moving

Three bedrooms, 2 baths, a 2-car garage: a split-level American dream.

"It's over in those rich-people houses," explains a classmate, with a wave of her arm. I picture her home and know she's sincere.

But I am pleased for whomever it is I am pleased for, the aunt, I believe, of a now-former student, a kid I have taught for only a few weeks. This new home is outside of our boundaries--one catch on their happy new day. I have met but do not know the new owners; I do know the type: an extended family, working hard, making do. And now it seems they've made it pay off. A house! And not a rental. An accomplishment here almost unknown. A nice house, in a nice neighborhood-- on a cul-de-sac, honest-to-goodness. A deck and a pool in the yard. I catch myself beginning to picture the looks they may have already gotten in that suburb built by white flight, but for now I shrug the image away. Such thoughts and such people are, in the end, irrelevant. Perhaps that's the lesson of the day.

"Buena suerte," I say, and shake his offered hand. I feel hopeful as I wish him good luck.

Crime wave

As if last year's flood weren't enough, my town seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Though I live in what is lovingly referred to as "the hood", I've never felt unsafe. Recent events are troubling, though.

On the morning of March 24, a woman was robbed at gunpoint in the 1400 block of First Avenue East while she was sitting in her car in a parking lot. Robbery at 7:40 a.m.! And I understand the culprit dropped two beers out of his pockets during the crime, and returned to fetch them.

Less than 18 hours later, two men were shot at Who's on First sports bar, 1323 First Ave. SE. Granted, this happened at a more fashionable hour for crime, but still.

As if that weren't enough, there's now this.

I can hardly wait for summer.

drawing a blank

And so Monday we'll go back to school, and we'll exchange the ritual greetings:

"How was your break?"

"Did you have a good week?"

I'll hear about Rosa's birthday. I may share some pictures, tell a little of my story. When they ask what I've brought back, I'll have an answer, for once-- flags that I bought on that pier, proof that I thought about them. But at the moment I'll be damned if I can remember what I'm supposed to teach.

fit to print

"I don't read."

For a time, my tone was ironic. And then it became matter of fact. Whatever books may be popular or featured in the stores, I surely haven't read them. I do not feel the loss. The list of titles my daughter wishes I would read grows as I ferry her to library and bookstore. She has the gene which at this point I seem to have solidly passed on for good.

It's true that I consume articles and columns and posts in a nearly continuous loop, but pixelated text doesn't seem the same. I am aware that makes no sense. Except as I get into the habit of reading only on a screen, as I move piles of weeklies from table to basket and recycle the paper unread--I've seen it on the website--it less often occurs to me to sit down with anything that doesn't require a click.

So it struck me this week that the two best things I read came from actual paper pages. (My salons, to sound ridiculous, are as yet wifi-free.) Of course, both are available online, so I'm not sure there's any lesson except that I want to go to Iceland now and that Mexico is a worry.

10 for 10

To resurrect a blog that has been dormant for an unprecedented number of days, ten random thoughts from Far West America:

1. Motel 6 does indeed leave the light on. Which is handy when one's itinerary requires staying awake for 25 hours and 24.5 is all the driver can manage.

2. Note to self: leaving the itinerary planning to someone else may mean checking-in to a Motel 6 at 2:30 in the morning.

3. Renting a convertible without putting the top down is just another way to say, "I like to hold my suitcase in my lap."

4. Just because the Danes are fake doesn't mean the aebelskivers aren't good.

5. Highway 1 really is that spectacular, and getting where you're going really will take that long.

6. A ballpark without a game may even be more fun than a ballpark full of Giants fans.

7. "Owning a parking garage" is San Franciscan for "license to print money."

8. Nothing says Chinatown like jars full of preserved deer tails. Not even $1.85 t-shits.

9. The real game of inches is not baseball, but the difference between wiping bird shit off one's sleeve rather than out of one's hair.

10. Sand blown at 40+ mph turns up in the unlikeliest places for days and days and days.

a great divide

And this is the difference between us.

A program that provides free eye exams and glasses to kids who need them is, to me, not something to begrudge; it is a reason to be glad. A family who calls to ask how the school can help is a family to be grateful for, not a family to suspect. For once, pride isn't standing between a child and a necessity; for once, someone is willing to ask. And when there is a way to provide, for once, when there is not only the will, well then, good deal. Hallelujah, really. That is another reason we are here.

If I am naive, it's a conscious choice: I know people take advantage. But I also know people are in need. And I know I hope to never become anywhere near so hard-hearted and bitter that I corner someone in the mailroom to gripe about charity that I am not eligible for.

"I bust my butt every day," you say. As if these people don't. As if they don't pay the taxes that you're so sure this write-off is increasing-- a leap that boggles my mind even as I defend the working poor.

"It's for kids!" I point out, nonplussed. We exchange facts as we see them, none making a dent. Soon enough, we part, neither budged. But what I left with, along with diminished opinion, is a fact that even now nags: how could you ever assume I'd ever agree?

A First

"Only Madison," I say as we walk through the doors, and the band director laughs and shrugs. His expression says, "You have a point," and I think, "At least he knows her."

But my assertion is not true. This gym and the halls and the classrooms turned competition rooms are filled with dozens of kids who could have just as easily clutched a sheet protector without realizing that the solo music had slipped out. It's just that it happened to her, more evidence that she lately seems charged like the polar ends of a magnet, repelling any and every thing of value. It must be some hormonal byproduct.

But today the search party adrenaline slips out of my system as she is rescued by a copier, and we make our way to the designated room. Her accompanist is there and no one else's is, so she plays early, without waiting, for the judge and me and a few other bundles of pubescent nerves. She plays easily and well, coming through when it matters. We applaud. I exhale.

In the minutes that we wait for her rating, we laugh at her band parent-concession stand breakfast of champions as she tells me of the check she may or may not have delivered and the thank you card she forgot to make. I question, but manage not to scold. And then we walk back to confirm what seems a given and see the "I" by her name for ourselves. This year she did it, and we are both proud.

my fellow Americans

Numbers are easy to argue against; the unknown has no gaze to meet as you make your case, theoretical consequences are easily dismissed. But when a statistic becomes an individual, and that individual becomes your friend-- your friend, or your student, or your neighbor, perhaps, a real person who's part of your world, doing, like you, the best that he can--well, then, it's different. The sharp truth of experience can puncture puffed-up principle, but what happens next is the tell.

Noe Guzman, is, by most measures, a thoroughly American kid. He has lived, worked, and gone to school here for nearly all of his life. His English is surely fluent, his interests the same as his neighbors'. Noe had no idea, he says, that he was not an American citizen until the Marine Corps discovered the Social Security card his mother gave him was, in fact, a fraud. So much for enlisting, so much for college money, so much, it seems, for his American dream. Enough people vouched for him that his deportation was thwarted, but at this point, he's just here, not legal--the same non-status he'd unknowingly had since he crossed the border at the age of 4, the same non-status as so many others.

"That's not fair!" said his friends.

"He should have a chance!" was the community consensus. I do not disagree. I share their indignation, but I aim it a little wider. Noe is just a name to me, no one I'll ever meet. But I do know dozens of others who, save for the shock of belated discovery, share that same complicated story. They live in Missouri because their parents moved here, or because they were sent to an aunt or an uncle to strive for a better life. They live, and they work, and they go to school. They are part of our communities, and largely, they are stuck.

The realization that doors were closing on Noe has rallied his community around him; to them he was not an unknown and threatening alien, but their neighbor, their coworker, their friend. They want him to succeed, to be a Marine, to go to school. They believe he deserves it, regardless, not because of, his documents. Even their Republican state representative has been recruited to the cause:

Said state Representative Charlie Schlottach, "We have a young man who wants to fight to become an American; a young man who has met and surpassed the American standard ofwork, willing to obey this country's laws. A young man who has the support of every teacher, school administrator, fellow student and community member I have encountered. … I offer my whole-hearted support to Noe and his quest to gain American citizenship."

Ironic then that Rep. Schlottach voted for the current Missouri law that denies Noe and others like him the "benefit of post-secondary education." While federal law does not prevent undocumented students from going to any state college they can afford, Missouri HB 1549 does. A year ago Noe could have paid the inflated international rate as a down payment on his dream, but that's not an option today. If he tried to do what he's been raised to expect, what he planned and hoped and wished for--what his community thinks he deserves--he would be turned away. I imagine that Rep. Schlottach may not have known of Noe when he voted; even today he may try to claim one situation is not like the other. The catch is that it is.

Noe is not the only kid trapped by circumstances. He's just the one whose newspaper connection and agitating friends may give him a shot at a private bill granting citizenship. It's a long shot, but it could happen. Still, it's no solution; it's only a patch. If I were to go to New Haven, Noe's current home, or Rep. Schlottach's office, and share the stories of people I know, match up each accomplishment and effort, could they now see the connection? Could they admit that the system is broken, that the issue is not the exceptions, but the rules? From here, that seems the first step. My dream is that we take it.

electronica

It's a late-night sibling confab: urgent messages sent, and instantly returned.

"Did you know?" exchanged for "What?!" and "Now what?!" Solutions grasped for, a work-around suggested. The hour is no matter for choosing an approach, uniting a front.

It's not a crisis, but it feels like a situation: Mom's lurking on Facebook. Heaven help she finds the blog.

Countertweet

How Twitter warned of death threat at St. Louis school

By David Hunn and Jeremy Kohler

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

03/05/2009

The death threat that made a St. Louis school clear out its classrooms and send home students Wednesday had something to do with poet Langston Hughes, and how he is portrayed in an online encyclopedia.

It also had a bit to do with Twitter, a trendy Internet technology that turned a friendly troop of academics from across the country into unknowing sleuths.



It started Tuesday night, with a teacher in Virginia asking her husband for help preparing for class.

And ended Wednesday morning with one relieved school principal.

"It was so amazing," said Katrice Noble, principal at Lift For Life Academy charter school, just south of downtown St. Louis. She was the subject of the death threat.

But it was Jeremy Boggs, 29, a history student in the Ph.D. program at George Mason University, who saw the note first. Or at least the first who did something about it.

Boggs was watching "American Idol," the pop-star reality show, Tuesday night.

His wife, a teacher, asked Boggs to look up Hughes — she was gathering material on the famous poet and playwright.

Boggs found him on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows readers to
add to entries. And there was the note, about halfway down the page, sandwiched
between sections on the poet's homes and his death, and written in bold,
all-capital letters.

"I'M GOING TO SHOOT EVERYBODY AT THAT (expletive) SCHOOL," it said, in part.
"ESPECIALLY KATRICE NOBLE."

Boggs, an alumnus of Virginia Tech, site of the 2007 student shootings that killed more than 30, was unnerved.

"This really freaked me out a little bit," Boggs said.

Sure, he thought, maybe it's a kid pulling a prank. Still, it named the school, the principal and — it would appear — even the student making the threat. "You can't just dismiss it," he said.

So he sought advice from colleagues.

On Twitter.

"Found vandalism on Langston Hughes article where author threatens to shoot people at a school," he wrote, according to Twitter, the online site that allows users to broadcast 140-character messages through cyberspace and with cell phones. "Should I just remove it?"

His message instantly reached across the Midwest.

And, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, it found Marjorie McLellan.

McLellan, a history professor at Wright State University, was writing a grant proposal for Dayton public schools on her computer, when she saw the tweet from Boggs.

"I think you need to report that to editors and police — he names a name," she wrote, according to a log of the conversation on Twitter. "Probably just vitriol but you never know."

Over the next several hours — and entirely via the 140-character tweets — six or seven colleagues figured out who Noble was, where Lift For Life was, and how to reach out to authorities.

They called or e-mailed the school, police and a reporter at the Post-Dispatch.

Still, it was late, and the group's efforts mostly found answering machines.

In something of a last-ditch effort, McLellan called a small-town Ohio police department with a reputation for being tough on Internet crime.

And it was a detective, then, from Xenia, Ohio, who finally got through to Noble, at her desk at Lift For Life, Wednesday morning.

Noble called local police.

But by then police here had gotten the other messages. Before Noble could get up from her desk, St. Louis officers had arrived at the school's doors on South Seventh Street.

Noble called for an early dismissal. Students filed back onto buses. School leaders started talking to students who may have been involved. Police combed the building, and found no immediate threats.

Noble was grateful to the Twitter troop.

"What if things had not gone so smoothly?" she asked. "And we had not taken that precaution?"

But Noble still had her own bit of sleuthing to do.

She called a sixth-grade English teacher at Lift For Life.

Doing any units, she asked, on famous black figures in history? Any students studying Langston Hughes?

Yes, the teacher replied. And yes.

By day's end, police had pinned down the computer used to send the message, Noble said.

It appears to be a student, who wrote and signed the threat in his friend's name. Just a prank between buddies. "They do things not realizing what they've done," Noble said.

The principal said she'll talk to the student and his parents today.

And in what may be the only tragedy to linger, it is likely she'll have no choice but to expel the prankster from school.

Tweet, tweet

I won't Twitter my life away
By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Today, I make you a solemn promise: I will never Twitter you. Or is it tweet? I'm never sure.

And here, let me pause to help the technologically illiterate catch up. One uses Twitter to send tweets (no, I am not making that up!) i.e., electronic notes, to one's online friends, family and other subscribers. A tweet, which is limited to 140 characters, (i.e., shorter than this very sentence) is supposed to bring interested parties up to date on what you are doing, seeing, thinking, in that exact moment.

When I first heard of this latest advance (?) in interpersonal communication, I pegged it as a fad that would be big among high school and college students -- i.e., young people, who frequently have the attention span of a squirrel on cocaine. Last week's presidential speech to a joint session of Congress shows how wrong I was. It turns out that, as the leader of the free world was addressing them on matters of urgent national importance, some of our elected representatives were hunched over their handheld devices madly tweeting, like 5th graders passing notes in the back of the class.

For instance, The Washington Post reported that Republican Rep. Robert Wittman tweeted the following urgent observation: ``I am sitting behind Sens Graham and McCain.''

''Place is on fire,'' said Rep. Denny Rehberg, a Republican from Montana.

Which is not to imply that only pols have gone Twitter mad. CNN's Roland Martin is stuck at an airport in Chicago, trying to get to snowbound New York City even as I write this: ''No flights allowed in,'' he tweets. ``I was on plane in Chicago, we pulled out, got word, now back at gate.''

NBC's Ann Curry, meantime, is in New York enjoying the snow: ``All stars are not the proper shoes for NYC today. But seeing this dark city frosted in white is worth my cold toes.''

And you and I need to know this because . . . ?

No, we are not being forced to look. But if you choose to, please reflect on the fact that life is short and you just spent some irretrievable fraction of yours learning that Roland Martin's flight is delayed and Ann Curry's feet are cold.

In the '90s, you often heard people complain of how memoir writers and afternoon talk shows had turned our public spaces into a communal confessional, intimate secrets once necessary for whispering now shouted into the ether like an order at a fast-food joint. Ten years later, we are not just sharing secrets; we are sharing lives. And not the good parts, either, but the banal, the mundane, the everyday.

I'm darned if I can see the fascination. I mean, I'm not surprised that technology allows this. But I am surprised that people -- by the thousands -- buy in to it.

Take it as one more example of the medium becoming its own message. After all, every new advance in communications from telegraphs to Twitter has been sold as a means of perfecting human relationships, allowing us to interact more easily, understand one another more readily. But it hasn't happened yet.

Indeed, you have to wonder if, as communication becomes ever easier, we have not gone in the opposite direction, crossing the point of diminishing returns as we did. More people have more ways to reach more people than at any point in history. But it turns out -- read a message board or an unsolicited email, if you don't believe me -- many of us don't have a whole lot to say. Unless, that is, you find some socially redeeming value in banality, cruelty and crudity, which have become ubiquitous.

You have to wonder what that says about us.

Now here is Twitter, which encourages you to narrate your life in real time as opposed to, well . . . living it. I'm sorry, but include me out.

I will never Twitter you.

In the first place, you have better things to do. In the second, I am not that interesting.

No one is.

change

A lunch time story of she said/she said, a complicated tale of, "she did" and "I would never," unspooled until the audience objects.

"You're different than you used to be," claims an involved listener.

A firm shaking of the head: "No. I'm the same. She's the one who's changed." It's true enough, and so's the reverse. Youth is complicated.

Across the room an interjection, a change of subject, a stake upon the spotlight: "I"--the pronoun is bolded, followed by a pause dramatic--"I have not changed," he says, interrupting the first story. Heads swivel and jaws drop. The teacher raises an eyebrow. "What?" he continues, over the murmured contradiction. "Just because I used to care and now I don't?" The assent is unanimous. "That's not changing; that's just being a teenager."

I shake my head and purse my lips and wonder if he's right.