Love in the Time of Climate Change (31 page)

Ultimately the Climate Changers picked a nice bouquet of flowery verse, some dripping with gloom, others bursting with color—quite an eclectic mix of good and not so good, but all with a point and a concrete take-home message. Some were even written by students other than Hannah and Trevor.

We left the meeting, each with a stack of poems, searching out light switches to tape them under, mouthing silent prayers that even the little things like these would change the world.

Watt you say?

That's right
.

It's watts
.

And kilowatts
.

And megawatts
.

And on and on
.

It's just not right!

So when you leave

Turn off the light
.

E
VERY SEMESTER
I
INVITE A PANEL
of professionals to talk to my class about employment opportunities in the renewable-energy field. It's part of the “what the hell I am going to do with the rest of my life” exploration I attempt to bring to my students.

The point of the panel is to highlight the diversity of local, well-paying jobs in clean energy. Academia can be so damn theoretical that students often lose track of the awesome fact that the knowledge they're (hopefully!) acquiring in class can actually have real-world applicability. It's always good to bring things back down to earth, to get students to understand that, believe it or not, wonder of all wonders, with a little bit of luck and a lot of effort you can actually get paid to do good work. Aware of my OCD as they are, not all my students buy that line from me. Hence the need to bring in a bunch of folks from the field to demonstrate that I'm not as full of shit as my students may think I am.

This semester's panel consisted of an energy auditor,
a photovoltaic installer, and a small-business owner who sold and installed solar hot-water and photovoltaic systems. I had a geothermal engineer scheduled as well but his car broke down, his kids were sick, and his mother-in-law was going in for surgery, which sounded an awful lot like the bullshit excuses for missed assignments I got from my students.

I had chosen the panelists carefully. They were pragmatic, easygoing folk who related well to the college crowd, had reasonably good stories to tell, and, most important of all, could keep their audience awake for an hour and a quarter. They spoke eloquently and passionately about the work they did, and they were very encouraging to students looking for entry-level jobs, even those who had no intention of going any further than an associate's degree.

The take-home message was YES YOU CAN! Yes you can save the world while putting a roof over your head and feeding your family! Hooray!

Each panelist spoke for about ten minutes, showed some PowerPoint images of their worksites and the jobs they had done, talked about their background and how they had arrived at their professional destination, and offered tips for students so inclined to enter their profession. It was interesting and useful, nothing overly dramatic. I sat in the back, once again struck by how difficult it is to be a student and how goddamn uncomfortable those chairs were.

I struggled. Try as I might to focus on the panelists, my eyes were constantly lured to the nape of the neck of you-know-who. I'd force myself to turn away, only to twist right back again. It got so bad that I had to physically put my hand on the side of my head, push it in a forward direction, and hold it there.

Eyes front and center!
I kept commanding myself, mostly to no avail.

Every move of her body, every twitch of her shoulder,
every time she rearranged her hair, I was all over it. Once she turned around and glanced in my direction, which startled the hell out of me. My pen flew out of my hand and hit the student in front of me in the back of his neck.

She smiled.

I caught my breath.

The panelists went on speaking.

How anyone could listen to anything the speakers were saying while sitting in a class with her in it was way beyond me.

Eyes forward!
I demanded.

Yeah, right. Whatever!
the eyes responded, wandering back to the nirvana-like nape of the neck.

After about half an hour of presentations, the speakers took a short break while I reiterated that these panelists represented only three of the myriad possibilities for green employment, that the venue was wide open. I brought out the fact that teaching was a viable option, that we had a middle-school science teacher amongst us doing great work in the climate field (she stood up and curtsied—so cute!), and that there were loads of opportunities to make a difference in the world.

Then I opened up the discussion for questions to the panelists.

Most of them were run-of-the-mill, routine, what you'd expect students to ask.

“What was your background?”

“Do you like your job?”

“How much do you get paid?”

It was getting toward the end of the class, backpacks began rustling, the natives were getting restless.

Finally, with time running out, I asked for one final question.

“What's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you on the job?” Warren the Catastropharian asked. Yes! He was in class that day!

“So,” the PV installer, a guy by the name of Brad, began. “We were doing this job down on Vernon Street. Putting up 3 kilowatts of photovoltaics on this really funky old house. Great project.

“I was having lunch on the roof. Which actually is not weird at all. We do it all the time. The views from roofs are outstanding!

“Anyway, there I was, relaxing, sitting up there on an old chimney. It was for a fireplace that hadn't been up and running in decades, so I knew I'd be safe. At least I thought I would.”

This last line got the student's attention.

“There I am enjoying the view and my ham and cheese when suddenly
KABAM!
” Brad brought his hand down hard on the table with a loud noise. Definitely an attention grabber.

“My ass feels like it's on fire! Literally, on fire! My immediate reaction was: ‘Damn, I sure as hell was wrong about that chimney!'”

The students laughed, hanging on to every word. Even my eyes were focused on the speaker.

“I stand up screaming, and throw my ham and cheese to the four winds. My co-workers are freaking out.

“‘Dude!' they yell. ‘Are you okay? What's up?'”

It was clear Brad had told this story before, probably dozens of time. The grin on his face made it equally clear that he relished the retelling. He had the timing down perfect.

“‘My ass!' I yell. ‘It's on fire! Somebody do something!' I'm jumping up and down, balancing on the pitch of the roof, yelling and screaming, waving my arms like a friggin' lunatic, and suddenly they all start laughing. I mean, they're busting a gut, going absolutely nuts. All of them. My boss is laughing so hard I can see a pee spot forming in the middle of his pants!”

Appropriate or not, there was no way I was going to stop this story from unfolding.

“I'm yelling, ‘What the frig! I'm on fire!
HELP!
' and they're keeling over with laughter. Think about it. My ass is on fire and they're laughing their asses off! It was like the world's worst nightmare!”

He paused for dramatic effect.

“So what happened then?” Warren asked, right on cue.

“Come to find I had a squirrel stuck on my ass. It had bit right through my pants and got one of its gnarly little incisors lodged right into my butt cheek. Stuck there. Hanging on for dear life. Evidently the old chimney was being used as a squirrel's nest and one of the little buggers had bitten me right in the ass!”

Now it was my class's turn to go nuts. They were laughing and laughing. The other two panelists had tears in their eyes.

“There I am, jumping up and down on the roof with a damn squirrel chewing me out!” Brad leapt out of his seat and demonstrated his squirrel-jerking, ass-jiggling move.

The class erupted.

“Finally the damn thing gets tired, alarmed, bored, whatever and leaps off, scampering back down the chimney. That, my friends, was weird!”

“Then what?” Morgan managed to ask through his giggling.

“Boss gave me the rest of the day off. I told you. I have a great job!”

All right, so the take-home message probably got a little lost in the shuffle. All they'll remember from the panel was the guy with the squirrel on his ass. Hell, all they'll probably remember from the entire semester was the guy with the squirrel on his ass.

That and the Twenty-Nine-Year-Old being attacked by geese.

But hey, what are you going to do? It was a great story.

I'll definitely invite him back next semester.

T
HERE WAS LESS THAN THREE WEEKS
to the end of the semester. Less than three weeks and she wouldn't be a student anymore. I could barely stand it.

Once again Samantha stayed after class. I so looked forward to these times alone with her. If other students needed me or wanted my time I was resentful and edgy. I knew it was totally inappropriate, but I just couldn't help myself.

This afternoon she was wearing a flowery skirt with a Caribbean-blue top that brought out the ocean in her eyes. I was lost in the waves of blue washing over me.

“I took your advice and registered for a class yesterday,” she said.

I sat down hard on my desk, the dry-erase marker slipping from my hand.

“You what?”

“Registered. For the spring semester. I still need PDPs, Professional Development Points. I thought that Adolescent Psychology might come in handy. Do you know the professor who's teaching it?”

“Here? You registered for a class here?”

“Yeah. This class has been such a great experience. And if I get three more credits I should be good to go for a few years.”

“Here?” I repeated like a moron. “You registered for a class
here
?”

She looked at me peculiarly. “Remember last Thursday in class? You read us the riot act about registering early so we could get the courses that we wanted. I'm glad I did because I got one of the last seats in that psych class. And it's perfect. It meets Tuesday and Thursday late afternoons, just like this one. And God knows I could use a little extra insight into why my students are so weird.”

I could feel my throat tightening, overwhelmed by a rapid onset of psychotically induced anaphylactic shock. My tongue had instantaneously swollen to the size of an English cucumber, my skin crawled, my nose dripped, I was terrified I would lose control of my bladder.

Sure, I had told my students repeatedly and in no uncertain terms to register for spring classes, but Christ knows I didn't mean her! Not here! Not now!

She had told me about the need to keep her teaching certification current, how college classes counted … but damn, damn, and double damn!

I conjured up the lake image, desperate to keep from passing out. Wavy and wild on the outside, calm and collected deep within.
I am the lake
, I told myself, focusing on the breath while frantically trying not to swallow my tongue.
I am the lake
.

“Do you know who the professor is?” she asked again.

“Lake,” I croaked. “Lake. No, not lake, I don't know. Wait, wait, yes I do. Burk, Gail Burk. Very good. Very dynamic. Students love me, I mean, love her. It's a great class. A really great class.”

Samantha gave me another funny look. I turned my head to avoid her eyes.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Yes. I don't know.”

I was in shock. Total nightmare, world-spinning-out-of–control, nothing-matters-anymore, bring on the Mayan end-of-the-world shock. Whether she was in my class or someone else's class, she would still be a student. No matter how “nontraditional” she was, whether she was just in it for the PDPs or not, whatever the reason, she was still a
student in my school
! There for all the world to see. Strictly verboten! GAME OVER!