She got wet, coming and going

Emily takes a community service class at school. I’ll skip the WTForks here; suffice it to say they now teach doing good. An aside, though—I once asked a gentleman caller to the house, to pass time waiting for his date, what he did around his house; did he mow the grass? The look was true deer in the headlights and finally he said “No.”  Dummy me; in Hudson the lawn services block the roads five days a week with huge trailers holding industrial riding mowers and crews of men who mow grass for a living.

But, I digress. Two half days a week Emily assists in an elementary school classroom. There’s something hinky about this, too. I paid a $400 class fee for Emily to learn to do good, on top of every other school fee and 49 mills of school property taxes, so the school district can take a pass on a teacher’s assistant for the equivalent of one day out of five.

And while I’m at it, there seems to be an unwritten rule in this school district: anyone old enough to drive a car may. I’m sure the parents pay the additional two grand a year for car insurance, as well as providing Johnny a car and gas money. The point is, almost every one of them has a car. Emily, however, has no license and no car. This was another problem, apparently never encountered before in this school district.

When Emily was registering for her classes last spring she explained the service class to me and asked if she could ride with someone. My rule is unchanged; if she could not walk, she needed to find a different class. The teacher called me. She would select a conscientious classmate who drives. 

“Think again, my dear; she can walk or find an alternate class.”

“But the elementary school is just over a mile from the high school.”

“Not too bad; she can be there in twenty minutes.”

“What if the weather is really bad.” At this point Emily had spent a season working ski lifts in blinding snow and below zero weather. I held my phone at arm’s length, tapped my head on my desk a couple of times, them responded, “We’ll deal with that when it happens. If I learn she ever gets in a car with another student, she will spend the remainder of your class in study hall.”

It rained on and off most of this past week, and Wednesday it was on, all day. I picked Emily up after school, from book club, and asked how it went getting to the elementary school.  The rain was in her face all the way there and the front of her jeans was wet, though they dried before she walked back to the high school. The backs of her legs were wet this time, and she sat through book club on wet jeans, though they seemed pretty dry by now.

We’re building character, here.

This is the class, by the way, in which her little charges are drawing quilt blocks for her to make. I went into the studio tonight to take a picture of the progress.

When she turned it over she said, “Darn, I sewed a row upside down.”

“How can you tell?”

“The names…….oh well.”