Thanks Mr. Nick. And thank you, Mom.

I was writing with great abandon AND concentration yesterday when I stopped to login to the sub teaching webcenter to pick up available jobs for next week. (checking between 11am and 4pm sure beats getting NINETEEN weird phone messages if you aren't home between 5pm and 11pm, the call-out times). It turned out that 'S', the custodian at Hutch HS was going to be out M-W of next week. The woman is a saint . . .to spend her days picking up squashed lunch leftovers from surly teenagers and deal with plugged toilets. She's friendly, but quiet. She is not "white"--as most of the employees at the school are. I mention this to touch on all our buried suppositions of economic/social/racial class that we like to pretend aren't there. Hutch is a school I know pretty well, and I place a like very much. Directly after accepting the position my preschool friends e-mailed wanting me to work the next two Wednesdays, plugged into the system as a classroom teacher, something that garners a slightly higher wage than other temp work. I called the office at Hutch to see how they felt about me being there only 2 days instead of 3. "You know you took a custodial position with S's job, right?"

To be fair, I think the inquirer had my best interests at heart . . .why not play roulette that I'd get a different 'classroom' call out for Monday and Tuesday and make a little more money for a days work. The answer is that I like Hutch, I like 'S', it's close to home, the workday runs from 715am-3pm, and I don't have to be "on" the way a classroom teacher does. And the custodial wage is not that far from what I made as a vet tech for most of my years . . and is FAR better(like DOUBLE) than what I made as a housekeeper in the mid nineties. I was in preschool this past Wed, and will be for the next two. Good enough.

My family (mom especially) enabled me to go to a private elementary school in Connecticut in the early eighties that was very small and community-based. You ascended from kindergarten through grade 8, with the same core group of kids. We were white and black, Jewish and Catholic, European and Japanese, Taiwanese, PuertoRican, red-haired, curly-haired, blond-haired, and braided. The only visible sign of cohesion I see in my mind when I remember the line of us passing through the hall to go to music or art, was our height (until 7th grade or so) and our green-blue plaid uniform. And, if we were lucky, we got to see Mr. Nick on his rounds. We would sometimes get so excited in waving and greeting him you'd think we'd spotted a gazelle in the woods. For decades "Mr. Nick" was the sole caretaker of buildings and grounds. I think he had minions in the summer for repainting and stuff. His face would light up when we greeted him. You knew he was kind right away. Sometimes he rescued us . . .in bathrooms when we felt sick, when the milk spilled inside the fish tank. He hugged us when school started up again in the fall. Come to think of it, though, he didn't talk to us much either. Was he Italian? Does it matter? These "categories" or far more stark in places just outside of New York -- where we were.

I hope Mr. Nick is enjoying retirement, and crawling with grand kids. Wonder if he could imagine that a girl in Alaska will be thinking of him with her hip-radio and spray bottle come Monday --