Drop Me a Line Sometime

I started teaching a new essay workshop a few weeks ago. My pace is down to about one class a year now, whereas I used to do three or four (each is eight weeks long, two and a half hours at a pop, which wears me out, on top of my day job, more than it once did). Last month marked my 22nd anniversary teaching at this creative-writing center for adults. 

I started taking workshops there myself in 1984, a year out of college, in my first professional job, feeling creatively antsy and looking to revive—or get guidance for—an interest in creative writing that had gone dormant after a bad experience during my first semester of college, when I was made to feel discouraged about my nascent talent by a grumpy old professor. I majored in German and wrote virtually nothing for five years. 

When I began taking workshops at the place where I now teach, I was amazed at the power of encouragement—I went from a column-writing class to a workshop called Autobiography as Fiction and Nonfiction to my first real attempt at fiction (I considered fleeing the room but mentally bolted myself to the chair) to more fiction and more fiction and more fiction (I couldn't believe I could actually do this!) to applying to MFA programs to quitting my job and devoting two and a half years to getting my master's in fiction writing and, all that time, swimming in the amazing soul-building pool of encouragement: encouragement of the pursuit of writing, the idea that it was worth devoting time to. Not the kind of encouragement that meant people said only nice things to me about my very imperfect drafts. 

The belief that to teach writing is to encourage writing has guided me since I taught my first fiction workshop to undergrads at my grad-school alma mater in 1990 and then—after gravitating back to nonfiction in my own work (almost immediately upon getting my MFA in fiction!)—when I started teaching the personal essay in 1993.

If you had told me 27 years ago, in the first year of my master's program, that all this time later I'd still be struggling with the up-and-down effort to integrate writing into my life, I'd have been, well . . . a little discouraged. In those days, surrounded every day by equally eager, literary-journal-submitting friends, I envisioned myself someday as an author, regularly publishing short stories, perhaps with a collection or two under my belt. 

If "regularly" can be understood to mean "occasionally, with wide gaps in between," then I am indeed a published writer, and proud of what I've managed to shepherd into print. But I long ago realized that I'm unlikely ever to write a book. (I'm not putting myself down, and yeah, I know, never say never. I get it.) Publishing a book requires a certain kind of motivation and doggedness, just in the writing, let alone in the right-hand-on-red, left-foot-on-yellow, right-butt-cheek-on-blue Twister game of finding an agent and publisher and then promoting the thing. It takes a particular sort of person with a particular sort of life and vision, and I'm not that guy. (Shhh, don't ever tell the 26-year-old me.)

What I have succeeded in doing, and thriving in, for 22 years is being a teacher. It's stunning to remind myself that I have taught literally hundreds of people better ways to tell their stories. Many of them return to my classroom multiple times—the number is still in the hundreds even if you count those folks only once. I've forged connections among the various professional and personal areas of my life and enjoyed minimal degrees of separation from other interesting lives both modest and distinguished.

My current class of 11 includes four repeat students. One of those was a young intern at my day job 15 years ago; he's now a married father of two. A young woman, herself the mother of a three-year-old, was one of my students when I taught a class in literary journalism a decade ago at the university where I'd gotten my MFA. A student closer to my age has a teenage daughter who received a heart transplant at age three, a subject her mom wrote about in a previous workshop; several years ago, the daughter wrote an essay about meeting her donor family that I edited and published in the magazine I work for. Another student is the wife of a man who started in the graduate writing program with me in 1987; I remember meeting his baby daughter at an MFA event—she's 28 now.

One 74-year-old man in my class is the son of a famous classical musician. I get a kick out of my indirect connection to the kind of prominence I neither aspire toward nor will ever achieve. In my early years, I taught the wife of a well-known journalist. Teddy Roosevelt's great-granddaughter has been under my tutelage. A few years ago, John McPhee's sister-in-law took my class. Many students have gone on to publish books. My name appears on some very impressive acknowledgments pages! Am I now in the habit of turning first to the acknowledgments page of pretty much any book I pick up? Yes!

It's satisfying to help others tell their stories, to cheer them on in the undertaking with which I myself have had a love/hate relationship nearly my entire adult life. Writing, to me, is like a member of the family. (Not, in this case, a famous member.) Loved and loving, irritating and insistent, a source of both puzzlement and expectations, someone to whom I'll always be bound, whom I can never see enough of and from whom I sometimes can never get sufficient distance. 

I may not keep up the correspondence to his satisfaction, but he keeps writing to me.

Alma Mater

The weekend before last, I met a former teaching colleague of my mother's for coffee. But the story isn't as straightforward as that.

In 1968, when I was in second grade, my mother went back to teaching Latin part-time at a girls' school. She loved teaching, especially girls. (She had taught at two other girls' schools before she was married.) She worked at this school well into the 1970s, continuing even as she pursued a master's in medieval Latin, which she completed while I was in high school. I remember doing my own Latin and algebra and English homework at the same dining-room table where she'd be typing her thesis—a translation of a manuscript about gardening (another passion of hers)—on a turquoise manual Olivetti. Both of my parents loved language. Words were the stuff of dinner conversations—not just the means of talking but so often the subject itself.

The school where Mom worked eventually stopped requiring Latin, and she left for a time, returned briefly, then for a number of years tutored students from there and other schools. Her last students were in the mid-to-late '90s, just as signs of as her dementia started setting in. I seem to remember a rather abrupt end to her final tutoring job, instigated by the boy's mother for unclear reasons. I think Mom was beginning to get confused about appointments and the like, and who knows how much repetition or forgetfulness might have been going on during the sessions themselves?

A year and a half ago, I published an essay about my siblings' and my experience selling our parents' house—the home we had grown up in, where Mom and Dad had lived for 50 years before moving into assisted living (by this time, in Mom's case, "memory care"). In the essay, I mentioned the school where my mother had taught. After the article appeared, I received an e-mail:

Dear Billy:

I was reading your piece when suddenly I made a connection. On reaching the paragraph where you mentioned where your mom had taught, I glanced up to check your name to see if I recognized it. Of course—Florence!

I taught French in the Upper School from 1971 until 2003 and remember when your mother joined the foreign-language department. More coincidentally, however, I saw your mom at  S______ [her assisted-living facility] earlier this year. I had gone there with a friend and former math teacher, Susan, to visit yet another longtime former colleague and English teacher, Miriam. Miriam no longer speaks and probably does not recognize us, but Susan and I visit her and make conversation about the school and the past. 

On our last visit, Susan's attention kept being drawn to a woman nearby, and she finally asked me if I recognized her, someone who perhaps had been at the school at some point. She looked familiar, but I really couldn't place her. An attendant told us her last name, and then I knew immediately. It's Florence!

I went over to talk to her, as she seemed likely to be able to visit a little, and I told her who I was, what the connection was. Her eyes lit up and we spoke for several minutes. Of course, her speech is garbled and difficult to follow and I imagine that she didn't know who I was, but she did know we were talking about her teaching Latin there, and I believe she mentioned A.D., who had been headmistress. I remembered that she had several children and I asked her about that, and she talked at some length about you all, but again it was garbled. We pointed out Miriam to her and told her that they had been at the Upper School at the same time, but that did not register. 

It was a bittersweet discovery for Susan and me, both retirees, to find her there, and we were so glad that we had been able to recognize her. It has become more and more sad for us to visit Miriam, who has been in a steady decline after a diagnosis an early-onset dementia about ten years ago. There is a group of former teachers who visit Miriam, although much less frequently now that she is unable to know what is going on. Susan and I will go this September and we will be sure to look up your mom. 

Your mother is still a lovely person, gracious and kindly. I remember her despairing at times over some of the more difficult students, but she was a smart lady and persevered. Anyone willing to teach Latin to adolescent young women has got to have some steeliness as well. 

Thank you for reading this and I send you my best,
Tessa G.

I was deeply touched by this surprise e-mail and replied immediately. I remembered my mother talking about Tessa often; she was definitely fond of her, even though they fell out of touch when Mom stopped her classroom teaching.

Since that e-mail, Tessa has continued to visit the assisted-living facility every couple of months and to send me reports. ("I saw your mom this morning. She was napping in her chair, but she woke up and I chatted with her. At one point she asked me very clearly what my name was, but I am not sure if my response meant anything to her. She looked well dressed, and I told her that she looked ready to teach.")

Tessa's friend Miriam died just two months ago, and she has since been back just to visit Mom—someone she knew half a lifetime ago, far less well than her now-deceased friend. Yet she continues to go.

Other than Tessa, my mother doesn't see anyone outside of immediate family, caregivers, and medical staff. Tessa, her long-ago colleague, knew her as a working, intellectually engaged, professional woman, and she now graciously honors that person my mother was by listening to her  mostly incomprehensible words, touching her hand, speaking to her of memories and people they knew.

After wanting to thank Tessa in person for more than a year—and simply wanting to meet her—I finally arranged for us to get together for coffee. One of my sisters joined us, as did Tessa's husband.

The occasion uplifted me in a way that I'm having trouble finding words for. Both she and her husband are warm and funny. They were easy to talk to, even interested in the rest of my family. We talked about the house in France they own, their own kids and grandkids. A bit about the school where she'd taught with Mom, but the conversation didn't linger long in that area. Maybe next time.

I hope there will be another time. But I don't know. I don't even know for sure if she'll continue to visit Mom as often as she saw her friend Miriam. She may, probably will—but then again, the visits may also taper off. And I couldn't blame her if they did. She's given a lot of herself already.

I've been thinking I wanted to find out more about those years when Mom was teaching, what my mother was like, from someone who saw her in an environment I didn't. Then I realized: As much as I'd like to hear these stories, I'm the one who knew Mom better. There's probably not much Tessa could tell me that I don't know.

My father died last summer. Mom greets visitors with a smile and a tender touch and an almost unceasing commentary of words that curl and wisp into a kind of music, yet are as hard to grasp as candle smoke. Yes, there's a "steeliness" within her—not the first word I'd think of to describe a person who has always been characterized more, in my experience, by sensitivity and emotion. But someone who knew her a very long ago reminded me that it's an essential part of her. My mother endures.

So Runs the World Away

Thanks to Diablo for sending me the following poem by Mary Oliver, a resident, as it happens of Provincetown, where I recently spent a happy week and a half.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

***

I spent many hours with D. biking the trails in and around Ptown, including the magnificent Cape Cod Rail Trail, which we hope will someday extend all the way up the Cape to Provincetown. I haven't owned a bike of my own since I was a child but am on the verge of buying my first adult bike. This is thanks to D. and the roads we've ridden together over the last nearly three years.

While on the Cape, we had a very nice visit with a former grad school professor/writing teacher of mine and his wife. He retired a few years ago and moved up there about three years ago. I used to see him at least a couple of times a year at various social or literary occasions but hadn't talked with him at length since his move, so it was nice to reconnect. One thing I told him was that he was a big influence on my teaching, as, among many other things, I learned from him that it's okay to teach from notes, that no one will think less of you if you refer to them. In fact, I still write out notes before the first session of every workshop I teach, and later sessions if I'm teaching an essay I haven't taught before, but the interesting thing is that I refer to my notes less and less. It's the writing of them that imprints them.

One of the last times I spent time with my old teacher and his wife was at a Josh Ritter concert at the Birchmere, probably in 2006. Now in his late sixties, he's a huge Josh Ritter fan. As it happened, I had just downloaded Josh Ritter's new CD, So Runs the World Away, onto my iPod before my vacation. I was just listening to it the other day and was struck by its style, so different from his earlier, more classic singer/songwriter mode. It's kind of epic sea shanty meets art song. I need to listen to it more.
I started this post almost two weeks ago (through most of that last paragraph). And just tonight I bought a novel, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, whose title reminded me of Josh Ritter's and then of this unfinished post.
The book I have to finish before starting that one is Rosanne Cash's memoir, Composed. I just finished a lovely chapter about six months she spent living in London at age 20 and 21, and that chapter ends on a note of wistfulness about friends and mentors she lost touch with over the years, some of whom she reconnected with later in moving and unexpected ways, some of whom died before she had a chance to.
I hope to see my teacher again the next time I'm passing through.