Like a Bird... on a Wire...

Like a drunk, in a midnight choir...
I have tried, in my way, to be free.

So much has happened since I last wrote here:  I slipped home for Easter, briefly, in the rent-a-car that replaced my Malibu after it was totaled in front of my house the night before I was due to start this year's test-scoring season in the Cities.

The hit-and-run driver  left his 2012 Buick Town and Country van at the scene, and took off on foot with beer cans allegedly left inside, according to local news reports.   The vehicle is insured, but the owner allegedly reported it stolen, the day after the accident.

Got that?

"Were the keys in the ignition?" I keep asking, but if you drink and drive, perhaps for some people it indeed does pay off to abdicate responsibility and make others prove you are at fault for their losses.   I can't believe I'll bear the costs of the out-of-pocket expenses caused by an insured vehicle, with Illinois tags attached and an initially (at least) uncooperative owner, who admits to being in the area but denies knowing the whereabouts of his van, according to the insurance investigator who contacted me regarding the ongoing investigation.

Sad message to send, if drinking and driving... and running from a scene after striking a legally parked car with such impact as to total it, can't be properly penalized and innocent others bear the costs.

In the middle of the night too, Sunday, just hours before I would have been gone, heading over to work in the Cities.

Needless to say, I lost out on that particular state project -- New Jersey.  You have to be there the initial days of training to learn the rubric, what the state committee has decided the student answers are being scored on (the variety of response in what's acceptable and what's not), which will be applied again and again in the following weeks as the tests roll in on the trucks to Minnesota, and are scanned on to us at the computer monitors.  There's too much missed to make up if a scorer is not trained with the group from the start -- think consistency -- although I was reassigned to another state's test in a different subject area, starting soon.

This is my third year scoring, and while it gets harsh on the eyeballs hour after hour, you learn a good deal about the educational expectations, standards, and even immigrant populations in various states of our nation: Last year, I worked on the Michigan English-as-a-second-language tests, from scoring kindergartners forming select English alphabet letters all the way up to immigrant high-schoolers demonstrating their English language skills in mini-essays written from a prompt.   Break your heart, some of them, telling you who their hero is, or where they would choose to go if they won an all-expenses-paid trip to anywhere...

Back "home", often, to places where they sometimes know war and destruction have replaced their childish memories.  Cousins mean more to immigrant children, too.  They're aware of the sacrifices their parents are making, and though some of these young people perhaps should have the least reason for optimism, you'd never know it by reading what they write, in their own words.


This is America's future, not a pot-bellied rancher nor a rich lonely old man.  There's no need to bring those men down really -- momentum will do the job -- but there is good reason to act to bring these newcomer children up wisely.  They have a lot to teach us, about priorities, about survival, about what counts in life.
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In other news,
as much as I tried, like a lepidopterist pinning a butterfly, to record the exact moment when we switched from winter to spring here, it happened in an instant, it seems.  As elusive as capturing Santa Claus coming down the chimney on Christmas Eve...


We've had ice out -- which mean the ice sheet slowly chunks off until the body of water is navigable -- on Rice Lake down the street for about a week now.  Buddy and I were walking the lakeshore last Monday evening, to the "tinkles" of millions of ice chunks that were being pushed up against one another in the strong winds.  The eagles were perched in a tree on the small island offshore, two of them, with a darker juvenile sitting on the edge of the ice sheet, near one of the openings, flying up and swooping in when perhaps a live fish seemed more appealing than the dead fish carcass on the ice it was picking at...

As the ice chunks were being swept into the shore, I reached out and pulled one of the bigger ones in and tossed it up on shore, where the remnants the next day were the only hint that ice ever even existed in the area.  It was a few pounds maybe, four or more inches thick.  The way the ice melts -- they're crystals joined together, hollowing out into thinner and thinner threads until they break down into smaller pieces.

Remember the ice palace in Superman II, where Clark Kent had second thoughts about renouncing his super powers to marry the mortal Lois Lane?  Build these chunks up two stories or so high, and there you'd have it.

It sounded wonderful though -- supernatural -- with the wind bringing color to the cheeks, the eagles flying by simply riding the wind overhead, and the dog on full alert for the scents of  spring now that the snows are gone.

A more bohemian "My Way" is how Leonard Cohen described his song,  his protagonists fighting past current circumstances -- breaking through that ice -- into the glory of a fresh season.

I have tried
in my way
to be Free...

BONUS FLICK:
Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson... what's not to love?