Jesse for the Win

by Kris Rasmussen

Ashley started swinging her legs, slightly. Across the classroom, Mia’s ever-so-innocent grin warned me she was about to do the same. Which meant Brie, Matthew, and Jenny would probably join in as well.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Jesse slapped his face then shouted, “Stop it.”

I shot the girls my best teacher glare as I said, “Enough, ladies.” And then, in the lamest teacher voice ever, I said, “Don’t, Jesse, don’t. Please, don’t. “

Jesse came to my classroom in a tiny charter school from a larger, traditional public school. No one prepared my students or I for his Legos obsession and the shriek he would make if I assigned homework. Quickly his new classmates began to prey on one of Jesse’s strongest tics—repetitive motion or sound. Jesse’s tic became a new game for his peers to see which of their antics could get the biggest rise out of him. One day it would be repeated tapping on their desks. Another day it would be a chorus of sneezes choreographed to explode one after another around the room. Each incident led to me admonishing students while sending Jesse out of the room to a designated quiet space to calm down. I tried the group pep talk about accepting differences. I tried consequences. I sent e-mails to parents about empathy.

Fail. Fail. Fail.

Jesse’s parents stuck by me, though. They didn’t helicopter into my classroom after school, admonishing me for not controlling the leg swinging. They didn’t blame me for my lousy classroom management. They had fought to get him here, especially after Jesse’s former school had refused to put him in a less restrictive setting, insisting he remain in special education classes or in a resource room with other kids with various labels. His parents were warriors. The gentle, foundry-working kind, but nonetheless warriors who believed their son could go to college and learn social skills necessary for the real world if he was mainstreamed into a general education classroom.] .

By January, students stopped swinging their legs though I’d catch eye rolls and sighs over Jesse sharing another essay on Legos or his favorite computer games. Jesse adjusted to my sense of humor—something some students never accomplished. One day he came in doing his impression of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” He continued after the bell rang. “Oh, Jesse”, I said, “It’s way too early in the morning for Ms. R to disco dance.” He chuckled, but then he stopped.

In February, Jesse’s dad suggested that Jesse join the quiz bowl team. Mia and Ashley were the school’s aces in literature. Matthew could crush it in history. Math and science remained the weak spots, and that’s exactly where Jesse could excel. But I wasn’t sure that would motivate my students to play nice. I worried Jesse’s ]dad seemed to overestimate his son’s ability to face strangers in a competitive environment and not melt down. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have the last word; the head coach did. The decision was made that Jesse could compete if his father came with him to competitions.

 At first, it was hard to tell if the experiment [was working. Sure, at some competitions, Jesse would solve an equation while everyone else was still writing the numbers down. But at others, he’d simply stare out the window or count the bricks on the wall (hopefully silently). The team and I settled into a hope-for-the-best-don’t-worry-about-the-rest approach to the season.

Then, in the final round at one of the last invitationals of the season, Jesse answered one question correctly. Then another. Then another.

Which of the following scientists was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1911 for the discovery of the radioactive elements radium and polonium?

Buzzzz. “Madame Curie.”

How many times louder is a sound of 40 decibels compared to a sound of 10 decibels?

Buzzzz. “1,000.”

Then it was time for a literature question, which meant it was time for Mia or Ashley to dominate the competition.

What character was made famous in a short story by Washington Irving and takes place in Sleepy Hollow?

Buzzzz.

Jesse hit his buzzer first. “The headless horseman.”

Ashley, Mia, and Matthew attempted to high-five Jesse, who clapped his hands and turned to the other team. He pulled his turtleneck up over his head. He even did a little gallop in place.

Lizzie gasped. Mia groaned. I froze. Jesse’s dad touched Jesse’s arm before I could say anything, and Jesse reappeared from inside his turtleneck.

The round ended and the other team won, despite Jesse's  impressive effort. Mia stormed out of the room after the members of the other team. I raced after her into the hallway. Was she that unhappy that the team lost?

Mia’s cherub cheeks flushed, and I watched her Goldilocks curls swish as she pressed her face too close to one swaggering kid. “I saw what you did,” she snapped. Mia moved in closer, backing the guy against the nearest wall. “Jesse is my teammate. I will not see those pictures on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat—anywhere.“

She took one more deep breath and plunged ahead. “I will be checking. And my friends will be checking. We will know if you do, I promise.”

The kid slinked away into the throng of competitors as Lizzie and Matthew swooped in and hugged Mia. I rushed up to join them at Mia’s side. I fussed and fumed with them about the loser daring to pick on Jesse; I also thought about the desk tapping and the leg swinging and how they had all faded away. Today, in this moment, it was Ashley, Matthew, Mia—and Jesse. Classmates. Teammates.

            “Mia, I ….“ I could tell it was going to sound too much like a John Hughes film, but I said it anyway. “I have never been prouder of you. Nothing else today will be as important as what you just did.”

Instead of a Hollywood fade-to-black ending under a kicky soundtrack, however, the team and I would return to school and face the battle of the farts—when Jesse went through his all-bodily-functions-need-to-be-shared-at-all-times phase. We didn’t always face the sounds—or smells—with patience and kindness. And the glazed donut episode will never be a career highlight. (I became unhinged momentarily over Jesse’s relentless fixation on a leftover piece of pastry sitting on my desk.) Yet as freshman year gave way to sophomore year, these moments no longer felt like battles to win. And even Jesse’s successes felt less like victories to high-five and more like a wall of  bricks I could silently count to myself.

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She Needs You to Forgive Her

Got to Let It Go    by Kris Rasmussen

Do You Remember the Time

Poised strategically in an aisle seat toward the back of the sanctuary, I scanned the congregation for her signature widow’s peak and cascading curly hair. Word on Music Row was that Amy Grant had been popping up to do worship at the end of Belmont Church’s Saturday night services lately and I was there for the free concert. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman with curly-q 80s-high hair. She was standing under an exit sign wrangling a fussy toddler.  But it wasn’t Amy. It was Shelly, a former roommate, and someone I never wanted to see again.   

If These Walls Could Speak

Straight out of college, I moved to Nashville not to pursue music, but to pursue theater and stand-up comedy. (Yes, I know, but at the time it made total, complete sense to me.) I found my obligatory office job to pay the bills while struggling for my art and moved into an apartment with a girl, Shelly, who I met at a church singles group. Shelly made me laugh and liked all the same music, movies, and clothes that I did, I couldn’t imagine us being anything but the best of roomies. It took several weeks before I realized there was a third entity in our living situation, her bi-polar disorder.

The nights that she stayed up all night cleaning after weeks of piling up dirty clothes and shoving filthy dishes under the bed didn’t alarm me too much.  (I was hardly a neat freak myself.)The weekend she took me and her two children (she had limited visitation) out to Opryland USA and paid my way for rides, concerts, and junk food seemed sweet and generous. Well, until Monday morning when I received a phone call at work from one of the elders of our church. Shelly had asked him for rent money because I couldn’t pay my half.  The problem was, I had given her my half of the rent a week ago.

The situation escalated. She continued to go on spending binges and out-all-night-doing-who knows-what-binges. She had confided in me by this time that she struggled with bi-polar disorder, but did not like her meds and felt if God was God, he would heal her.

The chaos came to a head when her landlord discovered I was living in the apartment with Shelly – a fact that violated Shelly’s lease, another detail kept from me. The landlord told Shelly she was being evicted for violating her lease and I came home late that night to find all of my belongings strewn in the lobby. Just like that. I was locked out my apartment and homeless. I found a payphone, called a friend, and she sent her husband to help me stuff my items in garbage bags and drove me to their house to spend the night.

That was the last time I saw Shelly until two years later that night at the church.

Father's Eyes

 The service was almost over – which meant Amy Grant might be closing out the worship that night because, well, this is Nashville, after all. One rousing rendition of “El Shaddai” and I would make my escape.

That’s when I heard the still, small voice I had come to recognize as God. She needs you to forgive her. Trying to find the internal mute button, I ignored that voice as I forced my eyes away from Shelly to search again for any sign of Amy Grant hiding in one of the pews ahead of me. I am not going to say I am sorry. I did nothing wrong. She needs to apologize to me.  

She needs you to forgive her, repeated the still, small voice.

Enough. I was not going to speak to Shelly.  I decided to leave the service early and miss Amy Grant.  So I stood up and looked for a different exit, one far away from the one Shelly blocked, and she saw me. We made that kind of eye contact you can’t pretend didn’t just happen. The second her eyes caught mine, she ran forward to hug me, toddler in tow, tears in her eyes.

“I am so sorry”, she whispered to me.

I hugged her – reluctantly -back. “I know,’ I said. “I forgive you.”

Good. I had done my job. But Shelly wanted to keep the awkward side hug going so we stumbled out into the church foyer. Shelly had lost her job, became pregnant again, moved away from Nashville, but was in town visiting her kids. She was trying to put the pieces of her life together. It was slow going. But she was on her meds and she was trying. I hugged her again, meaning it this time, and told her how happy I was for her, how thankful I was God arranged for us to cross paths again.

I Will Remember You

 No, I never saw Shelly again. We didn’t keep in touch. We didn’t need to renew our relationship to experience reconciliation. Reconciliation took only a moment, the moment when I did not just hear God, but actually listened to what He was saying.

 As Shelly and I talked that night, I realized God wasn’t telling me I was wrong. Or that I had to say I am sorry.  Or even that if I wanted to be a good Christian, I had better forgive her or else.  My defensive posture toward the past said all that.  God simply wanted to give Shelly the opportunity to receive forgiveness and me the opportunity to be free of my righteous indignation. Yes, the Bible calls us to forgiven even to seventy- times seven , but I have found it just as helpful  in my Christian walk to remember that reconciliation can happen in all kinds of unexpected, uncomfortable moments, especially if Amy Grant music is involved in anyway.

Madeleine Monday

We’re not the only generation to seek titillation in perversion, though I doubt if it’s ever been so open since the days of the great Roman excesses. Our civilizations are not dissimilar, both reflecting the end of something rather than looking towards a new beginning (which is always the stance of the artist) and both are the expressions of a secular culture accepting only the immediate and shunning the transcendent