ONCE UPON A TIME 0.6 : DAY 161

Mid summer heat has sucked everything dry. The lawn has cracks wide enough to lose a finger in and the big cottonwood is shedding leaves as if it were October. In June those leaves were shiny green with a waxy cutin rain coat, to keep water in. Nature is beautiful but also unforgiving. After nurturing those leaves to maturity my tree is now letting them go. When there isn’t enough water, the tree knows which leaves to sacrifice and which ones to hold on to. Ten days ago the back yard was speckled with dry, yellow cottonwood leaves. The lawn mower shredded them into mulch and the air was full of dusty grit that made my eyes sting. ‘How long would it take’ I wondered, for the lawn to be covered with dry, yellow leaves again? Not long; making coffee the next morning, the grass was freshly mowed but every fallen leaf had been replaced by one of its relatives. Three days ago I mowed again; it was the same story. 
        Once upon a time, when I was teaching biology, I taught a lesson on estimating size and numbers. How many leaves on a tree? You count the number of leaves on a small branch. Then the number of similar branches on a small limb. Then how many small limbs on a major limb and so on until you can extrapolate the math and come up with a calculated estimate. But start with a smaller, more manageable tree than the 80 ft. cottonwood in my back yard. I thought of that long-ago exercise as I put the mower away. Looking out across the yard, already there were dozens of newly fallen leaves on the freshly mowed grass. 

I’ve been ask what moved me to become an educator. I was a terrible student after all, not a bad guy but certainly no scholar, graduated cum next-to-lastly. I went to school because that’s where my friends were. Lots of people tend to view teenagers with condescending disapproval. Socrates had the same low opinion of youngsters 2,400 years ago.  But that jus shows how narrow and myopic adults can be, can’t remember their own coming out party. 

I joined the Army in 1958. My tour lasted three years but it only took a year to figure out, the military wasn’t my calling. Another four years of grunt work in factories; I thought life would be better than in the military but it was just different. But I was in the right place, at the right time; the planets all lined up on me. I could have stayed with a predictable, safe job with a major company or throw caution to the wind, take a leap of faith. If I failed, it would mean starting over at something else but I was young and failure never entered my mind. There was no plan B. I slipped into college by the back door; as a transfer student with 7 hrs. of Jr. College credit, a GPA of 2.3 and never looked back.

At age 25 I experienced the joy of discovery. The experts tell us that epiphany is supposed to happen by middle school. I still feel the joy. I loved being a student, the old guy, six or seven years older than my peers. I flourished in that niche. Becoming a teacher was a no-brainer. It meant I would spend my days with transparent, energetic, curious, young people. I choose them every time over the barking dogs I knew in the army and card punching derelicts from the factory. Where else could I make a 34 year career of being the biggest kid in the room.   

With Pandemic I have plenty of time to think about the classroom. We could read, report, review homework, make outlines, work in small groups, short lectures, laboratory projects, play science games; I got to decide. But I was working my way through a life long, exploratory internship. Everybody works their way through lessons, everyone learns something. My lessons came into the room, sat down in front of me and asked, “…what are we doing today?” I do miss that part, now especially. When you stop growing, stop learning, no more lessons, no more homework, you dry up, turn yellow and wait. It won't be long. Gravity will do its thing and then it's the lawn mower.