Sally Huggins Toner

We’ve had two school day delays in a row for a glaze of ice over bridges and overpasses.  This morning, I tackled a glaze of sticky notes and papers on my desk–names, notes, editions to and deletions from Broad Run’s Fifth Annual African American Read-in.  The auditorium lights went up on our featured reader at 6:45, and I was still fixing the program and accompanying slide show at 4:20.  Twenty seven student and faculty performances, cakes, balloons, a piano, reception and book signing afterwards.

To born organizers, none of the above sounds un-doable.  Plan, list, delegate, double check, triple check.  Piece of cake.  (Or both vanilla AND chocolate cake in our case.  We had both.)  But to me, the one who has operated with three book bags vomiting paper of various shapes and sizes since the eighth grade and presently has 131,000 emails in her inbox.  Well, you get the idea.

Being in charge of this was terrifying.

“But don’t forget you’re creative,” my mother always said when I never got above a satisfactory in organizational skills.  Or handwriting.  Or spelling.  Then she’d wonder aloud how I was the only Catholic school girl she’d ever known who COULDN’T spell or write in cursive worth a damn.  When our first daughter was born, I burst into tears when my husband came to the hospital and told me she was alphabetizing my spice rack and was laughing that I had at least ten containers of cinnamon.  Clearly, even as a mother myself, I had not grown out of being a beautiful mess.

Yes, I’ll add the word beautiful.  No one ever made me feel other than that. I grew up loved for who I was, ADD and all.  They didn’t label these issues then. We were called “scattered,” “unfocused,” or, if we had the parents I was blessed with–

Creative.

Unique.

But sometimes a mess.

There are times when being a mess is red hot carelessness.  Harmful to others.  You want to see me lose my s–?  Watch me after two tenth grade boys shove each other around the hall of my school and miss this littlest teacher entirely, where I have to employ my lightning fast 49-year-old reflexes to keep from being slammed into a water fountain.

“Hey, pay attention!” I project in my best teacher voice. (It’s much bigger than I am).  WATCH OUT BELOW.  I try to make it a joke, sometimes.  Still, they need to learn.  The messes that hurt, we have to clean them up.  Even those messes teach us something, though.  If we pay attention.

Want to see me lose my s– in a good way?  Watch these kids who raised their voices last night.  There’s nothing I can teach them in my little room that matches the courage it took for them to get on stage, to share their feelings about everything from loveliness to heartbreak to gender identity to what it’s like, really, to be black in Ashburn.

“How do you feel?” our featured speaker, my friend, a phenomenal spoken word poet and advocate named Camisha Jones, said on our way to her signing table.

“That was terrifying.  But it was awesome.”

“Those kids…” she began.

“I know, right?”

“Those kids.  They had something to say.  They got a chance to say it. They were heard.  That’s huge.”

It is.  They were fearless.  In a time and place where everyone MUST make a 4.0 or higher, be on the best travel team, have the best music teacher, trainer or coach, the best of the best of everything…

These kids of all races, creeds, and backgrounds honoring the tradition of African American literature were fearless.  They weren’t afraid to make mistakes, to miss a note or have a slide show they’d created replayed when the sound didn’t work, or stumble over a word.  They had something to say.  And they were willing to say it.  Mess and all.

And it was beautiful.