I was teaching my last class of the day on Friday when I looked out my window and saw two custodians attacking the azalea formosa with hedge clippers. The bush was covered with flower buds ready to bloom in the spring and three flowers had already opened prematurely in response to a cold snap we had two weeks ago. I interrupted my teaching, opened the window, and demanded that they stop. They insisted the principal had ordered them to trim that bush and he would just send them back to finish it unless I spoke to him directly. I said I would speak to the principal and they stopped. They circled back fifteen minutes later, saw me watching the window, and moved on.
After school I sought out the principal and found him at his usual post for bus duty, outside the guidance office. I told him what had happened and he gave me the most probing look I have ever received from him. I could not interpret the content of that look until the following morning. At the time, however, he said it was challenging to find good employees, and that he had pointed at the silvertips and told them to prune them. It's completely the wrong time of year to prune the azaleas, he said. As I reflect on the incident now, it occurs to me that he is the most landscaping-savvy principal with whom I have ever worked. He holds regular Saturday school beautification days and new plantings appear throughout the year. As I thanked him Friday I said I was pretty sure he is the kind of man who knows when to prune an azalea.
Even though I had checked email at lunch and paid a rare social visit to one of the history teachers upstairs, I did not go to the New York Times website to look at the most recent headlines, as I often do, either at lunch or after school. As a result I was completely unaware of the school shooting in Connecticut earlier that morning. I turned on the radio in the car on the way home, which I seldom do, and that is when I learned what had happened.
It was not until I was reading the Times on Saturday morning after breakfast that I had even an inkling of what might have been going through my principal's mind when I approached him about the azalea bush. Twenty children and six adults were dead in Connecticut. All of the children were first graders, at the start of their careers as students. Among the adults were two teachers, one young and one my age, the school psychologist, and the principal.
Of all the things any of us expected to be dealing with that day, a gunman at school was probably not in the thoughts of any of us except the sheriff's deputies, the deans, and the principal. Because they are preoccupied with all that can go wrong at a school, the rest of us can carry on teaching and learning. I can imagine that my principal was in awe of the absurdity of our conversation at the end of a day when students and teachers had died in a bloodbath. He might also have thought that if the untimely pruning of the azalea buds was the worst crisis he had to deal with at the end of the day, that was fairly mild. He had these thoughts and several others, I now deduce from the expression on his face as I unfolded my story to him, the students all around us getting on their buses to go home.
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