Carlson's Last Day

This is not a sad story. This is a story that could have been true.

            Today, Tuesday, was Carlson’s last day.

            Or it could have been. Every day might have been Carlson’s last day. Any day now. He will know for sure when it comes. The day he walks out of the classroom, without his things, without his canvas bag, without his blazer, his keys in the pocket, his half-empty flask of coffee on his desk, his notebooks of lectures stacked in piles on top of the stereo, and book shelves, and countertops, his graded and un-graded essays in colored folders on the corner of the desk. He won’t touch any of them. He won’t call the absence reporting system or check his email. The meetings will go on without him and no classes will be cancelled. In the grand scheme of the public educational system, he doesn’t really matter. When he realizes this, he will walk out that door, marked with the arbitrary number, 321, the tattered cartoons, the ripped poems, the fading newsprint, and the gift postcards & stickers. He will not return, and yet he will still exist.

            I imagine that what he will worry about the most is that his friends will have to pack up box after box of books. Throw countless, meaningless scraps and reams of paper into recycling tubs. Take down and sort through all the accumulated rubbage and packratery of a decade of residence in a 600 square foot classroom. They will forgive him because somewhere in their most honest moments they admire his abandonment. And they will understand when he doesn’t answer their calls. Eventually, and sooner than you might think, they will stop talking about him. Stop signing his name at faculty meetings out of respect or for a joke. They will not forget him, his walking away means too much, but they will think of him less and less until he hides away in the part of memory where one stores, or temporarily loses, what was at one time a daily bread.

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I wrote this story last October during a particularly difficult semester as a public educator. I hadn't re-read it until now, nearly a year later, while cleaning out some files. In writing this story I was allowing the part of me that was Carlson to walk away so that the part of me that isn't him could stay. It worked. For now, I'm far from walk-about, but I thought I'd share anyway. It ain't great, but it sure was fun to write.