Beautiful Girlhood

Last night I saw in a roundabout way again that people do grow up.  It takes time, but it happens.  The general consensus of the world is that you don't get to often feel peace when at a middle school dance, but I did feel peaceful last night.  After a full week of seeing students en masse, I got to see them individually.  I chaperoned, which involved collecting money with a student.  We sat together while Justin Bieber's music played in the background and she drank a smoothie and told me about her life. 

A selection of Maui Wowi smoothies,
featured at said dance

This got me excited once again for the trip to D.C. because kids really do share what is real with you and you have all the time in the world for long and winding conversations.  This is a really good time to listen and listen well.  Last night felt like this too.  When in D.C. I will no longer care about their writing skills -  I'll be walking with them down Constitution Avenue!  At the dance, students would come by and stop to tell me their stories and it was a very settling thing to sit back for a while and see what they see. 




I get to see great friends today.  Allison!  Molly!  Ariane!  And maybe Zach and Lucia.  We are going to Buca today for lunch, and it's literally the exact location where we met for prom in 2002.   I just talked about prom yesterday with another teacher at school.  Prom is weird.   There is a Disney movie coming out about prom.  Also weird.  I do like that the word comes from promenade and that people still do that in a grand march though.  Today I am walking into that restaurant wearing jeans instead of a purple dress, and we are going to sit back and soak in being together. 

New jobs and new adventures are shifting the geographical realities of my friends.  Thoreau said it well when he said, 'Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as having friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and the longitudes.'  One of my friends is moving to Connecticut very soon. Another is moving to Madison.  I thought of this quote a lot the year I had two good friends in Lithuania and Taiwan and it's ringing true again.


 I want to stop time for a while today and forget about that and be glad that they're right in front of me.  These friends are the kindred spirits from the growing up years.  The people who weathered the crushes that were always unrequited love and the impulsive silly choices and the terrible fashions. 

There is nothing like the friend who knew the you with curled bangs and had them too.  One of the friends I will see today missed this unfortunate style, but walked through those years instead with a perm.   My mind's eye can still see Ariane as a 9th grader in Mrs. Chlan's geometry class.  We knew each other before, but that's when we became great friends.   I love 9th grade Ariane!  She was hilarious, and she still is.  It was the age of overalls (mine were embroidered - sick) and Ariane had Doc Martens that were green.    

There is also nothing like a friend who had green Doc Martens.

Speaking of girlhood, I just received the book in the mail that I ordered from Amazon last week.  It's called The Great Good Thing.  It's a book for someone who is probably in 6th grade (I'm not great with the lexile scale) but it is a good story about a confident girl named Sylvie who lives inside of a book.  The first line goes like this....

"Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn't get to live it very often."

How's that for an attention getter? I read this to my 7th grade classes the first year I was teacher.  Can we say 'inspiring time filler'?  This book helped.  One review says it's "as much a romantic paean to reading and writing as it is a good story." I didn't know the word paean, so I looked it up.  It's a song or poem that celebrates a triumph or thanksgiving. 

Well said, Publishers Weekly.  I'm glad it's on my bookshelf too.