The way it was

Every morning, my wife and I sit in bed, drink our coffee and solve the world’s problems. Theology, philosophy, politics, social issues, existential dread, death – anything is up for analysis. The scraggly old blind cat wanders about, makes several false starts before jumping up on the bed, where he seeks petting and Mom’s lap.

We could never indulge in this leisure before retirement. It used to be get coffee, get dressed, pack lunch, load the car and head out to work. Before our kids were grown, it was get their breakfast, usher them out to a school bus or drive them to school, practices, games, rehearsals, performances, competitions, or meet-ups far away.

When we have had remarkable dreams, we relate the fascinating elements to one another, and maybe figure out why certain persons or incidents crept into our subconscious brains.

I retired after 26 years as a schoolteacher. Add four years at college for an even thirty. My wife worked longer than that as a speech-language pathologist, and sometimes we worked in the same systems. So it makes sense, in some perverse paranormal way that I continue to suffer schoolteacher dreams, like a bad hangover.

In these dreams, I am frequently, but not always, in a classroom dealing with some rotten teenager who won’t behave. One nightmare found me administering a god-awful exam, which became both means and end to schooling. Sometimes various mentors from my past, colleagues and principals, appear in context or in strange variations.

Recently I dreamed I returned to the school where I did my student-teaching and later taught; I was coming back, happily, to work there. Two of my mentors were involved in grueling paperwork and scarcely paid me any attention. They now had an extra prep period just to deal with the endless documentation the laws require.

So I wondered about people in other public service careers: do they dream about situations they may have found themselves in, all mishmoshed together in weird new combinations? Do cops dream about approaching armed and dangerous subjects, or do they relive those good times when they helped someone in a pickle? Are firefighters entering burning buildings in search of survivors screaming for help? Do surgeons operate on incurable patients and leave the scissors inside the abdomen? Do nurses dream about people they bathed, inoculated, fed, or guided through hospice toward death? And of course, soldiers are haunted by the horrors of war.

That’s where the famous PTSD comes in. I heard a discussion once in which the soldier said, “Don’t call it post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not a disorder. The stress is real and ever-present, not a disorder.”

The stressors in my work were occasionally recalcitrant kids, but more often schedules and deadlines, stupid rules and regs, bullying bosses, mundane meaningless activities. I broke up my share of fights (“His teeth got on my fist!”) and listened to stories about evil stepparents, abuse, jail, deaths. Every year I had at least one student who was pregnant or already had given birth.

But it wasn’t all bad news. While employed in the Indian educations system in Navajoland, I got to go as a chaperone for a five-day trip with the Art Club to San Francisco. Almost none of the 18 students had been on an airplane before and we flew over the Grand Canyon, Utah’s red rock canyons, the Sierra Nevada, and glided over San Francisco Bay into the airport.

We visited museums, strolled around Golden Gate Park, marched through Chinatown, ate at fancy restaurants. There is no pleasure in education to match bringing a bunch of teenagers into a restaurant where they can order foods they couldn’t imagine.

I brought students for several years to a statewide language competition in Albuquerque and we always went to Lorenzo’s, which featured 48-in. inch pizzas and 10-in. tall slabs of chocolate cake. Great fun, even if I footed the bill.

Somehow, we want to remember the good stuff, from childhood, adolescence, milestones. The disasters and night sweats stay with us. Have a Merry Christmas anyway, a Happy Hannukah, a wonderful start to the new decade.

Kirk Ashworth