International Beauty Supply

KIDS IN UNIFORMS

A couple of weeks ago I spent a morning with my friend Richard at a local high school in Queens, spending a couple of senior English class periods in the school library observing him drum up student participation in The Random House Creative Writing Competition, something he does several times a week at schools all around the boroughs.

He started off seizing their attention reading a particularly visceral poem on impressions he took from a past presentation of his to students incarcerated on Rikers Island. Richard’s also an accomplished actor and playwrite, and suffice to say he can really knock your socks off reading his own work. Where the kids were fidgety, dubious and impatient when they first walked in, their attention was now his. From there he immediately had them do a couple of writing exercises on their own, one of which was seven minutes writing on any particular place that had a profound impact on them, as his own example. Time’s have sure changed since I was in high school, colorful language the general rule, but I never had to live in Queens and the stuff these kids shared blew my doors open. I joined in the writing myself and did a little thing on Colman Pool in Seattle.

It was on those days no one else would come, or hardly anyone would come, that I felt most connected to the water. Those rare, cold, rainy summer days like autumn, when a storm would come over from the peninsula and sweep across the Sound. Those us who dared would swim with the rain on our backs one way and in our eyes and faces in another. Stinging, pricking poking rain that didn’t matter when most of me was submered in heated salt water, safe and smooth. Watching lifeguards stuck in high chairs trying to keep their umbrellas from collapsing and tipping over. They looked so sad and forlorn, wanting to be anywhere else but there, hoping for lightning so they could close the pool. But these were the best days: fifty meters to myself, maybe three of us in the water and nothing more important for the hour and a half we/they/I had before it was time for the warm shower and the shock of my naked self in the mirror by the sinks—a tan line on a cloudy day. Then to dry, dress and off through the rain on that path by the shore where driftwood rocked near the sea wall, or pieces of boats washed up, sometimes entire trees from god knows where.