2 years ago today, I found myself in court…

Feb 10th i was in a minor car accident that left me with a court date over a month away. Never in my life had I ever been in an accident and suddenly this intensely minor fender bender was holding on to my license for a whole month.

At that time in my career, i was an nontenured teacher and in the 3 years prior I had only taken more than one day off after contracting salmonella poisoning, so for me to have to leave school was truly a rare occasion .

After i finished court i decided to drive up to Rockford to visit a very good friend of mine who had been getting progressively more sick for  years. He would text me frightening tales of not being able to breathe and i often worried he wasn’t safe to be home alone. Although, very young, a degenerative lung disease escalated to a point where he was becoming completely unable to breathe. Lungs of an 88 year old, brain of a 20 something.

He counseled me after losing a close friend only years prior and was a constant stable source of wisdom. When I wasn’t close to my family in college, I could count on him to pretend to be my dad at the awards ceremonies and go to him about relationship questions. Always having a greater vision of purpose, he set my mind at ease and continually reminded me that, “Everything you need is already inside of you.”

The day i took off and visited him in Rockford was the last day i ever saw him alive. During my visit he joked and teased me, made hilariously inappropriate jokes, and although he struggled speaking, he tried to so hard to keep up with conversation.

Over my own time here, I’ve lost many people to taxing illnesses where long goodbyes and realizations about life’s purpose and goals occur.  The long goodbye is an agonizing process of years which no matter how much we all know it will happen, we never truly are prepared for the emotional loss that actually happens when the person does leave.

I miss my friend a painstaking amount and keep little notes up in my classroom to remind myself of the things he was repeating to me because the lessons he taught me are ones I need to share and remind myself daily.

Going to court cost me a day,

but taking a day off and making time to say goodbye

is a lesson I will not forget.

After visiting the National Air and Space Museum and listening to a lecture on women in NASA, I finally realized why my parents were so intensely mad at me when i dropped out of my Computer Science and Business degree in college.

 When my mother was planning her future in the the late 50’s and early 60’s there were “jobs for women and jobs for men” portions of the news paper. Typical jobs for a female were secretarial in nature, a nurse, a teacher etc. At that point the civil rights movement wasn’t even a glimmer in her eyes and she was still living in the city preparing for what would become white flight. The “sex” portion of the amendment was only added by a southern senator as a joke to make the bill seem even more ridiculous to the fellow congressmen so when it did pass it was truly a shock.

      The idea that a woman could be in business or would be in a science degree at all was not an option at all when she was growing up. Even the idea of studying science wasn’t a realistic life choice even though she had an obsession with astronomy and meteorology. My mother was born in 1943 and only now to I understand the backstory of the history of her environment to truly understand her anger at me and amazement at the same time when I make decisions in my life.

When I switched to education she didn’t see it as great compliment to what I deemed was a valuable and important career that she had been doing. She saw it as a cop out and a huge missed opportunity for me. It took me years to prove to her that education was in fact the place I belonged, but I see her even more proud that I’m working on a technology masters degree and understand that she just wanted all of us ( my sibilings) to achieve the kind of success that wasn’t available for her to pursue.

I don’t blame her anymore.

I’m not angry about that time

when was so mad she wouldn’t talk to me.

I understand what she wasn’t able to do

and see some of the choices she might have made

had she had the chance.

       As a kid I would sit for hours looking on the sides of boxes of legos and tinkertoys, attempting to recreate the mega machines they were displaying.  From the time they are born, kids are  built to be machines of determination. In the history of man, there has never been a toddler who decided they were just not going to walk. They immediately take to trying physical tasks that appear to be a natural sequence of events. Rolling, crawling, stumbling, walking. Time after time of failing and hurting themselves, they haven’t yet developed the capacity to think that something is impossible. When that mental ability sets in it becomes such a huge obstacle in the lives of those who can think abstractly.

    My students have been turning out plays and movies all year. Writing scripts like they are being paid for it. I begin to think like them and the mere immensity of completing the project weighs me down too much to finish, but kids rarely see the whole picture or view the whole vision as an overwhelming accomplishment. In fact, I dare to say that kids do not know the word overwhelming until someone tells them they cannot finish what they started because it’s “too hard” or “you’ll get hurt.”

It’s important to teach kids that good work takes time and that specific feedback is path to growing at skills. Kids shouldn’t feel like learning how to be better at a task is a punishment or a criticism, but rather, what all feed back should be, a guide to improving learning. Maybe we wouldn’t squash their determination if we taught them how to accomplish tasks in collaborative, manageable steps. 

Perhaps we can become inspired by these excitable minds  and continue to try until we reach our goals understanding all the while that achievement of any nature is a just series of steps.

                                                _              _                _

     One of the strange things adults teach kids is what it means to “waste time.”For instance, those video games are a waste of time or skateboarding is a waste of time. Kids have no concept to put value on the actions they take because everything in the moment is of equal importance as it is in the next moment. It’s not until about 2nd grade when parents and teachers really begin to emphasize, and when the point hits home, that you need to decide what is more important and there in, teach children to put a value on playing with friends or drawing a picture.

      Most of the adults I know who are excellent at their professions are people who spent outrageous amounts of hours honing a craft that everyone else that was a waste of time. This kind of unabashed passion to finish and find out is something that should be encouraged and modeled.  Instead of saying “waste of time,” remind kids to work hard to be good at something.  Reminding them that something can truly be anything.  Remind them to always have 1 good idea and find something you enjoy enough to creatively do it every day.

A good portion of my day is teaching kids to reopen their imagination, increase self confidence, admit the things they care about, and feel comfortable to ask when they need help. The goal is cultivating an encouraging environment that teaches children to leave self doubt behind in order to achieve quality products that contain organization and a sincere amount thought and revision.

If you made it through this week relatively unscathed and alive, consider yourself lucky as you have survived another year of knowing me.

In the last 7 years, I’ve had 7 people pass away this week.

In the first year 3 people died and every year after, 1.

Tomorrow I attend the wake for Aunt Barbara.

May we all get home safely.

This is a letter from my friend Matt. He wrote it in Sept. 2003 and passed away in February 2004. Every choice I have made or will make is based on this letter.

Written by Matt Lazzara (April 2, 1982 – February 15, 2004)

“this is all true. september 7th, 2003. the clock is ticking…

i don’t think a lot of people sit around and contemplate their lives. i mean, people think about their futures and what they’re going to do, and what they should have done in order to achieve something, but i don’t think anyone contemplates their present. what they’re doing right now. everyone’s heard of living in the moment or living for the moment or whatever, but i think very few people act on it. myself included and that’s something that i regret immensely.

life is a finite thing. obviously, everyone’s life is going to end, but mine has a time limit. no surprises for me. and depressingly enough, that time limit is going to run out rather soon. i’ve never really told anyone how long i have left, or what exactly (in great detail) is wrong with me, because i would rather my friends viewed me as a vital, volatile, silly human being rather than an animated corpse. a dead man walking. that’s being unfair to them, because they deserve to know what’s going on, and they are amazingly supportive human beings. but at age 21, most people don’t understand or know how to contemplate the thought that someone you know, or care about, is going to die. and i’m terrified that if they did know, they would abandon me for more secure, lasting relationships.

so every day, every minute is vital to me. the most mundane things are breaths of fresh air. the things that most people take for granted but shouldn’t – a kiss, a pudding fight, a good long walk or an intriguing conversation – are now intensely important to me. and i think they should be important to everyone. the fact that i know i won’t be able to experience these things make them achingly more important to me, and they make me desperate to achieve them one more time.

i want to close my eyes and kiss a girl one more time; the kind of kiss that makes you feel like you’re floating, the kind where you forget to do something with your hands because it’s so good. i want to go camping, and lay in the grass and think about how naively beautiful the day is. i want to shoot off fireworks and run away when the cops pull up. i want someone to hold my hand and tell me something nice about myself. i want to be able to read the paper and deride george w. to someone, and have them hate that asshole with me. i want to sit on a stoop late into the night, drinking shitty beer and telling stories. i want to feel alive, and not dead or dying. and i think that those things – the most trivial and passing connections to the world and people in it – are violently important.

so this is my contribution to you. i’m desperately telling you – all of you – to take advantage of your youth and vitality. i hear too many people talking about college and getting shitty jobs afterward. i hear too many people talking about work and how this and that sucks. fuck, we’re all wasting our lives doing things that disconnect us from everyone else! you don’t need a four or five year plan, and you sure as hell don’t need to worry about your future. worry about right now, and what you’re going to do tonight. worry about feeling innocent and immature again. worry about making every day something to talk about, and not just another blank page in your life.

i used to act like you. i had a plan. i had a future. and that all blew away. but right now, i barely have a present, and that’s how i’ve realized the error of our ways. please, please, don’t get old and die of cancer, and realize that you did nothing with your life but make plans that never happened. don’t miss opportunities anymore. if you like someone, tell them. if you think the time is right to kiss someone, do it. if you feel like you’re in a rut, do something stupid and silly and fun. if you feel the world is ugly, make something beautiful. stop being so cautious. some movie line said: if you take life too seriously, you’ll never get out alive.

trust me, as much as life sucks sometimes, and wow, do i know it sucks, it is still the only thing we know. it is the only thing that matters, and it’s wonderful. life is a beautiful, ridiculous, tragic disaster, but it’s the only thing we have. so don’t let it lie by the wayside in pursuit of crap that’s barely important. people are the most important resource, and so are the relationships built with them. i feel the pinch of that more than ever now. if we could spend 400 billion dollars to cure cancer instead of building and maintaining weapons, i wouldn’t have to write this. so this is, essentially, a plea. this is the most personal thing i’ve ever written, and i hope it reaches more people than i ever could.

don’t forget this is the only life you have. make something worthwhile out of it, and no one who you’ve laughed, cried, kissed, or bled with will ever forget you.”

Amy said it best.

If we ever colonized the moon, it would look exactly like Tempe, Arizona.

There is something so eerie about the ride from Flagstaff to Tempe. On our way to you coast on highways, past pueblos, cacti, desert, volcanic craters, green valleys, rocky mountains, red rocks and somehow end up in a cement flatland surrounded by expressways and  speckled with palm trees. yes, palm trees. of all things it was the last vegetation we expected to see, but there, to our dismay… palm trees.

Our dear friends live in the flight pattern for the Sky Harbor airport which is really no different than my parents house under the Midway airport flight path. In fact it was a bit comforting to hear a familiar sound in such a eerie looking landscape. There was just something about the dirt, or dust rather, the color of the ground, the structural sound geometric shape of the lamposts and traffic lights that made the place impenatrable to any weather or outside disturbance.

Though efficiently built, their architecture was not created upon aesthetic value, but purposeful and practical needs which leads me to think that maybe those area 51 conspiracy theorists are not so crazy after all. This desolate landscape seems made as the perfect setting for a any landing, as, even if it did land it seems it wouldn’t really effect the space.

Everywhere else we visited there was a sense of liveliness in the environment. All of Tempe’s activity seems to be taking place in the sky above the airport, everywhere else felt empty.

Just glad we had 2 wonderful friends to invite us in for the night. It was so nice to have kind faces in such an eerie place. We played frisbee till the sun made silouettes of the palms and reminisced of the midwest.

For the record:

if you can’t stand the heat, stay the hell outta Tempe.

The best part of any vacation is thinking back over the day and trying to remember how it started. The trip to the Grand Canyon was supposed to be the pinnacle of our trip. The epitome of every good american road trip, to gaze into the belly of the river eroded beast in wonder. The problem is just that though, everyone from every country knows that this is an amazing landmark.

The accents around the viewing sites of the canyon more of the european variety as we heard people popping open wine bottles and clapping during the sunset. Clapping. During. a sunset. As if it’s the protagonist at the end of a movie. Cool Hand Luke eating 50 eggs or something. They clapped. There was one couple who had to be in their mid 40s to early 50s who climbed to a lower portion of the canyon that was far too dangerous of a climb for unseasoned hikers and tourists. I would have paid to be them, but Amy and I climb to a ledge of our own to get away from the sounds of americans teaching europeans how to use the various settings on their cannon cameras.

It was exactly as everyone describes. incredible and i can’t help, but wonder how people felt as they found it for the first time. centuries of rock layered in a perfect order compounding plants and animals into crystal and stone with stories we can only imagine that they tell through their bones. forging the first hikable paths down. managing to find enough food and water to last journies and attempting to describe to others the unimaginable beauty and vast emptiness of the place.

That’s the best part is the dicotomy of the insane amount of people crowded on the overhang gazing at the largest most graceful crack in the earth that anyone has ever seen. So much space, so little time to explore it.

People are constantly snapping photos for almost an hour prior to sunset since it cast shadows and light on crevasses in such unusal ways. People come here over and over finding that wind has eroded mounds into pillars and pillars into points. There’s a feeling of I made it, from everyone around this strange bonding of naturalness as we all relish in savoring a few more moments of brightly orange lit sky.

Few sets will match this one.

Sitting down, 4000 feet in the air after a hour and half hike up the side of several slippery rocks,I realized I couldn’t remember the last time i watched the sunset and promised myself i wouldn’t let that happen again.

DAY 1- Cathedral Rock in Sedona Arizona

Cathedral Rock is notoriously known as a being a vortex of positive energy. It’s just east of the awful touristy part of Sedona which is lined with crystal stores and jeep tour stores. Amy and I had no intention of making this climb at this time in order to see the sunset. In fact, neither of us knew if we could actually make what seemed to be a treacherous climb up the sides of several smooth and some deterorating rocks. With each climb we took pictures thinking, that was as high as we would go for the day but, then we would fine a new trail, or a more steady footing that make the climb that more reachable.

Along the way we met an older couple from Michigan who hiked all over the US. They gave us some tips on places and tours to take, but we left them on a smooth set of rocks and continued to climb towards a family on the next ledge. They had 4 small children who were scribbling their names in the rock and furiously asking a million questions about the hike. We sat with them for a bit only to watch a group of German tourist “love the rock” as they made their way down a frightening incline.

Watching them gave us the encouragement to continue to climb, but at that point we were on our own and for the next hour we continued to follow unusal trail markers to plateaus with twisted trees whose roots seemed to be trying to make a drill and escape the ground. the last .3 of the miles of rock was a spiraled rocky terrain leading straight up to the Cathedral like pillars of red rock. The top didn’t feel like the top, but maybe that’s the feeling of any climb. We sat on the edge and listened to te echoes of some teenagers that had been hanging out on the various rocky ledges that were all pointing toward the sunset. Taking in the rays we watched the rocks and our faces change colors. Suddenly I became dizzy and realized I couldn’t remember the last time i sat and really watched the sun go down.

The encompassing shadows were our signal to start making our trek down the path so that we didn’t have to navigate in darkness.

I’m not completely sure what makes the trees and plants twist on the sides of the seemingly beating red rocks of Sedona, but i know there is something there that you can’t understand until you touch it and even then you won’t know what it is.

How strange it is to forget to acknowledge the daily celestial event that has allowed us to keep track of time for centuries.