{"id":856,"date":"2008-12-30T23:45:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-31T03:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=856"},"modified":"2009-01-02T15:42:14","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T19:42:14","slug":"sherrys-hopes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=856","title":{"rendered":"Sherry’s Hopes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"December 30, 2008
\nTuesday<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The other day<\/a> I mentioned that I would be using Joyce Rupp’s devotional guide Fresh Bread and Other Gifts of Spiritual Nourishment “<\/em>again this year” because it had “nourished\u00c2\u00a0me in the\u00c2\u00a0past.” It was published first in 1985. The copy I have is from the fourth printing in 1989. I don’t know when I last used it, but I know it has to be after 1997.<\/p>\n

The desire to use this resource again came to me Sunday morning when images of bread and the phrase “setting the sponge” appeared during C&C (Coffee and Contemplation),\u00c2\u00a0my silent meditation and\u00c2\u00a0prayer time without which the day just doesn’t get started right. I had to go upstairs to Lynn’s room to pluck it\u00c2\u00a0out of the basket where I knew I had put it along with some other spirituality resources. I brought it down to my place in the kitchen and ran my hands over it, greeting it like an old friend.<\/p>\n

A\u00c2\u00a0 paper\u00c2\u00a0was sticking out of it, in what turned out to be the section for November. Wow<\/em>, I thought. I must have really stayed with this the last time I used it.<\/em> I like finding things stuck in books I haven’t used in a while. Often my bookmarks are 3×5 cards with notes, or receipts from the grocery store,\u00c2\u00a0or a greeting card. Finding one sometimes gives me a\u00c2\u00a0glimpse of who I was and what I was thinking about at a particular time.<\/p>\n

Inside Fresh Bread<\/em> was a dried leaf from a ginkgo tree that I picked up at the Jesuit Spiritual center in Wernersville. The series of poustinia<\/em> retreats I made in 1993? The dream analysis workshop in 1996? I pulled out the paper, and knew at once. 1998, probably, the first year after I left the classroom.<\/p>\n

The sheet is 3-hole punched, wide-ruled, and about 7.5 by 10.5 inches, a non-standard size. A quick swipe with my pH testing pen shows that it is not acid free.\u00c2\u00a0It is, in fact, beginning to turn brown around the edges. It’s the kind of paper we gave the students at the school where I taught.<\/p>\n

Written on it is a list:
\nTo be skinny
\nTo have clear skin
\nTo have a small house
\nTo have 2 nice, safe vehicles
\nTo quit smoking
\nTo be happy
\nTo be healthy
\nTo have a healthy boyfriend and Baby<\/em><\/p>\n

Across the top, in my handwriting, is “Sherry’s Hopes.”<\/p>\n

When did I do this exercise with my students? Probably not first thing in September, before we’d built some community and some trust. More likely it was in January, during those first days back at work, when everybody is still feeling a little sludgy and it’s harder to move back into the school routine than it is in August. “What are your hopes for the new year?” I probably asked, knowing that the exercise would strike some as stupid, some as banal, some even as impossible, because they lived in such quiet desperation.<\/p>\n

Sherry was seventeen and two months pregnant\u00c2\u00a0the first time\u00c2\u00a0she slouched down into a desk in the far corner of my classroom, took a long pull from her bottle of Turkey Hill peach flavored iced tea, snarled a “here” when I called her name, and looked out the window the rest of the time she was there. She reminded me of Janis Joplin swigging Southern Comfort.<\/p>\n

She was the fifth or sixth child in a noisy,\u00c2\u00a0chaotic family. Each of the siblings who had gone before her had presented a different challenge to their\u00c2\u00a0teachers. Her boyfriend was about five years older than she and worked construction. Not long after she told him (and her parents) that she was\u00c2\u00a0pregnant, he fell from a roof\u00c2\u00a0straight down, landing on his feet, breaking both hips and the long bones in both legs. He would be disabled for at least six months,\u00c2\u00a0maybe longer.<\/p>\n

The August Sherry arrived in my classroom was the first year for what most of us would call “the new school.” It was really the old school which had undergone a two-year-long renovation that would see a gutting of the existing structure\u00c2\u00a0area by area and a reconfiguration of the space. I was not only in a remodeled classroom, I was in an area of the building which had been for the twenty-six years I’d been there the junior high, a\u00c2\u00a0place I rarely had occasion to visit.\u00c2\u00a0Everything everywhere was brand new\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u201d the furniture, the carpeting, the shiny dry erase boards, the metal locker doors still straight and undented. And it was decreed that students inhabiting this beautiful new state-of-the-art educational facility were\u00c2\u00a0neither to consume nor possess any food or drink outside the cafeteria.<\/p>\n

Sherry, however, was devoted to her tea. I spoke to her about it the first day or two,\u00c2\u00a0since one of my hopes was to keep from irritating the difficult and mercurial\u00c2\u00a0principal,\u00c2\u00a0who was\u00c2\u00a0fiercely dedicated to the no food rule. Sherry was resistant to giving up her tea, defiant, actually, and after about a week it became clear to me\u00c2\u00a0that she needed it.\u00c2\u00a0Possessing that tea and taking a stand in favor of keeping well-hydrated was the one thing that she could control. I knew that if Sherry and I were to have a successful year together, both of us were going to have to give a little on the matter of the tea,\u00c2\u00a0with my side giving the most. And so we came to an understanding.<\/p>\n

My colleague Brian, the history teacher down the hall, was not so accommodating of Sherry’s tea. The more he insisted she observe the no food outside the cafeteria rule, the more she clung to her need to possess, display, and even consume the tea. (She’d stopped even putting it under the desk in my classroom, instead capping it tightly and slipping it into her backpack.) I tried to talk to him about it. Couldn’t he see that the tea was the only thing in her life that she could control? Couldn’t he bend just a little?\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

He couldn’t. He had a brouhaha with her every day about the tea, confrontations that escalated until she was so rude and insubordinate to him that he reported her,\u00c2\u00a0and she did ten days in in-school suspension. My friendship with him, which had been very warm, suffered, and when he left the\u00c2\u00a0district at the end of the year for a college coaching position, we didn’t even say goodbye.<\/p>\n

Sherry had her baby in the spring. By then we had become quite fond of each other, and her class was one I looked forward to every day. I went to see her in the hospital. When she was discharged she moved in with the boyfriend, who by then was walking well with crutches but had not yet been able to return to work. He\u00c2\u00a0lived in another school\u00c2\u00a0district, and she planned to enroll in school there. When I saw her a year later, though, I learned she had been unable to do that.<\/p>\n

I have not seen Sherry since 1998. But somehow that paper has remained among my possessions. She’ll be 30 a few days before my birthday, and her little boy will be turning 12. I have ways I can track her down \u00e2\u20ac\u201d an address I got five years ago when I was doing some\u00c2\u00a0people search work for my high school class reunion, an address for one of her brothers.\u00c2\u00a0“Track her down” sounds a bit stalkerish, and I certainly don’t mean to intrude on her. I remember her as a young woman of courage and determination who was doing everything she could to manage several difficult situations. Her boyfriend, too, was facing his responsibilities and his challenges with an optimistic resolve.<\/p>\n

I hope they’re\u00c2\u00a0going into 2009 happy, healthy, with a safe car and no cigarettes. And even if I don’t find out, I will use Sherry’s list of hopes as my bookmark, and say her name into the morning light every day this year.<\/p>\n

*********<\/p>\n

A year ago<\/a>, I wrote a meta <\/em>piece about my Holidailies experience.<\/p>\n

Two years ago<\/a>, I went to a wedding.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, I did not post on this day.<\/p>\n

Four years ago<\/a>, I wrote about the Six Goals of a Quality Life that I endeavor to\u00c2\u00a0reach every year.<\/p>\n

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
\nmargaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)<\/em><\/p>\n


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