portrait

She is quiet in what seems a particularly Asian way, hands folded and passive: a stereotype in a seat. Though she's making friends with those girls who can relate to her word-by-word journey, her voice is barely known to her other teachers. She comes and goes, sits and works, sits and thinks. And while, with the aid of the electronic translator we do confirm that even at home she is known as shy, she nods with the slightest of smiles when I say, "You're not shy with me."

I'm thinking, and so is she, of the times when the times interest and vocabulary fizz together and spill out in a gush of excitable pretty-much-English. Then she's herself, a sixteen year-old girl, and not a student not trapped by I-don't-know-how-to-say. She tells me of a squirrel she kept as a pet, of her plans for university, of a relative's unfortunate brush with the casino, of any topic we can muster. For weeks in this way I've been assembling a mosaic portrait, but today, through one exclamation in a little makeshift poem it felt as if I got a glimpse of the real person she is:

My name is Tiên.
My name
is important to me.
I am not Tina!
My name
is from Vietnam.
My friends know my name.

the mutual admiration society

It's a last-minute catch-up before he crosses the border, the last time we'll see each other, unless it's not. It's a handshake and a hug and a quick accounting of what's next and what's going on. He tells me, "School, always school," when I ask of his intentions, and he lays out his indefinite yet solid plans: maybe Cancun, for work and university, not sun, maybe Tijuana, which makes me cringe. He acknowledges my qualms, agrees that it's not a good place, but, "You gotta go where the opportunity is."

I love this kid. His attitude is the standard by which I judge all others: despite his realism, he is undaunted. When he says, "life is what you make it," I believe.

So it makes me smile when he excuses my messy desk as "just busy," when he flatters by asking how I do "so many good things." It touches me when he says he's glad to know me, that "[one] doesn't meet many people like you." Likewise, Fernando, I'm sure.

I know that I'm not half the woman he thinks I am, let alone the teacher, but when he leaves, I feel as if I could be.

messages

"You must feel great. Good for you!"

"I do. Thanks! Now what are you going to do about school?"

His text had arrived out of the blue, as always. Always unexpected, never unwelcome, his notes always bring a smile and a question. "Slow night at work? Bored at home? Alone?" I can't help but wonder what prompts him to punch in an unpunctuated, "how are you," from two rivers away, but I never ask, and, sometimes, it's obvious.

But at first it's just the mandatory, "Not much," in response to my, "What's new?" so I tell him 160 characters of my can-you-believe it marathon story, and he tells me of 10 miles in Chicago and a 5K run for cancer, but the tone is too used-to, too don't-anymore. "Can't" doesn't suit him, so I pull out a reminder as tired as it is true:

"If I can do this, you can do anything," though the converse is equally true. More.

Later, he breaks what is likely an insignificant silence with college questions he's asked before. He has credits, hard-earned before the law changed again; to continue, he must pony up his trust along with inflated tuition in a different state, at a different school. I offer to make a few calls, to ask the tricky questions about ID and residence just to make sure. I tell him, "I know some people. It's no problem," and his, "yes, please," sounds relieved, though perhaps I am projecting.

By rights, he should be tired. He must be. He is. By now, he should have thrown his hands up and conceded. He won't. But by rights, he is wary. Skepticism keeps him safer, but all of it's so wearing. And yet wavering between determination and doubt, he once more sends me a message. How else could I reply?

The Real World

"I got my Passport!" she beams as she walks in the door.

 I don't detect that capital p, don't remember the jargon, so my, "Did you!" is especially emphatic and pleased, befitting a paperwork miracle.  To her, it doesn't seem out of line.

With a flourish, she hands it over, and at once I remember. "Passport" is the name of the tech school portfolio; I keep my mistake to myself, glad not to have sullied her moment. I page through the vinyl binder, genuinely impressed:

"Look at everything you know how to do!" I say as I look up to meet her smile. Her certificate is backed by a pages-long checklist of the nursing skills she has mastered; it's a real guarantee, spelled-out and explicit, for anyone looking to hire. 

But that was yesterday.

 "Hi," she says flatly, as she walks in the door. 

When I ask how she is, she claims to be fine as she slings her bag on the desk, but as her shoulders fall she admits:

"I'm a little disappointed." And then she explains her understatement. Today, on the last day of her hospital rotation, she had been working with a supervisor. A supervisor who offered her a job. 

"Go get your CNA, and I'll hire you," she'd said. "You'll have a job before you graduate." 

Except she won't, not there. Not with "not valid for employment" printed across the front of her card.  

There's so much to say but we've already said it, in this place but in other times. 

"If it weren't for my dad," she trails off, emotion, as always in check.  She knows how to endure. The father in question has been absent for years; his whereabouts are unknown. But once upon a time time he was in the States, legally, and he had applied to be a resident. The one adult in her life who has done her wrong may be her only way to make things right.  The world is often cruel. 

We sit on opposite sides of the desk, our helpless grimaces as mirrors. 

 

headline

"Ms. P., I am scared." She speaks, always, in wide-eyed declaratives; she never sees any gray. She does, however, see what they all call, "the Mexican news," a Univision program full of double exclamation points and horoscope breaks and what seems to me to be news of the weird between the real headlines; it makes for an interesting world view.

She tells me with a kind of sober excitement, "It's here." I confirm swine flu. And I acknowledge her facts--she's not wrong, exactly--and we talk about population and percentages and the biology of a virus in an oddly hushed half-circle: a model for an imaginary class of students who are truly engaged. Perhaps they trust me a little too much. But by the time lunch ends I've done my bit to lower the fever. But I'm still curious to calculate our odds--of quarantine, if nothing else--so I question an expected arrival.

"Hey, did you grandpa come up here yet?" In our world, I admit, family reunions have just become more interesting.

inbox

HI.HOW ARE YOU.

That's the subject line of her first missive in months. And being full of keen insight or an aversion to the poorly punctuated and insistently capital, I feel the trepidation gathering even before I click to reveal a message that resembles the work of some especially maladroit spammer:

"I need you help.
em.....
I want to go back now.
BUT,have some trouble.
I hope talk with you.
Can i have you phone number."

"Oh honey," I say. "Haven't we been through this before?" (And didn't I teach you better than that? I can't help but think, though she's been gone longer than she was here.) But regardless of her intentions, or her troubles, or how she thinks I could possibly help her get back from China sans parental consent-- if I had the tiniest fraction of my presumed powers, I swear I'd deserve my own comic: The Misadventures of Ms. P--regardless, I know exactly how my end of this conversation would go:

"No."

"I'm sorry."

"No."

Bookended, of course, with "HI.HOW ARE YOU," and an internal, "What the heck? What is she saying? Is she serious? I don't understand." in two languages at once.

I would rather not.

But my work number is on the school website that I know she's previously perused, and I don't want to alienate, really, and who knows what her story is. So I tap out the the digits, calculate a thirteen-hour time difference and hope for silence while half-expecting an immediate ring.

Not yet.

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.

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.

briefly

On August 1, 2012 he will be twenty-one. That age is the see-you-later drop-deadline for high school graduation: normal plus three extra years. I count the time on my fingers: 2009-10 is one, 2010-11, 2011-12. Plus this, one more-or-less semester. He won't make it, though it could be close. If this, if that, if the other.

I have had this talk before, initiated it myself. I have repeated in all sincerity, "High school is not the place for you. I think it's better if you go." I have talked of adult education, the free classes over at the college. I have walked a complication to the door and wished it all the best before I turned and sighed, relieved.

It's different this time, or not.

If his records had been read correctly, if, frankly, they had asked me, he would never have been enrolled. The sixth-grade credit the counselor granted him temporarily, accidentally, toward high school is what put him over the top, what pushed him over the line into, "okay, go ahead, take a shot."

And so for ninety minutes every day, we have been, just the two of us, by some miracle. Instead of the new kid getting, "One minute," and "I'm sorry," in the midst of some different, hectic class, he has gotten a private tutor. It'll be a short-lived luxury, and I'll miss it, when he's gone.

Day One

It's his first day of school since 2001. Seven years, no eight, since a desk and a teacher. His first day since he was ten.

We've been working for an hour, maybe more, when I realize. We have practiced introductions, spelled his name, begun at the beginning. He's shown that he knows the English alphabet, mostly, and more numbers than I expect. He now understands me when I repeat phrases like, "Open your notebook," or, "Write your name," commands that teachers give. We're working hard and we're smiling, each of us for our own reasons.

And then I try some math.

The gaps I see don't shock me or particularly surprise, but something does not, shall I say, add up, so I pause to figure it out. And in a conversation I cannot begin to transcribe, all Spanglish and cryptic notes and telepathy, I conclude, definitively, that the boy's education was not as I've been told. For once, I hadn't seen his papers.

"No secundaria?" I repeat, once more. He shakes his head; I nod. He looks at me a little warily.

"Okay," I say and again to the wordless question, "It is okay." A pause. "Tomorrow," I add, thinking of the algebra that is looming, "tomorrow, a different math."

As if it's that easy in a high school that has "raised its standards" by knocking out the steps. As if the fact that no one in the office noticed they were granting credits from a primary school report card--I confirmed it later--won't complicate day two. I know exactly what's ahead: more phone calls and paperwork, more compromise and confusion. A headache, guaranteed. And that's the best case scenario. But at the moment I only feel a good kind of tired because I taught, and my student learned.

this time around

Her English seems to be improving. Either that or she's grown comfortable with me. I wish she wouldn't have so many reasons to talk, but I know better than that.

The first times we met she was collapsed on her couch, pausing between jobs in a blue uniform t-shirt. We'd spend a polite hour trying not to bother each other as I tutored her daughter in the bedroom. She'd sometimes get up, bring me a drink, sometimes bring me a chair. We would both look at the baby. In the beginning, she only said, "thank you," and I would nod, smile, and come back tomorrow.

More than a year has passed. The baby is full of bilingual chatter, and now her aunt is my student alongside the mother: a freshman and a wanna-be junior. Most of the time, they're here. But more often than I'd hope at a few minutes past my phone rings on an outside line, and a grown voice asks for Ms. P. I know who it is from the Caller ID; I know who it is from the timing. But I don't cut off her introduction. I listen to her more confident voice, and I promise to relay the message. I don't mind if she'd rather call me than the actual attendance secretary. Calling anyone is progress, a change for the better. An attempt to do it right.

Last January, the daughter called nearly every day for a while swearing she'd attend-- and then showed up in August. Better late than never, indeed. This being real life, the return hasn't been triumphant, but it hasn't been half bad. For a full-time worker/full-time student/full-time mother/ full-time teenager, she makes an honest effort. Or at least she tries more than she did when there was neither job nor baby. She's not there yet, but she might be. It's possible. It could happen.

I don't know what her mom expects, but I know what she hopes for. In the meantime we do what we can.

best laid plans

"So my mom and I had a conversation."

My heart sinks a little. She tells me, a little deliberately, how her mom doesn't want her to go to college here. How there's no reason to complete the program for free college money. She tells me about a hair salon in Mexico and her place in a chain of events. If her aunt gets married. If the new bride moves to Chicago. If this and if that, and if the other thing happens, then a business will change hands, and this girl will go back to Mexico. An aspiring nurse will cut hair.

I feel my shoulder drop. "All I'm saying," I lie, "is that you should never close a door."

"You know, " I say, "as well as I do--better--that sometimes things don't work out."

She nods.

"My mom said it would be easier. It does sound easier." She correctly interprets my look.

I can't help it: "But you have always wanted to be a nurse!" She agrees.

We sit.

"I didn't think you wanted to live there."

"I don't. But I might." I tell her I understand, that I think she probably can't know what she wants, since when she lived there she was just a girl. She continues to try to convince herself. I listen. The arguments are sound, some of them. More realistic, I finally confess. Except for the fact that they ignore everything she has always wanted and believed in order to satisfy someone else. But, family is family. I try to know my place.

I do not claim to have the answers. I do not criticize. "More education can't hurt," I tell her. I do not change her schedule, and she does not object.

hope

It is the best thing that's ever happened to her. May that not always be true. May this be a beginning, not an ending. A first step, not a final chapter. I see her pride in the scrubs that she wears, and I cross my fingers again.

She's not a nurse, or an aide, or an anything, not yet. She's a student at the tech school, studying Health Related Occupations five mornings every week. Those teachers have their students dress the part, follow the rules for hair and jewelry and nail polish. Get into the habit. She's always wanted to be a nurse, and this feels like a real step. It is a confirmation. One that may be thwarted.

She has a father with a real green card, but his whereabouts are unknown. She has a social security number that is real but may not be valid. She has a mother who would prefer she study cosmetology over nursing; haircuts can be paid for in cash. She has no clear path.

In the afternoons, we look for scholarships that don't require citizenship. We calculate how far we can push the system. The year is half over and the rest will go quick; there's little time to figure this out. It may come to nothing, but not if we can help it. In the meantime, she learns and practices. A dream close enough to touch.

at not quite 17

I've never been that teacher. It should be easy enough to do. Given that I don't have 150 students, acknowledging birthdays should be a snap. This year, the computerized gradebook program even alerts me that one is coming, so it wouldn't take much effort to recognize each kid's day in some organized way. Lord knows we celebrate mine. But every year by the time I think of it, I've missed somebody, and then it wouldn't be fair. At least that is my argument, at least that is my excuse.

I always wish I'd gotten it together, though. Monday there's a big one coming up. I hadn't remembered but when the gradebook did, I said something right away.

"Monday is your birthday!"

"No it's not." For once he shies away from attention.

"So you'll be 17?"

"That's the thing, Ms. P. You never know how old an illegal immgirant is." My response somewhere between an eye-roll and a sigh. "My ID says I'm 18." I am not scandalized.

I'm heartbroken, is what I am. Or something close to that. This kid is too aware of his situation, too cognizant of his plight. It's possible to overcome, and it's possible that he might. But at the moment he's seventeen, or nearly, and he doesn't have it in him to fight. He believes in predestination as much as any Puritan he just studied, he believes in That's The Way It Is. Odds are, he's not wrong, but I refuse to concede the point. Perhaps, in there somewhere, he's listening.

"Illegal immigrants don't go to college, Ms. P." That's his self-protective mantra. No reason for regrets or disappointment if the goal is empirically unreachable.

"Yes, they do. It's hard, but it's possible." I wish I had more than two examples.

We've had the conversation that starts that way a thousand times, in a thousand variations, though we each stick to our parts. A shame that the best I can offer him is, "You just don't know how things will turn out, what the law will be, where you will live; it's why you have to try." I sound more certain than I feel. Sometimes I ask if he wants to work as hard as his dad has, as hard as he is now, for the rest of his life. Sometimes he thwarts me with, "Yes."

The truth that lurks in that smart-ass answer always gives me pause. I don't really know if it will possible for him to make a different life; I just don't want him to give up. Not now, not at not-quite-seventeen, when it all should be beginning. One way or the other, he'll be fine; at work he's ridiculously conscientious. But unrealized potential is hard to take. Just ask either one of us.

a bad plan

"You have to swear not to tell anybody." He's standing in front of four people.

I raise an eyebrow and look, guessing what's coming. I make no promises. The story bursts out, regardless:

"So we got pulled over yesterday and I had beers under my seat."

"You understand how many things are wrong with that sentence, right?"

"I know! My whole life flashed before my eyes!"

"I guess so! Were you driving?!" Seventeen and unlicensed, he says no, and gives me the name. His partner in would-be crime is equally familiar. "Was he drinking in the car?!" I exclaim some more at the wrong, wrong answer. He doesn't object but rattles on, compelled to give me the blow-by-blow of the run stop sign, and the tickets, and the maybe-not-idle threats of the cop, until he gets to the very best part:

"And then he said, 'Let's call Ms. P!"

"What?!"

He said, "She'll get us out of this!" I laugh, and I laugh, and I laugh.

Oh, to have the power these typically idiotic boys wish I had. I'd have locked them up myself.

the new kid

I do not know this boy, not really, not yet. It's only been a week.

I know that last year he caused us a fair amount of consternation when we went through all the enrollment rigamaroll and then he attended for one day, never to come back.

I know the first time I heard that note of quiet surprise in his voice is when I walked in to the guidance office, a year later, with the backpack he'd left behind. "You remember me?" Sometimes the best answer is a nod and a smile.

I know he has a sister and two brothers and a step-father who works out-of-town. I know last year he disappeared to work and buy the car which he drives without benefit of a license. I know the cafeteria food is beyond his budget. I know he sorts for FedEx under a different name. I know this is high school number four in state number three. I know that next week he will be nineteen. I know the odds. Perhaps even better than he.

I know that paperwork, ever the bane of his existence, may unravel this dream, if the wrong person tugs on the thread. Already the parking permit has become a protracted negotiation, my leverage mostly a figment. And the work program credits, well; I hesitate to guess. If it falls through at least there will be someone to break it to him who knows how to pronounce his name. Another surprise to him in itself. The smallest things make the connection, if only people would bother, if only people would notice the difference. He is, after all, a person.

A person who, after all, has walked in claiming the same goal so many others have abandoned. Who wants what we claim to deliver. I have to give him credit. Last year is last year, at least so far. I choose to believe, as long as there's reason, and maybe sometimes even when there isn't.

once upon a time

I feel so protective, when somebody says, "Their lives must have been so terrible there," or some variation on that theme. In my mind I take half a step forward, stretch my arms out in some futile gesture. Proud, counterproductive mother bird.

Who sighs and stammers and thinks of the once-little kids from both dusty villages and teeming cities who would never say they had terrible lives. Because in their minds they didn't. And who am I to say.

"People want to provide for their families," I say, answering a different question. "People do the best they can."

But sometimes I tell this story.

I tell them of the time we had a big Cinco de Mayo deal over at the middle school for all six hundred kids, a chance for my students to read and write and speak English disguised as a party. It was my best birthday ever, but that's a different tale. Before that posole and tres leches cake and dancing, we got ready. For weeks, we got ready, I'm pretty sure. We made decorations and videos and practiced dances and spent more of my money than I ever added up at the Mexican store. They were so excited, the bottom line became whatever it took. And the kids made these display boards like they use at the science fair, except they covered the cardboard with photos and facts about the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862) and life in Mexico. About home. They would be expert, for once.

We had glossy 8 x 10s of cathedrals in Morelia printed out at Walgreens and drawings of Tenochtitlan elaborately framed in colored paper and painstakingly written essays that I forced people to read. Those kids were so proud. But I don't recall any of them being any more excited than the eighth grader who called me over, face all lit up, when she found an online photo of her former Juarez neighborhood:

"Ms. P.! That's where we used to play when I was little! Every day! Can I print it out?"

I remember trying to reconcile the joy in her voice with the smokestacks in the photo. I remember trying to read the caption as she chattered about the games she would play with her friends. Turns out her playground was a lead smelter, and she used to play in its dirt.

Abigail

She is the queen of magical thinking, of "I wish it: make it so." She knows what she wants if only it were easy. She knows what she wants if only it were possible. She is dramatic and mercurial, charming and sometimes giving. She is beautiful. She is young. She is in too many was exactly the same person she was when she was twelve. She is only a kid, only a student. Delete the onlys, make it true. She is a constant presence in my life whom a few short days hence I will likely never see again. The thought of it makes me cry.

It's not that I will miss her in a way I'd miss a friend. It's not that the ending here is necessarily unhappy. I hope, I wish. It's just that it's so final, in every sense the end.



Her family is moving back to Mexico; her older brother is already gone. That came as a shock to both of us, that he got up the nerve to do it. Ciudad Juarez is not the suburban midwest, and we both understood that calm, quiet boy didn't know what he was getting into. His messages home have been brief and blunt, protective of his sister: "Abi shouldn't come." Think on that for a little while, imagine what truths are stretched around those few warning words.

And so while her Senior classmates mostly prepare to celebrate their launch out into the world, their independence, their next step, she sits, half serious, half sentimental, and wonders what to do. Reality has sobered her in unaccustomed ways, and there's nothing I can say. No good answers I can give her. That has mostly been my role in her life: six years of telling her how things work. Yelling in frustration. Offering advice. Explaining and explaining and explaining. Being whoever Ms. P is to her. Certainly not just a teacher. I cannot even articulate, but when she turns in a PowerPoint, one of her lasts projects, with "Love ya, Ms. P" randomly on the title slide, well. Maybe she is trying.

I wish she were heading off to something. Anything. I wish her unrealistic half-baked dreams were attainable. I wish she could just visit her old home--"I remember the cardboard houses on the corner," she says, when she makes that same wish. "But now they have paved streets."--so she would know for sure what she's missing. But for someone in her position, cross the border, north to south, and for all practical purposes, jig's up. The commentators may argue differently, but in her mind, there's no coming back. But maybe there's also no staying. Living with her Jehovah's Witness aunt and her ex-military husband in Georgia until she reaches 18 this fall is the other option she's been given. Neither of us can see that, not to mention the big Then What. So maybe she just stays with her family--so important to her--and tries to make a life in the land that's now foreign. A place that makes her uneasy to contemplate. I imagine that she will. And maybe it works out okay. But her brother's words still echo: "Abi shouldn't come."

On June 1, she and I will both wear caps and gowns, both walk through the commencement. I'll sit at the end of her row. She'll get her diploma--hallelujah--and we will celebrate our accomplishment. Plural possessive adjective there intentional. And then I'll greet her family, minus her big brother, another former student, again for the last time. I will tell them how much I've appreciated knowing them. I will wish them well. I will tell her that she better, somehow, let me know what happens. And then I'll say goodbye.

Postville

Gazette columnist Todd Dorman hit this one out of the park.

The sprawling Agriprocessors packing plant on the outskirts of town is imposing and intimidating even if you don’t know about the jaw-dropping lawlessness our government says went on inside these fences.Knowing sends a chill up your back.

So it’s probably lucky you can’t stay long. Tuesday, a stern, but polite, woman told Gazette video journalist Mike Barnes and myself to leave, pronto.

Fair enough. Nothing to see. No one’s talking. But there was plenty to see elsewhere.

There was St. Bridget’s Catholic parish near downtown, where dozens of plant workers and their families milled around inside the church and outside in the courtyard. Many here have family members among the 390 plant workers detained by federal immigration officials at Monday’s historic raid.

I know workers broke the law in coming here and working here and must deal with the consequences. Fine.

But you’d have to be one hard-bitten, coldhearted Minuteman to look into the anxious, dazed faces of these people, as their children played around their feet, and not feel some sort of sympathy.

“They’re lost,” said Sister Mary McCauley, pastoral administrator at the church.

McCauley wishes Iowa’s congressmen could be here to see this. So do I.

But I’m less forgiving.

This would have been a great spot for a congressional junket. Time for our so-called leaders to see what dereliction of leadership and government malpractice look like, close up.

This is what it looks like when you do next to nothing to rein in a meat packing industry that’s mutated into a monolithic monopoly of misery fattened by illegal immigration. Could it be that the folks who run this industry line political pockets with campaign donations? Campaign finance records show that members of the Rubashkin family, which owns the Postville plant, donated tens of thousands of dollars, mostly to Republicans, over the last decade. Say it ain’t so.

I think we’ll all be watching to see if top Agriprocessors executives take one of those famous federal perp walks. Justice demands it.

Add congressional inaction on big ag’s excesses to its inability to control the nation’s southern border or come up with a realistic plan for dealing with illegal immigrants already here, some for years, and you understand why Congress gets the kind of dismal approval ratings it so richly deserves.

This is a crisis, and all we get from Washington is a deficit of courage and a surplus of rhetoric.

I listened to federal officials describe, with straight faces, the detention center at the Cattle Congress fairgrounds like it was a summer camp, complete with bilingual board games in the rec room. Then they touted portable federal courtrooms on wheels, pulled onto the fairgrounds to dispense American justice by the truckload like kosher hot dogs.

So let me get this straight: After allowing illegal immigration to explode and for plants like Agriprocessors to reap the benefits for years, and now, after federal helicopters and buses roar in to save the day, tear up a town and scores of families, do they want us to stand and cheer? No thanks.

Instead, I’ll pray that the next Congress and president can fix this. And that Postville can heal.

her current dilemma

Slipped in, glossed over, presumed by both parties. One of those off-hand remarks that comes back to haunt, working its way to the surface, to consciousness, as I retrace and go over the words I've already heard.

"Of course, they don't have any insurance."

Of course.

I must admit I was hoping. Against hope, constant long-suffering companion. They're small businesses owners, so it was a toss-up, maybe at best, and Mom quite pre-existing. Maybe she's the only one without. What a poster family for the politicians; every wedge issue under the same roof. I make a mental note to ask my student aide--a citizen, for those scoring at home--if she's registered, make rude gestures towards Washington and passing campaign buses in my head. Go back to grasping at straws.

Because this child needs to be both home health care for her mother in the early afternoons and finish the final few weeks of high school. She doesn't know the rule about asking for forgiveness instead of permission, so she came to us for help out of her untenable situation instead of just skipping. And the only official word the counselor and I have squeezed out of The Office (the locus of authority, too maddening to be a sitcom), so far is, "we'll look into it." For 28 more days, I'll bet, until the calendar resolves their end of the dilemma.

Dear girl. You'll graduate. Have mom write--oh, lord: which arm did they take?--a note. Do what you need to do.