Closing the Education Circle

Flint & Steel Full Circle Writing Challenge

I first entered the doors of academia sixty-one years ago. Several of my neighborhood friends and I would be new students at Miss Carroll’s kindergarten, a private school in what appeared to be an ordinary brick, ranch-style house in a newer part of Bessemer. Our parents had the carpool order set, and we were allowed to bring our own snacks, an important lesson for some.

For instance, I remember the day that on our way, Elise Harris sat on Ted Clark’s potato chips bag. Ted cried for a long time that morning,

“She smushed my chips!”

As, indeed, she had. Golden Flake BBQ chips, and though I sagely assured Ted at snack-time that he could still eat them, that they’d taste the same, he was inconsolable,

“No, see: they’re still smushed.”

Well, of course they were, and Ted was forever convinced that Elise had smushed them on purpose. Was Elise, a five-year old neighbor, really that mean?

According to my mother — a great friend of Elise’s mother — she could have been, as at my birthday party earlier that year, Elise had grabbed a handful of sand from my sandbox and threw it right in my eyes.

“She did it on purpose,” my mother said. “I saw her do it.”

I can’t argue, because I’ve never quite known the lay of Elise’s heart.

Ted moved away after third grade, but Elise and I finished high school together. We were named “Class Lawyers,” too, meaning that we got to help write — with two other seniors — our class’s Last Will and Testament.

Which, of course, meant that we got to throw a lot of sand in other students’ eyes. One of these sand victims was a classmate who thought he was a Romeo or Lothario or something, but to me, he resembled the Bassett Hound from Hush Puppy shoes, a brand — in this world of non-make-believe — that he also wore regularly along with his checkered sweater-vests.

Elise conceived and threw the sand, for sure. She “left” this guy to all the girls of the junior class, and then insinuated at the end of her toss that in the leaving, though, a girl that this guy claimed was “his” might now be made jealous.

Thinking back on this, we might have revised so as not to incur the wrath of the Bassett Hound, who as far as I knew was relatively harmless (And I knew other guys who definitely weren’t). We might have also considered the girls: what had they done to deserve this pairing?

Most people take these things in good spirit, and I remember being happy enough in the previous three Wills just to have been mentioned (Full disclosure: In my sophomore year, I was labeled “Mr. Know-It-All”).

The Bassett Hound, however, took it all rather badly:

“Elise, you BITCH,” he declared when he found us behind the school after the ceremony ended.

I stood next to Elise, then, ready to defend her, telling the guy that it was a group effort and to walk away.

I wish I had asked that he apologize, but then, Elise had written the statement…

Knowingly and On Purpose.

I remembered her other on purpose moves, and thought then that now her circle, in a funny way, had closed.

Ted, though, wasn’t the only kid to cry in kindergarten. I cried, too, on many days, because we were forced to not only say “The Pledge of Allegiance” each day, but the 23rd Psalm, too, and I don’t know about you, but a five-yer old boy like me didn’t much care to think about “The valley of the shadow of death,” which for me turned into my mother’s walking down our sunny street without me, carrying a stick in case she might be attacked by a stray dog (or…), her shadow following always close behind.

No one knew why I cried; no one knew why I also had more “accidents” than most kids in that year.

I was indeed a very anxious child.

And maybe I always have been. I do have a will and a living will, though left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have engineered these. My wife insisted, and I wonder what I have to leave anyone except a lot of books and records, and selected memories that I try to write on Medium and elsewhere.

I have purposefully stayed off the streets and in academia for all these decades, not the first in my family to attend college, but the first to acquire/earn advanced degrees. One of my specialties is American Literature, particularly 20th Century Modern American Literature, winding from Realism to Naturalism through Modernism itself. From Crane, Cather, James, Wharton, through Dreiser, Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner — a journey of thought, reason, emotion, and, yes, “purpose.”

I have loved teaching, learning, and just because this is my “last year” to be a professor at Presbyterian College, which has employed me since 1987, doesn’t necessarily mean that my academic circle will close. I will continue learning, reading, and maybe even teaching the random adjunct class.

But I am intentional about retiring, and not because I’m tired exactly, though sometimes I certainly am. I want to spend more family time and watch my granddaughter grow and accompany my wife and daughters on longer family trips.

Paradoxically, teaching can be a solitary exercise. I’m alone in my mind so often, and I’m growing weary of that. An anxious introvert has put himself out there for all these years — years that have paid off in close relationships with both students and colleagues. I have been a strong ally and mentor, I hope. I have given and received so much. I know more about literature and life than I ever imagined I would.

And one thing I do know: Ted had a case against Elise, but Elise also had reasons, and these days, I find myself wondering more about her and those reasons, her own anxieties and fears for using “purposeful meanness” as her ally. She’s a very nice person, and I see her from time to time. And while I face my ghosts, I wonder what hers are and how she’s reckoning with them?

Maybe all of this has entered my consciousness more forcefully, because this fall — for the first time ever — I am teaching the early American Literature survey. I will be assigning the country’s founders’ essays, from Smith and Bradford through Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin. I’ll also be tackling the Puritans — Mather, Winthrop, and Edwards — seeking to understand more deeply and help my students, too, figure out how our lives have led us here and why we face the twin demons of Puritanism and self-righteousness still, after all this time.

This literature is all the more unsettling given that we’re in an attempted throwback era — an attempt to force people who have had so few rights anyway to anxiously retreat to closets and sandboxes where no one can see or hear them, or care about them.

In that regard, I want my students, and myself, to confront a textual theme: of women being abused and overpowered and cowed by rich white men. I want us to focus on the power that has always been held in elite patriarchal white hands. I’m assigning two texts for this purpose and “On Purpose”: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, an 18th century novel and John Wood Sweet’s The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America.

Both works examine how a young girl is “taken advantage of” by a well-to-do white man with power, one who is esteemed by all. Virtue is compromised, certainly. But it’s not just the virtue of the young women in question, but that of the men, of society, of, indeed, the young nation, as well.

Maybe we, maybe I, don’t understand the meaning of the word, “virtue.” Maybe we have chosen not to see it from the perspective of the voiceless, the highly anxious, or even the ones who strike back more violently than events would seem to warrant.

Kind of like, how do you see or interpret Euripides’ Medea?

Or, perhaps, why did Elise do it?

Will understanding complete me, us?

I won’t know until I try, and even if I cry in the process, I think the learning will be worth it — a way to ensure that my educational circle glows with meaning.

That it’s all been worth the walk down this often sunny, and yet, shadowy street.

Thank you for reading and to Ellie Jacobson for this prompt and writing challenge. Here is Ellie’s story on the challenge:

And here’s another story I wrote for Flint & Steel: