Of Twists and Moments

The Jar

The past is a change jar,
waiting dusty on top of the bookshelf.
To be used
when only coins will do,
not for the water bill
or next years’ school supplies.

I’ve broken down the dollars of years
—common and bland and shabby—
to imperishable small change moments:
Quarter pancakes on a snow day
Dime compliments
Penny glances
Nickel smiles
Half-dollar kiss,
rare and precious and interesting.

The way we wash dishes
after everyone goes home:
Worth about $2.17 in various coins.

The jar of change
—a piggy bank of generosity and goodness and love—
waits for days when I’m broke in the present.
When the tax of solitude is too high,
when criticism fines my already-low balance
and tollbooths loom ahead.

And on those poorest todays
I pull out a handful of moments,
turn them over and over until they are worn like pearls.
Coated with a lifetime of dust,
some are bright and new
and others gleam dully, worn with use.

That day when we
That summer when they
That night when I

And though I spend them
they are never gone.

A poem written for and to Period One
(as an example of extended metaphor)

I left my classroom as messy as it’s ever been. Skyscrapers of paper lean against the wall by the door. The desks huddle together in the center of the room, staying where I pushed them out of the way so I could climb on a cabinet and take down curtains covered in two years’ dust. The blue paint on the bulletin boards is starting to chip off, worn away when I removed the hundreds of staples and thumbtacks that held up flyers, grades, ad prices, photos and phone numbers. The furniture that I like is flagged with the blue labels of moving redemption; the rest have gone into exile, supposedly to a furniture graveyard underneath Memorial Stadium. Room 120, chaotic and awaiting new carpet and desks, won’t be resting this summer.

The school year ended like this, loose-ended, some details unresolved, some tasks incomplete. It ended with a sigh and a shrug, teenage-style, on a cloudy day and in the midst of cardboard and labels and packing tape.

It ended with a twist I would have scoffed at if it I’d read it in fiction. After spending a month planning for unemployment, daydreaming about traveling and mourning the loss of this school that I love, I was recalled to my job for the 2009-2010 school year. It is the last-minute reprieve of an author whose essential outlook on life changes mid-sentence, who doesn’t go back to rewrite the book but instead leaves it as is, strange and inconsistent. And yet, disorienting as it is, I am grateful. Questions of where I belong return to the background for a while; against all odds, I’m coming back for another year.

Like a cloudy last day of school, I’m excited and a little gloomy. I’m returning, but three of my favorite colleagues are not, a reality lost on me when all four of us were departing together. So it’s impossible to write a neat ending for the school year, as much as the writer in me desires to tie it up with a few words and an overall theme, or as a friend puts it, a “moral” for the year. I can only plead that lately I’ve been learning that reality defies this kind of metaphorization; in the end, I’m left with a scattered jar of moments to ponder in all their variety.

Period Four shrieks in rage when the bell dismissed class during The Merchant of Venice, leaving Antonio awaiting the legal doom of Shylock’s knife. They leave with the reluctant confession that they’re interested.

An assembly line of Friends of the Cascade fill our April newspaper with flyers that said “Josy, will you go to prom with me?” from one of the editors-in-chief to our artistic layout assistant.

I spend a 23-hour day with the Class of 2009, punctuated with an original song by one of our teachers, the first speech I’ve ever written, and a standing ovation from the students I’ve known and loved best so far.

The non-senior remainder of my journalism staff creates a farewell newspaper for me in three days, after which they declare, “We did all this! We can do the paper next year!”

Seniors on a post-graduation vacation call my classroom to see if I did indeed get hired back. They pass a cell phone around to confirm the news.

I moderate the poetry blog, kept up by a few students who call themselves the Ninth Wall Rebels, and discover genuine talent and thought-provoking dialogue, realizing once again that ninth graders are cleverer than anyone—even me—ever guesses at the beginning.

I’ve loved these days. Thanks, and have a spectacular summer.

The Ninth Wall

It's just barely eight o'clock when I finish giving the instructions. Even as I was talking about specific praise and constructive criticism (or, How to Comment on a Blog Post and Sound Absolutely Brilliant), I could tell that handing out the login instructions first was a mistake. I can see their monitors from the front of the computer lab, can see them hopping from screen to screen with feline technological agility.

"OK, I need to see all of your faces." Seven faces turn back to me, patient and silent, from where they were doubtless programming for the Defense Department or winning the 2015 Pulitzer. As soon as I start to speak they rotate back on swivel chairs, the magnetism of the more interesting Internet stealing them away.

This is by far the coolest thing I've done as a teacher. Usually I am comfortable with the marginal coolness bestowed on my because of my youth and the occasional instances in which I can mimic students with startling accuracy. That's fine, they shrug. You're not that bad. But you still like to write for fun and you don't go to the clubs on the weekend. And you think Shakespeare is great, so clearly you have taste issues.

This might be another Shakespeare--something that I think is spectacular and genius and my students just find annoying--but I suspect that our collaborative poetry blog, The Ninth Wall, might be cool on an absolute scale. I feel clever and edgy, excited for once about my relative youth instead of seeing it as a pitiful liability in these uncertain times. And that, for once, we might agree.

When I finally set them free to do so, they log in to the site with surprising ease. Since it took me almost three hours to work out the many kinks in this blog host and then create twenty-three profiles, I'm both relieved and a little bewildered at the fluency of their interaction with this completely unfamiliar medium. They find the obscure login at the corner of the page, quickly change their own passwords and move on to the poems they are supposed to be critiquing. I smile to compare this to the first day of poetry, a few weeks ago, which brought dozens of I can'ts and This is too hards from every corner of the room.

"Where's my comment?" someone asks, and I realize that I'm done instructing. They've taken over, essentially, but not in a hostile way. They have simply mastered what I thought was a strange concept, mastered it more quickly than I thought possible. They are commenting on the two poems that Ms. P and I posted for them to practice on. I return to my desk to moderate.

There are already six comments.

I scroll through the ones relating to the poem I posted, one that I had written on the overhead last week, when they challenged me to extend the ridiculous metaphor "The past is a jar of quarters."

This is great ms. dahlstrom the way you used the metaphores and it’s about money, and money keeps people happy all the time.

“The jar of change
—a piggy bank of generosity and goodness and love—”

I like how you used this metaphor to explain the greater meaning of the jar. I believe that you can improve your already excellent poem by adding a couple more similes.

great job on your imagery I felt as if i was there enjoying the snow with you

It’s improved since your last random quarter escapade on the projector.

It is a moment of breathtaking beauty, as I read the articulate and earnest critiques and approval from my students, commenting on my work for the first time. It is love, true and sincere.

Soon, they have each made their required "practice comment" on one of our poems, and they move on to typing up their own poems and posting them to the blog. After closing the loophole that let them use the comments as public instant messenger, I spend the last minutes of the classroom reading and publishing their submitted poems, lingering on their comments to one another.

Nice rhyme scheme.
Mr.Duck is ownage(;

I really love this poem especially how you use the seasons for phases of life. But you mightttt want to check the spelling on autumn.
(:

I like the smilie “Love is like the picture sitting in my mind over and over”, first post?:3

On the assignment sheet I handed out to them--written at the end of a long and incredibly stressful day--I had asked them to think of The Ninth Wall as "a big, magical refrigerator door, where we can put up all the things we're most proud of."

As I sit in the computer lab, approving comments and pre-reading poems, I realize it's not the refrigerator door we've created with our "collaborative poetry blog," home of originality and dialogue.

The Ninth Wall is our kitchen.