October 2010 - Facing the Random
I run to keep fit. I run in search of some decent kind of shape so I can keep up with my little girls.
I run for the rare moments in which I join Hermes and run with wings at my heels and with an ease that convinces me I could go on forever.
I run for the surge of blood as I kick it in on good days and tough it out on bad.
Last week my mate Brian was hit by a car whilst running. He ran for much the same reasons that I do: fitness, family, freedom. He and I were the same age – thirty seven – and we both taught English at the same school. Both had two young kids and a lovely wife. Our rooms were across the hall from each other. We were two big fellahs unwilling to go gently into that middle aged spread.
And now he’s gone. His lot could have been mine.
In that context, my mate Jan burst into breakfast after our weekly club run this morning. He’d flown back into town last night and heard a passing reference to the accident in the car on the way home from the airport. Thus it was with some kind of angry relief that saw me and confirmed with his own Thomasine eyes that it wasn’t me who’d been taken out. His relief, naturally, was immediately tempered by the awful fact that his gain comes at the expense of others. It is an ugly game.
Several days ago a bunch of us teachers gathered at a local brew pub to mourn for Brian. It would have been an excellent night had it not been for that which drew us together. We celebrated his life on a raft of comfort food swept amidst a sea of beers. We share Brian stories but some of the time – a lot of the time, I suppose – we avoided the topic altogether and talked to distraction.
A few pints into the experience I confided in my friend Carolyn. I’d been scared witless all summer about the Advanced Placement classes I’ve started teaching this year. I hadn’t taught at this level before; hadn’t considered text in a sustained manner at that level for several years.
How rusty was I?
Could I keep ahead of the kids?
Would they catch the scent of fear?
How much smarter are they than me?
(That last one is a legitimate question. I’m no dummy and I’ve no worry handling your run-of-the-mill type-A hard workers. It’s the freaks I am worried about, the goons, those creatures from outer space bellcurving through infinity; IQs shooting three standard deviations to the right of mine. These kids engage in secret rites hid in the halls of fraternities accessed via doors that only geniuses can see.)
Carolyn’s first year teaching at that level was a year before mine, and it turned out that she’d experienced exactly the same anxieties – those same fears of the unknown – and yet she had succeeded.
It gave me an immense sense of relief to hear her confession. Immense. I have taken and treasured that admission of frailty and self-doubt. It gave me some backbone in the wake of our ruinous week.
And it was an atrocious, devastating week. One night I came home exhausted. Laura and I talked. “You’ve the closest English Department in Western New York”, she commented, which got me thinking. The very fact of her true analysis angered me some. Here’s my response:
The Tightest
Reopen the old wounds!
Reignite the fires!
And callously rub
against our ancient aggravations.
Return the tears and groans that bind us, and take back our moment in the sun.
Sacrifice every ounce of this cursed loan of love.
Brother, I’ll take those old intolerances
and weigh my unkind words.
The price is too damn high for being
the tightest Department in New York.
for Brian Dugan (1973 – 2010)
As a school, a faculty and a department we remain in a state of flux. I am in a state of flux. It is seven days and twelve hours and twenty minutes since I got the call and I am only now starting to adjust to the new regime.
The new deal. The revised order. I hate these things, this emasculation, but there you go.
Random is a word that has come up several times this week in response to the utter unpredictability of it all.
Random in that there is nothing you can do against stuff that just happens.
Random in that we are all somewhat powerless despite our efforts to be healthy and there for the ones we love.
In the spirit of the week, then, I am facing the random. Kicking back at it. I actually took my precious four-wheel drive off the road and muddied it all to hell the other day instead of waiting patiently in traffic.
There’s the mud of remembrance all over the thing and I’m not yet interested in washing it off. It’s so dirty I needed to ride in someone else’s car to Brian’s funeral. There’s a big scratch down the right hand side and I should be upset but I’m not. I did it ‘cause I could. Because I needed to. I did it because I am alive and I damn well can.
Kookaburra