BTS (Back to School) TCB (duh)

Oh look – it became September. I was in the thick of the Great Grannie Caper so I didn’t notice. Y’all have no clue what kind of under-the-rock and over-the-river type of characters non-profit people have to deal with – in my case all of them disguised as Grandparents. Let’s just say of all the wisdom and colloquialisms and prayers and life lessons I’ve learned from them, the thing I know for sure, the opening line to my This I Believe NPR listeners, is that everyone turns Narc, Criminal, or Certified Saint if they live long enough.  ‘Course babbling curmudgeon is what I am aiming for but only time will tell what category that fits in.

I’m glad to see the change to September though. In Michigan I loved September, in Memphis (which is in Tennessee, but really it is not Tennessee like the rest of Tennessee is - you'd understand if you lived here) I don’t have the same love just yet. So far it has all of the trappings of a early fall month  - back to school and football games and Halloween Candy in Walgreens. But the heat says not really.

My classes on Tuesday and Wednesday nights are in rooms without any air conditioning. This past Wednesday night they were kind enough to bring in a fan that was five inches in diameter. I really could have put it on a headband and made a personal cooling system but I chose not to be selfish. While the prison won’t deal with the air conditioning (a student told me it had been broken since 1999) they do have a dress code, no sleeveless shirts, no sandals. It wouldn’t really be comfy wearing a tube top and flipflops in front of a room full of inmates anyway and usually I double up on the modesty but modesty is hot. As in temperature sweaty forehead, forearms, and armpits hot.

So for all of September and maybe even into October I will be sweating it out, losing my grip on the dry erase marker, wiping my brow with a zeroxed copy of a David Foster Wallace essay (that I have no permission to distribute) and walking out of class looking like I was trapped in the jade steam room at a Korean Spa with all of my dress-code clothes on. Anyone that has had to pretend like they know what they are talking about for three hours (anyone that isn’t my boyfriend) knows, it’s pretty similar.

Hello fall y’all.