Friends and Allies

 The baboon spoke Tuesday at a "rally" in Pennsylvania to kick of a multi-state tour about the economy. His goal is to convince Americans that prices are falling like his brain function. The White House website breathlessly reports that he spoke to a packed crowd!

Now that I've retired from teaching, people often ask me if I miss anything about my job. I always gave a firm, "Nope! Not a thing!" 

But today, I was surprised to come across something I do miss after all: snow days!

"What's that?" you say. "For you, every day is a snow day, just without the bad weather."

True! But here's the thing.

When you hear that a winter storm is sweeping toward your town, a particular feeling touches the air. It's both anticipation and trepidation, like something sinister is coming, but ultimately you'll be cozy and safe, as long as you do the right things, like stay home and drink hot chocolate. You wonder if you should run to the store.* You check the weather report again and again to see how much snow is expected. You scan the sky for the first dark clouds. You can feel a winter storm coming just like you can feel a summer thunderstorm. The air goes still. It's drier than usual. The sky is gloomier. All the signs say a storm is coming.

At home, you keep checking the weather for updates. Three to five inches of snow. No, six to eight. No, eight to ten. Twelve in some places. How much will there be?

And there's always the important question: will they cancel school tomorrow?

That question always brings about a delicious anticipation. In the 1970s, they canceled school in the early morning, never the night before. There were no robo-calls or mass texts. There were no phone trees. The TV stations wouldn't start broadcasting until seven. You had one recourse---turn on the radio and tune it to the closest local station. (On our huge, combination radio/record player/TV/hi-fi system, which was the size of a sofa, my mother had written the frequency number of the station on a piece of masking tape and put it over the tuning dial. That piece of tape is an indelible mark of my childhood.) You ate breakfast with the radio on and waited. Then you put your coat and boots on so you could run out to the bus in case school was on, and waited. My sister, brother, and I always sat cross-legged in front of the giant radio thingie like pilgrims worshiping at an altar. We were certainly praying, anyway. Eventually, the radio announcer would say, "Here are today's school closings." You got tense now and held your breath. 

Sometimes you were disappointed. The announcer said, "Those are all the closings we have for now. Stay tuned for updates," without listing your school. Sigh. You trudged toward the door and braced yourself for the snowy trip to school. But more often, your wish was fulfilled, and the announcer named your school. A cheer went up. It was a snow day! Anticipation fulfilled! And since you were already up and dressed for outdoors, you ran outside in the dark and played in the snow, leaving your parents to their coffee. 

This happened several times every winter, bringing with it that unique sense of anticipation and trepidation, and it adhered to your psyche. But eventually, you finish school and start your life as an adult. You don't get snow days anymore. If you do stay home during a storm, you have to use a sick day or go without pay. And you're stuck in the house with your kids, who are excited and full of beans and louder than a pack of puppies. The anticipation part of storms fades away, replaced with only dread that on top of everything else in your life, you now have to deal with driving in the snow, worrying about accidents, and clearing the driveway. Snow days as fun days have faded to a distant memory.

But not for me!

Teachers don't have to let go of the anticipation. Teachers still get snow days as fun days, along with the anticipation/trepidation cycle. Traditionally, teachers are still paid for snow days---one of the few perqs teachers still get---so you don't have to worry about PTO or vacation days. And you're in a school-ful of students who are also anticipating and trepidating. A storm is coming! Will they close school tomorrow? You get to say things like, "School isn't canceled until it's canceled, so don't put off your homework!" When I started teaching, you joined a phone tree to alert you if school closed. Later, we got robo-calls. So part of the anticipation was waiting for the phone to ring. When you snatched it up and saw the name of the school district on the screen, you knew. Yes! A free day off! I had this for thirty years.

And now it's gone.

Yesterday, a storm swept through my area overnight. It didn't deliver a lot of snow, but the temperature hovered around freezing, giving us a slushy mess that might freeze and turn the roads into icy death traps. These days, schools recognize that most parents juggle work and child care, and it's hard to find the latter on short notice, so they often cancel school the day before. That evening, school closings started rolling in on local news web sites. My district, Walled Lake, was one of them.

It had no impact on me whatsoever. I could still feel the storm coming in the air, and there was some worried buzzing around in our family circle about who had to drive to work and how careful they should be, but that was it. I'm retired. I don't have to drive to work, or anywhere else, if I don't want to. I didn't have to deal with the storm except to push a snow shovel over the driveway. The delicious snow day feeling was gone.

Last night I got ready for bed, shut off the lights, and realized I'd left the curtains open. Without the lights on, I could see outside. The full moon shone brightly enough to penetrate the cloud cover and leave a pleasant twilight. The pine trees out back were catching the snow and turning white. The yard and the back walkway were covered with snow marked by animal tracks. I was alone in the house, so it was silent. A hint of chill came from the windows, though they're very modern and weatherproof, so it was probably my imagination. For a little bit, I felt like I was ten again, sitting on my creaky bed and staring out the window at the silent, snowy countryside, hoping school would be canceled tomorrow, but also admiring the stark beauty outside. A tiny bit of the old snow day feeling returned.

So I suppose I do miss one aspect of teaching. But there won't be anything else! Nope. Not a thing!

Unless ... 



*When I was a kid, we lived way out in farm country, and more than once we were literally unable to get into town for days at a time after a major storm. If the weather report said a storm was coming, you went to the store. Always.

You know that thing people say? That they didn't know how bad a situation was until they got out of it? I've come to realize that for me, this was teaching.

Every day that I don't go in to work (and these days, that's every day), I feel a profound sense of relief. A major weight is gone from my life. I hadn't realized how incrementally awful my job had gotten over the decades, or how much worry had been slowly and steadily forced on me, until the day I walked out the door for the last time.

One of the biggest indicators of this experience? My dreams.

Around the pandemic, when stress levels went through the roof for everyone, my dreams underwent a shift. Most of them were intense and ... bad. Not nightmares, per se, but just intense and crappy. The kind of thing where you wake up and say, "Oh! So glad that was just a dream!" A recurring image was that I lived in a ramshackle house with a broken sewer pipe flooding the bathroom. In retrospect, the symbolism was clear.

Now that I've left teaching? My dreams are ... fun. I have more about leaping high or flying. I don't wake up and feel relief that it was just dream. I just wake up. I'd forgotten what it was like. Hell, I forgotten that it was =possible.=

The changed happened overnight, so to speak, and the difference was stark. Bad dreams had become part of my nightly routine, to the point where I didn't think of them as strange. They were NORMAL. It was like a pain that you get used to and forget you have until it suddenly stops.

I'm glad it did.