It Rained Today

The sky was heavy and gray, and there was a generous downpour. Teacher bag in tow, and flimsy light pink umbrella my only shield. I smartly wore my hair up (else, it would have been a disaster), but not-so-smartly wore my new beige heeled sandals. Once inside, brown paper towel pats saved my leaking feet.

The elementary lesson was about the Amazonian Rainforest. “But what does the rainforest have to do with Spanish?” I asked them. I had to make sure they could make the connection. They laughed till red-faced at my quirky animal voices when I read them the story of how a man almost cut down a Kapok tree. The toucan stole the show.

The middle schoolers: oh, what a delight. 7th grade was cool, 6th grade questioned me out (as usual), but 8th grade burned me up. Written in blood red on the papers of two boys who sit next to each other: “It was quite obvious that you turned this assignment into a ‘group project.’ 0/20. If you want to talk about it, see me after class.” Neither of them did. Did they think I was brainless?

The late afternoon greeted me with a sinus headache. After lollygagging a bit, I finally settled down to sorting out the best of the colored, cut, assembled, and pasted-onto-construction-paper faces each class created for my two gargantuan bulletin boards. (We learned body parts last week.)

I sat in one of the window seats of the elementary school library during our 45-minute joint faculty meeting. I let the emerging sun warm my back as I listened to the headmaster talk about short-term and long-term goals for the school. The future. I let my mind wander (I often do) and I pondered short-term and long-term goals for myself. My future. I snapped back into the present when the room filled with laughter as the headmaster presented a German proverb on his PowerPoint slide: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for the future.” Yes, I cracked a smile.