>So you thought that the second week couldn’t possibly be any more bizarre than the first. Alas! Wrong again.

Last week was only a bit odd – on Sunday, I had to drive my sister back to Dallas Love Field so that she could fly back to Nashville from her 10 year high school reunion, and my brother’s kids had been here for a short weekend visit, so I returned them to Mesquite, Texas. My sister-in-law Karen and I rented Bridget Jones’ Diary so that she could see it for the first time and so that I could see it for the fourth. And for me to at least catch a glimpse of what a single thirty-something gal’s life is supposed to be like! Karen, Chelsey, Brady and I went to Posado’s for lunch, and we determined that if you buy your chicken at Sam’s Wholesale Warehouse Club and put it in your restaurant’s alleged Tex Mex food with all the spices in the world, it STILL tastes like cardboard box. Ugh.

I went to Half Price Books Records & Tapes as well as to Starbuck’s before leaving the metroplex. And the hot guy behind the counter said, “You have very nice eyes, too.” And I responded, “Is there a run on nice eyes tonight?” He laughed. Come to think of it, maybe I should have invited HIM to go to Starbuck’s with me. I didn’t have to be at work the next day.

Oh but the day after that, I did. Posing as a sixth grade social studies teacher at Sam Houston elementary school. Let’s just say that Sam Houston himself must roll over in his grave knowing that his name is on such an institution. I’m here as an eyewitness to tell you that the public school systems are in grave danger. As is the future of America. (soap box alert)

Mainstreaming, first of all, is of the devil. If you don’t know what this term means, apparently, it means that there is no regard for what kind of disparity there may exist in a classroom between the extremes of aptitude. When I was in school, we were grouped by levels. The teacher taught all of us the same way, gave us all the same tests and had the same expectations for each of us. But that was because testing had helped to determine that we were pretty much all in the same ‘range’ of ability. Not anymore. I was dumbfounded to learn that teachers have to teach to such a vast array of students on so many different levels that there is no way that students at either extreme are being served. And in the gross vacuum that exists between the top tier and the lowest tier is a fertile breeding ground for behavior problems. Trust me. OH, and the teachers also are not allowed to give all the students the same test. They have to ‘modify’ their tests, which means that their work is essentially doubled (again). Ludicrous. Research this practice, and take a stand. No one can learn in that environment. And from what I’ve witnessed, the teachers (God bless them all) who have excellent students just create more work for those students to keep them busy – not enrichment work – book reports, or papers or something else purely academic. Thereby teaching them that they’ll be punished for being bright. Hello, did ANYONE take Educational Psychology but me?

Tonight, we drove down the road to visit my mom’s sister Tommie and her husband Sid. Tommie is a Language Arts teacher at the school where I was a substitute teacher last week. We talked a lot about some of the kids about whom I had questions. Elester was one of the little boys that I taught – he was really sweet, pretty bright, but a little difficult to corral in class. She told me that there had been an incident last week on school picture day where some little girl’s picture money (cash: a 20 dollar bill and four one dollar bills) had been stolen from my aunt’s desk while the students were at lunch. My aunt is a rather relentless warrior for justice (as she should be – the only example of such some of those children will ever have), so she went to the auditorium where all her students were lined up to take school pictures. She went through all the kids, asking them who was buying pictures and how they were paying. She had them all empty their pockets, and the money was not there. She went to the office and reported the money stolen. Then she went back to her class room to look one more time. Kristin’s order envelope had been torn open and was dropped into the wastebasket by my aunt’s desk. She knew that it had been thrown in there quite recently (as in during lunch time) since she knew that she had thrown away an empty box of Kleenex, and the envelope was in the wastebasket ON TOP of the empty box (reading Nancy Drew pays off, I’m telling you!). So she took the ripped, empty envelope back down to the auditorium and began asking anyone in there if they knew anything about the missing money. As she was leaving, one little boy said that Elester had asked him to hold onto some money for him during recess. Then he said that my aunt could confirm that story with Dedrick, another 6th grader. So she pulled Dedrick, the first little boy and Elester aside and took them to the office. She made the boys sit down, and she relayed the story to the assistant principal Mrs. Price. One by one, she brought the ‘witnesses’ into Mrs. Price’s office for questioning. The story was confirmed separately by both boys. Then they brought Elester in. They asked him if he had taken the money. He denied it several times, saying that the money was his and that his auntie had given it to him ‘last night’. (He lives with his auntie and his grandmother). Mrs. Price asked him for his auntie’s phone number, and he gave it to her. She then said, “You know, I’m going to call you auntie, Elester, and I’m going to ask her if she gave you that money last night.” They asked him over and over, and he finally admitted that he had taken the money simply because he had wanted to have his picture made and wanted to buy them. But his grandmother and auntie had refused to give him any money for pictures.

My aunt asked Mrs. Price to step outside the office and begged her not to call Elester’s auntie, relaying a story about a colleague who had called the woman the last time Elester was acting up in class. He came to school the next day with his eye blood red and almost swollen shut. The teacher took Elester aside and asked what had happened, and he said that his auntie had hit him and tried to scratch his eye out. My aunt was crying and convinced Mrs. Price not to call Elester’s auntie but to try one more time to have him confess. He produced $21.00 from his pocket, and they asked him for the other $3.00. They asked him if he had spent it on lunch, and he said, ‘no’. My aunt went back to her class room and let Mrs. Price finish handling the situation. Mrs. Price reported to my aunt later that she had retrieved the final $3.00 from Elester but that it was a little smelly. He had stuffed it into his shoe. So sad. And it’s far more the rule than the exception. If you have the opportunity ever to tutor children or be a mentor of any value, please do so – I suppose it really does ‘take a village’.

I accompanied my sister and her girls (the 3-M’s) to my sister’s school’s Fall Festival on Saturday. They each had twenty little tickets to play games (cakewalk, dart throw, ring toss, etc.) and proceeded, among them, to win three gold fish (much to their mother’s delight…eeek!), a boat load of candy, some toys and all sorts of other useless stuff. There was a bingo room, and we played a few rounds of Bingo together. There were two craggy old ladies in there, who had endless amounts of tickets and who were playing five cards apiece each round. And I’m thinking to myself, ‘all those prizes are just crap from the Dollar General Store that they could have bought ten times over for what they spent on those tickets!’ Whatever. Needless to say, of course, they kept winning, and those sweet little kids didn’t have a chance. At the end of the evening, the remaining prize items in the Bingo room were ‘auctioned off’, and Mayzie happened to be in there for that event. A few minutes later, she came out of the room, crying as if her best friend had just died right there in front of her. I asked her what was the matter, looking for open wounds or blood, and she managed to wheeze out amongst sobs, ‘there was this girl in there named Shelby who had tons of tickets, and she just kept winning everything in the auction because she had more than anybody else. It’s not fair. They should have let more people have a chance at getting those things.’ Now, here you must know that Mayzie did not have any tickets, and there was nothing on the prize table that she even wanted. She was upset over the principle of the matter. Her mom was elsewhere helping to clean up after the fair, so it fell upon me to try and explain the concept of fairness and of how some people just don’t grasp it, and how she should not get so upset over something she can do absolutely nothing about right now. So she calmed down, and I continued in the clean up effort. As I was walking away, she got all upset again, and blurted out, “the last line of the pledge says, ‘and liberty and justice for all’ – where is the justice in that?” She’s eight years old.

This afternoon, I went to the county courthouse where my mother works (and where I used to work in the District Attorney’s office) to put together some packages to take to the post office. My mom sent me out to her car to retrieve some papers and money that she needed to order my Aunt Verne’s medicine. I was sitting in the driver’s side of the car, one leg out the door, and this man appeared from out of nowhere, and leaned down and stuck his head in the car. He mumbled something even I couldn’t understand, and I said, ‘What?” Then he said it again, unintelligible. Then I understood that he was asking me if I could do him a ‘small favor’. Mind racing. I said ‘No, sir, I am on a quick errand, then I have to return to work in THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE. That appeared to have thwarted him. At least momentarily. So I decided that I didn’t want to sit out there long enough to sort through all the papers in my mom’s visor (aka her personal filing cabinet), so I grabbed everything, including the bank envelope with the money in it, which I had shoved under my leg when the scary man appeared. And he was in the car again! Asking me for two dollars for some gasoline. I just looked him in the eyes (which were less than six inches from mine) and said, “NO!” He went away, thank goodness. Rattled me, though. He had been watching me, I guess. Lovely.

So I pack up my mail and head to the post office. I had several letters to mail, and I put those in the ‘stamped mail’ slot, then went into the counter area to fill out a customs form. Then, going through my remaining envelopes – ones that I needed to add extra postage to – I realized that I had dropped an un-addressed, un-stamped envelope into the bin. Great. Anthrax alert. So I told the USPS fellow behind the counter, and he looks at me and says, “I’m going to have to call a supervisor.” Great. Aiming to leave the country and I get myself on the FBI Most Wanted List. So he calls for a supervisor. I’m on a cell phone call trying to hear a juicy story from a friend back in Nashville. And the supervisor comes out. Meanwhile, I’m watching the rest of the patrons, hoping they don’t go Flight 93 on my ass. I show the supervisor an identical envelope (my favorite kind – the plain brown wrapper kind) so he’ll know what to look for, and he goes back behind the curtain. Then he shouts to me from the other room and asks me to come to the special counter with him. Sweating. Lugging two packages and some other loose mail. Dropping customs form. Trying not to draw any more attention to already conspicuous self. He tells me he can’t find any brown envelopes in the bin. So I determine that perhaps I mistakenly left it at home. Then he notices my little brown box that I am shipping to London, UK (oh, like that’s not suspicious in Marshall, Texas), and he asks if he can photocopy the other little brown envelope that I have, ‘just in case the lost one turns up, he’ll know who to send it to’. Well, now they have a handwriting sample, fingerprints AND my home address. Only me.

I got home and found the ‘missing’ letter in my book bag. I had not taken it to the post office at all, as I was not sure that I had my organizer in the car with the correct address. Ugh.

Just came back from visiting my great aunt Verne (short for LaVerne) – my mom does her grocery shopping for her and picks up her prescriptions for her as well. We cooked meat loaf, turnip greens and yellow squash tonight so we we took her over a warm plate of dinner as well. She greeted us at the door, saying, “Well, I’d done give up on y’all comin’ over, so I’m cooking myself some chili in the kitchen.” Then she decided that she would have the chili for breakfast and eat our dinner tonight. By the way, it was only 6:30pm when she had given up on us. As we walked from the kitchen back into the living room, she said to me, “Girl, you have sure gained a lot of weight; I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you so heavy.” Delightful. Then she said, “How do you do it? No matter how hard I try, I cannot gain any weight.” So, to her it was a compliment? And she envies my girth? I’ll tell myself that. Then we sat down to visit, and she asked me if I wanted to see pictures of her daughter-in-law. I said, “Sure.” So she went into her bedroom and gathered some snapshots of her new daughter-in-law. I looked at them and asked her name. She said, “Cindy.” Then she proceeds to tell how Cindy has told her that she has to have dialysis and chemotherapy. Then my Aunt Verne asks my mom, “Do you have to take chemo when all you have is sugar diabetes?” My mom doesn’t think so. Then Aunt Verne talks a little about how she thinks that Cindy is mad with her because she hasn’t heard from her or her son Ron since last Friday. I asked her why she thought they might be mad at them. She said, “Because they asked me if I wanted to go to church with them on Sunday, and I responded, ‘Now, Cindy, do you think if I wanted to go to church, you would have to ask me?’” But she said what she really wanted to say was, “If I go to church, does that mean I have permission to lie all the time like you do?” Go Aunt Verne!

Other adventures this week: went to Nacogdoches last weekend to see Gary Allan, Sara Evans and Kenny Chesney. Had fun – Gary only played 30 minutes, so we all pretty much just hung around backstage at the coliseum and on the bus, dodging scary ‘fans’ until the entire show was over. Then to the Whataburger. Of course – what else would you do after a late night music event in Texas?

Also signed up for local internet service last week and was able to cajole the fellow, Ben, to sign me up with no contract, so I can bail as soon as I know I’m leaving the country. I was quizzing him (as he seemed the type who would know and tell the truth) about building one’s own web page, which is something that I hope to do while I’m overseas to help keep in touch with everyone. So I asked him how difficult it was to learn HTML and were there any easy programs to learn to do so? He rattled off a few but ensured me that there were a couple that were really great – Adobe Photo Shop and DreamWeaver. So he told me a little bit about those, and he said, of course, that the downfall was that they were pretty expensive ($250 or more). Then he gave me a wink wink nudge nudge and told me that he’d share his with me if we could just keep it between the two of us. Well, maybe, Ben, but that is ALL that there will be between the ‘two of us’. Lord E. Mama.