trying to stirrup trouble

August 17: Dylan got us trapped in a half hour of non-stop horse puns.
“She was coughing a lot, but don’t worry. She’s just a little hoarse.”
“I hope her condition is now stable.”
“You’re just trying to stirrup trouble.”
This was followed by a long silence. 
“How the hell am I supposed to work ‘Andalusian’ into this?”

August 18: The Punch Brothers gathered close together around one microphone as if they had forgotten how large the stage actually was. Chris Thile danced hunched over his mandolin and with his knees pinched together, which he swung from side to side in the manner of a child who really needed to pee.

August 19: The curse of Jeff almost won tubing day again. Waunt couldn’t find her car keys even after an hour of searching the entire house. By the time Ryan, Robin, and Jeff showed up, Nick had grabbed a coat hanger so we could break into the car through the slightly rolled down window. I managed to unlock and open the door. When the alarm went off, Jeff taught me how to pop the hood and disconnect the battery to make it stop. So all in all, it was a productive day.

August 20: For the first time since I have known them, my class got through a whole day without a single person crying. When I asked them what had happened to them over the summer, they looked at me seriously and said, “We are in fourth grade now. It’s time to mature.”

August 21: The kinder class was having yard time for the last ten minutes through school. There was a little boy on the teeter totter. Through the walls of our bungalow, I could hear his shrill, little voice declare rhythmically every three seconds, “Ow, my nuts!”

August 22: Fernando’s class played would you rather. When he let the students choose the questions, they got dark fast. They asked if you would rather die from jumping off a building or drowning. They asked if they would would save themselves or their mothers. Celeste did not take long to make her decision. She stood to one said and told the class that her mom would have wanted her to save herself.

August 23: I have 22 fourth graders stuffed into a room that is set up for 15 second graders. They can’t all sit in their chairs without moving the table farther away from each other and they can’t all fit on the rainbow rug at the same time because the cabinets are positioned right at the edges and there is no space for overflow.

August 24: The woman in the trench coat directed us to go around the corner, walk 60 paces, and walk past the black iron gate to enter the San Francisco Speakeasy. A man stood guard there and pointed to a nondescript door in the back of the building. The door lead to a series of concrete steps that got darker as we went down.
“This was all really just an elaborate ploy to murder you both,” I told Greg and Elaine.
“With this level of work and detail, you deserve it,” Greg said.





much love,
hedgie