grandfather's bras

May 25: The fog is rolling in and the temperatures have dropped. San Francisco summer weather is coming in. It’s always fun this time of year because it is so obvious which people outside are tourists that didn’t do enough research about this city. You can recognize them because they are wearing short shorts and oversized sweaters emblazoned with the words “San Francisco” in multiple neon colors that they were forced to buy at Pier 39.

May 26: Transcribing the kids’ books turned out to be harder than I expected. Even when they had typed up quite a bit of the story, cleaning the document up took so long. Valerye’s book had between two to ten spaces in between every single word. It took half an hour for me to figure out that when she wrote “grandfather’s bras”, she meant to say “grandfather’s brains”. She told me she had also finished the story, but it ended mid-sentence while describing the beginning of an important football game.

May 27: It’s fun to read used books and seeing all the marks made by other people. Looking at all the yellow highlights and bold underlines of what they found beautiful or important. Sometimes, she will see a star or an exclamation point and she will spend the rest of the night trying to figure out what they saw in it. The sentence wasn’t a particularly beautiful sentence. Does it foreshadow something?
It’s like when people tried to decode Lassie’s frantic barking about whatever problem Timmy got into. What is it boy? Did you spot some symbolism?

May 28: Down the street, a house is being completely remodeled to the point where it is a second story floor supported on stilts. At night, all the bare light bulbs are turned on and they shine through the gaps in between the squares of blue tarp. I wonder why they keep the lights on. Was it to keep wild animals away? Did they hope people fight jump in and help out with the construction?

May 29: Fernando had his students write scary stories and is putting them all together into a collection that he will pass out at the end of the school year. We all spent an hour debating if he should call the collection “Stories to Tell at Night” or “Our Mission is to Scare You” because nothing is scarier than a dad joke.

May 30: Before I announced the winner of the book contest, I told the kids that I bought meal worms that morning that we had to eat if we lost. I told them they were in Miss Ana’s care and she would bring them up only if necessary. They screamed at that and then screamed again when I told them we had won. I’m not going to lie, it was pretty fun watching Miss Alexander wince at her desk each time.

May 31: During the last half hour of program, I let the kids take out their toys. Luna and Joanna both brought out several types of slime. They discussed the slime like two wine connoisseurs, comparing colors and textures. Luna poked at one and made a sickened face. “This looks store bought,” she said.






much love,
hedgie