Thursday, June 16, 2011

FF Person of The Week, 290th week in a row!


Guess who?!

Wednesday of this fun-filled week, when I took The Boy into preschool, I noticed his teacher was in a lot of pain. She has a mystery malady they’re trying to diagnose; all they know for sure is that it hurts like holy hell. Yesterday morning, her eyes screamed: extreme pain + lack of sleep. I was not surprised to find she had already left when I picked up The Boy in the afternoon.

On the ride home, I asked him about her. He said, she left early. Then he changed the subject.

Squirrel!!

Next chance I got, I tried to chase down the teacher topic again. This time he mentioned she had been crying. I said, you saw her cry? He said, yeah. Then he mentioned the song we were listening to, and that it was a good one.

Music!!

I couldn’t help thinking about his poor teacher. She’s in her twenties or thirties (it’s hard to tell; chronic pain adds years to your eyes) and has a lifetime of this bullshit to look forward to. It vexed me, but I didn’t press The Boy any further on the issue. It didn’t seem to have phased him, and I didn’t want to draw a big, red circle around it to make sure he was traumatized by it.

Out of the blue that night, The Boy announced he was going to make a drawing for his teacher and immediately got to work on this intricate, colored piece of work. It’s something they’ve printed-out a lot of at his school; it’s a circle, but it has an intricate array of almost stained glass window-type tiles and sunburst shapes drawn inside of it. He worked on it until dinner.

He worked on it after dinner. He didn’t finish it until after breakfast this morning, just before we left for school. Over the course of the time he spent working on it, he occasionally reminded us, I’m making this for [his teacher].

Now, nobody asked him to do this. Or suggested it, or implied it… I know this because I asked him, and he looked at me like I had rocks in my head, and said “no” with every bit of disdain a well-mannered 5.5-year-old can muster. Just to make sure I had it straight, he added, This is my idea.

He reminds me of my Dad, more and more.

Much to my surprise (based on her early exit the day before), we found his teacher there this morning, so The Boy was able to give her his drawing in person. It turned out, she was just stopping in on her way to have Boise’s answer to Dr. House try to figure out why her body is punishing her like this.

But it gave The Boy the chance to give her his drawing in person. He had me cut the circle out this morning, and I noticed that on the back, he had written his name, and hers (carefully copied), along with an “I love you” and I’m pretty sure some Angry Birds ephemera in the margins for good measure.

I’ll have to check tonight when I pick him up, but I’d be willing to go out on a limb and bet that none of the other little boys made their teacher a pretty picture last night because they had seen her cry. And judging from her reaction, I don’t think she was expecting any others to, either.

For maybe 15-30 seconds of an otherwise truly shitty day, he had lifted her spirits and made her actually happy. Her kind of pain makes periods of happy infrequent and fleeting, but even more precious.

And that small, self-actuated act of kindness, in addition to all the usual reasons, is why The Boy is Fang’s Forum Person Of The Week—still.

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