Planning, Procrastinating, Being Brave and Reaping Rewards

Where I'd really like to be right now is ankle-deep in eggnog, adorning myself (or an evergreen) from head to toe in tinsel.

Instead, I'm here on the couch, wrestling with my required Weekly Plan.

One of the hard parts of teaching is that it follows you home.  Two weekends before Christmas, I wonder what the rest of the populace has on their minds on a Sunday evening. Probably colored lights, cookies, carols, and candles;  wreaths, wrapping paper, festively curled ribbons. Suitcase strategies, stocking stuffers. Model menus. Miracles. Antlers, angels, snowflakes, Santa.

Those things are are also on my mind (how could they not be, after a six-week course in Classic Christmas Movies, designed by Nicole when she found my Christmas movie education woefully lacking...) But at the moment, these seasonal concerns exist behind a veil of work-related concerns... Which Read Aloud book should I do first? How many kids will be absent the day before Christmas?  What should I do about the kids who still don't know their times tables? When are those people coming in for the peer observation? When can I talk to the ESL teacher about the new unit? How long will it take me to finish writing this IEP? What recommendations should I make at the parent meeting on Thursday? Are my math centers working? How should I change them? Where can I find lower level Guided Reading Books? How long is the Christmas concert going to last? Is there even the remotest possibility of actually finishing the whole math curriculum by the end of the year?

Planning my schedule every week feels like spinning a delicate spider web. Which is maybe why I get so irritated when my intricate planning is up-ended by unannounced changes. And also maybe why I procrastinate so much before doing the plans...

Lesson planning isn't the only thing that follows you home and haunts you on Sunday evenings. Worries, preoccupations, vague unsettledness, wishes and plans and hopes and dreams for and about the kids... these also stay with you, like it or not. Even after eight years in the biz, even after a lot of practice separating my work emotions from my personal emotional life, the clouds still creep in. Imagined voices of the kids and their parents whisper into your ears at night, always more critical than they would be in real life. Even after trying my hardest to do things right, even knowing, more or less, what to do and how to do it, there are still doubts and disappointments, little pinpricks of guilt. How did I let 6 kids fail the fractions test? How did I not realize that one student's entire writing piece was a re-telling of a movie he saw on Netflix? When did my to-do list get so long? How did my stack of grading get so tall? Why did that student's reading score go DOWN on the last test... it can't be that he's un-learning how to read...

Sometimes I get jealous of other jobs. Jobs you don't have to think about on the weekends. Jobs that start at flexible times. Jobs that start in the double-digits of the morning. Jobs that leave you with energy at the end of the day for cleaning house or doing laundry or buying groceries or answering emails. Jobs where you get more than twenty minutes to eat your lunch. Jobs where you don't get so busy you forget to eat lunch (and then wonder why everything feels so desperate and difficult.) Where you can "phone it in" every once in a while.

But of course, those types of jobs where you click-clack on your keyboard all day long also don't provide the same kinds of rewards. Like fierce, undying loyalty from the students - voiced in protests of outrage when I mentioned that I would be returning home to the states, even though logical reasoning would presume it obvious that they will have moved on from my class by then. My reward is hearing kids (more than one!) telling me that they never really liked reading until this year.  My reward is when the kids get as excited as I am about looking at maps of migration and colonization. When a kid notices and names a metaphor in a book. When they go, "Oh! Decimals are easy now!" My reward is when kids tell me that they like my class because I make learning fun, and knowing that they are telling the truth.

My job is rewarding, when you learn how to recognize and appreciate the rewards.  But that doesn't mean it is easy. I imagine it is much like being a parent.

Another hard part of teaching is putting on the impenetrable mask. Every morning on the walk from the bus or the subway or the parking lot in towards your classroom, you have to squeeze into it. Some days it fits just fine. Somedays it feels like it was made for you. Fun? Entertaining? Yet serious about learning? Wise? Well-informed? Quick-witted? Thoughtful? Dependable? Resourceful? Punctual? Prepared? Why yes, yes that's me to a T! That's teacher-me!

But other days it's hard to fit your real contours into the mask's semi-artificial shape... Tired? Ill? Homesick? Slightly hungover? Trepidatious? Blind with rage? Inundated with apathy? Doesn't matter. You mold to the mask; it doesn't mold to you.  Whatever you have going on on the inside, the outside has to be more or less consistent.

Every day, you must become calm, patient, and just. Even when you are actually feel frazzled and flustered and frustrated, irritable, irreverent, irrational. Every day you must be ready for anything, even when you feel prepared for nothing. Every day. You must be firm, even when it feels like a light wind might knock you to your knees. You must be steady on the outside even if you're trembling on the inside. Never reveal your anguish.  Not even when your intestines are tied in knots from something questionable you ate, and you think they might imminently betray you.

You must stand in front of others even on those days when you want to hide inside your shell. You must be prepared to give orders, but in a way that makes kids want to follow them. You must be prepared also to follow orders, even if they are contrary to common sense. You must act like the better versions of yourself.  All the time. Every day. Even when you don't feel like it. Even when you feel like one of the worst, most vulnerable, most whining, wheedling, weakling versions of yourself. You must motivate your kids, even when your own sense of purpose is obscured.

You must be present, even if your mind is really in the mountains.  You must be reassuring, even if anxiety is tugging at your tail. You must smile when they greet you, no matter if it's real or forced. You must act like you have an answer for everything, whether or not you're making it up as you go along. You must be brave when you are tired, when things don't go as planned, when facing the day feels like too much to ask. You must be like that duck, steady on the surface, but paddling furiously underneath. You must love all the kids, even those who are hardest to love. You must learn to love them more.

And, no matter what, even if you can think of innumerable more ways to procrastinate, and thousands more words to express what you feel, you must get your weekly plan done by the morning.

You might be wondering where I've been. The answer is, all over the place!

I've been hiking up the tallest mountain in Ecuador to see how the last ice merchant of Chimborazo harvests glacial ice; I've been bathing in volcanically heated hot springs in Banos and Papallacta; battling jungle insects and bodysurfing at the beach; birdwatching in Mindo; drinking fancy coffee in the Old Town and taking a biking around Bogota, Colombia. And meanwhile, trying to keep up with my responsibilities at school.

Alancito was here visiting me for over a month.  This had the effect of simultaneously enriching my knowledge and experience of Ecuadorian culture, opening my eyes to the fabulously diverse natural beauty that Ecuador has to offer, and also running me ragged.

But Alancito left last night, so now it's just me and my computer again. It's hard to know where to begin... PYP reports to write? Shows to watch? Groceries to buy? More likely than not, early bedtime will win out.

Good night!

Being grateful for pickpockets and petty thieves

Thanksgiving is a strange time to be away from your family in a country that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving.

There are so many things to miss, and by extension, so many things to be grateful for.

Mostly people. There are so many people I miss. And I am grateful that they are, or have been, or will be again, a part of my life.

I'm grateful also, when reading the awful headlines of the last couple of weeks, to be ensconced in a corner of the world that doesn't feel so threatened, or so much in the spotlight, like Paris or New York. It's a bit ironic when you think about it, because while those of us who are new here fear pickpockets and petty thieves, other Americans who have lived here longer feel more apprehensive when they return to the States. They fear greater harm on a broader scale from more calculating criminals.

When I read in the newspaper about the painful things that happen in the world, it does make me grateful for all the the things that I'm not. Not a refugee. Not homeless. Not a hostage. Not a victim. Not in a country that currently finds itself in the crosshairs of mass violence and indiscriminate destruction.

Sometimes on my bus ride home the strangest, smallest thing will make me feel homesick.  Like not knowing a word in a sign... At home, I would understand what all the signs are advertising. Or getting confused about the route the bus driver is taking home. In New York I always knew where I was, or at least which subway could get me back to a place I knew.

A lot of people seem to teach abroad because they are escaping something. (I suppose I am, too, if boredom and predictability count...I never did like coloring inside the lines.)  But I am grateful that the thing from which I am escaping is not my family. My family is my home. And although I am feeling homesick, I am grateful that I have a home to return to.

Gremlins

It started with a a rumbly in my tumbly. I woke up Sunday morning with the feeling that something wasn't quite right in my upper abdomen.  The feeling came and went all day, progressing from vague pressure, to fist-clenching spasms, to a fairly certain speculation that gremlins had taken up residence inside my stomach, to the distinct feeling of sharpened spikes piercing and protruding through the the lining of my digestive tract from the inside out. Maybe the gremlins were swinging their maces.

That night the shit hit the fan. Or shall we say, the bowl.

And yet, the next day, Monday, was one of those days in teaching that it would've been way harder to miss, and subsequently make up, than it was to drag myself out of bed, put on my proverbial Big-Girl Panties, take some Big Girl Immodium, and drift through the day in a hazy, semi-conscious state, subsisting on saltine crackers, tea, and the will to make it to the 2:30 bell.

The gremlins were also very likely behind the Internet in my apartment going down for two days. I think they like to mess around with electrical cords and things that have flashing lights and buttons. (Thankfully, Nicole rescued me by explaining my predicament to the TVCable people, who were able to re-set it.)

 I'm confident that gremlins were also behind the day at school this week where I spent almost the entire day re-doing work I had already done. I had to enter my report card comments 3 times because of a lack of clarity about the format that was expected, and once I had made my schedule for Parent Teacher conferences, I had to re-make the entire thing and change appointment times to accommodate a support teacher whose schedule I didn't receive until it was already too late. Not to mention the gremlins' handiwork of making me totally misunderstand what I was supposed to do with some of the assessment data we were given earlier in the year and consequently completely miss a deadline, not by a little...

The gremlins definitely stole the final project of one of my students that I definitely had sitting right on my desk, and hid it away from me in some extremely remote corner of my classroom.

I also think it's safe to say that gremlins were responsible for Alancito losing track of his passport somewhere between LaGuardia and Houston, and for him becoming trapped in Texas for an unspecified amount of time on his way to Chile (and indirectly, on his way to me!)

Finally, though, I am pleased to report that the gremlins have moved on, because my parent teacher conferences went off without a hitch, Alan was able to get his passport replaced in a single business day, and my appetite has returned with a vengeance.

Gremlins, good riddance!

Add to the list of minor milestones...

First (highly unpleasant) bout of Ecuabelly. That's the clinical term.

Parks, Plazas and Potato Soup

What a great Ecuadorian weekend!

Early Saturday morning, I went with Nicole and her dog Lola to hike in Parque Metropolitano.  This is an amazing place because it's right on the edge of the city and only took us 5 or 10 minutes to drive to, but once you park your car and go a few steps into the park, you are enveloped in a beautiful semi-wildnerness. Any Westchesterites that are familiar with Rockwood Park, that's kind of the feel that it has... meandering trails you could get lost in if you don't know your way around, a canopy of trees, beautiful views. There's even a little farmstead that belongs to people who lived there before the park became a protected area... But instead of maples and oaks like in New York, there were neon-green bamboo forests and tingly-scented eucalyptus trees, and instead of overlooking the Hudson River, the lookout points gazed out upon a chain of volcanoes. The best part is that you can end your hike with a cup of fresh juice for a dollar... I think every hike should end that way.

Also, my birthday is in November, so I've never before been able to have an outdoor birthday party... this year I plan to take advantage of the mild weather and have a barbecue in the park!

Saturday my neighbor and landlord Berthita had me over, along with her two other renters (also teachers from school)  to her apartment for an Ecuadorian family lunch.  Her son made shrimp ceviche, and she made colada morada, which is a traditional fruit soup made for Day of the Dead. (We're a little early for Day of the Dead, but Berthita is headed off on a cruise next week, because that's the kind of gal she is.) The fruit soup is made from all of the red fruits that grow in Ecuador: mora, which is in the blackberry family, raspberries and strawberries, plus spices like cinnamon and cloves. It's sweet and dark red in color, and represents the blood of ancestors who have passed on. It's served with gua guas de pan, or bread babies (great for dunking), and traditionally eaten in the cemeteries next to the family plot as a way of remembering those that have gone before. First you eat the head, and then the rest of the body, and there's a cheese or jelly filling inside.  It was a lovely spread, and her apartment looks out over Parque Carolina, with slices of the mountains visible behind uneven rooftops, pale in contrast to the dark charcoal grey land behind them. Berthita and her family are so generous and gracious. The three of us are lucky to have her as a landlord!

Then this morning, I went with some of my girls down to the Old Town to go to Catholic mass in the old Jesuit Church, Compania de Jesus. It is an incredibly ornate church, with a gold-plated ceiling and elaborate carvings and statues everywhere, and a high dome above the altar that reaches towards the heavens. I was surprised, given how fancy of the building appears, how relatively casual the service was. Many people attended in jeans, babies and toddlers were kind of sprawled out across the pews, and it was also not very long. It was quite beautiful, although I couldn't help wondering how many Inca temples and palaces had been pillaged in order to cover the entire arched ceiling in gold...

We capped off our morning with lunch at Case de Geranios, the House of Geraniums Restaurant on one of the cobblestone streets in the La Ronda area. We ate locro de papa, or creamy potato soup with cheese, and fried empanadas and plantain chips with spicy aji sauce. We sat in an outdoor patio overlooking the statue of the winged Virgin high up on the hill above us, surrounded by colorful pastel buildings, Spanish style ceramic rooftops, and balconies planted with lacy ferns and of course, geraniums.

And now I'm back home confronting the conundrum of being part tourist, part teacher. If we were simply on vacation, we'd almost certainly be still sitting in the Plaza Grande having a latte and taking in the colonial architecture, or perusing the shops, or exploring a museum, or meandering through the Botanic Garden for the Orchids and Chocolate exhibition.

Instead, I'm here in my apartment preparing to (or procrastinating from) writing report card comments, an IEP, and planning of the start of our next unit...

The positive side of this is that I get to know that I'm here to stay for some time, and there are many more weekends ahead to plan for, in addition to planning my units... climbing up in the rafters of the big basilica, my birthday barbecue, mountain biking or cycling down Amazonas Avenue, which is closed to traffic on Sundays, and maybe learning how to cook locro de papa and empanadas for ourselves! Cheers, to many more beautiful weekends in Ecuador.

Miniature Milestones

The rainy season has begun. Before this week I barely saw a drop of water fall in Ecuador, and I was beginning to think that the rain was only a myth, and that maybe tales about the rainy season were just some sort of elaborate wide-spread hazing ritual for gringos to make them more confused.  Throughout August and September the land looked parched and desert-like and felt like Arizona. This week it feels like Seattle.

Other small but significant milestones:

• I found a cleaning guy for my apartment.  Apparently our security guard also moonlights cleaning and doing odd jobs, so Berthita hooked it up so he comes twice a month and cleans until it shines, all for $25 bucks... I might as well enjoy it while I can afford it.

• The signs on the front of the city buses that explain where they go (which when I arrived did not have a lot more meaning to me that Egyptian hieroglyphics) are starting to make sense. When I read the names of the destinations, I am starting to have an idea of what places they are referring to and where they are located in relation to where I am.

• I started Spanish lessons. My teacher's name is Miriam. She's my age and hopefully will be the one who helps me go from kinda knowing Spanish to REALLY knowing Spanish.

• I answered a phone call that was all in Spanish and didn't get confused.

• I answered a different phone call that was all in Spanish and got so confused that I showed up a week early for my appointment.

• So, yes, things are moving right along. All that is left to make me feel as if I have officially settled is to arrange for water delivery, so I can stop lugging 3-liter jugs home from Supermaxi.

Happiness is riding in the back of a pick-up truck

The best part of this weekend was sitting in the back of a pick-up truck taxi, climbing a seemingly endless cobblestone road up into the mountains near Otavalo. I was wedged in happily with half a dozen other gringos and our hiking packs, bumping along and peering down over the cliff into the valley to see the patches of varying shades of green and brown farms, dotted with cows and sheep and simple farmsteads nestled at the bottom.

Friday was Guayaquil Day, commemorating the beginning of the independence movement in this part of the world. We had a day off of school, and happily, a couple of colleagues organized a trip to Otavalo, a market town about two hours north of Quito.  We stayed at a lodge/hostel called La Luna way up high in the mountains, with hammocks strung along the porch and a fireplace in every room, and several happy hostel dogs roaming around and schmoozing graciously with the guests.

Our destination for the first day of our trip was the lake at Mojanda for a hike. The landscape there was surreal. At 12,000 feet, the air was thin and cool and the vegetation shrubby. Everything was quite dry, even though it's next to a lake. It was a gray day, but bright, and it matched the color palette of the surrounding territory: cold colors, with grays and browns and pale sagey greens. The lake was surrounded by dark, sharp-edged, protruding mountain peaks whose profiles seemed to say, "don't mess with me."

The first part of the trail had us traipsing along a narrow path through monster-sized grass up to our waists. We turned left at a giant craggy boulder, and the path turned into a dry dirt road where we kicked up dust that coated our hair and clogged our nostrils.  Enormous spiky plants taller than a tall human lined the steep edges of the path. The whole area had a prehistoric feel, like a forgotten land. It was totally silent, except for the sounds we made ourselves. It would have seemed totally within the bounds of reason for a pterodactyl to have come screeching along over the horizon.

The road actually led down to a little hostel at the far side of the lake, where, conveniently, there was a little open-air cafeteria. (That's my kind of hike - one with a snack bar at the other end!) We ordered typical Ecuadorian food that seemed fitting with the day's Jurassic feel -- we ate choclo, which is a species of corn that has enormous kernels that are kind of starchy and not actually sweet. It was served with ava, which look like gray, oversized lima beans, a boiled potato, another root vegetable that I'd never seen before that maybe was kind of like a parsnip, and topped off with some satisfyingly squishy rectangles of fresh cheese. (Naturally, we also doused everything with aji, which is the tangy Ecuadorian chili sauce.) It was a hearty and authentic-feeling meal.

The following day's adventure was a trip to the market at Otavalo, which spreads out on Saturdays through blocks upon blocks of the city's center. The market is known for all kinds of beautiful hand-made goods, especially textiles like alpaca blankets and sweaters and ponchos. Alpaca is amazing, because it's just as warm as wool, but like 10,000 times softer. It got really chilly up there in the mountains at night, so just about all of us came back from the market with soft new sweaters or blankets or scarves.

The market is a beautiful and colorful place, with vendors selling beaded jewelry, painted bowls, pillowcases, tablecloths, and a million other things. On the far end you can find the "food court," with women wearing indigenous clothing selling heaping piles of beans and grains from burlap bags, and if you're hungry you can go over and get a slice of the roasted pig on a spit, with a tomato in its mouth and peppers in its ears. You could wander endlessly among the stands, taking in the colors and sounds and trying to use your very best Spanish to negotiate a fair price.

At the end of each day of our long weekend, we made our way back to La Luna, a blissful and quiet paradise of relaxation. It basically felt like summer camp, because I was there with a group of about 20 friends that I truly enjoyed being around, and we slept in bunkbeds six or seven to a room and shared the bathrooms and just hung out. There was a cozy living room with pillows and another fireplace and board games, and wherever you wandered you would find a group of people to talk to, or read next to, or play board games with, or order beers for.

I got to talking with some of the other gringo teachers who have been here a little longer. They expressed how great it is to always have new people coming into the community to make friends with, but also how how bittersweet it is to constantly have people moving on. That's just the way it is, but that doesn't make it easy. One said in an endearingly tongue-in-cheek way, "When you're abroad, your friends become your family," acknowledging that this is at once very corny and very true.

 It's an odd thing to be so delighted and happy with your surroundings and the people who surround you, and at the same time also missing the other people and places that you adore.  Being in a beautiful natural setting and living communally, I couldn't help but draw comparisons with Latvian camp. At the same time as I was enjoying the adventure and surprise of exploring a beautiful new mountain I'd never seen before, I found myself missing the well-trodden trails and coniferous forests of the Catskills. All these new crazy-looking plants are cool, but fir trees feel like home. I love my gaggle of new friends, but in different ways than I do the ones back home that I've known for decades.

The feeling of missing someone or something is also a little odd because it's not always totally logical. Of course I expected to miss my family and my friends and my boyfriend, but this weekend I also found myself missing loved ones that I won't be able to see when I go home for Christmas... my grandpa, our childhood dog Niks, my cousin Alfred, and my Uncle John. I guess when missing people is a part of daily life, your heart doesn't distinguish between those you will see again and those you won't.

That seems to be the challenge and also the satisfaction of this new life... letting new people into my life, and also letting myself love the people of my past. Leaving room to think about home, but also allowing myself to think of my apartment in Quito as home. Letting myself feel a twinge of homesickness sometimes, but not letting it overshadow fun and excitement of new places and the thrill of pick-up truck rides. Remembering truthfully that life in New York had downs as well as ups, as does life here. Enjoying my washing machine and my new alpaca poncho as much as I would be enjoying bagels and the Mets back home.

Before I left New York lots of people told me to “enjoy every minute” and things along those lines.  But Leslie Spangler, when she took us boating in the Chesapeake, told me instead to “embrace every moment,”  and that’s the advice I’ve chosen to try to follow, because it leaves room for a wider and more complex array of sentiments. I can be having fun and have an awesome weekend and be thrilled with my new friends, and still miss my old friends. I can fill my eyes with the gorgeous pale green mountain scenes, full of high-altitude shrubbery and cows in the road and and find them stunning and beautiful. And at the same time I can still be loyal to the rounder, lower, darker green but also stunning Catskill mountains of my youth. I can love my apartment but hate being trapped in in at night. I can be excited but also unsure. I can love Quito while missing New York. I can accept and even welcome these conflicting feelings, knowing they are all part of the experience, part of my story.

Spying on someone else's school

I love so many things about my school, and I'm sure I'll get around to telling you about them eventually.

Meanwhile. there is another school that has taken on an unexpectedly prominent presence in my life... It's a public school whose schoolyard I can see into (and certainly also hear) from my 10th floor living room window. It has become a never-ending source of fascination, and not infrequently, consternation.

The first mystery of the public school outside my window occurred several weeks ago, when all of a sudden it became evident from the shrieks and sounds below that complete and utter pandolerium had been unleashed in the schoolyard. Naturally, I had to nose over to the window and investigate the racket. All I could see was swarms upon swarms of uniformed kids milling and fading and shouting and moving erratically around the schoolyard. This was made more confusing because of the fact that it was getting close to 6pm, and would soon be dark. This was no extra-curricular program, this was hundreds and hundreds of kids.

Soon, my ears were accosted by the grating, nasally, metallic, thunderous roar of what I could only assume was the lady in charge, or possibly a demon from the underworld, shouting things into a megaphone. I couldn't make out many of the words, but there was certainly no mistaking her imperious yet desperate, piercing tone.  There was also no ignoring her VOLUME! Ten stories above the megaphone monster it sounded as if she were cupping her hands around my ears and bellowing as hard as she could into my eardrums, so I can only imagine what it sounded like to the masses down below.

After several excruciating eternities, the hordes ended up in more or less orderly straight lines, so I deduced that they were practicing, (in probably the most painful, inefficient and disorganized way possible) their evacuation drill.

Finally, mercifully, the captives were released, the megaphone stopped reverberating across the mountaintops, and there was peace in the schoolyard.

For a while...

To my extreme distress, I found that the following week, the satanic ritual was being repeated, only this time there were dark clouds in the sky and it looked as if rain were imminent.  And in fact, it was.

Just at the key moment when order had begun to settle in among the throng, the clouds burst, rain poured down in torrents, thunder crashed, and all the kids scattered and ran for cover, shrieking as they went.

Last week I was relieved that no drills had been required...

And then I discovered that drum line season has begun. And they practice for about two hours after school on Thursdays and Fridays.

Uncle.

44 Days in Quito

I guess I am just about on schedule, having been here for a month and change, to find the stars beginning to dim from my eyes, my open mouth begin to close. (Thankfully, I'm also finding I have a little more air in my lungs...)

In case you were wondering, the simple act of moving to a different country has so far not fundamentally changed who I am has a human being. Dishes still pile up in the sink. I still often avoid taking my vitamins days even though I know it only takes 10 seconds. I have more than once let myself fall asleep on the couch in front of Netflix at 7:30pm. I still sometimes delay grocery shopping until I am rummaging through the freezer wondering how I could potentially make a bag of frozen blueberries into a dinner.

Yes, I am the same person, but I've also noticed my perceptions about Ecuador start to gradually change,

The eucaplytus and palm trees that I found so novel and captivating when I arrived are starting to be just "trees."

The boxy, cinder-block architecture and hand-painted signs that line my bus route to school no longer seem exotic and Latin American. They're just buildings and signs.

It no longer crosses my mind how sweet and quaint it is that the school bus picks me up on the corner every morning to take me to school. Now it's just transportation. I used to find it titillating that the bus driver leaves the door open has he chugs down the block to the next pick-up. Now it's just part of the morning routine.

Getting in a taxi, not only am I able to effectively communicate where it is that I want to go, I can orient to the extent that I would have a clue if the driver were bringing me in the wrong direction in an attempt to abduct me.

This is certainly not to say that things have become boring or hum-drum. There's still plenty of newness to keep me occupied.

For example, I did spend about 15 minutes in the cleaning aisle of MegaMaxi, wondering which of the many colorful and intensely perfumed products people might use to clean their floors. I thought about texting Nicole, but then I said, NO! I will do this on my own! And persevered reading labels until I found one that clearly had the words "floor" and "clean" in it, and that didn't make me gag from the scent. People here seem to really like heavily perfumed products.

This was only after another quarter of an hour or so that I spent at the ATM, trying to activate my bank card for the first time. The problem was that I read so slowly in Spanish as I was trying to parse out the instructions, the machine kept spitting my card back out at me, figuring I must have changed my mind about my transactions after all this time.

I have also figured out how to pay my bills, and in fact it is extremely convenient: Bertita, my landlord and neighbor pays them for me, along with her own, and I reimburse her. Perfect! And I have learned to fry empanadas (granted the are pre-made supermarket ones, but I don't let that dampen my feeling of accomplishment.)

And I am trying not to lose track of the super-saturated colors of the blossoms on the trees --  hot pink, deep purple and vibrant neon orange. These were stunning to me when I first arrived, and I intend to continue being stunned by them.

Socially, I am slowly but surely starting to make new friends. It's actually an odd thing, to have to go and make all new friends at the age of 30 (well, thankfully not ALL new, because I still have Nicole.)  But it's a strange sensation to be surrounded by perfectly lovely and pleasant people who have no idea about your past history or anything much about you, other than they, like you, decided to move to Ecuador this year.  I guess I had kind of forgotten what it feels like to have to actively pursue relationships with people, and to do the work of getting to know someone. It feels strange, knowing that I have so many friends and family at home who know me and understand me and love me deeply and unconditionally, and here I am dipping my toes into little friendship pools, making the perfunctory jokes, finding polite topics of conversation, searching for common ground.

My work life, however, feels like it's becoming pretty solid. For the last month I've been totally immersed in school and all the work of setting up a classroom, carefully building piece by piece my little ecosystem designed to help my students thrive. There's a lot that goes into it, but the good news is that I think we're starting to reach homeostasis, where the kids and the room can function on their own. Boundaries have been drawn, expectations have been set, and we can start to shift our attention as a class from the basic understanding of how we do things to the more interesting task of what we're setting out to do.

One of the focuses of our international curriculum is teaching the students to be balanced. This is an interesting task for someone like me, who has a tendency to throw myself into my work and focus on nothing else, almost as a coping mechanism... especially here, in a world where everything is a little different and strange, where there is so much I don't understand, where even basic errands still require quite a bit of forethought and planning, and inquiring, and looking up words in the dictionary... it has been comforting to focus my attention on what I do understand - grading rubrics, charts about place value and order of operations, behavior systems, learning objectives. My dear old friends, comfortingly the same on this continent as they are back home.

But now I feel like I am ready to start venturing out of my safe school zone and exploring the world around me a little more. I want to set up routines so I can enjoy my life here, not just my work.

And with that said, time to go meet Sarah for dinner!

Things I have been adapting to in Ecuador

• milk in a bag
• the neighborhood dog that barks for a solid hour at sunup and sundown, every single day, like this: bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK, bark BARK...
• crossing busy streets Frogger-style due to scarce pedestrian crosswalks
• washing fruits and vegetables in vinegar solution before eating them. (This has not been helpful for my already abysmal track record of not consuming enough fruits and vegetables)
• Alan not being around, then being around for a week, and now not being around again
• Aji (tangy hot sauce) on everything
• Hulu, Songza, and Pandora being blocked
• feeling house-bound after dark unless I'm going somewhere with someone
• empanadas available in the supermarket!
• daily hummingbird sitings
• cool mornings, warm afternoons
• soccer games on Sundays
• haggling with taxi drivers
• volcano and earthquake drills at school
• not drinking water from the tap
• wearing a watch instead of taking out my cell phone to check the time
• carrying $20 or less and no cards with me unless I am on my way to go shopping
• speaking Spanish! I have overcome my period of awkward mutism
• Two types of beer: Pilsener and Club.
• Fruits I have yet to indentify
• catching the schoolbus in the morning to get to work
• no recycling of glass
• no ice of unknown origins (unless you are willing to risk a bout of Ecua-belly)
• the peculiar squeaky/honking sound that advertises the presence gas vendors as they drive around in their trucks in case you need a new canister for your stove
• vehicles piled high with family members, including children who are definitely not strapped in and definitely are not riding in a car seat
• people doing things like smoking out of the window of a public bus

Just so you know, the first week of school was GREAT!

I have so much to say, but haven't had time to say it.

Settling in

I’ll be honest: when I was on the airplane, and I first saw the lights of Quito popping into sight below me, I had a very strong reaction. It was,

What have I done?

Especially in those first few days, my mental state saw a lot of pendulum-swings.

Initial descent into Quito…What have I done?

Drinking beers and cheering at the soccer game? I can do this!

Waking up from a nap at Nicole’s house and staring out her window at the ash plumes emanating from Cotopaxi Volcano…  What am I doing?

Successfully navigating a trip to the corner store to buy water and snacks all by myself? I can do this!

Now, as a seasoned “Quitena” of over a week, I’m feeling more consistently and confidently on the side of I’m doing it!

Mostly, I’m struck by how remarkably smooth the transition has been. 

I was thinking about Margi’s mom, who was telling me at my going-away-barbecue about her experience teaching abroad several decades ago, where she up and left to Ivory Coast with a backpack and a sleeping bag, with no way to contact her family except pen-and-paper letters, days and weeks apart…

Me, I had to suffer through an entire weekend without internet (ok fine, I was still able to use minimal internet through my Ecuadorian cell phone data plan.) But not to worry, because now I am connected, and I have at my disposal at least 5 different ways to chat, message, write and even speak face-to-pixelated-face! Naturally, once connected, I immediately video chatted Rika so we could catch up…Although, while I’m being honest, I suppose I’ll admit that we probably spent as much time making faces at each other through the computer screen and giggling as we did actually exchanging information about the status of our lives. Just like home!

So, anyway, technology definitely has made being far away feel a lot less so.

Another contributing factor to my feeling relatively at ease is that I have bonded quickly and strongly with the group of new arrivals I am entering with. There’s nothing like being plunked down in the middle of a tangle of foreign customs, culture, food, geography, language, and personal safety guidelines to fuse you together with the people who are trying to figure it out along side you.

Most of all, Nicole has paved the way for me like nothing else. Yesterday she took me to the MegaMaxi, which is kind of like a Super-Walmart, only I think not owned by an evil empire.  Grocery shopping in a new place for the first time can be incredibly overwhelming, especially in a huge store where you don’t know any of the brands, or where anything is supposed to be, or even what products you should expect to find, and you can’t really read the labels all that well. Plus, everything’s slightly different, like milk comes in bags, and eggs aren’t refrigerated, and there are fruits in the produce section I’ve never seen before and wouldn’t even begin to know how to eat, and you have to order cold cuts in grams, and you have to get a receipt con datos, with your name on it so you can deduct it from your taxes…

All this could have been very alarming for me (I mean, I tended to become disoriented back home even just going to the other drug store on the opposite end of town). BUT, yesterday, Nicole took me grocery shopping and essentially led me by the hand down the aisles of MegaMaxi and explained which are the good brands of ketchup here in Ecuador, and that I should buy Aunt Jemima syrup now, and lots of it, because they don’t always have it in stock. And she and told me what she usually buys and what she usually makes and what it goes well with. (Truthfully, I could have used this kind of a service back at home because I have been known to wander absently down even well-known supermarket aisles and emerge with but a few bare essentials, only to find my cupboards bare again within a matter of days.)

Now I am basking in the victorious relief of having managed to meet my basic needs in my new country. (Admittedly, this accomplishment is mostly thanks to the patient assistance of others.) Fridge is stocked, pantry organized, various and sundry household items purchased and put away, laundry is tumbling away right behind me, and best of all INTERNET HAS BEEN INSTALLED. I am back from the abyss!

Finding home

Many accomplishments in the last couple of days!

Work visa: check

Ecuadorian bank account: in progress

Ecuadorian cell phone: in progress

school campus tour: check

Health and safety presentation about all the different ways and circumstances in which I could become injured, ill, a crime victim, or dead while in Ecuador: check (a tad alarming, but also full of  practical and sensible advice)

And, most of all, signing for new apartment: check!

I have endless appreciation and gratitude for the welcome wagon provided by Colegio Americano. Clearly, they have done this all before, and know the right way to get things done. They’ve made it very easy for us.

A television reality show should definitely be created about our “buddies,” who are the colleagues and Quitenos helping us find apartments.  I can see the show’s tag line… “3 buddies. 9 gringos. 4 days to find affordable, safe, convenient apartments suitable for all of them!” After lunch yesterday our restaurant table became a command center, with all three of them on the phone, taking calls, making appointments, strategizing… I have a 4 o’clock appointment for a 2 bedroom in Batan Alto!…  Who wants to see the one bedroom suite in Guapulo?…  This one has a terrace but it doesn’t take pets… Make it 2:30 so we can pass by the one that belongs to my cousin’s nephew on Gonzalez Suarez first… Do you want to see that one if I get him to lower the price?… I already have a call in to him, he was my neighbor for 17 years…

All three of them have been so accommodating and patient and persistent, driving us to and fro all across the city in their own cars, translating, orienting us to the different neighborhoods, showing us where the best places are to go for groceries and home goods and school supplies. And I’m pretty sure they are volunteering.

Thanks to Nicole’s advance footwork, I got a head start looking at apartments. (She asked for “the list” ahead of time, in which the school compiles all of their contacts who currently have apartments for rent, and identified the ones within walking distance of her house) And, just sayin’, I’m pretty sure I got the best one.

My favorite part of my apartment is my landlady! Her name is Berthita. She retired from teaching at Colegio Americano after something like 42 years, and my apartment is right next door to hers. I’m told that she is sometimes referred to as la abuelita del colegio, or the grandma of the school.  She also happened to be Nicole’s husband’s kindergarten teacher, and co-taught with my apartment-search buddy. 

Berthita is so kind and lovely and lively… both of the apartments she rents are full of original artwork made by her, and today after my colleague-to-be Sara signed for the other apartment, we dropped Berthita off at her senior citizens’ tropical dance class! Other people have offered her more money to rent her apartments, but she reserved them for people from the school, with referencias, whom she knew would be coming. That's the kind of person she is... she's not looking for income, she's looking for neighbors.  Also, her Spanish is very clean and precise and comprehensible, so I felt victorious when she taught me about all the different keys and appliances and bills in Spanish and I understood everything!

My other favorite part of my apartment is everything!  It’s half a block from Carolina park, which is Quito’s central park, and it's right next to the road they close off on Sundays for walking and biking. It’s four blocks from the shopping center. And, it is so much nicer and larger and newer than any apartment I’ve ever had in New York, for half the price. It’s on the 10th floor of a brand new building, with a view of Pichincha mountain. There’s a washer and dryer in the apartment, and it has a rooftop terrace. And, for any Yertle the Safety Turtles that might be reading this, it has a guard outside, two main entrance doors that need an electronic key card to enter, and a reinforced safety door to the apartment. 

Here are some photos so you can see for yourself!

August 16, 2015: How to Arrive in Quito

If you ever decide to pick up and move to another country, I strongly recommend doing it this way:

What you want to do is, station a really good friend of yours down there a couple of years beforehand. Go and visit them once or twice, get the lay of the land, do some sightseeing.

Then, once this friend has had time to settle in, pave the way, find all the best spots for fresh juice, ceviche, plantain pizza etc. etc., give them a ring and have them hook you up with a job interview for a sweet position in your target country. Once all the paperwork is sorted out, this friend can pick you up at the airport, bring you to her home, feed you a welcome dinner of fondue and champagne, introduce you to her dog, show you the neighborhood, and help you find an apartment, all within 24 hours of arriving in the country.

Not only should your friend be fully bilingual, it would also be helpful if she has already gone through the cultural transition a couple times and knows how to translate for you and intervene on your behalf and provide safety and city-navigation tips in a way that is helpful and funny and not condescending. She will also have a good sense of when it is time to go back to her house, post up on the couch and chill out with some home renovation reality shows (in English.)

As an added advantage, make sure your friend is married to a local. Then, they can bring you over to the family’s house some Saturday afternoon to meet the cousins and friends and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews, and you can have a beautiful home-cooked meal with them. (The family will be totally cool with the fact that, although you can indicate your general understanding of what is said in Spanish through appropriately timed smiles and nods, for all practical purposes, you are essentially a mute, other than to say hola, si, no, gracias, and ciao. And even though you’ll still feel much too timid to actually try to converse in any meaningful way, the family will still be super duper nice to you and make you feel welcome, and not make you feel as if you are intellectually challenged.)

Ideally, your good friends/hosts/native guides could also take you to the Sunday soccer game and teach you how to cheer like a local (hint: it involves a lot of profanity). And then maybe they can finish out the weekend for you with an outdoor world music concert with a view of Quito’s many mountainsides all lit up at night, and top it all off with consumption of a delicious fried dough product dipped in honey.

Anyway, I’m not saying you have to do it this way if you decide to move to another country. I’m just saying that so far, this way is working well.

August 15, 2015: First Impressions

Things that are, like, a little bit different in Ecuador:

1. Twilight lasts all of 10 minutes, and the sun sets at 6:30 every single night, no matter the season, since we are so close to the equator.

2. Toilet paper doesn’t go in the toilet. It goes in a little garbage can next to the toilet.

3. City smells: Sure, there’s bus exhaust, but there’s also a Eucalyptus grove right next to the highway, and a fresh, earthy smell after an afternoon rain that kind of reminded me of sage or cinnamon.

4. The altitude. Quito is 9,000-some-odd feet above sea level. Therefore, even a paltry amount of walking leaves me breathless and a little lightheaded with my heart racing, even though I am accustomed to walking quite a bit (but way down at sea level, poor limp-lunged, oxygen-guzzling NYC low-lander)

5. There’s an active volcano nearby that is currently, um… ashing?  I don’t want to say “erupting” for fear of alarming my dear readers. I’ve been reassured that, despite my Hollywood action movie-style visions of red-hot magma pouring down the streets and consuming everything in its path, the biggest effects we are likely to experience here in Quito are some haziness and reduced visibility.

August 13, 2015

Endings, Beginnings, and Last Times.

Alan was sitting on my roommate’s couch in my nearly empty living room. The movers had already whisked away my personal belongings, down all four flights and into the rainy Tuesday morning to be brought to a storage place somewhere in the Bronx.  All that was left in the room was Jessy’s couch and TV.  My scraggly houseplants were already in foster care with my mom. My old Ikea dining chairs had been sold on Craigslist. Over the course of the summer so far, all of my possessions had been pulled out, evaluated, then either packed away, given away, or thrown away. The apartment was doing that hollow, echoey thing that apartments do when devoid of furniture. It didn’t really seem like my home any more without all my stuff in it… just kind of a big empty box with a glossy wooden floor, and a few faint traces of my three years there: The floor scuffed up by my bed frame, the marks on the wall in the place where I would park my bike. 

I was washing dishes for the last time in that apartment. On a whim, Alan turned on Reading Rainbow  and the episode happened to be about endings and beginnings, and about how one thing leads to another, and about ending up where you started. It got me thinking about how many times I had washed dishes looking out that 4th floor kitchen window, and how the view had changed. 

In the beginning, the view was an ugly, squat brick building with a discarded sofa in back, deteriorating as weeks went by and the weather got worse. Then one day, all of a sudden, the entire building was demolished while Jessy and I were away at work and the view became a pile of rubble. Soon after, the construction started. To the tune of jackhammers and steam shovels, the site was excavated and turned into a giant pit. By moving day, they had started putting in the beams and foundation and pouring concrete and putting in the other things that rest underneath new buildings. 

The new building’s origin and evolution sort of mirrored some things about my life:

 At first, the old one was just there, because that’s where it always had been. Present, but unremarkable. And then, one day, someone decided that maybe they could put something better in there. And they probably thought about it for a while, and they probably had to get the proper permits and make a plan and talk to some architects and see if it could really work… and that's how it came to be that I was washing the dishes and looked out the window, and the building was gone! Just like that. I hadn’t known the time before that it was to be my last view of that unremarkable building. 

(A lot of times, when it’s the last time you are doing something, you don’t realize it’s the last time until later. For example, I didn’t know last September that it would be my last year teaching Social Studies at PS89.)

Over time, like the owner of the building outside my kitchen window, I looked around at my life, which had been feeling unremarkable*, and said to myself, maybe there could be something different here?  

And I thought about it for a while, and I talked if over with my people and started to formulate a plan… and one fateful day in December, I sent my resume to Nicole in Ecuador, to submit to the American School of Quito. That was my demolition day. I began to knock down the life I knew in favor of a new one I imagined.**

So, endings, beginnings, and last times... I washed the dishes for the last time as I prepared to do many things for the first time. l looked at the beginnings of a new building being constructed as I prepared to construct a new life in Ecuador for a couple of years.

All this seemed somehow related to the word carved above the entrance to my building…PROGRESS.

Progress. I always knew the apartment on Astoria Boulevard wasn’t a permanent home for me. It was pretty clearly a temporary resting place, with its weirdly pentagonal kitchen, and the backwards faucets, and the postage stamp of a bathroom and the slanted floors, and the unadjustable steam heat from the radiators that would suffocate from October to May, and the closet door that didn’t quite fit the frame. Even the neighboring storefronts, though they grew comforting in their familiarity, were unglamorous, and gave off an air of “good enough for now.”  There was Lupe’s deli with its ripped awning, Jerry’s Beauty Cage, now closed, and the dress shop that rarely saw any customers walk through its doors (other than older, vaguely gangster-y seeming gentlemen.)

Despite all this, it was still a good apartment. It might not have looked like much, or been in a particularly trendy part of the neighborhood, but it was an important place in its own way. A place for me to perch, gather strength, save up, and figure out what I wanted to try for next. Eventually, it would be time to move on. Make progress.

Now here I am, following a dream.  So far, following my dreams has felt like fairly mundane work. I am discovering that while actualizing dreams, you still have to listen to awful music in a loop while on hold, delete spam emails, get stuck in traffic, pay for overpriced airport sandwiches. You still have to wash dishes…But I guess that is what is meant by making a dream a reality. It’s not as if all of a sudden the clouds will turn to cotton candy and the whole world will burst into song. I’m still doing mundane things, but I’m doing them in pursuit of something I’ve wanted… Something new, an adventure, a challenge, a new perspective, a new framework for seeing the world around me. You don’t mind doing the work of life if you believe you’re doing it for something worthwhile.  

__________________________________________________________________________

* Family, friends, and loved ones:  YOU have always been remarkable. That is not the part of my life to which I am referring.

**Again, dearest friends and family and loved ones who are reading this, let me clarify that in no way do I mean to imply that I am demolishing my relationships with you and the lives we have been loving and living together. Those are permanent and immovable and always at my core no matter what. It was more my working life that needed renovation.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

It’s hard not to get excited about new beginnings.  The age-old question:  How different will I become? What of me will stay the same?

With 3 decades of living under my belt, I know enough to know that I cannot predict those changes… Will I become the type of person who flosses every day?  Who wakes up early to exercise? Who cooks healthful meals full of antioxidants on Sundays and individually packages them to be consumed throughout the week? Someone who knows which foods have antioxidants?

Teachers know that the time before the school year starts is the most hopeful, the most filled with resolve. It is the time when all things seem possible. Every new year has the potential to be the best year ever (even the ones that turn out to be the worst.) Mercifully, we don’t know ahead of time which it will be, otherwise we might not persevere…

I know enough to separate my hopes, aspirations and elaborate, Stand and Deliver-type fantasies from my realistic predictions of how life will be. But I also know that, realistically, this year is going to be special.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

The night before I leave New York,  the moon will be 0.82% full and waning. I looked it up on a phases of the moon calendar.  

The night I arrive in Ecuador there will be a new moon. What are the chances?

Last Friday, when I arrived in Philly for my final family weekend before I move to a different continent for two years, there was an actual blue moon, which, I learned, has nothing to do with the color, but is when there are two full moons that fall within the same month.  

The next night, as we were camping on the Chesapeake Bay after a day of sailing and cracking crabs, the moon was missing just a sliver, but still plenty bright to illuminate the neighboring cornfield and make the water sparkle as we swam in the middle of the night.

And last night, as Alan and I rode a night bus back to New York, that same moon was looming large and orange over the skyline, rusty and round and just a tiny bit slimmer than it had been the night before. It is waning. So is my time left in New York, my home. The moon, it seems, has become my countdown calendar, a lunar version of an old-fashioned hourglass. When this moon dwindles away and the new moon appears, I will start my new life in Ecuador.

Bus rides are good for contemplating things like that. 

I’ve also been contemplating the nature of good-byes.  

I’ve become a fan of the short good-bye.  As I left my family at the barbecue, it was likely the last time I’ll see my mom and dad and sisters for a while - maybe 4 months, maybe 10. But we had a bus to catch, which wouldn’t wait for sentimental notions, so there were quick hugs and kisses and well-wishes, a bottle of wine tucked into my bag (a symbolic gift from my dad because of the mountains on the label), then into the car and off to the station.

I like short good-byes because they are forward-looking. They recognize the unknowability of the future and embrace it. They help you charge ahead.

I have some very dear friends who tend to embrace long, if not lugubrious, good-byes (you know who you are!), with lots of hugging and exclaiming and thanking and planning when to meet again and promising to write or call or text. And I totally get that, too - it’s a way of showing gratitude, of letting people you care about know that you have valued the time you spent together, of showing appreciation for what they bring to your life, vocalizing the tenderness we feel when letting go, even temporarily, of people that we love. 

But there’s something appealing about a short good-bye. A short good-bye is about looking ahead, not backwards. It’s about getting on with it! It’s knowing that you’ll meet again if and when the universe decrees it. The short good-bye works best when you’re secure in knowing that the people you are leaving know how much they are loved, and that you’ll always be in touch in whatever ways you can be, and that you will continue loving them just as fiercely from afar. It’s a ripping-off-the-band-aid scenario…onward, towards the new adventure! Let’s see what life has to offer! What lies around the bend!? Every beginning is an end, and every end a beginning…

So with that in mind…

Bye!

Friday, June 12, 2015

There is a certain way the school smells sometimes in June.  (Not the sweaty kids smell, or rotting garbage, or bus exhaust, although those are not unfamiliar in June.) It’s something unique, not unpleasant, but hard to place…  It’s a summertime morning smell, perhaps the pores of the 100-year-old wood opening up underneath the varnish from the heat and humidity. Not a bad smell. Not musty exactly, but kind of an old-fashioned smell.

I wonder if I’ll miss that smell, and all the quirks and peccadilloes of PS89 and the life I’ve led in Queens. The school’s summer smell is one that I will forever associate with the patchwork tapestry of images and sounds that make up my memories of school… blue-uniformed kids with red ties and big backpacks being dropped off in the morning, some nestled in the handlebars of daddy’s bike, some on foot pulling along little brothers and sisters and cousins by the hand, some tumbling out of the yellow school bus, sleep-eyed as they are herded into their two straight lines. Parents paused right before their kids walk through the arrival doors to give kisses or blessings and the sign of the cross, or instructions in English or Spanish or Chinese or Bengali to be a good girl or boy, listen to the teacher, work hard.  Then the kids turn and enter the maw of the looming giant.

Will I miss the familiar imposing red brick walls that have surrounded my working life for the past 8 years, 4 stories tall and 2 deep? The tall windows reach towards high ceilings in rooms that were built before it seemed necessary to have more than 2 electrical outlets.  The school smell will always remind me of the rooms that sizzle with the untamable blast of dry steam heat from ancient radiators in winter; that transform from dry deserts into tropical saunas in late May and June.  (There is a a brief respite of comfortable climate in the spring, brought about by the long metal poles that push the windows open at the top.)

My life has been lined with shiny linoleum squares in the hallways, where the kids like to play “don’t step on the red ones,” despite the teachers’ supplications to please just walk like regular human beings. 

I know the details of the school in the intimate way that comes from spending the better part of a decade of your weekday working hours there. I know it the way you come to know a lover’s freckles and ticklish spots and gray hairs…I know the perpetually crooked window shades, the light switches put in by people who seemed to think all teachers would be a minimum of 6 feet tall. 

I know how many water bugs are likely to come crawling out when you first open the big closet down in the cafeteria. (Between 1 and 5)

I know which windows the pigeons like to come in, and in which classroom they one time built a nest (211). 

I know the incessant, repeated, saccharine chime of the ice cream truck floating in on warmer afternoons.  

I know the homemade vendor carts, transformed from grocery carts, selling churros in winter, ices in summer, and a range of healthful donuts and chips and candies in between. 

I came to know, (and feel a certain type of distant affection for) the trannies congregating at the Roosevelt Avenue Dunkin Donuts early in the morning as they concluded their nocturnal activities, unapologetically boasting fishnet stockings, sky-high heels, and sassy attitudes. 

I was privy to the way that daylight would break upon the changing of the guard, as the teachers poured in from Long Island and Manhattan and other parts of Queens.We would arrive for our “shift” in Jackson Heights and the ladies of the night, our foils on the graveyard shift, would depart, scattering to unnamed corners of the neighborhood.  

I was a member of an exclusive set of people, those who wake up before dawn. I rode the subway next to construction workers, nurses, and those with no homes to go to or leave from. We’d ride in sleepy camaraderie, clutching our coffees and glaring at those who occasionally broke the unwritten code of silence governing the use public transportation before 7am.

I came to expect the way the sun would shine directly in your eyes coming down Gleane street at certain times of the year, blinding you for the last block as you trudged towards school. I became adept at avoiding frozen dog poop on the sidewalk in winter, or uneven pavement that would catch you off guard. I watched the slow crumble and decay of the abandoned house in the middle of the block.

The little bits of my morning routine will not be the same this year. Erin’s white car will not pull up outside my building on bad weather days. We won’t hold our breath and say a prayer while merging onto the BQE, watching for potholes and imprudent drivers. I won’t hear her daily Dunkin Donuts coffee order: medium Hazelnut, skim milk, two Splenda. Those routines seemed immovable and permanent at the time. But like all things in life, they are not.

My daily sights won’t be the same, nor will the daily sounds. I’ll be exchanging the thick Queens accents of the school aides for Ecuadorian ones. Part of me is going to miss those

big open vowels.  (Open the do-ah! What’s that on the floo-ah? And my personal favorite, the Queens pronunciation of the Hispanic name Jorge: Hoe-ah-hay)

I’ll be far away from the people and places and things I’ve known for the entirety of my adult life. Yet I’m looking forward to piecing together a new collage, finding the quirks, collecting bits and pieces of daily life across the world, of knowing a new city, discovering a new school, finding a new routine.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

It used to be just a secret in my soul, something I’d whisper to myself in the darkness of winter to let myself imagine that change is possible, that maybe I wouldn’t live out the rest of my days and then die, a shriveled old lady, feebly pushing my blue Social Studies cart up and down the checkered linoleum hallways of PS89.

Maybe? Could I? Will I? Should I?

In time, it became clear to me that I probably would. 

Then it was a secret I’d shared with just a few people. It became a smile, a whisper, a knowing glance, a voice lowered down to its most confidential tones.

Last week my travel itinerary arrived in my Inbox.

I told my bosses at work. 

Now I’ve begun the strange process of seizing the day, of taking stock of my life here in New York, and beginning to sort in my mind: What will I bring with me? What will I leave behind?

A New York City rainbow: The brown faces of children staring out the window of the seven train, illuminated by the glowing green and purple in the light of the circular subway sign, framed against the backdrop of yellow and orange old-school subway seats. 

The twinkling of lights many stories up as I leave Manhattan and cross into Queens, catching up with car traffic as I coast down the long side of the Queensboro bridge bike lane.  The darkness of the water. The whooshing of traffic on my right side, compared to the silence of the water far down on my left. The steady squeaks and creaks from my bicycle as it sheds its winter-long stationary status, kind of like my knees. 

I will exchange these well-trodden paths for new and unfamiliar ones. If my footsteps followed me, they would break fresh soil in August. 

February 2015

Things I will not miss about New York:

-My shower, whose temperature fluctuates only between Dragon’s Breath and Ice Bucket Challenge.

-Carrying my bicycle up four flights of stairs to my apartment

-Wet socks from winter weather

-Grumpy people

-Rushing

-Sweating inside my winter coat while riding the subway

Things I will miss about New York:

-my friends

-my family

-pizza

-knowing my way around

-being a native speaker of the language