Happy New Year!

The New School Year Always Brings Tears. Part I of The Chillona Chronicles.

The Chillona Chronicles: the next few posts will focus on Teaching and Crying (you’ll be surprised how many stories can come from this!). This post is the intro/first part to the five-part Chillona Chronicles series.

Part 1: Happy New Year

Monday was the first day of school in Los Angeles.

I’m sure there was a lot of crying around the city. In kindergartens. Preschools. Main offices. School nurse offices. Hallways.

At least that’s what I remember from teaching early ed– the new school year brings waterworks. The first few days, the first few weeks, there are many, many tears shed. Sometimes the sniffles turn into heaving sobs; a few devolve into violent conniptions with kids throwing themselves onto the floor or holding onto their departing parents with death grips that stretch out work blouses and pop buttons.

Academy Awards should be given out to some of the students for Best Dramatic First Day of School Performance. Some schoolchildren cry like they are about to be murdered instead of about to sing songs about rainbows.

However, I’m no longer teaching, so on Monday when I encountered a crying student, it came as a real surprise to me.

Mainly because he wasn’t a kindergartener, he was a high schooler.

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I time my morning walks to coincide with the first bell of the school day. Old work habit, I guess.

I live near three large public schools and my daily step-counting takes me round the perimeters of the campuses. At 8 am the streets of East LA fill with buses, people, peddlers, pets, and, of course, brightly-dressed, backpack-toting schoolchildren. The streets are noisy, too. There are pedestrian signals chirping, car horns honking, and the prerecorded bells of Our Lady of Lourdes tolling from its steeple. The seven-to-eight o’clock hour in East Los Angeles feels like a feast day in some medieval village.

From a distance I enjoy witnessing the hustle-and-bustle of an elementary school’s first day of classes. I no longer have to participate or be as anxious about this day as I’m sure many working teachers are, fussing over the aesthetics of their classrooms, anticipating surprises on their class rosters, trying to memorize twenty new names in twenty odd minutes. Meanwhile, support staff is running around the school pell-mell trying to find lost students, acquire supplies, move furniture, get lunch ready, and put out bureaucratic fires left and right. The first day of the school year is very exciting and very exhausting.

This day I watched from the sidelines (the sidewalk, actually) as the crowd at Belvedere Elementary, my old alma mater, listened to the joyful but harried voice of an administrator who welcomed the students back for another year. I could not see her but I could hear her voice, amplified over a microphone, reverberate from inside a throng of kids and parents. She was literally surrounded by her school. It looked a little overwhelming.

As the students followed her directions and walked into the school building to begin their school day, I walked away.

I was free to do what I wanted. And I wanted to go run laps at the local park.

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The park is a couple blocks away from the local middle and high schools. When I arrived, it was already busy with retirees walking the jogging path and pet owners walking their dogs. Per usual, there were a couple of teenagers ditching school. Already!  On the very first day of the new school year, a couple of high schoolers were biding their time at Obregon Park not attending classes. Down the street the first bell had rung, but they were still here, not moving toward Esteban E. Torres High.

Loitering students waiting out a class they don’t like, or a school day they would rather not face, is not an unusual sight here at the park. I often see teenagers who should be in homeroom or algebra class sitting around the graffitied, concrete park tables whenever I run in the late morning or early afternoons. Sometimes the kids gather in small cliques joking with each other, swinging jackets around, guffawing. Other times they are alone, solitary, usually on their phones. I’m certain they’re supposed to be in class. I’m sure their teachers and parents don’t know where they are. They are unaccounted for.

In the springtime, the high schoolers couple up in a stereotypical seasonal ritual. Young teenage boys and girls (it has only been boys and girls, so far) intertwin themselves like amorous anacondas on the grass. The couples hang all over each other looking as inseparable as conjoined twins who have to awkwardly sit their attached bodies together in weird sitting positions.

Last school year while running in the park I spied this one little dude ditching school and setting himself up on one of the park’s tables along with his laptop. As I ran past him, I noticed he was watching YouTube makeup tutorials. He was wearing a hoodie but that didn’t obscure the fact that he was applying makeup to his face as he followed along with the tutorial. I’m sure the only privacy he had in his life was at that table in a public park. I’m sorry to have invaded his privacy even for just a second as I ran past him. I’m also sorry that the lighting for him was so bad. Despite being a former teacher and therefore an agent of the state, I still didn’t begrudge him skipping class for such a personal, artistic reason.

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Today, on this first day of the 2023-24 school year, there was one little dude I passed as I ran up a hill. He was sitting by himself staring into space.

Near the top of the slope I was climbing there was also a homeless woman nearby. She had a blanket spread out on the grass and was busy in the way homeless people always seem busy. She was organizing her clothes. She was pulling them out of a suitcase and spreading them onto a park table. Was she drying them? I didn’t pay her too much mind.

On my second lap up the hill, passing both the teenager and the homeless lady again, something unexpected happened.

I curiously watched as the teenager got up from his bench and approached the woman. I hate to admit that the possibility of something mean or even violent happening is what first crossed my mind. What is he gonna do? I thought. Hit her? Insult her?

He started talking to her.

I tried to pay closer attention to their conversation as I ran up and down the hill but focusing on this weird pairing grew difficult. I wish I could’ve heard what he was saying, but I can barely hear my boyfriend when he is five feet away talking to me in our own home. Nevertheless, I watched and wondered, what were they talking about?

Then, as I stared at the situation, I saw him place his hand on her shoulder. Suddenly, the homeless woman’s hands went up to her face, covering her eyes. She was crying.

Oh my god, what’s going on? What I wouldn’t give to have heard what he was saying to her. Why did he approach her? Was he helping her?

I stopped running for a bit and like a creep I stood behind a tree to watch this encounter unfold.

The boy continued talking. He gestured emphatically, making some sort of point. Then he took his hand off her shoulder, and then they hugged! I don’t know anyone who would hug a homeless person. I really don’t.

I looked around but nobody else was nearby or paying attention. It was only them and me in this section of the park. You know those moments when you’re the only one around to witness something like a double rainbow or a pigeon wearing a top hat? You look around to see if others are also looking. You want the vision validated. But no one was around.

I started running up the hill again trying to get a little bit closer to the pair to eavesdrop but my spying was futile.

The boy stood with her longer than I expected. When he finally moved away from her, I had finished my laps and changed my path to leave the park. The boy and I were now headed in the same direction. Our paths were going to cross. But I didn’t want to pass him so I slowed down.

As the boy got closer, I noticed a few things.

He was talking to himself. He was still gesturing and mumbling like he was trying to figure out a problem. I rarely see teenagers do this. I see homeless people do this all the time.

The teenaged boy looked upset. He was crying. He wiped tears away from his eyes. He went ahead of me walking in the direction of where he should’ve been nearly an hour ago— his high school.

Parents usually stop taking pictures of their children’s first day of school by the time they are grown teenagers. The adorableness has worn off. The ritual, tiresome. However, I wanted some sort of record of what I had just witnessed.

I couldn’t help but stealthily snap a picture of him from behind. The boy was gesturing still, talking to himself still, holding out his hands like he was carrying something unseeable but really, really heavy.

It was the first day of school in Los Angeles on Monday.

And there were some tears.