These soft April hills
Will soon lose their green to dry and dusty brown
Today we watch the lavender
and mustard
and dancing daffodils
spread wild along the path of pioneers
whose histories bloom each spring

Cave paintings, smoke signals, writing in the sand

Throughout the ages, across the miles,

From heart to heart and hand to hand

The world grows close, the world expands

On foot, on horseback and by air,

Today through cyberspace

Connect. Respond. Network. Brag.

The medium is the message, and the message is clear.

Is anybody listening?

Does anybody care?

Here in this moment, we proclaim we’re alive

You have something to say, I’ve got something to share

The human connection, so deep and so true

Now digitally keeps me tethered to you

Tonight at dinner, my husband lifted his glass, smiled at me and said, “Here’s to forgiveness.”

I swallowed hard.

Remembered that it’s Christmastime.

Tried to find it.

Couldn’t.

Here’s what happened earlier today.

A package that I had been waiting for had still not been delivered.

A present for my daughter. For Christmas.

I went online and followed the tracking number. Only to find that it had been delivered days ago.

To the wrong house. Our old address.

The online store had reverted to our previous address when it processed the order. An honest mistake, I suppose, in the frenzy of the season.

Drove to the old house. No packages delivered here they said.

But here’s the thing.

I had the confirmation that the packages had been delivered.

One on Thursday. Another on Saturday.

My name clearly marked on each label.

The Grinch had shown his greedy face this Christmas in a place where more than enough lives.

Someone stole something they didn’t need, for no apparent reason.

And as I struggled to understand why, I was struck by an awful realization – that maybe someone in that house has an emptiness inside that can only be filled by taking something that belongs to someone else.

My anger vanished.

Tomorrow night we’ll open a few fewer presents in our house. But it will be enough.

Fifteen years ago when I was hired to teach Language Arts at the local middle school, I didn’t have a classroom to call my own. Instead, I was the “roving” teacher, pushing an overflowing cartful of books from classroom to classroom during other teachers’ prep periods. Not exactly an ideal situation – and even less ideal when my class assignment right after lunch was in the chorus room. Picture this: twenty-eight seventh graders right after lunch, balancing in little wobbly lap desks arranged on three rows of risers with a grand piano between us.

I was looking for something – anything – to anchor us. One day, I opened up the newspaper to Jon Carroll, my favorite San Francisco Chronicle columnist, and the headline over his column read “This Just In…Words Matter.”

Words matter. It struck a chord. I hung a poster on the classroom wall -words matter – and every day we used that as our theme. The words we read, the words we wrote, the words we spoke, took on a deeper meaning. The students’ sense of voice and purpose had been awakened through one simple phrase. Those two words unified us. Those two words changed us. The only thing is, it took a number of years for some of us to feel the impact of the change.

One of those seventh graders with a latent realization of the power of words was Mark. He had more energy than the rest of the class combined. Every day he came bounding into the room; he shouted out questions when the room was quiet, he responded to questions with inappropriate answers that made the rest of the class howl with laughter, and he did that incessantly. Whenever I would talk to him about his classroom behavior, he would promise to try to contain himself, but he just couldn’t seem to do it.

One Sunday, he and a friend broke into the classroom during the middle of the night. When the police arrived, they were sitting quietly, watching Big Time Wrestling on television. After a few day’s suspension, he was back, as boisterous as ever.

Towards the end of the year, in response to something we had read in class, the students were asked to write about an indelible moment in their lives. I was surprised to see Mark take out his notebook and get right to work. He wrote all period without once disrupting the rest of the class. The next day he handed me his notebook with his completed entry.

Mark wrote about losing his mother the year before. In his entry he recalled how when she was dying, she would pull him next to her on the couch where they would watch wrestling together. They didn’t talk, but just snuggled together in the glow of the television for long stretches of time, just the two of them.

Click. The world shifted. In that instant I got it.

All those conversations we had over his behavior. Second chances. Patience. Forgiveness. Understanding. A classroom that somehow felt safe and comfortable and homelike to a boy who was still reeling from the loss of his mother.

Mark was my student again as an eighth grader. His behavior wasn’t much improved, but when I looked at him, I saw the pain beneath his joking exterior. I saw who he was, what he had lost, and most importantly, who he could be. At the end of the year, I had my students do something that my mentor teacher had asked of her eighth graders – I gave each student a stamped envelope and had them write a letter to their future selves. I collected their sealed letters and put them away for a decade.

So I was startled when last year, out of the blue, I received an email from Mark. Here is a bit of what he wrote:

A few years ago I received a letter I had sent to my future self, courtesy of one of your classes. You had followed through and sent them to us ten years from when we wrote them. I got mine at a time in my life where I wasn’t sure if the path I was on was going to pay off or not, and I saw in my letter to myself that I wanted to be in sports writing. You couldn’t imagine how much that lifted me up and how recalling that in tough times has instantly picked me up.

 I also wanted to thank you for being patient with me despite my constant troublemaking. I was lucky enough to snap out of that behavior early enough to where I never had those issues later in life like many of my friends did.

 I responded right away and we have since done a lot of catching up. These days, Mark makes his living as a sports writer in Los Angeles. I am no longer a classroom teacher, but in my role at the district office I am in charge of an annual writing contest for high school students. In March, Mark took a bus here from southern California in order to serve as a writing judge for me. Four hundred miles to connect with his middle school teacher and maybe with a part of himself too. Four hundred miles to spend a day reading, volunteering his time to connect with young writers with stories of their own. Working with him that day, I was struck by his kindness, his insightful feedback to the teenage writers, and the seriousness with which he undertook the task.

Time and time again I have found that we teachers learn way more from our students than they do from us. And just as we know that sometimes our students don’t reap the benefits of our teaching until much later, the same can be said of us. Sometimes, we don’t see the influence that we have had on our students for years, if ever. I believe in you, I see you, I care – whether said out loud or spoken through our actions is a powerful, powerful message. Our words matter.

Reaching all students is not easy. Kids come to us with hurts and failures and attitudes. But teachers have power, incredible power to make a difference. It takes patience and persistence. When we take the time to get to know the people sitting in front of us (yes, even when there are 150 of them across the day), when we truly believe that the human connection is the most important thing we teach, amazing things can happen. Sometimes it just takes a little more time.

The Napping House, written and illustrated by the husband-wife team of Audrey and Don Wood was published more than 30 years ago. It was based on a real life experience, and conveys a sense of warmth and comfort and belonging – in a rhythmically told tale. Over the years, kids and teachers and parents and editors have all suggested a sequel, another napping house book. The Woods weren’t interested. And then…

More than 30 years later, the full moon intervened. A restless night for author Audrey, led to the birth of The Napping House’s twin, Full Moon at the Napping House. The rhythm and the familial connections match perfectly, but the action is the complete opposite. When the two books are read side by side, it’s magic.

Last week, Don and Audrey Wood shared stories of their life experiences turned into picture books with librarians and coaches from across our school district. And then they headed to a local elementary school for a pajama party.

As their stories unfolded, I was reminded once again of the power of a good teacher and the importance of being patient. Sometimes learning takes a really long time. Sometimes, even when everyone else is clamoring for now, the individual must wait for just the right moment of inspiration and connection and growth.

Last month I heard writer Adam Johnson (The Orphan Master’s Son; Fortune Smiles) speak about his writing with San Francisco Chronicle book critic John McMurtrie. Listening to Johnson, an extraordinary storyteller, the thought occurred to me that maybe there was a bit of a fabricator, a fictionalizer in him as he shared his background – just a wee bit anyway. His father worked at a zoo and to hear Johnson tell it, they had another kind of zoo at home, a collection of all the unwanted creatures that people dropped off outside the gates of the zoo at night. These were not abandoned puppies and kittens, but rather amazingly rare and ridiculous animals. When recounting his childhood growing up amid this menagerie of wild and wonderful, nearly mythical creatures, Johnson’s past seemed to take on a life of its own. He said, “to tell a story was just to hold someone gripped,” and he seemed to delight in doing just that as he added layer upon layer to his story of growing up with a father who held not just the keys to a zoo, but the keys to everything. He said a writer can take control of the narrative, but after a while it seemed as though the narrative had wrestled control from him – he was as gripped by the story he was telling as we were.

I am a book groupie, and over the years I have listened to the stories of dozens and dozens of writers. I am always a little in awe of the way reality and fiction seem to meld as they begin to speak. There’s a glint in the eye, a kind of conspiratorial sharing of the embellished detail or two that seems just a bit past the point of believability. But maybe all stories of the past are like that – remembered and rehearsed and retold until they become larger than life.

I wonder how many of my memories of non-descript, ordinary days (like today for example, when I am still in my sweats at 2:00 in the afternoon, having done nothing but read the Sunday paper and take a short walk) over time become polished into bigger and better versions of themselves, and I in turn become a bigger, better, funnier, more interesting version of myself. Hmmm….