I cannot recall the last time I sharpened pencils, yet I smell them.
Crayons disappeared from the house five years ago when the kids stopped using them, schools dumping color-in-the-lines after fifth grade. But I can almost feel their waxy paraffin between my thumb and forefinger, leaving that oily residue that stays way long.
Like a return to the new, the school year starts in the season of dying.
The dissonance, I sense it like spasmodic leg quaking that tremulates chairs while calming nerves.
“It’s show time!” I mimic the movie star’s manic Joker’s smile as I fly out the door. No chorus line.
Yet not the performance but the insistence that erodes: “Wake up!!” I want to jolt them in stentorian holler as my head spins and spits pea soup—in a virtual world they recognize.
In real time, I merely cajole, advise, admonish and filibuster, all for their awakening to themselves, their process and their world, adrift in someone else’s expectation.
In the gaze of the other 
