When teachers text

Here's a text I sent last night:

I'm taking the cheese outside. I'm a pilgrim.

This was a pretty weird text to send my friend Sarah.

It was a REALLY weird text to send, by accident, not to my friend Sarah but the parent of one of my students.

I mean just inconceivably, mind-bendingly, authority-jeopardizingly weird.

Now I will over-analyze this situation in six paragraphs.

First, some context, which is more of a luxury than I provided to Ms. P, my student's parent: A couple weeks ago the fridge in my classroom broke. I came in one morning to find a grayish-brownish puddle on the floor and when I opened the mini-fridge it emitted a smell that made me question every life choice that had led me to that moment. I spent a few minutes trying to clean it out, but then I got light-headed from the combination of holding my breath and thinking about fungus, so I gave up and just posted a sign that said "Do not open! It will make our classroom smell!!" with a sad face. Of course the kids all begged to open it, but, seeing my pallor, even they eventually understood the gravity of the situation. The fridge was removed and disposed of. Yesterday afternoon, after many fridgeless days, our fantastic building manager brought in a brand new mini-fridge and we were good to go.

Then I came home and the fridge in my apartment was broken.

Luckily, it being winter in New England, my roommate and I were able to preserve our perishables by putting them in a bucket on a snowy ledge in the back of our building. I thought the night had reached its apex of absurdity when I was placing my food in a bucket outside. I was wrong.

Please note that I am very careful about texting. I am not exaggerating, for once, when I say that I have not texted a wrong number by accident since I was maybe fourteen, if ever. I had a traumatic situation on AIM once as a preteen (though wasn't every situation on AIM as a preteen traumatic?) and it taught me nothing if not mindfulness. If I have sent a mistext ever since, it has been mundane enough to not even register in memory. It surely did not include the words "cheese" or "pilgrim," certainly not both of them, and it was not sent to the parents of any of my students.

Why was this parent's phone number in my text log, you ask? Well, we'd been texting the day before about her son's grades on his recent reading quizzes, which none of us were pleased with. I love when parents choose to communicate via text or email, since I feel like it allows us to check in with each other more frequently, and being a millennial, I never learned to communicate with other humans using my voice; the whole concept makes me uneasy. But this text exchange had actually become slightly tense, due to some unimportant and uninteresting logistical misunderstanding about my class' reading quizzes, and we had decided we should chat in person when she came to pick up her son the next day. The chat was quick and productive and resolved all prior tension and confusion. We left with a plan of action, and all of us, student, parent, and teacher, were on the same page.

And then, three hours later, I texted Ms. P that I was a pilgrim who wanted to take the cheese outside.

Here are some more thoughts I have about this text: Cheese is the cheapest joke-fodder in the Western hemisphere. If I were trying to make up a scenario about a parent-teacher text gaffe, I would be tempted to invent a text message about cheese, and then I would say no, too cheap. I never even buy cheese! I'm, like, 73% vegan and this is the first time I've bought a block of cheese in about six months. But sometimes, I see now, the cheese joke finds you. You wake up one day and you realize you were inside the cheese joke all along.

To answer your final question, I don't know what I meant about the pilgrim. Putting your cheese in the snow just seems like something a pilgrim would do? I think I read that once? It was just the kind of thing you say in a text to your friend Sarah when you're not thinking very hard or paying very much attention to what you're typing... or whom you're typing it to.

Now if you'll excuse me I am going to eat some olives from a snow-bucket. I'm a caveman.