The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 560
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
BACKGROUND 244: JLHS Part Two 17
Sun., Oct. 7, 2007
… At the same time, I am essentially a solitary person. Most of all I was never a womanizer. That was one thing that was clear about me and Andy at Roosevelt and it was clear about me when I got to JLHS. I think that is still clear about me there in spite of everything that has happened. I don’t think anyone there could really have believed that Yael and I were having an affair and I think that was primarily because of me - both because of who I am and because I’m just too old for her. Maybe that could have gotten over that and they might have been able to believe that Yael would sleep with me because they mostly had fairly negative ideas about her. I remember telling her once that there is this stereotype of the “Russian” as very cold and intimidating both physically and intellectually. That was exactly the impression that she made but she wasn’t aware of that or of that fact that this is how Americans see Russians (Ukrainians). She is very tall, quiet, imposing and seems cold and isolated from human interaction. People who didn’t know her (most people there) could have believed anything about her.
But Luz was around during that first year up there as she had been at TRHS. That’s how I’d always wanted it. I mean, as you know, I’ve always loved showing off Luz. I still love showing off Luz. Luz is still the most beautiful woman around and it makes me feel very good to have her around me - this in spite of the fact that I’ve never had any problem with letting others, even men, take her off my hands. I mean, I’ve never had any desire to try to control her or to stop her from doing anything that she likes. and she is a very social person. I hide behind that when I can and I had every reason to hide during that first year at JLHS. It just so happened that she became very mean to me toward the end of that year so that by the time I went back there for the second year, Amanda had become a close friend and I was feeling abandoned at a time when I needed someone more than ever. That was 9 months into the Stone visualization and then a few months later Mom died. That changed everything.
Anyway, I had made a point of getting Luz to show up the week before - Friday, Sept. 28 at Havana Central, which I’m still going to try to get to today - maybe I’ll put it in the letter to Y. Most of the new teachers were there and I wanted them all to meet Luz and to see us together and that’s what happened so I’m now sort of back where I was before everything happened. That was the way I always liked it and I was happy that way. I’m certainly not going to change. I mean, friend, I think Greg was impressed with the way all of the new young teachers were talking to me at Havana Central but I am who I am still, which only proves (in my subjective opinion) that what happened was as real as I felt it was. After all, You Know It’s So does exist. That’s all the proof I’d need anyway, if I needed anything at all to verify what I felt. But I know what I felt and feel. I know that nothing like it is going to happen again. I mean, among the new teachers, the one that I think is a fox is Lisa Ray. I think she is one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen but it doesn’t mean anything more to me now that Gail McNulty or anyone else used to mean. I was never distracted in that way.
Anyway, we had a good discussion that centered, of course, on school stuff with Kate providing a lot of very funny anecdotes about her first month of teaching and trying to live with A.P Clarke. She has already been observed, for example, and they pulled the same thing on her that Clarke pulled on me the first time. They pulled her in there and told her that they would have to fail her if they gave her a rating this time but that they saw enough good stuff going on that they were going to give her another chance. Of course, they could have just counted this as a good observation and still made the same recommendations / criticisms that they’re going to make anyway but they use this sort of thing as a form of intimidation. The same thing ended up happening with Ron at about this time last year when Cerrone had put the whammy on him and that really shook him up. In fact, he’s not entirely over that yet. In his case, he defended himself and argued himself out of the “u” but the time gained was time gained. By the time they got back to him, they had so many other problems that they realized that they were wasting their time going after one of their good guys - or maybe Cerrone had just cooled off some and didn’t care any more. Who knows?
In Kate’s case, however, she went on to tell us a hilarious story about how she had misjudged the timing of that class and had wrapped it up only to discover that she was only about half way through and had another 20 minutes to kill even though the lesson had already come to an end. I guess she was trying to follow a lesson plan closely. But she had a math game as a back up and she pulled this out and managed to get through the class. She pulled this out on us right there and I found it to be an interesting game. There are cards with four numbers and you have to use the four operations and each number just once to come up with exactly 24. That’s the kind of thing I like and I think I impressed her when I got a couple of them very quickly.
Meanwhile Keely was making a call to Lisa Ray on my phone. Evidently, Keely, who is married, doesn’t have a cell phone at this point. She wasn’t into the math talk anyway. When she got back, she said that I’d been invited by Lisa to go with them to see Arcade Fire at Randall’s Island the next day (yesterday). I actually remembered seeing Arcade Fire on SNL and so I knew who they were talking about. The invitation might have had something to do with the fact that I’d mentioned to Lisa the week before that I had had a friend the year before who was into music and had taken me to see Ben Lee and Sufjan Stevens, both of whom Lisa knew and liked. I said that there was a possibility that I’d show up for that and asked Keely if my son was also invited. I didn’t know what the ticket situation was like but evidently it was a walk-up sort of thing. So I took down Keely’s number and said that I’d call and let her know. But this was for 3:30 the next day and we were already scheduled to play music from two to four so I didn’t think it was going to happen, even though I do like that sort of thing and was appreciative for the invitation. In the end, I tried leaving a text to Keely but this was sent back so I called her number and got an answering machine that had her husband’s voice on it so I left a message thanking them for the invitation and wishing them a good time. That was around four o’clock yesterday afternoon from the Mean Fiddler. But I’m coming to that.
Keely is only 24 and does remind me a bit of Amanda. She is very pretty and slightly overweight. I think Ron found her more than slightly overweight but I wouldn’t go that far. Nevertheless that means that she’s not my type physically. But she has a beautiful smile, a very calm, mellow demeanor that makes her seem older than 24 and that I like and so I was a little surprised when when she said that she really liked Ms. David. She seems to have made contact with a lot of people in the building fast. David and I are not the enemies that we once were but I don’t think there will ever be any getting over what she did to me that first year. Talking about her later with Ron, he said he wasn’t surprised that she had taken to E. David and thought that there was some very rigid tendency below the exterior. If there is, that could mean that she and I will never get along much and that might be significant because she is signed up to be number two with the Community Service tutoring group this year. I did write up the proposal for that, by the way, and handed it to Hoxha. I asked Angela if she would deliver a copy to Quintana upstairs because I’m hoping to get that going this week. I want to keep that going and Hoxha liked the idea of keeping it in the building very much. We’ll see how that goes and how it goes with Keely Ryan, who is also one of the three of us 11th grade English teachers - she, Desiree Anderson (island woman of about 35-40) and me.
We hung out at this place until about eight o’clock or so, I guess, and then hung out on the street for a while trying to decide which way everyone was going. Ben and I walked across the street to buy bottled water. He had drunk some and had to drive so I wanted to make sure he had that. We all ended up walking back past the church across the street from Ron’s building to Ben’s car, Keely asking what she might do for a Saturday school global history class that she was going to be teaching the next morning. We suggested that she do some geography. I suggested that she pull the maps down and make them draw some maps. Of course, that was something I always loved doing. Keely is not a teaching fellow (Kate is) and has her Canadian credential and some experience. She talks like she has a lot of teaching experience so she must have taught for a year or two right out of college. I don’t know how or why she ended up here but she has a lot to say about the inadequacies of the American system already - this with only having seen one school in one city in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the world. Our district is statistically the third poorest in the country - believe it or not. Maybe not because it’s hard to believe that we’re poorer than rural Mississippi but maybe they take cost of living into consideration but I’ve heard that statistic a couple of times from a couple of sources so maybe it is so.
Anyway, Keely says that she doesn’t care what happens to her here because it cannot affect her Canadian license and so far she hasn’t hesitated to criticize. Rather than radical, however, so far this has just made her judgmental. She seems smart but smart people tend to lay back for a while until they can see how things are. But this is the girl who tore down the poster at the jazz club the Friday before and got the four of us thrown out of there so I don’t know what to make of her. I asked her about that because I wasn’t aware of what was going on and she said that she had been leaning against a wall with a poster and didn’t like the attitude that the guy took with her. So she turned around and tore the poster off the wall. I was in deep, drunken conversation with a couple of guys at the bar on the subject of racism in the public school system but they threw all of us out - me, Karl, Lizzie and Keely. So was this an act of defiance toward unjust treatment or just a nasty streak coming out? I don’t know ….