My Black

"Well hello, Dramatic Spring in a Winter Consciousness."

It was the early nineties, and Mr. Munchweiler was calling the New Age health spa where I worked as a receptionist.

"Hello, Mr. Munchweiler," I said cordially.  I appreciated the fact that he remembered who I was, since few of the other patients did.  I would even have bet that he remembered my name, although he always addressed me as he just had on the telephone.  I didn't know exactly what he meant, and I enjoyed not asking him.

Munchweiler said he "did people's colors."  People paid him to tell them what colors to wear and what make-up to apply.  I didn't worry about make-up or the color of my clothes.  I just washed my face every morning with Ivory soap and put on something clean, baggy, and black.  Done.

Apparently, Munchweiler viewed me as a blight upon the fashion landscape.  I viewed him as a human petit-four.  He was very thin, with a sharp, homely face, but I had never seen anyone so meticulously groomed or dressed.  Looking at me upset him so much that one day, while sitting in the waiting room before his high colonic, he decided to do my colors for free.

He approached the desk.  He wore a $2,000 pair of designer wire-rimmed glasses, a robin's egg blue cashmere sweater over a cream dress shirt, perfectly tailored navy wool pants, and cordovan loafers.  He had no stray nose hairs, ear hairs, or blemishes of any kind.  His chin and cheeks were so smooth that he had probably shaved in the lobby men's room on the way up.  No comb-over for Munchweiler.  He must have powdered the top of his head to keep it from shining under the fluorescent lights.

The office soundtrack began playing Nat and Natalie Cole singing "Unforgettable" for the twentieth time that day.  My breathing got shallow.

"Darling," he said, "you are wasting your youth."

I could see where this was going.  I tried to head him off.

"Did you know," I said, "that Nat King Cole did not consent to sing this duet with his daughter?  He was already dead when she made it.  Don't you think that's creepy?"

Munchweiler was undeterred.

"What's creepy is a nice-looking twenty-five-year-old woman dressing like Lurch from the Addams Family.  No, listen to me."  He imperiously waved away any words that might escape my parting lips.  His fingernails were buffed and varnished with a healthy rose tint.

"Colors correspond to the seasons.  Everyone has her season.  Your season depends on your skin tone.  Winters wear black.  You are NOT a winter.  You are a Spring.  But you are not a Classic Spring."  He shook his head emphatically.

"You should NOT wear pastels.  They will drag you down.  You are a Dramatic Spring.  You should wear bright colors, but don't go into neons.  Those are for Summers.  Dark green should be the darkest color you ever wear.  Make it your black."

I looked at him.  He sighed, went back to his chair, and opened a People magazine with Heather Locklear on the cover.

"Everything I own is black," I said.

"So I surmised," he said, not looking up.

I said, "I don't have any money."

"Come on," he said.  "There are thrift stores."

Randi, the colonics girl, opened a door and said, "Ready for you, Mr. Munchweiler."

"And cut your hair," he murmured as he swept by, low enough so Randi couldn't hear.

The day before Munchweiler's next colonic was my day off. I got stoned and stood in front of my bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors.  While I cut my hair short, Billie Holiday sang beautifully, without any of her dead relatives.  I sang along on "And I find the very mention of you / Like the kicker in a julep or two."

The word "julep" gave me an idea.  I pulled on my combat boots and stuffed one ten- and one five-dollar bill in my jeans pocket.  My cat Tiny tried to follow me out, but since we lived on a busy street, I slammed the door in her face.  She yowled out the window.  Better pick up some kitty litter, also.

I walked two blocks to a thrift store.  It was still there in the window, a mint-green polyester dress, floor length, with a halter top.  The clerk was smoking a cigarette and reading the L.A. Times.  She did not look up when I came in.  She was wearing black, and I wondered if she was a Winter.

"How much is the dress in the window?"

"Seven bucks," she said.

"I would like to try it on."

She stalked over to the mannequin, pulled the dress over its head, and handed it to me.  Some ash from her cigarette fell on it.

Behind a fabric curtain, I pulled the dress over my head.  I looked in the mirror and saw that it was not baggy, to put it mildly.

"How do I look?" I asked the clerk.  "Be honest."

"Like Cher with anorexia and a bad haircut."  I noticed her tongue ring and smiled.

"Perfect."  I handed her my ten.

I stopped at the drug store and bought some cat litter.  In the dollar bin I also found some sparkly green eyeshadow, which I applied thickly the next morning after donning my combat boots and new dress.

That afternoon when Munchweiler came in, the Spring movement from Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" was playing on its thirteenth rotation.  I hadn't planned it that way; I did not even know where the stereo was.

"Hello, Anne Frank," Munchweiler said, unsmiling, sporting a flawless camel's hair jacket.  "You're on the right track."  He sighed, sat down and opened his date book.

Katz was the owner of the health spa.  His parents bought it for him after he got an undergraduate arts degree at a university which has a banana slug as its mascot.  I saw him gliding toward me as I was walking toward Hoyt, my rusted 1971 Volvo.  Katz was tall and slender, with carefully tousled dark curls.  He was dressed in a dove grey silk tunic with dark blue silk pants.

"We're going to have to let you go," he said, looking deeply into my eyes with his usual faux-tender expression.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"It's just not working out," he said.

"Oh."  I wondered how I was going to pay my rent if I could not find another job in the next thirty days.

"I can see you're upset," Katz said, still gazing softly at me.  "Would you like a hug?"

"No," I said, "but you're supposed to have the last check ready when you fire someone."

"Oh," he said, shrugging.  "Well, come on into the office and I'll write you one."

I never saw Munchweiler again, but twenty years later, dark green is still my black.

Three Things I Like About Teaching

It's easy for me to complain about the difficulties of teaching, and heaven knows I spend a lot of time doing so.  "I complain, therefore I am" could be my motto.  Lately, however, I have noticed that my unceasing bitching has alienated all my loved ones except my dog, whose loyalty is unwavering because he listens only when a food can is being opened.  So today I am taking myself firmly in hand and admitting that teaching has its joys.

Here are three of them.

1.  I like children.  

I like their frankness.  I can count on them simply to tell me if they hate me, love me, like my new sneakers, think my breath stinks, or don't understand a word I'm saying.  I don't have to wonder what they are thinking and feeling.  I find this relaxing.

I enjoy eavesdropping on their conversations, which I often find simultaneously funny and thought-provoking.

My second-grade class had many luncheon meetings about their band, "Exploding Diaper."  First they developed a surprisingly streamlined band logo, then identified the need for an entertainment lawyer.  (I once worked for a man I would have recommended, but no one asked me.)  Next, two of them made a CD at home and shared the songs with others during play dates (after my unreasonable refusal to use lesson time for this purpose).

On a walk to the park, one of my students told a classmate, "When I grow up, I want to be a nation."
"Well, you'll still have to pay taxes," she informed him.
He asked, "Will I pay them to myself?"
"Hmm," she said, "that's a good question.  You'd better ask about that."

Child 1: "Mommy made daddy sleep on the couch last night because she said he stank like cigarettes and beer.  When daddy woke up he was yelling at mommy because she has a friend who is a boy."
Child 2 (furrowing brow): "That's weird."
Child 1 (nodding): "Yeah.  Wanna play Uno?"

(One child's response to a child who was trying to convert several of his classmates to Christianity):  "When you pull down your pants, God is pulling His pants down, too."  (This ended the conversation.)


2.  I like the fact that my work requires me to keep learning.


Children stop listening to me as soon as what I am teaching them stops having meaning for me.  They can spot a phony a mile away, and no child respects or responds to a phony.  So I do what I can to keep lessons interesting for myself.  If they are learning something new about a subject, I need to learn something new about it too.  The fact that we are working on different levels is irrelevant; we are all growing.  Who knows, maybe this will keep me from getting Altzheimer's.

As a child, I hated math because it was taught in a way I found simultaneously confusing and stultifying.  To keep from inflicting this experience on my students, I forced myself to look for ways to enjoy math.  I had too much math anxiety to focus on directions about how to do Sudoku puzzles, so I humbled myself and asked a friend to show me.  He did not laugh at me.  Now I get a kick out of Sudoku.

I read books about math to help me reconnect with the one time in school that I found math beautiful, junior year geometry, when the delightfully British Miss Bennett spoke to me of fractals and the music of the spheres.  I show the children hexagons in carrots and five-pointed stars in apples, and they stand with arms and legs akimbo to become five-pointed stars themselves.  The children keep me running with their fascination with basic mathematical patterns.  Look Miss Bleier, all the answers in the fives table end with zero or five!  I smile and try to access the feeling that this is occurring to me for the first time, which is different from being a phony.  I try to cultivate what the Buddha called "beginner's mind."

I make up stories in which all four basic math processes are gnomes, hunting for precious stones in the Numeral Mines. (I stole this idea from Allesandra Profumo, a sexy Gypsy and excellent mentoring teacher I worked with.)  There is Pierre Plus, a zaftig lad dressed in green, thinking of lunch, collecting his stones one by one; Melvin Minus, melancholy in blue, always crying when stones fall out of his bag; Tallulah Times, dressed like a rock star in a yellow pants-suit, so lucky that she finds equal piles of precious stones which she arranges on her special tables; and Dame Divide, devastating in a red silk cape, possessed of enough chutzpah to settle arguments over how stones should be portioned out.  We act out all the parts using dragon's tears (those shiny stones people put in flower vases).

One rest time I was reading one of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books to the children.  The main character, eight-year-old Ramona, expressed glee because her school was closed and she didn't have to go.  The children looked at one another, puzzled.  A girl raised her hand.  She asked me, "Why would anyone not want to go to school?"  The others looked at me expectantly, waiting for my answer.

A decade of frustrating faculty meetings and unreasonable parents' expectations melted away, and I felt like I'd won the Nobel Prize.

3.  I like supporting myself by helping the innocent.


It's great to get a paycheck for doing something I regard as unquestionably good, like teaching a group of children to read.  In my hour of darkness, as Gram Parsons sings, I wonder what good knowing how to read will do my students in a world where people sext instead of writing sonnets, a world in which dog fight organizers and the Kardashians set the cultural standard.  But the other 23 hours, I believe reading can help children save their own lives, the way it helped me save mine.

Some days I blow it.  I yell at a child.  I get a migraine from the incessant noise -- they are so freaking loud and they never, ever get tired.  My lesson falls flat.  I tell all the kids put their heads down so I can try to take one deep breath.  I set the timer for five minutes and say none of them can ask me for anything until the timer goes off, unless someone is bleeding or choking.  I see my doctor once more about getting some teacher's little helper, then don't fill the prescription again.

Through it all, I believe I'm keeping a light burning in a dark time, simply by being interested in who these children are, and in what they can do.  Each of them brought at least one gift only he or she can give.  I want to help them open their gifts.

So warts and all, there is a way in which every day I teach is a party, although much to the children's chagrin, we only have two class parties a year.  I won't try to explain this to them, however, because they will roll their eyes.  Third graders are excellent at that.