You Can’t Learn Any Younger: Studying Ukrainian

After hemming and hawing over whether to study Russian or Ukrainian, I decided to express solidarity with beleaguered Ukraine and be a more accessible and welcoming teacher for the immigrants and refugees that have chosen our school for their children.

I enjoy and do well at learning languages. In (Canadian) school and in an immersion program I learned French, along with a little Kotokoli when I stayed in Togo a few months. In college I took a year of German and still remember a good deal.

Living in Israel for a few years gave me the opportunity not only to enter the excellent HSL programs there but also to use the language daily. I’ve dabbled in Spanish and thought of arranging an adult immersion experience to advance my fluency, as I expected to encounter many Spanish-speakers in my next teaching placement. All this has been great for my brain and for communicating with a few internationals, none of these languages, even Spanish, were useful in my job. But our school does attract more eastern Europeans.

I was intrigued by the idea of adding another new alphabet to my repertory. People also assured me that most Russians could understand Ukrainian, like the French-Spanish connection. I got the two-week trial version of Duolingo and started practicing daily, learning the alphabet, reading, writing, and aural comprehension. It’s not immersion, and it’s slow, but I can fit practice in every day and it works to build vocabulary and some grammar.

The app is motivating, though I avoid prompts to get me more connected and appeals, based on FOMO, to practice when I simply don’t have the time. My goal is to engage in actual conversation and not just maintain my Top Ten status on the app, so I’m starting to build a notebook and am making reference cards. In using the little language I have, I’ve seen how meaningful it is for them to hear their language from the locals, it helped me properly assess the math levels of a few kids whose geometry vocabulary was in Ukrainian or Russian. I’m getting help from these friends with the more subtle elements of expression and pronunciation. It’s a win-win.

Next steps: watching Ukrainian films, writing more, memorizing phrases useful for my work, and looking for opportunities to practice conversation.

 

A swamp is also a bog, where richness is preserved in layers.

It is day four of my spring break, a mid-week morning, and I am in my boyfriend’s house listening to Radio Paradise and finishing a second cup of strong coffee and absorbing nutrients from a vegetable smoothie packed with carrots and collards. My system has been cleansed and brain stimulated, and I consider my choice of morning activities. How shall I pass the time while my love is playing softball for a few hours?

I am free of the duties and pleasures of my usual tasks in yard, garden, and inside my small house currently shared with two grown sons, two dogs and two cats, free to rest my aching hands after days of digging up glacial till in clay, pulling buttercup and dismantling old wood structures. My pickup truck is there, waiting with its load of bark mulch, and in my warm, humid greenhouse, tomato and pepper seedlings are quietly growing while the spring sun and rain soften and warm the garden beds outside.

I have brought my copy of Horizon by Barry Lopez, and have just read with distaste and the mild and distant grief of one descended from privilege his description of a visit to the site of a formal Australian penal colony. He then recounts his introduction to the largest freshwater reef in the Southern Hemisphere, with its thousand year old thrombolites mounding under the surface of the clear water. I want to mark this part of the book to read to next year’s biology students, but instead I consider the difficulty of organizing my sharing of such excerpts, so many there are in this and other books, and I have not brought any sticky notes, and will I be able to find the relevant passage at the relevant time? And will they appreciate and remember these readings as meaningful and helpful, or affronts to their young Earth sensibilities or a threat to their inherited faith?

I am finishing the last of my second cup of coffee. Where I sit at the computer I have a view out over the tree-filled ravine and the river valley beyond, and hummingbirds arrive to sip at the feeder. One chickadee, also, which seems attracted and confused by the window’s transparency and reflection. Leaves unfurl, a maple stands rotting in the near distance, and a fine layer of dust covers a selection of twentieth century toy figures on the shelf beside me: Gumby, a beanie Tigger, a two-headed yellow one my love calls Bendy Guy. Above them is a miniature of Rodin’s The Thinker, a small meditating Buddha, and a gold party horn.

If I focus on one or a few things at a time I can travel across my experiences in a somewhat organized way. But momentarily I see in a more three dimensional perspective and perceive a layered depth and richness of connected meaning that could overwhelm me. It seems to be made of of everything–bio geological substances and events through time, human experiences across time and space, thought and feeling, a quiet, humid bog converting minerals and light to complex carbon compounds communicating with one another and the atmosphere, or gigantic frozen rivers explosively plunging into Antarctic ocean–events fast or unimaginably slow to human thought frame, changes we cannot see without joining that time frame, at least in thought.

The choice to try and understand and work in the world by means of any one field of study or point of view shuts out so much of the other ways of understanding. I want to broaden my mind, pay attention to everything–to the words of the writer, the song playing on the stereo, the light vaulting millions of miles through the window glass to create the shadows along the veins of my typing hands, the pips and caws and trills of spring birds’ breeding calls, if I would only step outside. I want to fold all this into the considerations of my own heart as I contemplate past, present and future of my own. This is to me a fine adventure, with risks, discoveries, and riches to gain and pass on.

But developing the itinerary to this adventure is challenging. I must focus, keep my brain from drifting aimlessly, or overloading. Even the sliver of Barry Lopez’s wide-ranging considerations of how his experiences speak to like’s meaning is hard to grasp, let along share and use as a substrate for something even broader. I am drowning, going down in swampy quicksand as no one set of frameworks has a solid floor to strand on, a “this is how it works” Table of Contents to index its key points for my notebook of life. Everything is connected to everything else. And to maintain sanity (?) I need to ignore most things, and choose a mental life framework, almost arbitrarily, but mainly drawing on my socialization or upbringing, infused with the apparently determinism of my genetic expression in any given conditions.

I take comfort in the things that seem closest, when meaning seems too hard to grasp. To taste fresh blueberries from a plastic box from Mexico, poke pea seeds into brown soil, dance to a groovy tune, rub my hands over the warm skin of my love’s arm while he sits beside me. Yes, even though I know there is a war on, homeless and helpless people, forests burning, and I will sicken and die one day. Typing in a web search that I do not end up pursuing.

The only thing that still seems to apply to everything is that energy will dissipate, even while it seems to accumulate, accumulate even while it seems to dissipate.

 

Trumpets, flutes, noisy gongs, and clanging cymbals: remembering

Band concert at my daughter’s school; her friend begged her to come, and we sneak in the back a little late. Parents, grandparents in rows, siblings and cousins here and there. I’m dressed up for the occasion, and warm from working in the sun. Perspiration gathers against the back of my chair. I scan for a familiar face, an interesting face–see parents of a horse riding friend, a church acquaintance, a neighbor with whom I lost touch, and her boys are so grown. A father with his son whom in this world would be termed special needs, since he claps at the wrong time and seems excessively cheerful. An extrovert business acquaintance glad handing along the rows of chairs.

After the sixth graders perform, the main lights go down down and the spotlights shine on the bright heads of the next performers in their white shirts. The music honks along, not soaring, but demonstrating substantial accomplishment of youth under the tutelage of their band teacher. Her strong, black clad back is to us as she conducts, bright blonde hair recently coiffed for the occasion. I close my eyes. At the close of each song there’s enthusiastic applause, with elements of pride and relief.

Between songs the band teacher jokes, “If any of those kids are making noise in the front, just let me know and I’ll dock their grades.” Teacher power. Supposed to be funny, and some people laugh. I tense. The power of a teacher to grade being no joking matter, in my opinion, but to be treated with honesty and humility, and a certain disdain because of its disproportionate influence on young people.

In the middle school I attended in the late 1970s, teachers gave out what was called a “class mark,” a score out of ten for very subjective considerations, the main one being paying quiet attention to the teacher. I was a tiny rural fish in a big suburban pond–a school that took a forty-five minute bus ride to get to. In the shuffle of names slotted into streamed classes, I’d been separated from every single fellow elementary school friend and acquaintance I’d ever had. Yet in my home room, sitting right in front of me was a boy with a huge smile and a great sense of humor, and I was experiencing the joy of making a friend. Listening to the drone to the teacher came second to exchanging stories, comments, jokes, drawings, even mutual help with schoolwork. We both got low class marks, which I suppose was meant to pull us back in line. Instead it gave me a further disregard for grading and a priority on personal learning that I give as partial excuse for my inconsistent grades in later years. After all, I could master the class material in my spare time, doing homework on the long bus ride.

By the time I was a teacher in my first messy year, teaching 7th-9th grade science and French, I was using the onl grading system I knew tests, homework, and a “participation” score worth 10%. My professional practice was fledgling, the biggest challenge being managing large classes where meaningful connections with students took a backseat to survival, and my grasp of best practices in grading and assessment was minimal. I was grading homework with lots of supportive comments but too-strict criteria, most test grades were coming out low, and with a lot of challenges to my authority and disrespect for me as a teacher, rooted in my fumbling rookie efforts and the no mercy, no grace response of a majority of the students, I was awarding very few student with decent “participation” scores. Report cards came out, and both students and parents were complaining.

My principal was wise. Probably he remembered with humility his own early days of teaching, and he took me aside to help me with of my learning curve while managing things with parents, whose kids had been getting all A’s with the sub that had taught the first month before I got the job, being more fluent n French and a science grad to boot. He pointed out that one must be careful with subjective scores, and suggested I reduce the participation score to 5%. He got me a sub, gave me in-school work time, and got me some guidance in creating a fairer scoring scheme. The grades I came up with were more acceptable to students and parents, but still somewhat arbitrary, I see now. I learned a lot that year, and in successive years developed a much more valid, nuanced, and clearly communicated grading scheme–one which rested on the much more important process of diagnostic assessment and responsive, standards-based instruction. Not that I hold the standards to be the most important aspect of my teaching–it’s just the part tied to grading and accountability. But that’s in my other posts on the art of teaching. Art and science being partners, and the former being the spiritual head of that marriage…

I had all this power wrongly located in a flawed grading scheme. I was reminded of the wrongness of this by that grades-docking comment during my daughter’s concert night. Teacher power. What is it? Of what use is it? What constitutes its proper use?

Certain types of teachers exude a sense of authority.  Or try to fake it, especially during unstructured time where there are no chairs to tell students to sit down in or tests to write, namely assemblies, lunch times and such. So similar to the posturing of ducks or pack dogs in attempts to be the alpha or chosen few of the alpha. I remember a certain teacher education classmate who had that stamp–not the stamp of principal as in natural visionary, leader, someone you want to work for, but a certain strut, desire to be liked, seen as boss, and a lack of interest in students as people or learners. Students were to complain and laugh about behind their backs over a cigarette, weekends were for tying one on. He came into the teacher education program, I suppose, as a man approaching middle age but adrift, seeing the opportunity to accredit and certify himself into a position leadership in some small town and be admired by the parents and younger teachers. To earn a decent salary with summers off and a nice office with a door that closes. There are schools everywhere–an open field.

At my school now, the principal’s door is open. She tells us we are all needed in our diversity, all important, all gifted and hard working. She needs us to, as she puts it “help her see the back of her hair,” to push back, say no, question her, bring ideas, do our thing. She invites us to lead, to head up what’s important to us, to work together, to get things done with or without her. She’s strong willed, brave, confident, adventurous, but with a kind, tender heart. Good with the students–they named her Teacher of the Year last year, before she was principal, and now she wants to teach still, but the central office says no, there are more important things to do.

 

The Pope’s Visit

Remember that day back in ’84 when Pope John Paul II came to Halifax? They tried to batten everything up so tight, but out he popped from the sunroof of his pope-mobile, all in white, with his wide, bald head and waxy wave, we lining Coburg Road in all our black undergrad robes, waving back?

That night we made plans to go to mass the next morning on the Commons, stayed up all night drinking, walking block after block to that side of town after the buses stopped running. The grouping and regrouping that night left me with you, Luanne and Peter, intelligent and sarcastic future lawyers who had never before distinguished my frosh self from the crowd, but my tongue was loosened and the snappy answers bounced around, and we were all drunk enough to feel ourselves and each other erudite and clever. Luanne, you found out it was I who’d broken up with the soccer star with the big brown eyes, not the other way around, and respect gleamed from your eyes. Peter, with your dark stubble and Mizrahi Jew looks, smiled to yourself, quipped, walked with your hands in your pockets, and were so above me, yet there you were.

There was a white stage, people arriving and blankets laid out on the dewy grass as the sun came up, and we stumbled around, and someone was sick, and I had a headache and a weariness that overcame my devotion to the pope and plans to stay for three more hours until he arrived, and so somehow I got home, maybe on an early morning bus.

I never had hangovers in those days, but after all that running, walking and dancing, hours on end, and a hot morning dawning, I gave up on mass, which, without any Catholic training, I figured I could not respectfully navigate anyway, dragged myself back to my dorm room and slept until afternoon under my blue sleeping bag with the red band across the foot. I woke up starving, hair awry, mascara smudged, neither Catholic not Protestant still. That was the year I tested a lot of things, and there was no one to shepherd me anywhere but to the next wild weekend. Not stupidly wild, or thoughtless–indeed, full of thoughtful inquiry, developing friendships, exploring the purpose of life and edges of its good rules, and seeing which ones ought to be left behind. It could have gone badly. as my mother, in her trembling heart, often and almost silently feared. I would not have listened had she attempted to restrain me. It was true, she had to let go; I did a lot of shaking her loose all the way through the years leading to me leaving for college.

What I took from that pope chase was a sense of pride that I had successfully attached myself for the occasion, if never again to two highly intelligent, though also drunken, pre-law students I admired, and still do.

 

I wish

I wish you had been brought up without any television, with nothing but walls of books and ideas about living off the land, with occasional excursions to your grandparents’ house, where the only indoor entertainment was a small set of British royalty romance novels, antiques up in the attic including what appeared to be a cream separator, a tin toy chicken that could drop eggs through its shaped vent, if you could only find them, and you couldn’t. So that if tired of exploring these things and, if it was July, you could swat the dozens of houseflies buzzing against the west window until they were all dead, and then, closing the attic door first, you could peruse at your grown-up uncle’s collection of Playboys that for some reason your grandmother still kept in the bottom shelf of the cabinet there.

I wish that even if you had to go to school, there was not much pressure from outside forces, that it was seen as take it as you will, as long as you find friends, tell the truth, and grow up. That you had a few imperfect friends–whatever ones were available, not hand-selected by anyone. That you could sometimes have sleepovers and see what other parents were like at home, what other sisters and brothers flitted or lurked around the edges of your circle.

I wish that maybe were even a little neglected at home, that there was usually no one available to sign you up for gymnastics, or softball (except for one summer), and that you knew not to ask for a new tape deck (unless it was your birthday). That you left to your own devices, though regularly fed with an eye to health, but not according to any orthodoxy, so sometimes there was bought bread or even Oreos, though not often. That there was roast, vegetables, and ice cream (never enough, and sometimes homemade, or only vanilla) and that when you set the table you were asked to include pickled items didn’t like. That you had to share, or luck out to get a share, with all the siblings that also wanted cookies when they came out of the oven, or homemade fries. That, to assure a regular supply of treats that you had to learn to make them yourself. That to have enough of the clothes you liked you had to sew them yourself. That to not be embarrassed by your younger brother’s haircut, you had to learn to give him one yourself.

I wish you saw and heard people immersed in and reading from books, magazines, and saw them putting their own pen to the page, that Christmas gifts were heavier on the school and art supplies side and light on the latest thing. That, even though you wanted Barbies, you had to visit your best friend to play with hers, and that annoyed her a little. That you might get a homemade play house with dolls the size of Barbies but in different colors and with knees that bent.

I wish that when you had someone in your family, maybe more than one, die, you came close enough to the coffin to catch sight of their cold, pasty countenance, for the certainty of it. That your house was full of church neighbors who brought casseroles and handled things, soaked up the grief, then went away, and you had to go back to school and carry that strange loss and even a surprising sense of recovery.

I wish that you went to the nearest church, so near you could walk there on the train tracks whose bridge trestles made you forever associate the smell to creosote with trout fishing. That your parents were not as hypocritical or obsequious as some churchgoers, that maybe they stirred things up a little, or tried to do some kind of real church. That even if you got a little too much religion at college, they waited it out and figured that at least it would keep you out of some kinds of trouble, if not all.

I wish you couldn’t afford to buy a car when you grew up, even though you worked, but you saved and saved and bought a good bike, and the roads weren’t too dangerous, or at least no one told you they were and you got around just fine that way without being hit by anything other than a car door once. I wish that getting job wasn’t a sure thing, sometimes took a month and dozens of applications, but you did it, and at different places of work you met many different kinds of people–from China, Greece, Ghana, Cape Breton. Some hot-headed managers, some who had the gospel, some a hangover, a foul mouth, an arranged marriage, or, especially, recording equipment and a budding band.

If all of that had been yours I think it would be easier for you now that you are stuck at home a lot, afraid to catch the virus or be responsible for spreading it, cycling back and forth between following the rules and ditching them when your feel like it, then are startled back into seclusion by the waves of infection rushing through every city, every county, every type of place people try to be normal a little too soon. I think you would not be so easily bored, so often anxious, so dependent on your electronic fake curated spun connections, so alarmed by spun headlines, so angry at those on top, so tired of the few people you get to see, so unable to concentrate on ordinary things, so on hold. I think you wouldn’t so easily accept that normal now is to drink more, be lazy, binge watch streamed shows. I think you would see that is all made up, just a bunch of symptoms of things that were always going on and not just now. I think you would be okay with being reduced to bare bones priorities, that you would be creative, focused, and make a plan for the rest of the day, the week, the future–a plan just as good as you did before all this, when summer was coming, you were in love, and you have a good pair of sneakers and a new spading fork.

 

It was never that normal, I guess

I am settling in to the second week of remote high school teaching. Funny how that few weeks has enabled me to mentally visualize each section of students by where I taught them in the building. Before I couldn’t remember which one was in which roster in my online system–now it’s no problem–I just think of their faces and remember which room we were in.

I’m now able to work three days from home, two at school, per week, which is fine by me. That’s an extra hour at least per day saved in commuting, and I enjoy my leisurely breakfast and coffee integrated with an early login, easing into my morning lesson plan finalization before starting Zoom classes.

I still work an hour extra in the morning and an hour or two in the afternoon beyond my official hours, some on weekends. I’m still cycling in and out of that feeling that this is unsustainable, and wondering if I’ll I be able to land somewhere where I can get a break, settle in on one or two courses and actually rise to some level of professional excellence, rather than focusing on mastering new content and curriculum. Or, like some teachers who have another earner in the family, I could drop down to less than “full time”, while, of course, working full time in reality. Because what teacher doesn’t want to use those extra hours to prep a little more, unless urgent other responsibilities prevent it?

They say it takes about three years of teaching a curriculum to master it. I’m into my sixth year. I have had a second year in two math curricula I no longer teach, two first years in three other math curricula (two ran in the same class concurrently), one year in another math I only taught once, a year in an environmental science I cobbled together myself and will probably not be teaching again, almost two years in a biology curriculum (subtract a few months of pandemic hodgepodge), a first year in a chemistry text (without a lab), and am in a second physics curriculum and a first time through a physical science. Next year it will be another new chemistry curriculum and I’m not sure what my second science will be. In 2022-2023 I’m be starting a third year in one of my curricula for the first time, with files full of useful familiar and favorite materials–Woohoo! Maybe.

I’m not sure if curriculum mastery is slowed down by teaching an adapted version for a student body that has classes only two days a week and the other three for homework. It would certainly be an adjustment to go back to five days with much less homework. Maybe I’d less feel the need to be highly engaging and productive in person if I had five whole days–they could even do some quiet reading in class instead of all the discussion, group work, and variation between videos, paper activities, demos and projects I try to fit in while we’re together. They could peer edit, plan and work on longer group things.

That’s high school. Fortunately the two sciences are online learning management system-ready, grading and feedback is a breeze, and my tech learning curve leveled off sometime in October. The biggest challenge is staying ahead in Physics, where my problem solving skills are rusty, and dealing with a Physical Science curriculum that was evidently slapped together in a hurry–it’s riddled with errors and formatting glitches.

On the other two days I currently teach 1st-5th grade natural history. That requires additional planning and organizing, but comes more naturally–no need to review content for mastery, and there’s only one prep a week with variations for the levels. In past years in addition to two science and two or three high school maths, I taught three to five different 3rd-8th classes one day a week. I’ve built up materials I can reuse there, and have some freedom about which courses I choose to teach, so that’s okay.

Tonight is the lull after three heavy prep and teaching days, with tomorrow a repeat 1st-5th day and then a no students day, so I can relax a little. Since I started so early this morning, I took off a bit early as the sun came out of the clouds an illuminated my front year a little. I crave the sun this season, and always exercise and fresh air, being so much in front of my screens, so I went out for a few hours to pull weeds and do a little gutter declogging. Then I soaked in the hot tub under the stars. Mars glowed red, and I tracked a satellite heading north incredibly fast. I resolved to try to get to know more stars at least in the part of the sky enclosed by the silhouettes of the trees and buildings in that spot.

I listened to rush hour freeway traffic far away, and the hissing of my ears. An hour or so of writing feels satisfying. Now its movie time.

 

Shore Road

I’d like to bring you
down into this sparkling ditch,
bubbling with spring flow,
and a little red mud

I’d have you step on yielding,
combed-over gold brown grass
watch the hunting spiders scatter
hear sparrows skirting your perimeter
thrip, trill, kachee, come away-way-way
and crickets that hush

If you could angle back up
the uncertain banks
to the red dirt road, look across the fields
to the purple, sparkling bay water
and see a fence dip into creased hollows
and rise again past the alder wetland

Then the wind would lift with the tide
and you’d breathe in musky hope
and clams far away.

 

Ten Goods in my Life, Five Not

Good: I am healthy, get quality sleep and exercise, and feel energetic most of the time.

Not: I am being lazy about writing and other forms of creativity, watching too much TV instead.

Good: My sweetheart and I are still together after distance dating for a year and 4 months.

Not: My kitten Gary Sparkle has gone missing.

Good: My kitten Turtle has stayed home and has got over her extreme anxiety.

Not: I have a constant hissing in my ears and probably some hearing loss.

Good: I get to teach 1st-5th grade Exploring Nature classes; we go outside each class in all weathers, and they love it. I get to incorporate drawing, music, and poetry.

Not: I don’t get to visit my family in Canada yet because of the pandemic.

Good: My family members are all COVID free so far.

Not: I am again teaching new high school curriculum and have to put in a lot of extra hours to stay ahead, without feeling that I am rising to excellence yet as a teacher.

Good: My children are all local and I get to see them regularly, because they’re all in controlled bubbles and being careful about avoiding COVID infection.

Good: I have a freezer full of fruits, apple juice, and organic chicken, a pantry full of staples, and a garden full of brassicas.

Good: I have cut expenses by cancelling or cutting back on unnecessary perks.

Good: Two of my kids have jobs and two have government support.

Good: My basement is no longer a swamp, and instead I have a pond and a rain garden in process.

 

The Second Date, and Since Then

I have a wonderful boyfriend. True story. He’s like no one I’ve ever known, including myself, and yet we have a tremendous amount in common.

A few months after we met over a year ago, I opened up a little in this post, but have not felt comfortable writing much else while things developed between us. And of course I was having so much fun being in love that wasn’t thinking deeply enough about other things to write much.

But now I want to celebrate, share some of my appreciation for my special guy. I will start at the beginning.

He was my second online date, and we met mid-way between our cities on a warm, pouring-rainy July afternoon at a pub. He warned me that he no longer had the curls and beard of his profile photo, as he had cut it all off.

Heading out I was relaxed and had few expectations, unlike at my first date, because I had landed a date with a third fellow a few days hence, and had high hopes for that one. According to his profile, he too was attractive and intelligent, as well as closer to my age.

I got to the pub first, looked around to see that there was no date yet, peeled off my red rain shell and looked around the space, cozy with large reclaimed wood tables and a nearby bar. I recognized one of the bartenders and told him so, and we figured out that he had formerly worked at my town’s food coop. A real friendly face, which felt good.

As we chatted while he polished glasses, someone strode by on my left, and I knew it was him–short hair tending to curly, graying, 5’8″. He turned back to scan my side of the room, he saw me and his smile got bigger, and there he was, coming at me with a hug. I smiled, said “Hi–oh, a hugger,” or something, and was embraced. It was to be the first of many embraces.

It was an immediate maybe. This surprised me, and I liked the feeling.

I slid onto a bench, and he slid in beside me, explaining that he could hear me better that way if there was noise in the room. He ordered an IPA, I a black currant cider, and the date was I guess a typical getting to know each other kind of thing, punctuated by French fries and, for me, a spreading feeling of relaxation from the cider.

Before telling more, I need to back up a bit and explain why I clicked “like” on his dating side profile in the first place, and continued the email dialog he then started.

First, his profile was a fun read. It was kind of random, included that he was liked by most animals, and highlighted some creative projects rather than possessions or financial status. In our emails, he was lighthearted, creative, and had a quirky sense of humor. He showed interest without eagerness. He gave me his phone number in bot-proof form to foil the site’s data collection system, and he described his self-perpetrated haircut as a failure. He told me he made things in his shop that float and spin, and that he looked forward to meeting me and doubted that we would irritate each other.

So I was expecting to meet a neat guy who was probably beyond my age range (I had clicked like and then noticed the eight year difference).

Right now as I write, I’m thinking of his smile, then, coming obliquely and warm. I’m folding my hands, smiling to myself, and biting my fingers. In fact I can’t stop smiling. I really like him.

I was attracted. He was attracted. I liked his smile, his eyes, his hands, his personality. He gave back good vibes. I wondered quite early what it would be like to kiss him.

After our drink, as it had stopped raining, we took a stroll one the trail near the river, more small talk, and then parted with another hug. I said he might hear from me, that I had another date in a few days, and he wished me luck.

To be continued.

 

Neoprene and environmental racism – FaceBook group reaction #1

Yesterday I posted a question on an open water swimming FaceBook site about leads on ethically and environmentally sourced swimming wetsuits, adding a link on environmental racism around neoprene factories. Within an hour I got a message saying the post had been removed because the piste (sic) was about how wetsuits are racist and they felt it was inappropriate.

A real knee jerk reaction, based on what? Fear that I would enter into some kind of social justice tirade on a swimming forum? Tribal loyalty to the neoprene tradition, effects be damned? Anti Black racism issue fear or fatigue? I was surprised and thought it was really strange, as everywhere else there is so much openness to see and connect the dots on how Western society is racist. It touches conversations where it was hidden, and thank heaven so many Black writers, speakers, comics, artists, friends and acquaintances are speaking and being heard more. May it continue, and not just be “trending now”.

And for the question itself, what kind of moderator can’t see the sense in looking for a product that isn’t directly tied to illness and injustice? Wearing something made from a known carcinogen, even if only at the manufacturing level not a concern?

I looked for a way to respond to the moderator. Didn’t seem to be one, and I was reluctant to put my response out there for all when the issue, I hoped was with this person; I also didn’t want a public call out to be my first conversation on the page. I wondered if perhaps I would be blocked if I continued in that vein, and the pros and cons of making a stand.

After some thought–not a lot, I reposted the question without the link, and soon had some good suggestions. Others saw the value in a more “green” suit.

I now I feel I should have pushed back more, at least appealed to site members somewhat to look into the issue for themselves, and use the opportunity to spread the conversation about anti-Black racism, what is known as Cancer Alley seems to be a prime example. I have not given up hope that it’s possible to get through the moderator’s fears to allow at least a conversation. When I looked again at my second post I realized it was pretty whitewashed, no mention at all for my social-ethical reasons for wanting to avoid neoprene. I will take another stab at it, and if I do get blocked, that site isn’t local for me anyway, and I did find one connected with my own waterways. It will be interesting to see what may come up when I bring up the topic three, or if others have already done so.