My Cardboard Balcony

Nobody Panic! by Belinda Roddie When the world spins too fast for him, he sits cross-legged on the pavement, smoking and spitting onto his hands as if to keep them clean of the nicotine. When the noise has gotten to be too much, the veteran across the street screams profanity to accompany the traffic. If the sound is going to be overwhelming, like the gunfire he grew so used to hearing at night while fighting to sleep, it has to consume everyone and everything. I keep my book against my hip, my bus card pinched between two fingers. The cold could freeze my brain and all its synapses, but the earthquake in my stomach is subsiding, and the Golden Gate Bridge still crackles with static from yesterday's storm, and somewhere, we have all become calm enough to dance without our hearts picking up speed during the impromptu choreography.

Every parent that I talked to at the conference did not like what I had to say about their child. It the same spiel with all of them: That their son or daughter was gifted, that they had something special about them, and clearly I simply did not understand who they were, and thus it explained all the reasons why they were flunking in their biology and chemistry classes. I, of course, took it all in stride, and I let each mother and father rant at me as if letting it all out was cathartic and therapeutic - even if in the end, in regards to the pupil's problems, it solved nothing.