Flashback

On Halloween evening after a first rehearsal for a new-to-me play, I was in a bar with one of my students and her girlfriend. The student is doing the play as her senior project for a theatre major. She asked me to “star” as the male lead.

I’d planned to go to that bar after the rehearsal to look at the Halloween costumes, which I did. One of my friends was there, so we were chatting when the two young women came in. Soon we were all talking.

My student suggested that she’d like to set me up with her girlfriend’s mother. To my dismay, I blushed. She thought that was hysterical. My friend said “Go for it.” Suddenly I was seeing a scene of another bar in another town on a Halloween night thirty years before.

My brother was standing at the bar next to me. Young women were clustered around him, two of them pushing between the two of us and turning their backs to me so they could direct full attention toward him. He was loving it.

A couple of times he interrupted them to re-direct their attention toward me–once to introduce me, which they politely acknowledged and then turned back toward him, and the other time to get them to guess which of us was the older. All five were sure I was the older. He was seven years older.

Big brother Norm had sex appeal. I didn’t. It radiated out of him all of his short life. He drew women. Even old women were interested.

My student didn’t know, when she saw me blush, that I was re-living an old conscious realization of being the man of little sexual interest when compared to my younger-seeming older brother, a brother who has been dead for twenty years.

Mine was a loaded blush.

Losing

I once wrote a poem about a comb. It was a comb I had bought from Old Man Cross of the Cross Barber Shop in Superior, Wisconsin in 1966, when I was in 7th grade. His shop was not far from the junior high school I attended. I remember that the school was a seventeen block walk from home and the barber shop was three blocks from the school, Old Man Cross had white hair, and I was happy to go to a man’s outpost, even though I was only about five feet tall and hadn’t gone through puberty yet. There men talked of men’s matters, which I didn’t know much about, and I had a dime to make a man’s purchase in a man’s setting.

I carried that comb in my back pocket for over thirty years. It gradually assumed a curve that conformed to the contour of my right rear cheek, and also gradually lost tines (“tines” rather than “teeth”–teeth that near a cheek is too much to bear). I wrote of the curve, and compared the gaps in the comb, developed over all those years, to the gaps in my hair developed over all those years. That ten cent comb had a manly significance.

And then one day it was gone. Not in yesterday’s pants pocket one morning. Never seen again.

I’ve had and lost several combs since then. The current one has been with me long enough to begin to assume the shape, but hasn’t lost tines yet, and I don’t much care whether I lose it. It doesn’t tell me anything other than I’m prepared to comb what hair I have left–and now the beard I didn’t and couldn’t have had when I bought the Cross comb, a beard now going gray, approaching the color of the old man’s hair.

I’m used to man things now. I’ve been one for a long time. Still, in a way I miss that comb and the youthful wonder I brought to a men’s barbershop all those years ago, before I knew that being a man really meant not anything mysterious but rather meant losing. Being a man means losing things, losing hair, losing youth, and being a man about it.

I’ve lost the poem, too.

sustaining a teaching career

The ability to begin again is fundamental to sustaining a career in teaching. This means beginning again today, this hour and next hour, and it means beginning again four, seven, ten, twenty, thirty years later. For me it has been beginning again at 32, 36, 43, 47, and 51, to choose some times when I’ve made beginnings that are significant to me. All of them have to do with times I’ve made changes in my learning life. All of them have meant changes in my teaching life.

This doesn’t mean wholly starting over. We don’t lose what we’ve done. The new teacher isn’t really new. The new teacher has been taught, has observed teaching. The new teacher just needs to accomplish a shift of mind into teacher thinking rather than exclusively student thinking. That’s a kind of beginning. The long practicing teacher can benefit from the opposite: being a student while teaching can help return a teacher’s mind to student mind. That’s another kind of beginning, or renewal. The mix is salutary.

I started teaching at 21. It was a 53 year old student in my first term’s class who made me realize one day that thinking about teaching was really satisfying to me, as he talked about how much the class was satisfying to him. I paid attention to him. I realized I cared what he thought, how his existence was at that moment. His quality of life in my class mattered to me. This was an important realization. He didn’t finish the class; he died of a heart attack about two thirds of the way through the term. Part of his legacy is that he helped me realize that thinking as a teacher is a wonderful thing to do. That was thirty-two years ago. I’m 53 myself now, and I hope that part of my legacy is that I’ve helped others come to that same realization. Oh, and I hope to do that for a long time beyond now.

That was my first experience with losing a student to death. There have been more since. Often people going into teaching don’t think about that. One whole section of a memoir I wrote about my life in school is devoted to the idea that teachers need to teach with a consciousness of death, not as a means of depressing themselves but as a means of reminding themselves of how precious what we do–and those we do what we do for–are in the great scheme of things. That 53 year old man sobered me in my first two months of my career.

He died, and then we met in class and began again. I can’t over-stress how much I think that matters. Teaching is about living. It is an optimistic act. We begin again.

While I can speak of teaching as a career, and speak of making changes at stages of that career, always I come back to that which hit me so strongly one fall day in 1975, talking to a man in my class. It is right now that matters. Being with a student this hour, caring about how the moment is affecting that student, caring about what this student is bringing along to this moment, that is the primary sense of living the teacher’s life. That is always new. Each encounter is a beginning. Sounds trite, but it isn’t; each moment may matter; each is an occasion that might resonate thirty-two years later.

the pedantic optimist, or optimistic pedant

There is a timelessness in teaching. I do not know how this can be. In classes for teachers I preach the necessity of living in the moment, of teaching as being in the present tense, of teaching as “being with” students, as paying attention in the now, and yet there are moments in the classroom when a sense of eternity washes over me, that these precious people and I are a small part of an unending continuum of being and learning, that we are participating in an endless universal quest for making meaning of being, of being the makers of meaning, and that each day’s small writing and reading and speaking and listening is that day’s meditation or prayer or contribution to the universe, a timeless universe that accepts, or perhaps, I hope, welcomes those contributions, prayers, meditations with the same good will I feel when I offer a poem or song or essay or a classroom hour in the company of fellow aspirers sharing in the mutual quest to make today matter, eternally.

I feel this when I meet former students whose names I don’t remember, and realize that remembering their names is minor, because the learning we did in common is still there, the paragraphs still have been written, the discoveries were made and cannot be undone.

I feel this when I learn of the deaths of former students and contemplate my own, waiting out there for me. The classroom hours have happened, this classroom hour is happening, and those contributions, and this contribution, cannot be undone.

And so, teaching is now, but teaching is forever.

Opera scenes

On Friday evening I did my first operatic ensemble performance. Two years ago, doing such a thing would have been unthinkable. For one thing I didn’t have the requisite skill, but for another I still hadn’t done any performing that required individual singing while also acting with others–and singing with others, too. I’ve gone through some learning.

The first thing I learned is actually a re-learning, with additions. Performance–musical performance but especially dramatic performance–is a matter of being in the moment and only in the moment. It takes a focusing, a husbanding of mental energy into use of the body, the voice, gesture, step, turn of head, that is absorbing but also is choosing. It’s thinking about so many things simultaneously that other things have to go. I can’t think about my day or the war against Islamic terror or what to do with my tired old RV while I’m performing. Instead I thought about those things I just mentioned, and how to cover the memory lapse I had in the second scene and the one beat late entrance in the sixth without disturbing the audience and also reducing any negative impact on the other performers.

More. Acting in a play takes concentration. Acting in the one musical I’ve been in added a layer to the acting. Singing and acting was harder for me than just acting or just singing a solo. Acting in a opera (or opera scenes, as I did Friday) added another layer, because the singing was more difficult. I don’t have enough experience to say whether being in an opera is more challenging than being in a musical (I know, they’re related). I do know that in one iteration of each I’ve found the opera more so. It was difficult but doable work.

Another thing I’ve learned: I don’t do it for applause. I do it to do it. The audience helps me focus, but the motive behind this for me isn’t primarily to please audiences or earn praise (though I like both), it’s to achieve that sense of life in the moment, life being lived intensely and richly. Performance on stage is very much “is” and very little “was.” I’m glad to have done a reasonably good first-timer amateur performance, but the draw isn’t being able to look back on Friday night’s performance; it’s being in Friday night’s performance on Friday night.

So today I’ll go practice toward some other, next Friday night.

another kind of teaching

Later today I will have a lesson with my voice teacher. It’s fascinating to watch how he works. He’s 72 years old, limps badly, and is widely acknowledged among the music students and faculty as the very best there is. I’ve come to realize people think that of him in other places, too. New York City, for example, where his former students sing at the opera of the same name and at the Met.

His methods intrigue me. First, he’s cheerful. He greets me in a welcoming way, his voice lifting in a fashion that makes me feel like something good is coming next. He inquires about my life, listens, remembers things I’ve told him before. I know he’s paying attention to me, not just to business. Then he asks how the voice is coming this week, which signals a transition: he’s still asking about me, but also moving toward the work we’re about to do. And then he adapts the way the lesson is going to start to whatever I’ve just told him about how the voice has done since the last lesson.

Then the lesson. In it, his attention is wholly focused on me. I’m not sure he would notice a brass band starting up outside the studio door–as long as it didn’t interfere with his ability to hear me. From the beginning he gradually pulls me toward the something new he had planned before I ever came through his door. Fifty minutes later we emerge, startled that so much time has passed, to realize the lesson is over. Then he sends me on my way, happy, satisfied, and eager to get back to the practice room.

It feels effortless, though I’ve worked hard and am both exhausted and elated.

Bass contractions

I joined the college’s opera workshop this fall. Our first performance is coming up in a little over a week. We aren’t actually performing an opera; we’re performing scenes from two operas. I’m in two scenes: as Sarastro in a trio from The Magic Flute and as Bartolo in the Act II finale from the Marriage of Figaro.

This is another first for me. Last year at an introductory meeting of a committee on campus each member of the committee was asked to name something new he or she wanted to do in the next year. I said, “Sing in at least one scene of an opera.”

I’m about to do so.

I’ve been in a musical, once. That was early last spring. I had one song. I’ve done solo arias in recital settings. This is my first attempt at ensemble operatic singing. More learning to do. Later today we rehearse from memory (or “off book,” as I have now learned to call that) for the first time. That’s hard for me–memory always is harder for me than for many people–but clearly has to be done.

In the trio I have to be careful because my big-ass bass (take out the “ig” in big ass and what do you get? A bass contraction.) is stronger than the voices of the tenor and soprano, so I’m trying to build a balance for their sakes. In the other scene that doesn’t matter because there are so many people singing that a big voice doesn’t stand out–or if it does, it should.

I met a couple of the other students today, as well as our rehearsal accompanist. The singers are nervous about the rehearsal.

They’ll–we’ll–be more nervous in a week.

Santa Claus thoughts

Yesterday, Sunday, I was in the office because I’m a nerd and the Vikings game wasn’t on yet. All morning I spent building a graduation photo album for a young friend in her senior year of high school. We had done the photo shoot Saturday. While waiting for CDs to burn I read about the death of Don Murray, a writer and teacher of writing from the University of New Hampshire. He also was a journalist and Pulitzer prize winner.

Actually, I knew of his death some months ago. What I read was appreciations written about him in the May ‘07 English Journal, which is a professional magazine for English teachers. Here’s something I cooked up this morning as I thought about him and the lessons I’ve learned from him over the years:

He looked like Santa Claus. Round body, round face, full white beard, big smile. I never met him, but feel like I knew him because of reading his books about writing. His books are so clear and so self-revelatory that to read him is to know him. And like him. Both of the appreciations written to acknowledge his death and celebrate his life are themselves reflective of Murray’s personal generosity as writer and teacher.

Murray once wrote (and it’s quoted in one of the two articles) “I have apprenticed myself to two trades I can never learn, writing and teaching.” That was not a false modesty. That was realistic. We never master either, though our efforts at any one time can make that hour’s output, at either occupation, more productive than it would have been otherwise.

Reading Murray for all these years–I “discovered” him in the ’70s–has led me to this: transparency, or the illusion of it, is one factor that appeals to readers. I don’t mean mere clarity, conveying content without misunderstandings; I mean transparency, the absence of barriers between writer and reader. Murray lets you in, puts his inside on the outside, invites you to join him, allows you to watch his mind at work.

I try to do this as a writer of nonfiction and poetry. My poetry, at its best, is so simple and direct that it startles readers into contemplating larger things. I hope. Seeing big through seeing little. Similarly, in nonfiction I try, often, to use image to carry content as the poems do. The image, conveyed with enough skill, clears the way to concepts, even essences. Think Santa Claus with a bag full of essays and teacherly questions. What gifts.

There is teaching about teaching in this. In my own life, the very best teaching moments are those in which I feel no barriers between students and teacher. The best teaching, at least by English teachers, involves teachers letting students in, teachers putting their insides on the outside, teachers inviting students to join, allowing students to watch their own minds at work. Santa’s bag is full of goodies.

No wonder he smiles. He’s happy in his apprenticeships.

You had to like the guy.

Seventy students in a living room

Seventy students in a living room, seven or eight police officers at the doors. Thirteen of the students getting minor consumption citations for the crime of consuming something alcoholic while under age 21. A profitable day for government. I wonder if it was a righteous day for legislators.

That’s the scene I heard one of my students describe as class was starting up. It happened recently. I couldn’t tell whether he was describing the previous night, but it was recent enough that it could influence whether some student athletes could play during the next week. There may be issues involving athletics and alcohol consumption that make sense, but I don’t buy the “minor” consumption law at all, when those charged aren’t really minors. The victims of college party raids mostly aren’t minors. They are legally defined adults who have had their judgment superceded by other adults. I think this is symptomatic of a line of reasoning that is, in the worst sense of the word, paternalistic. Young adults get no respect. The adults making the laws are almost certainly not affected by those laws. They are over twenty-one.

Reasoning that leads to restrictions on freedoms enjoyed by adults are too often based at least in part on a sentence most likely to make me suspicious: “It’s for your own good.” Very few statements are more likely to make me doubt the speaker. I immediately am wary that the speaker who utters it is assuming a self-righteous superiority. I also immediately question that superiority.

In Minnesota state schools, campuses are, with occasional exception, “alcohol free.” This is an absurdity, of course. The rule makes a large percentage of dormitory residents rule breakers. The notion of a 40 year old drinking a wine cooler in her dorm room becoming a violator is another absurdity. The adults making the rules are almost certainly not affected by those rules. They don’t live in dorms.

Minnesota’s latest anti-smoking law has its points, but it has an excess, also. It bans smoking in those set-aside smoking rooms built after the previous law limited smoking in bars, out of what was then cited as concern for employee health. The set-aside rooms had their own barriers, their own circulation and ventilation, and did not require any exposure by employees to second hand smoke. They are now illegal. There is no justification for this part of the law. It simply reflects the easy paternalism of those who dismiss the choice of drinkers who associate alcohol with tobacco. Those people’s preferences are unimportant. The lawmakers have assumed a superiority they don’t deserve, though have the power to enforce. Smoking is bad for you. We can force you not to do it in public places, even where your choice to do so will not affect non-smokers. It’s for your own good.

I don’t much like the word “paternalism.” It means “fatherly,” but it also means “fatherly” in a way that deals with others without allowing them choice or responsibility for their own actions. The laws I have just mentioned don’t feel fatherly to me. My father taught me to make choices based on my own reason and sense of responsibility. These laws, laws that make adults criminals while engaging in otherwise legal actions, are purely dictatorial. They reflect badly on those who pass them.

Sometime soon thirteen young people will pass through the court system. They shouldn’t be there. They are law breakers. They broke bad law. Bad law happens when adults assume the attitude of “it’s for your own good” toward other adults.

For your own good

I just wrote a little essay about paternalism, and then took it down. Reason? I realized I don’t really know what I think about what prompted the essay. I’m trying to figure out what I think about laws that limit legal activities conducted by adults, such as the law criminalizing alcohol consumption by adults between 18 and 21, or the law in Minnesota that now makes smoking in designated smoking lounges separated from bars by barriers and independent air flow and not served by employees, as illegal as smoking in work places.

I keep coming up with complications. This probably is easy for people who simply to choose to restrict behaviors they disapprove of. It isn’t that easy for me.

I’ll work on it some more.