Breaking the Hermit Habit

I’ve often wished to be a hermit. Have you ever read My Side of the Mountain? It’s about a boy, tired of living in a cramped apartment with too many siblings, who runs away to upstate New York to live on the family land his father has told him stories of. He makes a home inside a huge tree. He raises a hawk and teaches it to hunt.

Man, just hook up wifi in that tree and I’m there.

I work at a school, and that means along with not working (or getting paid) over the summer, I don’t work over winter break. Two whole weeks of no work, each and every year. What are you going to do? my coworkers always ask. Going anywhere?

Generally the answers are nothing and no. I’m gonna stay home. For two solid weeks, I’m gonna stay home and I’m not going to talk to ANYONE I don’t want to talk to. Now that’s a vacation. Last year was special, but most years I manage my two weeks of solitude. By the end of it I’m reluctant to speak to anyone, dreading going back to work…

Yeah. It’s probably not good for me. Here’s the thing I have to remember–I write about people. I write about things happening. I loved reading On Walden Pond, but I’ve never actually for even a moment wanted to write a book like that. I like action and movement and change. I want to write about people having amazing lives.

So yes. It’s good for me to know the stress of an office manager trying to arrange a field trip for two hundred thirty-five students, five teachers, eight teacher aides, and four buses, when the district suddenly changes the rules about how money can be spent. It’s good for me to experience the gentleman who has successfully completed an entire semester of law school so he’s quite certain he knows what my principal should and should not be doing in the running of the school. It’s good for me when one teacher comes down with the plague and is so determined not to let her kids down that she infects five teachers and fifty students before she gives up and goes home.

Yeah, all that stuff is good for me.

*cough*

All sarcasm aside, it is good for me, and good for my writing, to experience these things. The most amusing, amazing, frustrating, heartbreaking, glorious stories come through my office. With eight hundred preteens/teenagers and more than a hundred staff, every day is an adventure. I’ve talked eleven year olds out of trees and helped eight-inch lizards out of heating grates. I’ve been told every story from “no, miss, my dog really did eat my homework!” to “my dad threw a garbage can at me at two a.m. because he was mad the house was a mess.”† I’ve rescued kids from spiders and spiders from kids, wrangled stray dogs and stray children and even a few pigeons.

These are the things I remember when I have to go back to work after a glorious two weeks off. Everything, they say, is grist for the mill. My job, I think, has a bit more fiber to it than others–and I’m very lucky that it does.

Now if I could just remember how to get the computer to give me an accurate attendance count…

 † Yes, that resulted in a call to Chlid Protective Services. Obviously.