Vignettes

With or Without you by U2

Childhood

I’m 12 and I just got home from school. I learned today that the boy I had a crush on likes me. I put on the radio and take out my homework. Just as I found the chapter in my Science book the opening chords of With or Without you come on. I stop and lift my head. I’m not sure what I’m looking at or even thinking…but my heart starts beating really fast. “Sleight of hand and twist of fate”, I don’t know what it means but I am sure in the knowledge that it’s about love and pain. It’s the longing in Bono’s voice. I feel heartbroken already for a boy…a love…I haven’t even discovered. Melodramatic love songs got its hooks in me and that was the beginning.

Stairway to Heaven-Led Zepplin

Teenage Years

It’s prom night. Shannon and I have escaped the hot drama and loud music of the ballroom and sought refuge in the late spring night. I remember thinking the air felt like bathwater. In our dresses we leaned back against her boyfriend’s old Buick. Shannon handed me cigarette and I leaned in for her to light it. From inside the car Led Zepplin’s, Stairway to Heaven came through the speakers. She exhaled and the smoke wafted up around us, clinging to us in a circle. “Whatya think it’s going to be like?” she asked. “I have no idea but it’s going to be incredible,” I said.

The energy, the excitement we felt having nearly finished high school was palpable. Even in that moment, I knew that any conversation I was to have, going forward, would be unparalleled to that particular one on that particular night. Twenty years later, I’m in my car with my kids and Stairway to Heaven comes on, and I am transported back in time to the parking lot. That energy still remains unmatched.

Now

Fake Plastic Trees- Radio Head

I’m driving home from work and RadioHead’s Fake Plastic Trees come on and my heart bottoms out. I’ve been teaching for 14 years and known of this song for nearly 20 years, but on that day, they connected. While I have noticed a

positive evolution in my students acceptance of each other’s differences, I have also been exhausted by the transformation of the once (public service) community college to the corporate mindset where suddenly students are consider clients, whom I am working for. I came to be a teacher, to educate, to lead and inspire.; not to keep up someone’s GPA because their tuition is paid and they have a scholarship on the line, despite the fact they were tardy, absent and oftentimes their essays were incomplete. The entitlement undermines the very reason I went into teaching. I went to college and it was difficult. I often never heard from or received feedback from my professors. I never once considered complaining about them. The foundation is shifting under my feet and I am not sure what to do about it.