A Brief Photo Essay

And so, you loyal reader type people came through with some ideas. I've considered them all ( thanks for the whole Israel v Gaza thing Dash, i might have to jump on Wikipedia before i tackle that one.... ), but i thought this might be the easiest, and most fun, for a Sunday afternoon. A few of you said " hey, stories from your childhood " and of course you wanted accompanying pictures - plus, this is my official entry into Andy's photo challenge. And so, please enjoy a few photos of yours truely, accompanied by a short commentary on each shot:

Firstly, yes thats me as a cute, chubby little baby. And, yes, you're eyes are not deceiving you - i am wearing a baby bikini. ( Also, this is as close to naked as you will ever get to see me, so enjoy it while you can. Or, actually, dont enjoy it - enjoying it would be wrong... ). I believe i'm almost a year old in this photo, playing in a blow up pool in my Nan's backyard. Dont ask me what those green things floating around me are - i dont exactly remember - but i'm pretty sure they must have been fun to play with.

On to Picture #2 - thats me on my first day of school, 5 years old. All together now - awwwww. Its sometime in late January of 1989 ( yes, Northern hemisphereans, we start school at the start of the calendar year, not in the middle ). Please take note of my awesome, late 80's fashioned, school uniform - a sad green pinafore, white cotton blouse and little knee socks ( that dont quite come up to my knees ). Also, please notice that I am completely rocking a mullet. Yes, a MULLET. Business in the front, party at the back. To this day, i cannot believe that my mother willfully did that to my head. The missing teeth at the front though are all my fault - they came out while i was eating an apple.

Check me out - that is me, and my new bike, circa around 7 years of age. My dad and my pa made me that bike - yes, you read that right, they MADE it out of second hand bike parts, instead of buying me and my brother a new bike each (we werent dirt poor, but neither could we afford two brand new bikes ). My bike rocked - i chose what colour i wanted, i put cool stickers on it, and you better believed my brother and ruled the neighbourhood on them. We had a group of around 6 or 7 kids in our street and we'd ride around on weekends playing " bike-tag " or we'd ride down to the Death Track. Oooh - sounds dangerous, doesnt it ? Kind-of, sort-of, but not really. It was basically this huge hill of dirt ( maybe 2 storeys high ) on some land owned by the NSW Railway. Some older kids had made a walking track to the top and then a long, bumpy, dipping track to ride down. Woo hoo! I'm proud to say i never suffered a single injury there. My brother, however, did take one memorable spill which saw him fall into a patch of weeds and end up with a whole patch of thistles in his butt....

Picture #4 - this one is especially for you Andy. Anybody who reads Andy's page will recognise that he and I may have in fact owned the same pair of glasses as youngsters. Those things are freakin' huge! Again, I have my mother to blame for my complete lack of style ( an affliction I am to do this day trying to overcome ). In case you wondered what the hell is going on this picture let me explain - i am in my PJ's and I am apparently trying to kill my younger brother ( the little kid in the blue PJ's with the pained expression on his face ). And i'm smiling because jumping on your younger brother and trying to squash the guts out of him is fun. Right ? Right ?

And lasty but not leastly, Picture #5 - me before my Year 12 Formal ( read: Senior Prom ). This one isnt exactly in the humiliating category, but i thought i'd share it anyways. Please bear in mind when looking at this picture that i have lost aprroximately 17ish kgs between then and now ( i've changed from a size 16/ US size 12 down to a size 10/ US size 6 ). I think if i had my time again i wouldnt have picked that dress. It was a velvet dress with spaghetti cross over straps and, looking back, it didnt really fit all that well. I could have found something so much more flattering. As it stands though it wasnt all that bad - definately a more timelessly chic choice than some of my friends....

The Great Escape

Today my boobies made a run for it. Can you believe that ? No, they didnt up and leave my chest area, and no i dont have prematurely aging saggy boobs. No, i was at work and my bra broke.... can you believe that? I'm just standing at my desk talking to J and all of a sudden - the elasticity is gone. Every woman out there must know what i'm talking about : when the girls are strapped in there is a firmness, a secure feeling. When that hook lets go, all that security is gone. And so it was today - and chesticles tried to make a break for it. Thank God that a) it was so freaking hot today that my bra was glued to my skin by sweat ( i know, gross, buts thats an Australian summer for you ) and b) that i work in the central shopping area of my town ( i was close enough to duck out for a minute and go and buy myself some new undergarments ).

Thank God, this wasnt exactly a Girls Gone Wild moment. I mean, i did have a shirt on after all, so it wasnt like i was falling out of anything, but there is a brief moment of mortification where you hope nobody has noticed ( even if there isnt all that much to see ). Its kind of like a guy being almost pantsed ( or dacked, as we call it here in Australia ). Sure, there isnt exactly anything on show - except maybe your boxers or your favourite tighty whities - but for a minute there you wonder if anyone has noticed anything else. (As an aside, dacking people is funny, unless your the one being dacked ).

You know how it is right ? Any intentional exposure of other peoples bodies, in the aim of embarrassing them, is funny, unless your the target. I cant remember how many times the boys in my grade during high school would run up behind someone and yank their pants down. Boy-on-boy, after a while, seemed a little homoerotic - so of course it progressed to either trying to do the same to us girls ( unless we were wearing a skirt, in which case they were just trying to get a glimpse underneath, anyway they could ). And what other form of torture did they devise for us ladies ? Bra strap flicking and, occasionally, intentional unhooking of the bra. During science class. Luckily whilst seated in the back row.

Oh, wait.... yea, thats where they got me. Science was not exactly my favourite subject, so my friends and I in the back row spent a lot of time fooling around back there. Usually we threw pieces of eraser at people, or passed notes, or talked in low tones so the teacher wouldnt hear, but one day my friends L and Jay decided it was Pick On Amy Day. This newly celebrated holiday involved L reaching behind me andi n one foul swoop, pulling at the back of my bra and miraculously unhooking it with one hand. O.M.G! How, like, totally embarassing! I had to slide underneath the desk and try and fiddle underneath my shirt and hook it back up without the teacher noticing i was gone. No mean feat let me tell you.

And so, we have learned two things: pantsing people is funny. Unhooking girls bras in science class is not.

Also: either my breasts have magically grown a cup size overnight ( please God, say its true! ) or they just dont make bras like they used to....

Sexualization

When parents tell me their oldest child is going to be in middle school, I sense they have mixed feelings. They’re proud but worried. They’re worried about their children’s loss of innocence. No parent can put that off forever, of course, but they shouldn’t have to worry about it when their kids are only eleven. When it’s parents against the culture, I hate to admit it but the culture is likely to win. Parents know this at some level and fear it.

Students are more sexual these days than I ever remember. I shouldn’t be surprised given the escalating sexualization of the entire culture in which we all live. Our children grow up permeated by sex on the television they watch, in the music they listen to, in the literature they read, and in the advertising they’re continually bombarded with from all angles every single day. So of course I’m going to see it more in class, and it can be awkward at times.

On the first day of school I passed out textbooks, just as I’ve done for decades. I have to record what number book each student gets, so I call their names one at time and they tell me what it is. In four out of five classes, at least one student said he or she had textbook number 69. Each time, there were knowing looks and snorts by other students, mostly boys but not exclusively. There should only be one book numbered 69 in the whole batch of course, but at least three students last year had changed the number in the book they were assigned. I had to decide in an instant if I was going to confront the sniggling behavior or let it pass. The first time, I ignored it. I recorded the 69 in my computer and called the next student’s name. When it happened again in the second class, I realized that at least one of the books had been altered and I had to ask myself how would I deal with it. To do so in the moment would call more attention to it. Considering that there may still be many students who didn’t know what sexual connotations the number 69 has, I hesitated. My attention to the matter would cause them to ask questions and find out. Maybe I’m naive to assume they’re unworldly, but I hope not. I wanted to believe most of them - maybe only some at this point - are still innocent enough at thirteen or fourteen to not understand why the boys were snickering. So, I ignored it the second time, but I was disturbed. This was the first day of school. I’ve been teaching a long time and it didn’t use to be this way. I ignored it in the third and fourth classes too and tried to put it out of my mind by filing it in the mental folder I call “another depressing sign of the times.”

Last fall, nearby Portland’s school board gave King Middle School permission to prescribe birth control to students as young as eleven. Last spring, the Centers For Disease Control reported that 1 in 4 teenage girls in America ages 14-19 has a Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD). I remember how sad I was reading that. I remember mentioning it to a group of teachers the same day and getting no response. It made me feel like a dinosaur. I’m not the oldest teacher in the district, but I’ve been here the longest. Sometimes I feel like yelling to students and teachers that it didn’t use to be this way, but what good would it do? It’s the way things are now and I guess it has to continue trending like this until a critical mass in the wider culture out there says, “Enough!”

I hope I’m still around when it happens.

People, Time and Place

Inishowen Peninsula

First come those dew-covered webs ground spiders make on the lawn. Then crickets start chirping as they are while I write - early on this misty morning. Ferns will begin to wither soon. Those are the signs of waning summer I notice each year. Others may detect different indications of the passing season, but those are the ones that bring me that familiar mixture of anticipation and dread when I realize that school will begin soon. It’s more anticipation than dread this year because I don’t know how many more first days there’ll for me. I’ve gone back in early September more than fifty times. When that pattern will end I don’t know, but it won’t be long.

As I sit here on my back porch, one of Ed Dunlea’s cows is lowing over on Shave Hill and a loon is crying on Kezar Lake. The mist is rolling back and forth between my hill and Ed’s like an ocean tide. When it’s over me I can’t see very far, but then it rolls the other way and I can see the mountainous horizon with a few patches of blue. I like it because there hasn’t been too much blue to look at up there lately. It’s warm and wet this day, but soon will come a morning crisp and dry. I’ll need long pants and a quilted shirt to sit out here so early, but that means the humidity will be gone too and I’ve had enough of that. The towel in my shower was clammy this morning and the salt shaker was caked up last night when I tried to sprinkle my corn.

It’s my habit to rise before the sun, when everything is still and I can watch the day dawn slowly while I go through my morning rituals. The dog knows I’m about, but no one else. The complicated world is simpler at this time. Early and alone is my favorite way to start the day. Then I’ll try to stay in it - stay in the moment if I can. I know my mind will drift away to the future or the past, but I hope I catch it and get back to the present before it gets lost. That’s not always easy for a history teacher. Today though, there’s much I must do to prepare for my journey to Ireland.

By the time this is published Thursday, I should be walking the streets of Dublin. When I tire of that, I’ll go north a bit to look over Newgrange, a five-thousand-year-old structure of white quartz and other stone. Little is known of the people who constructed it and carved its spiral patterns. Were any my ancestors? Don’t know. Nobody does. Then I’ll look over the Battle of the Boyne site nearby - that place where Catholics were defeated in 1690 and the Protestant British hardened their control over the island. Then I’ll head northwest to British-ruled Ulster where I want to feel what may remain of the struggle or “The Troubles” as they’re sometimes called. Many McLaughlins have lived in the city of Derry (or Londonderry as the British call it) for eight centuries, and still do. One, Mitchell McLaughlin, is General Secretary for Sinn Fein - political wing of the Irish Republican Army. He lives in Bogside, the Catholic quarter. Will it feel at all like my visit to the West Bank last year? I hope not, but we’ll see.

Then it’ll be on to Donegal further to the north - to the northernmost tip of Ireland (the Inishowen Peninsula) from where my great-grandfather, James McLaughlin, emigrated around 1900. It’s part of the Republic of Ireland and most people are surprised to hear that. “Northern Ireland” conjures up British-occupied Ireland, but it would more accurately be called “Northeast Ireland.” I want to find what remains of his house and get a feel for the people still there. After more than a century, will I recognize any by their looks or their laughter or by something else? We’ll see. I’ll keep my movie camera handy to record it if I do.

During the few August days I spend in that remote place, I’ll smell it, see it, hear it, and feel it - find out why my great-grandfather left it, and maybe get some clues about myself.