Big Yellow Taxi

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”

— Joni Mitchell

Late last winter, I came down with a nasty cold that wrecked my vocal cords for months, and I learned not to take my pipes for granted.

A week later, our campus closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and I learned not to take in-person teaching for granted.

Campus reopened briefly in October, but the state ordered my boss to take all the flexible seating out of my classroom and replace it with traditional desks, and I learned not to take my professional autonomy for granted.

I came down with the coronavirus in November, complete with several weeks of brain fog that screwed up my ability to get words out of my brain and onto the page accurately, and I learned not to take my intellect for granted.

The virus also forced me to quarantine, and I learned not to take my pantry and freezer for granted.

In the middle of all that, one of my oldest and dearest friends died, and I learned not to take people I love for granted.

Last night, a colleague and I realized that our usual regional inservice day — which everybody generally hates — will happen online this year, in a scaled-down form, and I learned not to take free doughnuts and coffee and a day of bitching about consultants behind their backs for granted.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been on doctor’s orders not to run again until I can walk three miles without feeling winded. Ramona the Pest and I walked 3.8 miles today, and I feel better than I have at any point since last spring. I did not take that for granted, and I am looking forward to a gentle run later this week.

After a year of loss, I think a good workout is going to feel a lot like slashing the tires on a big yellow taxi.

Emily

Loss

The world lost a good man this week.

I met Darian several years ago, when he was a round-faced sophomore serving as a quiet beacon of sanity in a class full of outrageous cutups. He was a sweet kid, unfailingly polite, and so quiet and unassuming that when I went through my archive of classroom photos in search of a photo of him doing something ridiculous to post on Facebook, I came up empty, because Darian wasn’t the kind of kid who craved attention. The only photos I have of him show a young man with a sort of bemused smile on his face, enjoying the antics of some of his more gonzo classmates during a group project at the conclusion of a unit on Hamlet.

Somehow those images, shot by one of his fourth-hour classmates, capture the essence of Darian as I knew him better than anything I could write about him. He was one of those kids every teacher looks forward to working with because he was so good-natured and reliable.

Sometime during Darian’s junior or senior year, he was diagnosed with cancer. He battled it — seemingly successfully for a while — graduated in spite of the distractions it dealt him, and last year, married another of my former students, a funny, confident young woman every bit as sweet and bright as he was. They seemed a perfect match, and smiling at their wedding pictures on Facebook, I fervently hoped they’d get their happily ever after.

Cancer doesn’t care what anybody hopes, and this week, it assigned Chelsey a title nobody her age should have to carry: widow.

The word sounds wrong when I think of her laughing in my classroom or beaming, radiant and beautiful, in her wedding pictures. It feels wrong. It weighs too much. It tastes strange in my mouth when I try to say it, remembering Darian grinning at whatever outrageous thing the class cutups were pulling this time.

Chelsey is a strong, compassionate woman. She’ll need that strength, and I pray that compassion will be returned to her — amplified exponentially — in the coming weeks and months and years. I suspect it will. I know Webster, and I know southwest Tulsa, and if there’s one thing kids who grew up together on the west side of the Arkansas River know how to do, it’s love and support each other through rough times. They’ve had to do it before — far too often — and I wish with all my heart I could stand between them and the world and absorb the blows so they’d never have to do it again.

If you can spare a prayer, a thought, or a good vibe for my kids — and especially Chelsey — I’d appreciate it.

Emily