Le vingt-cinq décembre 2021

It is really hard to type with a splinted finger. Handwriting is out, hence the stickers, but I am determined to send cards. I know, I know. But this supply line been active since 1984 and she ain’t ready to pack it in.

Had I, I might not have found myself in a middle school classroom, on the very last day of a 15-week sub job, teaching French to twelve-year-olds. Very last day. Without a classroom (I teach from a rolling cart), without a curriculum (county having “an identity crisis” vis a vis world languages), I have managed these 129 students in 2 different middle schools for 105 days, 5 hours and 27 minutes and I am—how do you say?—fini. I’m sure there are other words, but we don’t put that kind of language in the Christmas cards, tu sais? Not to mention I’m down to nine fingers.

I broke my finger a week ago. Actually, worse. I snapped the tendon. Burk-world a week before Christmas, right? So it’s going to be either the pets or the house delivering us gifts of disaster (Do vehicles count? Yesterday on way home with college girl we cracked the car windshield). This year, mes amis, it’s both! I was cleaning cat vomit off a carpet upstairs (that had been there before Thanksgiving). I had a mind to turn back the mess and squalor that had overrun the house while I was traipsing through Paris with my students, taking virtual tours of Versailles and doing French Food Friday. It’s Christmas, for Pierre’s sake! I just wanted to have the house all prettied up by the time my people came home. In a fit of household triage, I chose the carpets—scrub, scrub and—SNAP! Did I mention it is the middle finger? The absolutely wrong finger to be holding up to explain the sitch in a middle school.

So I’m in the teacher workroom filling up water bottles for the painting craft we will do at the little class party I planned—a watercolor painting of the Paris skyline. C’est merveilleux. If they hadn’t come out so great the day before with my other classes I wouldn’t be pushing for it, but they looked so pretty and it did me good to see 25 teenagers at a clip, seated, listening to French Christmas music, and painting! For one, they were industrious. For two, they were quiet. These things TOP my wish list, there, Amazon. The list is long, the day short, I’m rushing. But I can’t get the cap screwed back with my club-hand. The bottle slips, the water spills over the floor, and in my efforts to wrestle enough paper towel off the roll to sop up 20 oz of water, what to my wondering ears should appear but the piercing, deafening shriek of a fire drill. Honestly, if I could have fit my body into the little cupboard underneath the sink I would have.

Needless to say, it’s been a long fall. You’d think I invented the 8-hour workday for all the whining I’ve done. But do people understand what teachers go through, have always gone through, and are dealing with today, thanks to helicopter parents, SOLs, screen extreme, school violence, and tik-tok? Oh yeah, and Covid.  What on the earth?!! I blogged about it, BTW, my sub job—just to keep my sanity. Some of it’s pretty durn funny. To wit: Recent email from a little girl in A4. Hasn’t been here for over a week, hasn’t handed in anything, high “F” in the class: “Mrs burk i’m in orlando so.. ill be her for February and idk how to.. like do the stuff on paper while in here and i never know if im going to move to Georga.” Like, you can’t make this up. Like, what exactly do you do with that? IDK. Today…the last day…they are maybe a little more endearing. They’ve turned the hounding after grades over to their parents, so I am getting emails throughout the day and cell phone photos of their child’s work so that I can what—kick my origami Eiffel Tower to the curb in A3 and grade their stuff? Stuff due in October? Sacre bleu, people! I kid you not. I feel like a whistle blower from Insanity. Maybe I’ll move to Georgia.

So now, though it wraps nicely around a computer mouse, the last joint of my finger is useless. Good thing I gave up on grooming in 2020, so that’s behind me. The billion chores before Christmas are a bit of a setback, I confess. Plus, I find I can’t grade their final essays that come pouring in. Handy! (get it?) I read each word, tap in a grade on the computer. But not a single comment in the margins. Talk about a labor-saving injury. Instead of the hours it has taken me all fall, with this assignment I’m done in two nights. When I take the papers to hand back in class, pristine as they passed ‘em in, I hold up the finger now sheathed in a clumsy metal sleeve and just shake my head. “Quel domage…you see… I couldn’t possibly…” After listening to every excuse in the book all semester long from these paysans, it is kind of fun to dispense one of my own. While flipping them off.

My glee is short lived, however, because like everyone else riding the Christmas train, I need all my appendages plus some to get through this season. You try gift wrapping, grocery lugging, and dish washing with one finger “immobilized and securely braced.” The doctor at urgent care has “uh oh” written all over her face.  She all but shook her head at me. And she draws out her words: “It’s veerry veerry hard to keep the splint on for six weeks. And if it comes off, even so much as once—well, six more weeks.” Okay. Okay what’s your point? I just hung onto to the helltrain for 15 weeks, a mere six will feel like a walk in the Tuileries. I put the drug store brace back on my permanently mangled digit and leave the doctor office, defeated. “Try not to use it???! Try not to use it. I want to laugh my French head off, little tears of hysteria squeezing out the corner of my eyes. Needless to say, I keep resetting the *&^%!! clock. With the current pace and with all the non-still, non-immobile activities my finger is pulling off, I might be able to remove the splint by early 2023. To anyone advising me I need to hold it still, to do better, I raise said finger so they can see it reeeally well…

Here’s the good news. I have discovered that when your college peeps come home to a hovel they kick in. Sophie refuses to use the bathroom her brother has had free reign in for the past four months. Though he’s removed the Shrek shrine so he can use it to decorate a full-sized Christmas tree now gracing his bedroom (wait, doesn’t everyone have a Shrek shrine in the upstairs bathroom?) his ogre-like habits in there have left it unserviceable. By the time I get home from school on the last day, Soph has cleaned all three bathrooms, carted off a layer of mail and papers from the counters and is setting the table (Oh, it’s a table! I wondered what was under all that clutter on my late-night grading station.) Fresh off the highway, Ellie washes a mountain of dishes in the sink while I try to track down a mobile glass guy for the windshield. Put “moving college daughter out of dorm permanently so she can study abroad” on the list of taboo activities for busted finger. And surely one of the many things you want to be doing 8 days before Christmas. Put wishing she won’t graduate on time so she can live in Florence next semester on the list of all the many strange wishes we’ve had in the pandemic. Italy or bust. Oooh poor word choice, that.

It’s ok that I’m falling apart. Nine fingers and maybe a few more teeth than that, I am good to go. When I think of all the sadness and anger and disaster in the world, I realize how well my hands still work, especially with palms together, fingers straight, pointed up. I give thanks for many, many blessings. The friendships and the years God has blessed us with. A hovel to come home to, and all my peeps about. It’s all in the perspective, tu sait? I’m not crippled, I’m part bionic. I’m not old, I’m chronologically blessed. I’m glad we’re all home and hanging in there. Like my finger 😊

Joyeux Noel from la Maison de Fous  (that’s Burk house in French)

Photo by Boris Ulzibat on Pexels.com