And Then ...

[copied from dland]

It's Monday night, I've already posted, but I'm getting a head start for tomorrow because I just saw Meryl Streep win a Golden Globe and make a speech, and K and I were talking aobout her early film roles, and so I've got a Sophie's Choice anecdote to share.

Now, if you haven't read the book or seen the movie, this is a spoiler, but since they came out 30 years ago (or thereabouts), I think I'm on safe ground.

In brief, Sophie is a Polish Holocaust survivor who was forced upon her entry to the concentration camp to choose which of her two small children would be given the opportunity to be saved and which would die. For reasons which we are asked to imagine -- not spelled out in the story -- she chooses life for her son, her older child, and death for her smaller daughter.

At some time after the movie came out -- which was 1982, actually, so this was a few years after that -- the topic of the story came up in the faculty room, how it would be an impossible decision for any mother to make (which is why it was so tragic, of course), and my pal The Other Chai, then and now the mother of an only child, ultimately concluded that Sophie made the only choice anyone could, because she saved her firstborn, and every mother feels a special -- and greater -- love for her firstborn than she could for any other child.

The others in the room, mothers of multiple children, had no reply. We looked at her, in some cases, with dropped jaws. Do you really need to have more than one child to get that? Uh ... isn't that what the book was about?

---

Tuesday Afternoon

Great name for a song.

So we have printers in the library, lovely new excellent printers. We still have five computers yet to be installed (because the architect had computer furniture installed that blocks the electrical outlets) and the teacher's computer in the computer lab/classroom installed (because the architect didn't plan for an electrical outlet at the front of the room) and our photocopier is still on order (but due within a week or two, I hope.) All that and about 300 bookends (also on order) and we'll be up to speed. The day keeps me busy, and that keeps me happy.

It's cold at last, for what that's worth. I haven't heard of any snow in the forecast yet, but the temperature's dropping. It's not that I like it, but I do like the whole normalness of it.

I pulled a muscle in my back this morning, not a big deal, but I thought that the weight machines at the gym wouldn't be the thing for it. I put on a heat wrap when I got home, so I'm hoping for a better tomorrow on that. How did I pull a muscle? I reached for the tea bags on an upper shelf -- with my right arm -- and felt a lower-left back muscle spasm. How does that work, anyway? (And no "neck bone connected to the head bone" please. I get it, I get it.)

What I'm doing here is trying not to write about a local tragedy, a wonderful man who died unexpectedly on Friday, but it's all I can really think about. He was unbelievably community-minded, had a wonderful family ... we're all very sad here. I've known him a long time, as his late mother-in-law worked at my school for many years. He was only 48, and left four children, the oldest of whom gave him CPR, but the heart attack was massive. I tried to go to the wake this afternoon, but the line was literally out the door; I heard that last night the line was three hours long. It seems that everyone in town knew him or his wife or her sister (my kids' first grade teacher) or one or more of his kids, two of whom are already out of the high school and the youngest not yet in it. What can I say. It's overpowering around here.

Okay, so I didn't manage to avoid that very well, but I guess it's better that I didn't. And on that note ...


WATCHING STILL STANDING :: ENTRY #1350