wealth and poverty

You must learn day by day, year by year to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about—the more you have left when anything happens.
--Ethel Barrymore

in the middle of screaming at my students the other day, i had the weirdest little fugue - i suddenly had a vision of no particular place but a mix of places i have been - iran, turkey, morocco - mostly iran because it's recent - dust and heat and sun and wide wide sky...

...with somewhere a whiff of roses and mint, the sound of water, all those pleasures that are all the more delightful for being found in the middle of the desert...

all this washed over me with incredible vividness. in my memory of the classroom scene, i clearly recall myself sitting on the back table, with a couple of students trying to do something at the board and chaos all around, with my mouth open shouting something at them - and just as clearly it seems that the dusty, scented wind lifted my hair for a moment, as i struggled there indoors in snowbound chicago...

it was so clear and overpowering that i was disoriented and lost my train of thought... i told them i had lost my train of thought, and started to open my mouth to tell them where i had been, but closed it again.

the all-powerful, live-or-die-by-it No-Child-Left-Behind-mandated standardized test is in 13 days: there is no time for wind that smells of roses and the preciousness of the sound of water in the desert.