Today by Billy Collins
If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary's cage
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
Yep, today was just that kind of day in western Oregon. Spectacular.
A.A. Milne wrote
Now We Are Six
When I was one I had just begun.
When I was two I was nearly new.
When I was three I was not quite me.
When I was four I was not much more.
When I was five I was just alive.
But now I'm six.
I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now
For ever and ever.
And I wrote
Now We Are Three
Today I'm a pirate
Fierce, proud, scary!
Tomorrow, round and red
I'll be a cherry.
Yesterday it wasn't me
Who got out of my bed.
It was a cow instead.
I went into the kitchen
And mooed for some toast.
Mommy cow smiled at me.
She understands how cows can be.
When I'm a bat
I flap my wings
And let my tongue hang down.
Bats fly in crazy circles
And their tongues are fuzzy brown.
One day I didn't move at all.
I was a leaf. Green and small.
I wasn't fierce. I wasn't tall.
Just very leafy me,
Growing quietly.
Sometimes I roar and show my claws
And Grandpa says, "Now who are you?"
A lion doesn't say his name,
So I just roar and shake my mane.
Last week when we went to the store
I was a worm upon the floor.
Mommy looked at me and sighed.
It's hard to wait for a worm.
They don't walk; they squirm.
I can be a frog. Or a barking dog.
A bug in a bog.
But today I'm a pirate.
Fierce, proud, scary.
Tomorrow round and still,
I'll be a cherry.
In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I am reposting an account which was the inaugural post of my now defunct blog, The Principal's Prattle. Leprechauns never get old.
The school day was punctuated at either end by wide-eyed children with extra bounce in their step. At 8:35, 3rd grade Aileen, dressed in a lime green flare skirt and shiny green tennies, burst into the copy room asking if there were footprints to be found.
"They're all over our classroom! They're everywhere! Any in here?"
And out like a flash with an undulating tail of jibbering followers.
At 3:30 I entered the staff room to check on the St. Patrick's Day pot-luck clean-up crew.
1st grade Xochitl announced, "There were leprechauns in our classroom! They messed up the traps, left fingerprints on the window and one even left his boots behind!"
I followed her to the room to verify the scene of the melee, tsk-tsking all the way that they hadn't managed to catch even one.
Oregon got a sunny day yesterday.
As I raced to the gym for a Battle of the Books assembly, I walked by a kindergarten teacher nestled into a corner of the dusty, lumpy blacktop of the courtyard, bordered by the rusty chain-link fence. She was reading a children's book to her attentive charges seated there in the sun. She wore sunglasses as she displayed the lovely illustrations and read aloud to them.
After the assembly, classes were filing out of the gym and into the gilded daylight. I held the door open, high-fiving kids and commenting on what a respectful audience they had been. A fourth grade boy pointed and said, "Look! The sky looks like a movie!"
We turned and raised our sights above the shrubs to a cerulean sky and its floating cotton ball clouds.
"Yes, Luis. That's a lovely sky. In some parts of the world, you don't have to watch a movie to see a sky like that. In Oregon, it's a special event. Sometimes we see a shooting star at night. Sometimes we see a clear blue sky in the daytime." What a moment.
