A gray Saturday in Virginia

Today is Saturday and it could be the first day of the rest of my life.
But then so could any day.
The leaves lie limp on the tree outside the office window and there's a grayness hanging over the squat buildings of the toy soldiers' compound across the street and the gantries of the great shipyard beyond.
Soon the leaves will turn into a beautiful portfolio of red and russets although it's hard to imagine anything beautiful growing from the limp yellow offerings hanging outside the office.
It's funny how a densely populated city on a Saturday afternoon can feel like the surface of the moon. There's not a soul on the streets, trash is being kicked along and abandoned in cold corners by an aimless wind and even the linear highways are bereft of all but the occasional car. I hear a low whirr from my office window and it's gone.
There's a scanner voice out there in the areas of the office that still lie in quasi darkness like the half abandoned strip malls round these parts.
And information lies all around me, but nobody's making any sense of it. My redundant notepads are still here, a testament to two years of collecting information for people who will quickly forget.
Who now remembers Mary S. Thomas, two counts of child neglect or Christopher A. Judkins, abduction and kidnapping?
These nefarious acts that scour and scar and ruin existences, are commonplace on the yellowing pages of my notepad. The shorthand outlines take on a life of their own on the page. I can't even recall if they made it into print.
So many lives and deaths are forgotten about. Today I am driving through the city to see a woman whose uncle was blown away outside a convenience store two years ago.
It was the first day on my job as a crime correspondent. I heard the call but my predecessor went out and covered it. She wrote of the everyday nature of death. The school bus that had just disgorged its cargo when the youth worker was peppered with bullets outside the store.
The store closed for a while. Then it reopened. Life went on.
A few days later I went on the peace march. A small crowd lighted candles and placed flowers on every street corner of carnage, before they went home to finish off another day. So many victims: all forgotten now.
My predecessor ignored the quotes I had collected and put her name alone on the story. I only cared in passing. She went on to the education beat but left soon afterwards. Everbody's forgotten about her now.
Like the wind that batters old papers and sends them skidding from gutter to sidewalk, we are buffeted along uncertain paths and we play many roles before we return to a second childhood.
And we forget. Many of us completely, but some of us not so well.
I have a problem forgetting. Like I said I am a collector. I hoard memories, I miss faces; I reguarly make futile searches on Facebook for my best friend at university.
I miss people. I miss whole continents. I often see the late afternoon sun caught in the windows form a dazzling sculpture of mirrors on cliffs of Positano when I close my eyes.
Then I open them again. And it's still a gray Saturday in Virginia.

The First Month of School

Today I saw a girl in a busy hallway who I dimly recognized.
"Mr. Cifaldi," she said, and gave me a look as if she was unsuccessfully trying to reconstruct a relic from a lost age.
"Macaulay." I mumbled, as I struggled to remember her name.
Then it all clicked into place. I think the expression is epiphany. I should know as I've spent most of the week trying to teach epiphany in My Left Foot to a bunch of unreceptive 10th graders.
Roberta was another new teacher at my school back in the day, somewhere in the Jurassic period or at least in the dark ages when Beowulf was written.
A month ago to be exact.
We hung out one lunch time on the whirlwind induction week and talked about teaching. In measured tones and idealistically.
Have I mentioned it was only a month ago? Before the age of students.
Neither of us has got out much since; not out of our classrooms let alone into the sunshine.
Except when the school holds fire drills.
And the only contact I have had with my fellow students on the career switcher course has been on taut emails when they have described their nervous breakdowns.
The girl who landed a job teaching at the school I wanted to teach at quit after a week-and-a-half.
She couldn't stand another day trapped in a "windowless hell."
My classroom hasn't got windows either. And it can resemble hell.
Whenever an administrator comes in and all hell is breaking loose I tell him or her we are rehearsing Milton's Paradise Lost. There's a limit to how many times I can use that excuse.
The trouble is that, while I like many of my students individually, collectively they can become a rowdy mass that's hard to bring to heel.
But then sometimes, against all odds it works. The class is silent and I have to pinch myself to believe it's true.
Then a few minutes later it isn't. I'm floudering like a big filleted, flat fish on a beach as the tide recedes.
And inevitably time becomes the tide. I'm looking at the electronic slab of a clock, at the angular red letters on the gray wall, wondering if my material will run out before the bell. I know chaos could ensue on the next digit and if I lose their attention for a second, I'm doomed.
But let's look on the bright side. I survived a month and June is just round the corner. Kind of.

Jockey's Ridge

Sunday was a day of refracted sunlight and benign clouds that rolled across the azure skies of the Outer Banks without threatening cause any serious damage to anyone's mood.
When I first woke up the beach house felt the same as always. The holiday light still seeped through the plantation shutters in the morning, illuminating memories of long, lazy weekends in the days when I had more ahead of me.
But for the first time in nine years the familiar family portraits had gone from the bedroom walls and heirlooms were poking out of boxes on the floor. Order had been replaced with uncertainty.
Visiting my inlaw's home hasn't always been a pleasant experience and I confess there have been times when my foot has slipped off the accelerator as soon as we turned into their street and the car almost stalled.
But the idea of them selling up, leaving and searching for a cheap house in the dead heart of North Carolina after all these years filled me with sadness.
When I climed to the roof deck and looked over the sea and Sound, I wondered if it would be the last time I would gaze beyond the weather vane at the gentle roof contours upon a quiet Sunday by the sea.
And then, as if by instinct, I drove down the main highway averting my eyes from the neon signs, the strains of Kate Bush's Cloudbursting driving me onward from the stereo.
I turned off the highway into Jockey's Ridge State Park, where a vast sand dune towers over the flat inlets of these barrier islands.
With the sun still low in the sky and the clouds scurrying overhead, Jockey's Ridge was almost deserted.
Recent rains had formed lakes in the sand that weren't here the last time I walked across the dunes. Now they gleamed in the sand like circular washing basins that trapped the clouds and turned their fleecy undersides dark with refraction.
So I walked and I took photographs and I thought and felt the morning drift away as the sand warmed up on my feet.
And I wondered where the sand on the dunes would be when we were all displaced and gone and mankind had been rendered as insignificant as a glassy grain in the egg timer of history.

First Day of School

I haven't blogged for ages because I was recently offered a job teaching English at a local high school.
My first reaction was surprise because I had been on about 300 interviews. This quickly turned into euphoria and then panic at the thought of telling my bosses at work who were lining me up for the dizzy heights of covering the city of Newport News.
The Washington Post was meant to be offering me a job in its Hawaii bureau but the letter failed to arrive. We live in a new condo development and the mail is unreliable.
The first thing that hit me about school was the requirement to be somewhere the next day at 7:30 am. I didn't really know what 7:30 a.m. looked like but, in fact, it was similar to 8:30 a.m. with the requirement for even more coffee.
I haven't looked back or slept since.
For the last week I have been familiarizing myself with school procedures.
Monday was tough. We were trapped in an introductory meeting for about three hours without a bathroom break. Now it's one thing explaining away the fact you have never taught, quite another the fact that you are a new hire who has wet his pants in front of the whole school.
I made it without an accident but it was a close call. It felt like being back at school.
For the rest of the week I have been trying to make sense of the craziness, the bell schedules, the online tardiness procedure, the absence procedure, 504 plans, blocks, AYPs, SOLs and HELPs.
The only thing I seem to have remembered is where the red panic button is on the wall of my classroom. A successful lesson involves not pressing it within the first five minutes of class.
And nothing is simple. Searching for a grade 10 text I decided on The Great Gatsby because a- The Great Gatsby is a great novel and B - there are at least 30 copies in the school book closet in a decent condition.
But one of my colleagues came over all skeptical when I mentioned Gatsby. I could tell by the criss crossed lines that appeared on here forehead.
"That may be more grade 11. You'll have to check with the Grade 11 teachers that they're not using it."
So plan B is A Farewell to Arms. But there appear to be only 26 copies - leaving me about 4 short and many are in a dilapidated condition. So do I tell the class most can have a copy but three luck souls will have to buy one?
It's these kind of considerations you don't think about when a small light goes on one night and you think: I want to teach.

Charleston cemeteries

The last time I was in Charleston there was a lot of heat and a lot of kids.

At times like this escape is in order. I hastily made my excuses and headed into the labyrinth of old streets with my camera looking for the nearest cemetery.

Although I live in Virginia it doesn't feel a lot like the real old Antebellum south. There are too many wide highways and gleaming new buildings up here. Virginia has progresss and that doesn't always look pretty.

Antebellum is one of those curious pleasant-sounding words that describe something unpleasant.

To me the word conjures up sleepy images of plantations, festooned with Spanish moss and hammocks swaying under the Magnolia trees, rather than the days of strife and bloodshed that led up to the Civil War in a south scarred by the monstrous system of slavery.

The specter of the war still limps around some of these quiet streets and you can find a few old timers who still curse the Yankees.

But the good news for the visitor who has passed through hundreds of miles of hideous strip malls and Piggly Wiggly stores to get here, is that General Sherman didn't.

Charleston is a living museum and its churchyards are some of the most atmospheric places in America.

I've always had a fascination with cemeteries, be it the blackened necropolises of Glasgow where ghasty stone angels hold court against a sky of leaden clouds, or the quirky ivy-choked Cornish churchyards where gulls wheel high above the crashing turquoise sea.

When I was in Cairo years ago I wanted to visit the Cities of the Dead where the vast tombs have been converted into homes and given minaret towers. I was overruled by a partner at the time who had heard stories about tourists being stoned by the local kids.

At least I got to visit the grandest cemetery of them all, the Pyramids of Giza where some rather powerful people were buried under oversized headstones.

I have photographed seas of plain white crosses that stand like mournful sentinels over the empty fields of Flanders, celtic crosses beside monasteries in Ireland and tombs like small houses in Cuba.

If there was a world cemetery tour and I had the time, I would sign up for it.

Some people may find my fascination with such places morbid but I am always moved by cemeteries because they are a small window into the vastness of time and the transience of life.

They make you wonder who the people under the slabs were, what kinds of lives they led and, mostly importantly where they are now.

If I had the answer to that question I could become very rich. I might even be invited onto the Oprah show.

Cemeteries can be mourful and romantic. In Charleston they have a ghost tour where they recall how the ghost of Annabel Lee appears at the Unitarian Cemetery. Apparently Lee used to meet her young sailor lover here before her father found out about it and locked her away. The tale of doomed love inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write the poem Annabel Lee.

A day after hearing this tale I visited the Unitarian Cemetery to photograph it for a travel feature, but a downpour meant I only managed one uninspiring and hurried shot.

But there was no rain on the day I visited the chuchyard of St Philip's and the recent memory of fountains, hyperactive kids and extended family, led me to spend some time here, although I missed the grave of former Vice President and all round reactionary guy John C. Calhoun.

All of which gives me another reason to go back there.

The Art of Being a Crap Dad

I have this recurring nightmare that I'm on the shortlist for the Crap Dad of the Year award.

Imagine the Oscars and then whip away the red carpet and set it in a dingy, smoke-filled bingo hall in New Jersey and you've got the idea.

The bingo hall is full of dads who have left their offspring somewhere en route but can't remember exactly where.

In the dream a couple of dads come up and make speeches about how being a Crap Dad is an art form, thank the director and the sound man and recall a tale about how they sent their kids to school wearing their pants inside out.

Crap dads aren't like some of the fathers I report on. Dads who smoke crack around their kids are Bad Dads - Crap Dads are something else entirely.

You know you have been rumbled as a Crap Dad when you drop your daughter off so late at daycare that all of the other kids are midway through their midday nap. The teachers can expose a Crap Dad at 20 paces with their piercing stares.

You make the situation worse by apologizing too loudly and dropping your keys, causing about seven babies to jump up in their cribs and start wailing as you head for the parking lot.

I wasn't that late today. But I was late enough that the rest of my daughter's class was already outside involved in a rather frightening pursuit called Water Play.

(let's face it. If most of us were lined up against the wall and blasted with a hose in all weathers we'd probably describe it as water torture).

But Zara seems to like it. Unfortunately.

She methodically put her clothes in her bag and put on her water shoes, ready to go to water play. She hung up her bag.

Then the worst thing imaginable happened. All the other kids came back into the building, wet with shining morning faces. Water play was over and it wasn't even 9.30 a.m.

"You missed water play, ha ha." they screamed. It struck me as a conspiratorial cacophany.

Zara crumpled into a heap. I muttered a few meaningless words of consolation and put an arm round her, all to no avail.

So I beat an embarrassed retreat thinking if I'd been an assertive parent (ie. a mother) I would have confronted the teacher, asked if they could do water play for five minutes longer and threatened to withdraw her from the daycare if she refused.

More than 12 hours later Zara's still talking about it, but she doesn't seem too upset.

Still I worry. What if in 20 years time she looks back on the water play incident as the point when childhood ended and early angst set in? Did Jeffrey Dahmer have a 'water play moment' as a child that changed his life for ever and turned him into the sort of guy who cut up people and kept their skulls in his fridge?

I hope not but I'm scared to sleep because the Crap Dad dream may return. What if I end up as one of those shuffling out of the bingo hall clutching a gold over plastic Crap Dad Oscar?

A desperate retreat for the English language

When I worked in North Carolina I once carried out a survey on students' reading habits asking them if they has ever read a novel by Charles Dickens.
A few had "heard of the dude," and some even confessed to having ploughed their way through Great Expectations.
But some hadn't the dickens what Iwas talking about.
"He wrote The Raven, didn't he?" asked one girl, referring to the Edgar Allan Poe classic.
"Didn't he write Charlotte's web?" one student of Elizabeth City State University asked.
Over at Elizabeth City's library the woman looked at me blankly when I asked her when somebody had last taken out a novel by Charles Dickens.
I expected her to say: "Don't you know those books are just there to fill a state quota or to eat up space on the shelves."
It was further evidence, if any more is needed, that these are parlous times for the English language.
Those who care about language are now on the front lines of a battle that's looking about as desperate as Verdun.
Kid's don't write full sentences anymore. They text.
Maybe one say I will attend a meeting at a godforsaken library at the end of the world where we'll sit around a candle and talk in hushed and revential terms about vowels.
It's all a great shame. I recently rediscovered Great Expectations and managed to separate it from the bad experience I had at school.
There can be few novels of the 20th century that match Dickens for his clever characterization. And Dickens is genuinely funny.
Mrs. Joe who thunders around threatening Pip and Joe with a cane, which she has named Tickler, is the heir to a whole host of frightening matriachs depicted in subsequent TV shows be it Hattie Jacques' terrifying matrons in the Carry On Films or Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances.
Nor should other classics of the Victorian era be left rot in a jar labelled The Past. There are no shortages of cynical social climbers in the 21st Century but there can be few better depictions than Becky Sharpe in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair.
Emily Bronte's classic Wuthering Heights may seem more disconnected from present times but it is really? In this era of broken homes many youngsters live with sorrow and the spectre of brutal and bullying father figures such as Healthcliff.
Nor should we leave out classic American authors. In the depths of the recession John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath serves to remind us we have been here before and it was a lot worse then.
So make for the library and grab as many classics as you can before it's too late.

The Internet is doing my head in

The Internet is doing my head in and that's official.

In the four minutes of each day that I allow myself to be away from the screen I now check my head in the bathroom mirror to see if there's a dent in it caused by overexposure to the Internet. Then I worry I may have missed an email and rush back.

Sometimes I wryly try to imagine how I did my job before the advent of the Information Superhighway as it used to be called in those pioneering days when it was new and mysterious.

How did I research facts? How did I network? Did I have to talk to people face-to-face? How scary must that have been?

The first newpaper I interned on used heavy typewriters, vast inky behemoths that would swallow your fingers if you missed the keys.

Make a mistake on the tawdry bits of paper you fed into the beast and you were told to bash "xxxx" over it. Our copy was such a mess it was amazing that it ended up as newsprint at all. But then there was a whole floor of mirky production people downstairs to check it.

These days when I write a story it appears on the website (dailypress.com) two minutes later. It calls for concentration because my grocery list could easily end up online if my mind wandered.

Today I have spent a while clicking on the 'most read' section to see if "Man shot by gun in old clothing" is going to climb up the list past "14-year-old still on the run," or "Death of homeless man was not a homicide." I'm thinking "Cat bites woman," might get more hits if the headline was "Woman Bites Cat."

For light relief there's always Facebook. I can browse the pictures of a colleague's wedding, see a former colleague holding up chickens, see an unknown relative of another former colleague visiting New York and view butterfly photos from another former colleague with a liking for butterflies.

I have a lot of former colleagues. I start to get paranoid about this and wonder if there's a website for people who are paranoid about colleagues becoming former colleagues.

But before seeking that I have to decide whether to poke back someone who poked me on Facebook because she thought I was somebody else.

And there's always the Facebook quizzes - what kind of serial killer would I be? A not very pleasant one I'd assume as serial killers tend to be...

I'm told once you have compiled the 40 things about yourself note on Facebook it's game over. You have to discard the site like that tattered old Operation game you had when you were a kid.

But I still regularly check Facebook, although I'm not sure if I should be sad about missing Live Q and A with the MLM LeadSystemPRO co-founders. I'm sure they are a lovely bunch, but you wouldn't want to take them down the pub.

Anyhow Facebook is apparently passe and pedestrian now in a cyber universe that moves at quite a zip. The idea is to go on Twitter and get as many followers as possible because this may confer you some kind of advantage in the afterlife.

Twitter makes you feel needed because people email you with interesting looking links. Unfortunately when you click on them most seem to be selling things, although I can't work out what.

Still it must work for some people as there are so many of them out there describing themselves as Internet Entrepreneurs, who devote a lot of energy to posting messages of such excrutiating positivity that they are obviously manic depressives. Be absolutely determined to do what you do/ don't allow yourself a negative thought/make sure your pets ooze positivity - that kind of thing.

I'm tempted to post: "My life sucks and I can't go on," for the hell of it to see how many followers I lose in a cyber second.

Anyhow I'm told Twitter is meant to be a vehicle to get people to see your blog, but they'd need to be confused or drunk if they are still reading mine this far, especially as I'm sure it's not maximising interactivity potential.

And that's when I'm supposed to reel them in like big gullible guppies and sell them something, I guess. At this stage the strategy starts to come undone like the line of knitted undergarments I thought I'd market on EBay once I learned to knit.

My aim is to get off of here and to reconnect with my family if I remember what they look like. Maybe we can cook sausages over a camp fire a long way from here and sing songs 100 miles away from the nearest internet connection. Yeah - I know, you don't need to plug in now.

I have promised to give it all up soon. At least after I've updated my blog.

As soon as I connect with my first buck toothed girl from Luxembourg that's it. I'm going to swich off the computer and dust off my type writer.

A user friendly heart of darkness

The mosquito-ometer at the visitor center of Congaree National Park was set to "brutal."

Had there had been a boredom-ometer inside the center it would have been set to "tres bored," if the attitude of the ranger who was intent in engaging me on every minute detail of his grand trip to Europe a decade ago, was anything to go by.

In the end I had to fake a bathroom break for my daughter and headed outside to take my chance with the mosquitos.

If Congaree National Park doesn't have the profile of, say the Grand Canyon, that's because it's in the middle of rural South Carolina and isn't quite as dramatic.

You can easily blast past on the road to Columbia without realizing you are passing the largest remnant of old-growth floodplain forest remaining on the continent.

But unlike the Grand Canyon you don't have to take a second mortgage out on your home to visit Congaree, which is free, and instead of fighting your way through the crowds to glimpse a ravine, the only pests at Congaree are pests.

Once we had realized foul smelling bug spray was our best friends the mosquitos kept at bay, although they were always buzzing away in the background, waiting for the spray to wear off like scavangers biding their time to attack the laggers in an army of occupation.

At least at Congaree a three-mile boardwalk ensures visitors can see the savage beauty of the swamps and gaze up at the highest trees on the eastern seaboard without descending into the mud.

Not that it's any old mud at Conagree. It's actually called "muck" and it's the famous Dorovan Much which made newspaper headlines in the 1980s, according to the information for the boardwalk trail. I made a mental note to check out those headlines.

My daughter was more interested in the spiders' webs across the trail and the turtles that snapped up the bread thrown to them by a fellow visitor on Weston Lake.

It reminded me of feeding the ducks in the park. You have to hand it to the National Park Service for making America's answer to the Amazon Rain Forest so user friendly.

Poetry in Dry Places

Hollow canned soundbites nibble at the nether distance of the bedroom.

I find it hard to take it seriously; the southern twangs of the healthcare debate.

"I don't think Speaker Pelosi's going to do that but if she did it would be a direct slap to the Democrats ... I don't see the bill being there to get enough votes on the floor."

The arcane language of power yawns from C-Span and takes on a life of its own like the drool that oozes from the jaws of a sick old dog. I can hardly bear to raise a heavy eyelid to watch.

"Doctor Gingrich has some amendments on that."

When did he become a doctor? I wouldn't let him operate on me. He's done enough damage to my brain already.

"My mother is in her 70s. She could not have gotten that knee operation that changed her life under this bill."

Oh - and there's a specific provision that mentions your mother? The below provisions exempt Mrs. Patty Bumpus of Little Rock, Arkansas.

"It may be we can sit on Saturday and move to Monday 3, and Tuesday 4 if necessary."

Or out of here altogether. Does anyone look out of the windows over the lawns and suggest going out instead for a picnic? Let's have Pims and at least we can slap the Democrats on the grass instead of the floor.

"Well over 100 amendments have been filed ... If the process had moved more quickly and we had allowed for some of the free market processs and cost control principles."

After paying $4 for a packet of rice crackers at FarmFresh I could use an injection of free market principles and cost control.

I could also use the off switch, if I hadn't lost the remote control. As the debate meanders on my soul is saved by an anthology of poetry.

Did Dylan Thomas care about heathcare as he careered over the insane cliffs of Wales, high on spirits both liquid and literary, back to his boat house?

And what would I give for someone to throw open the windows of Congress during the minutiae of the debate and let in the words of the great poet like a flood of salty estuary water in this driest of places.

In the mutardseed sun/By full tilt river and switchback sea/Where the cormorants scud/In his house on stilts high among beaks/And palavers of birds/This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave/He celebrates and spurns/His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age/Herons spire and spear.