The People I Love Best

Today during my planning I lingered in the doorway of the gym, to watch the senior award ceremony. The seniors wore their maroon and gold caps and gowns and tall heels that shook the floor of that poor gym as they crashed up the steps. Detached, unknowing administrators blandly read off prize amounts and casually shook sweaty palms with beating pulses before they exited the gym, guffawing loudly and importantly at their authority to interrupt the ceremony with noise.

Halfway through the awards, the senior choir rose to perform. In their long robes, they swayed like a church choir, the ladies carefully shifting their weight silently from heel to heel. A boy in the front conducted, shaking back his robe sleeves and waving his hands in the air ecstatically. He was the best performer. In front, a couple shared the microphone back and forth, crooning into it above the wails of the choir.

Their chosen song was “My Testimony,” by Marvin Sapp. Eyes filled as the seniors mournfully sang, “I’m so glad I made it through / In spite of the storm and rain, heartache and pain…” The song was not your usual graduation lullaby about missing one’s childhood. These kids' childhoods were tough, and they’re proud that they survived them to stand it on the stage. I got chills as I listened. It was utterly foreign and utterly appropriate.

Today was a maelstrom of getting ready for the end. Students went through practice tests on last year’s exams. Third and fourth block were inspired by my speech, “this is your time to study. You are lucky.” Second was not so convinced, and a roar of “No!” greeted me when I told them it had just become an open-notes quiz. Unlike my other classes, they haven’t quite gotten the love of learning for the sake of learning down yet.

The blur of grades, paperwork, recovery-tracking and roster-checking and equipment-labeling that comes with the end of the year has me a serene whirlwind. I like this kind of thing, though it gives me but a few moments to myself. I paid two of my kids ten mini-chocolate bars each to carry school supplies out to my car, and my walls are already stripped and bare, my grades already nearly all chalked up, just waiting for the last day’s worth and any lucky kid who ignored my timeline and tries to turn in late work. There’s something wonderful about these last days, about the hard straight rain pouring outside my window right now and thundering down my chimney, as determined to blast through its purpose as I am at the moment, when everything has crystallized into a clear mountain to be climbed before me.

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy

So I chose to work with teachers.