More Poems and Prayers and Weird Things

“Hope is a little girl finding a bird’s egg and knowing it won’t hatch, but hoping that some way, some how, by some sort of miracle it will.”

I don’t know what inspired the above but I have believed in miracles for a long time. It’s really because I have lived them.

“Around about the dawn of man
There came a gentle rumble across the land

It grew and grew to strength untold
Then like a flower it did unfold

A gush of air, a bright light
Life exploded with all its might!”

Hmmm…

Some prose…
“There is a person inside myself that bounces from extreme to extreme of my mind. Oh, if only I could stay in the middle.”

And some poetry…
“Myself, inside me
Confined by conscience bound skull
Bouncing from extreme to extreme
Revealing the outer limits of personality
And seldom my real self.”

Entry from May 11, 1981 – “As we drove by IWC this morning bringing me to school, Becky said, “They get out of school pretty soon.” Heather (age 7 at the time) looked at the kids walking to class and said, “Get out of school? How early do they get up?” It was really funny but it kind of hurt Heather’s feelings when we all laughed.”

In the fall of 1981 I was thinking about ways to help my students remember what each punctuation mark is for. I considered having students in groups make giant copies of each mark and become experts on that particular mark and share what they knew with the rest of the class. Although I don’t remember for sure, I think we did that at least once.

What I do remember is that out of this idea the Punctuation Players evolved. I wrote a short play called “The Tragic Story of Penrod Period.” It was humorous play and each punctuation mark was a character in the play. My students did it every year until I left teaching. I still have videotapes of one or two of the productions.

In December of 1981 I wrote that a student brought enough lumps of coal that each student in my class could have one. It was near Christmas and someone had a reference to receiving a “lump of coal’ for Christmas and most of the students, to my surprise, had no idea what a lump of coal was. I don’t remember who the student was or where they had gotten the coal.

The last entries in the second journal are from January of 1982. I write that the weather has been cold, snowy and windy. One day it was 25 below zero. We missed the first two Mondays of January because of the snow.

That journal took me from Christmas of 1980 into January of 1982 so it was used just barely over a year. The quotes, original writing, thoughts, dreams and frustrations chronicle my life during that period. The germs of thoughts and ideas were started and beginning to evolve. Looking back now, knowing where those thoughts lead me makes reading the journal personally fascinating!