(This is best read out loud)

 

Conversation with the School Board

 

            Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board, the people who stand before you today are not teachers, they are not even educators, they are superheroes.  They have a superhuman power, one which shows its head every day in their line of work.  What is this great power you ask?  I’ll tell you.  When everything around them descends into chaos, when a person enters their life every day for the sole purpose of causing its ruin, when bills are not paid, lights go out and they sit on tacks in their chairs, the people who stand before you here today keep their cool.  When anyone else in society has a problem with another person at 2 in the morning at a bar (a place which the people behind me are prohibited from) they begin to shout, perhaps punch, sometimes even aim a weapon at them and then might get charged with a misdemeanor.  But these people behind me, they are not allowed to hit the person ruining their life with an insult, let alone a punch, or else they will lose what little they have left and become nothing more than the average Joe who ruined their own life.  All because they deal with people who have not, as of yet, completed the American right of passage. 

            The American right of passage began when a boy, AGE TWELVE, strode into the woods for 1, maybe 2, weeks living off what they could catch and find, and IF they survived, they would return a man.  But what that now has dwindled down to in America is that a child ascends 3, maybe 4, steps to a stage, crosses that stage and shakes hands with a man who spent 40 years of his life and hundreds of thousands of his dollars for 3 little letters and a punctuation mark behind his name, gets a little piece of paper from this man and descends from the stage an adult.  They then head off toward the sunset and go off to college and join what you understand to be a classroom.

            For a classroom is not what you remember.  It is not a perfect square room with solid beige walls and a PowerPoint on the screen while an old, gray haired man drones on reading the PowerPoint to the students who miraculously and unquestioningly turn pixels into penmanship.  No, a classroom is the true American melting pot, the last real place where smart and dumb, girl and boy, black, white, green and orange all come together in one place.  It is a room with colorful posters lining the walls which only the teacher really ever looks at and where whom is going out with whom is far more important than what some dead white man said or wrote in centuries past.  That is a real classroom, and it is the home of the greatest of all superheroes. 

            No, not the people who stand before you, I am speaking of Jr. High and High School Students.  For they are able to do what none of us are able to do.  They are able to sit behind wooden tables on chairs that broke 5 years go, trying to cautiously balance on 2 legs so as to not disturb the teacher, and they are able to do it for 7 break less hours without speaking; all the while attempting to decipher how they possible lived for 13,14,15,18 years without knowing how to convert centimeters to meters and how much better their life is going to be now that they know.  They then leave their place of work, for that is what the school really is, and go home in order to do 2-3 more hours of work, after which they accompany their mother to Wal-Mart and are promptly told to buy 3 YARDS of fabric.  And then they complete their extra ordinary status by doing it all over again tomorrow.

            So I now humbly offer a solution to their problem, our problem and your problem all at once.  Recess.  You see, recess appears miraculously, and then goes away as quickly as it came only to reappear after that blissful right of passage rechristened “smoke breaks;” so in reality the only people who are not allowed to defuse their minds privately are those going through puberty; those who perhaps need it most.  We tell these children that they do not need the luxury that we hold so near and dear to our hearts and then wonder why they rebel or choose to take them anyway.  Therefore it is my humble suggestion to introduce recess into all levels of school and then see if your discipline problem clears up.

Justice

            I am sitting alone in a tiny, two person, green booth in a small burger joint in west New York State.  The location is not important, just that it is far from my home.  The business meeting, which starts in an hour, is with a prime client, so they sent me to handle it.  The waiter, who is approaching slowly from the counter, is your typical, college age waiter.  I wonder if this is really his table.  He seems to me to be the kind of waiter who steals a table when it looks like the tip will be good.  Most college students do things like that, after all they need the extra buck.  Probably will go and spend it on beer for his fraternity party tonight.  Well, he’ll have to earn his money if he wants any from me.

            “How are you today sir?”

            “Fine.”  Fine, the type of answer any scrub off the street would be able to come up with.  I give my order, a bacon cheeseburger with extra tomatoes.  Makes it healthy.  He goes off to get my drinks.

            “Here you are sir.  If you need anything at all, I will be sure to come to your aid.”  What was that?  He’s just fishing for tips.  Maybe I should take him up on that.  He rests over by the counter not ten yards from my seats.  I face the counter where he speaks in a low voice with his girlfriend.  It is not a long distance, but it’s enough that I can’t over hear their conversation. 

            It is at that moment that I realize just how quiet this diner is.  There are muffled sounds in the air, but it is thick with silence.  The diner sounds just like Ol’ Joe’s diner back home.  I remember how it was back then.  We might get 10 customers a night.  It was a small diner, only 5 or 6 tables; plaid seats, checkerboard tables.  Typical ‘70’s diner.  I was in college, a business major and I remember fighting for each customer as they walked in.  I beat up a waiter once to get a table.  He wound up in the hospital for 3 days.  They would have fired me if Joe hadn’t gotten arrested that night.  There were more cops than customers that night.  Turns out the marijuana in the back was the only thing keeping the diner open.  I lost everything, moved onto the cold street.  Used to bunk up in friends dorms till security found me.  But I made it here, look at me now, VP of a major corporation, stiffing college boys of tips.

            What if this waiter had been in Ol’ Joes’s all those years earlier?  What if he was me?  Would I have given him nothing then?  Would he have let me stay in his dorm so I could finish school?  Surely he would have.  Surely this boy was the type of upstanding young man who I strived to be.  He comes over with the food.  “What do you do besides this?” I say.

            “I’m a student at Syracuse, Business major.”

            I leave a $200 tip and my card on the table.  I hope he calls when he graduates.  I’m sure he would make an excellent VP to send to one of my best clients.  It is like a savior jumping up from my past for this young man.  I’m glad I could help.

Miss Scarlet

 

            I say, I was in the house on the night poor Mr. Boddy has his life so tragically ended.  I happened to be practicing my dancing, in the ballroom of course.  A girl cannot simply get up one day and begin to dance, it takes practice.  That’s why I had the candlestick with me, for light.  I heard Mr. Boddy’s scream over the music it was so loud, and I came runnin’.  I come in and I found poor Mr. Boddy lying there on the floor.  I tried to help him up, but there wasn’t nothin’ I could do for him.  His last wish was for me to tell his wife he loved her.

 

Prof. Plumb

 

            The fingerprints results for both the candlestick and the lead pipe, which were found in the room in which Mr. Boddy was killed, have come in.  From these tests I was able to conclude that Miss Lynn Scarlet was the most recent person to touch the candlestick and that Col. Donald Mustard was the most recent person to touch the pipe. 

            I will remind everyone here that this does not convict either of these persons of the murder; it is possible that Mr. Boddy was killed by another means, or with another object.  All we know for certain is that Mr. Boddy was killed, and he wound up in the bedroom.

 

Col. Mustard

 

            O’ course I had my lead pipe.  Didn’t you here ol’ Teddy Roosevelt, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”  Well, I done got my big stick, or pipe in this case.  As for my being in that bedroom that night, well that fine young lady Miss Scarlet invited me over for a nice evening, I mean dinner.  I was simply exploring everything her…uh house had to offer.  I found that Boddy character lying in the bedroom covered in his own blood with a candlestick stickin’ out of his head.  Course I don’t mind blood usually, but I dropped my pipe there beside the bed and made a beeline for the door.  Not really something I’m too proud off.

 

Prof. Plumb

 

            The record player in the ballroom has a layer of dust on it about a cm. thick.  It is clear that it has not been touched for several months, maybe years.  Miss Lynn Scarlet was not playing music in the ballroom last week.

 

Miss Scarlet

 

            Ok, I was in the bedroom, but I was still dancin’ with Col. Mustard.  I invited him over for a grand ol’ evenin’ and we had adjourned.  Say what you want, I don’t care no more.  We was havin’ a fine time when that James Boddy walked in.  What was we supposed to do?  I didn’t want the town on me! 

            Yes, I, Miss Scarlet, killed Mr. Boddy in the bedroom with the candlestick.

Late?

            I actually left home early.  Not an hour early, but certainly earlier than I needed to leave.  But when I got to 7^th street, there was a major wreck right in front of me.  It wasn’t my fault, but it blocked the road and I couldn’t go anywhere.  What was I supposed to do?  I explained to the police officer that I had to get to work, but she just wouldn’t listen to me.  This was about the time that Robinson hit that shot to tie the game so I still wasn’t late yet, but I know the time was getting close.  Once the wreck finally got moved, I went onto 6^th and immediately got behind a funeral procession.  Now, I wasn’t going to pass a funeral procession! 

            So I turned off 6^th and headed south, but I wound up south of the tracks and got all scared.  My heart was pounding and my blood pressure was rising, I could just feel it.  I freaked out and couldn’t get back north of the tracks.  This took forever; I was hardly even recognizing what was happening.  It was about when Rush missed and the game went to overtime.  I think that’s when it was…I saw it on Sports center later.  Once I finally got back north of the tracks, I turned back on 6^th and got behind the stupid funeral procession again and followed them slowly to work.  So really it wasn’t my fault I really tried everything I could!

Why I Quit

            Anyway you look at it, being a janitor at the convention center on Star Wars week sucks.  By the millions, the Star Wars freaks began entering the building; the Jedi, the Sith, the little green and brown men and women, short people, tall people, orange people with annoying little bills; all with their cloaks, talking masks and fake laser swords (which they decided to fight up and down the halls with, knocking all our carefully placed things on the no longer clean floors and toppling the trash on top of them) flying past the janitor’s room gleefully trashing the whole place as we took an immense pleasure watching the entire first season of Star Trek Voyager.  Carefully, we would peek out the door into the fray, each time bringing A New Hope that someone would help us out, and each time we would wind up cursing these d**n Jedi and their d**n convention.

            During these gleeful times of rest we took to planning our revenge on the not so Phantom Menace in the convention center.  Every now and then, one of us would leave the room, tour the complex, and come back with a report.  Frank’s report was the worst yet: trash everywhere, the table cloths down, bathrooms flooded and clogged by the clone troopers which had marched Frank into the ground. “Great stupid pieces of s**t!”  He had yelled this to the mass which, thankfully for him, didn’t hear him.

            “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said as we went out during lunch, which was out on the lawn and surrounding areas; it was our chance to rebound from the Attack of the Clones (and others).  Just one room had to be spick and span for Carrie Fisher’s visit that afternoon, but it happened to be one of the biggest in the whole facility.  Keeping track of the time, we worked feverously to prepare the room, wiping off the chairs, sweeping the stage, hanging the banners and setting up the statues and figurines.  Little did we know that the Princess was watching us and that she wouldn’t like that we were all eating cinnamon rolls while we did our work.  Magically, the room was ready 5 minutes early.

            Next was the Return of the Jedi and Sith, and ewoks, wookies, storm troopers and especially those annoying Yodas.  On and on they went as the arena slowly filled with eager looking freaks and their memorabilia.  Pay checks seemed to be the only thing keeping any of us janitors going.

            Quick, too quick, Mrs. Fisher was finished with her speech and soon they all returned to wreak havoc once again.  Recognizing all the work we had done, they seemed to take it as a personal challenge.  So complete was the Revenge of the Sith, Jedi and all other manner of foul smelling, scruffy looking nerf herders from some galaxy not far enough away that I hardly recognized that there even was a building here when they began to trickle home.

            “The Empire Strikes Back,” joked Frank as we all began to clear the debris of the day.  Unbearable as the work began to be, we labored tirelessly without too many complaints.  Vainly, we continued to bathroom after hallway after bathroom, slowly reclaiming the complex from the heaps of trash (421 bags worth!) which littered the floor.  When things began to look done, a tiny Yoda came up and poked me in the leg. “Xavier, I see your name is, quickly must you come, spilled my punch I have!”  Yelling, kicking, screaming, punching I carried him to the door and I threw him and his pathetic light saber out the door and turned around straight into my boss. “Zach,” I said, “I quit!”

 

This story contains quotes from and allusions to the Star Wars Saga.