Memory

Memory, Memory
Dangling
Inches beyond my fingertips
Elusive and Taunting
Carrot and stick
I can not reach

Fading Fading
Bit by bit,
Byte by byte,
By the year and the decade
Details, names
Anecdotes never shared that now never will be
Blotted from recollection
Like moth holes in an old gray sweater
Fissures gnawed into old grey matter
I'd assumed was intact
Until I reached into the closet
Pulled it from deep in a drawer
And held up to the light
The tales of my youth
My coming of age
My glory days
Now threadbare
Torn
Unraveling

Wishing Wishing
I'd written, photographed, journaled
Recorded those details I once wished to forget,
Mundane, humiliating.
Endless hours riding the school bus,
Fidgeting through church,
Driver's education.
First awkward kiss, first hopeless crush, first little league ballgame strikeout,
Once painfully obvious
Easily recalled
Now forgotten as an everyday dream
Lost to the ether.

Grasping Grasping
Far too young for decaying faculties
Stored naively
Without mothballs
In a sturdy steel sieve.
At least I remember these past years
Adult years
Career and family years
Or do I?
Old colleagues and students, in time, begin to blur together into this type or that type.
Names familiar but no longer known
Semesters, Years of relationship
Reduced to a vibe
A glimmer.
An uncertain Hey-do-I-know-you
That I'm afraid to ask,
Because I know that they'll know me.

Memories, memories
Unable to lock away
What I still have
This vapor drifting across my palm
Brushing past arthritic fingertips
Knowing I could reach each one
Could grasp it
And hold on
If only I was a year younger
If only I'd worked harder at it.
Wishing I could stretch these hands that
One last inch.

My Kind of Special

One could say that I am in the late stages of transformation into a full-blown "Mad Scientist."
Having earned my biology degree in the mid- nineties, I've had the "scientist" part down for some time, and now I'm just working on the "mad" part.
For I am a Special. Education. Teacher.

And if you're thinking special as in "Special Olympics," where everyone smiles and tries hard and wins the gold or earns the A for effort.... Not MY kind of special.

No, this is "special" as in "they think they're something special" special,
special as in "subject of an ABC After-school Special" special
special as in "the proverbial 'special place in hell' has got NOTHING on my classroom" special, and I'm still not sure what I did to deserve my place there, but it can't have been that bad.

My kind of "special" is slack-jawed and lazy-eyed with an extra helping of both slack and lazy.
It doesn't know, it doesn't care, and it aint doin nothin' for nobody - try and make it.

The recipe for my kind of special is one part ADD to two parts chip on the shoulder, with a dollop of redneck and a pinch or two of crazy. (The recipe calls for a cup of birth control, but my kind of special usually leaves that out.)

It is the herculean feat of educating this kind of "special" that siphons my sanity like stolen gasoline by the gap-toothed mouthful every day.
As a scientist I postulate that there is no madness known to man like teaching My kind of special how to use a compound light microscope.
The task is a simple one.

• Place just one drop of swamp water on a slide.
• Lay the cover slip on the drop.
• Place the slide on the stage.
• Move it under the short (SHORT!) low-power objective lens,
• And focus.

You never want to start switching over to the high-power lens until they’ve got that, because you KNOW that my kind of "special" will break the cover slip with the long lens. Over and over and over. On purpose.

With my kind of special it's less a question of how much they CAN do as is it how much they WILL, if they even bother to show up. That "just one drop" turns into a swamp water fight, the broken cover slips become handy tools for self-mutilation, and it's really hard to focus a microscope after my kind of special has run off with the eyepiece.

And just as I'm sure I'm on the brink of inventing some evil robot to take over the world, MY kind of special shouts "Holy crap - there's stuff swimmin' in here!" (of course, they don't exactly call it “crap” and "stuff") A small crowd forms around a microscope and someone asks, “What is it?”

After a brief, yet brilliant, teachable moment...
They ask me if we can do it again tomorrow.