Any answer other than “clay” would be incorrect: It is indeed reclaimed (that is, made pliable again) potter’s clay, a small ball of it, only enough to fit nicely in the palm of my hand, because I didn’t want to start with the tubful first and mess it all up. If you will, think of the tiny ball as one small decision to run down to Dollar General for some chips, and the larger bag as a move to, maybe, Italy. (I’ve always wanted to travel there, so I’ll use that country.)
Not to get too pretentious or to drag out my metaphor too long, I will stop there.
This post will be a personal one, unrelated to genealogy, but as I’m the owner of the page, I can do that! If you find it boring, skip back to another post.
Some of you know already what I’m about to say, though probably not all the reasons, which I’m not going into, anyway, on this blog: I’m going to be teaching mainly art, not Spanish, this fall, and not at the high school where I've been these nine years. I told the principal several years ago that the only way I could’ve stayed in teaching after all this time was that I “took off” once in a while, usually when things at whatever school where I was working got weird and unpredictable. Or when my frustration rose to an unbearable (for me) level over the state’s, or a district’s, approaches to dealing with the education of kids I cared so deeply about.
Some of what follows, I’ve said already, in other posts, but bear with me.
I have ALWAYS known what I was “supposed” to be, since I was around 15 or so, when a high-school teacher asked me and another student or two if we’d like to teach a 20-minute lesson to her Spanish I class, with her guidance, of course. My sister-in-law was Hispanic, a fact that had already made me love the language; and after that short lesson, I was hooked. Add in a couple of inspiring, demanding English instructors in high school and college, and I ended up ultimately with a double major plus a teaching credential. —Which I’ve kept since 1974, when I left Ole Miss to teach my own students who were about a year and a half younger than I: I was eager, I was ready to take it all on, so I’d graduated a lot sooner than most people do.
What they can’t really tell you in college—what you finally have to experience on your own—is the fact that a lot of people regard school, maybe especially high school, as a place for kids of that difficult age to go to be put up with by people other than their parents: Whew, let somebody else deal with them right now. Teenage years can be tough. I know: My four daughters were all teenagers one time.
We try to maintain safe environments for these almost-adults. We’re their counselors; they cry on our shoulders (sometimes, literally). We do our best to elucidate for them topics we hope, we believe, will be important to their future selves. It’s exhausting work, exhausting way past my ability to describe, something people who’ve never taught really can’t understand completely. That sort of bone-deep tiredness has been characterized as “decision fatigue,” a phrase that may be about as accurate as any other term I’ve ever heard: We’re constantly, real-time, making choices about your child’s wellbeing, immediate safety and mental health, and future. And not just your one child, but times about 25 or more per class. Times multiple classes.
Administrators—even if they themselves have taught (and all SHOULD have, and not just for a year or two)—frequently forget this, the same way some childbirth memories are forgotten. Me, I’ve always felt too much—maybe I shouldn’t have started teaching at such a young age, because I wasn’t “grown,” myself, then, and my own emotions were still pretty naked and undisguised. Whatever: I learned early that I don’t have the desired ability just to shut out things I know aren’t going to end well, and stay in my own world and go about my own business indefinitely. I’ve wished sometimes that I had that trait; it lets teachers carry on and do their thing regardless of official chaos. But I didn’t have it, so my solution was to “check out” once in a while. I know not everybody has the luxury I did of taking that time off and finding something different to do for a while, then coming back in a few years, refreshed and ready to have another go at it.
And that’s where my own big tub of clay comes in. I’m about to reclaim, refresh, remold myself.
I always drew, painted, sculpted. We didn’t have money. But I’d buy tempera paints, ink, nice paper, whenever I could as a teenager. Long past the time I should’ve been in bed, I’d sit in my room, lights off, and stare out my window at the night sky, painting it in the dark, rubbing my brush across a sliver of bar soap and then into the paint, to keep my tempera from running all over the paper. In books about art history I’d run across pen-and-ink drawings done in the 1800’s, and I painstakingly copied them with my own nib and bottle of ink, purchased after I’d saved up enough allowance.
When he was forced by poor health to retire early, my father opened a ceramics shop. (I’ve posted about this before.) By then, I’d been teaching for several years. After school was out for the day, I’d sometimes run by his shop, and he’d hand me lumps of clay left over from whatever plates or bowls or pitchers he’d been working on, and I’d turn them into stuff: frogs, mushrooms, unicorns, figures representing family members.
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| Daddy also hand-made the pegged cedar table. |
I think now that maybe Daddy’d been something of a frustrated artist who had to work during the Depression instead of taking his own “time off”: he’d also given me one of my first calligraphy pens that had been given to HIM when he was in high school. He’d never used it.
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| Look at the sign behind them...and I painted it! |
So, back to now: I’m not “retiring” per se. I’m not ready to quit teaching. Some of my energy still comes from working with young people. But I find myself once more caring too much—not caring too much about THEM, because you can't care “too” much about kids, but you can let other things kill your spirit—and so it’s time for a break, and when this one is done, so will I be, at last. This time, I almost feel as if parts of my life have been teaser-trailers for this big final show. I didn’t realize that art I had in high school, that art I took in college (as my advisors tore out their hair and reminded me of required classes I HAD to have), the afternoons I spent with carving tools in Daddy’s shop—all of it seems to have been preparation for this moment, and I am grateful.
I was going to miss speaking Spanish on a daily basis, and I grieved about forgetting it through lack of use. But as it happens, that particular road-not-taken has U-turned in a serendipitous way: I’ll also have one language class! How much better can it be?
This weekend, my big chore is to start turning all that leather-hard potter’s clay back into usable stuff, and I know I can do it, because I took the first step and made a smaller amount soft and pliable again. Just as with myself. I’m not quite irrevocably hardened just yet.
Ælfwine
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| Tiny bits of clay require tiny creations. |
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