children

The Heroes’ Hangout

/ Fran Haley / 27 Comments

Do you believe in fate/destiny?

That’s today’s WordPress prompt.

It’s beguiling, like the sword in the stone: Dare I grasp that jewel-encrusted hilt? Even if the sword should slide free of the rock (wonder of wonders!) will I have the strength to heft its ponderous weight, to actually use it? And to what purpose?

Here is what I believe: With every challenge comes opportunity; you cannot know the outcome until you seize it (ever how cold, heavy, terrifying the opportunity may be).

And so I put my hand to the hilt here with bits of a destiny story:

When I was a child, reading and writing were practically my life’s blood. Invaluable gifts for life’s journey. When the path took terrible turns through the darkest regions, strewn with loss…I could always read and write and pray my way through. Some encouraging soul, some sage, would also appear at every critical juncture to help guide me along, before I lost my way entirely.

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be a pastor’s wife (nor, most certainly, did many of my young acquaintances and their parents). But here we are, my husband and I, thirty-eight years in the ministry, standing on the the cusp of our fortieth wedding anniversary, with two grown sons and two granddaughters who are the joy of our days.

I never expected to be a teacher. I quit college at twenty and didn’t go back to finish until after my youngest started school. The way was circuitous, full of obstacles…impossibilities…even loneliness and more than a little despair…until the sword called Opportunity appeared, glittering there in the gray stone of Challenge. I put my hand to it, finally graduating from college with a teaching degree when my oldest was taking his first semester college exams. Today I work with students in the very things I loved best as a child: reading and writing.

Do you believe in fate/destiny?

I see the hand of God at work in all of it…that doesn’t discount destiny, now does it?

In this, my seventeenth year of teaching (a latecomer, oh yes, but it doesn’t matter, the story begins anew every day), another opportunity presented itself: Setting up a program and a space for volunteers to come and read books to students. The challenge: Where? Every space in the building was in use, except for a recessed area at the top of the stairs, where black-draped tables once housed student “artifacts”… with a little time, imagination, and the generosity of our PTA, this has become our Heroes’ Hangout:

In this space, children fall in love with books and stories. They laugh. They learn. They experience. They ask questions. They observe. They imagine. They are at the beginning of their own hero-stories.

For, after all, are not the ideas of fate, destiny, and hero inextricably intertwined?

I have had the opportunity to guide students with writing in this space. Here’s a cento poem (cento meaning “patchwork”) composed of completely borrowed lines, my favorites from poems my second-grade heroes have written:

I worry about me and heights
I cry over the iPad because Mom said no
I understand my dreams tease me
I see a fairy in the forest
I say mermaids are real
I wonder why people think Ohio is strange
I dream of going to Ohio
I try to be kind
I worry about animals dying
I hope all the endangered animals survive
I wonder if Dodo birds are still alive
I see a baby goat getting milk from its mother
I hope people never litter again
I understand that palm trees are not trees
I want ice cream for life
I try to be a better sister
I pretend I am brave and smart
I think Heroes’ Hangout is the best
I pretend I am the fastest thing alive
I worry I am going to lose my gravity
I touch Dog Man’s hat and it feels like victory
I hear my future.

Do you believe in fate/destiny?

You tell me.

I can just tell you that if you are looking for heroes…you will find children.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge. This is my ninth year participating alongside fellow teacher-writers, as a means of continually honing the craft.

Confession: For the first time in nine years, I’d decided to not take up the Challenge.
Writing every day doesn’t seem sustainable right now. And maybe it isn’t.

But this morning, without any kind of plan, I got up and did it anyway.
Opporunity is here. WordPress provided a prompt. I reached. I pulled.

Your hand is on the hilt, my friends. You can do this!

Universe of possibility

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

Children
we realize
behind those eyes
lies a universe of
possibility

My granddaughter, Micah, age 2.

As educators, writers, human beings…let us not fail to see the value and potential of every child.

Let us not fail to help them see.

With thanks to two fellow Slicers in the daily March challenge:

Margaret Simon, for continous inspiration with the elfchen or “elevenie” poem form; and Thomas Ferrebee, for the phrase “universe of possiblities” in his post yesterday, describing a Chilean rhubarb plant.

With special thanks to my precious Micah-roni for exponentially expanding my universe, and who spent all day Tuesday with me, which explains the brevity of this post.

*******

Composed for Day 6 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Monostitch poem

/ Fran Haley / Leave a comment

with thanks to Kim Johnson for the inspiration on Ethical ELA’s Open Write today. Kim offers the monostitch form: “a strong sense of connection between a title and a poem of one line inspires the writer to consider the relationship between the title and the word.”

And so I share an observation from today…

Heaven’s So Near

Little girl sings The cattle are lowing…preacher-Grandpa’s face is streaked with tears.

Here’s a two-line version, for good measure:

Heaven is Near
Little girl plays in the floor, singing so pure, so clear: The cattle are lowing…
Preacher-man Grandpa rests in his recliner, listening, face streaked with tears.

Spiritual journey: Celebrating small things

/ Fran Haley / 5 Comments

Today’s spiritual journey theme is celebrating small things (thank you, Ramona, for hosting our group).

What’s been on my mind all week, however, is the brokenness of things.

I wrote a series of poem-posts on it.

In those posts on the brokenness of things I could have mentioned that the incalculable horror, loss, and grief in Uvalde still weigh heavy on my heart each day, that I mourn the state of humanity and the inability to spare children. I could have mentioned that this school year, another chapter in the continuing saga of COVID, has been the hardest yet on staff, students, and families. I could have mentioned my despair over diametrically opposed viewpoints about what’s best for students and how some educators cannot get beyond deficit thinking to see the wealth of creative and artistic gifts in the youngest among us…

I wrote instead about being a child. About breaking my arm on the school playground when I was nine. About fearing my father’s anger and being surprised by his gentleness. In an effort to comfort me he brought one of my dolls along to the orthopedic office. It embarrassed me. I felt too old for the doll. Maybe it was more a matter of not want anyone else to think I still played with dolls. Yet the gesture touched me, even then. To this day the memory of my father holding that doll, shouting at the orthopedist to stop when I screamed during the bone-setting, is one of the most indelible images of my life. There my father stood, unable to spare me more than a moment of the suffering I had to endure. I could see the intensity of his own suffering. It was written all over his pale, fierce-eyed face. His presence and the knowledge of his pain on my behalf somehow breathed a waft of courage into my terrified heart. This little stirring of courage would sustain me through a subsequent hospital stay when the bones in my arm slipped and had to be reset. It would prepare me to visit a five-year-old boy with a crushed foot across the hall as he screamed in pain and terror. It would beget empathy: me there in my wheelchair with a cast halfway to my shoulder and him in a hospital bed with crib rails, his poor damaged foot heavily bandaged and raised on a suspended sling. United in common suffering, we would find a glimmer of overcoming, in the very midst of our brokenness.

That is the thing about children. Before there are even words to express, there are keen understandings. Children are natural ambassadors of healing. They instinctively seek to comfort. Their native language is love.

I realize, now, what I was longing for when I went back to those childhood moments.

The spiritual journey is littered with broken things, broken people, broken self. I remember wondering how that little boy’s crushed foot would ever heal. At nine I imagined the bones in countless pieces and couldn’t conceive of how doctors could repair that much disconnectedness. I wondered if his foot would ever be okay…but I knew, somehow, he would be.

Which leads me, at last, to the Great Physician. Who, like my father, intervened on my behalf to alleviate my suffering, and who, unlike my father, is able to provide more than momentary relief.

I’m not sure yet if I’m done writing about the brokenness of things but here’s where I finally pick up the path of celebration. I celebrate the sustaining gift of faith. I celebrate the memory of my father, gone for twenty years now but so alive and active in my memory. I celebrate that the school year is now ending, that a desperately-awaited respite has arrived. I celebrate children.

It occurs to me that none of these are “small things.”

So, here is one: I celebrate the musicality of children.

For on the most hellish of days, when I hear them singing, I remember heaven.

For the kingdom of God belongs to such as these… Luke 18:16.

Salvador Dalí – Los niños cantores (Children singing) 1968. Cea. CC BY 2.0

The brokenness of things: 4

/ Fran Haley / Leave a comment

part of a story-poem memoir, when I was nine

The pediatric wing
of the hospital
is quiet
in the gray-blueness
of a June afternoon
easing into dusk

muffled sounds and voices
from the nurse’s station
down the hall

alone in my room
my newly-casted arm
is heavy
and awkward
bent in a Z-shape
so the bones
will knot back together
nicely

on the bedside table
two dozen handmade cards
crayon-decorated
by my fourth-grade classmates
brighten the sterile room
Hope you are feeling better SOON!
I’m sorry about your arm
We miss you

I am feeling
surprisingly loved
in these
long and lonely
moments
of nothingness

until a scream
shatters the
gray-blue stillness

a jolt
of electricity
shoots through
my heart

another child
nearby

the scream rises
and falls
into loud sobbing

it goes on
and on

when the nurse comes
to take my vitals
I ask
Who‘s that, screaming

she replies
while taking my pulse
Another patient
across the hall
he’s five

What’s the matter with him
Why is he screaming
like that

she looks at me
I can see
she’s thinking

His foot was crushed
by a lawnmower
He is frightened
and he has a rough road
ahead of him

would you like
to go see him

it might help him
to not be so
afraid

I’m imagining
a little foot
full of crushed bones
how can doctors
ever put all the pieces
back together

it frightens me

I don’t want
to see

but his screams
are terrible
to hear

Okay
I say
I will go

although my heart
is beating
no
no
no

Pediatrics exam room. Stanford Medical History Center. CC BY-NC-S