Just Call Me Fraülein Maria

I am a mentor teacher for our district. It's a very glamorous and well-respected position, let me tell you. I help write and revise our curriculum, I facilitate and present at professional development meetings, and most importantly, I visit new teachers to our program. I review their lesson plans, watch them teach, offer advice, answer questions, and provide sample activities which I also demonstrate with their students.

Visiting new teachers means visiting their schools, and in the five or so years I've been doing this job, I've toured many different neighborhoods within the city limits. I've seen lovely places, but I've also seen gang tags, working girls on the curb at 8:30 a.m., a man using a hand truck to roll a folding table down the MIDDLE OF THE STREET, grown men standing on the lawn staring at a plastic grocery sack, various and sundry cement lawn statuary, and what I thought was a crack house because people kept parking and going in and out. It turned out to be the house where the lady sells nachos and pickles. I know because when I went into the office at this particular school, one of the secretaries had been across the street to get some nachos.

At the school I've been going to this semester, I get to visit with a Kindergarten class and a fourth grade. We've been having a good time and I look forward to seeing them. (My protégé is doing a really good job, too -- gotta give credit where it's due.) This school is adjacent to a public park but has a chain link fence surrounding it. On my past visits, while driving to the back of the school to park in the faculty lot, I've noticed that the park looks clean and deserted.

I have confidence in not being attacked and left for dead.

This past Monday I drove around -- as has become my custom -- but the gate to the parking lot was chained and locked. There was a car in the little drive beside, so I parked there, grabbed my bag o' crap™ and guitar case, said a prayer and proceeded to locate the nearest entrance.

Did I mention there's a chain link fence encircling the compound?

Yes, dear friends, your Aunt Sat traipsed around the school, through the park, loaded down with music teaching accoutrements, trying to remember if it was this neighborhood that her friend Baby Spice said a body had been found in and hoping that throwing 30-pound dumbells in the air for the past 4 weeks would make her stout enough to take somebody out if necessary.

Five minutes later, I was safely inside the school office signing in, and after two hours with my protégé and his students, including a rousing rendition of "Peanut Butter and Jelly," I had forgotten my adventure. Until I went back downstairs and remembered. So, back around the school I went, but this time there was a man in the park. He was talking on a cell phone. He was also probably somebody's granddaddy and waiting to walk them home from school.

As I pass he says, "Good afternoon, young lady." "Hello!" I say, smiling.

"You been playing that guitar?"
"Yes, sir, or at least trying."
"You have a good one."
"Thanks! You too."

Whew! I'm so glad I didn't have to go all Kung Fu on Granddaddy. I could have hurt him really badly.

The Silver Fox Joins the Twenty-First Century, Part the First

The Silver Fox is an extrovert and, I swear, that boy loves to talk on the phone better than any 13-year-old girl who ever lived. I've been known to play like I can't hear the phone ringing so that I don't have to talk on the stupid thing. I've used smartphones for a few years now, and because I'm somewhat of an Apple fangirl, I currently have an iPhone 4. The Silver Fox, on the other hand, has had this phone since 2006. I promise he's fairly technologically savvy, but this phone -- honestly, I don't know what is the deal here, but it's been with the SF so long that it's become like a member of the family. He shows it off to his students. "I don't need 'bells and whistles', I just need a phone that works." What is he, 80 years old?

Granted, the Silver Fox is the man who had a Facebook account for two hours once. He set it up, posted, added some friends, played around, and looked up to realize it was two hours later. He deleted the account immediately. He says it's because he wasted so much time, but really, that's never stopped him before. It's more like he'd rather just pick up the phone and talk to you. (He also hates to type, mostly because of a spinal cord injury that causes his fingers not to do right.)

The Nokia has been dropped, hit, perhaps even run over. I do know it has been involved in a few moving vehicle violations. Miraculously, the thing still works! Recently he's been using his phone to text more, mainly to reply to people who text him, and people will send him pictures that he can't open, so when the trusty Nokia started to show signs of giving up the ghost, he started dropping hints that he might want "a phone with a keyboard." Okay, with real buttons, I ask, or a touch screen? "I'm not sure." This has been going on for months. He'll go back and forth -- the Nokia is awesome, no, it's dying, he hates texting, but clients text him and he needs to be available, etc. etc.

This week he decided he wanted to take the plunge. My job was to go online to see what was available, and he chose a refurbished iPhone 4. (With very little input from me, I promise.) I ordered it online and we waited for it to arrive.

To be continued.

What's in a Name?

I love words. I love language; I love to read. I love poetry and prose. I love grammar, etymology, proper usage and semantics. I also love to spell. No, really, I love spellin'!

I also love order. I have a lot of "Deputy Dawg" in me (as my husband, the Silver Fox, likes to remind me -- he does not consider this the compliment that I do) and I like rules and directions and for people to follow them. Order is good. In the beginning the Spirit moved over the water and the Lord created order out of chaos, until Adam and Eve had to go and screw it all up for all of us scheduling types. I'm just biding my time until Jesus comes back and sets it all right. I don't know what all of you spontaneous types are going to do in the Kingdom, but I'm sure we can work something out for you.

My affinity for spellin' and rules (read: total dorkiness) made me a natural choice for judge of our school's Spelling Bee several years ago, and because I was the only one who seemed to be able to interpret the infamous rules ten and eleven (read: because I'm a total loser), I was promoted to pronouncer when the former Matriarch of the Bee retired from teaching. It was a grand day, let me tell you. I bought a new outfit and everything.

Since then, I've only missed the Bee once, and, believe me, it was unavoidable. That's another post for another day. The year before, while I was on stage pronouncing and explaining rules for all of the babies and their mamas and their teachers who still remember the rules from nineteen aught-seven (they were different back then), there was a special visitor from another school in the back of the room. She had just been appointed coordinator of her school's bee and she was visiting us to see how to run the bee.

She leaned over to our bee coordinator and whispered, "Who is that lady? Does she work for the 'Spelling Bee Company'? Can she come and help at our school?" And, that, my friends, is how your Aunt Sat became the Spelling Bee Lady.

Random Things Strangers Say to Me

As an introvert, I spend a lot of time down in the mineshaft of my own head, even when I'm out in public. Oftentimes I will have no idea what is going on around me until I realize a random stranger is talking to me. (Obviously it's a stranger -- no one who actually knows me would mistake me for approachable. But I digress.) The best example of this phenomenon is the time I prayed in SuperLo in front of the spaghetti sauce with a lady who was going to have to decide whether to euthanize her dog.

So, anyway, I've been frequenting the YMCA here lately, following the workouts as prescribed in The New Rules of Lifting for Women. This involves the free weight section of the fitness center, where men doing eleventy-bazillion bicep curls look at me all askance. Not really, everybody's looking at themselves, but I'm paranoid and that's why I take the Zoloft. Here are three random things said to me at the gym over the past week:

1. Sixty-something man tells his personal trainer he needs to take me home so he'll have someone to "work out with." He's been there every time I've been back.

2. Forty-something man tells me I look "fit." "I just wanted to tell you that." He gestures to his face as if it's my countenance that makes me look fit, and not the jelly roll around my middle. I hate to tell him, but that's the Bella Bamba. (I'm grateful that he waited until after my warm-up set but before I started dragging 95# up my legs to tell me this.)

3. And the bestest of the week: Street man/potential panhandler (now, I'm not one to judge based on appearance, but I've lived in downtown Memphis for 12 years) approaches at the trolley stop and I get all ready to tell him that I don't give out money but I'll buy him a sandwich from across the street, but instead of telling me that he just got out of jail AND the hospital and just needs enough money to get to West Memphis, he says, "You need to go back and work out some more because you don't have a thong. You need a thong." He didn't even stop, just kept walking by.

I know people say crazy stuff to people all the time, but it's always a surprise for me to be jolted out of my own thoughts by strangers with something to say. Can I get a witness?