October 13, 2024
Last week, out of nowhere, or more precisely Mali, I received a greeting card postmarked “Tombouctou.” The message, in a French hand, credited “notre cher professeur” for teaching “several among us” the value of foreign languages. There was no signature, but the return addressee was Phil Paoletta, c/o sleeping camel hotel, Bamako. Not a name I knew. Since I taught for 35 years at an independent school for girls, even his sex was a puzzle. Oh, I had male students, courtesy of a cooperative program with the boys’ school a couple of blocks away, but not enough of them, at an advanced level at least, to forget a name. So I looked up the hotel online. Apparently, the sender was one of its owners, and this is a service they offer to help subsidize the local artisans. Order a handmade card from us, and we’ll get it franked in Timbuktu and mailed to anyone anywhere in the world. I am immensely touched that someone went to the trouble of honoring me with one. Naturally, I have a few suspects among the girls who pursued French seriously and who might be eager to support such an initiative, but I could be wrong: you don’t always know the effect you have on a student. I’ve run into some later who tell me they found my classes chaotic, or thought I was too hard on them; I’ve had a surprising number affectionately friend me on FB; I once heard a voice shout “Best French teacher ever!” at me from a passing car. The life of a teacher is as rewarding as it is challenging as it is draining. I brought work home just about every night, and every weekend, and fairly frequently fell asleep in front of our house as soon as I parked my car. One favorite ex-student, in flattering but clearly exasperated fashion, lambasted me for inspiring her to be a teacher. “Why didn’t you tell me it was so hard? You made it look like fun!”
It wasn’t always fun. By my early sixties, the load had begun to feel impossible. But it’s the only job I ever tried which I liked enough to foresee as a career. It worried me at times that I might simply be following a path that was laid down for me, or that I had laid down for myself. There are a lot of teachers in my family. At sixteen or so, I told a guidance counselor that my ambition was to be a teacher, though not an English teacher (my best subject) because my father was an English teacher—so maybe a foreign languages teacher?—while writing books, just for myself, on the side. And that’s exactly (with some detours) the life course I have followed. And yes, maybe I could have made some braver choices along the way. But on the whole, I’ve liked my life. What parts of it would I really care to renounce? And haven’t I lived, on the side, as rich a life of the mind, as exploratory and as creative a one as I could have hoped? One of my never to be written books is about Mali. It was to be a travel book, if I ever traveled there, which I really only wanted to do so I could use its title, On y va qui Mali pense. The motto of the Order of the Garter, one of the highest orders of knighthood in the UK, is “Honi soit qui mal y pense”: basically, “the shame of it is in your mind.” (The shame of a knight sporting a garter, or of a great lady having her garter slip down about her ankles on the dance floor, it’s apocryphally suggested.) The phrase has always amused me, due in large part to a popular history spoof I read as a teen—1066 and All That—where it is translated as “Honey, your silk stocking’s hanging down.” Anyway, that’s the nutty reason why I’ve always thought of Mali with great affection.
And all of the above, and much more, flashed through my mind as I fingered my anonymous thank you card.
A human lifespan may be short, but an instant of it can be immense: in its here-and-now sensory intensity; in the imprint such a moment leaves; in our trove of memory; but most of all, surely, in the untrammeled flit of the mind. Capable, sure, when it disciplines itself to it, of the most focused stringencies, when that kind of inner life, the Socratically examined kind, strikes one as the only life worth living. In retirement, though, with so much past under me, a dragon-hoard of it, I find that I believe with equal fervor in fallowness; in the great play of reverie; in untrammeled flit. Only in the proper balance of them does time, it seems to me, become timeless.
But I began this piece intending to thank whoever greeted me from Bamako: thank you. Thank you for launching me into memory and meditation. Thank you, whoever you have become and are still becoming, for lightening my spirits. Here’s to the thread of that moment that once trammeled us up into it, into a relationship that has pulled and not broken, so that the memory of me still means something to you.
All memory means much to me, even as I toy with it, and fudge it. I try to live in the present as if I weren’t just a visitor here, but the past is my heart’s country. (I’ve never concerned myself much with the future. At the end of my life, whenever that may be, I hope that I can still look back, remembering, at this immense instant of me now: that’s enough. Hey, future me, do you miss this guy? Are you still this guy?) The past, though, in its dragon-hoard largeness? It is still, and always, in its fudged and shadowy beauty, with me. It stretches and compresses for the present instant to encompass it; my teaching life—a lifetime ago!—flashes its chime and glitter. In the wink of its inner eye I remember the student who told me, when I was maybe sixty, such an eternity ago, “You have to understand, from our perspective, your life is already over.” And jostling her aside, I see the girl who wrote in an essay for senior English, “I’m 18 now, so I’m already pretty much who I’ll be for the rest of my life.” And here comes the junior who looked at a photo of me at 19 and exclaimed in dismay, “Is this what is going to happen to us?”
Well, yes, that’s true, I tell all three of them—and yes, let’s hope it will—and no, of course it’s not.
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