ess

Spent Saturday squatting on the steps of the capitol in the gathering dusk. The building looked good from far away, but running up to it, it was too clean, a facade. Gnats vibrated all around. It was a ghost town downtown there, and I got paranoid and kept making turns onto side alleyways that turned out to be streets that all led the same place. Nobody told me it would be so small, Jackson, an empty core, with plastic suburbs all around. I kept coming back to it inadvertently, a big old plantation house covered in cheap white paint sitting like an overturned shoebox on the sidewalk on the street, pillars like giant matchsticks, with no more pride than an abandoned couch.
Minutes before leaving Oxford I had torn apart my part of the room searching for a swimsuit to wear by the pool. I didn't find it, and I'd gone through all my drawers twice, a tornado, but more thorough, a tropical storm. That's the thing about wearing too much black, you lose things easily. So I sat reading Delta Autumn in my running shorts like a tourist. It was actually interesting, not like ploughing at all. Time passed, the rubber strips of lawnchair stuck to the back of my legs. Girls in bikinis drank bloody marys, played marvyn gaye, and splashed in the pool. There was smoking and laughter and the tinkling of ice in glasses. Except to turn pages, I didn't move. Had I opened my binder for even a second I would have found there my swimsuit, migrated, some kind of cruel joke. I'd say irony but that would be cheapening.
Teaching went much better today than it did last week. Last week I didn't feel like I was in control. They were disciplined but not contributing. Today they actually raised their hands, they had things to say. It wasn't a flashy lesson, there was no miracle working, I just did it by the book, but I had them, they were learning. Even the boys in the back. It's pretty satisfying, to do okay.