SOMETIMES A SIMPLE PLEASURE, PART II


for a wary mind.

I sense a trend here. But it ends tonight. It always does.

Last Tuesday, at the end of a long day, barely at the beginning of a long week, I came home happy and tired and ready for the cozy comforts of a cool room, a good basketball game, and the blessings of a sweet, gentle evening. Here I am again, with a warm, funny little feeling of deja vu. The Spurs & Pistons are tied, the air conditioner gently hums, and the keyboard quietly clacks beneath my fingers. And I know that I will not be here next week, hearing these same sounds, thinking these same thoughts, feeling these same, langorous sensations.

Because, for better or worse — physically and temporally, it’s always better; emotionally and intellectually, it’s usually worse — two more classes have come to a simple, satisfying end. Flex-Mode N. Flex-Time G. Mini 5, Writing and Decision-Making. Clinched and concluded. And now, for the first non-funereal week of 2005, I have no more lectures to give, no more classes to teach. At least not until the end of August. The long and beautiful grind of six months’ thinking and writing and teaching and working slows and slouches to a crawl, then, once the last of the grading is done, to a hale but melancholy halt.

Voices and faces and tones of both, smiles across the video feeds and laughter across the classrooms, the hard work and good humor of people you've come to know and like and maybe even, in a great, platonic, thoughtful and appreciative way, actually depend upon for motivation and inspiration, move on to the next class, the next professor, the next assignment and deadline and endeavor. And you hope that, just as you carry a part of them and of what they meant to you, they carry also with them a part of the class and of what you hoped to mean to them.

This is the way it goes, from beginning to end and back to beginning, a cycle of endings that never does end, in a profession, a passion, a calling that asks always for giving and taking, for sharing and sacrificing and finally for sanctifying, and then asks only, simply, that just one person, the one with the most to give but maybe also, oddly, the most to gain, stay behind, rest awhile, and start again.

Goodbye, you want to tell them. But it's already too late.

You lost them at Hello.

Posted: Tue - June 21, 2005 at 11:18 PM          

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