Cold Feet

Fashion trumps common sense for a large number of women. The drive to “look good” wins over wearing comfortable shoes designed for the shape of a person’s foot, or even wearing heels that allow a woman to walk for hours without wincing. But what really confuses me are the spaghetti strap high heel sandals in sub-zero degree weather.

On a recent trip to the Denver Performing Arts Center, I counted over a half-dozen women wearing high heel sandals, feet bare, on a snowy minus two degree evening. After precariously walking through ice and snow to our designated theater, we were standing by the front entrance waiting for friends that were joining us. Despite a coat, hat, gloves and low heeled, zip-up leather boots with wool socks, I was considerably chilled. Bill went to grab some hot-chocolate for us while I stomped my feet and began people watching. That’s when my eyes fell on the incredible number of women shivering in dresses with bare, pedicured feet in high heeled sandals with paper thin soles.

What were these women thinking? Were they thinking? Did they imagine there would be blankets available to wrap up their bare legs and feet during the two plus hour performance? Even in pants and boots my feet remained chilled in the theater where a low draft made its way through the auditorium. As you might guess, most of these women weren’t wearing sensible coats either that they could drape over their icy extremities. It had been cold for days, so this weather wasn’t a surprise. The desire to look a particular way was clearly more important than staying warm, comfortable, and potentially well.

Even in warm weather it fascinates me to observe women trying to walk safely and comfortably in high heels. I’ve idled at stoplights downtown and watched women in 3-4” heels running on their toes across busy intersections. Yes, some have tripped. Lately these shoes are the extremely pointy kinds, that don’t even allow enough room for one’s toes.

Maybe you read the New York Times article that reported on new cosmetic toe amputation surgery (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20031207/ai_n11427905.) Amazingly, women are electing to amputate their toes, or parts of their toes, so they can fit more comfortably into pointy shoes like Jimmy Choo’s. Sadly pointy toe boxes have been found to cause significant pain and even make it impossible for a woman to walk due to permanent damage to the front part of the foot. Decomposition and rot can even occur between toes crammed together too tightly for hours in a tight, enclosed toe box. (Maybe this is why those women were wearing the high heel sandals.)

Exploring the extremes that women are going to for fashion, I uncovered that the thin soles of high-end luxury high heels often lead to serious ball-of-the-foot problems that can keep women from even wearing the kind of shoes they had their toe(s) amputated for. Never fear, collagen injections into the balls of the feet can help, for the short term anyway, as these do not appear to provide good long term results. So, the experts say, maybe something better can be developed for injection, or some special shock absorbing material that can be surgically implanted at the bottom of the front part of the foot.

Despite the recent popularity of “cosmetic” foot surgery, a high percentage (20% or more) of these surgeries are failing with complications that are frightening. Forget the surgery and injections; just join the latest exercise class that has women wearing high heels: “The new work out craze that's gaining popularity among women. It's a high heel work out class!” Its creator Rosalind Neilen says, "When you're in heels, the worst thing you want is to look like you are uncomfortable. . .the high heels are getting higher and higher and as I was stumbling around in them, I just figured out a way to make everybody feel comfortable and have fun.” Can you imagine running in high heels? Well, how else do the ‘Dancing With Stars’ contestants make it look so easy?

Oh, my. I’m afraid as women we will never achieve the respect and regard we’ve been seeking until we do something as innocuous as choking ourselves with neckties.

More Everyday Heroes

Time to get rolling. With teachers back at school after a holiday break and in the second semester of their licensure program, it's time to do the prerequisite classroom observations required for their licenses and/or endorsements. Once I’m sitting in their classrooms with my computer poised on my lap, I am deeply appreciative of this aspect of my work. I sit and peck away, typing what I’m hearing and seeing. For the most part, it’s like eavesdropping with permission on lots of everyday heroes.

Like a lot of you, I loved hearing about the pilot, Sully, who heroically landed the big airliner in the Hudson River recently without one fatality. After a couple of geese hit his plane, a mixture of skills, experience, and pure instincts took over with little thought about what he should or shouldn’t do. He didn’t have the luxury of extra time.

I see this kind of scenario over and over with teachers, exhausted though they may be. First of all, rarely do they have that luxury of time. From the get-go of a teacher’s day the clock rules. While students are filing out of one class, other students are bumping into them arriving for the next. Planning period is consumed with making copies, calling parents, filling out incident report forms or other endless paperwork, consoling a student or a colleague, grading, and if you’re extremely lucky, maybe making a few plans. Going to the bathroom feels like an indulgence. Dawdling or water cooler talk isn’t a common activity for most teachers. Gone are the days of smoke wafting out of teacher lounges while teachers puff and commiserate.

The real treat in today’s world of education is when a teacher has somehow managed the time to carefully think through and prepare a lesson. But whatever plan she/he has at hand, most often the pure determination, tenacity, and strong, open heart anxious to teach someone something is readily observable. The unadulterated joy of watching a young person learn something is what keeps most of us coming back, day after day, year after year.

The teacher is often excited and quite enthusiastic about what she/he will be doing with students. A bell rings, students wander in, often moodily wearing whatever has happened to them throughout their lives, during the last week, last night, or becaue of an incident/exchange that just happened in the hallway. Teachers understand this, and know who is most vulnerable to disruptive behavior. They are well aware of how it can be a crap shoot as to who will be able to shuck off interfering attitudes and shift into being a receptive learner. They're constantly on the look out for the saboteurs. Teachers become masters at the control panel, checking the gauges and quickly making even the slightest adjustments instinctively to steer the take-off and entire flight of a lesson in a successful direction.

Geese come out of nowhere. One, two, plowing into our best intentions, threatening to disintegrate a lesson easily within nano seconds. An offensive side comment from one student to the next, an exasperated “this class sucks” from a student needing some extra attention for one reason or another, too many students not having read an assignment or brought their materials, a cell phone ringing and a student obstinately answering with the all too predictable response of “It’s my mom!”

Over half of the teachers in the alternative licensure program where I am an instructor and teacher evaluator work with adjudicated youth at minimum or maximum security lock down facilities (for those who have committed more serious crimes), or at residential treatment centers (for those with severe emotional and behavior problems to help them manage the impact of traumatic experiences and/or mental illness). Many of these students are master manipulators, and when you have an entire classroom of such, imagine the genius required of the teacher in this cockpit.

Regularly the take-off happens and the hour flies, usually not without some turbulence, sometimes major. Most teachers, so beautifully earnest with their dreams and honorable intentions for their students, do the best they can with what they have, frequently working with youth that have largely been discarded by the rest of society. So many teachers navigate their way through the geese and storms, with outdated equipment in less than desirable physical environments, often receiving only minimal direction from air traffic controllers, yet they fly and land safely hour after hour, regularly making emergency landings, unbelievably managing to teach many children every day. I bet that even Captain Sully calls these people his heroes.

Sniffles and Sneezes

Where are the kleenix? Looks like this year has rolled in spreading colds and sinus infections. Our writer’s retreat was just cancelled with two out of three of us coughing and sneezing, and this morning I woke up looking for tissue. Three out of three now.

Oh, winter. Colorado is stingy with its daylight compared to Texas during these cold months. We celebrated December 21 as the shortest day of the year, eager for the day’s light to be on the other side of the hump. Ever so slowly we began watching it stay a wee bit lighter until 5PM. Night still feels like it slams down way too soon, with a cloak of darkness hanging heavily by the time we sit down to a much too early dinner. By 8:00 it’s already been dark for hours and can so easily feel like bedtime.

When feeling a little puny, winter evenings are best handled by getting warm and comfortable with something good to read. After reading cumbersome teacher portfolios most of the day, laptop positioned, where else but in my lap, glancing back and forth to mark the rubric on my computer screen, my eyes beg for a good reading light and a small, well-written book come evening (Current reading: Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett).

I admit, however, this morning's cheery light leaves me wishing I were tucked around a kitchen table in the hideout mountain cabin with my two writing colleagues, sipping coffee as our pens scratch out a couple of pages on whatever writing prompt that has come to one of us in the night. We’d have a box of kleenix on the table and when done, we would read our words to one another between sniffles and sneezes.

Back and Forward

("firecracker" dandelion photographed at Graceland)

12/31/08
Last chance for 2008. Another year is heading out and I eye the one coming with suspicion. What will it hold? A new President for starters, thank goodness. More political shifts throughout the world, no doubt. Further economic downturn? Probably a blizzard here, a hurricane down there, twisters in the middle, and unpredictable floods somewhere. Some people will get well and others will receive unpromising diagnoses. And amidst it all, faith will seed and grow, offering to carry us through.

Looking back on 2008 helps me to understand why I'm so comfortable with it coming to an end. Early in the year I helped my elderly parents finally make the grueling decision to sell their beautiful country land and home in Texas and move into town for their last years. Finding them a new home, selling the old, dealing with animals, and packing up their long lives were extremely challenging endeavors. Settling them into a different environment in their mid-eighties and watching them re-sort belongings into different kitchen drawers, while learning to navigate an unfamiliar house and new town was difficult. But they are no longer isolated in the country far from help. How must it feel to make such a monumental change near the end of one’s life? I'm so sorry my parents had to go through this, and sure hope I never do.

Mid-year our dearest friends told Bill and me they were splitting up. We were stunned. Had we been so unaware as to not see there were serious problems? We shared weekly dinners with these friends, holiday and birthday celebrations, and regular journeys to the valley where we have land close to one another. When deciding to move a few years ago, being in close proximity to this couple had been at the top of our wanted list in a new home. Now three blocks away, the friend-family we had grown accustomed to and had come to love so deeply abruptly began to drop away. We felt a gaping hole in our lives with the loss of those times we all regularly shared together, our hearts aching for what our friends were going through. Remembering our own relationship’s unpredictable journey, we reached for compassion and understanding, realizing how our decisions of many years ago may have impacted those we are close to in difficult ways as well.

In the middle and at the end of this year, two people I worked with died unexpectedly. Shawna, our MHM office person, gave in to heartache and a treatable respiratory infection. (Refer to “That Duck” piece of 11/26/08.) Then Dave, a formidable teacher candidate just finishing our arduous year-long program, died several days before Christmas a little over three weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Dave is still fresh in my memory due to our recent discussions about artifacts he had selected and reflections he had written for his final portfolio. Images of both Shawna and Dave remain crisp in my memory, whether it's how Shawna’s hair fell so beautifully onto her shoulders, or the neon orange winter cap Dave popped on his head when leaving class. I can still hear how each of them laughed. And unfortunately with both, I remember hastily ending our last conversations so that I could get back to my “schedule”.

This past fall, when our class venue changed, I found myself confronted with the necessity of teaching the value of reflective practice to a huge group of students in a large, vacuous space. The environment certainly wasn’t conducive to quiet reflection, but most of all my challenges of standing in front of large groups hit me square in the gut. I couldn’t hear well, I stammered, I got lost. Trying to navigate away from the quiet groups around conference tables in Houston classes, to the circular tables in smaller classrooms of the La Academia School, to the uncomfortable picnic tables of this warehouse space with half the students’ backs turned to me felt miserable. Struggling and determined to be flexible with the environmental and number challenges, I made significant yet disappointing changes in my curriculum that have not revealed the same growth in teachers’ abilities to be self-reflective that I have noticed in the past.

The year ended with the Texas Christmas fiasco. Trying to coordinate with multiple families and expectations proved dismal and hopelessly chaotic. Our desires to create a space for a family time ran amuck and Bill and I fell into bed most evenings questioning our intentions and vowing to stay upbeat. Exhausted, on our flight home we determined that in the future we will certainly visit family regularly, but not on holidays, removing ourselves from the unpredictable and apparently unsolvable equation of how to celebrate or spend time with everyone. The necessity for amends from this trip still hang in the air, regrets that have left tender, sore spots on several hearts.

Moving into 2009 is just fine with me. In all fairness, however, let me mention some of the brighter moments of 2008 and promises of ‘09. My parents are in a safer place. Our friends that split up seem to be forging a supportive friendship. I think I’m learning to not rush so much, to listen more carefully and let conversations linger, recognizing that I never know when it could be the last with someone. After our final November class, it looks like we’ll have smaller groups in different classrooms when classes begin again in February. Bill and I look forward to those non-holiday Texas visits in 2009, visiting family we love, soon to include another grandchild arriving in August. And of course we predict our garden will be as beautiful and productive this coming summer as last, supplying delicious food for our cooking and dinner ventures.

Bear with me a moment while I rattle off a list of treasures from '08. Visits from Bill’s brother in June, and our son Shawn and his family in August. Reestablishing contact with Billy, Bill’s oldest son, and another grandchild, Kayla. Rusty & Cece’s trip earlier in the year, more precious visits from Nancy and Malcolm, reconnecting with Blake in May, then having Peggy, Mary, Connie, and Carolyn all come to Graceland (our place in the valley), and the Durango and Taos trip in October to visit friends in their homes. Sharon and I making poetry mobiles this summer while Pat grilled goodies. Becoming closer to our neighbor Kathy - a high spot of our move to this ‘hood. Ann and Ben, other neighbors, promising us opportunities of babysitting soon with a baby coming in April. Weekly meetings with our writer’s group and the commitment Rebecca, Karla, and I have made to regular writing retreats. And of course the relief and blessing of watching QKS, Quality Knife & Supply/http://www.qks.com/, (Bill’s small business) hold steady in strange times.

A new year? There are sure to be more testy challenges a-comin', along with ample occasions for joy. My wish: may our faith in the future continue to be nourished, growing ever stronger regardless of how we label the experiences we encounter.