Today in my big classroom cabinet, I found the notebook that I kept in the summer of 2002, when Maddy and I went to Puebla, Mexico to study Spanish.  It’s a pleasure to see my old notes: vocabulary, diary entries, exercises, idioms and tongue twisters, all in Spanish.  Here’s a couple of tongue twisters, or trabalenguas:

Tres triste tigres tragaban trigo en un trigal.  En un trigal tragaban trigo tres triste tigres.

Erre con erre cigarro/erre con erre barrile/rapidas corren y rueden/las rapidas reudas del ferrocarril.

I left the notebook out on a table, and began my teaching day.  During 5th period, my student Jonathan Fajardo handed me my notebook, open to a poem I wrote, and said, “I like this.  You ought to publish it.”  I had completely forgotten it:

I would like to be in a circus,

a circus of middle age.

If I could, I’d wear a long red wig

purple stockings, and my heart

on my sleeve,

like now, but more obvious.

I would blow kisses to babies

frighten the young

and tenderly embrace the old.

If I could, I would dance on a wire

to express my hopes and fears,

gaze down at upturned faces

and throw candy

into their midst.

I would sing a song

to erase regret

and teach it to everyone.

I would throw the balls high into the air

to remind the young

that in the midst of constant change

and on the verge of chaos

fun is always possible.

Needs work, but I like the sentiment.  The language has a ways to go yet.

Two reasons I am leaving my classroom now — one: there is a rat in my classroom, and our attempt to trap it in a humane trap last night did not work, so the exterminators are coming.  And two: I have a leak in my sprinkler system and when I left for work today, the earth was soaking wet and water was bubbling up as if from an underground spring.  Charming, but not a good idea during a drought.  Expensive, and wasteful.