Monte Rosen:  

I received the utility bills today, and even though I swear I paid the last month's bills on-time, I'll be horsewhipped if they aren't unpaid still. Digging through the pile of assorted papers on what appears to be my desk, I discover last month's sneaky missives still perforated with envelopes unsealed and unstamped. Now how did that happen? "Time slips away unawares," my mother always warned. And aside from an occasional stab of guilt, time certainly does slip away from me. Actually, it tends to fly away at great speeds. I remember all my friends from seventh and eighth grade, how one or two are still friends now, though most have thankfully disappeared from my life. One who hasn't disappeared, though not by choice...Boogie...just got married last summer, and I even saw Mrs. Porte at his wedding. Kids, remember to invite your eighth grade teacher to your wedding, okay? She was my dreaded eighth grade homeroom/English teacher, whom I tormented in every devious way I could devise. Goodness but the Battleaxe hasn't changed in twenty-one years, and I still didn't have the nerve to apologize for being such a dirtball to her. I think of the old saying: "No matter how much things change, they stay pretty much the same," and I still don't have a clue as to what that saying has to do with anything. My ex, Ruth...another quandary, who occasionally offers me painful insight into my life, usually uninvited, managed to slip away sadly into the past too, this most recent summer gone by. Her leaving still feels raw, uncalloused, and tender to the touch of many memories. She still owes me money too. But like most recent friends, she's still in my thoughts and occasionally she springs for a conversation, long distance of course. For instance, we got to talking on the phone last night, about what we learned in school versus what we really needed to know in life, like how to mooch off your friends for months, what shoes never to wear to an Australian wedding, or why ice cream hurts your teeth. Neither of us had more than one or two teachers who really gave a rat's ass about us, a valuable indicator of worth. But what our so-called teachers couldn't do was crush our love of learning, nor the joy of living, out of us. Though football coaches very nearly did both, simultaneously. Thus we reconciled that even though none of the wisdom we needed in order to live, came to us from too many teachers, it came to us when we were ready for it. And it came because one teacher tried to reach out. So if you build it, it will come. And then you're stuck with it. Now, with the district wide budget cuts here in Boulder, it appears for all practical purposes like I'll have to leave Boulder to find work as a teacher, since all the fishmongering jobs are taken. Last Friday, when this word came down from on high, I felt defeated and angry. After a year of steady work, my future is again uncertain. Still, it's not as shaky as my past. Worse than this, after a year of reaching out to students, stirring the mires of their thoughts and feelings, (and I do mean mires...more like deep bogs of sinister wondering...or strange eddies of steeped rat snot...) I have to leave before I get to see the effects. I'll be left with questions, haunted by doubts, plagued by vague pondering that these kids will be no better off now than they were before I came. But maybe they'll send a postcard. Still I worry that I will have meant as little to them as some of my teachers have meant to me, which is a great deal of little. It's all such a confused mess, and yet the consequence of this slop is another generation left to their own devices to make sense of it all. Come to think of it though their devices are much more clever than our own devices were: Mood rings? Pet rocks? Platform shoes? Oh puhleese. "Kids these days..." is the refrain you always hear when adults are exasperated. For example, one might say; "Oh...the kids these days just don't care! They h...Expand for more