It is TCAP standardized testing week. We educators spend the entire school year planning for and teaching toward this week. So this is our culminating event, the big show, the icing on the cake. And, if I may be blunt, the documented most BORING week in the history of the world. Hours and hours of watching small children silently read and bubble small circles with #2 pencils. It makes watching paint dry my dream job. Today was day 1 of 4 scintillating days of this torture. I needed a drink after work and then a nap because my brain had glazed over and was comatose. As I was preparing for bed and anticipating another fascinating day of education at its best, I found myself depressed with the hours of mindlessness that stretches ahead. Then Tessa bounded in. Tessa is my new-ish kitten. She was on a tear, chasing . . . uh well, chasing something invisible that was tormenting her and which she was damn well going to kill if it was the last thing she did. She leaped upon the bed and was incensed that I moved my toes under the quilt. She attacked and killed the toe hordes and then suddenly flopped over and was asleep before she hit the quilt. I was quite entertained and as I put band aids on what was left of my toes I had this epiphany. I need to be smart like a kitten and learn to make my own entertainment. That will be my intellectual challenge for this week. Using my quiet time to chase my invisible dreams and create amusements that only I can see. Forgive my liberty. But I now pay homage to my favorite poet.
Mending Kitten
With apologies to Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a kitten,
That whirls into a twisting frenzy with a toe swell under the quilt
and claws and spits to kill the bed moles and decimate their evilness.
Then collapses into deep and total recumbent slack
Much as a rug spreads, inanimate, across a floor, boneless.
Good kittens make good people
because to love a kitten, to snuggle its soft fur and
tolerate the tiny fangs of its wild heritage to discover a satisfied purr
Is to find your fine and glorious inner humanity
Hidden from sight by the trash of the day and
the slog of modern life and muddled mindless human interaction
Good fences may make good neighbors but
Good kittens make good people.
