The Last Class

As some of you know I am working on a book about life in education. It has had several titles; You can lead of Hort-to-Culture but you can’t make her think, Ignorance was my Business etc. I am down to the fourth draft, lumbering toward the glossary and a section of “quick picks” containing choice lists of things you need to be a teacher.  It has been and continues to be a struggle.   This is a cutting of the last chapter….

In Memory

The last Class

            It is a sad fact that when you teach at a school for an extended period of time you find yourself surrounded by ghosts.  Every room has memories of several people who taught there and generations of students.  But there is that special room that holds the lost children, the dead. Those children snatched on the edge of adulthood and preserved in the amber of my memory.  I call their roll and remember them…

……..There were also the children that were so frail and tender that they could not take the frost of aging.  Taken by their various illnesses,their pictures are always smiling at you from a misty road in the back of the yearbook. It was the custom in our school that any dead student would be honored at graduation with a class that claimed him as a member.  A black ribbon would mark the chair and a rose and diploma were given to the mother.  One graduation, while the students and I were waiting to go on in our robes, young man asked me in all sincerity.

“How come if you die, you always graduate on time?”

The Good times Rolled Reunion 2013 New Orleans

We are back…. 

Once again we amazed a Hotel staff.  We are old friends that don’t know each other, we are close but live all over the world;  we are a vagabond group of children grown old that are called Service Brats. We appear like magic or locusts every few years for a Lajes High School reunion. This high school was part of the Azores Air Zone Command (Commando da Zona Aérea dos Açores) Base Aérea nº 4  on Terceira, an island in the Azores archipelago, in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. Now you see why we just say we went to school at Lajes.  Sometimes these islands are considered a place that might have actually been Atlantis.  Since our high school and many of the bases we grew up on are from a time so long ago that they were part of another century and millennium, we pick a town and call a reunion. Two years ago our reunion was in Santa Fe and two years from now it will be in Seattle   In today’s world we are a flash mob.

This time we are in the Big Easy at the beating heart of Bourbon Street.  We are at ground zero Mardi Gras land, leaning over balconies and throwing beads to the undulating crowds. I cannot even imagine what actual Mardi Gras would be like because the street is a circus now and will be so till the bars close at 4 am.   The kind concierge asked me when we arrived, if being from a small island; wouldn’t we find New Orleans….too strange?  Oh, sweet young woman you do not know strange.    

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Like festival in Santa Fe, in the Big Easy we laugh and dance and eat and laugh some more and buy beads, masks and stroll late into the night. The next morning after Beignets (which I unfortunately called bengays in a less than sane moment) and coffee, beloved friend Russ, and I head to St Louise Cathedral and light candles. We have opted for larger candles, this time,  close to the altar. We are hoping God will cherish our lost friends that we hold in memory as much as we do.  

We light candles for our friends

The lessons learned are people become more precious as time passes.  These are the people that sing my songs and will be the last to be able to answer the question that all Service Brats are asked? Where are you from?  I am from this group of people and when we gather; I am home. If you are a LHS graduate of any year of the 20^th century you should come…

The other thing I learned was that nothing good is going to come from a large blue drink in a glass shaped like a skull that has batteries…

Laissez le bon temps rouler à Seattle

 

It’s a Relief

Found in the San Diego terminal between the human restrooms

This goes out to all my pet loving friends.  For those of you from New Orleans that are waiting for a post…its coming, I am waiting for some pictures from Jim’s camera. And those of you who are waiting for the San Diego pictures, I am trying to figure out how to get “What does the fox say?” video dance to load,  For my loyal IT, I am working on the blurbs for the web page and collect the images for the web page.  And for those of you who asked where is that book on education…its in the 3rd rewrite and I am moving through chapter 7.

step inside….

But for the moment, this bunch of sh… is what I found amusing.