May Day

There was a letter in my box at school the other day. Its envelope was sealed with wax and along with the note was a sticker of a luna moth with the words “Dwell in Possibility” across its wings. The letter was a thank-you from a former student I’ll refer to as “Jake.” In 8th grade he started growing his hair out, and by his junior year it reached his waist and baffled the school’s admin. They didn’t know whether to make him cut it or put it up in a bun or let him go around the school with it hanging down one shoulder. In the end he had to tie it up. So it goes.

I sent Jake a copy of The Peregrine because his mother mentioned that he had developed a fascination with birds, although that wasn’t how she worded it.

“Jake has gotten into birding,” she said. And, honestly, I thought that was something pertaining to the transgender community, which Jake was slowly working his way into as his hair grew long.

“As in, he’s gotten into studying birds,” his mom said.

“Ah, ok. Yes,” I said and stopped twisting the buttons on my cardigan.

I read The Peregrine last year and was mesmerized by how the author intertwines poetry and nonfiction. Or makes poetry nonfiction. Or takes what could be otherwise encyclopedic and makes it poetry.

I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

Jake’s letter was the one bright moment in an otherwise hellish week. At small group, when it came time for prayer requests, I had flippantly asked for prayers that the school year would end well because why not. All good teachers should want that. But then the school year proceeded to do the complete opposite of what I asked, and I returned to small group the following Sunday a cynical shell of my former self and carrying some new ideas about trust. Students had cheated, but also they seemed a little proud that they cheated, which hit me like a freight train. When I thought about looking at them one more time at graduation, I imagined sending them off to the real world with a cold line like, “Farewell. I hope your college experience is the one you deserve.” Imagine a teacher saying something like that to you right after you graduate and just before you go out to Olive Garden with your grandparents.

I am in a kind of limbo right now in my teaching career. I’m no longer young enough to be consistently hip. And I’m not old enough to be “cute,” as I’ve heard students refer to our 80-year-old history teacher. She can give a full lecture on the very last day of school when other classes are eating pizza and donuts, and these young people will merely sigh and shake their heads, as if to say, “What are we going to do with her?” and then go to her lecture. I’m in that phase when those little micro sins of confiscating phones and marking students tardy at 8:01 pile up against me. By May, the phrase, “I’m not angry, just disappointed,” doesn’t mean much to some students. In fact, the inverse proves to be more effective. By May, my teaching methods are more gladiatorial. I say things like, “Shall we clear the desks, then, and settle this like men?” By May, my classroom is at its furthest point in the galaxy—its aphelion—from Robin Williams’ classroom in Dead Poets Society. By the end of the year, the thing that’d make some of my students most happy would be for me to kindly eff off. Their goodbyes are thinly veiled, their smiles plastered on their faces like advertisements for tooth whiteners. So it goes.

While Jake is somewhere reading the silken words of J.A. Baker, I am reading Vonnegut, who describes a bird’s song as “Poo-tee-weet?” with no particulars as to what kind of bird it might be. In Vonnegut’s writing, birds break the post-massacre silence of Dresden. They are convoys of nature, and nature, I guess, serves as some separate, pure entity entering into human desolation and saying something like, “What’s going on here?”

The day after I confronted my students for their dishonesty, one of them brought me a note. Not an apology note, but one in an elegant hand that was part of a gift. The young man received a graduation present from his kindergarten teacher and asked if I would read it to him because he struggled to read cursive (which is a whole other essay).

I took up the letter and read thusly:

“Dear young man who was once in my kindergarten class. Why did you lie to your high school English teacher? I figured you two had a pretty good teacher-student relationship, and then you killed the vibe. I thought y’all were chill. You are not chill. I hope college is everything you deserve.”

Ok, it didn’t say that. I read the letter as it was written, and though I don’t remember it in detail now, it touched on how diligent this young man was when he was five years old and in the “owl class,” which is how our school divides up the kindergarten. They’re either whales or owls or foxes or elephants. She also reminded him of his remarkable hunger for knowledge. She said—in all sincerity, in the fine loops of her penmanship—that she remembered how he would learn his memory verses with great enthusiasm. As I read it, he smiled with recognition—with that look of, “Aw. That old teacher of mine. She’s so cute.” And then he took up the money she included in the card and tucked it into his pants pocket. And he and I have never talked about the “incident,” nor can I see his smile without some hint of self-satisfaction in it for having pulled one over on the 40-something teacher who—by the way—isn’t all that funny and who—while we’re on the subject—has really overused that George Orwell line. Like, we know you were born in 1984. Move on, already.

Jake—lover of birds—ended his letter in this way:

“It’s very easy to forget yourself when birding…which is good, because it’s also easy to feel ridiculous when using binoculars. I hope you’re doing well, and have a great summer.

Sincerely, Jake.”

So it goes.