The Beauty of the Last

And now the counting begins.

On Friday, James, my best friend and roommate called me to say "hey tonight is my last Friday night in New Orleans." There was something so weighty about hearing these words.

As the school year draws to an end so concludes my time in the Teach for America program, and most likely my life as a teacher. I have decided I will stay in New Orleans for at least another year. The plan is to find a day job that will allow me the freedom to devote more time to comedy. Yet even though I am staying, this still seems a time for endings and goodbyes. And therein I find a strange and unexpected beauty.

There is something about feeling the approach of the end that makes us live that much more fervently. We begin counting our lasts - our last visit to our favorite restaurant, our last walk down a familiar route. The familiar and totally ordinary becomes sacred. Our last time washing the dishes.

Yet given that I am not leaving, all of my lasts are last encounters with people that I care deeply about.

The last "family dinner" at Nirvana - a tradition we started to keep ourselves from dying with stress and subsequent malnutrition. Rolling out of the door full bellied into our last Sunday night prep for the coming week.

Playing guitar with James, standing in the middle of our stairwell - a place whose supernatural acoustic qualities were discovered by accident. Singing at the top of our lungs. Making up lyrics as we go. Wondering if this indeed will be the last time we play together.

My last week of teaching. As teachers are boxing up books and taking down wall decorations, I am putting more up. Posters and signs I create knowing that I will have to take them down within four days. They carry images of DuBois and Douglass, sayings I've kept for two years and neglected to ever put up. "We don't just run to the finish line; we run through it." "Fall seven times, stand up eight." So many lessons I have yet to teach my students and so have condensed into a chart paper slogan I pray they will read and come to own as part of who they are : "we never ever give up" "I am a maker of history" "impossible is nothing" "education = freedom" "I believe in myself."

A last kiss. Standing on her porch. A kiss urgently held as if it were possible to breathe it in and keep some part of it. The kind that compels you to suddenly turn around and bound up the front steps you just descended to kiss her again in a way that might be more permanent than your last one.

It is truly beautiful. There is something about the approach of the end urges us to live, to seize the moment.

"This is it," I whisper to myself, "Make it count."

"Make it count."

Mayme

Grandma,

I know you are there. I know you can hear us.
Please fight. Please come back.

I love you,

CJ

What I love about the airport

Dear airport news stand,

Thank you for the 300% markup on bottled water. I think $3.00 is a very fair price for water, and I am happy to pay it.


Dear united airlines,

thanks for your new baggage fees. 15 dollars for the first bag. I think this is pretty reasonable considering I pay 15 for one bag on any other form of transportation. Trains, buses, you name it.


Dear Sarcasius of ancient greece,

Thank you for inventing sarcasm.

Tell the truth

Dear George,

In a few hours, I wake up to board a plane back to New Orleans. Exhausted and unashamedly procrastinating packing my bags, I happened to turn on a special in which the Kennedy Center was honoring you for your work in comedy. Throughout the course of this special, watching big-screened clip after clip of your most memorable material, I learned two things:
1.) I am awed by you.
2.) You are no longer with us.

And so I wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for reminding me that truth is indeed greatest form of humor. Unapologetic honesty.
I have gotten so wrapped up in gimmick - wanting to be the next Andy Samburg - believing that funny has to be something never before seen, something dressed up and packaged and side splitting, that I had forgotten what first drew me to comedy.

I had forgotten the thrill of seeing Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Robin Williams stand before sold out thousands and issuing from these crowds the same collective breathless call: "that is so true..."

Its not about spinning gold from straw. Its about holding up a mirror.

Thank you.

- CJ

Doing time.

Wow. It seems that the only time I am moved to write is when I have these very depressing broody thoughts. Apologies. But I just wanted to share this.

It was fifth period and I was reading with a student. Her attention absorbed in Sweet Valley High Book.

My co-teacher and I share a classroom. One side of the room she has set up a small half moon of small tables around which she gathers 4-6 students at a time. I do the exact same on the other side. In the peculiar overlap of space and sounds, I have developed the habit of tuning in and out on the conversations she is having with her students.

Lamel, one of her students sauntered in late, apparently upset that he had been given detention. He sat down to begin his work. A moment later, the collective reading silence in the room was broken by his voice: "you know" he said almost light-heartedly "detention is just like prison. You get one mark, thats 30 minutes, you get two marks you gotta serve an hour." It was something in his tone that struck me. It reminded me of the way a child tells his parent "you know Santa Clause is not real." A child letting you know he is on to your secret. A look of acknowledgment. Without another word, he returned to reading.

Thank You, Marley

"What do you think about classism?" she asked.

Marley and I were two perfect strangers. In a packed artists warehouse near the ninth ward we stood (standing room only) watching characters dance and shuffle around stage in blackface. Entitled "Uncle Tom: Deconstructed" the play was put on by a Virginia based theater group called The Concilliation Project. Traveling the country to put on plays about social justice and equality, the group had come to the New Orleans Fringe Festival to stage this harrowing work about white privilege and the legacy of slavery. Check em out: http://www.theconciliationproject.org . At the end of the play the cast lead a discussion about race in which they asked us, the audience members, to turn to a perfect stranger and share out thoughts.

Marley,a young woman about my age, blonde hair and blue pea coat, stood intently listening to me go on about how I enraged I get when white people talk about color blindness. "I totally agree," she responds. "It's kind of a privilege to even be able to pretend that you are color blind." I like her. She is honest about how she feels and when she is listening she looks like she is listening and not just preparing her next line.

"I often feel that class inequality has gotten as bad as racial inequality did in the 1960's" she comments, "but no one today wants to recognize what a big issue class is." I cringe immediately, recognizing this as the beginning of a conversation I have had so many times in which a white person attempts to use a discussion of class as a way to move away from an uncomfortable talk about race. I begin to launch my rehearsed counter-argument talking about how race was used to create the american class system. Somewhere in between a diatribe about the racialization of suburbs and the portrayal of black welfare mothers, I find out that she herself is on welfare.

"I had a baby, and we didn't have any health insurance." "So many people," she continues, "assume that my husband and I are lazy or something, but the truth is, we just didn't have insurance and now are on government assistance." As she spoke my image of her as this pea-coat-wearing-SUV-driving college girl dissolves and I found myself with very little to say in return.

For me, talking about race has become a sort of rehearsed battle - a chess game. With all possible moves anticipated, I have memorized a set of attacks and counter attacks. Staggering statistics, historical facts, carefully constructed analogies, and an ability to reference specific FHA policies - these, my weapons, I carry with me into cafes and dinners parties, bookshops and train stations as ready ammunition should I encounter a stranger passionately denouncing the evils of affirmative action or asking, "why can't those blacks get it together?"

But in this moment I found myself being forced to listen. For once.
Thank you, Marley. I am not used to having to interrogate my own assumptions. Nor am I used to having any conversation about race in which I am not intently focused on trying to "win."

It is a strange realization to discover that you yourself wear a mask.
My mask is that of radical black intellectual. I developed it in college when all it took to be "down for the struggle" was an ability to quote Fanon and talk about the problems of the nations public schools or prison industrial complex. By claiming this identity I escape having to interrogate my own class privilege. With this mask, I - Mr. elite Massachusetts boarding school, Mr. 30,000 dollars a year for middle school - can stand in an artists warehouse with a 24 year old white mother on welfare and tell her that class is just a diversion from a much larger, pressing issue.

Thats my mask. What is yours?

Crazy Guy

Yesterday, the placid silence of the Oak Park Public Library was broken by the terrified screams of a man that we could not see.

Turning from their laptops, folding newspapers, looking up from broad tables covered with reference books, people began frantically searching for the source of the disturbance with their eyes. The man's desperate panting could be heard beneath the squeaking of his sneakers moving back and forth across the floor. For a moment, he emerged from behind a bookshelf and met eyes with the room of concerned patrons. At this, a few taller white guys stood up, adjusted their khaki shorts and headed off towards the man. "We'll just see about this!!" Ten minutes later, after everyone had settled back to their reading, security arrived and did a customary fruitless sweep of Chicago Biography section.

Newspapers were unfolded.

Laptops exited sleep mode.

And I sat there wondering about the screamer.

Was he just some crazy guy? Or had he perhaps just woken from a nightmare? If he was indeed in danger, no one would have believed him. Thats not how it works.