To the Kid Who Walked Out Of My Class The Very First Day I Taught

Perhaps if you had known I was running across the main quad. In cowboy boots.

Perhaps if you knew it was my very first day of teaching.

Perhaps if you knew I wasn’t nervous at all until I got to the classroom only to find it empty and locked, realizing then I had the wrong room.

Perhaps you would have stayed.

Purdue Campus

I ran up the stairs to the 3rd floor, turned to go down the hall and saw you coming out of a classroom. You walked towards me a little slowly; I could almost hear you thinking, “Is that her? No...can’t be...is it?”

I said, “I’m pretty sure you’re gonna wanna turn around and go back to class.”

When I get nervous, very nervous, the Texan in me comes out. I may have even said, “go back to class, pardner.” Who knows; it’s all a blur, really.

Part of me could not believe this school was going to let me teach. Somehow I thought teaching assistant meant I would assist someone. I was teaching a class I never took as an undergrad to students I never met in a building I’d never been in, in a city I never imagined. No wonder I was late.

Milton Kessler, my favorite professor.

I had no idea how to be a teacher. My favorite professors were my poetry professors, who were all greying Jewish men of varying height and girth, but all with a much deeper voice and a command of the room I knew I did not have.

But this was new to you, too, Ryan. This was your first day on campus, having moved into town over the weekend. How did you know you could leave a class? What in you made you think, “Look, I’ve got better things to do than to wait around for some teacher to show up…” and get up--the only one in the class willing to do it--and leave the room? The other students were shocked.

In that way, you saved me. I was late and sweaty and clearly out of sorts, but that’s not what they noticed. They saw you come back into the room, a sheepish "she-caught-me" grin. I had disciplined my first student before I even stepped into the classroom.

I write my name on the board, turn and say, “Good morning. Let’s begin. It’s pronounced ‘burn’.”

To Misunderstanding Song Lyrics

We’ve all been there, riding in a car or at a party, when a song comes on that we all know. And we sing along, until someone gets it wrong.

“I believe in miracles! Where ya from? You suck some eggs, you suck some eggs!” 

And the person singing has no idea, sings easily through the lyrics as if it makes perfect sense.

When I was young, I heard “Jet Airliner” by The Steve Miller Band. He’s on the road, eager to get home to his family, sleep in his bed, eat off his own plates. Sure, people think life on the road is glamorous, he suggests, but it’s really tedious, lonely. The people out here don’t really care about you.

“You know you got to go to hell before you get to heaven. Ohohoh, we don’t chat at the lineup.”

To me, it fit perfectly. I’d been on a plane before and I remembered standing in line, waiting for a boarding pass. People stood around, looking down at their tickets, maybe a magazine. (This was before cell phones). No one spoke to each other, despite the complete boredom.

No, Steve, we don’t. We don’t chat at the line up. We stand facing the back of the person in front and we wait. We will file onto the plane and fly hundreds of miles and never learn another person’s name. The song was the perfect reflection of alienation in the 20th century.

Only it wasn’t. But somehow, in my pre-adolescent brain, I’d made it fit. And I was well into my 20’s when I realized I was wrong. It began to occur to me that Miller probably wouldn’t use the word “chat” in that song and a “line up” was not the same thing as standing in a line.

I still like my version better.

A friend tells me she thought Steve Perry sang, “So now I come to you with broken arms…” How much better is that? Maybe the broken arms are real and the casts are heavy and he’s asking for just a little love, just some sympathy. Or maybe, it’s a metaphor: without her to hold, his arms feel broken. Either way, broken has a pain in it that “open” just doesn’t. Maybe Perry just missed that opportunity.

I like our songs better, the images so much more twisted and strange. But not nonsense. When we hear it, we make it work. Our imaginations take over and quickly bridge those images. Bly called it leaping poetry: the way the mind jumps, so willingly, from one idea to the next, nimble and completely confident.

To The Process

My study in the summer

As a young writers, we talked a lot about “the process” and the need to “trust it.” Even though I wrote every morning before class, I thought the process was something bigger, something more esoteric.

When I trained for my marathons, I ran sometimes 40 miles a week, and still I thought I would never be able to finish. Our coach would say, “If you can do 20, what’s 6 more?” And I wanted to say, “Do you hear yourself??”

After my first marathon

From here, today seems daunting. Errands, a school project, grading, making travel plans, trying to find time for my family, walk the dog, run, a dinner with friends. Already I am behind. These tasks pin me to the couch. Another and another and another.

Writing, running, raising a child, whatever it is, the doing of it feels like a risk. Not a risk of right or wrong, good or bad, but even more simple: finished or not finished? I started, sure, but anyone can start. Did I finish?

But the process is present tense, -ing, not -ed. Writing isn’t the posts or the poems or the book; writing is the fingers pressing the keys, the pen on paper. The long pauses and then the fury and then the pause. And then the fury. Running isn’t mile 3.1, 6.2, 26.2. It’s my foot striking the ground, striking the ground. I pass over a bridge, by a field, through a tunnel.

Trust isn’t in the process, it is the process. It’s no bigger than my fingertips, no more mysterious than getting to the next moment. Finishing is part of it. But so is waking up and starting all over again.