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2006-10-14 - 2:19 p.m.

I�ve voluntarily taken on a new little �duty� at the school. A couple of weeks ago, one of the administrators had to go out of town for a few weeks on a family emergency and asked me if I would be willing to take over her spot for a couple of days. Instead of her having to hunt around some more for somebody else to also help with this, I said I would just do it every day for her while she was gone. It ended up that I enjoyed it so much that I have continued to do it even though the administrator is now back (they can always use help with this, so having me as an �extra� is a plus).

It has to do when the children get dropped off in the morning, and again when they get picked up in the afternoon. It�s really quite a major task, accepting onto campus several hundred cars, all of whom want to come more or less all at once, but we have some procedures that help to move this process along and it really is very smooth, efficient, and relatively painless.

What really holds the process up is when the drivers want to get out of the car, which they would for several reasons, such as getting backpacks and lunch boxes out of the back of the car, helping the kids get unbuckled, kissing and hugging their kids good-bye, and even walking them in to the classroom. Instead, the school has us there to do all the �dealing with the luggage,� unbuckling, helping the kids down out of what seem like very high seats (for a kindergartener to come out of some of those SUVs, I feel like they�re climbing down from an elephant�s howdah), and even walking some of them to class if they want it. If the parents want to walk their own kids to the classroom, after they drop their kids off at the special drop-off spot, they can then circle back around and park and then walk over while their kids wait for them, sitting on special benches.

We also have a safety function, in that if we have a long line of cars unloading, that means that we will end up with quite a few very tiny kids walking along the drive next to very high and big cars (almost all of them are immense SUVs) that are kind of hard to see out of. We used to have parents parking and then crossing the drive with the children, but we decided that was just too dangerous, so now every student HAS to be dropped off into the hands of one of us according to our organized procedure. The last thing we want is for somebody to get hit by a car in the confusion!

In a way, it is a �servile� position, like a footman for a coach or a doorman at a luxurious hotel. But I kind of get off on this service function and perform it with as much care and consideration as I possibly can. The only people who ever treat me badly (and even that is very rare and it doesn�t ever happen more than once, believe me) are the nannies, who sometimes are the ones who do this driving of the kids back and forth to school. It�s the old thing of �the boss yells at the worker, the worker goes home and picks a fight with his wife, the wife spanks the son, the son hits the sister, the sister kicks the dog, the dog bites the cat, and the cat urinates on the carpet� and, I admit, I have seen some of the kids act very nasty to the nanny (when they achieve the understanding that this person is a servant and not a surrogate parent, and when they are of a mind to try to see how far they can go with this sense of new-found power�hey, where is Nanny McPhee when you need her?), and so when the nannies try to put me into a category of being one that they think THEY can dump on, I understand what is going on, but I don�t tolerate it. (A raised eyebrow or a certain tone of voice does wonders in disabusing the nannies of this transference behavior.)

But these problems are extremely rare, almost non-existent.

The rewards that we get from doing this make this job one of the school�s secret pleasures and one of my friends who does this says that it is her favorite part of the working day. As for me, it gets the day off to a GREAT start or a wonderful ending and there are certain kids I look forward to seeing every morning (such as one phenomenally cute little boy who sits on a bench and patiently waits for his mother to park and then walk him to his classroom) and if I miss seeing them for some reason, I feel as if I got out of the bed on the wrong side that morning.

How is it possible for a human being to smile so purely and brightly? I mean, �knock you over with beauty, gladden your heart with joy� smiles. (The word for "smile" in Spanish looks like "sunrise" to me.) Perhaps part of the �adulteration� that makes one an adult instead of a child anymore IS the loss of that smile, I think. It kind of makes me think of a person that I loved very deeply once, who is probably still the most beautiful guy I had ever seen in the flesh. But then he got hooked up with the wrong crowd and due to a series of crimes he committed, ended up being sent to jail. When I saw him again after he was out of jail, that beauty was gone. His body and face still had the same shape and dimensions, so the change wasn�t physical. But this was now a person who had been an inmate of the criminal justice system, had had his freedom removed, been repeatedly raped, and had to survive in a violent, unprotected world. Whatever had been innocent and pure in him was now completely erased from his being and that change was quite perceptible.

Becoming an adult isn�t quite as bad as being put in jail, is it? And yet, there is the idea that freedom is now gone, our purity is raped, and we have to use our own devices to now survive in a world that we know is violent and dangerous.

Maybe this very process that I am part of, ushering little tiny children into the greater outer world of the school, is the beginning of the loss that I am talking about. (Some of the children act that way, walking away from the car as if their loins were girded. Some of the mothers are calling "good-bye" and desperate for a little return smile and a final wave, but their kids don't respond, they just keep on walking. I feel the sadness in the mother, and yet understand that to the child, he or she has now left the safety of the mother's fold. They're not ignoring their mother, but have stepped over a threshold into a foreign dimension.) How horrible to think that I am somehow facilitating that, and it must be that I am, because sometimes there are little brothers or sisters in the car who aren�t old enough for school, yet, and whatever wonderful thing it is that our students have, their younger brothers and sisters seem to have it even MORE.

Sometimes I can�t tell who all is supposed to be getting out of the car, and some of the cars are quite full in that it works out better for certain parents to share the carpool duties, so there may be as many as six or eight children climbing out from hidden recesses in the back of the SUV. I am sometimes reminded of the visual joke of numerous clowns tumbling out of a little car at the circus, except in this case the cars are immense and the passengers tumbling out are little�and yet, still, there seem to be so many and there�s something humorous in the process of them keeping on coming out!

I�ll start to unbuckle somebody and the mother will say, �Oh, not him, he won�t be coming to school for a couple more years yet!�, and I say, �Oh, yes, let�s not rush it, let him stay home with Mommy for as long as he can!� But many of them are intrigued by where big sister or big brother is going, and they peer out the window longingly at them and I now am as familiar with some of them as I am with their brothers and sisters who are getting out and going to school.

And the dogs, too, for that matter, for there are often family pets that come along for the ride, and I am treated to lots of loving licks or excitedly wagging tails. Dogs are often the best part of the picking up process at the end of the school day, because there is nobody in the car who seems more eager for the returning kid than the fuzzy little poodle or that dog that somebody has that looks like a little fox, or that other, cream-colored Lab-looking dog.

None of this is to discount the pleasure of seeing the mothers and the fathers, and some of the nice nannies that I know. They are wonderfully friendly and in such good spirits in the morning, and many have told me how much they appreciate this service that we provide of welcoming their children to the school in the morning. My knowledge of who our parents are, and which ones belong with which kids, has increased gigantically since I started doing this. This has made me aware of a personal handicap of mine that I used to simply �accept�, but that I now think is unacceptable, and that is how terrible I am with names.

This started with the kids, more of whom know me by name than I know back (and I feel so impotent having a kid excitedly say �Hi� to me by name, and all I can do is say �Hi� back�if ONLY I could say their name, too!), and I am worse with the parents, who introduce themselves to me and then in a second I forget what name they said. This has been bothering me so much lately that I ordered the five-CD set of the �Evelyn Wood Memory Dynamics� course. There really is no reason for me to not become GOOD with people�s names, even though it will take some work and discipline, and, I suppose, the expenditure of some energy on some bothersome techniques, but if it works, then I think it will be worth it. As is so often said, the most beautiful sound to a person�s ear is their own name, and certainly I should become good at giving out those beautiful sounds.

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