Back To School

I have new school supplies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to buy some, but I went to Office Depot and got some Sharpies, ink cartridges for my printer, a new pair of scissors, a battery-operated pencil sharpener, and a Rolodex. The Rolodex is for the contacts I’ve been accumulating at record pace, largely due to the Spencer Program.

I used to love getting school supplies. Pee-Chees. Pencil boxes. Crayons. I often tell the story of how my second grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor, made all of us break our new Crayolas in half. “So you’ll have two of each color,” she said. I can still see her brunette flip; I realize only in hindsight that there must have been a lot of AquaNet in that hair. When Mrs. Taylor gave us that instruction, I knew I was going to be in trouble.

Everyone I tell this story to sympathizes. How terrible! I didn’t want to break my beautiful, clean, shiny, waxy Crayolas in half! Neither did a lot of the other kids. Now I see my teacher’s practical point, but it might have been just as useful to let us keep our crayons whole; if we lost one, we’d have to ask our neighbor if we could borrow his Burnt Sienna or Cornflower. We’d learn how to ask, say “please” and “thank you.” Or maybe she thought we’d learn how to steal…and fight. To take someone’s Goldenrod or Aquamarine when he wasn’t looking. I remember that our pencil boxes were milk cartons with one side cut out. We wrapped them in yellow construction paper and decorated them. They looked like boats.

Anyway, I have to prep for my first class next week. I’m trying to convince myself that I know what I’m doing. I take comfort in the fact that I taught high school seniors last year, and so it’s like I get to teach them again this year…only for 15 weeks instead of one. I also take comfort in the fact that I said I wanted a do-over for college. Well, I can’t imagine what would be more of a do-over than having to teach students myself. I was reading some of the selections in the Norton Anthology I’ll be using, and was gratified by the awareness that I have become a better reader than I once was, that a story like Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is more layered and interesting than I remembered. I have the freedom to assign other works, and am thinking that the opening story in this recent collection The Boat, by Nam Le, raises the same questions and sets out the same issues as the Grace Paley story in the Norton. Do I dare disturb the universe? Why the heck not!

The Great Leap Forward

What do you do—or say—or write—when suddenly everything you’ve ever wanted in your life begins to manifest? I find myself in this remarkable position, and report that you have to keep yourself as calm as possible and concentrate on one thing at a time. Within days of taking the helm of this substantial new project at Chautauqua, I was offered two teaching jobs that I had to turn down because I couldn’t see a way to honor my commitment to the Spencer Writers Workshops. I have, however, been offered and accepted a position to teach English Literature at Niagara University this fall. I have been seriously wanting to teach at the college level—and to teach seriously at the college level—for some time, and will be teaching two sections of basic Intro to Lit on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So what else is going to happen in my current life? I can’t imagine. I keep laughing, remembering that I was afraid I was going to be bored in Buffalo.

My friend Richard Stafford was here recently for two weeks as a guest teacher in my brother’s ballet school. Richard and I have been friends for five years, but I often feel like it’s been longer. We established one of those rare quick and deep connections back in New York City, and I’m happy to report that it has endured. Don’t get me wrong—this is nothing more than a friendship, but how many of us can say, I have too many friends? I’m not one of those people. In fact, I feel grateful because at times in my life I felt that I was losing friends. Even worse, I didn’t even realize I was losing them—and what kind of friend did that make me? Well, Richard and his partner Peter are now ensconced in a new apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, which is where they lived when Richard and I met. I hope they never have to move again!

So I’m watching the Rangers and the Yankees over my shoulder, and of the sports stories that have come ‘round so far in the first half of ’08, that of Josh Hamilton, the outfielder who set a new record in the Home Run Derby during the recent All-Star Game festivities. If you don’t know Hamilton’s story, look it up online—just Google his name. It’s said that baseball is about never losing faith, but Hamilton’s personal story is about a more painful story, one about losing faith to the point of despair and even death, and then regaining it.

I hope to be a little better about keeping up on this blog than in recent weeks. I can’t afford to fall behind in the count, not with a schedule like this fall’s looming on the horizon.