#dcolin

I think we might be the best parts of the playground.

We both make hearts fly a little. See the sky different. You see it’s all about perspective.

We know what it’s like to have legs push for us. Bodies reaching endurance on a swing. To a rim. We know about trash talk. Kids seeing who can go higher. We know about late nights and street lights.

We know about emotions when they go wrong. See, no one goes to the slide when they’re sad. We got swag. We be a new way to see clouds before they rain.

We just might be the best parts of the playground.

We see dreams big as life. The ground on one side. The sky on the other. Only difference, they have to jump through hoops to get yours. Or no difference, they have to swing a lot to get mine.

We see sweat and pain and tears and scrapes. We see blood. Sometimes it’s not the kind from victory. Sometimes it’s the kind we should never see.

That kind of play. Ground up. Like I lost my memory. Like I forgot the way laughter sounded on the way down. I just want to keep them lifted off the ground. Too many of them are laying on the ground. I just can’t swing that kind of pain.

Tell me how do you keep them above the rim. Maybe I can keep them reaching for the sky.

Real talk. We be the best parts of the playground.

We be the only ones have them reaching for something bigger than themselves.

Mrs. Large was a tall woman with broad shoulders and a walk that could wake a room.

I was eleven. Little. Shy. Full of quiet. Nothing of boom.

Sixth graders were afraid to make it to 8th grade because she was everything of boom

Voice and blackboard and chalk. She knew how to write fear and erase it in a child.

Mrs. Large was large. She could intimidate just by standing.

She could silence a class just by looking and waiting.

She chilled in her power, cool as shaved ice on a summer day.

Cool as the short hair on head full of gray. She danced in her passion. First teacher I ever met who loved what she did.

I was eleven. Mrs. Large asked my 6th grade teacher for the top of the class. That was me.  The nerd. The bored kid.

After conversing with her, Mrs. Large asked if I would write a speech for the school contest, then speak.

Me. Little. Shy. Full of quiet.

No. That was me.

Mrs. Large didn’t take no for an answer. She heard possibility. She heard nothing of no and everything of boom.

She was after school and pen and paper and chalk and blackboard. She was grammar. She was hope and ambition and challenge.  

The first time I ever spoke in front of the school, I thought I would die. Faint to no waking. Mrs. Large said she was my audience.

Mrs. Large was large enough to fill the whole room.  She was the only one there. She was stage and mic and front row.

I never told her.  I hope that she knows.

I am writer because of her. I am stage and mic and poet and might.  I am light on words because of her.

She was the teacher who set the precedent. She told me once I could be the first black woman president and I believed her for a second. She lit light bulbs every year as her job. Grew her garden on the beds of our heads. Dug out the dirt and watered our minds like they could grow like vines over walls strong enough to break them.

The bar. She defined it. Education. She refined it. My little. My shy. My full of quiet. She confined it.

She gave me more than gerunds. More than verbs and sentence structure. Most students had her for one year. I had her for three. Working on speeches. Working on me.