Math Saved My Soul

My senior AP English teacher required we all get a subscription to the Atlantic Monthly. Eight years later and I am still forever in her debt. From there I began to read more of the New Yorker and when I moved to NYC a year later my appetite for such magazines and other journals had grown.

With my impending month off I am looking forward to so much, catching up on many of those rags is one of them. Eight years ago today, tragedy struck. I was in gym class when news of the towers being hit reached our high school. The gymnasium was a new annex to the school, separated by the cafeteria, and the theater. The news hit my ears in bits and pieces as I made my way through the halls to my civics class. People were in such shock, they couldn't get full sentences out. I heard "bombs," "New York," "Pentagon," "planes," "Twin towers." Then panic began to set in, "terrorists," "White House," "Boston," "GE" (which sent my head spinning, my father worked there). I didn't get any clear answers until I made it to my class, sat in my seat and turned around to my ex-boyfriend, who I sparingly spoke to due to the fact he was still a little sore about the way things had gone down between us,
"Sh---" was all I got out of my mouth, before Shawn said, "Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center towers. They think a similar thing happened at the Pentagon. It's most likely a terrorist attack, but no other attacks have been reported." We watched the classroom t.v. sets like drones for the rest of the day . . . except in my math class.

Mrs. Latham was part expert math teacher/comedienne. Next to Mrs. Robinson she's another reason why math never kicked my butt. She looked at us and said,

"We could sit here and watch the same horror over and over again. But I don't know much about world politics save a few personal opinions of my own. What I do know is education, particularly education in math. I came here today prepared to teach you the tools you'll need to pass your AP Calculus exam in the spring and continue on with your bright futures. I will not let whatever force is out there stop me from teaching you, stop me from doing something that I love. You honor the dead by helping the living." We spent the rest of class solving for "y." There are some "why's" we may never solve for . . . but she taught me that we can shrivel up and cower in the corner or we can do whatever it is we do best in hopes to ameliorate. Accept your part of the struggle, one hand and one step at a time.

I had a hard time watching the news coverage myself. But this article surfaced weeks following the attack and struck a much needed chord in me, The Talk of the Town (09/24/01).

Poem from Journal (orig.date 03/11/09)

I'm a napkin note kind of person. Pieces of these poems materialize all over, and come together and grow in ways even I don't fully understand. Taking a moment from the blood . . . this poem is still about breakfast.
Oh, and this one has a title already

Q & A: A New Yorker Kind of Breakfast

It was Fraser Field the last time
my legs got stuck on the bleachers
as my father and I watched the Mad Dogs
play like any other baseball team, major, minor
or little league, the game of baseball is the game of baseball
to me he seems so forced as he
sits there in his flannel over Venture Brother tee
his bear hat left on as he eats
his blueberry bagel with butter
baiting me with a pop quiz about hometown bliss
(or piss is more like it)
my banana-nut muffin starts out sweet, but hardens and cakes in my mouth
getting tangled in all the words I want to speak, but don't
the words he forces me to swallow
cutting
me off at the start of the race then
clinging
to each word as they scrape their way down my esophagus
churning
in the acid of my stomach
burning their way out
permeating
into the rest of me
where they explode, taking out other various parts of me
I catch him hacking away all the time
trying to get at those words I tried to get out
all on my own
break
I saw the stain on the back of his jeans as he ordered at the counter of the cafe
I focus on the image of it as we slip in and out of awkward silence, "The New Yorker has the worse comics," he says
I don't take the bait, instead I am remembering that stain,
those imperfections, those unintentional mishaps, those marks on his soul
that only I know, that even he doesn't know that I know
make me in some way invincible to the reality of this moment, guard me against his axe
make me love him that much more
but
he's far, far, far
from loving my mark.*

*I must say these poems lose something not in their forms. I love figured poems. Yum.