignored me during the last half of the year that they weren't going to offer me a contract for a second year. This was a relief because in spite of everything, I knew it would be hard for me to tell them I was quitting if given a choice. I've always had a difficult time quitting anything, even when I know it's for my own good. Also, during the second part of the year, after I had given up, there were snippets of time when I almost enjoyed the job, and realized what people who liked teaching got out of it. These were moments when a student seemed to actually learn what I'd been teaching in spite of everything. But when the last day of the school year finally came, I have rarely been so happy although I had no idea what to do next. I figured I would think of something.

Only a few days into the summer, I received a call from the assistant principal at another school in the area. She told me Dr. Strickland had recommended me for an opening there, and wanted to know if I was interested. I wondered how in the world Dr. Strickland could possibly recommend me for another job after the disaster she had witnessed in my classroom. I thought about it for about five seconds.

"No thank you," I told her. "I'm not planning on teaching any more." I hung up the phone and went back to sleep without the slightest tinge of regret.


In spite of the fact that my one and only year of teaching was an utter disaster, a few good things came out of it. First of all, I knew for sure that teaching was something I did not want to do, so I didn't have to wonder if I did any more or not. It also gave me a perspective about the difficult lives many young people have growing up that I had never before appreciated. I can also tell anyone all there is to know about To Kill a Mockingbird, Julius Caesar, Greek Mythology, and pretty much everything else I taught that year. My students might not have learned much, I certainly did.

Ten years have passed since that year, and now as a mental health counselor at a state prison, I conduct various psycho-educational and therapy groups for the inmates there. I always feel extremely anxious about teaching these groups no matter how many times I do it. It reminds me a little too much of teaching. But once I'm there in front of them, things generally go well. I try to keep it as informal as possible simply because I feel more comfortable that way, and it's actually one of the parts of my job I enjoy the most. The inmates' behavior is usually infinitely better than the kids in my classes.


One day, about three years after my teaching debacle, I had a job working at an amusement park to help pay my way through grad school. I was walking back into the park after my lunch break and heard someone yell, "Hey Mr. Parramore," from about a hundred yards away. I looked up and saw a blond kid walking towards me with a couple of other guys. They were landscapers working on the grounds around the park, and I had no idea how the kid knew my name until he was a couple of feet from me, and I recognized him as one of the more mischievous kids in my ninth grade class during that Hellish year.

The kid introduced me to the guys he was with and said, "Mr. Parramore, did you know you were the nicest teacher I ever had?"

I could only smile and feel more touched than I probably should have. "Thanks," I said. "I had no idea."

I might have been the nicest, I felt like telling him. But I was also probably the worst.

The Young Man's Last Tale

"In my world," the Young Man began.

He opened his mouth to say more, but when he looked at those gathered at the vast round table, he found himself unable to speak. He blinked back tears and studied their faces. They waited patiently for him to continue. He felt truly young for the first time among them. In the past, he'd sometimes behaved arrogantly and rude towards them, not respecting the wisdom they had gathered through their many millenia of experience. Now, he was humbled.

Most of them had seen so much more than he. Their experiences had shaped them so that they never seemed too high or too low. But he had never felt lower than he did now. He felt it to his core. He wondered if he'd ever find the neutral place of most of his elders, and even if he really wanted to. He'd always taken pride in his passion, and felt that to abandon it for stability would be to lose himself completely. But perhaps that was how they survived.

They met like this every million years or so although none of them knew exactly why, and the meetings were never planned in advance. But the time would come, and they would find themselves here again, seated at the round table, speaking or not speaking as they chose. In the past, he had crackled with an energy that was the envy of everyone. They were drawn to his boldness, his imagination, and the sheer vision he'd created for his world. He'd shown them the life he'd made there--the way his plan had allowed it to thrive in such abundance across his world, the endless variety of his creations and how they multiplied until they covered nearly every inch of it. Even in the deepest caverns below the darkest oceans, life flourished. Even in the highest peaks of the coldest mountains, it persisted.

From the beginning, he'd had a grand vision for his world and patiently waited for it to evolve into his expectations. At first, it had been little more than a seething, boiling, freezing rock where cataclysmic collisions with celestial objects were a constant occurrence. But in time, it cooled. The collisions slowed to a rate that allowed his world to achieve the stability it needed to flourish.

He remembered how he'd watched so breathlessly when the first vestiges of life formed deep within a hypothermic vent of that prehistoric ocean. He'd held his breath watching that single cell replicate into another. He'd known it wasn't much compared to the awesome abundance of advanced life created by many of his peers, but this was his world. This was life on his world! He'd set it all up so meticulously in anticipation of this event, and yet still when it happened...it seemed like a miracle.

From that single cell, life spread not like wildfire, but like a swarm of wildfires. It was the most ambitious, single-minded, tenacious thing he had ever witnessed. He knew he had been the one to set the variables in place, but had not anticipated its power. In a few thousand years, that single replicated cell had changed the landscape of his world from a drab, dusty place into one of a maelstrom of colors, where creatures of all shapes and sizes flew, ran, slithered, crawled, and swam across its surface.

The Young Man had been content and satisfied with his world for billions of years before something happened that attracted his attention like nothing else before it. He watched as a new kind of life took hold of his world. This too had been part of the vision of his original design, but like life itself, it seemed a miracle to witness it taking shape. From furry creatures that swung from the trees of thick jungles, they changed into hairless beasts that walked the land on two feet. They had hands able to manipulate their environment, and brains with the ability to adapt and thrive in the harshest of climates. In time, these creatures developed the quality he had been waiting for.

Consciousness--the ability to be aware of themselves as nothing else on his world had before. They used this talent to master their environment to a level that no other creature before them had ever approached. In time, they emerged from the shelter of caves to form villages and later towns and cities. As they progressed, they accomplished amazing things the Young Man had not foreseen. They were creatures of unparalleled productivity, but at once, even from the beginning, he saw their powers of destruction were at least as great.

As the technologies they invented became more and more powerful, as their tools evolved from stone axes into telescopes capable of seeing half the Universe and flying machines that could take them around the world in a few hours, the Young Man was at once amazed and terrified by this creature he had, by his own hand, set into motion. He wanted to warn them to slow down. There was no need to hurry. They could be the masters of this world forever. There was no need to destroy one another over petty differences. He wished they would follow the examples of some of his other creatures. They were content to be where they were. They simply took life as it came with no worries for the future and no particular dissatisfaction with their lives.

But he also knew these "humans" as they called themselves were simply following the blueprint that made them great to begin with. He was often tempted to help them get along with one another more harmoniously, to try to convince them of the foolishness of many of their actions. But he could not. It was understood that none of his kind ever interfered after they had set their world in motion. They were watchers, and most watched their creations with detached interest. But the Young Man was different. He loved his creations. He felt they were extensions of himself, and he experienced their joys and sorrows as intensely as his own.

His humans soon became so numerous they could barely sustain themselves. The gases released from  many of their production plants clogged the atmosphere in a blanket so thick, the world began to suffocate beneath its own stored heat. At the same time, numerous bloody wars broke out between the humans' nations as the resources needed to sustain them dwindled because of their sheer numbers. There were those among the humans who stepped forward to try to end the violence and to suggest ways they might share their resources without fighting or killing. These were wise men and women whom The Young Man applauded, but they were inevitably shouted down by the rabble who only wanted things to return to how they used to be, and believed they were entitled to it because their race, religion, or nationality was superior.

In spite of everything, The Young Man believed until the end that his humans would adapt. They always had before. When problems arose, they found solutions. That had been the human way from the beginning. When the melting Arctic glaciers caused flooding in a place called New York City that drowned nearly a million people, and when one of the most powerful typhoons in all the worlds' history, fueled by the overly warm Pacific Ocean, destroyed Tokyo, and when the countries called Pakistan and India were annihilated by nuclear bombs, he thought they would cease the violence. Rationality would prevail and mankind would rise above its violent nature once again in order that it might survive and continue to prosper. And for a time,  it did.

A single governing body was formed to guide mankind through its greatest crisis. A brilliant, wise, and kind man was named President of this government, and he began to take authoritative steps to put the world back on the right direction. People heralded him as the Great Peacemaker, and after all the warfare and man-created natural disasters, it appeared that all the nations of the world were finally ready to come together to solve their problems. But the tenuous hopes of mankind were so fragile that when the President was assassinated by a mentally unstable zealot, everything he had built fell apart like a house of cards. The wars began anew, and soon the entire world became enveloped in conflict. Nuclear detonations and deaths on a scale never before witnessed in human history became a daily occurrence.

When the violence finally spent itself, the human population was drastically reduced, and many of those that were left died slowly of radiation poisoning, epidemics of every description, and starvation. The few million who were left eventually fled underground. All the technology they had gathered for centuries was lost. All the art and beauty created by human imagination was destroyed. The ruins of their cities were poisonous, smoking wastelands where nothing stirred in the day, and only the heartiest predators emerged at night. The civilization mankind had taken thousands of years to build was obliterated in less than a decade. Those humans who were left were forced to burrow underground to survive.

Watching them, the Young Man knew he had been finally right after all. His humans, the creatures of whom he was the most proud, whom he loved like himself, had survived in spite of everything--even in the face of their own penchant for self-destruction. He watched his survivors grow in strength and numbers as the years passed. A century went by before they dared to live on the Earth's surface again. They formed colonies and their numbers began to grow once more, slowly at first and then exponentially faster.

New cities began to appear in the world. They lacked the grandeur of their predecessors--humble buildings made of stone and hardened dirt--but cities just the same. The sight of them filled the Young Man's heart with more hope than he'd felt in a very long time. Perhaps the violence of their past was only a stage--like a tumultuous adolescence followed by a responsible adulthood.

But then the new human colonies began to feud over the boundaries of their land and who should control the still meager resources of their scorched world. The feuds erupted into wars, and before the Young Man's disbelieving eyes, his humans were killing themselves again. It was then that he finally understood that these people would never learn. They were eternally flawed, and he could really blame no one but himself. If he'd only set those initial variables up a little differently, then surely the outcome would have been different. If they could have only retained the tenacious, ingenious qualities that had made them masters of their world without the selfish, entitled, self-destructive streak that was their undoing.

For centuries, he'd watched them destroy themselves again and again, and every war was like a fresh barb to his soul. Even after they'd reduced their world to rubble and poisoned it nearly beyond repair in the process, they still could not move past their impulse to fight and murder one another. The Young Man felt rage building within him and was overcome by a desire to punish his creations--to do more than punish them--to annihilate them so thoroughly he would never have to watch them repeat their pathetic pattern of self destruction again. In his rage, he found a very large asteroid floating harmlessly in the reaches of space, and he flung it with all his strength at the world he loved.

The asteroid struck somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean with the force of a million atom bombs. A shock wave flowed from the impact, destroying everything in its path for thousands of miles in every direction. The most powerful earthquakes and tidal waves the world had ever experienced rocked the land in the aftermath of the explosion. Great clouds of dust and ash rose into the sky, blocking the light from the sun so thickly that the Earth became a frigid, icy place where only the most few organisms could possibly survive. Humans were not one of them. Their revived civilization was utterly destroyed, and as the new ice age persisted, they went from an endangered species to becoming completely extinct.

As the Young Man watched the last human on his world die, he grieved as he had never grieved before. Why had he let his anger get the best of him? he asked himself. He'd broken his vow to never interfere with his world, and in the process, he'd destroyed the beings he'd come to love. He tried to tell himself it was for the best. They were impetuous, impulsive creatures who could never get out of their own way. They were doomed to doing nothing but destroying themselves over and over again. He had only put them out of their misery. But he knew he was fooling himself. He couldn't reconcile his actions. How could he have done such a thing? Why had he let them anger him so much that he'd broken a sacred vow to punish them?

*******************

He gathered himself, blinking away his tears and prepared to address the round table again. But the expressions on their faces told him they'd already seen everything that had happened in his mind. Some regarded him with pity while others stared at him with accusing faces. But the faces of the oldest were inscrutable.

The eldest of them, the one they called The Old Man, pronounced his punishment in two terse sentences. "You have broken the vow," he said. "You will no longer sit among us." He rose to leave, and was quickly joined by many others. To the Young Man,  they all looked so bored. It was their boredom and not the pronouncement of his exile that angered him.

He stood and yelled at them "What would any of you have done?" he said.

"Nothing, of course," one of them answered. "That is what we do. We set a world in motion and then we let it go." Bewildered by the question, the man shook his head and left.

"But it's not enough!" the Young Man roared. "Can't any of you see? It's not enough!"

A very old, but still beautiful woman sitting next to him placed her hand on his shoulders.

"Can't you see, Young Man?" she said. "The fact that you destroyed your humans only proves you share their nature. You loved them so much that you became just like them--full of energy and passion, but also with anger and the capacity for self-destruction."

The Young Man opened his mouth to protest. But then he knew she spoke the truth. It was so obvious. How could he have not seen it before? But the insight offered him no comfort. He began to weep, and the old, beautiful woman held him against her chest.

"Don't despair, Young Man," she said. "We've all made mistakes. You will learn from this, and in time you will become the Man you aspire to be. "Go back to your world. Start over. But this time, let your passion guide you, but not rule you. Do you understand?"

"I think I do."

She held him until he'd cried himself out, and the round table emptied until only the two of them were left.

Amoebas to God...and Beyond

The other night as I was trying to get to sleep, I was thinking about a book I read a year or so ago called The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. In it, he says that the reason humans seem so suited to their environment here on Earth is because we have evolved through time to fill this particular niche. But this niche is one of an infinite number of niches, and there are few others that humans would feel well designed to exist within. He goes on to say that, through our senses, we perceive the world a particular way because we have evolved to see and feel our world in this particular way. A rat or an insect or a cow views the world in a different way because evolution has given it a different viewpoint.

This idea, which makes sense to me, got me thinking about how I would view the world if, say, I was an ant, or even a virus or a paramecium. I assume that none of these creatures have any self awareness about the lives they lead. I suspect they're simply born, live their lives doing the things ants and viruses do, and then they're dead. They simply are until they aren't anymore. To the best of my knowledge, the same holds true for most higher level animals as well. We love our dogs and cats, and I think most of us would agree that our pets appear to possess emotions as well. But they also seem to lack a sense of self-awareness. They just do what they do. As far as I can tell, dogs and cats don't fret much more about what they're going to do with their lives than ants and viruses. As far as we know, humans are the only creature on Earth who are self-aware and have the capacity to make purposeful decisions about how to spend the time we're allotted to live, although I do suspect that certain animals like dolphins, elephants and chimps are probably a lot closer to having this ability than we suspect.

But my point is that humans appear to be the only species on Earth who possess the ability to not only shape our lives, but to also shape the world on which we live. As far as humans know, we are the most highly functioning creature in all the Universe. Many of us are even arrogant enough to believe that the entire Universe was created for our benefit. But I wonder how creatures like ants and viruses perceive the world. If they had the capacity for self-awareness and consciousness, would they believe they were masters of the Universe based on the incomplete observations of the world their limited viewpoints provided them? Would an ant be able to see a human for what it was, or would it believe it was some natural force that tended to wreak havoc on its ant existence? Would an ant go on to believe that in all the universe, as far as it could tell, there was nothing superior to an ant? An ant would likely believe it ruled the world, and quite possibly God Himself created all the universe for his benefit.

So perhaps we're not so different than this hypothetical ant in our observations of our world and the universe as a whole. Of course one could counter that ants don't have telescopes or microscopes or any of the science that humans have developed to understand our surroundings more accurately, but I think it's also true that just as an ant is limited in its understanding because of its antness, humans are similarly limited by their humanness. We can't comprehend what is beyond our comprehension. For example, if no one could see, how would people have any conception of sight? Doesn't it seem possible that some other sense exists out there somewhere that we cannot comprehend simply because we have no reference from which to understand it? When I was in college, I remember a professor once saying that it is impossible for anyone to imagine something that is totally different from everything we know because we cannot imagine anything that is foreign to our point of reference. We can imagine amalgams of things, but not of entirely new things.

Similarly, if there is something as much more advanced than us as we are to an ant, how would we have the ability to conceive of that thing's existence? To go a step further, perhaps that being which would seem godlike to us is still only another rung on the hierarchy. Perhaps there is something above it, and in turn another being still above that one. Perhaps it continues on ad infinitum like one of those Russian nesting dolls. Perhaps this applies in both directions as well. Maybe the lowest form of life we can conceive of--some single celled amoeba or something, is not the lowest sort of life form that exists. It is only the lowest that we are able to detect from our limited perspectives as humans.

Of course, all of these thoughts simply evoke more thoughts such as what is at the top of this theoretical hierarchy? Is it God after all? If so, it would likely mean that He was so far beyond our comprehension that we could not even begin to conceive of Him with the limited capacities of our human senses, and it seems laughable that this being would have even the slightest concern about our human affairs--no more than we would have for paramecium probably. Perhaps this being would possess the knowledge of why all this existence was put into motion in the first place. Maybe such a thing would be as simple as two plus two for Him, and He would be contemplating other mysteries that we could not even imagine to conceive of. And even writing about the simple-minded questions that I seek answers to as a human betrays my limited perspective as I can only contemplate questions through the limited means of my human perspective and intelligence.

It also occurs to me that pondering questions for which no answers exist is a bit pointless. Maybe I'd be better served to get to sleep so I could be a bit more alert in the morning times. But then I realize that even thinking this is a symptom of being human, and like any other creature here on Earth, I can do nothing but be what I am until I am no more.

Kookookachoo

            Walruses are wise and fearless...so I've heard!





I wanted a walrus disguise because walruses are wise and fearless. I didn't know how to make one so I searched on Craigslist for someone who could do the job. I found Frances Staciliski. She lived in Northern Minnesota. I called her.

"A walrus disguise, aye?" she said. "Why on Earth would you want to be a walrus?"

"My life is boring and sad. A walrus' life is better."

"Oh yeah? How do you figure?"

"That Beatles song says so. The one with kookookachoo."

"I don't care if you're crazy. How long do you want the tusks?"

"Foot and a half sounds about right. Pure ivory of course."

"Of course. Ten grand will cover it. Give me six months. Meet me here with the cash."


One hundred eighty-two days later I flew to Minneapolis. I rented a car and followed Ms. Staciliski's directions to a dirt road. In a blizzard, I made out the snowmobile she said would be there. I drove it ten miles through the woods. I was wondering if she'd led me on a wild goose chase for kicks when I had to slam on breaks to keep from crashing into her cabin. I was happy to see she'd cleared a path to the door. I walked right in. She was a blur until I got my goggles off and she'd placed a steaming cup in my hands.

She was ugly. Her nose was unnaturally long and two curly hairs jutted from her chin. She wasn't so much fat as lumpy. She wore a shawl that might have been sewn with camelhair in the middle ages. She looked like she'd stepped from the pages of Hansel and Gretel. Did I smell a stew cooking or a brew full of newts and babys' fingers?

"Show me the cash," she said. "And I'll show you the disguise."

I dug the Benjamins from my coat. She made them disappear in her shawl or the lumps beneath. She retrieved the costume from the brew. The tusks were sharp as daggers. It smelled like a walrus as much as looked like one. She dropped it at my feet. Steam poured from it in waves.

"Put it on," she said. "Or did you come all this way to gawk?"

I put it on.


The next thing I recall is lying on a piece of glacier ice in some place even more remote, cold, and snowy than Northern Minnesota. The disguise was more than I'd bargained for. It was warm and slippery, and flapping my flippers seemed so natural it was like I had no arms underneath. I was hungry, so I dove into the water to find fish. A moment later, I speared a salmon with a tusk and ate it raw. Delicious!

Later, sunning on the shore, and peering about the frozen wasteland around me, I wondered how I'd ever get out of this disguise. It was a good thing I didn't want to.

Frances Staciliski had earned her money. Kookookachoo!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r58pkRJTlTg

Christmases Past at the Brown House

Every Christmas, from the time I was born until my grandfather died when I was about eighteen, my mother's side of the family always got together at my grandparents' house in Tifton, Ga. To me, Christmas wasn't Christmas until then. Since that period of my life has ended, Christmas, for me. has never been the same. What made those get togethers special, I believe, more than anything else was the presence of my granddad. He was, as anyone who knew him could attest to, one of the most original people ever. He was well known in Tifton, and almost anyone who knew him described as quite a character, but also one of the kindest, most humorous, gentlest people they'd ever known. He seemed to relish the Christmas season.

One Christmas, he got his picture in the Tifton newspaper when he sat up a giant blow-up Santa Claus in a helicopter on his roof. Another year, I vaguely remember him dressing up in a Santa Claus suit and greeting me at the door when I arrived there with my mom and dad. That was a wondrous and confusing experience for me because I had no idea that it was my granddad under the suit, and in spite of the thrill of meeting Santa, I wondered where he had gone when I stepped in the house. When I learned later that it hadn't been the real Santa at all, but only my granddad playing the part, I seriously wondered if maybe Granddad was the real Santa after all. To me, they seemed to possess the same qualities.

On yet another Christmas, when I was five or six, he wrapped up a pair of shiny, white tap dance shoes for me. He told me I should put them on and begin practicing immediately because it was something that not many people could do. If I learned to tap dance, I'd be on the road to being rich and famous. Tap dancing was not something I was even remotely interested in, and I turned up my nose to them. For years and years, they sat unworn at the back of my closet. Writing this now, I wonder what would have happened if I'd taken him up on his offer. Maybe life as I know it would have been completely different.

Granny B. also made Christamases in Tifton special. She was actually my step-grandmother who my granddad married a few years after my mother's mother died. They got married the same year I was born. She was a retired school principal, and it was easy to see that side of her. She was as disciplined, refined, and exact a woman as you could ever hope to meet, but also equally sweet and kind. She treated all of us as if we were her family by blood.

For years, she always let the children in the family open a small gift upon our arrival to take the edge off our giddy anticipation of opening the real presents under the tree. One Christmas, I opened my introductory present with great anticipation to discover that it was a small wind-up turtle. From my expression, Granny B. could tell I was less than impressed with this gift, and being eleven years old, I didn't hold my tongue about it. "All it does is crawl," I said. "Shouldn't it do something more fun than just that?"

Every year after, Granny B., who always called me her "Junebug", told this story as if it were one of the most amusing incidents she'd ever witnessed. Granny B. lived into her nineties, outliving my Granddad by ten years or so, and she always displayed a commonsense, positive attitude towards life. I've always considered her and my granddad to be two of the best people I've ever known, and Christmas brought out the best in them.

My mother's two twin sisters, Gay and Kay were also there at Christmas. They were only sixteen years old when I was born, and they always made a huge fuss over me. For the first six years of my life, I was the only child present at these gatherings, and naturally the recipient of all the toys and attention. Gay and Kay were definitely two of my favorite people. They both had long, very straight, very blonde hair, and vivacious personalities. They always made me feel like the center of the Universe, and they tended to hold adult conversations in my presence. Flattered by their non-condescension, I always hung on their every word.

Even after my sister was born and my aunts got married and had children of their own, Christmas in Tifton continued to seem like the real Christmas to me. There was nothing really special about what we did there. All the usual things: dinner, presents, and singing Christmas carols in most years. It was just the feeling I had when I was there. To me, everyone always seemed so happy and enthusiastic at those gatherings. I don't ever remember any family squabbles or tension. Everyone seemed to genuinely like each other. It always seemed to be everything Christmas should be about.


But those days are over now. My grandfather and Granny B. both died over ten years ago and strangers have been living in the house they owned for just as long. Sometimes when I drive through Tifton, I go by their former house for old times' sake. It still seems wrong to me that people besides them should be living there. My grandparents are also not the only ones who are gone. My mother's side of the family seems to be unfairly singled out for tragedy as if they were cursed by some ancient gypsy. My mother died of breast cancer like her mother when she was thirty-six, and her twin sister Kay died of the same disease two years earlier when she was thirty-two. My granddad, who probably died of heartbreak as much as anything, passed away sitting in his house in his favorite recliner a little over a year after my mother died. All the deaths effectively ended Magical Christmases at the Browns' house forever.

But the last Christmas before Granny B. passed, she told all of us who were left that she really wanted the family to continue to get together at Christmas after she was gone. I think it's a testament to how much we  respected her that that has actually happened every Christmas since although we rarely speak to one another the rest of the year. In recent years, the reunions have seemed much more awkward than magical, and I sometimes wonder if there's any point to it at all.

It makes me sad to think about how much has changed about Christmas for me since I was young, and sometimes I think one of the main reasons I'd like to have children is to have the opportunity to make it magical again. When I was a child, I took those gatherings for granted and assumed the holiday would always seem as unthinkingly wonderful as I considered it to be then. But time marches forward and, at least in my case, cynicism follows. I've come to think that Christmas is really just an arbitrarily set date when we're also supposed to be joyously happy and go out and buy stuff for others and ourselves that will be set aside and forgotten once the new has worn off.

But when I was a kid who believed in Santa Claus and feeling all the Christmas joy and love in the world at my grandparents' house in Tifton, I didn't think that way, and sometimes I think that's a shame.