Broken Dreams.......

I've been thinking a lot about the Langston Hughes poem "A Dream Deferred" since last Thursday. A young man whom I call my "godson" received a shocking blow, and his dreams may be dead for the immediate future.

This kid has been a baseball phenom since he could walk. Folks at the major league level (I'm talking professional baseball here, folks) have known about him since he was about eleven years old. One of the scouts for a major league team has told him since pre-teen days, "You don't need an agent. You don't need an agent. You don't need an agent."

This time last year, that same guy said, "Get an agent."

You would have to know this kid and his family to appreciate this story fully. They are humble (as in not arrogant, not as in poor), down-to-earth, REAL people. 

Every single team from MLB has sent a representative to their home at least once. Some have made multiple visits. The kid has also been offered a wowser of a scholarship at one of our state's universities (but not my alma mater).

When the pros came a-calling, his parents said, "This is kind of fun, but there's always college." As it became more and more real, they still said, "He's got a college scholarship waiting for him." Never once did I hear them brag about his accomplishments, his being so heavily recruited, the visits from big-whigs. These aren't bragging people.

He's not the stereotypical jock either. This is the kid who took calculus his senior year in high school as an ELECTIVE. He could very easily have taken an easier math (or a weightlifting class) during spring semester of his final baseball season. 

Last Wednesday, the kid tore whatever ligament behind the elbow requires major league pitchers to have Tommy John surgery. He's a catcher. It makes no sense at all, a high school player, let alone a catcher, to have this kind of injury.

And the draft is about eight weeks away.

They had to have a conference call with a lot of important people to let them know about the injury and impending surgery. They had to let them know that the kid is probably off the table as far as the major league draft is concerned.

What a heartbreak.

I know all the platitudes, and I'm sure his parents have heard them plenty in the past week.

"He's young; he'll recover quickly."

"There's always college."

"It's amazing what they can do these days."

"It could have been much worse."

"The recovery period is only about eight months."

It still sucks.

Not only is his dream of playing professional baseball dead (for now), but the rest of his senior year as well. His team is headed to the playoffs, but he won't be behind the plate.

The whole thing sucks, but especially the timing. This injury happened Wednesday night. On Tuesday, he had received a package via UPS from Major League Baseball. In it was a drug test kit that they only send to the players projected to go in the top four rounds of the draft. That's the 200 best players IN THE COUNTRY. And he is one of them. 



He's just a good kid.

There are still all kinds of possibilities. One team that has shown a tremendous amount of interest also happens to have 12 picks in the first four rounds of the draft. (And that exhausts my knowledge of how the draft works.) His "advisor" (because he's not technically allowed to have an agent yet) said there's a possibility that a team might still take him, even with his injury. But that possibility is slim.

I'm trying to look on the positive side. Worst case scenario is that he goes to college. For free. And he'll be ready to play his freshman season. Because of some quirky rules, once he starts college the pros can't touch him until after his junior year. (I know, I know, it makes no sense to me either. They can take them straight out of high school, but they they have to wait until after the junior year of college.) So maybe he plays THREE years. Heals nicely. And the majors will probably still be interested in him.
It still sucks. Not just because his mother is my best friend and I wanted to get him to autograph the cover of Sports Illustrated when he appeared on it.

Because he's just a good kid.

Good-looking, smart, well-mannered, sincere, and just downright nice. 

With all due respect to Langston Hughes, I hope a dream deferred neither festers nor explodes. I hope it gets watered, tended with loving care, pruned at just the right time, and then blossoms into magnificence that you have to look at kind of sideways because it hurts the eyes to look at it directly.

Because if anyone ever deserved to have his dreams come true, it's this kid. And his mama and daddy. And even his (precious, adorable, witty, lovable and loves me to pieces) little sister.

If Only I Had a Whole Bunch of Money........

Even in our little bitty school (population 75 or so), we hear heart-breaking stories far too often from kids who have been "kicked out" of their houses by their parents.

Every time I hear a student say he or she has been "kicked out" of the house, I put that phrase in quotation marks even in my mind. Because as a parent, I simply cannot conceive of the idea of telling my child, no matter how horrid (and my child was FAR from horrid, thank you God again today), to hit the streets.

I realize we are talking about different cultures, so to speak. Family values (or lack thereof) these days are foreign to those I grew up with. With which I grew up. Whatever. I didn't have a white picket fence upbringing, and I rode the school bus to visit my brother in jail after school some days, but I was certain I would always have a home to return to at the end of the day. I could count on my mother coming home from her job, even if she DID happen to be in a bad mood. (I learned over the years that the lipstick was the telltale sign. If her lipstick was gone, I should give her a wide berth, and the house had BETTER be cleaned up. If she had on fresh lipstick, it was safe to approach.) I knew my mother wasn't on drugs and wouldn't be in jail when I needed money for a prom dress. She might raise hell when I asked for the money, but I don't remember ever going without something I needed. Or a lot I wanted. In fact, she made me a dress for one particular prom, and I had been SUSPENDED FROM SCHOOL for two days that week. Maybe she SHOULD have kicked me to the curb. Too late now, Mom.

One of our students this year is a bright girl, other than the fact that she has a baby. I don't hold that against her; that's another difference in the culture. She is trying to do right by her baby, and she has had a mountain of things stacked against her. According to our school social worker, the doctors messed this girl up BADLY when she gave birth. In her words, she doesn't "even know if anything is in the right place." We're talking anatomy here folks. Anyway, "Autumn," we'll call her, has been a joy to have in our school. She's hard-working, and she truly wants to LEARN, as opposed to those who just want to GET IT DONE.

Autumn disappeared about midway through the semester. Apparently there were child care issues. We made the decision to allow her to work from home, as long as she progressed, and she vowed to continue working on childcare for her baby girl. She HAS worked, and she has mostly stayed in touch with her advisor. Then we heard from another student that she had been "kicked out" of her house, and she had also had surgery. We contacted the social worker, who called the mother, and the mother verified that she had indeed kicked her daughter -- and granddaughter -- out of the house. A daughter who is not yet 18 years old, and a baby girl who is 13 months old. How do you DO that? I realize there are problems of which I am blissfully ignorant, and I don't know how much hell this daughter has likely put her mother through. I only know the sweet side of the girl. But still. I keep picturing that 13-month-old baby girl, bouncing with her mother between the homes of two friends, either of whom could decide on a whim that it isn't convenient for Autumn to stay there either.

The mother then went and brought her daughter and granddaughter home yesterday. Perhaps she was shamed by the social worker's call? I know I would have been.

Finally, I'm getting around to the point of this post.

If I had a whole bunch of money, I would buy a house just for students like these. The girls with babies who don't have anywhere to go. The ones who have been kicked out of their houses but still want to pursue their educations. Even the young men who are trying to work full-time jobs and earn those last few units toward their diplomas. I would buy a house with four or five bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. The requirements to live in the house would be that they had to assist with the upkeep of the house by doing chores, and they would have to attend school unless they were genuinely sick. I might have someone live there and act as a house mother, perhaps even someone qualified to keep the babies while the mamas go to school. Students who graduated and moved on to a job, college, or the military could return and serve as mentors for new crops of students. Any activities involving drugs or alcohol would result in removal from the house (I guess I would "kick them out" too?), as would any criminal activity. I wouldn't want to be a parent to them, though. I would want them to live independently, and I would hope they would take pride in their living quarters and take care of them. I would help them learn how to manage a household (they could learn right along with me, I guess) and other life skills that school doesn't really teach that well.

That's my pipe dream for today.

Crazy Dream #7.....

This is one of those dreams that when I woke up, I went through the sequence of events in my head to make sure I remembered it.

It was just bizarre.

It involved one of these:



He was there:


And some of these were there too:


There was a lot of this:


And conspicuously absent was one of these:


I went on a cruise, and I took a group of students. What was I thinking, even in a dream? Gus was also along on the cruise, which just proves that I was out of my mind.

Immediately after embarking, I locked myself out of my stateroom. That's not too far outside the realm of possibility; it sounds just like something I would do.

I went to call a steward-type person, and she asked if I were on Level 1 or Level 2. Huh? I had no clue where my room was. Again, that isn't too far outside the realm of possibility. I probably couldn't stand in the middle of the ship and point forward. I have zero sense of direction.

The exasperated steward-type person told me to follow her, and we were walking along the OUTSIDE of the ship. Then the ship came to an intersection with a road, and there were cars waiting to cross, so the ship had to go UNDERWATER. A submarine cruise ship? When it submerged, naturally I was washed off the side of the ship. I was swimming furiously, trying to catch up with the ship. The steward-type person was yelling at me from the ship, "You DID bring your clay kit to build a raft, didn't you? Build a raft! Where's your clay kit?????"

In a different chapter of the dream (perhaps BEFORE I got washed overboard?), I was going to sun myself on one of the decks. Students were all over the ship, and I had no clue where anyone was supposed to be, but I was there to relax, so I was going to rest and soak up some sun. On my way to the sundeck, I passed a group of students.

"Dr. P_____, I haven't seen you in a bathing suit before," one of them said.

"You still haven't," another one said.

It was then that I realized I was naked.

[Does anyone else have naked dreams?]

You can't make this stuff up.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream.....

That quote has almost nothing to do with this post, except that it has the word "dream" in it.

This is one of those risky posts, because if no one else out there has ever had this experience, I'm revealing myself as a freak.

Won't be the first time.

You know how you have those odd occasions when you're sleeping, and you're dreaming about peeing, and you wet the bed because you really DO start peeing in your sleep?

Oh come on, that's not the freaky part. I know everyone has done that at one point.

The last time I remember doing it I was about 15 years old. Mom and I were visiting my grandmother's house in Savannah, and we were sleeping together on a lumpy old pull-out sofa bed. How embarrassing. Mom woke me up in the middle of the night, screaming, "Wake up! You're wetting the bed!" She wasn't too happy about it, believe me. I'm sure Grandmother wasn't exactly thrilled either.

But every now and then, especially at school, I'll sit down on the toilet to pee, and I wonder, "What if this is just a dream? What if when I start peeing I am really asleep and I wet the bed? How embarrassing will that be?"

And sometimes, depending on the day I've had, it's worth the risk for that not to have been my day at all.

I'm just sayin'.

Crazy Dream #6..........

Last night I dreamed I was in a car with Sweet Girl driving, and she didn't navigate a curve very well. We flew off the road and into a lake. The car bobbed a few moments, but I knew it was going down. I reached for my Blackberry and called 9-1-1. And I was so dang CALM! I wasn't even angry at Sweet Girl for putting us in the lake. I remember saying, "Well, that's not what I had pictured."

Before the rescue personnel got there, however, we somehow were slung up onto the bank. Someone had tied a rope to the car, but I was somehow responsible for steering it in such a manner that it whiplashed its way up onto the bank.

It's somewhat miraculous that I could manage to call 9-1-1 and navigate the car and all that, since I was also HOLDING A BABY. I couldn't even explain where the baby came from, but it was mine. It had dark hair and was precious and was only a few days old. (This was probably due to my snippy post about teenaged moms the other night.) In one scene in my dream (don't know if it was before the lake incident or after it), someone was questioning the diapers I was using. They were more of the pull-ups style than real diapers. I remember thinking in my dream, "Wow, it's been a long time. I'm going to have to learn this stuff all over again." The person I was talking to was looking at me like I was an idiot.

I'm not sure if it was because I used pull-ups on a newborn.

Or if I had a baby at the age of 48.

Weird Dream #5.......

I don't know why I tell these things. I'm sure one day after telling one of my dreams, I'm going to find the men in white coats at my door, ready to take me away.

Last night I dreamed I was chaperoning the prom. Only I also had a date to the prom, a teenager whose identity I can't figure out from the dream. Probably a good thing. Only I also had a Hubby in the dream, so this date must have just been a pretend thing.

A school bus (yes, a yellow one) took us all to eat at Applebee's. Service was terrible, and all I ordered was a beer. Apropos, but not necessarily realistic if I were chaperoning the prom. I tipped generously for my $3 beer (I always do), but my receipt read $14. I raised all kinds of holy you-know-what. And they would NOT change the amount. One of the waitresses justified it because one table of our students had ordered $35 worth of food and only tipped $3.50. I told her it might be true that they needed to be educated regarding proper tipping, but that didn't mean I had to pay $11 more for a beer.

And then I argued so long with them that when I got ready to leave, the bus had left me there. I was trying to remember who was on the bus whose cell phone number I had, and I finally remembered one student who graduated last year. I was crying by the time I got hold of him, and I distinctly remember saying, "Nothing has gone right this whole night." And then I proceeded to walk home.

I can't figure out why Hubby couldn't come get me. He might have been pissed about me having a date to the prom and all.

Weird Dream #4.......

I was awake at 3:37 this morning, and it was the kind of awake where I thought to myself, "Uh oh, I'll never go back to......zzzzzzzzz." I almost got up at that ungodly hour, but I fell back to sleep before the thought could crystallize.

Then of course I was dead to the world when the alarm went off. The clock is on my side of the bed, and I haven't hit the snooze once in 12 years, ever since one morning right after we started living together when Hubby said, "Why don't you just get up when it goes off?" It's my responsibility to turn the alarm off. But that doesn't necessarily mean I wake up to do it.

In our little morning routine, I turn off the alarm while I'm still sleeping, and Hubby gets up and goes into the bathroom. He shaves and gets ready in about 7 minutes, then comes out into the bedroom to dress. He doesn't turn the light on, using the light from the bathroom instead, and at some point in that space of time I come awake and get up.

Just before he came out of the bathroom this morning, I was dreaming about one of our students. She finished her coursework right after the semester break, and she and her twin sister will graduate this week. In my dream, she was sitting at the table in my classroom talking about her college grades. She told me three grades, a 31 in something, a 13 in math, and something else. In all my kindheartedness and with the warm fuzzy support I'm known for, I said to her, "C., those grades aren't passing if you ADD THEM ALL TOGETHER." Then we started trying to factor an equation.

My friend Wanda the Warrior Princess thinks there are some deep underlying meanings to all our dreams.

I don't want to know.

Crazy Dream #3......

Where does my brain come up with this stuff?

I was in an airport, maybe flying home from somewhere, when I realized I didn't have my Blackberry. I had left it in my laptop case in one of the airport terminals. I called it a terminal in my dream, but it was actually one of the gates. Funny that I missed the Blackberry before I did the 30-pound laptop bag.

I was in a panic, but I thought I would just call the NFL to see if they had the bag. NFL as in National Football League. Because it was an NFL flight I was on. I don't mean that I was flying WITH the NFL, and I wasn't going to an NFL football game, although that is certainly not outside the realm of possibility. But the NFL had its own airline, and for some reason I was flying on it.

I got lost in the airport, which is also not outside the realm of possibility.

I came home because I had to pick up the car from the repair shop. The name of the shop was Savage Motors, and the guy who owned it was apparently named Savage, but I know for a fact it was Charlie Mc, a guy Hubby used to bowl with.

When he presented me with the bill, it was $407. I grinned at him and said, "How did you make the amount the same as my birthday?" I was tickled.

Retarded.

I was flying home from Iowa, where I may or may not have been participating in RAGBRAI. I know it must have been a dream because I am still married, and being married and riding in RAGBRAI again are mutually exclusive.

Those are just the parts I remember. There are some more nebulous details niggling at the corners of my mind, but they refuse to be called forth. They probably wouldn't make any more sense than the rest of this junk did.

Where does my brain come up with this stuff?

Strange Dreams Installment #2.....

I know people who put a lot of stock in the symbols of certain things in dreams. I look for symbols in literature all the time, but I don't pay a whole lot of attention to what things in dreams mean.

Other than if I dream about death, I figure it pretty much means..........somewhere, somebody is going to die.

If I dream about snakes, I figure I'm afraid of snakes.

If I dream about running and not being able to get away, I figure that's an accurate account of what would happen if someone really WERE chasing me.

I dream about flying a lot. And not in airplanes. In my dreams, frequently I just have this ability to sort of jump up in the air and take off flying. It's a pretty cool thing to have, particularly in high traffic situations.

If I dream about falling, I figure my talent for flying has gone on hiatus.

Those dream symbol-seeking souls (love the alliteration?) might just have a field day with my dream last night.

It wasn't at all clear, as my dreams most often are, and I have a feeling there were several vignettes that may or may not have all tied together. The plot line of this one escapes me.

But there was a toilet involved.

It was made out of concrete. It had the correct shape, but it had no moving parts.

And it was in my classroom.

And no, I wasn't drinking champagne this time.

Go ahead. Figure that one out and get back to me.

Crazy Dream #2.....

Last night I dreamed (dreamt? I hate that word) that I was riding a bicycle with one of my students, whom I'll call KK. I suppose we were riding the tandem, and Katydid will be pretty pissed that I let someone else be my stoker, even in a dream.

I have no idea where we were, but there was a huge DOWNhill. And it led to an even steeper downhill. And the road merged with another road on a blind curve, and we went flying down the hill and into the other road without me even being able to see whether or not a car might have been coming. The pavement was wet.

I remember screaming to KK, "Hold on!" As if she had a choice of doing anything else.

I told KK about my dream today at school. I think she went to get her schedule changed.

Crazy Dreams....

I probably shouldn't make my dreams public. Most of the time when I tell people my dreams, they suddenly remember they have urgent business elsewhere. I dream vividly, and sometimes I remember entire plots. Last night's dream was one of those. I typed it as soon as I got up this morning so I wouldn't forget it.

Hubby and I were headed to the airport to go to the Dominican Republic. It was extremely crowded in the train station, where we were trying to get a MARTA train to the airport. The crowd was mostly football fans in town for the SEC Championship game (which means we were leaving TODAY, which is just crazy). We were in the Atlanta airport, but we had been somewhere else beforehand, like Las Vegas. I saw a guy in orange and blue holding up four fingers. I was thinking, "Dude, you came all this way to see Florida play, and you don't even have TICKETS?" (That's proof that I dream in color. Otherwise, how would I have known he was a Florida fan? I mean, until he opened his mouth and got obnoxious. Ha ha ha ha ha)

Hubby and I got on the train, but we got separated immediately because it was so crowded. There were two aisles on this train; he went down the right one, and I was on the left side. At the first stop (I thought), I looked for him because I didn't know which gate our plane was leaving from. He wasn't there. I couldn't find him anywhere. He didn't have a cell phone, so I couldn't call him. I looked at my watch, and it was 2:35. I think our plane was supposed to leave at 1:30 or something. (Actually, it will leave at 10:00 AM when we go to the Dominican Republic in APRIL.) But I couldn't find hubby, so I called a co-worker and told him I didn't know why I was calling him.

Then we were at the SEC Championship game. Apparently I found hubby somewhere along the line. And suddenly it wasn't so important to get to the Dominican Republic after all. And I was yelling "Roll Tide!" because I will pull for anyone playing against Florida. Only it wasn't Alabama after all. It was Texas. (Duh, they aren't even IN the SEC.) So I had to start yelling "Hook 'em Horns!" I don't know why we were even AT the SEC game, since Georgia wasn't in it. Yes I do. A couple of times we've gone because hubby won the tickets from Dr. Pepper (they're generous like that, giving away SEC Championships and random Harleys) when we didn't give a rip about either team in the game. It's very boring to do that.

The score was 3-0 Texas, and then later it was something else that I can't remember, but someone had scored. Texas tried an onside kick, which is pretty stupid in itself because it was early in the game, but whatever. So they kicked the ball and it rolled to a stop, and just as players from both teams were about to jump on the ball, the ball jumped up and ran off because it was a little black and white dog. And everybody just stood around wondering where the football went. I'm sure that's a trick play that even Urban Meyer hasn't thought of yet.

Then we were at a dance, and I'm not sure it was hubby anymore, but it was SOME man, and I was trying to dance in high heels. (Maybe it was hubby after all, and I can explain where that part of the dream came from. Hubby and I were slow dancing in the living room last night. But in the dream we were FAST dancing. Whatever.) And after that the details get kind of fuzzy, so I'll just stop right there before you start thinking it wasn't just the dream that's crazy.