What's In A Name?

In August, 2006, while cleaning my classroom in preparation for the upcoming start of the new school year,I found a very retro set of sight-word flashcards left over from an old reading curriculum, long since abandoned in favor of my contemporary techniques for literacy instruction. The cards were about six by eight inches, laminated, and printed in classic Zaner-Bloser ball-and-stick font, one word to a page.

Shortly after being unearthed, these word cards became the medium for a creative but perhaps ultimately overwhelming art project that I gave as a gift to a new friend. In the months that followed, as the school year went on, I would pull out one or a few as necessary to make succinct points about various things to my family, my friends, and my loved ones—almost always to express adoration and affection, but on rare occasion to share sorrow or frustration. This form of communication taught me a lot about the power of a single word, a handful of syllables, to express a complex message.

Just about six weeks ago now, while cleaning my classroom and packing up all my personal materials accumulated within those four walls over the past five years, I found my box of word cards once again. Flipping through, I looked for some unique combination that could communicate the essence of what feels like this new chapter in my life. I found the three I wanted almost instantly and left them, as I had many other notes cards letters pictures gifts and special treats over the course of the year, in the mailbox of that same friend to whom I had given the first word card art project. She had already checked out of school for the summer, left her classroom to rest from all the teaching it had hosted and learning it had harbored over the past months, and so I knew she would not find my message until she comes back this August to prepare for the beginning of another new and promising year.

By the time she finds this last collection of cards, once she reads the three-word message I left behind as my note-passing legacy, I will truly be

gone

away

somewhere