Get e-book WildFlowers: a memoir of an inner city high school teacher

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online WildFlowers: a memoir of an inner city high school teacher file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with WildFlowers: a memoir of an inner city high school teacher book. Happy reading WildFlowers: a memoir of an inner city high school teacher Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF WildFlowers: a memoir of an inner city high school teacher at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF WildFlowers: a memoir of an inner city high school teacher Pocket Guide.
WildFlowers: A Memoir Of An Inner City High School Teacher [Judy Fitch] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. As a senior high school teacher.
Table of contents

Instead the parishioners try to find ways to occupy them during Mass. Many people attend the coffee hour after Mass, filling their plates several times with cakes and cookies. Sometimes people ask if they can take a plate home to hungry family members, and the woman in charge always finds a little more.

Once, while helping out, I asked about a man in work clothes who came in during a rainstorm without an umbrella. I was told he was a recovering alcoholic struggling to get back on his feet. I asked how I could help and was suddenly in the middle of an impromptu conference with several women who discussed what he needed, what they believed he would accept, and how I should approach him. Now, each Sunday, I make him a package of fruit, soup, and crackers. I trace my religious roots to Central Florida, where horses, cattle, and barbed wire make up most of the landscape.

Essays on Poetry

Jesus is a popular figure there; the billboards tell you so. I went to an Assembly of God church. Every Sunday a painted-over school bus picked up my next-door neighbors, Sissy and Tommy, and me. We were supposed to be getting saved and asking God to forgive us our sins, but mainly I went to church to see Mark. I longed for him to press me up against the Sunday-school wall when no one was looking.

Mark took up with Ellie instead, and I watched from two pews behind while he slid his arm around her spaghetti-strapped shoulders. My sixteen-year-old brain was flooded with envy, lust, and anger — three of the seven deadly sins.

Sorry, we can't find the page you're looking for!

Why was I praying for a boy to run his hands up my shirt — something that could bring nothing more than ephemeral pleasure? So I prayed for Sissy and little Tommy, my parents and grandparents, my cousins and friends, and even Mark and Ellie.

Sissy told me she saw Mark and Ellie groping each other under the canopied oak, but I barely listened. Instead I just gazed out the bus window at the grazing cattle, the bales of hay beside them, the sun high above the horizon.

Wildflowers : A Memoir of an Inner City High School Teacher

Church was the place where I yearned for a boy. Out here was where I truly saw God. I grew up in a secular Jewish family that celebrated Passover and Hanukkah but never attended synagogue. I became an atheist at sixteen. In college I majored in piano performance. Needing income, I auditioned for an organist position at a church.

Other than two hours of practice, I had never touched an organ nor had I ever attended a church service , but I was an excellent faker and got the job. For the first few Sundays a choir member cued me through the order of the service. I played only on the keyboards at first, then gradually figured out how to incorporate the pedals. My organ career has now spanned twenty-five years. I have worked for three Christian denominations and played more than three thousand services. As my musicianship developed, so did my understanding of Scripture, the cycles of the church year, and the profound interconnectedness of music and worship.

Search Our 40 Years of Archives

I have never come out as an atheist to any of my employers. The pastors and congregants who tell me that the Holy Spirit surely moves through my music also proclaim that atheists are destroying the world.

When Mark and I began dating, I pointed out that our worldviews were vastly different. I had no ties to religion, although I had adopted many customs from my indigenous roots. I wrote my own prayers and practiced my own rituals, free from patriarchy and gurus. We knew the odds were against us.

I would share my feelings and worries — sometimes aloud — with their images, which seemed to listen. Occasionally I brought a small ofrenda of food, drink, or tobacco. Mark knew all this and seemed to respect my spirituality at first. He read endlessly to me from the Bible, and I gathered what wisdom I could from those words. It had taken time for me to develop a rapport with his teenage daughters, but his son and I hit it off immediately.

I recognized myself in this beautiful boy, whose spirit seemed to carry a balance of masculine and feminine energy. Mark struggled to get along with his son. Within days Mark broke up with me, and I was ousted from the family. Mark insisted this had nothing to do with my suggestion about his son and everything to do with the way I worshipped, and I believed him.

I even took my altar down for a while, entering a lonely period of soul-searching. But now I can see it all clearly: Mark was so blinded by his devotion to Christ that he could not see his own son. My holy trinity: the scale, the mirror, the calorie-counting app on my phone. Every day I stand in front of the mirror and lift my shirt to examine my stomach.

Every meal I enter the food I eat into my calorie-counting app. Every week I step on the scale with a mixture of dread and excitement. Instead of losing myself in the divine or among a throng of fellow believers, I am physically disappearing. Thirteen years ago, when I was seventy-two, I regularly saw a group of children waiting for the school bus in the mobile-home court where I live. They entertained themselves with mischief: chasing one another into the street, breaking a split-rail fence while pretending to ride it like a horse, and scratching a vehicle as they ran around it.

They needed supervision, so I began waiting at the bus stop with them. When snow and ice made it dangerous for me to walk there, because I am vision impaired, my driveway became the bus stop. The children like to hear stories about my childhood and are amused that I wore pinafores and underpants my mother sewed from flour sacks.

They are amazed that all the gadgets they have were not invented yet and that I did not see television until I was fourteen. One morning a large bull moose suddenly appeared from the backyard. No one run, and no one talk. The moose walked up to a girl, lowered his head to sniff her, then turned and walked away.

Substitute Teacher - Key & Peele

Excited children boarded the bus that day. Sometimes a child comes early to talk privately to me about a problem with a parent, a sibling, a friend, or a teacher. I listen and give an extra hug along with some encouragement. One morning a girl told me her grandmother had just died of cancer. One boy moved away, then returned after two years. We clung to each other as the earth surged violently beneath us.

A blog for civic renewal

I am not affiliated with any religion and do not attend any church. My religion is the love I share with these children, year after year. After moving back to our hometown, my wife and I began attending Mass at St. We found a true sense of community in the parish, and we liked the pastor, who seemed to have a good heart. One Sunday a visiting priest came to say Mass, and in his homily he suddenly began discussing the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. We should have, too, and I am sorry we did not. This priest said the only answer was to rid the priesthood of gay men, and he implied that gay people should be excluded from the Church completely.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, a group of about fifteen congregants stood and applauded when he had finished his sermon. All of you.