Ellie Mae

Ellie Mae
Beautiful Ellie Mae

Freddie, the French Bulldog

Freddie, the French Bulldog
Lazing on a sunny afternoon

The artist

The artist
Ollie Mac

Ollie and Annie

Ollie and Annie
Azorean grandmother

Acrylics and watercolors

Acrylics and watercolors
Cannabis and sunflowers

Papa and Ollie Mac

Papa and Ollie Mac
Priorities, Baby

Acrylics and watercolors

Acrylics and watercolors
Hollyhocks

Mahlon Masling Blue

Mahlon Masling Blue
My friend and brother.

Mark's E-mail address

bellspringsmark@gmail.com

Saturday, July 14, 2018

"No One Got Killed"


The premise that “good people disobey bad laws” is where I started five posts ago, and the same premise will see these chronicles to a conclusion. As hard as it is to go in this direction, I have been known to ponder the “What-if?” possibilities, had the government chosen to simply prosecute me for cultivation. 

What if there were no land-forfeiture action? Might I have sought a different route than the Pro from Dover, thus saving myself beaucoup bucks? What if I got convicted of growing 33 plants, because there was no additional incentive to delve more deeply into the case, as the land-seizure provided?

Romeo (Laurel) and Juliet (Ariel)
Off the top of my pointy little head, slides the realization, that I would not have been employed by the Laytonville Unified School District for seventeen years. Good people who have been convicted of cultivation, are not allowed to teach in California public schools. 

How many good people have been prevented from teaching because they chose to grow cannabis? How many people were growing for the benefits of the medicine, most likely for personal use, and got busted because of the jerk down the road with the big grow?

I could go on asking [rhetorical] questions all night, but for the moment, I will just wonder what it would have been like, had I not been allowed to teach? Regardless of the impact on my family, in terms of finances and insurance, what about the impact I had on the middle school?

For good and for bad, I brought a Victorian flavor with me when I rolled into town, no pun intended. The irony of me and cannabis for the first five calendar years I taught, is that I abstained. That’s 1,825 days, but who’s counting? Of course, I have no idea how many days the five years constituted.

Once I was hired in the summer of 1990 to teach in the middle school, I stopped all cannabis consumption. My fear was drug-testing, even though the district never tested me once, the whole time I taught. However, because of litigation in the Wellsprings Educational Collective conflict, I feared that the same person who brought down the little school on the mountain, would turn me in as a dirty cannabis user. 

So I stopped an adult lifetime of self-medication for five years. I did not know it was medication at the time; cannabis just made me feel good. When I was diagnosed as bipolar II, in 2012, a lot of puzzle pieces no longer had to be beaten into place. Saying “the pieces all fell into place” is always going to be a stretch for mental illness, but at least I understood my lifetime use of the gentle giant of all herbs.

I went from June of 1990, when I was hired on at the middle school, until Halloween, of 1995, when I attended the annual party at Kenu’s home, up here on the mountain, without using cannabis. Most everyone who lived in the vicinity of Kenu’s spot, looked forward to this event. On top of that, our home is within twenty minutes’ walking distance of where Kenu used to live. We walked to the party one year, before I started to teach.

I remember because our golden retriever Hazel showed up. Gluten-Free Mama and I were inside, while the three boys rock and rolled with their homies in the night air. With the bonfire raging there were plenty of folks enjoying the festivities outdoors.

One of these outdoors individuals cruised through the room where we were, asking if anyone owned a golden retriever. Apparently the bowzer was holding three kids hostage outside. GF Mama and I looked at one another, and I jumped up and staggered out to see what was up.

Hazel was “protecting” the boys, which meant she wasn’t going to allow anyone near them. Who knew Hazel could growl so menacingly? Whistling and hollering out her name, I rushed over to where the commotion was happening, and whisked our girl home, vowing to do a better job of socializing poor Hazel. 

Taking the middle school position as I did in 1990, meant that five years had passed since the helicopter had landed in the field below our house. More than four years had elapsed since the the land seizure action had been dismissed. How many people out there knew about my brush with the Law?

And would they care? 

I suppose the answer to the last question must be that they did not care. It has always been my experience that when it comes to public schools, unhappy parents are not hesitant to share their dissatisfaction. Publicly. Loudly. Insistently. In unison with other disgruntled parents.

Had there been parents out there who were concerned about my presence in the system, I can guarantee you that they would have let their feelings be known. All of the kids who were in Wellspring Collective ended up going through the middle school.

Most of them were at the benefit for GF Mama and me, and rocked out to some quality music, provided by Indiana Slim, BabyLee Goodyear, Bear and of course, Michael. There were others but their names have slipped through my colander-brain temporarily. 

Meanwhile, if you were in Paul’s and my program in the middle school, you were involved in a full-length Shakespeare production, that went two full quarters of the school year. You either acted, painted sets, or even a couple of years there, made costumes. All students were part of the play in some way; they had to be because towards the end, the production, it overflowed into the classroom.

As elementary students, these middle schoolers had already seen as many as four of these middle school productions, their teachers signing up for day performances, and taking them over as a class. We used to set up the octagon-shaped classroom as though it were a “theatre in the round.” We took out the tables and classroom chairs, and brought over chairs from the multi-purpose room. We put black plastic up on five of the eight sides of the classroom, with the other three being sets, and covered up the skylight, so that it was pitch-black inside the theater, even in broad daylight.

This put the spotlight on the lighting system, designed and put together by Jessie, a parent, back in the early days. There were four halogen lights, arranged strategically across the top of the stage, and controlled from a central panel. When all the kids were seated-and only then-the lights engineer would cut the brilliant halogen bulbs. 

There was always a gasp from the munchkins when the lights went out, already excited to see their older sibs in the play. The sudden darkness produced quite the reaction. 

As hard as it is to fathom, the students who did the lights were the ones who were most likely to struggle staying focused and on-task in school. Yet these were the very ones who always relentlessly pursued this part of the productions.

How I would try to discourage them. “You will not only have to read this play, in its original language, you will have to know it better than you do your girlfriend’s phone number. You will have to follow along every time we practice, so that you know when to do the lights, and you will have to come to four night performances.”

“We know. We know,” they would say. They always applied in pairs.

“You will have to keep up your grades which means not missing homework assignments.” That was sure to stop them.

“We know. We KNOW!”

We’re talking some of the squirmiest kids on the block, and they excelled beyond all belief, shocking teachers, parents and even their peers. They never let me down. And I’m sure that had nothing to do with the fact that, if they messed up during a performance, their own peers acting in the play would have killed them.

No one got killed, community packed our theater each year, and there are a whole lot of Laytonvillians out there who know a lot more about the Bard, than they are telling. 

Gluten-Free Mama made costumes every single year, both creating them from clothes bought at flea markets, and also designing and sewing countless costumes over the years. We had over two hundred costumes of all shapes and sizes, when we left teaching.

So yes, I had some influence on the middle school,and I haven’t even started to talk about diagraming sentences. I added to what Marianne Loeser already had in place, and together we made Shakespeare a legitimate part of the campus culture. 

How different would the middle school have been if I had not been on staff? What would I have ended up doing, if I didn’t teach? And how many different times can you look back and wonder, “What if?” before you decide to give it a rest. 

Good people disobey bad laws, but that does not make them bad people. With a little bit of luck, and with the services of a good lawyer, even the shadiest of characters, like this old hippie, can get a job in the school system.

After all, no one ever got thrown in gaol for reciting Shakespeare.

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