As the blender began to spin in the cartoon I copied off to post, at work, I stood transfixed.
The cartoon was a picture of a blender filled with water. A goldfish swam on its surface. The expression on its face was one of dread, eyes wide open, mouth curved downward. The caption said, "So, you think you've got stress!"
I blinked my eyes and shook my head several times, looked up at the cartoon, and saw it return to its original standstill humor.
The only thing that bothered me was the question, "Is this portending something terrible?"
Admittedly, the new superintendent's behavior was unsettling. She was making negative headlines, claiming corruption in high places. I'd also heard her yelling and screaming at length at someone, in the supply closet.
It was clear she thought Joe Clark and Jaime Esperante were heroes, and she wanted to be the next heroine.
Yet, she stood there at a community educators' meeting and lied, assuring us that we would continue in her employ and be able to "keep our homes and feed our families". This was followed by applause.
Yet someone must not have trusted her, as I received an application for unionizing community ed and began to fill it out.
Alas, it was too late! She and the then Republican Governor were getting cozy, and before we knew it, our hours were cut. Then, not much later, my own boss got fired. Generally, community education got cut across the board, and charter schools popped up all over the state. I'd heard that, after the governor did his hatchet job, he left the state. She too went back to her home state. And now, as things developed over time, the head guys in the capitol are making this school system into a charter school.
Personally, I had to spend my summers doing temp work, so I wasn't rolling in the dough. Due to in-station politics in broadcasting, another non-protected profession, my husband had gotten let go, after 20 years in the field.
So on my new supplementary adult ed teaching job, I got wind of a mother and daughter graduating the same year, interviewed then, and wrote it up for a local down-home newspaper. It was a powerful argument for community ed, but it wasn't something that the politicians would take note of at the state capitol.
I began to sense that what the poor fish had forebodings about finally happened. I returned to the break room at what was left of my main job, looked at the still-life cartoon once more, as the blender, once again, began to spin.
