parched

2005-02-09 - 10:24 a.m.

I dreamed I was in the desert. I was in a school with only a handful of students. The building was an imposing, earthy brown, lording over a tiny village of poverty-stricken people clustered on the edge of the sand ocean. My classroom was one tiny room with a green chalkboard at the front and a yellowing map pulled down over the center of the wall. A shabby wooden desk stood in front of the map for the teacher, an aging man with drooped shoulders and hollowed eyes. Twenty student desks stood in rows in front of the teacher, but there were no more than eight of us there to learn who knows what.

We came to class and he broke us up into two groups. He gave us each a piece of blank paper and sent half of us out into the heat, but gave us no instructions for the project. We waited there in the sun, sweat dribbling down our faces from our temples, unsure of what to do. Now and again a student from the other group would come out and sometimes one from our first group would go in to the classroom, but I couldn't figure out how we were to know when we could go back in.

Eventually the heat and thirst won out and I headed up the long outdoor staircase to the classroom. When I opened the door, I found the teacher with tears streaming down his face, his eyes lost in anguish. He turned his head a little in my direction, but without looking at me simply said, "I'm sorry," and rubbed at his eyes with the back of his forearm. The students were silent and I couldn't tell if I'd interrupted a horrible conversation or if the teacher had been sobbing alone there in front of the students. The map now showed RADAR images in deep purples and greens, indicating severe storms on their way.

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Pretend it's 10th grade. Leave me a note.

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