1
It’s been 16 years since I left teaching. As another retired friend said this week, “That feels like another life.”
I don’t miss it. Nostalgia has always struck me as a dead end. Move or fade away I’ve always thought.
But memory is different as long as one acknowledges one’s failures, as long as memory does not get mixed up with a dismissal of losses or regrets.
I’m coming back to it one more time because memory also reveals.
By 22 I knew about hard hearts, those precision machines, but in the classroom, I learned that loss of face means loss of game. That arena can be so unforgiving, especially to the young.
They were looking at me, a blur of faces on that first day. I felt frozen, no, not all the way, freezing up is more apt, crushing the ice with my voice. I was so young.
Who was I to stand before them and proclaim anything as true? Me, this badly dressed 12-year-old looking schlemiel. Me, who stored a mess of fools inside his face.
There was no path out but through them, carried by the inexorable clock knocking down each period until the end. My only resource at that moment was that I was terrified of failure. That got me through the first impossible month.
Later on, pressed back against my own harsh judgments of myself, I stepped toward their massed faces, briefly paused, appraising, and discovered that control is theater and bluff, silences and a steady gaze.
In this way I found a home I never knew I owned.
2
When former students approach me now, sometimes I can reach back and find a younger face … like picking 1 pin from high grass, 1 thin fact, a job, a mother.
Both of us reveal time’s treacheries and strains, but time too recalls the churning of their youth and that classroom exhilaration I learned to read. Even when they were miserable in love or neglect, they blazed like grains of gunpowder thrown on a fire, the only immortality I’ve ever seen, the lie that was true.
3
Sixteen years out, I find that more than anything else, I loved teaching them writing. Somewhere, I found the confidence to say, “Here is how to think,” and presumed that I could help them unravel maps and trails to lead them to their untraveled space, this blank page, their hearts and minds balancing above it.
This blank page. I had to assure them that there was no danger, nothing coming fast out of a forest or over a hill — only the duty to get it right. To do this for them, that was a failure full of teeth.
So, to compress it as much as I can, I would say set your thoughts to this empty page, neglect nothing, welcome all, and from that pandemonium make an unswerving line to what is true, coarse, unpolished, this, your bewildering creation, yours alone.
When I got that right, I felt light in my bones.
