waiting for yet more medical testsâa PET scan and a simulation for some high-tech radiation treatmentsâthat inhaling all that car exhaust may not have caused me to get lung cancer but it wasnât exactly preventive, either. Especially as emissions standards were a thing of the distant future. On a hot, still July day at the Spring Valley toll plaza, the air felt, smelled, and tasted like vaporized, rancid butter infused with gasoline fumes.
Sometimes the endless procession of automobiles strikes me as a march of monsters along a wide swath of flat, man-made insult to nature. Cars begin to take on a surreal implausibilityâtons of metal often, usually, carrying a single human being oblivious of the peculiarity of the dreadful mechanical complexities his speciesâ overgrown frontal lobe has wrought. The traffic parade also reminds me of my time as a waiter at the Guest Camp, with the guests sitting and eating all at the same timeâseventy, eighty, a hundred of them at long tables of ten, working their jaws, spooning up soup, forking London broil. I would sit on the porch rail and watch, and the scene would turn into a Boschian nightmare. To this day, I sometimes divide people psychologically into those who have waited on tables and those who havenât.
Â
Twenty-three to twenty-six
Â
The kidsâboys and girlsâwho go to the George School, in Bucks County, sometimes seem radically bereft to me. No matter how you try to dress it up in the garments of a good Quaker education, an idyllic campus, good athletic facilities, and so on, these kids have been sent away to school. I swear you can see sadness in their faces when they donât know youâre looking. And you know how lucky you were to have stayed homeâeven a home with Problemsâin a home worth staying home in.
But that may just be me, projecting like a modern-day Imax my own separation anxiety of such long duration. I will never be close to completely rid of it. And many if not most of the kids are no doubt better off away from home. Every now and then I get a small hint of real trouble in their families.
Teaching composition to undergraduates at Hopkins was one thingâbasically technical, well suited to my nearly inborn deep grammatical structure, no in-loco-parentis expectationsâand teaching fourteen-year-olds is another. I donât know what Iâm doing. Iâm boring. As I write this, I canât remember what books we read, what kinds of papers I assigned, or very much about the individual students, although a few non-academic moments have stayed with me.
One: An Ethiopian exchange student, brand new to this school and this country, reports for outdoor phys ed in a ribbed white undershirt and white Jockey briefs.
Another: A wily kid offers to exchange a pretty good tape recorder for the prized â52 Series Fender Telecaster I got for my sixteenth birthday. I donât realize the inequity of this swap, but it doesnât matter, because I wasnât ever going to play the electric guitar anyway. It was a momentary passion that my indulgent parents indulged. The kid apologizes to me later, and I tell him to forget about it.
Another: A young teacher friend of mine gets a senior girl in trouble and marries her.
Another: A smart and lovely senior girl gets what I call now a âstructural crushâ on me and looks me up in New York after she graduates and turns eighteen.
Another: I launch a literary magazine, and we announce it at a school-wide assembly by means of a funny and iconoclastic skit I write, involving students standing up in the audience and proclaiming their authorial genius, or denouncing the whole project as propaganda, or reading awful poetry.
Another: I take one of the poems Iâve been writing and submitting in vain to
The New Yorker
and copy it and give it, without a byline, to one of my classes to criticize and analyzeâthis occurs when the head of the
Sometimes the endless procession of automobiles strikes me as a march of monsters along a wide swath of flat, man-made insult to nature. Cars begin to take on a surreal implausibilityâtons of metal often, usually, carrying a single human being oblivious of the peculiarity of the dreadful mechanical complexities his speciesâ overgrown frontal lobe has wrought. The traffic parade also reminds me of my time as a waiter at the Guest Camp, with the guests sitting and eating all at the same timeâseventy, eighty, a hundred of them at long tables of ten, working their jaws, spooning up soup, forking London broil. I would sit on the porch rail and watch, and the scene would turn into a Boschian nightmare. To this day, I sometimes divide people psychologically into those who have waited on tables and those who havenât.
Â
Twenty-three to twenty-six
Â
The kidsâboys and girlsâwho go to the George School, in Bucks County, sometimes seem radically bereft to me. No matter how you try to dress it up in the garments of a good Quaker education, an idyllic campus, good athletic facilities, and so on, these kids have been sent away to school. I swear you can see sadness in their faces when they donât know youâre looking. And you know how lucky you were to have stayed homeâeven a home with Problemsâin a home worth staying home in.
But that may just be me, projecting like a modern-day Imax my own separation anxiety of such long duration. I will never be close to completely rid of it. And many if not most of the kids are no doubt better off away from home. Every now and then I get a small hint of real trouble in their families.
Teaching composition to undergraduates at Hopkins was one thingâbasically technical, well suited to my nearly inborn deep grammatical structure, no in-loco-parentis expectationsâand teaching fourteen-year-olds is another. I donât know what Iâm doing. Iâm boring. As I write this, I canât remember what books we read, what kinds of papers I assigned, or very much about the individual students, although a few non-academic moments have stayed with me.
One: An Ethiopian exchange student, brand new to this school and this country, reports for outdoor phys ed in a ribbed white undershirt and white Jockey briefs.
Another: A wily kid offers to exchange a pretty good tape recorder for the prized â52 Series Fender Telecaster I got for my sixteenth birthday. I donât realize the inequity of this swap, but it doesnât matter, because I wasnât ever going to play the electric guitar anyway. It was a momentary passion that my indulgent parents indulged. The kid apologizes to me later, and I tell him to forget about it.
Another: A young teacher friend of mine gets a senior girl in trouble and marries her.
Another: A smart and lovely senior girl gets what I call now a âstructural crushâ on me and looks me up in New York after she graduates and turns eighteen.
Another: I launch a literary magazine, and we announce it at a school-wide assembly by means of a funny and iconoclastic skit I write, involving students standing up in the audience and proclaiming their authorial genius, or denouncing the whole project as propaganda, or reading awful poetry.
Another: I take one of the poems Iâve been writing and submitting in vain to
The New Yorker
and copy it and give it, without a byline, to one of my classes to criticize and analyzeâthis occurs when the head of the
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