A Premature Nostalgia

“I’m so far from not caring.” (DeYarmond Edison, “Bones”, 2006)

I know that it is only May 5th, but I’m sitting here at this desk and looking out the window and I’m already gone for the year. The song on the little stereo isn’t helping me: “Bones, lying in a trunk at the foot of my bed / they're always open to show me that they're still dead / and everyday it's harder still”.

I’m not sad, not depressed, but there is a dull ache (a mini-melancholy) somewhere near the marrow. I guess it’s been there for years. Most of the time, I’m smilish and have a habit for telling stories—whether the audience wants them or not. Another version of me, one I cultivated for many years is quite quiet, nearly silent (boy, can he brood). He’s still my chauffeur most mornings and afternoons. He stops the car for me to take picture, keeps it running though. Today he must have entered the building, knowing that it’s Wednesday and the extroverted version won’t be needed for hours. But introversion breeds thinkiness and thinkiness breeds loneliness—sometimes.

But then a friend dropped in and stopped the seclusion. Sensing the mood (and the music?), he confessed to a predilection for “premature nostalgia.” The end being already envisioned, the getting there becomes less important; he explained that this has lead on occasion to a dampening of happiness—or a quickening of its always-eminent departure, but this friend is far from a kill-joy. In fact, he has a talent for making people happier by just showing up, but he’ll also let you wallow if that’s what you need. Today, we broke the wallowing with conversation, only a few minutes, but we broke it well.

Alone in the room again, and soon I’ll get back to the work I’ve been avoiding (and I have, I had to so that I could get to this, I’m not that bad of an employee), I let myself listen to that song one more time. The last verse gets back to the bones: “skin, and it's warm enough to hold you and keep you breathing / but it locks me out and makes me lose my needing / and how long to be alone / how will I carry these bones? // and I'm so far from not caring”.

What I am nostalgic for is both already past and yet always arriving. I have passed decades of Mays and ends of school years; I have felt their relief more often than their wistfulness, but I have felt both, feel both. After all, it was as recent as this January I was ready to hang it all up for good and find that second career, but things, especially mood, always & often change.

This year, I want June. I need June. I’m already mid-way to June in my mind, but I can already feel the end of summer too. All the things that won’t get read, written, cleaned, organized, thrown out, painted, played with, and on and on.

And there are the things of this year that still need to be processed and accounted for or left behind. And maybe this is it. Maybe it’s a nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake I’m feeling. Maybe, sitting by myself in this room—by myself here for the first time in months it seems—I am coming to terms with the changes that have already occurred (that every survived year brings). This year there is much that I haven’t caught up to yet. I have a lot of people to say thank you to. I have a few to let know that though the summer drought is about to begin that I’m not too far to be reached, and not just electronically.

Time is no straight line, but rather, it folds accordion-like back onto itself, separating and coming together. I won’t talk about the music it makes (like it or not), but I will end with that song again:

Pain, I'm good with the ways there are to erase
And I'm pancaked on the floor, you can't see my face
Cuz it's buried like the moon
Sober morning's come too soon


And I’m so far from not caring; and I’m not going anywhere, not yet.

There My Be Ten or Twelve Things...

There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve ...

I've always admired teachers.

My best moments with my grandmother, my mom's mom, were when she got caught up in old stories or listened with the interest of a [former] teacher. This didn't happen that often, but I remember those times when it did.

My mother, as selfless a human being as I've ever known, taught kindergarten for decades with all the kindness and compassion of a saint on the earth.

My two irreplaceable and irreproachable sisters, both now professional educators, sacrificed (or just spent) their after school time and summers playing ‘school’ with me until I was old enough to go there myself; I went straight to kindergarten—sister school being a good enough pre-school.

My father was a natural ‘doer’ but not a natural teacher. However, he did try. One of my last and most prized memories with him involved him ‘teaching’ me how to install a car stereo. He also taught me how to pray without anyone needing to know, how to be a loving husband, and how to be a reliable dad. He taught much more than he ever knew.

In finding the love of my life, I found another teacher. And I found her in school of all places: a course in World Religions. She still hasn’t let me live down skipping class on the day that she presented her biography of Gandhi, but I bet she can’t remember my favorite section of the Tao Te Ching either. Now, she dedicates her days to helping the youngest strugglers one by one by one with infinite love and kindness that never ceases to impress me.

So, I guess it is no wonder that I spend my days in a room full of books, and minds, and ideas hoping to inspire at least in a few a means to making a continuing and meaningful education.

At some point, in what must have been dire need, the educational bureaucracy decided that I was qualified to supervise future teachers, and the first go not ending in utter failure (long live Mr. Dixey!), they let me try again. Enter Ms. Amanda.

________________________________

Teacher

For writing—being a writer—always seems to the writer to be of dubious value. […] 

Teaching—even the teaching of writing—is altogether different. Teaching is an act of communication, sympathy—a reaching-out—a wish to share knowledge, skills; a rapport with others, who are students; a way of allowing others into the solitariness of one’s soul.

Joyce Carol Oates, "I Am Sorry to Inform You"

Schopenhauer was a pessimist but
he played the flute.

William Stafford, "Things I Learned Last Week"

I.

There were two nuns, two years apart, in two different towns, each taught me  something about what it means to read, to know, to speak, listen, and teach. 

If not for one, I'd be much less kind. If not for the other, I don't see a world 

in which I'd be writing this, having read that, or known any of you.

II.

Nearly ten years ago, I was the intern, twenty-five years old & rough around the edges. Mary was my mentor, without whose endearing example, along with her good word, I wouldn’t have landed this job. We don’t talk much these days, but I think of her often for the help that she gave.

It’s been a charmed ten years. I’ve made friends from colleagues, who remain close by even when they go. I wouldn’t be writing this without them, and because of the luck of the draw, or the hand of fate, this last twelve weeks we got one more.

III.

I’ve never been the type to say everything happens for a reason, but I know that things happening is the only reason I’ve ever found. Where we are matters much more than where we’ve been, even though we spend a lot of time thinking and writing about having been there. When it’s said and done, where we are going is never anywhere else than where we end up.

Though we can’t stay forever, we all ended up here, and that is all the difference that can be made.

IV.

Teachers are givers, and not just of tests. It occasionally hurts to put a version of you out there to face apathy or rejection, and sometimes it’s hard to recognize yourself in the bathroom mirror, but hours build into days and days somehow into years. The faces return without the names and the memories they carry (and they’re usually better than you thought) give back whole years you thought you might have wasted.

Some mornings a teacher remains alone when the crowd slumps in; some days they buoy you up like a much needed raft when you feel most tossed upon their seas. Afternoons can be devastatingly exhaustive, while whole evenings can be powered by a particular day’s educational highs.

Sometimes whole semesters are lost in a struggle for one lost lamb or one lion that you couldn’t  tame. This is unavoidable. It often hurts to care, but when you stop giving a damn, do everyone the favor of getting the hell out of the way.

After all, teachers are optimists; there’s no other way to make it through a year. When doldrums and disrespect start to drown out all joy, that’s when it’s time to pull out that flute and play the best Debussy you can muster. This is the gift you can give to all the friends you make along the way.

V.

Lastly, a little advice to our newest friend.

Write on the windows; tell questionable jokes.

Make plans and then change them; teach a lesson you’d never tell anyone about. 

Make up nicknames for the ones you love as often as the ones you can’t stand, and try not to neglect the ones in the middle.

Tell them when they let you down, but remind them that you’re not giving up.

Don’t take professional development any more seriously than you take yourself.

Most important of all, find a way to laugh in each class every day, even it’s you that you’re laughing at and even when they refuse to notice.

Oak & Ivy

"Parasitical"-the word is an interesting one. It suggests the image of "the obvious or univocal reading" as the mighty, masculine oak or ash, rooted in the solid ground, endangered by the insidious twining around it of ivy, English or maybe poison, somehow feminine, secondary, defective, or dependent, a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing the life sap of its host, cutting off its light and air.

(J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host” 1977)

“Wyatt, you are an oak.” (Doc Holliday to Wyatt Earp, Tombstone, 1993)

I.

My friend, the oak, is not about to fall. In winter, not exactly skeletal, but showing strength and weakness at once.  A confidence that knows that soon birdsong, leaf, & bloom will return: the coming alive, again. And then, again, go. Meanwhile, he is content to stand alone. To let wind mock before it sings the branches that will not break. Then there is the temptation to give in to winter dreams. Does the oak dream? Does he consider the lady cardinal, hiding red with brown, as she flirts, with fickle foot & sleek song, all the while knowing he cannot compete with the red of early bloom and the ashy snow? Not to mention the blue flashes of spring, the guest beside the grain, the ivy in the hedgerow.

II.

In Old French:

          As in Camus:

“L'Hôte” implies

          A doubling;

Host is Guest;

Guest is Host.

The double bonds of hospitality:

                       Greet, eat, ask, answer, switch.

Story for story; performance per performance.

Tell you mine: show me yours.


              Remember: welcome the stranger; 
                                 speed the parting guest.


              Beware: some guests don't know how to go.

III.

In these numbered hostels that we borrow, guesting, we host them daily, performing the stories, the truth & the fictions. We remain open (before, during, after) to their apathy as well as their neediness. A place of lodging, even slumber, though the sitting uncomfortable, and the stories compelling—these travelers don’t always accept our strange currency, the best guest/host gift we have to give.

But they are the secrets that we keep that ghost these halls, these rooms, comme des hôtes des bois.

IV.

Respectability. That's what did it. I found out some time ago that it's idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities--contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures--eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun--than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it--oh, yes, she taught me that; she has marked me too forever--nothing, nothing.
[The Wild Palms, William Faulkner, 1939]

V.

What host of virtue, spent

nights without sleep, wondering which branch

might be the one to send the whole house finally crashing?

What truthful prayer: < nada y pues nada>>

might make it all clear once and for all:

I’ve staked nothing upon nothing and have nothing to show?

What guest of pleasure, tempting,

might arrive singing: <<There is a Balm…>>

suggesting that giving in is not giving up?

The difference between health & sickness,

fidelity & infidelity, enemy & friend, lost & found,

is felt by walking that thin line of a fragile faithfulness.

VI.

As a reminder of friendship Whitman twined a switch of live-oak with New Orleans’ moss, sitting it on a bookcase, in memory of the loved ones miles away. How much like ivy our attachments keep a hold on us. How much like ghosts, our smallest unrealized desires hang around our old haunts.

My friend, who fears God and seeks Glory, rises as an oak among us—a new string of ivy climbing slowly but steadily to some inevitable end.

A Meditation on Teaching from a reminder by H. D. Thoreau

When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.   (H. D. Thoreau, “Walking” 1851)

That this could be a place to look forward to is not lost on everyone. To take for granted is not to hate, and, contrary to the belief of many of the famous among us, it is not worse. Of course, it would be better if they all arrived ready, daily, to be brilliant, to be brought to new heights, to be dropped, to fly.

No one counts the sunsets or sunrises seen, nor do they grieve the ones they’ve missed. Perfect attendance is no longer cause for award. But the days when the light streams for their eyes only, when the crowds disappear, ear-buds, iPods, and cell phones stay in backpacks and laptops remain unnecessary, when the blue sky of possibility does not fade to the starry false-night of day-sleeping but streaks with the color of new thought, then being awake, being alive, being here is worth more than the pieces of paper suitable for framing. The good days, hours, and minutes are worth counting one by one, and not crossed out like days on a calendar between paydays and until vacations.

There is much forgetfulness to be remembered and much to be memorized and then erased, but the moments of real learning remain constant; the rest cease to have existed. The good hours, landmarks between the monotonous minutes and are the frustrating weeks, are never passed over unnoticed. When the sleepers in those awkward desks are awakened by a miraculous moment they remain just a bit more awake, and that much closer to the path that inevitably leads to the glorious and perpetual glow of a lifetime of searching towards an education of their own. It is this daily ritual, often faked, ignored, or just plain missed, that gets us up early on a cold, winter morning, that keeps us from walking away on a bright, spring afternoon, and that makes summer’s never-quite-long-enough recovery only temporary.