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Creative holiday spelling

/ jelizabeth / 2 Comments

Ten-year-old Grace has an excellent vocabulary, as do Eli and Lydia, and she uses it in her writing and speaking. (Yesterday, for example, she implored me, “Please don’t scowl.” How much more precise it was than “don’t be unhappy,” which I was not.) The meaning of a word, though, may be more important to Grace than its precise spelling. Here’s a note she wrote and stuck to the refrigerator.

Misspellings prompt my imagination more than correctness does. And this misspelling makes me recall, too, other memorable and wonderful writing mistakes. A few years ago an ESL student of mine wrote a personal essay about her faith in Jesus Crisis.

A stalking Santa and a savior at his wit’s end — maybe there’s an idea in there for a story appropriate to this pressured and frantic time of year.

Where I want to be

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Once, on my long path from the parking lot through courtyards and down hallways to my office, I trailed behind an admissions tour group led by a student. I heard him say to the assemblage of parents, prospective students, and tagalong younger siblings, “Our campus isn’t very beautiful. I mean, it’s an urban school.”

Whoa there, I thought. Our campus is amazing. Indeed — domes, arches, windows, low stones walls, high ones, the river over there, surfaces, trees, groundcover, bicycle racks, and silhouettes against the sky — there is always something interesting to look at.

Last Wednesday, after a day filled with 1:1 writing conferences (6 of those) and presentation rehearsals (4 of those), I took a detour back to the parking garage to check out a new outdoor sculpture, Alchemist by Jaume Plensa, that I had noticed from across the street as I hurried back and forth on other days.

W 11.24.2010 ~3:00pm @W20 MIT

And last night, same sculpture, same impulse. Continue reading →

Space carved out

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It was Wednesday, one hour squashed between other hours and another appointment in a week filled with appointments. In the room, I and my ESL student, whose name is Karma, worked side-by-side on our own copies of the reading. The door to the hallway was closed. Through the wall, we heard a muted piano and, etched on top of that sound, a soprano voice. I counted 12 chairs around the table in our tiny room, and a chalkboard filled one wall and a window another.

view from room 4-146, Wednesday 11-10-2010 @ 10:55am

This was silence. This was luck. This was like the world saying, Be here now.

The hour was long enough.

Bits and pieces

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By the back door, on the way into our house, I empty my hand or pocket of whatever acorn or stone that has caught my eye as I rake, sweep, or beachcomb. Leaves occasionally fall there too and hang out for a while, until a wicked wind swirls them away. When I emptied the planters of their spent annuals yesterday, I set aside what I call the tree bones — small pieces of weather- or insect-rotted branches I collect on walks and then strew around the yard — and put them in the growing pile of finds.

I have no idea what I will do with this hoard, and yet it accumulates.

Writing can go like that sometimes.

A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging in my desk drawer for quarters. I needed two to get a cup of coffee from the office Keurig. Under the pencils, binder clips, box of tea, folded canvas bag, and loose band-aids, I saw a stapled document. I started reading the page I could see. It was not about science and therefore out of place; usually everything I read at work has to do with the technical. Whose is this? I wondered as I read about a dream of an unknown man, a car, and two people kissing. Who gave this to me? I was perplexed, almost disturbed. Continue reading →

Accidental vegetables

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After I harvested the potatoes, we tilled up the patch and mixed in some lime for sweetness. While we were at it, we tilled up another troubled patch of grass and mixed in our first batch of compost. Would lime and compost yield the same results?

Grass is similarly sprouting in both the lime- and compost-treated areas. There is also, surprisingly, some additional species growth in the area with compost. Ah, vegetable seedlings to be exact.

Tomato jungle towers above grass understory.

Leaves of a big-fruiting plant -- melon? squash?

Ironicially, beets, which I wasn't able to grow successfully from seed this summer.

Plants do what plants do. We have decided to simply let this go — no mowing — until the first frost.

– Park Street busker

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“Excuse me.” That’s what I said to the couple blocking my passage from the turnstiles to the station at Park Street. They were just standing there, looking up at signs, their backs to me. “Oh, sorry,” he replied, in a British accent. I moved quickly past them, no eye contact, up and around the low barrier near the track, and I felt a few seconds of regret for not being nicer to them.

Down the middle stairs tiled red, into that basement that’s like a big grungy shower room — all those worn white tiles — to wait for the train to Kendall Square. It was 4:50pm, and I was leaving GLAD and heading back to MIT to get my car to pick up Grace at BSED. Three points of my life, in acronyms.

I felt neither haste nor leisure. People brushed by and pressed into each other. There was another middle-aged pair, a man and woman, chaperoning a bunch of teenage girls, some wearing Red Sox “merch,” as my kids call it. Was there a game today? Sometimes I eavesdrop on people, but this afternoon my spying tendencies were worn out.

Against the red tiles of one of those square pillars that hold the Green Line and all its trains up over the Red Line’s sublevel, a small man sat. His black guitar case was open in front of him. A music stand, adjusted low. An acoustic guitar, a high buttery voice, a Spanish song. “Noche …  noche…  noche,” was the only word of what he sang that I recognized. Another verse, full of the sound of longing but no words I knew, and then again, “Noche… noche… noche.”

I thought of taking out my phone and taking a picture, a video even, so that I would have a document to share with someone. And then I realized that what held me to the moment was that it would come and quickly go. Anticipating that its life was only minutes long, I soaked in all of it — his singing, the sound of words I didn’t know, the crush of tourists and fellow commuters, his smile when I put $2 in the guitar case, his gold-rimmed dark glasses removed when I got close up to him.

The moment would be gone, I knew, as soon as the train came. Which it did.