Love in the Time of Climate Change (23 page)

“Organic 101,” Trevor said, smiling at her. “Pot that is.”

Everyone laughed.

She had a fascinating point, argued with eloquence. I felt gobsmacked to realize that I had never given any due consideration to where my pot came from. To be perfectly honest, I only cared about the size of the buds and the quality of the buzz. But there was clear merit to the sustainability issue. Organic pot, grown only with synthetic-free pesticides and herbicides and fungicides, fertilized by poop from free-range chickens, hand- or horse-sown and cultivated, fossil-fuel-free, brought to your local dealership on the back of bicycles—what wasn't to like? What self-respecting medical-marijuana user wouldn't jump all over that one? I certainly would. Valid diagnosis or not.

And you knew the competition was going to be fierce with legal pot dispensaries clamoring for market share. They'd be desperate for any kind of edge.

Maybe this was why Hannah was a business major.

And it was all true: we had a newly built passive-solar greenhouse on campus and were in the process of setting up permaculture gardens. We had an emerging degree option in farm and food systems, and were already teaching agriculture-related classes. We were rolling out a new initiative called SAGE: Sustainable Agriculture and Green Energy. The idea of teaching business people how to grow marijuana for medicinal purposes in as environmentally sensitive and low-carbon way as possible was far from lunacy. And again, what better place to address the issue than a community college?

I did not, however, for an instant, think the Climate Changers had a chance in Hell of selling this one to the president. She was a wonderfully progressive woman, but teaching as sensitive a topic as this in a state institution before the dust had even settled on the referendum ballots was certainly a stretch, at least at this time. Indoors or out, conventional or organic. I could just hear the acrid tone of her voice as she camped out in my office following a conversation with the Climate Changers, the dean standing behind her, scowling. While I had never heard inappropriate language from her before, in this instance her dropping one or two of the F-bombs would certainly not have been out of the realm of possibility.

Later that evening, I brought up the idea with Jesse. I approached him mid-drink in the middle of a lactose frenzy and, not for the first time, milk shot out of his nose as he exploded in laughter.

“Fabulous idea!” he roared, soaking my students' homework. “I can just see the headlines now!

“‘PVCC Takes the High Road.' Or better yet, ‘PVCC Puts the High Back in Higher Ed!' Or how about this one:
‘Three R's Not Good Enough for College: Reading, ‘Riting, ‘Rithmatic, and Now Rolling. Joints, That Is.'”

Jesse was certainly on a roll of his own. There was no stopping him, and I had to admit he could be quite quick in his witticisms.

“Okay. I get it. Thanks for the feedback.”

“I'm not done!” he said, gesticulating wildly, this time spilling his milk. I quickly gathered up my students' homework I had been grading, wondering how I'd explain the stains to them. Jesse could be such a spaz when he was over-enthused.

“What about this? ‘Looking for Academic Excellence? The Grass Really Is Greener at PVCC.'”

“Enough!” I said.

“How about ‘PVCC: Perfectly Voluptuous Conscientious Cannabis.'”

“I'm not quite sure about voluptuous, but you've made your point! Anyway, all brilliant ideas are initially met with ridicule.”

“Ridicule? Are you kidding me? This is the best idea I've ever heard! Absolutely brilliant! You'll put PVCC on the map! In fact, coincidences abound—I just scored some outrageous outdoor weed.”

“The dealer wasn't an economics student, was he?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Jesse replied.

We spent the rest of the evening happily high watching countless episodes of
SpongeBob SquarePants
, perhaps the best stoner show ever. Voluptuous!

Brilliant or not, I secretly hoped this issue would be one that the Climate Changers would put on hold, or, better yet, forget all about. Picking and choosing one's battles was a great modus operandi.

“D
O YOU HAVE A MINUTE
?” Samantha asked.

“Of course,” I replied.

It was after class on a windy Thursday. She had waited for all the other students to leave, and then sat back down heavily on one of those torturous, ancient wooden chairs, whose only saving grace was that their aching discomfort was sometimes the only thing that kept my students awake.

This would be my seventh time I was alone with her in the classroom—not, of course, that I was counting. I put on my nonchalant, professorial, eager-to-engage-student-on-a-purely-intellectual-basis-even-though-they-are-so-incredibly-hot face, hoping it would mask an overwhelming urge to rest my hand on her thigh.

Pity the boys in her seventh-grade classroom, and a good number of the girls as well. I wondered if she had a clue as to how many crushes students had on her. How many boys were introduced to wet dreams featuring her in a starring role. Christ, there were probably kids deliberately flunking out just so they could gaze in wonder at her for another year.

She was wearing an oh-so-cute skirt with an ice-age-mammal theme. Wooly mammoths and mastodons and saber-toothed cats. She caught me staring.

“The Pleistocene epoch,” she said, pointing to a giant ground sloth. “We start tomorrow. I call the unit the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre. This skirt is a teaser.”

Damn right it was a teaser. I crossed my legs, hoping nothing down there would get the wrong impression and rise to the occasion.

“Anyway, I had a horrible experience yesterday,” she began, face downcast.

“Oh no!”

“Just horrible.”

My mind ratcheted up to worse-case scenario mode. She knew! She knew! Shit. Jesse, opening his stoned, can't-keep-a-damn-secret mouth must have blabbered away in the downtown donut shop about his ridiculous professor friend who had a continual hard-on around a middle-school science teacher who just happened to be one of his STUDENTS! I uncrossed and then recrossed my legs, sweat beading on my forehead. I prepared for damage control—deny everything. Always the best option.

No, now was the time to confess my obsessive love and lay my heart out on the table.

No, no you fool, deny!

Confess!

Deny!

She looked at me quizzically.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said. “But you? What's up with you? Why horrible?”

“I was so devastated,” she continued. “A parent came in. She told me how upset her son was with what we talked about in class.”

“Which was?”

“The Issue, of course.”

I let the air out of my lungs and drew the back of my hand across my brow, relieved that she wasn't on to me. I stuck a reminder note in the back of my brain to yell at the Roommate for something he had never done. Preemptive strikes were often a wise tactic.

The Issue. She called it “The Issue”! And I had thought I was the only one who did that. It was just like her. So … perfect.

“Why was the mom upset?” I asked.

“I guess she felt he was too young to hear about climate change. It was just too much for him. Too real. Too depressing. He had cried himself to sleep the night before. Didn't want to go to school in the morning. ‘What's the point?' he had asked. ‘We're all just going to die anyway.'”

“Oh God. That is so hard.”

Samantha wiped her eyes. I didn't know what I was going to do if she started crying.

“Yeah. Really hard. It used to be sex ed that brought the parents running. Now it's this.” She let out a long sigh.

“What'd you tell her?”

“I tried to be empathetic. I told her we were done with the gloom and doom and were now plowing full-speed-ahead with the ‘We Shall Overcome.' I complimented her on raising such a sensitive boy and told her how I fervently wished all my students were just like him and cared so deeply about climate change.”

“Sounds like quite the boy,” I said.

“Actually, truth be told, he's a royal pain my ass. Always making farting noises. Can't keep his hands to himself. Has the attention span of a banana peel. I was shocked he had heard a word I said!”

I laughed. “Kids. Full of surprises.”

“I guess. But it made me question everything. Maybe they are too young. Maybe we should wait until high school to teach them this stuff. Keep them innocent a little bit longer.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just like sex. And we all know how well that's worked.”

She smiled and blinked away tears.

“I don't know, Casey, I just don't know. Here we are at the tipping point with the whole world hanging in the balance, and these adorable, naïve little kids are going to have to deal with who knows what. My heart goes out to them, even the pains-in-my-ass. It's just not fair. It just isn't.”

I wanted to gather her up in my arms, ice age mammals and all, and tell her somehow, someway, all evidence to the contrary, everything was going to work out.

“I give them the facts and of course it frightens the heck out of them. How could it not? It frightens the hell out of
me
. I used to dread ‘the big week,' as we call sex ed. Penises, vaginas, intercourse, pregnancy, STDs. I wouldn't sleep a wink until it was all over. Compared to this it's a piece of cake.”

“As an ex-seventh-grade boy I wouldn't quite call it that. More like the big, the hairy, and the bizarre.”

She laughed.

“What do I do, Casey? What do I tell them?”

I shook my head in response. So hard to hear the truth.

So hard to be the ones to tell it.

“What do we do?” I answered. “What do we tell them?”

I
T HAD BEEN A SHITTY DAY
. It had started off shitty, it ended even shittier, and the middle had been full of shit. One of those unmitigated disasters of a day. Best to have stayed in bed.

My morning class slept through my entire lecture. Not a few of them, not most of them, but all of them. Every single one. Even those students who managed to keep their eyes open were sound asleep. If I had known in advance how the morning would go I would have contacted a few sleep-clinic professionals and rustled up some of their clients. I could have made a small fortune off those poor bastards with insomnia. One breath of that toxic classroom air would have sent even the most sleep disordered blissfully down under.

I should have bagged, bottled, or canned the stuff. Sold it on eBay. Made a small fortune.

It was one of those mornings where I could have left the classroom, come back an hour later, and found the same slumped slugs snoring away. No one would have moved. No one would have known I had gone. No one.

After my morning class I graded exams. I love my job but I hate grading. I hate it with a passion. I loathe it. I would do anything, anything other than grade a goddamn exam. ABG my colleagues and I call it—Anything But Grade. I'd go to a day's worth of Academic Affairs meetings, I'd fill out forty curriculum actions, I'd do my E-3s and my E-5s. Christ, if it meant I could get out of grading I'd smile through an All College Assembly!

It's my fault. Most of my colleagues have thrown in the towel and retreated into the dark abyss of multiple-choice, Scantron-graded, quick-in-quick-out grading. For some godforsaken reason, I actually make my students write something on their exams. I do my best to ask thought-provoking questions that actually require critical thinking. Most of them do a fabulous job. But there is something about reading, over and over, the same answers to the same questions, however stimulating or intelligent they may be, that taxes my brain in cruel and unusual ways.

Three exams down, fifty-seven to go. Somebody shoot me.

The science department had booked a prominent scientist from U-Mass to speak at noon about The Issue. He was an active member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that had won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore. He had been harassed by the Bush Administration for his outspoken criticisms of government policy. He was engaging, edgy, funny, and right on target. With solid advance publicity school and community wide, we had scheduled him in Wakefield, our largest auditorium, which seats 200.