In my words, March 18 – 24


Sorting clothes before washing, putting them into piles, pulling out the socks so they aren’t balled up, making sure it’s not all been twisted into clumps, but loose and free to move and be cleaned; I never stuff a washer full; that soapy water needs room to be pushed and pulled. Then some goes into the dryers and some goes home to be hung up to dry, nice black cotton t-shirts and soft cotton sweaters. If you want the clothes you like to live long happy lives, don’t dry them in a dryer. Home. Cleaned, vacuumed, starting in the kitchen. Akram doesn’t know how to clean; he starts in the middle instead of at the beginning, shoves a vacuum nozzle into a mess without sorting through it. So he gets to scour the tub, the toilet, around the toilet, the stove, the frig, the sink, and mop. When I wash clothes, I don’t think; I’m a beast of burden set to the task. When I clean, I plan. Beginning in the here and now, doing it, at the moment in the movement that is needed to bend, stretch, push and wipe, cleaning propels me into the future. Because I can see clearly what needs to be done, I can easily do it.

from X-Word Grammar Intermediate by Dr. Linda Ann Kunz

Friday morning I did something I’d been planning to do for a long time. I sorted through folders of past lesson plans, full of the many handouts I used then, and can use now, if I just sort them out, saving on paper, using what’s there instead of printing more, environment friendly and clearing my workroom of stacks of unused stuff, usable if sorted, a daunting task though. Where do you start? Well, you pick up a folder and open it up, and there is the first page. Do it and it will get done! For about five hours non-stop, I put like pages into their proper piles around the living room, covering every surface: Parts of Speech, Active/Passive, Prepositions, Simple Past vs. Past Progressive. The paper pulled all the moisture from my fingers; I’d sometimes have to wet them with my tongue. I kept thinking I should go and rub my hands with cream in the bathroom, but I just kept on sorting, from time time licking, and never did stop.

From some twenty confused folders, I pulled out and organized the pages of a book I use a lot by Dr. Linda Ann Kunz, X-Word Grammar Intermediate. She taught at LaGuardia College for many years and believed that teaching the helping verbs to English language learners was best for them to understand how to think, write and talk. I met her at a seminar and asked if I could sit in on her class. It was January 2007. In graduate school circa 2003 I’d been taught theory but not how to teach. Dr. Kunz constantly engaged her students with language, talked to them all the time, whipping them up, kind of like a juggler juggles her pins and balls, individually asking them questions, all the while getting them to focus on the task she had put them into groups to do, writing perhaps. There was always a project at hand. And one after that. She had great lesson plans too, all worked out. She had done the work; all she had to do was follow through. But she wasn’t lazy, resting on her laurels, she was always teaching because, though students come and go, they’re always learning, always new, and for the teacher a constant fountain of youth.

“The helping verbs do, does, and did,” Dr. Kunz said, “are the most important words in the English language. Even when we don’t see them, they’re there. Understand them and you will understand everything.” About a year ago, I wanted to ask her some questions about would, could and should. I’d misplaced her phone number and went on the Internet to find it. She was dead. She would never answer my question again. I could have called earlier. I should have. I was saddened and surprised because when she taught, she seemed so alive, that the teaching sustained her, perhaps the best teacher I’ve ever watched. Ah life. I put her pages into piles, what she’s left behind, not just a student’s teacher, but a teacher’s teacher, she was mine. When I understood her, she made my life so much easier, laying it out, freeing me up to teach. She did all the work; all I had to do was see it. RIP.


Dr. Linda Ann Kunz


Spring break.

I’m off for a week. Yes! As I cleaned on Friday and Saturday, I planned out both of my classes until the end of the semester, which is in June. And I thought of this sonnet as I was cleaning too. It came to be in the spring of 2004; the photo was probably taken in 1987 at 9th Street and Avenue C where I still live.

I’m cleaning into every corner.
I don’t want any dust. That is the truth.
The sun will shine in clear windows and you
will see the majestic willows over
across the street are looking back at us
when I am through. You used to see the World
Trade Center from this room. It kind of whirled
around and it was gone, a lot of dust
covered us, and smoke, a burnt bad smell.
That now is long ago but a busy
city like Manhattan is always dirty
really so when someone sweeps, you can tell.
Like editing words, clearing clutter shows
honest as a poem the surface below.

Tomorrow it’s Amtrak to the mountains to see my dad and the cat, walk in the woods, contemplate sonnets, read a book I hope, or part of one at least, the Dubliners. Akram is going to relax and draw, row the boat into the middle of the pond, stop amid the spreading circles and eat an apple or an orange, thinking all the while.

Let me end this week’s blog with a poem, fitting for a Palm Sunday, Royal Palm by Hart Crane. To all my friends celebrating Passover and Easter, have a wonderful time with your family and friends, enjoy your traditions (and not too many peanut butter eggs, you Christians!) (I will have at least one.)

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