Word After Word

Engl 155A Fall 09

High point of the week: talking to my stepson in Afghanistan. Scary, sweet, stunning, dramatic, urgent, true, and scary. He wants to have an exciting life and a good life. He wants a good job and has one. He wants to be married, to be good, to be alive, to make a difference. He wants different food. I have a list. It will be such pleasure for me, putting this box together. It feels like making something very important.  He requests stew. He requests poetry. My heart breaks. His voice in my ear for over an hour. High point of much. High point of everything.

Tomorrow’s high point will be making the box for this soldier and thinking about what to do with all the things he told me. And I will make a box for his brother, J., in the Navy: books and pistachios. It’s easier to know what to send to CT.

About six years ago, I took a vow: to stop complaining about work.  (I am sure my friends would read this and say, really? We did not notice this vow!).  But I stopped coming home and saying “So busy! Such annoying people!” I just stopped. I have a great job. I love my job. I am incredibly lucky to have this position.  It seems obnoxious to complain about work. Unless, like LL, one is gifted with an extraordinarily good sense of  humor.  I found myself obnoxious, anyway. to myself, so I stopped.

My work this week was so, so, so good.  High points, all:

My class hugged me. D said “Thanks for keeping it chill.” Charity gave me the CD which I was secretly drooling over, hoping she would give it to me. The class cheered for its members. We were all so truly truly truly sad for this class to end. How lucky is that???

I have this terrible flu-cold, this ancient dog, the Troubles, this amazing job. I have students who call me and say “Thank you” and I am so moved because I don’t know what I would do without them! K’s call, S’s breakthrough, A’s mom poems, C’s music, Peter’s stunning lecture on poems and masculinity (while my stepson is asking for poetry to be sent to him in his tent in his outpost in the desert in Afghanistan) –this week had a strange beautiful symmetry.

Related posts:

1. Work One Idea To Death
2. WHAT TO WORK ON, HOW
3. Ten Tender High Points
4. WRITING, PROCRASTINATION, REALITY
5. Lost Work aka The Magic Starfish Method