I remember when Luke Jackson was in prison. He’d been out drinking one night and took the tops off of a bunch of parking meters. He was doing time in a rural jail when his mom died. The prison guards, they knew that when a man’s mom dies, he’s likely to try some stupid stuff, to try and escape and make it to the funeral, so Luke just spent the time in the box.

Luke Jackson, better know to his friends and movie goers as Cool Hand Luke is fiction, but this sort of stuff takes place everyday around us, and most of us probably never notice.

Gina Coggio’s post, Brinn's Bracelets made me think of Luke. Ms. Coggio writes about her students at a school in New Haven for the New Haven Independent, and in this latest entry she writes about one of her students getting arrested.

She changes the names, but I assume she is using consistent pseudonyms. I assume that the Brinn that got arrested is the same Brinn whose mother died a month ago. So, let’s go back to the beginning of the story. Back in September, Ms Goggio wrote about finding out that one of her student’s mother had cancer.

At first, my student Brinn didn’t want to talk about it. She hesitated sharing the information, claiming she’d go sit in another teacher’s room, or that she’d talk to me later. But as she walked out the door, she suddenly decided to stick around. She walked over to my desk; her voice cracked and tears rolled down her cheeks.
And that’s when I found out about the cancer.
And that’s also when I threw myself 12 years back in time and saw a young Gina sitting in front of myself, dealing with the struggles of a dying father.
That was not the place I thought I’d be at 7:25 this morning.

In November, Ms Coggio wrote that Brinn’s mom died. She wrote about the advice her friends gave her to be strong and no cry in front of Brinn. She wrote about Brinn’s mom’s funeral.

And then my eyes rested on a beautiful young girl—a young woman, really—with set curls and a pink and purple tweed jacket and skirt. She was beautiful. It was Brinn, and my heart squeezed a little in recognition. Brinn was gripping the arm of a girl who walked next to her. If that girl had stepped away from Brinn, I wasn’t convinced Brinn would be able to stand on her own. I followed her with my eyes and read her face. It was broken. Absolutely broken. (I’ve tried three or four times now to describe how her face looked and I can’t get it right without sounding clichéd. Of course I can’t describe it. How can you describe a moment like this without sounding clichéd?)

She ended the post with ” I’m not sure when Brinn’s coming back to school. Last week, she told me that she wanted to move to Atlanta so she wouldn’t have to live at home. She said she wanted to move down there over Thanksgiving or around the holidays. I don’t know if she’ll follow through with these plans. I hope she doesn’t. I think she needs to stay here and work through it. As good as she think it may feel to go away from this place, she can’t go away from her emotions.”

Well, in Ms Coggio’s latest post, she writes, Brinn got arrested today. In my classroom. Before 8 o’clock this morning. She had gotten into a fight just outside of my classroom door and was ushered into the room by the principal.

How did Ms Coggio respond? Instead of keeping the stiff upper lip she wrote about when Brinn’s mom died, this time she wrote:
I sobbed. Out loud. I sobbed.
And no one said anything.
I don’t know how I pulled it back together, but I had a job to do, so I guess I just started doing it. I organized the materials I needed, I started giving them out to kids, and I got a grip on myself.
My kids were quiet. One girl was crying and writing a letter.

She goes on to write, But it wasn’t okay. It’s not okay to see a 17-year-old girl get taken away in handcuffs and a squad car. It’s not okay to see that in my classroom. It’s not okay for my other kids to see that happening. It’s not okay. It isn’t.
“I don’t think you guys know,” I started, my voice choking back tears again. “I don’t think you know how much we care about you. We want so much for you. We want so much more for you than this. You just don’t know.”
It was a poor explanation for my outburst of emotions. But it was true. I wanted them to know that to see a student of mine get arrested in my classroom didn’t feel normal or emotionless to me.

Another random association pops to mind, the quote from Lord of the Flies, “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true wise friend called Piggy.” I’m not sure what that has to do with Brinn and Ms Coggio’s story, but it feels like it belongs.

I guess some of what particularly jumped out at me from the whole story is when Ms Coggio told her students, “I don’t think you know how much we care about you. We want so much for you. We want so much more for you than this. You just don’t know.”

No, I don’t think that was a poor explanation at all. We all try to keep our stiff upper lips and not let the people around us, the people that we care for, know how much we care, how much we want them to have better lives. Perhaps that is why I like Ms Coggio’s writing so much. In these days of inauthentic ‘reality television’ she is writing something authentic, she is even letting that authenticity spill out at times when conventional wisdom tells us not to.

And if you care, don’t let them know, don’t give yourself away

Later on in her post, she wrote about having had her class write their eulogies or life achievement speeches. One of her students wrote ”that she died at the age of 35, the victim of a terrible gang fight.”. Ms Coggio continued, Our class fell absolutely silent. … Some kids looked at me for direction; others kind of started at Amanda out of disbelief.

We could spend time talking about how difficult it is to break the cycle of violence and tie it back to Brinn’s story. Yet, it is Christmas time and I want to end on an upbeat note.

I want to imagine Brinn’s story, many years from now, or that of some other student of Ms Coggio, who will remember back to Christmas of 2005 when a teacher cared so much for and believed so much in one of her students, that she did the unthinkable, she wept when the student was arrested for stupid stuff. I want to imagine this being a turning point for some of the people in Ms Coggio’s class.

It is Christmas time, and that is the Christmas miracle I hope for this year.