Hey Regular Reader, Happy New Year!
What’s that? It’s not off to a great start? Really? I hadn’t noticed. Well, maybe I had an inkling when every person I knew got Covid between Christmas and New Years. It was a buzzkill of a New Years Eve. Forget the champagne, America was hopped up on NyQuil and in bed by 9:30pm.
We at Casa Baird, having had Covid last year and being vaxxed, obviously… still got it again. My husband tested positive the morning after Christmas – – a day we spent with his entire extended family making sure we all drank out of the same glass while trading pieces of chewed up gum. But, it’s fine.
I mean, we did throw our family into the White Whoosh and drive home immediately after his positive test. (To be clear, that’s home from Philadelphia, but no big deal.) So what if we drove with the windows open, wearing double masks for five hours? We love super loud, freezing cold, drives up the blighted northeast corridor. Ask either of our teenage daughters. I’m sure you’ll get two giant thumbs up for that bit of family bonding. Like I said, it’s totally fine.
At least we contained the virus with the jaunt in our rolling wind tunnel. Except, no. I’ll refer you to my point above, everyone got it best we can tell. Though here’s a plot twist: we couldn’t tell. We tested a lot, but that’s when the world realized that sticking a Q-tip up your nose was actually a party game meant for New Years Eve. The tests were supposed to shoot glitter into the air after you waited the 15 minutes, but that component was stuck in the shipping delays.
So basically, 2022 is off to a rip roaring start. Which is why I think I was called again to be a substitute teacher. What better way to ensure the continued success of this year than to bring me in?
Regular Readers may recall that I subbed for a Pre-K class last year and was able to showcase my many hidden talents including, but not limited to, drawing unicorns. This year I advanced to first grade where the main focus for much of the day was phonics. Given that phonics are the building blocks of spelling and grammar, and given that I’m a writer not an editor, I obviously had no idea what was going on.
The class began by annotating a morning greeting written on an easel. They circled and underlined and divided words up. I tried to look engaged and wore my best ‘phonics are important’ look. And, when the main teacher reminded them about not starting a sentence with the word ‘and,’ I nodded.
Hmm.
I also noticed that they kept putting stars by certain words. I had no idea what the stars, scattered about like so much fairy dust, meant or what made them star-worthy.
“Psssst.” I whispered to a bright eyed girl sitting near me, “why are those words starred?”
She nodded at my question, clearly she thought it was a good and relevant one. “Well, those are wonder words.”
“Wonder words?” I asked, “What does that mean?”
I had this idea that maybe they were special words full of magic…
She nodded again. “Well, wonder words are words we wonder about,” she whispered breathlessly, “like, ‘I wonder why it’s spelled that way’ and we don’t know so… we just wonder.”
She shrugged as if to say, life was a mystery, and there in first grade that reality was made plain through words like ‘you’ and ‘have’ and ‘I,’ words that didn’t follow the rules, and no one knew why.
I had to stop and contemplate this idea. Things that made no sense, things we couldn’t explain, things that seemingly fell into our lives with no order or structure or logic or common sense… where had I run into that lately? Where had I personally felt some – and I paused to try replacing what I had thought was my frustration, exasperation, and utter incredulousness with – wonder.
Did other things that made no sense have wonder to them? Wonder on-again-off-again CDC regulations? Wonder mask mandates in this town but not that town? Wonder rapid tests that stopped being effective in any timely manner? Wonder sports league protocols? Oooooh oooooh, wonder trash sticker rules? Wonder infinite wait times for PCR tests? Wait, wait, what about Wonder Marty the robot at Stop and Shop? Wonder supply chain issues! Wonder people that don’t leash their dogs on roads! Wonder weekly meal planning! Wonder teenagers!!
I was on a roll. Because, well, so many things don’t make sense right now.
So perhaps, we need to remember at least one of those first grade phonics rules. Perhaps we need to let some of the craziness of our current world simply be a cause for… wonder.