When I was really young I was rough and tumble and all kinds of tom boy. I kept my hair short like a boy, loved the color blue and cried when my mom put me in a dress. I don’t remember, but I suspect that I found the concept of nail polish to be beyond offensive.

Times eventually changed and all photos bearing my time as a pseudo boy were hidden far out of sight and I became a fan of the art of nail decorating. Like most 12-year-olds, my major goal in life was to be just like every other 12-year-old in my world. I wore the same shoes, begged for the same clothes and even liked the same boys as my middle school counterparts. But for some reason I held back in the nail polish arena. Bubble Gum Pink and Strawberry Short Cake Red was fine for others, but I stuck to clear or nearly clear.

All of the girls around me seemed to have perfect nails.

That’s exactly why I held back, actually. I knew that although I could wear the right shoes and squeeze into the right jeans from the right stores, I could never have the perfect red nails. I could have my mom paint them. Or, as I grew older and discovered the power of a car and disposable income I could have a nail salon polish and buff them to perfection, but I could never keep them that way. And I hated it.

That’s the thing about color on nails, it shows your flaws. In my mind, every chip, every scratch, showed one more way I couldn’t be like the rest, couldn’t reach perfection. My nails could begin with a coat of socialized flawlessness, but left to me and my rough and tumble life, they would always — quickly — begin to fail.

It all feels very shallow and silly now, but for many years my nails were the perfect explanation of my life. I longed to live the outgoing, loud lifestyle I saw reflected in the hands of my peers, but I was too afraid to be that out there — that bold. Boldness meant a greater chance of failure. Fire Engine Red meant chips and cracks I knew were in my life and would immediately show up on my nails. It was a failure I could not face and a boldness I felt I would never obtain.

What I’ve found in my life is that, just like my tom boy ways, I’ve allowed parts of myself to bend and transform into something different. A different version of me. A version who is less worried about the faults and failures others may see in me and more worried about the faults and failures I create in my world when I’m too afraid to step out on the line and give something a try. Even if it is something as simple as Espresso Yourself Brown

My nails are all kinds of shades of browns, purples and even the occasional red these days. And my life is still rough and tumble and messy around the edges in different sorts of ways. My nails still crack and paint still chips. Some days I’m too busy to take it off even far beyond the point of it looking remotely new or perfect. And that’s okay too. When your life is busy and messy it’s because you’re living it. When your nails are chipped and imperfect it’s because perfection can no longer be quantified in a flawless coat of paint. And when you reach a point where you simply don’t care, in my eyes, you’ve found a better place to be.

I teach five and six-year-olds each week at church. Last Sunday as we sat around the carpet saying our thanks before snack one of my girls looked at me and said with the true heart and soul of a five- year-old, “I’m thankful for nail polish.”

As I looked at my own chipped nails encircled around her little hand I noticed the barely visible flecks of paint a weeks worth of hard play had nearly worn away. And I smiled. I’m thankful for nail polish too. And I’m thankful for cracks and chips and the boldness to wear any color I choose and the wisdom to know that when the paint falls away it’s because your hands and your heart are busy living your life.

That’s all the perfection I’m ever really going to need.

Sharon London* has added me as a friend on Facebook.
(*Sharon London’s name has been changed to protect, well, my own ego).

I hate friend requests. Love Facebook. Love catching up with old classmates, and perusing their best drunken pictures with a gleam of “I can’t believe he/she got fat/skinny, married/pregnant, repulsive/attractive” in my eye. I just don’t like any of those things quite as much when I’m the one who has been sought out, or at least accidentally located. I much prefer playing the roll of The Seeker, tracking down that kid who walked out of the bathroom in first grade with his pants down (Dayton Meier**) or the girl every boy had a crush on in junior high (Brett Roscoe**).
(**Okay, this time it’s for their own good).

The Facebook friend request is really the “bumping into an old acquaintance whose name you can’t remember on the street” of our generation. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, but at least now we can not only remember their name, we can learn their favorite books, religious beliefs and level of desperation (the number of SuperPoke applications is directly proportional to one’s need for attention — math of the 21st century).

Well, Sharon London recently added me as a friend on Facebook. I’ve been varying levels of creeped out, bothered and virtually assaulted by different friend requests during the three or four years I’ve been on Facebook. I accept them all, I can’t bring myself to do anything else. The request from Sharon, a classmate of mine from 6th to 8th grade, was the first one that affected me on a different level, for a number of reasons.

First thing’s first: it’s important for me to say that I had completely forgotten about Sharon London. In the universe I’ve been living in since college, she didn’t exist. She was a ghost, someone from my past who I never would have thought about if not for her request to know me on a social networking site. She didn’t play much of a role in my past, and I never expected to see her again. Essentially, she disappeared from my memory to make room for some other irrelevant memories I’ve accumulated since I last saw her.

More importantly, I should be up front and say that I wasn’t very nice to Sharon. That may or may not be an understatement — I honestly can’t remember. I didn’t exactly dump fake blood on her at the 8th grade prom, but I didn’t invite her into my circle of friends and encourage them all to treat her with dignity and respect. She was weird. She was awkward. I was, too, but you can’t bully yourself, so you have to do it to someone else. I was a bit of a class clown in those days, but I was also quite a sheep. I followed a handful of my more pressuring peers into acting in a way that was completely opposite of the way I had been raised. Sharon, and a few other classmates, felt the brunt of my inability to say no to those dangerous peers.

I don’t remember any certain thing I ever did to make her feel bad. I’ve wracked my brain for the past week trying to come up with something specific to apologize for, but it’s just not happening. The only thing I remember for sure was an inside joke I had with another of my friends (a guy who didn’t pressure me at all and who I’m still friends with today) about Sharon. We used to raise our voices above their usual 12-year-old pitch and generally poke fun at everything about her. It was nothing malicious, but it wasn’t nice. I’ve felt bad about the way I sometimes treated people back then ever since.

In my adult years, I’ve worked hard to morph past the know-it-all little prick that I look back at and feel ashamed of. In fact, for those who read this site and have only known me as an adult, I expect that I’ll garner a “Erick was MEAN?”-type reaction (or at least I’ll hope for that). If anyone is reading who remembers me from those days, I hope that you’ll read this and think I’m being too hard on myself and remember me as more of a class clown who accidentally (OK, I meant to do it) hit my 7th grade English teacher with a hacky sack from the back row. But then, maybe that’s just me hoping to be absolved of any past misdeeds.

I thought for an hour or so about how I would respond to Sharon (I accepted the request, of course), but she beat me to the punch. By the time I logged back in, she had sent me this message:

“Hey whats up? i remember you always made me laugh, are you still a little bit of a comedian? what are you up to these days?”

It sounded to me like she has either chosen to playfully disregard any of my faults from the past, forgotten them completely, or was luring me into her carefully planned destruction of a ghost from her own memories. I had zero idea how to respond. This whole exercise was about getting past my previous discretions and moving on as a bigger person, so I approached it in the most adult way I could think of.

I apologized.

I told her straight up that I never felt like much of a comedian and that I felt bad for treating people poorly. I told her I hoped she remembered me more as a class clown than as a tormentor. I hoped her life had turned out well.

As far as I can tell, it has. Sharon lives in New Mexico, goes to business school and owns a house. She says she embraces the memories of her odd and awkward self of the past and holds no grudge against me.

When she told me that, I felt light years better — I had been so focused on coming to terms with my former self that I’d ignored the fact that everyone has a former self and that maybe other people are as displeased with what they remember as I sometimes am. I started to think about many of the same memories I’d thought of before (as vague as they are) and I focused more on the class clown, the “comedian” of my past, and less on any real trouble I might have caused. Have I been absolved because Sharon London doesn’t hate me? Not really. But right now, it’s feeling like a nice start.

Today is one of those days. You know the ones. They go like this:

“OK, class, today we are studying libel. I have prepared a PowerPoint for…

“Ummm, the projector doesn’t seem to be working. No problem. Instead we’ll go back into the computer lab and begin work on an independent study unit. Log in as…

“Six of you can’t log in? I see. No worries, let’s try…”

After struggling to find log-ins and coordinating passwords for the final six, I notice a student, one of the ones whose computer works all too perfectly, watching a booty-shaking, Shorty-gettin’-low rap video.

My voice shoots up an octave.

“Brendan,WeDon’tWatchMusicVideosinClass…andYouOweMe$6…25centsFor EachCussWordThatJustSpewedIntoMyClassroom.”

And it goes up another half-octave more into the screechy “Nightmare Before Christmas” kind of voice…

“You’veAlready FinishedTheUnit? DidyouREALLYReadIt orDidYouJustSkim? AnswerTheQuestions? YouDid? JustSitQuietlyThen.”

Then the bell rings.

Today was that kind of day.

I spent all of seminar just signing students in and out of my class. For an hour and a half, I wished I could have recorded my words so I didn’t have to repeat them.

“I need your pink ‘here’s where I’m heading’ form. While I am completing your Green Card, please make sure you have signed the Student Accountability Clipboard. We’ll need to make sure that the Green Card and the Clipboard agree as to what time you left. Don’t forget to sign back in when you return and give your Green Card back to me. If you are planning to leave the room again, we will need to repeat the entire process. Yes, you can have a paper clip to attach your Green Card to your shirt. Yes, I know it sounds like you are an illegal alien seeking legal work status…”

AndThenItWasLunchTimeAndIReallyJustNeededToGetOutsideOfTheBuilding. IRushedToTheDoorAndTheMostAmazingThingHappened.

Iopenedthedoor,

theairrushedtowardme,

Isteppedoutside

and the sunshine hit my shoulders .

A l l o f a s u d d e n,

I j u s t s l o w e d d o w n .

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With the nearly five inches of drizzly rain punctuated by a few sudden cloudbursts (and, yes, a few tornadoes) that drenched Kansas City in the past few weeks, everything is beautiful here… green and slightly squishy. The mornings dawn as crisp as a Jonathan apple with temperatures in the high 40s. When I get up the moon is still bright, when I escape the building for lunch, it’s bright outside. Downright cheery.

There’s something about fall that I’ve never really appreciated. We’ve just come out of what we always perceive as the relax-in-the-sun, “let’s-go-on-vacation” days of summer. The pool no longer calls to us. I don’t feel pressured to make sure I am having a good time. Fall makes me slow down. Makes me take time to notice the leaves’ slow transition from green to gold to orangey-red. It forces me to notice the changing quality of light as we move from the brilliance of summer to the stark shades of winter. The prairie flowers have dressed the land in autumn’s earthy shades. The garden calls to me, offering the final harvest. The pear tree challenges me to find uses for its fruit. The Ziploc bags of applesauce stacked in the freezer speak of tiny apples too small to peel but too numerous let fall to the ground.

The dark days of January are the ones we see as a time of reinvention and renewal. I have never been good at New Year’s Resolutions. There’s too much on my plate, too much pressure. I’m too tired from celebrating Christmas and the New Year and the likelihood is too great that I will fail. But fall… fall is slower and so much safer. Transition is in the air as we anticipate the beauty of frost-etched windows and a snow-blanketed world, all while clinging to the warmth and lushness of summer. I’m summer lean right now (well, as lean as I’ve been for a while). Rather than work to diet away the excesses of the holidays and the layer of fat I put on in winter (to keep me warm, of course), I will start now just to avoid the whole thing. Rather than wait until the organizational sales of spring cleaning, perhaps now, at the beginning of the school year, is the more appropriate time for me to get my filing system organized, to get those notebooks put together, to throw away the things that clutter my desk and my life. Rather than catching up, I’m choosing to plan ahead.

Isn’t that what autumn, the season of the harvest, is all about? Saving the bounty of this season to tide us over. Capturing summer’s season of growth in a little bag of applesauce. Organizing and planning ahead. Preparing for the busy-ness of that comes with the holidays by taking time to breathe now.

Gotta go. I’ve got a sunset to watch.

Working with kids does funny things to me. For example, it makes me older and younger. Older, because I worry for their sake about bullies and the nutritional deficiencies of Hot Cheetos and the harm gossip can cause; younger, because I get REALLY. EXCITED. about coloring and recess. It also makes me nerdier and cooler. Nerdier, because I spend a large amount of my day extolling the virtues of reading and randomly asking 10 year-olds to spell the word they just said; cooler, because I SO know the latest gossip.

Working with children also makes me a pseudo-parent. True, there are few habits, activities or considerations I have in common with real parents (e.g., I am actively concerned if I go more than a week without going out, and I “stress” about whether I will “have enough money for spring break”). But working with children brings out a few parent-like mannerisms. For example, I’m given to starting sentences with, “I tell my kids…” or “My kids…”

And I don’t know if actual parents have time for this, but I also seize on parenting literature. I could make it halfway down the magazine aisle at the grocery store and have to turn back to check out “10 Activities to Make Your Child a Genius.” I take an extra moment to linger at the teaser titles on the cover of “Parents” before moving onto “US Weekly.” And if there’s ANYTHING about disciplining teenagers, forget it. I’m so engrossed I’ll risk smacking into a 16-tier display of ketchup.
Today my parenting-literature phenomenon and dichotomous-effects-of-working-with-children coalesced when I read this article about disciplining children. Turns out (as anyone who has perused a brochure in a social service lobby knows), it’s better to reward good behavior than punish the bad. And p.s., kids act out for attention. And it dawned on me: Working with children has made me parent-like, certainly; I am devoted to summoning utmost patience to offer support, encouragement and yes, discipline. Just as much, though, it has made me child-like; I am absolutely thrilled with attention from my students.

A few students rushed up to hug me on my first day back. It was like the salve of Mom telling me I was a Very Special, Beautiful Young Lady during my adolescent years, during which I could have been sympathetically described as a wholesome-looking mutant. Then, a particularly tough, evasive student responded to my messages about an upcoming meeting. It was like the comfort of, when you’re sure you’ve been screwing up big-time at work, your boss telling you she wishes more employees were like you. And an eighth-grader with a GPA below 2.0 wrote me a lengthy thank-you card. I carry that card in my purse, the same way others carry pictures of smiling grandchildren or really profound cookie fortunes.

Either the positive-reinforcement model is true for all ages or I’m a childlike sucker for attention. Maybe it’s because I’m a Leo. Regardless, my job rocks, and I’ve got quite the stockpile of parenting tips.

I’m not sure why I opted to return a shirt to the Gap near Times Square on a Saturday. Especially when I have a choice among 207 Gap stores in New York City. But I found myself in a crowded store, bobbing and weaving through masses of tourists, in search of a short line. I thought I was clever by going to the Body section instead of Women’s because the line was 75 percent shorter. But somehow my transaction ended up taking 15 minutes. I’m not sure if my cashier or the computer was to blame, but I was only given $3 instead of $23 back, and even though I’m not one for math I noticed.

After multiple walkie-talkie discussions, a manager came to help my cashier figure it out. Then they had to call another back-up person to get to the bottom of it. They decided the solution was to count all the money in the register and then give me the difference. This made me nervous for a number of reasons. Mainly because my receipt said how much I was owed and I seriously questioned the counting and calculating skills of these people. Normally, my annoyance by the situation and location would’ve sent me in a hissy fit. Normally, I would be screaming in my head, “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE JUST LET ME RETURN MY YELLOW SHIRT AND GET ON WITH MY DAY.” Normally I would’ve sighed and rolled my eyes and looked at my watch. But I’m trying to not let things get on my nerves so much. And I’m happy to say that I’ve been making progress.

While I stood there waiting patiently and pleasantly, I listened in on the conversations the other cashier, Heidi, was having with her customers. I learned that her sister works at Anthropologie and they’re having a really good sale right now. Heidi’s shirt was from Anthropologie and she got it at the sale (it was a navy pattern and very cute, but clashed with the black shirt she was wearing underneath). I also learned that Heidi had traveled around Europe. And that she was obsessed with music.

I’ve frequently noticed what catchy music the Gap plays and often repeat the lyrics in my head, trying to remember them until I get home and can download them. This never works. I either forget the lyrics or didn’t hear them correctly (“Hold me closer, Tony Danza,” anyone?) But I had never thought to stop to ask a Gap employee what was playing. And I never thought a Gap employee would run to the back of the store to check. But that’s exactly what Heidi did when her customer talked to her about how much she loved the song that was playing and Heidi offered to look. Of course I can’t remember the name of the musician Heidi reported back, but it was a one-word name and I think she was Swiss. Or was it Dutch?

Which got me thinking about the soundtrack of our lives. Even when the music stops, there are still other noises to our soundtracks, many of which are out of our control. Traffic. Conversations. Rain. Elevator pings. Closing doors. Flushing toilets. Cell phones. Chopped vegetables. Footsteps. Laughter. Vacuums. Air conditioners. When you stop to pay attention — to be in the moment and not block out all the distractions and clutter — what do you hear? Is the sound of life what you expected?

Writer’s note: I had this idea to write about three of my former teachers who continue to have an impact on the way I live. Other than my mom, no one has had a greater influence on my life than my teachers. They give so much and even though I think teachers have the most rewarding job, I don’t think we can ever thank them enough. So I began to write and I had too much to say about each one. It would have been a thisordinaryday.com word-count record, and then some. Each teacher deserved her own entry. So I decided to break this into three, all called heroes, because that’s who these women are. They are my heroes. This is the final entry.

Patti Winkler

Last year, before college graduation, my mom wrote a letter to Patti Winkler, my favorite teacher when I was in middle school.

Patti wrote my mom and me both letters back in July, almost 14 months later. She had three datelines on the letter and said this was her third version.

“To my embarrassment,” she said, “I was unable to fully express what I wanted.”

I know how that is. The letter Patti sent me has been sitting on my desk for almost two months. I battled to come up with a way to show her my appreciation – not just for her letter, but the impact she had on my life.

On my last day of middle school, in 1999, I gave Patti a letter, because my mom had advised me she would value a letter more than any gift. I don’t remember the letter, but Patti said I detailed why I appreciated her as a teacher, person and role model. In the last paragraph, I covered the program I was going to develop to recognize teachers when I became a pro basketball player or golfer.

Well, with the help of Susan Massy and Christy Bradford, I became a writer. I may not have the funds to start that program, but I do have the power of words. And as my mom said, words are much more meaningful than gifts or money. So that’s when I decided to write about three of my teachers*. My heroes.

*I hope anyone who has read these essays will contact an old teacher who helped change your life. I’m sure it would mean more to those teachers than any awards or praise they’ve ever received from their peers.

With Christy Bradford and Susan Massy, I realized pretty early that they were teachers I needed to let in. But with Patti Winkler, I wasn’t so sure.

My first day of seventh grade at Hocker Grove was also the first day for Patti at a new school. She had Respect by Aretha Franklin playing on a CD player.

Middle school kids can be cruel. They’re trying to figure out the world and figure out themselves and figure out why they have hair down there and why their bodies are changing. And as they’re going through all these changes, they don’t really know how to act. So they act mean.

Middle school has to be the toughest age to teach and control. Patti wanted to make sure she was in control of her classroom. So she made a big deal about respect. I remember thinking that first day that this lady was kind of a hardass, or at least was trying to give off the façade that she was a hardass. As the bell rang at the end of class, I made a smart aleck remark, trying to get her to loosen up, maybe realize that we all weren’t punks. Before I could apologize for my remark, Patti was laughing.

I wanted her to let her guard down, because she didn’t need to be guarded. It wasn’t a song or chewing out a troublemaker that was going to get her respect. It was the way she was: her passion in front of a classroom*, her energy and how much she cared that would win us over.

*Patti taught history, a subject that wasn’t one of my favorites. But she was one of those teachers who would make you care. She was crazy in the classroom. I know time can make us exaggerate things in our head, but I remember Patti’s classroom as like a showroom. In my memory, she was dancing and singing about history on top of tables.

Eventually, of course, I learned Patti wasn’t a hardass.

I used to get migraines and would miss almost one day of school a week. Patti would collect my homework from every teacher and have it ready for my mom after school, because she cared.

And so I returned the favor — I cared too. In her July letter, she wrote, “You gave all of you, every day; you wanted to learn; and most importantly, you were always ready to share your sense of humor.”

Middle-schoolers want to act like they don’t care about anything, but she made us care.

Patti wanted us to dream. We were ready to show that we were growing up and maturing, but she made us dreamers again.

And I was a dreamer – even if those dreams were unrealistic. My dreams made me work hard. My work ethic now comes from the hours I would spend every day in the gym as a teenager, demanding perfection from myself.

Patti never saw me play basketball, but she was the first one to come into my life – outside of my family and coaches — who really believed in me. Maybe she didn’t believe in my basketball skills, but she knew I was going to make something of myself, and she made sure I realized that. She did so by calling me out, making me realize that she had high expectations for me and that I had potential.

After seventh grade, Patti made the move to eighth grade with my class. She requested that I be in her classes. She would also ask for my assistance with any special programs in school and recommended me when our school adopted a peer mediator program. She made sure I knew that she thought of me as more than just one of her students, and that made me work my butt off to make sure I made her proud.

Patti said at the end of her letter, “Dream. Look to your heroes. Continue setting your goals.”

Well, she doesn’t need to worry. I’m still a dreamer. And I do look to my heroes, and she is one of them. Just like Christy Bradford and Susan Massy, Patti Winkler’s passion rubbed off on me, and my biggest goal is to live every day in a way that would make them proud of me. I think that’s the best thank you I can give.