The Tortoise, the Pope, and the Record Player

What I learned from my students, my weekend away, and one tiny porcelain dog.

I’ve noticed a lot of new faces around here recently, so I wanted to make sure and say hello again on the ‘stack. It is the end of the school year, so my schedule is full. There are end-of-year art shows and final projects and class parties and permission slips galore. I feel like a kid in a lifejacket bobbing in the current, hoping the waves don’t get too big.

I recently came back from a weekend in St. George, UT with three very lovely people who may have become “weekend away” friends, which is a type of friend I have been looking for since Annie died. The four of us stayed in a family-owned house that felt like it was preserved in 1995-era gelatin: blonde wood cabinets, pastel and rattan furniture, gold plastic fixtures in the bathrooms.

I felt like a kid again.

During the day, we hiked the petrified sand dunes and Jenny’s Canyon, which looks like it has a thousand tiny apartments built into the stone. We met a tortoise (really!) and stopped mid-trail for photos every time we saw a cactus in full spring bloom.

When it got too hot to keep hiking, we ducked beneath the shade of a juniper tree and talked about best friends and death, and Do we come back again, after we die? or is it The End, after all?

And which would we prefer, anyway?

We drank matcha and ate lavender beignets for breakfast. I bought two vinyl records and a tiny porcelain dog from an antique shop.

The tiny porcelain dog.

The dog looks like my dog that I had growing up, who was the only dog I ever had. He lived with me here for a few years when he got very old. He was so fluffy and fat, and he couldn’t stop widdling on the carpet so we wrapped him in a doggie diaper whenever he was inside the house.

He used to follow me into the kitchen and sit on his round, fluffy haunches, looking up at me just like this whenever I cooked anything.

A legend.

Each night when the three lovely people and I got back to the St. George house after hiking and antiquing, we watched a cauldron of bats swoop and dive after mosquitos as the sun sank behind the golf course. We stayed up late and read our fortunes (mine was terrible—it always is) and we filled the house with irreverent, cackling laughter.

Some days are really like that.

Then there are the other days, days when I feel like slipping back into bed and curling up for centuries until they find my calcified bones beneath the crumbling fragments of a thousand ancient comforters. There’s never enough cover, never enough weight, never enough layers between me and the stinging, unjust world. I don’t want billionaires or book bans or Cinnamon-Toast-Crunch-flavored bacon to exist, not alongside the swooping bats and the vinyl records and the lavender beignets.

On days like that, I just want to close my eyes to it all and sleep.

But school is wrapping up and I can’t sleep any more than usual. I’m busy cramming in last-minute assignments into the schedule and grading papers until my brain liquifies. Even before I started teaching, my fellow parent friends and I used to joke that May was actually more like Maycember, because it somehow ends up being just as busy as December every year. It’s NOT THE FUNNIEST JOKE but it does describe how breathless it feels to dash towards that finish line.

Or, towards the starting line of summer.

So I’m cramming in all this schoolwork and I’m ignoring the fact that these assignments were actually assigned by me. On purpose.

I realize now that I haven’t written a lot about my experience teaching this year. I think this is mostly because I don’t know how to describe it. I’m surprised because I think it makes me… actually happy? I hadn’t expected this, especially since my first several years of teaching (when I was a grad student in college) always felt like a distraction from the Real Work I was supposed to be doing—work like writing essays and short stories and novels and one Grand Thesis on something that I thought was very important at the time.

So when I accidentally fell back into the classroom—and middle school at that—I expected it to feel more like a burden, more like the thousand other awful jobs that I have done and been fired from throughout my adult life. I didn’t expect to be happy about the work—for it to feel tiring and difficult, but never, ever like the wrong fit.

I’ve had so many wrong fits throughout my mismatched professional life. In fact, my work experience has been so awful that I thought every job would feel like that—dreadful and exhausting and soul-wrecking.

But teaching—even teaching middle school—has been anything but. Most days I find that I actually enjoy what I’m doing, minute to minute. The work is good, and when the work is good, life is good. Despite the days when The World Is Too Much With Me and I want to desiccate into bone dust beneath the covers, I find myself suddenly in love with all of it—the bats and the bacon, yes, but especially the work. It feels meaningful and wholesome—like sliding the last piece of a puzzle into place.

Everything right and correct.

Two weeks ago in my high school English class we turned on the live-streamed announcement of the new Pope. We were meant to be working on a persuasive slideshow, but the new Pope was so novel and immediate that it easily crowded every other thing.

The camera panned across the Vatican crowd and we made lighthearted predictions on who the new Pope would be. We read each other status updates from the AP and googled questions pages in real time: Why do their uniforms look like that? What flag did that person in the crowd wave in the air, with the sun in the center? What part of Chicago is the new Pope from?

How do you say “peace” in Latin?

There’s something so wholesome about a group of kids following their questions into the dark, finding answers that don’t have any point to them beyond satisfying our shared curiosity. I felt so at home in that moment, waiting for the new Pope to emerge and learning more and more and more useless little things.

And then there he was, the new Pope! He seemed so small when we finally saw him out on the dais. The Latin word for peace is pax, and it was one of the first words out of his mouth.

I’m not Catholic, so I don’t know why the idea of the new Pope felt so important or cheerful. The day he was announced, whenever there was a lull in my thoughts, I heard “new Pope!” in the back of my mind. It made everything feel so promising.

Maybe he’ll help, somehow. Pope Leo.

My son (also named Leo) learned the Pope’s chosen name and immediately began using it to his advantage at school. He began blessing everyone in his vicinity and cleared out the hallways during each passing period.

And so it is.

Last Sunday I took out those two new vinyl records that I bought at the St George antique shop—Greatest Hits of Cat Stevens and Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues—and played them on a small portable record player that has recently appeared in my house. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to records, mostly because my record player (which was gifted to me long ago by a boy in college) had a broken needle, and I had no clue about how to fix it.

Then the portable record player showed up. It took a few weeks of staring at it in the box in the corner of my room, but eventually I set it up on a stool in the living room and dug out my old record collection (also gifted to me by the boy in college). Before Cat Stevens and Robert Johnson, we slid an old Beatles record from its sleeve and let it play.

The kids were entranced. For a few hours together we sat or laid down in front of the record player, listening to the little pips and pops and wobbles in the music as it turned.

I didn’t know until I was an adult how delightful a record player is—how it stirs the bones, humming and buzzing like a plucked string, even after the record has finished. Lately I find myself browsing old records on eBay, or planning out lists of albums I’d buy up if I happened to be in an old antique shop some day in the future.

And what a future, to find myself rifling through old records, wandering through some future antique shop. I imagine the walls piled high with old things—the memories of a hundred kindred strangers.

The antique shop, plus the “weekend away” friends inside the antique shop.

Since the last time I wrote here, it was Spring Break in early April. Jon and I had planned on a quick trip with the kids—somewhere within driving distance, somewhere we’d never been. But because we were so busy, we didn’t plan the details in time. Instead we spent the week at home making foods from different countries and taking small luxuries—folding our own croissants, drinking tea in the afternoons, swimming at the crowded rec center pool where the light bent on the water like brilliant topaz.

These moments of brilliance feel separate, somehow, from all the things that keep happening—the things that drive me beneath the covers on a morning. But they’re not separate, are they? They slide into place alongside each other like strung beads.

A rosary. A recitation.

I will say, I continue to quake and rage over all the destruction happening because a few spoiled men got bored with the lives they made for themselves. Shame on them.

I wonder what would’ve happened if someone had taught them to be whole and satisfied—to see the light on the water in the morning—glittering and peacock blue.

Until next time,

📿Becca Lee, Haunted Librarian📿

PS - Here is the tortoise: