The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 2

Ft. Worth to Glorieta, NM

636.3 Miles/134 Songs

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Lyre of Orpheus
Belle & Sebastian – Push Doorman to Open Old Wounds (Disc 2)
Jeff Buckley – Grace
Madonna – Madonna
Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog
Wilson Pickett – Don’t Knock My Love

12:38 pm - Chillicothe, Tx

I’m hoping lunch will help prepare me for what’s to come—the arduous journey through the desolate waste of the Texas panhandle. Stretches of vast nothingness, interrupted occasionally by the pockmark towns that serve as speed traps for tourists and truckers. It always makes me feel lonely, especially when I’m driving alone, as I am now. I try to imagine the people who live here. Why are they here? Why haven’t they left like everyone else? How do they cope with the immeasurable loneliness? How could they ever expect to find love way out here?

“I’ve heard of pious men
And I’ve heard of dirty fiends
But you don’t often hear
Of us ones in between”
“Us Ones in Between” – Sunset Rubdown

I stop for lunch in Chillicothe, pockmark #3. I pull in at a Dairy Queen but notice Love’s BBQ & Steakhouse next door. A bit riskier perhaps, but that’s sort of what this trip is about, so I leave my car parked in the DQ parking lot and walk next door, looking for Love, and maybe some answers to my questions.

9:43 pm - Glorieta, NM

Church camp. It’s been ten years since I was here. And I remember feeling much the same way these kids do now. I look around and I see eyes closed, hands raised, souls held captive by the emotional sway, and I wonder how and when I became so cynical. Ten years ago I was swept away in the tide of holy fervor; tonight, I’m the only one with his hands in his pockets. Ten years ago I swore to God Almighty that I would repent of my evil and negligent ways and never again drink or smoke the devil’s putrefaction. My promise lasted six years. Not real sure what’s significant about six years. Maybe that’s about the time the cynicism kicked in.
As I look around at these eyeless faces, I wonder how long it will take the cynicism to work on them. Six years? Ten years? Kids today are sharp; maybe it will take less time. I hope it takes longer. I hope they can remain blissfully unaware. Cynicism is lonely—lonely as hell.

“Ain’t a penthouse Christian wants the pain of a scab,
But they all want the scar.”
"Innocent Bones" - Iron & Wine

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 1

Austin to Ft. Worth

211 Miles/29 songs

Sun Kil Moon – April
Rainy Day – Rainy Day
Paul Simon - Graceland
Rangers Game

5:52 pm - Waco, Tx

For the first 50 miles or so, I can’t help but wonder what I’ve left behind. You always leave something behind—you just hope it’s not something too important. A toothbrush is fine. Pillow, headphones, best pair of undies. These can all be replaced on the road, likely at the next Wal-Mart. But charted map, contact lenses, phone charger—these things are harder to replace. A conversation, a hug, a proper goodbye. These things weren’t on my list. They never are.

These songs of loss and regret, they’re what get me thinking this way. I can’t seem to look forward without seeing my rearview mirror.

“She comes back to tell me she’s gone;
As if I didn’t know that,
As if I didn’t know my own bed;
As if I never noticed the way she brushed
Her hair from her forehead."
"Graceland" - Paul Simon

The Manifest Destiny Tour - Day 0

0 Miles/0 Songs

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving town for a while. Roughly three weeks. That’s the plan anyway. I’ll drive to my sister’s in Ft. Worth. Then pick up my brother from church camp in Glorieta, New Mexico. Then together we’ll spend a week at Wilderness Ranch, between Creede and Lake City, Colorado. Set in the San Juan National Forest of the Weminuche Wilderness of southern Colorado, near the continental divide, it’s one of the most beautiful places I know. When we leave there, we’ll hit the open road. West to California—San Francisco, L.A. On the way back maybe Vegas, the Grand Canyon. Then back to Texas. We’re keeping our plans purposely vague. We want to leave room for spontaneity. I hope that isn’t a mistake. Actually we’ve been planning this trip for years. As soon as he graduated from high school, I told him, we would go on a road trip, just he and I, to see America.

"Now there are many
Who will swear it's true
That brother all we are
And yet it seems there are so few
Who will answer a brother's call."
"Brother Where Are You?" - Johnny Rivers

I'm as Caged as a Bird Now

Here it is. It's sort of a long one. Making up for lost time perhaps. So, maybe wait to start it until you have about 10-12 minutes of uninterrupted reading time.

-heatmiser

The last time I was in a talent show I was eight. Three of my cousins and I sang a four-part barber shop Southern Baptist rendering of “Just Like John.” We didn’t win. And it was all my fault. Despite two and a half weeks of rehearsing in my bedroom, the backyard, the shower, and anywhere else I spent my adolescence, when the time came to sing my verse, I blanked. I froze. It was as though someone had stapled my tongue to the roof of my mouth—it was that painful. To this day, I still remember the lyrics (“Now, brother better mind how you step on the cross Walk in Jerusalem, just like John Your feet might slip and your soul get lost Walk in Jerusalem, just like John”). Well, I must have stepped on the cross in a bad way because my soul (and everything attached to it for that matter) was lost on that stage. I stood bleary-eyed and bludgeoned, tamed and trapped, regretting my eight years of life. And in that horrified moment, I swore that I would never show my talent again.

Fast-forward 20 years. Recently, I was approached by a fellow teacher who plays the drums (and hockey, incidentally) and asked if I would be interested in joining his teacher(slash)student band for the upcoming talent show. My tongue immediately felt a staple prick, my eight-year-old self reminded me of our on-stage promise, and I balked but coolly said, “That could be fun.” I didn’t really think it would happen. No students would be interested in playing with their teachers, and so close to the end of the school year, we teachers would be so busy that anything put together would surely fall apart. So you can imagine my surprise when, three weeks and two and a half rehearsals later, I found myself on the school’s Performing Arts Center stage with three other teachers and six students ready to tear into CCR’s “Fortunate Son.” Two drum kits, four guitars (two electric, one acoustic, and one bass), one piano, one keyboard, one bass saxophone, and a tambourine. Straight forward, pure and flawed, the way it should be. The way it used to be.

I had agreed to take part in this nonsense with the strict understanding that I would not be singing, just strumming my rhythm guitar, but since no one else could come quite as close to belting out Fogerty’s diaphanous strains, I was reluctantly forced into the position. With no monitors and the lead guitarist’s amplifier directly behind me, I had no idea what notes I was actually singing, so I tried channeling Fogerty’s pre-Fogerty spirit, howling my best cathartically visceral Joplin meets Plant shriek-sing-scream, which is really the only way to get that high without drugs. Even though I knew the lyrics, have known them since being raised on my father’s cassette tapes, the eight-year-old made me keep them on a security blanket music stand. Perhaps not very rock n’ roll, but neither is staring blank-faced and fat-tongued into oblivion. Our drummer’s adrenaline turned a two and a half minute song into a one minute and forty-two second romp that would make Megadeth proud. I didn’t mind, of course. Just get the damn thing over with. We finished to mild applause and a few catcalls, presumably from our students dotted about the audience. We were the last act, and while the judges were tabulating, we were asked to play an encore, sort of as a filler. We had rehearsed another song, but it was hardly ready for public ingestion. It’s a fairly complicated piece with a number of instruments and a tricky tempo change in the middle, followed by an incendiary guitar solo. The song: Freebird.

Coincidentally, I had heard “Freebird” four days earlier. At prom. I hadn’t planned on going but at the last minute decided it might be fun to help chaperone. I spent most of the evening outside the main ballroom, helping students get checked in, being surprised at how much older they seemed in their tuxedos and dresses, trying to ignore the awful music being played by the DJ. But as “Soulja Boy” faded out and the southern rock anthem of anthems faded in, I couldn’t resist the impulse to peak my head in to see how the dancers were going to handle this one. I reached the dance floor just about the time the ballad turns bawling, and just as I suspected, the kids were a little confused about what to do with their partners in light of the new rhythm. Most simply stopped slow-dancing, slackened their loose-limbed embraces, and stood gaping at each other. Others attempted to transition with the song, maintaining the same slow-dance sway, just speeding it up, so it looked like an old-timey video recording. Still others reverted back to the “Soulja Boy” dance they had butchered five minutes earlier. All in all, it was a pretty awkward scene. And not a humorous one either. I felt their pain. I’ve known public humiliation. But still, I’m grateful for the image—because to me, it’s a great representation of the teenage life.

“Freebird” as an expression of the teenage experience. I’m sure that’s not what Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zant had in mind when they wrote it. But think about it. It’s a restless tune, the lyrics just as much as the music. (“For I must be travellin’ on, now, ‘Cause there’s too many places I’ve got to see.”) Remember how restless we were at 16? 17? 18? Also, the song really isn’t that good, but it’s iconic. The American pop culture landscape would contain a tremendous musical chasm without it. Likewise, our lives would feel a void if not for our wanting teenage years. (Of course, some might see those years as a spectacular ass-crack dividing an otherwise decent life.) And then there’s the song’s structure. It appears really complicated and erratic, but really it’s terribly simple. Van Zant himself once said, “If you can count to 4, you can play Freebird.” Of course, he also initially rejected the song when Collins brought it to him, saying it “had too many chords.” (It has six total chords by the way.) So maybe it’s actually very complicated and appears to be simple. Confusing? So is life at 17.

I’ve said before that teenagers are dumb. I don’t really mean that. They’re actually pretty smart. Some are ridiculously smart. That’s not to say that they’re without some sort of mental deficiency, however. They’re not. It’s just that it’s hard to pin down exactly what that deficiency is. I suppose in my laziness I’ve used the word dumb, hoping it would suffice. Confusion—like that experienced by the prom dancers—is closer. But even that’s not completely accurate; the real problem lies deeper than confusion. It’s the result of inexperience and immaturity. I think the real problem is that teenagers lack a realistic perspective on life. It’s why they can’t see even two feet into the future. I’m not sure why reality eludes them so. Maybe it is just inexperience. Maybe it’s the illusion of reality that’s peddled out to them by today’s insta-grat mainstream. Or maybe it’s all that self-esteem building, follow your heart crap that’s rammed into their heads during their developmental years. Whatever the reason, I’m convinced that it’s this that makes them appear dumb.

The only reason I mention this foible is because I am often the recipient of the assumptions it breeds. For some reason, my students have a hard time believing I’m an actual human being. They like to ask me how many parties I went to over the weekend or when the last time I smoked pot was, but then they’re shocked to see me drinking a beer at a music festival. Actually, they’re shocked to see me out of school at all, like I’m supposed to be perpetually behind my desk grading their essays. They can’t believe I have a Facebook page, like their generation invented the computer or the internet or something. It’s really a shock when they discover that I listen to “their” music, especially hip-hop, like teachers should only be listening to classical music. The other day, one of my students, apropos of nothing, of course, busted out with the opening line of R. Kelly’s “Bump ‘N Grind” (My mind’s tellin’ me No-oh-oh), so I finished it for him (But my body, my body’s tellin’ me Yeh-eh-ess). And they were baffled that I knew the song. A song that came out when I was in 8th grade and they were 18 months old.

The reality of things—and this is what the kids have difficulty grasping—is that I’m not all that different from them. I berate them constantly for their laziness and procrastination, yet I’ll wait until the last minute to grade their essays. (Some of you know about the time I was at school grading until 3:15 AM because grades were due at 8.) The students don’t know what they want to do when they grow up and neither do I. If they’re excited about an upcoming holiday, it is nothing compared to my own excitement. I’ve been looking forward to summer for two and a half months. But now that we are two days away from it, something strange has happened. I’m not ready for it end. How dumb is that? I’ve been craving a break for so long, and now that it’s here, I don’t want it. Why? At first I thought it was because of the kids, because I would miss them and their antics. And while that’s definitely part of it, I think there’s more to it than that. I’ve always put a high premium on wanderlust, on being able to pack it in and move away if necessary, shunning the sedentary life. A career is not something I’ve ever really been interested in. Even with teaching, I figured it would be a job I could try for a couple of years before moving on to something else. But not a career. My father is a career teacher, 30 years plus, and I always swore when I was younger that I would never be a teacher, especially an English teacher. But here I am. Now, I’m not saying that I’ll teach to retirement; like I say, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But for right now, this is what I do. Call it a job or call it a career; it doesn’t really matter. I’m a teacher. And I realize that doesn’t sound very rock n’ roll. Ronnie Van Zant would probably laugh at me and tell me it had too many chords. But that’s okay. I’ve lived the simple life of the freebird too, and all it did was make me a lonely asshole. I’m alright with being a caged bird, as long as the company is good, and there’s plenty of food and water.

Oh, and the talent show? We won it.

A Tip of the Slung

I'm sorry this post has been so long in coming (that's what she said), and I apologize in advance that it won't have been worth the wait. Eventually this blog will again supply its readers (all 8 of you) with the anecdotal quality it possessed in its infancy. Until then, read this:

I don’t know how it is in other jobs; I almost can’t remember ever having any other job. But I have a vague recollection of once being able to speak like a normal human being. I could string together words into complete sentences almost without having to try. And I think I remember being pretty good at it. I could say exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and the other person would leave the conversation understanding exactly what I wanted them to understand. I took effective communication for granted. I don’t do that anymore—because for teachers, effective communication is a luxury, something that only happens when the fates allow or the stars align or you get a good night’s sleep.

Part of the problem is trying to work with a clientele that is flawed by default. We all know how stupid teenagers are and how stupidity has a way of rubbing off on others. But I can’t blame everything on the students. Even in those rare occasions when they are listening attentively (especially at these times it seems) I still have difficulty conversing. I find that my tongue’s main assailants are the Freudian slip (saying one thing and meaning your mother) and the spoonerism (tangling the beginning sounds of words—“it is kisstomary to cuss the bride”) and other such malapropisms. And the worst part is, these slips are typically sexual in nature. I can’t explain why that is. Maybe the tongue just gets tired of continual repression and self-censorship and, like a cork from a bottle of champagne, it just pops.

I was afraid at first that I had some strange perversion that was causing these sexual slips, but I’ve since talked to other teachers and found that I am not alone. Sometimes the slips are explainable. Like the time the usually verbally chaste teacher was one day hit by the Huck Finn bug. (That’s a spoonerism you sort of have to concede at least once when teaching Twain.) Sometimes the slips are unexplainable. Like the time another teacher inexplicably blurted out a slang for the female reproductive tract. (I won’t say the word here, but it rhymes with shunt.) Sometimes the slips are perhaps a product of some subconscious desire. Like the time the screenwriting teacher was leading her class in one of those “Who am I?” games where everyone wore a card with a different movie title on their foreheads and had to go around asking questions of others in an attempt to determine which movie they were, so she starts off with, “Is Brad Pitt in me?” And sometimes the slips are hopefully not a product of some subconscious desire. Like the time a student’s cell phone went off in his pocket with the ringtone of some booty-bumpin’ jam and I said, “Sounds like you got a party in your pants.”

Recently, I was going over a grammar review with my classes. Our main focus was the common uses of the comma. I was going through it pretty quickly because a) it was pretty easy stuff that they should have known since the 6^th grade, b) students’ eyes tend to glaze over if you take too much time with something like punctuation, and c) as usual, I was trying to squeeze 30 minutes too much into the lesson plan. About halfway through the review, we got to this sentence: “She was a pretty good cook, but her mother-in-law will always be better.” The common use of the comma here obviously being to separate two independent clauses with the help of a conjunction. So while reading it aloud, I felt it necessary to say the word “comma”: “She was a pretty good cook (COMMA) but her mother-in-law will always be better.” A completely innocent sentence, right? Unless you read it so fast that you get the words cook and comma tangled. Then it takes on a whole new meaning, albeit one that doesn’t make sense anatomically.

But my first, and probably best, sexual slip of the tongue happened on my first day of teaching. There was this kid named Frank. Right off I knew he was a weird kid: around his neck he wore a twine necklace with a rattlesnake head pendant. Yes, a real snake head—forked tongue and fangs and all. And this was my first class of my first day. I wasn’t sure if I should be missing my construction job yet. Well, as is often the case on the first day of school, students’ schedules were changed around, and so was Frank’s. So I had the pleasure of seeing Snake-boy twice that day. And because he had already heard all the first day rigmarole, while I was getting the other students rigmaroled, I told Frank he could just sit there and play with his snake.

And that’s the difference between teaching and other jobs. It’s not that other jobs are free of sexual commentary. Certainly not. It’s that the sexual commentary is on purpose. But in teaching, it’s always an unintended and embarrassing catastrophe. We try to play it off, but the kids know better. After all, if teenagers know anything it’s sexual banter.

Hatful of Hope

Lance’s first name is Devin. Lance’s middle name is Jackson. As far as I know, Lance’s parents had no intention of ever calling him Lance, but that’s the name he prefers to go by, so that’s what we call him. I’m not sure what’s so special about that name, why he’d rather use it than either Devin or Jackson. I guess it’s all a bit arbitrary really. I mean all things considered, the names Lance and Devin are relatively similar—same amount of letters, both fairly common but not too common, both of Anglo-Saxon etymology (I think). I can see no advantage—or any drawback—to using either name. I wish I could say that it didn’t matter to me, that I haven’t lost sleep brooding over it. I wish I could say that I’ve long since stopped trying to figure out the quirky motivations of teenagers. But it would be a lie.

Truth is I spend a great deal of my time trying to figure out this bizarre group of near-humans. I find that I am enthralled with them. I observe them—always with the scientist’s aloof objectivity or the birdwatcher’s eager gaze. My goal is two-fold: to discover their true nature and simply to marvel at the weird wonder of it all. One of the main reasons I’ve started this blog is to see if I could set down an accurate portrayal of today’s American teenager. The movies are wrong. They either make them too simple or too complicated, but they’re both, and neither. Stereotypes are useless and, consequently, so is attempting to flip those stereotypes. On Tuesday the star quarterback might be seen modestly yapping it up with the third-chair tuba player, and then on Friday, he’ll be the picture of detached coolness. The burnout slacker might be seen studying for a test because his Algebra teacher also likes The Grateful Dead. The mousy little art girl with the swooping bangs and hand-made jewelry might be seen yelling her rodent head off at a basketball game because the goal of getting the ball in the basket always seemed to her like a poignant metaphor for love. My point is it’s nearly impossible to pin down anything close to an accurate definition of what a teenager is. The best I can do is recount these various anecdotes and hope the empirical evidence speaks for itself.

Which brings us back to Lance. Lance would not fit well into any theatrical attempt at teenage life. The kid is a walking contradiction. He comes from a poorly educated, working class family, but he’s quite intelligent when he wants to be; he’s a veritable fountain of disparaging remarks, but he’s surprisingly understanding and tolerant of other students in the classroom; he’s a large kid, but he’s graceful in a way. He has a name that he doesn’t use. If I were writing the next Hollywood high school blockbuster, I would cast Lance’s character as an overweight bumbling redneck fool of a kid who gets wasted on cheap beer on the weekends and laces all his dialogue with vilifying comments about homosexuals, women, minorities, Democrats, little people, skinny people, and anybody else that wasn’t like him. And I would be about 90 percent accurate. But it’s the remaining 10 percent I’m interested in. That’s what the movies leave out because it confuses viewers. I can’t really blame the screenwriters; I wouldn’t want moviegoers to experience the same befuddlement I’m forced to live with everyday. However, the part of me that craves truth would like to see, just once, a movie that paints an accurate picture of a kid like Lance—10 percent and all. So for those of you who don’t spend half your waking life around teenagers, this is for you. Prepare yourselves to be baffled.

Lance loves America. When we are led in the pledge to the flag each morning (ironically, it’s by a British woman), he is the only one who ever follows along. There are days, however, when Lance prefaces the pledge of allegiance with the announcement that he will not be joining in that day because America is being overrun by liberals. So we all stare silently at the flag and listen to the foreign inflections of the familiar refrain. On one such occasion, Lance proclaimed to the class that, instead of pledging his allegiance to America, that day he would be pledging his allegiance to Puerto Rico. Sure enough, as soon as the intercom speaker began reverberating with the strains of patriotism, Lance joined in with his strains of sarcastic dissent. “I pledge allegiance to Puerto Rico and…” (mumbling, searching for something clever to add) “…and to Communism…” (more mumbling) “…and…to Castro…” I should have been the one to stop him here, but I was too entertained. Luckily the student next to him retorted, “That’s Cuba, you idiot!” I shot a glance in their direction to make sure that Lance’s feelings weren’t hurt or that they weren’t about to start some territorial dispute, but Lance wore his self-satisfied grin all through the Texas pledge and the minute of silence, his point having obviously been made. And I’m not so sure he didn’t know exactly what he was doing.

A couple of weeks ago, Lance wanted to talk politics, and since we had some time to burn that day and because it was the morning of the primary elections, I allowed it. Lance wasted no time in blurting out, “I don’t like Obama.” (For sixteen-year-olds, this is talking politics.) I applauded Lance for achieving the first step in rhetoric: stating his position. And then I told him what he needed to do was defend his position.

“Why don’t you like Obama?”

Knowing Lance’s proclivity for racism, I grimaced a little while waiting for his reply. And I exchanged concerned glances with the mulatto student at the back of the room—sort of a preemptive apology for what was certain to follow. His response, however, caught us off-guard.

“Because all he does is talk about hope.”

I was stumped. I’ve always considered hope to be a pretty damn good thing, and I assume that other people feel the same way. I knew I should have just let it go at that, but my curiosity was piqued. Remember, my ultimate goal is to try to discover what makes kids like Lance tick. Plus, I was pretty sure I could make him look like a fool.

“So are you supporting the despair candidate, Lance?”

Unphased: “No. I just don’t see the point in hope. What can it do? Nothing. What can you do with it? Nothing.” And taking off his cap for effect: “I could fill my hat with hope, and it wouldn’t change a thing. It would still be a hat. I could throw it on the ground and stomp on it. And then where would your precious hope be?”

Again I was stumped, but this time it was for a different reason. It was because I knew I had been beaten. (In my defense, it wasn’t really a fair fight because when Lance said he wanted to talk politics, he really meant he wanted to talk philosophy. I was equipped with the wrong weaponry: I came wielding a crowbar, but what I needed were brass knuckles.) At any rate, Lance was right. What good is hope? And why had I assumed it was a good thing? After all, it was at the bottom of Pandora’s box of evil. Hope might be nothing more than our futile and pretentious attempt at playing God, at dodging the inevitability of fate, at rearranging the very structure of the universe.

The problem, however, was not my misconception of hope. It was my assumption, but not my assumptions on hope. My mistake was assuming that all of Lance was contained in that aforementioned 90 percent. We all know the tired adage of what assuming will do to us. And if you need proof of its validity, then just go hang out with a teenager for a few minutes. Not only does Lance pass along backdoor axioms with the deftness of Yoda, the kid can also write a story like you wouldn’t believe. He may not have the most agile tongue, but give the boy a pen and paper and he will break your heart. He probably has more raw talent than any other student in my class. And if that’s not enough to confuse your preconceived notions of high school archetypes, Lance was voted homecoming prince by his classmates this year. You should have seen him down there on the 40-yard line with all the pretty kids. It was beautiful.

We recently started reading The Great Gatsby. Two pages in, Fitzgerald dispenses a major theme of the novel when he has his narrator state that "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope." There are numerous cliches that express this exact sentiment: don't judge a book by its cover, beauty is only skin deep, all that glitters is not gold. Maybe Lance's refusal to accept his given name is his way of expressing this sentiment. By choosing a new name for himself he is refusing to be typecast into his expected role. He's saying he won't allow others to pigeonhole him. He's sloughing off the dead and useless skin of our expectations. Or maybe he just likes the name Lance.

In Memoriam M.L.K.

On the first day of each virgin class year, I have my students read a portion of the thirteenth chapter of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It’s a fairly challenging excerpt in which Steinbeck bemoans the destruction of the individual at the hands of the collective mass. He tells of his fear of the future—a future where mass method becomes our way of thinking until we “have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.” It’s a frighteningly accurate prophecy that Steinbeck sets forth, but maybe it's just because humanity has been constantly moving in that direction since we were mere dust and ribs. Or maybe it’s just the tired strains of an artist championing the individual. Or maybe it’s the defiant decree of the punk-rock rebellion screaming “Damn the Man!” Whatever the reason, it’s a pathos that sixteen-year-olds can get behind. They understand, almost innately, the inundation of the mass upon their individuality. After all, at sixteen what have you got besides yourself? So we talk about this threat to their individuality and try to come up with some strategies to defend against it. For a while the discussion seems hopeless. I mean, what can any one of us do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?

Prior to reading the Steinbeck passage and planning our strategies for survival, I have the students write their name on a note card. As class progresses I have them add other various personal information that is fun for me to know—things like favorite color, extracurricular interests, and post-high school aspirations. When they are writing their names on their cards, I tell them it’s the most important thing they will do all day. Because they’ve only known me for about five minutes at this point, they don’t know whether or not to take that statement seriously, and most snicker a bit. But I am serious, gravely serious, deathly serious. I ask them why writing their name might be a matter of utmost importance, and at first, they’re stumped. So we talk about what a name means and what it does, and eventually they begin giving the answers I want: our name represents who we are and what we’re about, it connects us to our forebears, and it distinguishes us from one another. They begin to see a little of what I mean when I say that names are important. I, of course, take this opportunity to tell them that names in literature are doubly important. At this time I also impart to them the single most important piece of advice I give them all year: “If you don’t do anything else this entire year, don’t forget your name!”

Again they snicker. Because at this point they haven’t discovered the full impact of this advice. It’s not until after we've read and discussed Steinbeck, until after we've recognized our wretched condition and have gotten to the point where we have to save our damn-ready souls, and I ask, “Okay, so what do we do to escape the oncoming tidal wave of the mass and prevent our single voice from being swallowed up and drowned out?” And then I wait for it. And eventually the synapses fire and one of them remembers the silly bit of advice, and he or she says, “I know how to save my wretched and damn-ready soul. I remember my name.” I smile in gratitude and say, “Yes.”

This isn’t about the first day of school, however. It merely serves as a preface for what comes next. (And you’ll have to excuse any heavy-handed sentimentality that follows. It’s sometimes difficult to write with detached objectivity.) Nearly seven months have passed since that first innocent day, and things have changed, although I suppose they’ve basically stayed the same. Students have been crammed full of nearly seven months-worth of information they likely mostly will never use, except for when they take the state’s standardized test, which they’re doing now while I’m writing this instead of actively monitoring. We’ve had a successful athletic year: The football team won the state championship; other students have done well in the various arenas of academia. They’ve played video games and read books, made music and made love; they’ve gotten drunk, gotten high, gotten free; some have found God, some have lost Him; some have gotten smarter, others think they have; they’ve made good decisions and they’ve made bad decisions—in short, they’ve been teenagers.

And three nights ago we lost one of them in an automobile accident. Her name was Megan. (At least that’s what we’ll call her here.) She was driving home from work after having picked up some Easter candy for her family. The truck coming the opposite direction veered into her lane, the driver having temporarily lost control for some reason that will remain unknown, and Megan never had a chance to react. A head-on impact. She was tall and thin, she had straight blonde hair, and she was a good kid. She was quiet, a wallflower type, except when she was with her several close friends.

I had her in one of those classes that never seems to shut up. The last class of the day, when I’m getting tired and they’re just getting started. Megan was a remote oasis in a desert of noise. At times when I was particularly annoyed or frustrated with the unceasing drone of mindless prattle, Megan and I could exchange the furtive smirk of our shared empathy. Because of her demure nature, Megan advanced relatively unnoticed through her social stratum. Many students didn’t even recognize her name when we heard the news Monday morning. Our culture has a way of attributing value to people in accordance with how much noise they produce. But I’m reminded of a line from Whitman’s “Great are the Myths” that advises us to “forget not that Silence is also expression.” If this is the case, then Megan expressed more than most.

On the last test we took, about a week ago now, Megan forgot to put her name on her scantron portion of the test. It’s always a little frustrating when students forget to put their names on assignments, but exceedingly more frustrating on scantrons, especially when two or more forget. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish one student’s bubbles from the next. So when I noticed Megan’s nameless scantron, I was slightly annoyed, and when I showed it to her the next day, I can’t deny that there wasn’t a certain tinge of disgust in my voice. It may be that nameless assignments and tests bother me on a metaphorical level. Part of me sees it as reckless disregard for my first-day advice. Of course, I never miss the opportunity to remind students of this, so in my best pseudo-patronizing teacher voice, I asked Megan if she still remembered her name. She flashed me her sheepish grin and nodded yes. And after writing her name on her scantron, she shuffled out of the classroom. That was the last time I saw her; three days later she was gone.

I’m not sure I know what I believe happens after we die. Tunnels and lights and St. Peter at the gate and all that. Do we play harps and sing and ride on clouds? Do we scrape the caked and crackling earth-dust from between our toes and belly buttons? Do we return to Eden? Do we become what we'd always hoped for? Do we finally incarnate the individuality we strove so hard to attain? Or do we melt into each other like drops into some transcendent pool of the over-soul? If we could talk to Megan, she could tell us. But she’s busy conquering space and time. I only hope that during her journey from here to there, while the pall and shroud were stretched and the cosmos blurred in her rear-view mirror, while the steel and stone yielded to blood and bone, while her mother was pulling in the slack of her umbilical cord and her father peered ahead into the listless night, I hope she didn’t forget who she was and what she was about. I hope she didn’t forget her name. If she did, I will remember it for her.