Also a good backdrop to spending a lot of time in your own head. Early August can be such a loaded time of the year. Eight of my nine major address changes have taken place in early August. The back-to-school ads are starting to crop up. I have been thinking, if fleetingly, of syllabi and schedules and new legal pads.
Sometimes I miss being a student--someone whose full-time job is to find a seat, pay attention, and take notes. Of course, being a teacher is the second-best thing. Of course, you should wake up every day and find a seat and pay attention. It's just that as a teacher, you have a very different relationship with a campus. It is still a place to learn, but it is also your site of employment.
I miss being a student because I had such good experiences as one. Both Fredonia and Kato, though very different schools, were good places to learn. They were cozy and safe and the campuses were full of secret places to camp out with a notebook and work the brain for a while. Though I don't miss the food. I really should have gotten into the habit of packing lunches much earlier than I did.
Michael Perry mentions in Truck that nostalgia used to be diagnosed as a mental illness. At the very least, it has to be a luxury of the fortunate. I try to remember this. And of course there is something cozy and safe about this apartment, the two of us typing away in different rooms, the dog flipping his favorite toy--a rock--under the furniture.
*
Five years ago today I was starting my second run as a student--this time a graduate one. I woke up in a bed that I had built myself, one of dubious construction and held together with a lot of wood glue. I wore flip-flops, and I did my hair because I thought we might get our ID pictures taken, and I wandered over to the first day of our TA workshop. Later that night, an acquaintance from undergrad took me out to a local bar, and I met some people from the program. One was wearing a blue polo shirt, and he had a shaved head and very nice eyes. He bought my second round for me without asking--just placed a brown bottle in front of me. Oh, I remember thinking. I see. And then Thank god. I was broke and thirsty and tired, and another beer was exactly what I needed.
Later, after most folks called it a night, the three of us wound up at another place, shooting pool. I was very bad. I drew a chalk mustache on my upper lip as penance for biffing yet another shot, and he screwed up his face and pretended to kiss me from a few feet away, and our companion took a photo right then. And I am glad she did.
Then there were more nights out and better games of pool, and he showed up one day in the office with a black eye, the result of an elbow in a pick-up game of basketball, and I sort of swooned. We started calling each other. Usually he would narrate episodes of Pimp My Ride over the phone. We painted a friend's farmhouse and went for pitchers of cheap beer and omelets and we sat in his car listening to music until six in the morning on the day he had to take a rather important teaching certification test at eight a.m. He had the best stories: brothers and farms up north, and Lake Superior and Duluth, and he said bage when he meant bag.
That was my first August in Minnesota, and the weather was sunny and the sky was blue and the horizon flat. Every morning I woke up and wondered what was going to happen that day. I was learning how to be a teacher. I was learning how to take apart poems and put together a syllabus. It was, I would later find out, great weather for the Midwest in August. Everything was catching me off-guard, but in the best possible way.
*
Now it August again. Things are comfortable. It is not my job to find a seat and take notes; instead, I will be the one at the board, writing them. And I can indulge myself in these nostalgic little moments, because in the next room that guy--who has since chosen a mohawk and a pair of chef's pepper pants--is writing while our dog flips a rock at his bare feet. He brews coffee for me, even though he hates the scent of it. For the last week, he has been at my side whenever I've needed him, and he has taught me how to navigate stairs with crutches.
On Monday night, while I was still getting used to the weight of the cast, he took me out for ice cream and we sat in the car, listening to the radio. When the light catches his face just right, you can see the scar under his left eye. And this morning, he placed a plate of hash browns in front of me without even asking.
They were, of course, exactly what I needed.
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