To Being Relevant

I was relevant. 

 

Once.

It was a good day.

At least, I think it was. It must have been. The trouble is, I didn’t know on that day, at that time, that I was relevant.

Maybe it was the day when, as a sophomore at Southern Methodist University, we were protesting on the the main quad about the payments to the football players. Students were holding rallies between classes, demanding to know who was breaking the rules and who knew about it. I was wavering between a major in linguistics and poetry, and I wanted everything I said to mean something, to matter. Reporters were on campus. My picture ended up in a paper in Rochester, New York. Someone thought I was a badass. I heard about it weeks later.

But maybe, that wasn’t the day.

Maybe the day was when I was teaching at college classes at a high school in Michigan. Students were doing research papers and the principal caught wind of their topics: teenage depression, teenage violence, teen pregnancy. The principal would hang out in the hall during my class and then call me in later to ask me questions. One day, I shut the door. I called the students in closely and explained that they had the freedom to research the topics they wanted and write about what they learned. They felt dangerous. To me, it just seemed obvious.

But maybe it was a day I don’t even remember. Maybe it was a vacation I don’t recall or a conversation that meant nothing to me but everything to the person I spoke to. Maybe it was an email I sent at just the right time to just the right person saying just the right thing.

Relevant seems like a good goal. I want to be relevant again. But first, I want to have my dinner. And read my book. And write this letter. And live this life. One irrelevant day at time.