Twenty Winks

            ‘Relentless,’ her eyebrows expressed, ‘but not really,’ smiling to put things in perspective. “How’re yours going so far?”

            “Half-way home, that’s all I can say.” I could say plenty more: we had a spare five minutes at the coffee urn, and Sandra never shied from the chance to chat. Yet today—tonight—we were spent. Second Thursday of the new school year, ‘Meet the Teacher’ after barely knowing who these parents’ kids were, setting up the world for them: first assignments, feedback funneled, clubs begun, silent fights and brash banality in the corridors, spilling into rooms. A million admin mandates filling some oblivion. Then random things to keep things real, and music from the spheres that proved a job in education kept the universe in gear, if muted like an oboe in a shopping mall, trying to swim upstream.

            “I think I’ll call in sick tomorrow—shit!” she realized, “That’s only hours away…”

            “Summer fever. Kids bring in effluvia from everywhere. Their parents pay to—”

            “Shhh,” Sandra bumped my ribs. The boss was hankering for coffee and a chance to ask how conferences have gone. Sandra was good at glad-handing and whiling time away, talking shop outside the need to man the shop—her classroom and the parents that showed up tonight.

            I would also have some knocking on my classroom door, so I made for that direction, giving Boss the thumbs-up he’d appreciate.

            But at the staircase I veered toward the elementary wing, to see how Marjorie was doing. She had taught my own kids a million years ago, and thirty years my elder, she would have montessoried me. Since our duties overlapped the second Thursday of each school year, I never had the chance to ‘Meet the Teacher’ who defined most everything I taught. She was Mr Rogers with a wry side, singing songs to children, sometimes about filching food from gardens or running naked through the woods. She had shared a stint with Dr Goodall in the Gombe Stream, way back when, and like that anthropologist, she embraced the creature in us all. She asked me once, “what’s better: growth or growing?” I wondered, so early in a school year, what we answered then, and what we’d answer now. Idea vs process? Achievement vs aptitude? One syllable vs two?

            The mental strain is showing as I see her leaning against the playhouse roof. There are some parents flipping through some picture books and watching a video loop of last year’s kindergarten doing stuff for ‘Culture Week’. Another brushes nylon chords on the guitar Marj used to play a lot, before arthritis made that difficult. She shines her eyes at me as if I’m coming to tag-in, wrestlers we never really had to be. ‘Agonists’, she’d say, ‘toward making kids heroic in their little ways.’ Though she probably hadn’t used such terms with parents in the room tonight.

            “You alright, Marj? Need a coffee break?”

            Still leaning on the playhouse, sotto voce: “Rather catch some twenty winks. Coffee in the evening isn’t good for me.”

            “I could cover for a bit, if you want—”

            “Nah, I’d just as soon get through the hour—that’s all it is by now, correct?”

            “Hour and a quarter, technically. But who’s counting, anyway?”

            “I am. Twenty winks.” She closes her eyes. I stare at the serenity of her barely wrinkled face. “Nineteen.” Still sotto voce, parents unaware, as stocked as the classroom is with stimuli and bits of care. I shut my eyes to try to see her world right now. “Eighteen,” she says in a perfect stretch of time. I whisper that I think the nurse’s cot is free—I sometimes go there for my winks, once or twice a year. Fever’s going around: it’s best to be pre-emptive, get in rest before another busy day tomorrow.

            “I’ll just check for you, before I face my own last hour.”

            “—and a quarter,” deadpan, eyes still closed. “Seventeen…”

            There was a phrase she used to use when my kids were in kindergarten—my oldest two, at least, until the school told her to stop: “Every day is a cathedral day.” I thought of that while leaving her and the parents in her room. She didn’t go to church, per se, or follow any doctrine, if  ‘theosophy’ came up discursively. She’d be the first to point out how slaves and others died to make grand monuments to God (or gods of our own making); she cried for countless rapes within the crypts, hypocrisy within the apse. ‘Cathedral days’ could contradict their purpose—often did—so, why should every day be one of those, especially for kids?

            “Because they let the homeless have some warmth. They conjure Bach, Rachmaninov, and, best of all, an apogee for silence. They watch the city go to sleep and wake again, and sometimes toll their bells.” Marjorie would listen for those bells, and your response. She’d acknowledge, “sure, each day is more than that—box of chocolates, winding road, rat race, what you will. I’m sticking with my go-to, though, even if it isn’t in a lesson plan.”

            The nurse, in her understated office, wasn’t busy, naturally—she also looked past-ready to go home. I relayed that Marjorie was taking twenty winks, semi-standing up: “perhaps she could come here to lie down awhile?”

            “Twenty winks?”

            “Probably done by now.”

            “And parents in the room?”

            “Self-occupied. I just thought I’d—”

            “Thanks,” she said, and slowly pushed her weight upright.

            I walked with her until the staircase, second-guessing everything. “Maybe I should go with you.”

            She didn’t turn around. “Up to you. You’ve likely seen her final breaths.”

            “What? How can—”

            She altered not her pace. I clung uncertain to the banister, wanting to go nowhere, except perhaps a cathedral somewhere in the collective conscious.

           

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)