I’m talking to myself.  The book is the notebook I made a list in on Thursday, on the way home from session 16 and a long dinner with my two assistants.  It was a very pleasant dinner, I thought.   The heavy bags I’d struggled with rushing to the session in a downpour (my pancho and ziplocks were indispensable)  were much lighter walking from the restaurant.  When I put on my backpack with the laptop, cameras and stands and picked up my duffle bagI thought I must have forgotten to pack something when I left the classroom.   My bags were much heavier when I set out, they were lighter when I hefted them to leave after the session and a nice dinner with these two intelligent women I hope to expand the workshop with.

On the train Thursday evening I made notes of calls I need to make, emails I must not forget to write, follow-ups, most of them, things to push the program forward when the school year ends in three weeks at our current site.  I was leaving for a long weekend, everyone was and I’d take care of all business on Tuesday when the business week resumed.    Only Tuesday found me staring at the cracked walls, the buckling ceiling and the missing tiles on the unwashed floor.  I remember thinking “what the fuck?”   I thought it many times, but I did not open the book to look over the checklist of my tasks.   At 1 a.m. I took a bike ride.

Today was Wednesday for me.  Some will call it Thursday, since it is 2 a.m. and technically they are correct.  It is 2:11 a.m. Thursday.  But for me it is still Wednesday, the day I woke up to 14 or 15 hours ago.  I could not open the book.  Did not open it.   Poetry may have spilled out of it like a delicious drink on the sandpaper tongue of a parched man, face and facade about to crack, but nothing could tempt me to open it.  I would not, did not.   I wrote a pleasant email to a lovely polymath, the inventor of many things scientific who has in recent decades turned his great mind to the problem of educating primary school children.   You may have heard of Sugata Mitra, I hope you have.  If you’ve been paying attention you have heard me go on about him.  Wonderful man, I wrote him a pleasant email today.  It took a very short time.  My small committee, two excellent writers who read these kind of letters for me and fire back their comments, both wrote back quickly to say it was just about ready to go.  I made one quick pass, trimmed a few sentences, sent it off to Mitra in Newcastle, found his personal email address, shot a copy across the pond to him over there too.

But I did not open the book with my list of important reminders in it.  It was as though I didn’t want to be reminded of the steep uphill climb.   I walked to Target in the Bronx, bought t-shirts and a pot to cook in (I have one to piss in).   I found cauliflower for $2.50 and bought a head, took it home, reduced it to a bowl of florets, chopped garlic, ginger, jalapeno peppers, made suki gobi out of it in the suddenly humid NYC summer.  Listened to the Yankees get stomped by the hapless Mets and then took another bike ride, working the heart and lungs.

But I did not open the book.  No force in the world could get me to reach on to the chair, extract it from the open blue bag and pull back that heavy cover.   The cover of that book weighs I do not know how many metric tons.