If you’re just tuning in, DEVOLSON is an acronym I made up that stands for the Dark, Evil Vortex of
Late September, October, and November. This three-ish month period is for me
and thousands of other teachers I know the most difficult stretch of the school
year. The amount of paperwork, adjustment, and readjustment involved ends up
creating this giant tornado of exhaustion that sweeps through my life every
fall, destroying everything in its path from my social life to my overall
hygiene.
Neat, right?
Anyway. Enough of that metaphor and of talking about my
hygiene. DEVOLSON begins tomorrow, and because DEVOLSON is terrifying, I thought it was only appropriate that I tell you a ghost story from my teaching past. This is from one of my very first years, so it’s extra spooky. Ready?
It was not a dark and stormy day in October.
It was unseasonably hot, and I’d had a particularly terrible
day. I was exhausted, had blisters on my blisters (I had not yet learned the
value of orthopedic shoes), and, as usual, none of my lessons were going the
way they were supposed to. According to the district calendar I was supposed to
be teaching coordinating conjunctions, which is difficult when you’d only
realized only a few weeks earlier that most students couldn’t write a complete
sentence.
One of the markers of a bad day for me during DEVOLSON was
(and is) crying. I had kept it together throughout the day, but as soon as I got
in my car to go home around sundown, I started whimpering.
But a few minutes later, when I pulled up to the traffic
light just outside my school, I stopped crying and gasped. A tiny, snow-white Chihuahua was
darting in between the tires of the twenty or so cars waiting all around me on
the busy street.
“Oh, no,” I whined. “Baby, get out of the road!”
The dog was panting, looking in all directions as it
skittered under cars. No collar. None of the other drivers around me appeared
to notice it. The light would turn green any second.
I knew what I had to do. Maybe I could get the dog to jump
in my car, take it back to my apartment, and then look up a no-kill shelter or
foster program on the Internet when I got home.
I opened my driver door.
“Hey! Come here!” I shouted as nicely as I could.
The dog perked up its ears, turned toward me, flittered over
to my door, and hopped onto the floorboard. Just then, the light turned green,
so I shut my door.
“Hi, little buddy! How you doin’?” I said gently, admiring
her sweet face as she peered up at me from just under my knees.
And then that dog promptly lost its mind.
If we were in some robot science fiction movie, this would
be the scene where the sweet, tiny librarian rips off her face to reveal that
she’s a bloodthirsty cyborg. The dog jumped (more like Exorcist-style flew)
onto my passenger seat, bared her teeth, and began barking so ferociously I
thought her head would fall off just from force alone.
For a few seconds I was in shock. Then the car behind me
honked, which made both the dog and I jump about a foot in our respective
seats.
I thought maybe the sudden noise would quiet her, but the
dog soon picked up her verbal harassment, nearing closer to my elbow with her
razor-sharp teeth that looked like they had been meticulously sharpened by her
previous owner, Satan. I tried to reason with myself that the poor dog was just scared, but what if she had rabies? Or, more likely, was a zombie?
"It's okay, shhh," I tried soothing her, but she wasn't having it. She lunged at my wrist on the steering wheel, barely missing it. I said about seven bad words.
I was driving forward now, so me jumping out of the car was
not an option. Instead I reached down, grabbed the floorboard mat, and draped
it over my shoulder to form a barrier between me and this little dog made of
nightmares. (I am very resourceful.)
I turned right at my first chance into a neighborhood and
swerved into the closest driveway. A couple was standing on their lawn and,
rightfully, looked surprised to find me pulling in so suddenly. I slammed my
car into park, hopped out, and shut the door. Then I shrugged off the floor mat I had on my shoulder.
“There’s a dog in there,” I told the couple, motioning toward the car.
Then I realized the dog had its paws up on my driver’s side
window, still barking maniacally, so my announcement was the equivalent of
saying, “We’re on planet Earth right now.”
The couple didn’t speak English very well, but between my
rusty Spanish and their English we managed to decide that it wasn’t safe for me
to try to drive the dog to a shelter, especially not alone. Maybe, the man
suggested, we could try to get the dog into his old dog’s crate?
Don’t, she’ll kill us
all! I wanted to say, but I nodded as to not appear more crazy than I
already did.
The man disappeared
into his garage, then came back a moment later holding a small tan crate.
“You open?” he said, nodding to the driver’s side door.
Carefully, so as to not provoke the beast, I opened the door while the man stood close by with his crate, but the second
I had the door about four inches open, the dog flew out, landed perfectly on
the ground, and ran at lightning-speed across the road, down half a block, and
under the fence of what I hoped was her home.
“Fantasma,” the
woman said, laughing. Ghost. Was it the dog’s name, or because the dog was so
terrifying and had disappeared so suddenly?
I thanked the couple, got back in my car, and drove away. It
had only been ten minutes start to finish, but it felt like a lifetime had
passed. The way time moves when you see a ghost.
So let this be a lesson to you this DEVOLSON: sometimes,
when you think that your day couldn’t possibly get any worse, a little tiny dog
you're trying to rescue may try to eat your face off.
Love,
Teach
*I told this to my students later, one of whom lives in the neighborhood and was able to confirm this was, in fact, the dog's home home.
