Just yesterday, I searched the homemade slat shelves in what used to be my father's basement workshop to find the necessary parts to fix my mother's television signal. Like always, his collection of mismatched sundries, an addiction to keep (passed on), provided what we needed. That the picture is now clear is point, though prodigal, of much wanted filial pride.
And in this room,where I began most of eighteen years of nights and where last night the five of us slept mostly soundly, snuggly, half a life later (and twice to go?) I notice, without slightest regret, the juvenile S of ceiling stars no longer glow, their infinity broken, miraculously years ago to bring on these new years.
Finally, this morning, a threshold opened in long gone memory, thirty years disappear: I see this house as it was, this day through the long years, revisited in the doorway's suspended jump of a nine month old, the furniture diving of a three year old, the brave explorations of wise old six.
The gnarled trees, mostly cottonwood, rosebud, & sycamore are lousy with watchers: red-tailed, red-shouldered, or broad-winged raptors.
At the Miami County line they start to turn dark-winged, their light autumn bellies shining in the midday glow.
These are not the same frequent fliers of my daily drive: these sentinels stay their posts suggesting: we know you, we've seen you before. It's been too long.
Of all the things I doubt, they're never one.
This life we make, day on day, is all we need to be certain.
Like one step echoes, then three more, & I'm the lucky one who follows.
I'm the lucky one who follows.
There is something too familiar
about his portrait: hairline,
eyes, the glasses, nose?
Maybe it's the ears.
He will turn 35, four
months before I do,
less one day, but
who is counting?
His story with the boy
lost in the airport is being
read right now by hundreds
(is that too few?). My story
about the lost girl never went
very far, though I did finish it.
I have not read his novel
about the Italian immigrants
of Elephant Park, Ohio,
which I think is a made place,
but my maternal grandfather
was Angelo, born in a mining
village in Crawford County,
Kansas in 1911. There is a story
that is his life. I will not write it.
I would not hurt my mother.
The novel will begin with my
grandmother milking a cow.
My grandfather was a track
star, deathly afraid of submarines.
This saved him from WWII.
These things deserve to be told.
His novel has been translated into
French, German, and Italian. No one
wanted my translations of Reverdy.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow.
I have several close friends.
I think it must be the ears;
I would never comb my hair
that way.
I might have been
a concert pianist, had I been
born somewhere else, and
with someone else's name.
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.
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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.
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.
The above is the inscription to W. B. Yeats' 1914 collection of poems Responsibilities. Try as I might, I have never been able to locate the actual 'Old Play" that Yeats is referencing (but that's not the most important part).
This inscription, slightly revised, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", is used by the inimitable Delmore Schwartz as the title for his story published in the inaugural issue of The Partisan Review in 1937. It became the eponymous story of Delmore's first collection of poems and stories in 1938. The story is not available in full online that I have found, but I have a copy if anyone wants it. In it, the narrator tells the story of a nightmarish dream in which he watches a date between his parents some twenty-plus years previous from his seat in a movie theater. He is dismayed by their treatment of one another, both when gentle and when harsh. Knowing what will become of their marriage, including his own existence, he is dragged out of the theater for screaming out... I will not spoil the story by telling more, but let it suffice to say that the story ends thought-provokingly.
This leads to part three of this triptych: the final episode of My So Called Life, an episode I had forgotten I remembered so well. That episode's title just happens to be "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities". The episode begins with Angela's dream and proceeds with several other characters' dream references, but the episode quickly moves into the realm of dream as hope or hopefulness. It is an episode full of personal tensions, temptations, and irony. In one particular case, an irony so obvious that even Jordan Catalano understood (finally picking up on his tutoring from "Brain").
At 18 or 19 years old when the show first aired, I found myself caught up in the Angela plotline--seeing a bit of myself in the hopelessly awkward Brian, much more so than the annoyingly awkward (yet handsome) Jordan. As a much older person watching the episode again now, though Brian's plight still resonates, it is the marriage drama that strikes me in a way it could not have then, though I recognized that then too.
(Feel free to watch the episode below before finishing reading this post--be my guest. But note the thumbnail I chose; I couldn't resist.)
So what does all this have in common, the Yeats, the Schwartz, and the teen/family drama? Well, besides me, and the shared title, it seems that it is a coming to terms with hope and with loss. For Yeats it is a coming to terms with what is gained and lost in continuing to tell (re-dream) the Irish stories. See, for example, the fifth poem in Responsibilities, "September 1913":
WHAT need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry "Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son":
They weighed so lightly what they gave,
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.
In Schwartz, as well as in My So Called Life, it is a coming to terms with the recurring patterns that we as clan-collecting people face, that families face: the unavoidable irony of repeating one another's mistakes. A part of the sharing of dreams is the sharing of responsibilities even if we didn't know we were already doing both. Perhaps this sheds some light on the dream I shared a few posts ago. Maybe the room I am always looking for isn't mine after all, but a shared room where responsibilities can be meted out once and for all. Heck if I know, I'm only sleeping.
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As a side note, one of Delmore's pupils was a young man named Lou Reed. Here's one of Lou's best. Oh, and it has to do with TV, too.
