Pay Attention

There are things you never notice you're noticing. Expectations of sorts. Like a breath. When it stops even momentarily, you notice, but the million and one breaths you took the hours before go unnoticed. Day in and day out.

Every day after lunch my students ask if we can go to the park so they can play on the equipment, chase each other around in a game of tag, or madly launch themselves to the sky on the swing set. If the weather isn't particularly nasty, we go. I need it as much as they do. Being inside all day with the venting system and the overhead lights gets to me as much as it gets to them. I need daylight. I need fresh air. I need to see birds fly and busses go by and even the drug dealers at the corner store. These are solids and my life diet just doesn't feel complete until I touch my shoes to the wet park grass or sit on the park bench and watch the girls play.

I always loved the catalpa tree at the edge of the park. It was enormous and its shade cooled the park on hot fall and spring days, its leaves whistled in the wind, and the branches snaked and stretched like some old man rising to greet the day. Even without its heart-shaped leaves, the tree was dignified and inviting. With thick, sturdy limbs all the kids wanted to climb on it, but with liability issues, such adventure was discouraged. Still, we used the tree for art projects. We drew its expanse in our field journals. We wrote poems about tree. We talked about the function of bark and counted the ripples at the trunk of the tree.

I knew the tree was important to me. I knew that my need to go to the park as often as I could during the day was more about the tree than the fresh air or the delight in watching the girls play. I knew the tree was a way I could center myself on a busy day, a way I could disconnect from the stress of teaching and reconnect with the calming beauty of the natural world. The tree was a little wilderness escape in the middle of an urban life.

With our recent tragic windstorm many things were lost. Our electricity. Some lost parts or all of their homes. Some lost loved ones.

I lost the tree. Or maybe we all did.


The tree fell in a great crackling heap pulling up the sidewalk along with it. All the pieces are still there, weeks after the "storm of the century." Caution tape surrounds it and limbs upon limbs are piled up like stacked twigs ready to start a fire.

The girls went out the other day and drew a picture of the downed tree. Then they wrote odes to the tree finding the poetry of loss in the upturned roots and split bark. Over New Year's Eve someone must have celebrated by it for at the base of the great wreakage are beer cans, a champagne and vodka bottle, and cigarette butts. One student wrote a simple ode-- "You are alone now, your only friends champagne and vodka..." while others wrote about the age of the tree..."Older than me, I hope my death is as brave..."

One student took a shoot from the base of the tree and placed it in a plastic cup filled with water in the classroom. "I'm hoping," she told me, "I'm really hoping we can save a memory of that tree."

They noticed, didn't they? I noticed, too, though I hadn't really noticed how much I'd noticed. Still sometimes, when we go to the park now, I can still hear the leaves hum in the wind. They sing what they've always sung and now I'm noticing. "Pay attention" they say, "Pay attention."