Yesterday I was sitting in the library with one of my classes, listening to our wonderful librarian talk about interesting reads for my students. I remember feeling tired, definitely not 100%. For a minute I thought about what I would rather be doing (sleeping, reading on a couch somewhere, sitting outside in the sunshine), and then it hit me: I was actually in the middle of my perfect day. I don't know that I've ever been so acutely aware of being in the moment, or at least certainly not when I'm at work. I usually reserve that kind of presence for vacations. Here was my startling revelation, and not in a nutshell:
All of my classes visited our library yesterday, which is arguably the most beautiful indoor space on campus. My freshmen were working on poetry projects, which meant that I could sit and read poetry too and help them find relevant poems. I ended up with a Billy Collins volume called
Sailing Around the Room and Other New Poems, and here is the poem that caused me to erupt into unstoppable giggles for the remainder of class:
"Schoolsville"
Glancing over my shoulder at the past,
I realize the number of students I have taught
is enough to populate a small town.
I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,
chalk dust flurrying down in winter,
nights dark as a blackboard.
The population ages but never graduates.
On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park
and when it's cold they shiver around stoves
reading disorganized essays out loud.
A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags
into the streets with their books.
I forgot all their last names first and their
first names last in alphabetical order.
But the boy who always had his hand up
is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.
The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine.
Their grades are sewn into their clothes
like references to Hawthorne.
The A's stroll along with other A's.
The D's honk whenever they pass another D.
All the creative-writing students recline
on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.
Wherever they go, they form a big circle.
Needless to say, I am the mayor.
I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.
I rarely leave the house. The car deflates
in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.
Once in a while a student knocks on the door
with a term paper fifteen years late
or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.
And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane
to watch me lecturing the wallpaper,
quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.
Later in the day, my seniors were working on another kind of poetry altogether:
The Great Gatsby. After listening to booktalks in the library we raced back to my room to talk about the strange and glamorous people that populate the first chapters of that novel. My students were exuberant: they adore this novel. They adore this novel even though they are in the middle of November and college applications and are only minutes away from Thanksgiving break.
After wrapping up Gatsby and teaching, I met and worked briefly with a group of teachers about diversity issues at my school. I love this group of teachers and what we're doing. I realized during my epiphany that I was looking forward to this meeting all day.
Then I had my fiddle lesson, and I am officially rocking out on some Christmas tunes these days.
Finally, I found myself at 9 p.m. sitting in the cheapest seat at the symphony listening to the gorgeous layers of Bolero. Sigh.
A perfect day.
I share all this because anyone who knows me well knows that my life is far from perfect right now. But there is something transporting and dazzling about good literature and poetry and music.
