Fooled Around and Fell in Love

Our pre-Spring sunshine is making me restless. I want to drive forever with my windows down. Get me out of this windowless office.

I've been reflecting on past students. Many of them are in various places around this planet due to, at least in some small part, my assistance with their letters of recommendation. There is a blonde girl-next-door type that I taught two semesters ago currently studying in Great Britain. The boy who watched her from across the room all semester is studying, at this very moment, in the Czech Republic. He sent me the blog he is keeping about his travels, and I was delighted to see how his writing has improved.

The "Irish" boy--remember him?--stopped by again on Monday to chat about the play I gave him at the beginning of the semester. (It was Edward Albee's The Zoo Story.) His enthusiasm for this mere extracurricular reading made me feel like I could handle a room full of 30 angry faces for the rest of my career.

The middle-aged mother of two, who has slowly but surely been dropping weight with Jenny, dropped the class, but not before sending me a long email detailing her own fears of "looking stupid" in front of her young peers. I wanted to tell her to read Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. When I hated myself in 2002, and I couldn't stop stressing over everything in the world, I sat on the sunny back porch of my treehouse apartment and devoured this novel.

I feel like a mother to all of these babies--some of them twenty years my senior--and I watch them grow up and out of my classroom. It is a little bittersweet. I hope I never stop feeling so emotionally invested in my pupils.

The nice Indian woman across the way in the Speech Pathology department just greeted one of her patients--a young boy in a power chair with a slow, shaky voice. She said, "Whoa. Stop now! Here comes Keanu Reeves everybody!" I can only guess that she feels the same reluctant compassion for her charges as I do.