Ms. T.

This has been a hard year of losing teachers, first a high-school English teacher who was my yearbook advisor, and now the woman who embodied the Talented and Gifted Program for fourth- and fifth-graders in my city. That program gave me faith--that I have even now--that even if the place I found myself was dreary, somewhere only a shortbus ride away was a place where people did not laugh at me for being smart.

I learned from Tim today that the woman who first embodied that faith for me died a month ago. I suppose that these days the children of Newport News have a different teacher for that program, and who they will come to associate with their own faith. For me, though, there could be no other.

It is funny: I have, in my twenty-two years of formal education, had a lot of teachers, many of them immensely inspiring (let's not talk about the others today). But you never do forget the first teacher who really expected you to stretch, and gave you some idea of how to start, and made the whole thing seem like the most fun a person could ever have. Ms. T., each time I walk into my own classroom, I do it with the hope of bringing you back to life and introducing you to another group of kids hungry for what you gave us all.

R.I.P. Jay Evans Paul.

Born September 1915 in Brooklyn, NY. Deceased June 2007 in Newport News, VA.

And for the record, played a mean hands of cards. And finished my crackers after I licked the peanut butter off them. And never sounded anything by thrilled to hear my voice. And spent every moment he was allowed with his wife as she ailed from congestive heart failure, holding her hand, looking lovingly into her eyes.

Grandpa, I'll miss your voice, and your smile and laugh, and I am sorry I haven't managed to beat you in cards. Maybe next hand.

A simple question.

How do you tell a person that you have had enough of them in your life?

I am not talking about those people who honest and truly you have had enough of--the people you wish you did not work with, the people you should not have dated, the people who cut you off in traffic.

I am talking about the people you love. What I am wondering is, when do you say, if you are in a position of having to say, I am ready to go now. I will not see you again. You and I both know this and it is the way it is.

How do you say to this person, thank you for everything you have done to make my life richer, to be a very real piece of my experience on this earth. Thank you for being one who had the brilliant smile, one whose voice always lit up when I walked in the room, one who made me feel so valued, so precious. Thank you, and now I have had enough, and I am going on my way, so that you can do the ugly things you have to do between now and the end of your life, but I will not have to see them. How do you say to that person, I have more important things to do now? Than spend days with you as your body betrays you? Than deal with what those drugs are doing to your brain, even as they are helping you deal with that pain? How do you say, I am going back to my life now.

Can someone please tell me this?

That Thomas Wolfe plaque.

Greetings! As Jarrett would say, rumors of my blog death have been exaggerated. It has just taken me a little while to process a few things about my recent trip to the southern part of heaven.

Here is something Ian Williams said about his own trip, which, stars being aligned, coincided with my own:

Almost without fail, Tessa and I have journeyed to Chapel Hill every year to teach one of Dr. Peter Kaufman's classes at UNC. And without fail, it's always a fantastic trip, getting to dip our toes in the undergraduate experience once more and meeting a cadre of cool kids. I use the word "kids" self-consciously, because every time I step onto campus, time stops and I am eighteen years old again, wondering what Jon, Chip and Bud are doing for dinner. In essence, I don't feel that different from them, even though they were born in 1987 and I have a toddler who keeps yelling "Daddo has ears!" (emphasis mine)

I agree with some of this. I admit it: I spent a good bit of my time there sitting on my favorite couch in Davis Library (NCMarcus: Davis says hi back) doing the work I needed to do for my own classes. I even took a nap there, even though I was facing out the window and I knew that some 2000s version of my 1990s self would walk by and laugh at me. And I ate or tried to eat at all my fav places, wondered at the transformation of Chez Lenoir, tried to track down a couple of old profs, dropped way too much money at the Bull's Head, wandered around Fortress Greenlaw, ate a sandwich in the Pit, etc. etc.

And don't get me wrong: it was seriously cool to give a talk at my own alma mater about the subject of my own undergraduate honors thesis in front of professors and new students.

But I cannot agree with what Ian said in the bolded part of his message. In large part, I think this is because in the years since I left UNC I developed a new relationship to college campuses, such that without even realizing it I made the nostalgic return that I really desired impossible. You see, because I spend most of my days on college campuses, grading papers, trying to get the youth of America to think for itself, navigating jaywalking people on cellphones--because of all this, when I looked around the Pit, I saw not latter-day versions of myself, but instead I saw ......... my students.

I felt as if I had entered some kind of liminal zone, where I could not really identify with the faculty there, even though they could now be my colleagues, and I could not really identify with the students, because (apart from the distinct lack--thanks be--of orange) they could be the sleepy faces looking back at me at 9:30 a.m. Here I was, looking for the big reconnection, only to find . . . I'm not sure what, but not that. It was not until I took a 6-a.m. walk around familiar territory (Winston, Spencer, Grimes, the rose garden around the planetarium), while most everyone else was still snoozing, that I could reclaim the campus as my own.

So what does it mean to require a post-rapture landscape for such a feeling?

And it was not until I returned home and was narrating the trip to a friend and burst into absolutely unexpected and overwhelming tears that I realized the biggest gap in the whole thing. How can you go back to something when one of the biggest somethings about the thing is not there? You know, I noticed this visit that there is a new commemorative Thomas Wolfe plaque on campus: I suppose he was right.