The smallest classroom. Yellow walls, and the ceiling seemed too high. Boxes lined up in bright colors on the tables, each a different level. This class for retards? This a toony class? The kids swaggered and straggled through the door, unwilling. To be seen here. Laminated cards, one at a time. Second, third grade skills for fourteen-year-olds. Mostly boys. I'd been assigned to help the reading teacher. Her long gray hair bunched and slipping along with the hairpins and combs. She'd organize field trips. Took her own beat-up station wagon. Once she drove us up the coast to the Great Blue Herons' nesting grounds. We walked up and up until we could look straight down into the tops of the big trees. She showed us how to spot them, the saucers of nests resting in the branches.

I never got the kids to move beyond a level or two. Nobody stayed on task. Once I was pronouncing vowels with Lester Tims, light-skinned, freckled, a skinny little dude. O: okra, Oakland, Coke. And o: butter, supper, dove. His eyes shone. He was standing beside me. "Doves," he said. "We can talk about birds?" "Sure," I said, and told him about the finches I was raising at home in as big a cage as I could afford. "Man, why didn't you say you wanted us to talk about birds?" and he was out the door. Before the bell rang for the next class he was back. I was putting cards away in their boxes, red tipped ones in the red box, brown in brown, folding the lids closed. "You like pigeons?" he grinned. "I do, I do," I said. He unzipped his jacket. I don't know how many wings flapped out from him, ruffled my hair and fluttered all through that yellow room, a sound only feathers can make, as Lester told me every one of their names.

Ontario Review #47