Lilified

Just when I start thinking I can drink many glasses of wine on a Thursday night without fretting about my extra-long teaching day on Friday comes one like today. i really, really could have used all of my brain functionality today. Or maybe it wouldn't have mattered, really. It went something like this....

Wouldn't a flower dissection be an interesting way for kids to learn about the parts of flowers? Why yes, it would! Pistil, stamen, anther, etc. - I brushed up on it a bit, but in the end I felt like I needed to buy flowers with as clear-cut examples of these parts as possible. Looking at the alstromeria at Trader Joe's, I couldn't see everything. The more expensive lilies, on the other hand, were gorgeous, big, and very obvious in their anatomy. I decided to buy an extravagant amount - one for each kid, plus a bunch left over to brighten the classroom. I spent a bit more than I meant to, but I thought, fuck it. A lot of things have been hard/upsetting/disappointing lately, and I should buy the prettiest flowers possible.

I walked into school this morning all Miss America-like, with this big spray of lilies across my chest. I was so excited, and expected the kids to immediately start quizzing me about them when they walked in, the way they start quizzing me if my hair is sticking up or I have accidentally worn a similar outfit as the day before. No one said anything about them, though, which I was also kind of happy about, because it would be such a great surprise come science time.

The room was all lilified and fragrant by 11:00. The tighter blooms had opened in the sun. I cut one for each kid, and gave the first set of directions: to make a sketch from the top and one from the side. As I was cutting, I noticed that the anthers (yeah, I've internalized at least that vocab word) were fucking full of pollen. Like, tons of pollen spilling out. I'm not that smart and didn't think much about it except, "Wow. That's a lot of pollen."

Soon, coughs started up around the room. Kids started clearing their throats. "I don't feel right," someone said. "Me either." "My throat itches." "My eyes burn." "My head hurts." "I'm dizzy." Then my personal favorite: "My tongue feels funny."

That did it. As a person with long-standing tongue-feeling-funny paranoia, my attention was caught. I took a good look around at a sea of watery eyes, blotchy skin, and woozy expressions. Shit. I had triggered a mass respiratory event in my classroom! Now my throat was itching like mad, too.

The next minutes were a blur of emergency lily confiscation, rapid-fire hand washing, and classroom evacuation to the fresh air of the outdoors. My fears worsened when about half the class opted to sit listlessly in the wood chips on the playground rather than actually play. I pounded on a colleague's classroom window and asked her to remove and destroy the lilies, open my windows wider, and alert the principal. This colleague later reported that the lily smell upon opening my door was overwhelming, sickening, unbearable...

I gathered the kids in a temporarily empty classroom and read to them, hysterically noting in my mind who was reacting normally and who was not, hoping my voice wasn't betraying my own swollen throat. My students were bizarrely sedate, glassy-eyed, zombie-esque. One girl's throat bloomed with red splotches, and I sent her to the office to be watched over.

I finally took them to lunch, then cried a little from stress and worry. This day was a low, low point in my teaching career thus far. Almost any job seemed preferable. I would have strongly preferred to be a fish-catcher, and I have deep existential fear of both worms and fish.

Instead of eating my lunch, I scrubbed every possible pollen-harboring surface and sniffed the air fretfully. By the time the kids came back in, only a lingering perfume remained. We talked about what had happened, and I explained that the room was now totally lily-free, even though the scent was still there a little.

"Don't we get to take our flowers home?" they cried.

Uh...no.