To Commitment

[I wrote this one about/for a good friend who passed away today. So I'm reposting it for tomorrow's post. He was one of the few people who knew about this blog before I started it, and he was always very encouraging about my writing. I remain committed. More than ever. Because, really, that is all we have.]

My friend writes me, “Every morning I see my 60-yr-old neighbor head out for her walk. Today she was trudging along, umbrella open, head down against the driving rain. You should write a letter to commitment.”  Only, I think he doesn’t want me to write about commitment, really, but about her commitment: her umbrella angled against the rain, the implication that now that’s she’s 60, she could take a day off, the morning routine that could be so easily broken. One day you just don’t go.

He wants me to write about that, but of course, I want to write about his commitment. He drives 47 minutes to work, all through winter. No matter what time I get to the office--7:45, 7:15, 7:03--he is there before me, lights on, jacket off, grading or writing class notes. When his students come for help, he greets them with, “Hey! What’s up?” as if he has been doing nothing but waiting for that person to walk in.

He would say that’s not commitment, that’s just a day. We talk about the upsides of teaching and realize, in many ways, how lucky we are. How hard is it to commit to a life like this?

He married his high school sweetheart. When he talks about his 13-year old son, he says, “My little boy…” They live in the same area he grew up in. He has a PhD in literature. When his son’s baseball team traveled all over the Midwest last summer in an unpredictable playoff season, he went with them, staying in hotels and eating crappy road food.

Commitment is easy to see when it’s someone else’s. That’s you, we think, doing that again. We look and see all the other choices you could be making: staying in bed, getting to work at a normal hour, letting someone else drive the kids. When it is ours, though, the choice is often so obvious as to not even seem a question.

Commitment isn’t choosing every morning, even in the rain, to go for a walk. Commitment is defining yourself once as a person who walks every day, rain or snow, and then believing it, all the other options gone. It’s just me, you think, this is just who I am.