And Now, a Surprise

Jesus, I'm happy.

This is good, of course, but it scares the shit out of me. Last night I wrote this in an e-mail to Katy: I want to talk about how happy I am, how I feel like I've been reborn, how it's so different from last semester, but there are things I can't exactly talk about, and I also don't want to tempt fate. I think I am more superstitious than I realize.

The last time I was happy was August, when I was beginning that ended-as-soon-as-it-began ridiculousness with the boy with the great name. You remember him. He was the one who sang to me, kissed me warmly, and waved as I was leaving his house, and then I never heard from him ever again. Like, ever. And then, after I realized I'd been abandoned, that I'd been found lacking, that I'd been fooled, I opened my eyes and realized something else: I was in the middle of the semester from hell. Near the end of it I couldn't quite catch my breath. I was finding it hard to make it through the day. I was waking up and thinking, I can't. I can't do it. Don't make me do it.

And then came the point in the semester where one of my students called me a fucking bitch. This was when everything unraveled for me, when I realized there was no saving the semester. It was ruined.

This was after I'd been giving some notes on apostrophes. I'd had my back to them--I was writing on the board--and one of the boys in the class screamed. I mean screamed. I whirled around, and the boy who screamed was rubbing his arm.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Glenn punched me!" the boy said. He pointed to the kid next to him.

And Glenn looked at me from under the hat he'd pulled low over his forehead. He crossed his arms over his Carhartt. He raised his eyebrows. He dared me to say something.

So I said, "Get out. I don't care why you did what you did. Just get out of my classroom."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" he asked.

"NO," I said. "GET OUT."

And so he grabbed his books, his jacket, and then he stormed toward the door. He whipped the door open. "FUCKING BITCH!" he said, and then he left the classroom. He barreled down the hallway and out into the parking lot, where we could see him get into his truck and tear away from school. He squealed his tires tore around the bend toward the road back to town.

It was the most dramatic exit I'd ever seen in my life. And it made an impact on more than just those of us in class. An hour later, when I was with my creative writing class, one of my students came up to me. She frowned at me--a gesture of pity, really--and nodded. "We heard," she said.

"You heard?"

"We heard that kid leave class. We heard him yelling all the way down the hall. He said some not great stuff about you."

And the whole building got to hear it.

It was a treat. A real treat.

So I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that I couldn't wait to get out of Maine and back to Buffalo for Christmas break. All I wanted to do was sit in a dark bar and drink a whole lot of vodka with all the people I love best, and I wanted to do it repeatedly.

A lot of good things happened over Christmas, and I woke up one morning feeling renewed. Over night, things inside me had slid back into place, and I remembered who I was. In fact, I felt a lot like I did in grad school. I felt young, I felt fun, I felt like I was someone worth spending time with. I didn't feel rotten or awful or miserable. I didn't feel like I was a bad teacher, a boring idiot, a killjoy. I stayed up really, really late and did some inappropriate things and let every nasty thing from the previous semester melt off me.

And now that I'm back in Maine, and now that the spring semester has started, things are looking good. By this time last semester I already knew my classes were going to be bad, that they were filled with some really awful, really mean students, and that it was going to be a struggle to make it through.

But here's what I know about my classes now, after two and a half weeks: They're good. In fact, they're pretty great. I am especially in love with my intermediate creative writing class; it's filled with former students of mine, sweet devoted students who have really amazing things to say, and it's blowing my mind. Things are looking up.

I can't stop dancing. I can't stop singing. (Last Friday, as I was on my way to Portland to have lunch with Emily the radio first played Rosalita and then Cecilia, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.)

A former student of mine--one who knew about my woes last semester--stopped me in the hall last week and said, "Holy shit. Look at you! You're so happy!"

And now that I've said it, now that I've written it out loud, now that I've confessed it, I'm terrified. I am superstitious. I don't want the universe to think I'm bragging, I'm boasting, I'm showing off. I don't want it to think, Whoa now. Let's not get carried away.

I don't want any take-backs. I just want to be quiet and happy. I'm not saying I deserve it, but I am saying I'm thankful for it. Dear God, am I ever.

Jealousy

Today when I was out running errands, I witnessed a grown woman ram her SUV into a parking lot snowbank. She put her car into reverse and eked back out onto the main drag that circled the plaza, the main drag that I was driving on. I stomped on my brakes.

She backed fully into my lane, and I figured when she turned her head to look my way, I'd see a face pinking with embarrassment and anxiety. After all, she'd just accidentally run into a snowbank in a busy plaza. I figured I'd see her hastily jamming the car back into drive and trying to maneuver around the snowbank so she could get out of my--and everyone else's--way. But when she turned her face to me, I could see she didn't look embarrassed at all. Instead, she looked angry, lit-up, crazed. And when she did put her car back into drive it wasn't to maneuver around the snowbank; it was to plow back into the bank, jamming the nose of her vehicle far into the stack of ice and snow. She was no longer trying to avoid the snowbank. She was trying to kill the snowbank. Obliterate it. The woman's teeth were barred and her eyes were wild as she went at the snowbank another time.

And as I drove quickly around before she could take another pass at it, I understood her completely. I understood the impulse, the urge to take a car and ram it into something, hard and repeatedly. I understood wanting to take something down, dismantle it, make it nonexistent. I understood wanting to feel the impact, the hard kiss of the crash. I'd felt it before on the worst of days, but of course I'd never been crazy, bold, or reckless enough to go through with it.

And as I watched in my rear view mirror as the woman put her car in reverse one more time, I was just the smallest bit jealous that it wasn't me getting to feel that quick lick of satisfaction when the car hit the snow.

Infinitely Better Than the Gun Raffle

Over last Thanksgiving break, the Boy From Work dragged me to a gun and meat raffle. Of course, dragged is a bit of an exaggeration. I'd heard him talking about gun raffles for months, and I was curious. I knew enough about meat raffles--Ex-Keith's mother haunted meat raffles like nobody's business and often came home loaded down with turkeys and hams bound for the freezer--but I didn't have any experience with gun raffles.

The way I pictured it, there was a fire hall filled to the brim with antsy rednecks who were jostling each other to get a better look at the stage. And on that stage stood the event host, holding rifles and pistols up under the lights before calling out the winner's name. Everyone waited with bated breath for their name to be called, and if it was, the winners would let out a mighty woop! before descending on the stage to claim their prize, fill out paperwork, and tote it home.

To me, that sounded at least mildly interesting. Plus, I was told there was a whole bunch of food at gun raffles, and, as we all know, I am a fan of food. So I let the BFW pick me up a ticket and drive me to the small-town fire hall. When we got there, I was filled with a sudden panic. The parking lot was frighteningly crammed, and a line of broad-shouldered men trudged toward the door, cases of beer crooked from their fingers.

"You can bring your own beer?" I asked.

The BFW looked at me like I was crazy. "Well, yeah," he said.

"To a raffle where guns are being distributed? You can just waltz in with booze?"

He nodded, grabbed my mittened hand, and tugged me toward the door. When we pushed through those doors, it was a surreal experience. First of all, there was no stage. There was no discernible front of the room, no hub, no center of the action. Instead, there was a giant hall filled with collapsible tables and chairs. Almost all the tables were full. Some people--the unlucky ones, the ones who had come late and hadn't had friends save them spots--were wandering through the aisles, pitifully looking for a place to sit.

People had coolers cracked open next to them, showcasing beers of all varieties. Men wearing confederate flag T-shirts were playing poker and slowly erecting giant pyramids of beer cans. Women with teased hair and big bangs were shouting at kids or rubbing beer bottles against their lips or shrieking at their friends.

Near the back of the room, volunteers from the fire department were setting up a buffet line filled with sliced deli meats, bratwurst, macaroni salad, Limburger cheese, baked beans, pickles, sauerkraut, and condiments.

There was no display of the guns that were being raffled off. There was no auctioneer calling out their names, statistics, or finer qualities. There was only a pair of tables covered with thick tablecloth, and those were the tables that housed the meat. Steaks, turkeys, hams, thick-sliced bacon, and roasters were spread out for display and scrutiny.

As can be expected, I did not exactly "fit in" at the gun raffle. It wasn't anything like I'd hoped. It was less like an auction and more like a social event, like an indoor picnic, like some giant family reunion--except less cooler than any reunion my family might have had; at those, there is at least a dessert cook-off. Here, instead of the tables filled with Best Chocolate Cookie or Best Brownie or Best Pie submissions, there were only tables of bloody meat. And no guns. Zero guns, which is exactly what I thought we were gathered to celebrate.

Today, though, I got to attend an auction--my first--and that was a much more satisfying experience. It was sort of what I was hoping the gun raffle would turn out to be. And at this auction, actual guns were lofted into the air for the general public to ogle before they flashed their bid cards into the air for a chance to make them theirs.

Before today, I had approximately zero experience with auctions, aside from what I've seen on television. The word auction made me think of the following things: artwork, mothball-smelling old ladies, and fast-talking men. When one of my colleagues suggested we go auctioning this weekend, I conjured up the stereotypical scene in my head--shouting! paddles in the air! fabulous items being carted to and from the stage!--and I thought, Yes. We SHOULD go auctioning this weekend. After all, I wanted to see how right I'd been in my head.

And, well, I was sort of right. There were an awful lot of mothball-smelling old ladies who sat in the front row--reserved seats--and bid on the lots of costume jewelry, rosaries, and plant stands. There was a fast-talking man who went straight through 600 lots without taking a break. And there was artwork, although it was less "fabulous" and more "icky" and "musty." Of course, that's not to say there weren't some deals. One of the people I went with picked up a great vintage photograph of a man bending over a book and looking very scholarly. "This," she said, "is going into my TV room." She'd floated her bid card into the air and--poof!--it was hers, and they marched it right over to her. The instant gratification was intoxifying.

Still, this was no New York City auction, where mink coats and grandmother's pearls and famous paintings were wheeled onto the stage. This was an auction where there were at least ten different lots of antique planers, chipped china, and moldy boat building manuals. But it was fantastic. It was exactly the experience I wanted in return for waking up at 6:30 AM on a Sunday so that we could drive to the sweet coastal town where the auction house sat flanked by two bear statues wearing Santa hats.

I wanted the smell of old wood and antique silver. I wanted the shouting. I wanted the bustle. I wanted the food table with its big vats of chowder, its buckets of oyster crackers. I wanted to throw my bid card into the air for a mahogany "pie crust" table (what would I use it for?) and a lot of small glass pitchers (why would I need that many?) and a lot of rose-printed teacups (how quickly do I want to become my grandmother?). And then I wanted to go eat lunch with a man who bought a lot of comic books in hopes that he could sell them on eBay and a woman who buckled her vintage photograph into the backseat of her car so it didn't get jostled on the way home. And then I wanted to go and stand on the marshy winter edges of my co-worker's home town--Southport, Maine (which looks like this in summer, but trust me when I tell you it's just as spectacular in newly fallen snow)--and I wanted to wish for the hundredth time that I could live on the water, so close to everything good in the world: beach, ocean, seafood, and a place where I could get a six piece wicker patio set for $25. (No lie.)

Dear March: You Suck. Love, Jess

Yesterday it was forty-five degrees. I wore a pencil skirt to work. Kicky heels, too! I was festive as all get-out. But then this morning when I woke up, this was the scene outside my window:

This is one of the reasons I went to the travel agent today and said, "Get me to Bermuda. Fast." And I was so, so serious.

The Mandatory "I Live in Western New York" Picture

There's been an awful lot of discussion about winter lately. People are complaining. Forwards about the horrors of winter, the horrors of snow, and the horrors of storms are zipping around left and right. And the other day one of the members of my department sent me an e-mail that was filled with pictures from Buffalo--you know, pictures that put this year's Maine snowfall in perspective.

I've seen a lot of those pictures before, and I've also been posed in a lot of those pictures before. It's kind of a requirement, a mandatory right of passage for anyone living in the greater Buffalo area. When it starts flurrying, when the snow starts piling up on the back porch, that's when you get out the camera and strike a pose. Then you mail that photo to everyone who doesn't live in Buffalo. You say, "See what we have to live with?" After all, we've earned the right to make a big deal out of it. Trust me.

Well, tonight I found one of those mandatory photographs that features me, my back porch, a building bank of snow, and a facial expression I am sure came from my parents saying, "Look scared! Look like you're about to be swallowed whole by that snowbank!"

What can I say? I tried my best.

I Am Not the First Fool

This weekend I was busily stacking my arms with newly arrived home furnishings at TJ Maxx when I almost stumbled into another shopper. In fact, I almost stepped on her feet. Normally, this wouldn't have been a big deal. It's February, after all. In February, normal people wear shoes that cover their feet. Sneakers, boots, loafers, whatever. They do not wear flip-flops.

But this lady was wearing flip-flops. Oh, you should've seen the look I gave her. The look was a combination of Are you nuts? and For real? and You are unreasonable! Flip-flops! In February! When there is a layer of ice and snow so thick in the parking lot that I've forgotten what asphalt looks like!

I can appreciate optimism, but that this woman's flaunting of her perfectly-painted toenails just seemed silly. But maybe it's because I'm taking this winter hard. I don't usually take it so personally when winter drags on and on and on and on, but lately I've begun waking up and thinking, You're doing this just to piss me off, aren't you, winter?

I am restless. I am craving things like sun, a crisp snap to the air, and the color green. Here near the coast of Maine, we've got absolutely none of those things. Maine hasn't been having a winter like we'd have in Buffalo, and it's not as cold as the winters we had in Minnesota, but this one seems extra tough because the lack of regard the town has for my small back street. The plowing has been questionable. The snow accumulation has been impressive. The banks have grown and grown and grown, and no one bothered to clear the sidewalk or even the road once the banks outgrew even themselves and spilled out onto our driving space. This has made getting out of my driveway and down the very giant hill on which I live a challenge. Getting back up the hill has been equally troublesome at times, and, after the ice storm that almost kept the Boy From Work from arriving in Portland, there was even a night where I could not get my car up the hill. The tires spun. The car squealed against the ice. I had to back down the hill and go up the other way, which was slightly better sanded.

The only thing I find even remotely redeeming about winter still being here is that it gives me reason to drink this. (I'm just recently coming to the Cacao Reserve party--a fact that irks me plenty, mainly because this hot chocolate is so freaking good.) Save for the hot cocoa, I have nothing good to say about winter. It's making me crazy, and maybe it's making my students crazy, too.

But even though I've been itching to hurry winter along, to get Maine back to the beautiful thing it was when I arrived, I have not turned into the first fool (right, AN?) who trudges out into the still-freezing winter air in a pair of shorts, in flip-flops, in a tank top. No. I refuse to sink that low. I refuse to fool myself into thinking that my teeth are chattering because I'm just! so! excited! it's! spring! and not because it's twelve degrees and snowing.

Still, today I did do something that made me wonder if I was walking some first fool line. This afternoon a nice swatch of sun sent the temperature nearish to forty degrees, and because of this I was inspired to roll down my windows--a crack! a smidge!--while I was running some errands. No one else dared to play that game, but I figured maybe that was just the Buffalo in me coming out to shine. After a winter of lake effect, you get pretty excited by the way warmth smells in the air. And I just wanted to have a few minutes to smell it, to sit at a stoplight and breathe in something that was just a little different, a little kinder than the heavy weight of winter that's been dangling around our necks for the last forever. But then the stoplight turned green again, and I had to creep forward along streets pocked with--no, demolished by--potholes from the hard winter freeze, and suddenly even the warmish air couldn't change the fact that we weren't done yet, that I'm going to have to entertain many more winter weeks before I can even start dreaming about the beauty that is this state in warm weather.