Body shop

I start my 22nd session of physical therapy, as I’ve started the 21 others, by paying upfront.  I pretty much have myself and pickup basketball to blame for my broken wrist and the surgery to right it, but many people coming here to come back from their injuries are in the middle of legally faulting someone else, and who knows when those suits will result in costs being covered, so they insist.

After I put the receipt with the others, I hang up my coat in the odd little closet* and go back to whichever of their two rooms has an open seat. This office specializes in hands, arms, and shoulders, and it’s nearly full, as always. Most people spend many weeks in physical therapy, and I recognize almost everyone. The Belgian high-school girl who hurt her finger playing varsity volleyball pokes neon-colored putty to work her grip. The two female cops sit together as usual, cracking each other up with cop-speak jokes and comparing workman’s comp attorneys. The young guy with two phones comes later, talking to a series of people while a therapist sends electricity through a muscle in his forearm. I haven’t seen the woman with the plastic-surgeon dad in a while, probably since she can get cortisone shots at will.  Once, after I had become a regular, I actually found myself saying to a stranger next to me whose shoulder was being unbandaged: “What are you in for?”

I find a place in the room where each seat has a wooden TV-dinner tray next to it, rickety as the limbs leaning on it, and with the obligatory lithograph of Escher’s hands drawing each other to life, which almost makes literal sense given its context. The other room has old elementary-school desks for tables and a framed closeup from Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel ceiling, the really famous part where God reaches out to Adam’s limp (injured?) hand. The entire place has an oppressive level of metaphor density.** The woman who works me over twice a week asks how my wrist feels, and I say “fine” because, like all questions of this sort, its answer is pure ornament. She’s good at juggling patients, has to be, and she lays a big blue bag of heat on my hand to loosen it up and returns to someone else in the other room.

Sessions are like getting your hair cut, only your hair is broken and it hurts. My therapist and I have been through so much small talk in two months that I have a fuller picture of her than most of my coworkers and neighbors. I know that she plays mahjong with her friends twice a month and that she picked up the game pretty quickly from her grandmother. I know that her husband is finishing up his MBA and has an enviable ease with foreign languages. (I know that his grandmother is a surly Holocaust survivor.)  They’re childless but thinking sometime maybe eventually. She’s left handed and is forever after whoever borrowed her special scissors. I know where she and her husband are each from originally and what they’ve done more or less every weekend for the last two-and-a-half months — something I no longer know about myself.

After she returns and removes the heat, I do some wrist curls with a 5 lb. weight, then squeeze an old gripper thing 30 times. Once I’ve limbered*** up a bit, my therapist bends my wrist. Hard. We do what she gamely calls a “strong stretch” that usually involves me looking away and down from the hurt while she applies her full body weight to my hand and aims for 90º flexion. I try the Zen thing of detaching myself from the material experience. I cycle through pictures in my head. My arm as cold dough that grows more pliable as its folded and rolled. A car door iced shut overnight finally coming free. An iron bar glowing orange on an anvil, throwing sparks at each hit, but taking shape. The Tin Man choked with rust, already with a heart but needing oil and an adventure to discover it.

The idea of physical or occupational therapy, the purpose, arises out of the fact that adults cannot be trusted to properly harm themselves after injury. Expertise is involved, too, of course — bodies can break in so many ways.**** Each of the three times the cast came off my son’s arm, he was unleashed back onto the baseball field and into the schoolyard and the swimming pool, without need for therapy. His body is a riot of growth, which helps with recovery from just about anything, and he (like most kids) can easily forget hurt. Adults, though, generally have vivid memories of pain and tend to convert it and anticipation of it into suffering. We quickly restrict or retire hurt limbs, which in turn leads our bodies to slowly give up on them. After I hurt my wrist back in May, I wrapped and iced and defended it for several weeks to give it time to heal itself, but time instead eroded my range of motion. And then the surgery and the pins and surgical screw and the nine-week cast all conspired to fix my hand straight.  Now it has to be bent further than I want it to if I want to come back.

The Zen thing doesn’t work. My wrist pops and smarts like hell but won’t stay past my best angle reached a few weeks ago. My PT reminds me, again, of how I came in, with flexion and extension of basically 0º, to make me feel better about where I can get to now, which is 50º and 60º respectively. It occurs to me that the old saying really should go, “Time fixes all wounds,” with ‘fix’ smuggling in all its senses.

All the effort going on in rooms makes them stuffy, and my PT cracks the window near my seat.  The days have gotten glorious, and I’m glad to welcome in the loud warm air of 57th Street. I think of Q and her classmates running in the schoolyard, waiting in the 60° morning for the bell, how they shed their coats and become their bodies.

We’re all done, she says.  See you next week.

_________________________
*I’m fascinated by this closet, possibly unhealthily so. It seems to contain roughly twice the space of the waiting room it’s off of, and its bar is stocked with weirdly thick hangers, like bunch of taupe hotdogs bent into triangles.
**Example: The Michelangelo print is even from before the restoration, meaning it has visible cracks running across the arms of both God and Adam.
***One thing I learned while writing this: The word ‘limber’ does not, lexicographers apparently think, share the same origin as the word ‘limb’. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘limb’ can be traced back to Old English’s lim, which means strong. The OED says that ‘limber’ probably entered the language much later (around the 16th or 17th century) and may have the word ‘limp’ as an ancestor. I know, right?
****The Wikipedia page on “physical therapy” makes for good reading. Assuming what’s there is mainly true, PTs in the U.S. were first called “reconstructive aides.” It says that the first American PT school was at Walter Reed Army Hospital in response to injuries incurred during World War I, and the first professional organization, founded in 1921, was called the “American Women’s Physical Therapy Association.” Though this approach to convalescence can be traced back to Hippocrates, modern physical therapy cut its teeth on war and polio, and was almost exclusively performed by women.

Data dumped on

(Photo by The Gates Foundation used under CC license)

I like to think the best of people. I try to start with the assumption that everyone believes, honestly, in what she considers good reasons for something, even if that something and those reasons turn out to be misguided about something extremely important.

The New York City Department of Education recently released performance rankings for 18,000 New York City public school teachers. In the New York Times’s summary: “The reports, which name teachers as well as their schools, rank teachers based on their students’ gains on the state’s math and English exams over five years and up until the 2009-10 school year.” In the report, each teacher (or set of teachers) receives a percentile ranking indicating whether the teacher is Low (0-5%), Below Average (6-25%), Average (25-75%), Above Average (75-95%), and High (95-100%).

Everyone pretty much agrees by now (or should at any rate) that performance on standardized tests reveals precious little about individual students and even less about their teachers. Here’s a simple example: Scores on a single test may be indicative of academic level (and, more tenuously, of teacher competence), but such scores may better represent inadequate breakfasts, wrong sides of beds gotten up on, bad pencil luck, and on and on and on. Not to mention the deep and abiding structural walls/ramps of economic strata and cultural pressures of family and community. Average scores may also vary widely across classes because, for very real example, one teacher’s students arrived day one better prepared than the other and therefore test as such. A teacher with the lower average score could in fact be “adding more value”* than his colleagues — his students could have scored far better due to his instruction than they would have without it, even if they ultimately scored lower than fourth graders a door or county over. In sum, standardized test scores could easily be the result of a galaxy of external factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with teacher potential and performance, which means they make an exceedingly poor metric for evaluating teachers in any real way.

At this point one could just jettison the whole project of trying to judge teachers (and perhaps even students) via standardized test scores, or one could try to evaluate the scores in a more sophisticated way. The NYC DOE and other places have gone for the latter, calculating the very personal percentages dumped last week via what’s called a “Value Added Model” (VAM). VAMs more generally are mathematical models designed to factor in (and therefore factor out) the swarm of influences on students to isolate the contribution of the teacher to student performance, thereby giving the “value added” by the instructor. A very (very) simple version of this is having students take an exam early on in the year to serve as benchmarks, testing them again later in the year, and then comparing scores to gauge improvement. VAMs try to account for all sorts of external factors so that the internal cause of student performance (viz., teaching) can be revealed. (For a great and extremely accessible primer on VAMs, see a paper by John Ewing in the May 2011 Notices of the American Mathematics Society.)

Not a bad idea if it works — this is me still trying to think the best of everybody — but it’s not at all clear that it does. As some have pointed out, the data collected is shot through with errors, from mis-attributed test scores to altogether absent data to sample sizes to small for the statistics they support (classes of 10 students, etc.). These kinds of error can perhaps be avoided with tighter reporting, assuming public schools have the funds and personnel to dedicate to that sort of thing.** The more troubling inaccuracy, though, is with the VAM itself. As you can tell from the examples just two paragraphs back, the factors contributing to student preparation and success prove exceedingly complex and quickly vexatious. The accuracy of VAMs hinge on our ability to sort the causally relevant from the irrelevant and the external causes of performance from internal ones. But how do we even go about knowing when we’ve sufficiently accounted for external factors and properly weighed them? How would we feel confident that the model is comprehensive enough to produce meaningful results about classroom performance that could be leaned heavily upon in tenure and promotion decisions? Again, not at all clear, at least not at this point. VAMs therefore turn out to be extra pernicious because they give the powerful but false impression that we’re talking directly and purely and with precision about how an individual teacher contributed to overall student learning. And this type of report will be used by the State of New York to formally evaluate teachers, which is, simply put, a travesty.

The NYC DOE apparently recognizes and admits*** the report's limitations by listing individual teacher scores with margins of error of 35 percentage points for math and 53 for English. Doing so, though, reveals the rankings as farce as well as travesty. Even a 35-point swing means a teacher rated dead average by the DOE’s model (a 50) could for all anyone knows be an Above Average 85 or a fireable Below Average 15. The swing is even more dramatic and therefore more risible for English scores. As commenters on various New York Times pieces quickly pointed out, metrics with this kind of error slack would be laughed right out of most anywhere else. Consider: “In 2012 Jeremy Lin had a field-goal percentage between 27 and 80%”; “Last year this fund had a rate of return of 9%, give or take 35%;” and, more pointedly, “Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott performed his duties somewhere around the Below Average or Average or Above average level,” etc., etc.

Look, I’m not one of those Teaching Is An Art Not A Science people. I’ve been working in higher education for around 15 years as an instructor and administrator. Colleges and universities have likewise been swept up in assessment mania, and I see and hear lots of resistance to attempts at evaluating what students gain by attending a particular institution. Push-back in many cases is warranted. But principled resistance — resistance to the idea of evaluating what you do in your classrooms as a teacher and/or a administrator — sells people and disciplines and institutions extremely short. A teacher of any sort should be able to say pretty explicitly what she wants students to learn skill- and content-wise, how she plans to get her students there, and how she will figure out whether they’ve made it.**** Assessing teaching and learning isn’t easy, of course, on any level, but it’s worth doing and doing well. The problem is, “well” most likely means either more individualized and extensive personal evaluations of students and their teachers (hyperlocal) or, if you like your tests standardized, more aggregate measurements of entire districts or systems looked at as aggregates à la Finland. Either way, “well” means not viewing the results as opportunities for punishment and reward. The NYC teacher data dumped last week doesn’t get close to assessing well: It’s too flawed, too personalized, too high-stakes, too susceptible to misunderstanding and misuse.

I could go on. I could speculate about why the NYC DOE and the state would distribute and base decisions this report, but that exercise always pushes me downhill into despair to the point where I begin to wonder exactly when we stopped being serious about important things. I’ll stare into these abysses on my own time.

I do, though, want to spend a little time here not understanding why the New York Times acted as it did. As the Times itself will tell you, the paper sued to obtain the teacher data and won, despite the protestations of the United Federation of Teachers. No problem there; the data being used to hire, fire, and promote public school teachers should be looked at by people other than those who hire and fire. However, the real story turned out to be the extent to which this data is flawed and misused. But the Times published the data itself anyway in an easily searchable form, thereby making it nearly effortless to gawk at the results that various of its writers wring hands over.

If the data is so bad and misleading, why publish it? Here’s the Times’s answer:

Why did SchoolBook decide to publish these evaluations?
The New York Times and WNYC, who jointly publish SchoolBook, believe that the public has the right to know how the Department of Education is evaluating our teachers. Since the value-added assessments were being used for tenure and other high-stakes decisions, we sued for access to the reports. While we share some critics’ concerns about the high margins of error and other flaws in the system, we believe it is our responsibility to provide the information, along with appropriate caveats and context, for readers to evaluate.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it. If Times writers and editors really did “share some critics' concerns” to the degree indicated by their treatment of this whole issue, they wouldn't have made it so simple to see the 36 given to your fifth-grader's teacher. The data could have been anonymized and/or excerpted for publication. As is, the concerns and caveats preclude any proper context for these results: I have no way of knowing whether the competence of my kids' teachers falls on the thick black error bar let alone where. Putting up a mechanism for teachers and the general public to respond doesn't help either; those kinds of things don't receive the same level of attention as the numbers themselves. In my more cynical moments, I begin to think that the actual context for the story involves the Times's pageview counters.

Teaching is good, hard work. I remain puzzled why we seem so determined to make being a teacher so difficult.

_________________________
*Pardon the cringe-inducing quotes. **A yellow-bus sized assumption there, of course.
***I did have “pretends to recognize” and “sort of admits,” but I'm still trying to exude a generosity of spirit here.
****In many ways the problem for higher ed is more acute because college-level teaching involves somewhere around zero hours of required faculty development or teacher training, even though it's almost a theorem that research performance is inversely proportional to teaching ability. Lord knows I struggled early on in my classrooms, and I still find myself confounded sometimes. K-12 teachers at least have to go through education courses and student teach, say what you will about their training.

Who's to say

This was supposed to be a shortish piece about some observations my lovely wife and I had as to how our kids have been moving about their social landscape and how they feel about it.  I would bring up some of my young self’s experiences (good and bad) for relief and mention The Breakfast Club as a good but ultimately insufficient example of the rigidity and porousness of ways to be at school.* I would probably use parentheses too much and make some jokes in footnotes.

But the morning I was polishing things up,** The Boy came out of his night's sleep and sat with me at the laptop, as he often does. I took a moment to add to my coffee (as I often do), and he took the same moment to look over the screen.  It didn't take long for him to realize that I was writing about him and his school.  He didn’t seem moved one way or the other — I don’t think I had said anything that should have affected him one way or another.  Like I said, I don’t think this was the case.

Problem is, what I think may not be the end of it.  Though I have gone to some lengths to remain anonymous out here — this pseudonym and site are roughly as old as my daughter — I do now mention new posts on the social media.  For some Friends™ and Followers,™ 'Q' and 'The Boy' pick out people they know, people their kids know and see something like daily.***  Our kids’ friends don’t read, say, Facebook all that much yet (as far as we know), but their parents do, and for some subjects I might want to bring up and break down, my lovely wife convinced me that that’s enough to think twice.

Back when my wife and I were in junior high and high school,**** we, like everyone, worried about our parents saying something embarrassing about us.  The vectors of embarrassment, though, were few and transient.  One parent might mention something to another, who might mention it to another, who might mention it to his or her kid in school, and teasing would ensue.  Or some kid might get a hold of a note meant for someone else, passing it around from person to person until the paper and the jokes wore out, which usually didn't take that long.

Things could not be more different now. So much information about ourselves, from the trivial to the intimate, sits more or less permanently available, and the access to it constantly becomes easier and in younger and younger hands.  I’ve overheard many kids in my daughter’s first-grade class talking about how they now have their parent’s old phones, the ones with built-in wifi and apps that take only intuition to operate.  My son and his friends, only slightly older, already have expertise in Youtube and opinions about Facebook and Twitter.  And though its jokes may have already worn out, this note I’m passing you now can be shared with nearly everyone everywhere forever.

This is all to say that I’ve got some new considerations.  I’m not going to give up writing about Q and The Boy in this space and elsewhere. After all, my kids make up the most interesting part of my story right now.  I also reserve the right to embarrass them in the usual parent ways and to enjoy doing so.  But Q and The Boy are getting to the point where they deserve some control over their stories, especially those that hinge on how they feel. I’m going to try to let them write their most important parts. 

_________________________

*Remind me someday to talk about the explosion of the nerd/brain social category.
**Yes, I polish these things before they go up. Don’t look at me that way.

***In other words, these folks think about them de re as opposed to de dicto, if you know what I mean (and believe in that sort of thing).

****You know, back when people called it “junior high.”

Memorial

We go up Liberty Street (this choice perhaps deliberate, something America would totally do) to Greenwich, through sluices of concrete blocks to slow movement, to where a surprisingly small number of people point cameras at the construction. The entrance to the 9/11 memorial is laid out to process large crowds, but it’s cold and just after the holidays, and once we present our passes we’re directed past a nearly block-long zig and zag of ropes instead of through it. Everyone and everything tells us to KEEP PASSES OUT, which we do, and they are repeatedly checked. We follow the arrows down a tunnel made from white concrete barricades topped with blue-netted fence to a glass building. A young guard dual wielding hand-held lasers scans our passes. The building turns out to be an airport-style security checkpoint, so we squish our hats and puffy coats into the bins on top of our cameras and phones. We don’t have to remove our shoes, which is good because mine happen to be complicated. The detectors don’t find us or our stuff suspicious (no one really seems to be watching that closely anyway), and we spend an equal amount of time on the other side gearing back up. To exit we must show our passes, which we do, and then we follow more barricades and arrows pointing and making the path up to Ground Zero, this time right along the West Side Highway with New York in a hurry. A guard at the entrance to the memorial proper asks for our passes and, once satisfied that we belong there, waves us into the site.

Most of the area is still a promise, an idea slowly unfolding. The museum, looking like a chipped box sinking on one end, isn’t open yet, and cupping our hands on the glass reveals a deep and broad space with a long way to go. The new swamp oaks stand in place, but they have given up for the season. We all take pictures — The Boy already has his mother’s eye — and the wind searches for our bones through our clothes. I loved to look straight up at a twin tower from its base, the way eyes work bending the top back toward me. You would swear they were built on a dare. But the new main building, now thankfully referred to simply as 1 World Trade Center, doesn’t have a precarious thing about it. Its heavy base leads the eye to compress it, to hold it down. Perhaps when I can stand close in the finished plaza I will see things differently.

The waterfalls, however, are complete. I remember the fraught memorial design competition, and of the finalists, this one was not my choice.* I thought the emphasis on the tower footprints was too literal and heavy-handed, dwelling on the holes blown in lives and not the healing. Still, realized, they do make a powerful impression. Each is a sunk black box with water falling geometrically for about forty feet then pooling into a smaller square in the center. Lights run around the base edge of the pool, and the water coming down carries the light up into it, multiplying it in interesting ways. The names of the dead, so many names, have been cut into the black metal that frames the waterfalls. I pull out my phone and use the memorial’s web app to look up my wife’s law-school roommate. We locate his name near a corner of the north waterfall, and as the evening comes on we can see it glow from below. I have read that the sound of the water was designed to muffle the city and to promote contemplation. But when I close my eyes, the evenness of the roar conjures up airliners in flight — cruising, though, not accelerating, not approaching on a violent angle. Still, I assume this was not intended.

And contemplation does not bring comfort. Memorials can provide places to offload grief, but so much remains unfinished even now, ten years out from 9/11. My thoughts about the attacks, ruminated into neater shapes over the years, have begun to show their original ragged edges. The war in Afghanistan, becoming medieval in its duration and destruction, is somehow older than Q and The Boy. I remain mostly proud of my city, less so of my country that became a wildly flung fist. I don’t know what to do or to think about any of it.

After only a little while, the cold wins, and we go back through the barricades and out into New York to eat. Always go back to the body. We order burgers and fries just a few blocks over at a place we’ve been wanting to try, and we crack peanuts from their shells while we wait for the food to arrive. Construction and change are everywhere; this neighborhood can’t become itself fast enough.

Remember, but don’t let memories get in the way. Write down the names where they can be touched and traced. Yes, a pool, too, but a small one with its own shape. And leave the surface still so that it can borrow the blue of the sky, can reflect the rising buildings and the office workers on their lunch. Make the place easy to enter and cross. Invite the whole loud, living city here, on foot and by train. Remember why we dig graves so deep and cover them with earth.

Most of all, make people look up.

_________________________
*I am, of course, precisely nobody.

Giving season

My lovely wife and I have promised ourselves bigger gifts for some time now, but that promise has had a fair amount of give in it. We’ve talked about moving for a few years, either to a larger apartment in the city or to somewhere altogether different, perhaps even to a place with yards and cars and weeds thriving in the sidewalk cracks. But this giving season we finally made good: My wife, who tracks nearly every apartment in the city, saw a three-bedroom open up in our building (and price range). The rents drop in the winter, mainly because people don’t like to move in the cold and the middle of the school year. Neither the cold nor school presented issues for us, and the third bedroom presented opportunities.

It was all rather sudden. We looked at the apartment the Saturday night before Thanksgiving and decided the next day to take it. This year, unlike most, we had booked travel to Southern California to spend the holiday with my sister-in-law and her family. Our work and school schedules makes holiday travel tough, but they just moved into a new big house with lots of room for us and for new memories. We know what it’s like to have small kids while far from family, and there aren’t many opportunities to get my wife’s family together. We found ourselves packing what we could of everything else along with our suitcases before flying out on Monday.

Thanksgiving on the opposite coast, though quick, was just how it was supposed to be. We all made bits of the feast, the shared work in their large open kitchen the sweetest part of the meal. Q crafted most of the name cards, including one for my brother-in-law’s father who came for part of the time without telling his wife.* (After saying his thanks and goodbyes, he left the table, then came back to quickly slip the name card into his pocket.) We went to Sea World, and the kids eventually agreed to pose for pictures in a giant snow globe. Since we traveled both ways off-peak, the planes were empty enough for us each to have our own row. I give thanks for the visit.

We returned late Friday just after Thanksgiving to a half-boxed house. The new place had become ours while we were away, and we started taking things up, small cart by small cart, all weekend. The Boy began mourning the old place in earnest, which is understandable given it’s where we’ve spent the last eight-and-a-half years, including all of Q’s life and most of his.** My wrist was still fixing itself in a cast, and I wasn’t much help with the heavier stuff — we have an absurd number of books — but our building’s maintenance staff muscled the big items*** (and most of the small) up the padded service elevator into the new place. No moving truck, no layers of subcontractors between us and our destination. My wife spent moving day on the new floor unpacking and helping place the big things as they came in. Which meant that Q and The Boy left their shared space for school and came home to separate rooms that each looked as if they had been lived in for years.

We unpacked our traditions in the new place just as quickly. We determined the apartment’s natural spot for a Christmas tree (in the corner joint where the big windows meet), and strung our lights across the limbs and the jambs. My wife and I found fresh hiding places for the kids’ presents until they appeared under the tree disguised to be hefted and shook. We like to dedicate a good part of December to connecting with people, and we kept up with that, too. We spent Christmas Eve with our good friends and their daughters gloriously failing to build gingerbread houses, as we have for the past several Christmas Eves. We had new friends and their daughters over for my wife’s crème brûlée French toast, which is as French and good as it sounds. Q and the boy were like squatters in their friends’ home across the street.

The kids didn’t ask for much for Christmas, never do, and they deserve lots. We strove (like always) to find a rough mean between asking and deserving, and grandparents and aunts and uncles generously helped fill out our tree to the deserving point. Both Q and The Boy loved their new LEGO sets (Hagrid’s Hut and LEGO Architecture Falling Water respectively), the magnets maneuverable into surprising lattices, the books (including another volume of Calvin and Hobbes), the kits for making and spying, the obligatory but necessary winter clothes, and many other wonderful things. My parents gave my wife and I a box of Kansas barbecue, which we, reluctantly, shared with the kids. And we appreciated the familiar park and river from new directions and heights.

To give a gift is to entertain another’s beliefs and desires. We as a species do this so often and so well just making our way everyday, though, that I think we tend to forget the magic of it, and the difficulty. To give well — to give, as we say, a thoughtful gift — is to inhabit a whole mind as it is in motion and not as one pictures it. Now and again I still see Q and The Boy as they were when they fit easily on my shoulders and lap, even though these days The Boy and my wife can share shirts. I like to think of myself as still better described by what I have yet to do than by what I have done. All of these ideas have had to give.

My wife and I always find it difficult to give to ourselves, but with the new apartment we have more than promises this year. We live in the same building, but everything seems new enough to give us the change we needed. We’ve made a few promises, too, of course. We want to take the kids somewhere new, perhaps to Paris or London, or to where you can see right through the ocean to the sand. We could also use a new mattress and fewer broken bones. And I want to finally let go of at least one book and see where it lands. Might as well give it all a try.

Happy and Merry, everyone.

_________________________

*Long story.

**His mourning consisted mainly of crying quietly in his old room’s closet with the accordion door closed. My lovely wife and I decided to take these moments as indicative of how much he enjoyed the place. And further confirmation that the boy is as subject to sentimentality as his father. He still hasn’t quite run to the end of his grief — or so he says while ensconced in his own room behind a sign reading “Boys Only: Enter & DIE!”

**Piano!