This sweet woman was one of the people I met at the PowWow yesterday. The tattoo is in honour of her brother who died, a face crying with a pool of tears below it. She showed me her other tattoos, one of which is for her son, the symbol for his name, and the other on her back a large hawk-like creature, for her husband whose name is Sky-flier if I remember correctly.
I love all their names, Sly Fox, and Thomas Cloudwalker, all names which paint images in your mind. If I were Native American I think I would like my name to be Birdsong Skypainter.
My first eighth-grade class was despicable today, I was warned by the teacher who had them the class before, and perhaps then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, you kind of expect the worst, so that's what you get.
When there are many years between you and your own Std 6 (grade 8) experience, you become exasperated with bad behaviour, you can't understand how kids can be so thoughtless, so wasteful, so rude, so..... But when I think back I was probably one of the naughtiest girls in my class, if not the very worst! I remember my Afrikaans teacher would just walk into the classroom and throw me out before I had uttered a word, just because she had had enough and couldn't bear the sight of me, no doubt. Which is how I feel about one particular boy in that class!
And then you can carry on an amazing conversation about art and what makes a good artist, with a group of kids from the same class, ten minutes after you have ejected the disrupter. They are like a bunch of molecules just hanging around, and a crazy molecule bursts in and jiggles them all, so that they all bounce around for a while, until the crazy molecule is taken out and everyone slowly relaxes and stops jiggling and becomes a good 14 year old student sitting in a classroom paying attention.
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