by Durga Chew-Bose
Brimful and smiling, like a grandfather whose prolific life can still offer the most patient eyes, my teacher, acknowledging each of our faces, asked, Who else? Who else should we raise our glasses to?
It was our last class of the year and for some of us, our last as undergraduates. Together, we had read a canon of 19th century novels and thousands upon thousands of pages, spanning four seasons; Spring! he once shouted, I promise Spring will arrive the day we start Anna Karenina!
Occasionally saccharine, his style of teaching prompted us to read deeply and to follow our more tender persuasions. If even the slightest image, its meaning perhaps at first ineffable, surfaced on the page—an orphan's misspelled name written earnestly, a pair of polished, porcelain shoulders, an inkwell the size of Vesuvius!—our teacher pushed us to follow our tiny wonders, endowing them with significance. Short of Ethan Hawke's gauntlet throwing O Captain! My Captain!, this class offered a similar spirit; that strangely mournful feeling of truly loving a book.
And so, in the annex of an old building on the south side of our campus, we met twice a week, each of us carrying the current selection; its cover and pages worn from a week of inseparable and dogged reading.
On this last day he had brought food and wine to celebrate. We passed the paper plates and plastic cups around the table—a sober act, no matter the occasion. I watched as we reached over one and other for the cheese platter, for the salad, for more wine. That too, the image of people around a table—ripping grapes from the vine, offering napkins, politely asking, mind passing a knife?— is by some means plaintive in its cheer.
Again, my teacher asked, So? Who will we toast?As if summoning something long hushed and undeniable, he threw up his glass and howled, To Huck! To sweet, darling Huck!
To Huck! We joined in.
And Jim! Someone added.
To Peggotty and Micawber!
To the Tail in Moby Dick!
We raised our glasses with (and to) our teacher—a room full of dopey-hearted literature students, tossing wine and wondering, This just might pass as bittersweet.
After graduation, all the nights left in summer came and went and soon it was Fall; the most scholastic season, burnished in those sentimental coppers and tans. Quickly, I began to feel an absence and this growing sense of bankruptcy.
For the very first time in my life, I had no school to attend, and more importantly, no new teachers to meet and no past teachers to visit. Where had all the adults gone? The ones with corduroy blazers, gray trousers, published books, who carried worn briefcases and drove olive green cars, where were they hiding? Does a borrowed book mean less if it wasn’t on loan from my teacher? Her copy of My Antonia. His Cathedral. His Yates. An impassible week of writing blocks and listlessness was turned around when my teacher would offer me a book from her shelves: Here, when you get a chance. That chance encouraged the side of me that is embarrassingly liable to hug a book.
I began to miss the way an entire class might rally around a teacher’s story. We’d sit and watch as he removed his glasses, as he unknowingly rolled up his sleeves and squinted, like he was awakening a vulnerable detail from a life he rarely revisited. Stories like those strayed from the syllabus and volunteered immediate and impressive lessons. More special was witnessing our teacher remember; watching as he allowed the past to outdo the present. Never before was our glow of admiration brighter than when our teacher became susceptible to his own nostalgia.
Another teacher, who often arrived at new ideas mid-sentence, would throw her arms up, waving them with emergency: Forget everything I just said! She would pause in a separate world—I imagine her standing in her beloved garden, planting a bulb or cutting a peony, her face shaded under the rim of her hat; a glass of gin, forgotten on a fresh bed of soil, the phone ringing inside. She’d return soon after with bright eyes and a cleared throat: Forgive me, class. Let me try that one again!
To be near that kind of pressing vitality is something I long for. It's a quality I've only seen arise in my teachers; an unflappable poise, occasionally punchy and candidly imperfect.
The best teachers, the important ones, were those who helped me find what was most authentic in my thinking. Perhaps my fear is not of being teacher-less, but of depreciating and losing site of what they had perceived in me.
He had a hunch. She saw something hidden.
It might seem callow to seek validation. It might seem freshly amateur, perhaps maddening the way younger siblings are maddening, but who can deny having had a similar charge, having wanted regard, scanning a paper, hoping to decipher the mildest check or scribble, or being excited by the occasional note: Let’s meet later this week. I have some thoughts about the ending.
Like anything remembered, no matter how long ago or how near, I cannot dismiss the less candied moments when the same teacher who encouraged boundless invention was occasionally coarse and frank. That same teacher was often very removed from my more adolescent and honest tempers; seasonal loafing, heartbreak, those critical and creeping doubts about everything, all at once! Expressing uncertainty to my teachers was something I never figured out how to do. Inertia born from contradictions and plucked from that jittery fear of suddenly questioning purpose, was something I could not admit. Instead I reread favorite essays and stories, anticipating images and sentences that never failed to reach straight into my center. Somehow, reading was far more purging than speaking or writing.
Nearly nine months have gone by since graduation. On some mornings I ride the train to work wishing it were my teacher's office I was heading to instead. A year ago, come winter, I was always late, running with my boots half on and my scarf wrapped carelessly. I would hurry across the campus, passing a friend as she said Hey you, and as we exchanged plans, and as I'd excuse the rush, Call me later?, and then I'd run down a few stairs and enter the building, suddenly flush and out of breath; unready and having forgotten my purpose, My notes! Shit. I would hesitate a second before knocking, but as I entered, ducking my head in first, that indescribable sense of belonging was immediate. There was nowhere else I was meant to be.
1 comments:
the first time i cried in front of a teacher was like this. but the "my notes, shit" turned in to "my pride, shit". i sobbed for 30 minutes about a life that had little to do with him. after i was done, it became "my heart, shit". that teacher is the only one who knows about that hysterical crushing feeling. that feeling that i only get now when i realize how long it's been since i've been with that teacher face to face.
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