vineyardmusings

When the pandemic started, I made my first-ever mask. That has turned into a cottage business and a continued love of sewing and fabric that started when I was in kindergarten watching my great-grandmother, my Nonnie, making a dress for me on her sewing machine. The business is called Vineyard Musings after my first blog post many years ago. I have made thousands of masks, hundreds of pencil cases, many dozens of toiletry bags, piles of market bags, some book sleeves and other small creative projects.

As I retired, I never thought I would start a business after a lengthy career as an educator and a teacher educator, but my mother started her first business at 76 so I guess I follow her lead starting this one at 67. As I head into year four, I can say I have not made any money, just enough to pay for fabric and fun. Isn’t that what retirement is all about anyway, making fun.

Now, I also need to finish those children’s books I have started. Maybe one day I will publish them. Who knows what a day may bring forth. After all, I never knew that this would come as the result of furiously sewing masks for people during the pandemic.

It is not often that things move me deeply in everyday life, probably because I am a skeptic.  However, today was one of those days that the emotions rose to the top and my heart jumped into my throat.

From December 18 – March 11, I was literally housebound due to a knee injury that kept me on crutches. Then, on March 13, the world was on lockdown due to the pandemic COVID-19. Schools closed indefinitely, restaurants were only doing curbside delivers, non-essential businesses closed. So many people started making masks to give to people and to help healthcare workers.

I slogged through the whole time from March 13 through today hoping it would all be a bump in the road we all would endure for a few weeks.

I made face masks, read books, practiced on my new Bodhran drum, made homemade bread and pumpkin bars, played music way too loudly on the radio, walked the dogs many times, purged many boxes, filled the trash container, made hand sanitizer, attended several virtual meetings, listened to my pastor deliver sermons virtually on the church Facebook Live feed, and tried not to live on social media.

Today, however, I ventured to the city for a doctor’s appointment. When I entered the office, only two of the six chairs in the waiting area were present. There was a plastic shield over the formerly person-friendly check-in counter.  When a third person entered the doctor’s office, I was ushered into another waiting area with only three chairs, spaced six feet apart. My doctor and all of her employees were wearing face-masks. The office assistant had a tissue between her ear and the elastic band on her face mask to prevent more irritation from the band. Never before had I been in any doctor’s office where I saw people wearing medical grade face masks. I had only seen this in hospital stays for surgeries.

After this little diversion, I headed to Starbucks to get my FREE birthday coffee and some lunch. As I was driving into the mall complex where the Starbucks coffee shop was only serving at the drive-through window, I was stunned to realize the parking lot, which holds thousands of cars on any given day, was totally empty. There were NO CARS as far as the eye could see. My heart started pounding and I was becoming breathless as I pondered this sight.

My trek to the drive-through lane was not normal either. There were nearly two dozen cars lined up to purchase that wonderful elixir.  Most of the time when I go to that coffee shop, there are six cars. Drivers patiently moved forward at a faster than normal pace, which seemed surreal. Foodservice personnel literally PUSHED food bags out the window faster than I had ever seen at this drive-through window. After I inhaled said coffee in the parking lot, I went to get dinner and gas for my car.

I ventured then to Chik-fil-a to get salads for dinner using gift cards from Christmas. There were two lines inching along and 13 Curbside pick-up stations that were filled with anxious customers. Clerks hurridly raced food to these customers in crates, defying all moving vehicles in their paths.  Fortunately, I was able to place a mobile order that was immediately credited to my account. Once again, the foodservice clerk pushed my bag out gingerly through the pick-up window, and said “Have a great day.” I wondered if Chik-fil-a was the center of the universe for a moment.

On to the gas pump, I headed. Not only were there few cars at the gas station, but gas was $1.87 per gallon. In the 80s that price would have meant a race to get gas. I can still hear my Econ professor saying “less demand equals lower prices.” I usually pay $45 to fill up my 12-year-old Honda, but today I paid $25 to fill that same tank. For that I was grateful, for the short line I was grateful, for the few cars I was grateful, not so much for the cold lake wind blowing up across the lake plateau.

The next stop took me to another “essential” business, Aldi’s, to get a week’s worth of fresh fruits and vegetables and meat. I donned my homemade mask, got my cart from a store employee who had dutifully sanitized the cart for me. In the store, everyone I saw was wearing a mask. People were socially distancing. People stood six feet behind other customers to check out on blue tape floor markers. The cashier ensconced behind a plexiglass shield, scanned my groceries wearing surgical style gloves. As I pushed my cart to the car, I saw the sanitizer employee again and he also took my cart as I returned it, ready to sanitize it again. I am sure he was smiling because his eyes sparkled.

I am not one to get panic attacks, so this feeling of doom was new to me. As I drove home from this little adventure, I got the feeling I was in a time warp or a Ray Bradbury short story. I wondered when the terrific seniors I know would graduate, when I would hear band concerts and see high school plays or hear high school and middle school choirs sing again, when little kids would be permitted to have festive birthday parties with their friends, or when I could hug my dad once again. He turned 92 on Sunday.

I know all of this will mold our new normal, and if we will ever go back the life as we once knew it, our old normal.

COVID-19 is real and the far-reaching impact of it has changed the world. As we wait for the curve to flatten, we pray for our first responders, health care workers, our family members and friends who are on the front lines of this war against an invisible enemy.

Perhaps, in this time when the world has been silenced, may we hear something greater than ourselves, may we reach to Heaven for guidance, peace and hope, because that is where our normal begins. It reminds me of the verses in Philippians (2:10-11) which say “That at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and in earth, and things under the earth: and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

And there rests my peace.

I have not posted a blog in quite some time but decided that I need to follow my own journalism educator’s advice and report what I see. When we look back at this time, we will need these narratives to remember this pandemic.

At the moment we are under a Stay at Home order except for essential needs in our county to lessen the chance of spreading COVID19. Schools are closed, churches share services virtually, and streets are barren.

There are five positive cases of COVID 19 in our county today. Statewide there are1687 positive cases with 16 deaths due to the virus. There were zero two weeks ago.

Today was not an ordinary day to go help my 91-year-old father do is grocery shopping and have lunch together. We often reminisce and I have learned so much about his early life, his time in the Air Force, his love for my mother and so many other things.

Rather, it was a day to race around to stores to find him milk, orange juice, cottage cheese, some soups, dog food and of course, his Pepsi. I really wanted to just go in and sit a spell and drink some coffee with him and chat, but I just went to the door, passed his groceries through to him and said “Bye, Daddy, love you. See you next week.” It was so hard because I just wanted to hug him and be with him, but I know that keeping him safe from the impact of COVID 19 is essential.

His face told me that he loved me, too. He let me know I was doing the right thing because I had to go to several stores to get him things and could potentially bring all of the various germs with me.

As I walked to my car, he said, “Call me when you get home,” just like he has every other time I have left his house. I did and we chatted for a few minutes, as we always do.

As I was driving home, I remembered a scene from my teenage years when he came into the kitchen and said, “Jane, get off the phone. You are always talking.” I laughed aloud because I knew that today my daddy wanted me to talk to him on the phone as long as I wanted.

He has always promoted the idea that we need to be of great courage and resilient in times of trouble. For that, I thank him and know that it is the reason we have weathered many storms together. His last comment to me today was, “See you next week, Sunshine. Love you.” Yes, we will weather this together.

Love you, too, Daddy.

This is the most wonderful time of the year. At least that is what people say. However, for some, it is the worst time of the year for many reasons. People all around us have lost children, parents, spouses, friends. They are grieving deeply as they know this will be a season of missing someone they have celebrated with for years.

Others barely make ends meet daily and are not even sure how they will eat tomorrow. They do not even consider where they will get their children any holiday gifts. Some have lost jobs are friends for no apparent reason.

Some of our local children are anxious because they know that their 12-day break means they have to figure out how to get meals because most of their meals come during school.

This time of year, if you are blessed, reach out and bless another. I was blessed today because I saw a young man in the store actually lean forward and hand the cashier money to pay for an elderly man’s cart of meager supplies. Giving like this does not require much, just a simple understanding that there are people around us who struggle daily to live, even in this small town.

Just making the effort to check on someone else to make sure they are okay during this celebratory time of year is so important. It costs nothing. We may even save a life, just by stopping by to share a few moments of our life with another.

Take some time to give the gift of you to someone this holiday season.

When I started kindergarten, there were no first-day photos like we see today. I did love that my mom walked me to school; met my teacher, Miss Dunbar; and came to get me at noon. Miss Dunbar had a cool bell-like my favorite tv show Ding Dong School, I watched on a black and white television. I loved her brass school bell and told myself that I wanted one someday. No, I did not know I wanted to be a teacher then, but the seed was planted.

Then, there was the first day of school in a new town. It was hard. I was in sixth grade and so mad at my parents because they moved on my twelfth birthday in April and I would have to start in a new school away from all the friends I had ever known. I discovered a box of very old books in the attic of our new house. They were by author Horatio Alger. I read all eleven of them that spring and summer.

Reading became my solace, and I met a friend for life in that spring. Every day we got to go home for lunch. My brother raced ahead and I moped along trying to figure out this new place. Up ahead a girl waited for me and asked if I wanted someone to walk home with. I said yes. I headed home, still moping. On the way back, I met her again. She was actually waiting for me. That was the beginning of a friendship that lasted for 54 years until she died in March of last year. For 29 years, we were able to teach in the same district and I always loved it when I had students from her sixth-grade class come to my high school English class. They were so well prepared.

There was another first day when my parents decided that I would leave private school and go to public school – in November of seventh grade. Once again, no friends! I was very angry and became a recluse by hiding in the library during study hall to read books. I carried home books and read them at night, under the blankets with a flashlight.  My mother helped me by signing me up for Girl Scouts and joining as a leader. In Girl Scouting, I met another lifelong friend, Lorraine. We did so many fun things together and graduated together and later ended up in the same college, both studying to become teachers. Our mothers were also friends, and we are still friends to this day.

After college, those first days of school each of my 44 years were full of anticipation as I was so eager to meet my new students and hone my skills as a teacher helping kids learn to love literature like I did and also teaching them to write well. I never slept through the night and always had the first weeks planned to the hilt every year, even when I taught graduate school. My control-freak personality was always in high gear on those 44 ‘first days,’ definitely an adrenaline rush. Why? Because someone planted a seed on that first day in kindergarten when she rang that brass bell from us to come in from recess.

Over these 45 years as an educator, I have met some amazing teachers. On occasion, some of those teachers have held after school or additional responsibilities such as advising or coaching for small or no stipends, never an hourly rate, because schools could not afford to pay them for their time. If we paid teachers minimum wage for these extra assignments, schools across the US would be bankrupt.

Some of these very teachers are experts in their fields and are held in high regard among their peers on a national level. However, in their local school systems, some have been taken to task for giving their time and expertise to students by allowing students space to create and think and grow as individuals.

Students need space to think and speak and grow and learn. Student publications give them that place to develop their passions for life. Sometimes, students write about things that make adults uncomfortable. Was it not Thomas Jefferson who said, ‘Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter’? Why, yes, it was. With that thought in mind, I often wonder what motivates administrators and school boards to take teachers to task for giving students voice in their student publications. (Full disclosure, I am a certified principal and elected school board member at the time of this writing.)

If we are to raise a nation of thinking, creative, positive adults, we need to give them space to challenge what they see that is going on in the world around them. We cannot challenge it for them.

In recent weeks I have seen numerous posts that bash students for speaking out about school safety.  Some of those posts have been acerbic and accusing students of being used and manipulated by adults. Funny, though, the very people who do not want students to speak or write about their concerns are the very people who are chomping at the bit to censor students who do speak their own minds. Yet, these very folks scream foul when people try to censor their speech. When we do not listen to students, we run the risk creating of students who do not listen to adults.

In the past five years, I have seen the exponential rise of teachers being threatened with dismissal and non-renewal of contracts as well as being suspended without pay because these very teachers, who teach the Constitution and First Amendment rights, refuse to censor students. How do we teach students that words matter if we do not let them use their words to grapple with the volatile issues that surround us in this country?

Kids are angry, as they should be, about the things going on in this country. I remember being angry in the 60s about war and unrest and riots. I was a teen then. One thing I was able to do in high school was to find my voice on the school’s newspaper staff. It helped me negotiate my passion. Yes, I taught journalism for more than three decades as a result of that experience. It also taught me that those who speak up can create change in the world.

When a teacher takes the time to give students the opportunity to develop voice, we need to honor that teacher and we need to make sure we do not ask that teacher to throw away a whole career because we are miffed that a student published something that might make the school look bad. Student publications are not public relations tools for the school.

What makes the school look bad is the denigration of highly respected teachers who help students learn more than content in the textbooks (which is often erroneous.) When that controversy plays out in the local media, social media and school board meetings, the students lose, the community loses and those who try to thwart the free voice of students by dismissing the teacher, lose.

To all of the publications advisers I know, this is for you. You are valued, you are respected, you are worthy of praise for educating a future thinking electorate. We support you. Press on.

Creativity has always been fascinating to me. How do people develop creativity? Over the years I have tried to use art, music, photography, dance and theater in my English classroom to invite students in to the conversations about literature and to spark writing ideas.

I believe creativity is something we nurture in children and that it is not innate any more that reading or math are innate. We must teach children to be observers and thinkers and reflectors about the life they live. When we do that we can expect children to generate new ideas and new things.

Although I am not a professional artist, I love to play with art and see things in new ways. As a small child, I had a great art teacher who took us to the school yard one day, not to play, but to observe. She asked us to get on our bellies and she put a small open square in front of each us on the grass. In this square, we were to look closely at what was going on inside of the square. Then, she gave us a piece of a small board with a piece of art paper taped to it and told us to draw what we saw. I remember drawing a worm and an ant playing in the grass. Little did I know that this was my invitation to observe life.

The arts can do many things for us. Music was so powerful to me as a teenager, whether it was buying my first 45 rpm record or singing in church choir, music spoke to my soul and much of the time as a teacher, I have relied on music to keep me calm and to help kids in their thinking process. When my brother died at the young age of 32, it helped heal my heart and mind because I could not fathom that he was gone. I often wonder how our kids would deal with life’s tragedies if we infused more music into the healing process. Fortunately for me, I work at a place where art therapy is a major and I get to see the impact of integration of arts in to peoples’ lives.

Last fall I learned the power of art to heal the mind. I had the opportunity to use a new art form I was learning to help heal my brain after a nasty fall that resulted in what doctors call CBI, or closed-brain injury,  often called a concussion. I spend days practicing Zentagle, a form of art using pen strokes to create designs. I had learned it earlier in the spring, from my great art teacher, Christine French, so the process of picking up the pen and drawing in this new way, helped my mind to refocus and heal more quickly.

As the school year begins, think about how you can help students be more creative.

I stood at the door of my first teaching job in Indianapolis wondering if it would be my life’s work. I loved literature, I loved writing, but deep down inside, I was scared to death because I knew teaching was about kids and that was a huge responsibility.

What would this  year hold as I faced those fresh-faced juniors to teach them American literature and how to write. Little did I know I would fall in love with teaching and spend the next 43 years doing this very thing. The summer before I left for my new job, my grandmother gave me a key ring that said ‘God is love’ on it. She told me to BE THE LIGHT and that has been my motto ever since.

Teaching students to love two hundred years of literature, helping them to develop writing skills and advising them as they build their student newspaper were all part of my day.  I did not know it then, but did find out a few months later that a teacher’s life is a life of very little sleep. We worry, fret, cajole, and anguish over “our kids” just like parents do. That was a real eye opener.

I must say, the world of journalism education has really changed since then. I remember teaching my students how to use a hot wax roller to create an adhesive back on their galley sheets, so they could be mounted on a pica board and taken to the printer. We typed the galleys on an electric typewriter that actually counted the spaces we needed to reset the type in the correct width to present a justified column. We also learned how to mount tool lines with the tiniest of tapes and cross cut the corners on a 45º angle so they looked perfect. I also learned how to develop black and white film and print photos that year. All of this knowledge would come in handy seven years later in another job. I am so glad that little old yearbook adviser took me under her wing and said, you need to learn to do this so you can teach kids to do it, because it is their publication.

Today, it is just not the same doing photos in PhotoShop. Same principles, yes, but the process is not the same. Dektol and developer, I do miss you and the artistic way you enticed us all as photos emerged from the paper. Doing the newspaper was the biggest part of my life as I stayed after school for many hours helping the kids write their best stories and design their best page layouts and print their best photos. It was so intense and I wondered if all of my teaching career it would be this way or if it would get easier.

Another thing I learned that year had to do with tornados. I had never seen one, but had heard that they were dangerous. Our first school drill was a storm drill and not a fire drill. There were many days in that school year and the next school year, that we ducked for cover in hallways where there were no windows and the steel beams of the building would cover us as winds blew over the school. I was never so happy to be in a basement in my life.

In the spring of that year, I went back to my alma mater to visit my roommate and her husband. On the way to their house, I decided to stop by the college to go to the bookstore, my favorite place. When I came out I could see a storm brewing, so I hopped in my beautiful red 1969 Cougar and took off for their house, just 12 miles away from the campus. As I left the last turn before leaving the small college town, I saw this mammoth funnel cloud coming toward me from the left. At that point I thought may days were over and floored the gas pedal. I remember seeing 100 mph on the speedometer and realized that something had hit the room of my car, which made me push the pedal even harder.  As I outraced the tornado and pulled into my college roommate’s driveway, I knew there was a reason I was still here and that was to teach.  Getting out of the car, I noticed that the thud I had heard on the roof of my car as I raced to their house had come from a piece of the flying barn roof I had seen in the funnel cloud. So much for that beautiful vinyl roof.

As I went to the front door, my roommate’s husband opened the door and said “Are you okay?” Of course, I could not talk and ended up passing out from the trauma of the experience.

Yes, it was very dark in that funnel cloud that came at me that day, but I could see the light ahead of me and I kept my eye on the light to get free. After some great tea and a warm bed, I knew that my grandmother’s advice was right: teachers need to BE THE LIGHT ahead of the child, so the child can see the path to the future.