Mr. Rice

When you’re a substitute teacher at Naperville Central High School, sometimes the teacher you’re substituting has what they call a “supervision period.” During your supervision period, your job is to sit in a chair behind a desk planted along the wall of a major hallway intersection for 50 minutes. Ostensibly your supervision post serves a purpose – one post is set up down the hall from the cafeteria so that during lunch periods a responsible grown-up like me can tell kids not to leave the cafeteria without a pass. No lunchers have escaped into the halls and lit the school on fire on my watch, so I must be doing it right. But most of the time you have no written instructions and your post serves no discernible purpose, so you just plop down behind your hall-desk, crack open a book, and try to look imposing enough that any kid thinking about breaking whatever rule you’re there to enforce thinks again. 

Yesterday, during one such aimless exertion of authority, I was occupying a post kind of between the library and the gyms, and a kid with a camera approached me and asked if I was Mr. Rice. That’s how I introduce myself to the kids, but I hadn’t taught this kid before. He just knew. He was looking for me specifically, as a representative of the Central Times newspaper, to take a picture for some upcoming story about substitute teachers. His mission was to get a picture of me with a student that liked having me as a sub. Now, theoretically, this should have been easy, since I’ve probably taught at least half of Central’s students at one point or another this semester, and enough of them remember liking me that I hear happy hellos in the busy hallways on the reg. But I had to tell the kid it was a gamble. When you’re a sub you have no routine; every hour is a total surprise.

The bell rang, and students spilled out into the hallways like a liquid fills its container (not like solids and not quite like a gas, 6th graders), and within a minute a boy I recognized from two days back in March as an English teacher said hi to me, and in seconds we were posing together for pictures. This kid, whose name I absolutely do not recall, is emblematic of a large portion of the students who appreciate me – the foundation of our relationship is two days of him trying to avoid classwork and me calling him out on it publicly in a whatever way I found funniest at that moment. Somehow this produces a kind of loyalty where he greets me excitedly in the halls. “MISTER RICE!” I’ll take it.

A couple of students – seniors, I think – got me talking about my travels, and somehow they got enough information out of that to find this blog. One of them told me so. They dug it – lucky for me I don’t have anything to hide from impressionable teenagers. Yesterday another student who knew I traveled asked if I wrote, and I told her it was findable, but I wasn’t gonna help her find it, and that there were students in the school who did find it, but I wasn’t gonna say who because I hardly remember any names of students. It’s fun sending kids on hunts.

In February when I talked about travels, it was to say where I’d been in the last few months of 2015. Now the topic of travel points towards the future, and a date: May 23rd. If you fly to Europe via IcelandAir, they let you take a free stopover in Reykjavik for up to a week. I’m doing that, Couchsurfing with a young sister and brother from Spain, on my way to see David, one of my closest buddies, who’s studying Divinity with the likes of N.T. Wright at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He’s got a cool wife and a new baby, so as soon as my flight lands in Glasgow, I’m gonna skedaddle their way. I’m really excited to see them.

After that visit, I might see a friend from college in Dublin, and later I might see another college pal in York. London is big, so I may try to stay with more than one host there eventually, but I do have one lined up in Lucy, an old friend of my mom from when she worked there briefly in the ’70s, younger then than I am now.

At some point I’ll be ready to visit the mainland, so I’m building a map of potential hosts and possible destinations (reader, if you have any ideas for either, let me know!). The plan at that point will be to meander across the continent toward those hosts, mostly hitchhiking and largely improvising. I’m excited for this part. My departure is so soon now, and every act of preparation etches the reality of it all deeper in my mind. I’m ready to be on the move again, and if the west coast was an adventure, this will be, well, also an adventure, but more logistically complicated.

I’m wrapping things up here. I’ve been writing lots of songs that I’m very proud of this year, and I’ll be performing some of them on Saturday at an event in Wheaton that my friend Adam is putting together. He’s the one who’s been helping me record some of my songs. It’s no aggressive move into the suburban Chicago music scene, just a chance to let some of my new songs breathe and find some ears. I’m excited. These last few months have largely felt like a placeholder, a commercial break to make money for the real show, but I do have some good songs to show for it, and it will be nice to show them.

And that’s my winter. Odds are pretty good that the next time I write I’ll either be on the brink of departure or already on the road. See you then.

 

Reading: Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
Listening: Dig Me out by Sleater-Kinney; those new Radiohead singles
Enjoying: Star Wars, always, obviously