There’s a cacophony loose in the elementary school today. The students are practicing for their school festival at the end of the month, which means that the separate grades are banging away on separate instruments, sequestered in separate classrooms, all over the building. And at certain points in the school’s hallways, different parts of the cacophony will harmonize, and the haphazard symphonies that emerge are endearing and a bit haunting as they echo away down the long corridors of this place.
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A third grader passed close to me and caught a whiff of cologne or deoderant or detergent from my shirt. She pressed her face into my shirt and held it there for a minute—for a second, I almost thought I could feel her breathing—before pulling away in a swoon, exclaiming iinoi! As if it were a call, that got the rest of her class to surround me, each of them planting their own faces in the fabric of my shirt and holding there, immobile for a moment, before withdrawing with iinois of agreement. I stood there, frozen, not knowing what to do and not wanting to interrupt them.
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A fifth grader burst into a giggling fit as she tried to get out the words “red sweater” in the middle of a game we were playing. There was no doubt that she could do it as she regularly trips over herself to bombard me with her most recent Englishisms at nervous, breakneck speed. But all she could squeeze out when she tried was giggles, and her giggles got me giggling, and it didn’t help the situation any to have a member of the opposite team blurting out “PANTS!” “GREEN!” emphatically, over and over, despite the fact that his card depicted “green shorts.”
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