Part III

Noon
Storm warning

The high school was buzzing with high school noise and everybody was taller than me.
Maria, my 11th grade student had only one thing on her mind today. “What is the recipe for baked potatoes?”She wanted to know. She had one for lunch and now wanted to know just how that was done. I told her how. “No, please, the truth, how is it done?” I think she wanted the procedure to be difficult.

“You’ll believe me when you try it,” I told her. That she told me was the most sense I had made all day.

Ramon, my senior, had a more perplexing problem. “AM is morning, right? And PM is afternoon, right? The why is there AM and FM on a radio? Is AM for listening in the morning and PM for listening in the afternoon?”

I liked his reasoning on this, and told him so. Then I tried to explain something about radio waves and having more stations that could be heard at further distances, not that, I really understood it either.

He listened intently and then asked why his logic appeared so much more reasonable than mine.

2:15 pm
Rain and Wind


Felipe was in trouble with the bus driver at Central Elementary. It seems he threw a dead cat into the bus. Mrs. McCall, the vice principal, explained to me the seriousness of this action

“The dead cat had worms.”

“Worms?”

“Maggots, lots and lots of maggots. You must go talk to his father.”

I went to trailer park where Felipe and his family lived. I knew his family well because all of his brothers and sisters were also my students. As was the case, a lot of my students were related to each other.

“Hola, Ricardo, Como le va?” Hi Ricardo, how is it going.? We talked about the weather and food and the glories of his home state of Guanajuato, Mexico. I asked him if he had heard about the cat and the bus driver.

“Ah si,,yes”, he said, “the cat had worms.”

“Maggots”, I said.

“Whose cat was it? The bus driver had a cat?”

“I don’t know”

“Why did the cat get on the bus?”

“Felipe threw the cat into the bus.”

“The cat was hurt?”

“The cat was dead.”

About that time Felipe’s uncle comes out of the front door. “I knew that cat. That cat was not well.”

Felipe had arrived home and turned the corner of the trailer. “Is this about the cat? It is OK about the cat.”

“What do you mean?” the father, the uncle, and I ask all at the same time.

“The cat didn’t have a head.”