The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 488
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
BACKGROUND 238: TRHS 9
Sun., Oct. 21, 2001
… This is all intellectualizing, of course, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Even if things go in more or less the direction I’m predicting, there will certainly be many unexpected aspects to whatever happens. This has been as constant a factor for me as doing what I expect not to do and getting teaching jobs at critical moments. As far as everything that I said about Hal yesterday, it occurs to me now that the interesting and difficult part might be if he now actually decides to help us in some real way. We will have to decide whether or not it is wise for us to take him up on it. I suppose it depends on what he might offer but as of now, I’m determined to cut him loose by next April. We’ve still got to deal with him through January.
[May 19, 2007: He did come back to help us but only after about three years and after we were in serious trouble. Maybe I should have followed through on this and forced Luz to cut ties with him totally.]
The last thing is that I wanted to express my devotion to Luz again. I can’t remember what I wrote about this yesterday already but I am happily turning over whatever I do for the rest of my life to her. As I told her yesterday, I could teach full time for the next 12 years and still not work as much as she has in the past 12 years and I know that she is not going to stop now. She can’t. She will never stop and she knows how to keep herself going until the age of 200. You cannot overestimate her. She has devoted her life to me and to Geoff and has done the work to prove it. There really is no way to repay that. I am extremely lucky and blessed to be spending my life with her.
[May 19, 2007: That was how I had always felt and that is why it is so difficult for me now to think that I was wrong about that. By this time Luz had abused me quite a bit but I was always willing to overlook it. But that got worse and worse during the teaching years when I needed support and help more than ever. Finally, I couldn’t take it and I can’t forgive her now unless she makes some sort of effort to prove to me that she regrets. This she has not done. I don’t think she can do that.]
Sun., Oct. 21, 2001 (reprise)
I just took out what I wrote yesterday and tacked it onto the rest of journal 2001 in order to print it out. I’m printing this monster out month by month as a backup in case the Mac goes down before I can replace it. I’m planning to upgrade this thing in the near future and then to use this hard drive as a backup to the new hard drive (and hopefully whatever zip type thing Mac now has) because these files are too long to save on standard floppies. So I really don’t have these backed up and that can get you into real trouble.
But there have been developments today even as I type. Claudia Soto and her husband have been looking for a place to live. They’ve been in a basement in Carteret since her brother kicked her out for living with her own half-brother. That is astounding to me but this is the mentality of people out there. There is a tremendous amount of ignorance and superstition but it is the sheer lack of compassion that is really frightening. How can you throw your own sister out onto the street with a small child?
The house they’ve been in for about a year has been sold and they are out of work. So they have been appealing to Luz to move into our basement at least temporarily. I have been opposed once again and Geoff has expressed ambivalence but they are desperate and so when they came today we agreed. They’ll be moving in next week or so and are supposed to pay us $300 a month until they get on their feet. Both Claudia and her husband are illegal but Brandon was born here and so he’s an American. This is how it is in the world today. Mother can be so easily separated from child. It’s a crime and yet in the current climate this sort of thing is becoming more and more common. Americans are ready to throw everyone they don’t like out. I’ve heard this kind of talk.
[May 19, 2007: I did buy the lemon Mac not too long after this. I bought it with the first money that I made as a teacher and it was a mistake. I was never able to back anything up because Mac by then didn’t have anything compatible with their old stuff. Fortunately this thing is still going and now the plan is to move everything from this hard drive into the new new Mac where I’ll be able to put it onto flash drives and the like. I remember this little episode with Claudia but they disappeared right after this and we never heard from them again. The way I talk about it here sounds like the time we were ready to move Toni in with us. That would have been about two years before this. Martha backed out at the last minute without a word of explanation after we had gone to the trouble of becoming her legal guardians so that she could legally go to school out here. I never wanted anyone in the basement and right now feel like I’d rather just sell the house than do that. We need the money now more than ever but I don’t want anyone else around here. I don’t know what is going to happen to us now.]
So I just went downstairs and agreed to this. The main thing that it will do is cause Geoff’s friends to use his bathroom on weekends but then he’ll have to clean it up. Brandon is in 2nd grade and will go down the street this year to School 5. He shouldn’t have any trouble getting in since he’s an American. We’ll have to show some proof that he lives here and I don’t know what that will call for.
We’ve tried this twice before. Twice I’ve been opposed and twice it has not worked out. So I’m not confident that this is going to work out either and if it doesn’t, it could be a problem because of the child and the child on the way. Claudia is pregnant. But helping people isn’t necessarily easy. If it were, everyone would be helped. It’s like I said to Sarah Durand at the train station the other day: if war solved anything, everything would have been solved a long time ago. This is the sort of thing that is so obvious that it ought to end warfare in itself but people are damaged and unable to act humanely. If all of the pain and suffering can’t stop war, how is simple reasoning going to do it? It won’t, of course, and nothing will - short of pure honesty and compassion, the very things that have been beaten out of us. Then there is the possibility of some alien demonic force at work here, too. Sometimes I feel that. In fact, it feels right now as if we are up against some sort of demon. Maybe we are but we take precautions and do what we can. If we can’t overcome it, no one can. Of course, there is failure all around us all the time. Maybe most can’t. Maybe no one can.
Tues., Oct. 23, 2001
I’ve got a few minutes this evening to attempt to get down what happened yesterday and today in this latest teaching saga I’ve been drawn into. Yesterday I got up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to catch the 6:18 to New York, although I was thinking that if I’ve really got to be there by 7:30, I’m going to have to be on the 5:43, which is only the second train running. But I got up and got ready and got to the train station before dawn and saw a different world, one I have not seen here in Linden ever. There were people there catching trains and it turned out that the 5:43 came along at about 6:18 and so I didn’t have to pay the 3 dollar rush hour surcharge. Technically I was on a train that arrived before 6.
I got to Penn Station at about 10 to seven and then, as planned, caught the A train to 145th Street and the D from there to Fordham Road. From there it is a good 10 minute walk down to Roosevelt High School and it was eerie walking down those streets before much of anyone was out and in the year 2001. If there was deja vu in riding the train out to LaGuardia to teach that term in 1993, this was even more severe. It had been longer since we lived up there and I’d spent less time in the area. We didn’t spent much time on Fordham Road but got down there enough so that I’m somewhat familiar with it.
[May 19, 2007: The main thing I remember about this first trip up there to TRHS is being scared to death. I didn’t walk Fordham, as I recall, but the street just south of there and wasn’t sure how far Roosevelt was. It was early and there weren’t many people out and I was going into a school that I knew was going to be a tough place. I guess it was good that at least I knew something about the area and the neighborhood. But I was determined to do it.]
I got through the door and the metal detector and introduced myself to Ortega, the security guy working it. For this I needed only the fingerprinting paper that I had. Ortega sent me just down the hall there to one of the first administration rooms where there was (I think) an assistant principal. The woman in there immediately acted as though she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I told her that I had been sent up there by someone in recruitment but when I said that my fingerprinting had not been completed, she said that that could take 3 months and seemed to think that that was the end of it. But I asked if there was someone in the English Department that I might see and she gave me a name.
As I stepped out of that office, I ran into just this woman, Lorraine Lovergine, who grabbed me and acted as though my showing up were the greatest news in the world. She took me up to the English Dept. office, which is around to the left and to the back and thought that she was interviewing me for a job vacated by a woman by the name of Wendy Land. Evidently this happened 3 weeks ago and it took this long to fill the spot. Why that was is a mystery since there seems to be a lot of people still looking to get teaching jobs. Evidently many, many were hired and many not particularly qualified ….
[May 19, 2007: This was fairly miraculous. I had no idea what to do and was ready to walk out of there. That was a gigantic building and I had no idea where to go or if anyone else would see me. It might have been Roseanne Collins there that day who told me that no one there had heard anything about me. I don’t know but Roseanne turned out to be a decent person. She (or whoever) probably just didn’t have time to be bothered. Wendy Land - a name I’d forgotten - had only lasted three weeks. I talked to her on the phone and found out that she had had a very difficult time. The final straw had been when someone stole her purse out of a classroom. She didn’t go back and so there was a job. If Lorraine had not been walking by at just that moment, I probably would have just walked out of the building and gone home and then who knows if I would ever have gone back. Who knows, too, if that would have been good or bad. I mean, the job has kept us in this house these six years and the experience in retrospect has been generally good for me but this is not a job that I want to keep doing. I don’t think I can keep doing it. And the way I’m feeling today, maybe it would have been better to have made an even more drastic move at that time. I wouldn’t have said that a couple of years ago - wouldn’t have even thought of it. But now I really don’t care about anything anymore.]