I feel that I must apologize in some way for hammering away at Lucia Mar with my very small hammer on Facebook. It’s not that I’m important. I just have a big mouth. I will return to my usual cheerful self, one way or another, soon.

Since I am retiring, I really don’t have much of a dog in this fight: retirement is determined by averaging the last three years of a teacher’s salary, and I would have to make more than Leo DeCaprio this year to make any substantive difference.

But I do not like to see good people get pushed around. I do not like to see them patronized. I do believe that loyalty should always go both ways. I do believe that the teachers in my District are dedicated, compassionate and skilled and I believe most of all that they love children.

I do believe that the District, too, will find a way to get even with me and with others who have called them out. Lucia Mar has a long and well-deserved reputation for vindictiveness, so there’s a good chance that someday soon, a meteor will fall and squash me flatter than a copper penny on a rail. That is the way life works.

From Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons:”

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all… why then perhaps we must stand fast a little –even at the risk of being heroes.

No heroes live here. I am a small and fearful man whose fear is tempered by an Irish temper. People like me, and people far braver than me, must be squashed. We call that Progress.

Before I get too awfully flat, I’ll throw in a photo of me where I have always been at my happiest: in the classroom, with the teens who are your children–and mine, too.

I will now be quiet until I can talk about better things and remind myself that I must not be taken too seriously, no more than the man who rows the Thames taxi carrying More back to his beloved daughter, Meg.

Another hard morning. Elizabeth is dusting,  vacuuming and moving furniture to sweep underneath. I have gotten up twice and gone back to bed twice.

This adrenal fatigue ( not medically official)  stuff is insidious. It can leave you breathless. Sitting up makes you dizzy. Getting out of bed feels like attempting  a reversal , in wrestling, against an opponent three weight classes above yours. I’ve had times, working at the computer, when my head droops, my chin hits my chest, and I go to sleep. At school, lunchtime and passing periods are the worst, because you have to fight off the urge to lie down, or, worse, the urge to feel sorry for yourself, and you have to summon the energy for the next class of kids.

At the end of the day and on weekends, there’s no energy left to summon. This is not remotely like depression–been there, done that. This is like living in a body, heavy, stiff,  leaden,  that refuses to do what you want it to do. It’s infuriating , or would be, if you had the strength to be angry. Now, I want to sleep and I want to resist sleeping, and there’s no victor in a fight like that.

Mmmmm. Inari sushi. Haven’t had it for years. Used to have it when I was young at Ben Dohi’s house–a great man– but only on special Japanese holidays like Christmas, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. (And Thanksgiving, of course.)

On one visit, I had the honor of holding Ben’s baby niece, who still has not forked over the royalties I am sure she owes me for not dropping her. Her name was Kristi Yamaguchi, and I liked to think I had a small part in making her athletic career possible.

The sushi was wonderful, but even better were Kristi’s aunts, the Yamaguchi sisters–Ben’s wife, Ty, was a Yamaguchi– preparing it in the kitchen. They were very, very funny. (Witty, because they were also very intelligent. They made the air kind of crackle.). They liked to needle each other and, even more, the men in the living room watching football or baseball on TV in various semi-horizontal positions. I think they were out there for protection, kind of like when they circled the wagons in Westerns.

I love sports, but I used to hang out in the kitchen because the women were far more entertaining, and they had the same kind of giggle that sisters can have, and that was a happy and endearing sound, but there was something else, and it was just a little magical. For just an instant, they were teenagers again, pleated skirts and bobby sox and saddle shoes, and you had the distinct sense that for Mr. Yamaguchi, these three daughters were a handful. If it’s not already obvious, I loved the Yamaguchi sisters very much.

.

Last week, a student left a Valentine on my teacher’s desk at Arroyo Grande High School.

It read: “Thank you for believing in me.”

She was born in Guerrero, a Mexican state I know from my college studies of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who was from nearby Morelos, south of Mexico City.

Zapata’s life, ended by assassination in 1919, empowered peasants who wanted a little land to farm. He fought rapacious sugar planters who both monopolized the land and guarded it with Maxim guns. The planters, in fact, wanted to expand their holdings, threatening to plant cane even in the naves of little churches in Guerrero.

My life is ordinary. I’m no Zapata. I am a bespectacled and aging teacher who has been inspired in watching this girl empower herself.

Her family’s first language is Spanish, but she is mastering the arcane details of Advanced Placement European History, with its Hapsburgs and Bourbons, Calvinists and Anabaptists, Girondins and Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Spartacists.

She is getting an “A” in one of the most difficult classes we offer, and she has just turned sixteen. I want to see her in a UC when her time with us is done in the Lucia Mar Unified School District.

My mother would’ve had the same hope. I wrote about her in an essay called “To the Girl on the Lawn at Cal,” which was purely imaginary. She was trapped in poverty, abandoned by her Irish father, a man who liked his liquor and had a penchant for borrowing cars without notifying their owners, in 1920s Taft.

Like this student, she loved to learn. My mother’s mind was forever hungry, just as she’d been, in the physcial sense of the word, as a little girl. The laundry room of our home on Huasna Road faced a pantry with cupboards filled with canned food that we would never eat because there were times when she never ate.

In the essay, I imagine my mother, about nineteen, in a sweater, pleated skirt, bobby socks and saddle shoes, on the lawn outside the Bancroft Libary. Her notebooks, dense with her precise handwriting, were at her feet. She was, I think, studying for her final in Cultural Anthropology (a course I later, and very happily, got to teach to my high school students), and she was devouring information as quickly as a hungry girl can devour bread.

Twenty-five years later, she shared the education I’d wished for her, in my imagination, with me.

My mother taught me how to read, how to appreciate music, art, justice and faith.  Fifty years after her death, I took my sons to Gettysburg and was able to describe where we were, in tracing the landmarks of the three-day battle, and what had happened there. The words came out without me willing them, in brigade-strength paragraphs, the story-telling gift that was my father’s.  I was summoning ghosts. 

But the meaning of what I was telling my sons was my Mom’s doing. As a mother, she felt the pain of Gettysburg.  It was her spirit moving inside me and it was her voice speaking, lovingly but bluntly, to the grandsons she never got the chance to meet. 

The two of us—her voice entwined with mine—left my sons visibly shaken, a little grief-stricken and, I am now sure, better human beings.

They weren’t the only young people my mother cared for. Everything she’d taught me was was meant for students exactly like my Valentine, the teenager from Guerrero, a girl who might have been hungry, too, once upon a time.

My mother knew this girl, and she loved her just as much as she’d loved me.