It is where we went everyday—every time we went someplace
that wasn’t a home, or our school. Our habits and plans were anything but
regular, when we weren’t in some season or scheme. Team practices, midterms,
finals and other things, of our own devising, took time and regularly planned
work. But even in the midst of those seasons and schemes, we would end up right
here. Just killing time and waiting for something to happen. Still young and
restless; even when we wanted to rest, we didn’t want it to be predictable...
or very restful. At least that was what we thought in our wide-eyed young minds.
This little cookie cutter dinner (not made of ticky-tacky,
but all still the same) was just off the interstate and just close enough to
home to walk if we didn’t have a car to use. It had an unusually large parking
lot. We guessed it was for trucks from the four-lane, and every once and a
while there was one. I always figured they were lost. It was an interstate, but
who needed to pass by here to get anywhere? And even if you had to pass by, why
stop here? And rarely could we figure out who inside the dinner was from behind
the steering wheel of the 16 wheels parked outside. Only by process of
elimination really.
We knew all the locals, and all the regular passer-throughs.
Some times there were new faces, and sometimes they were interesting, even pretty.
Rarely were those faces receptive. There was the staff too. None of them were
from around here. Many of them didn’t sick around long. The interesting ones
came in just for short stints from other cookies, other ticky-tacky shacks,
most of them with smaller parking lots.
The college girls were the most interesting, and usually the
prettiest. Of course, we were a bunch of high school boys. Boys. Even when the
girls from school hung out with us there, they were just one of the boys. Some
of the college girls were waitresses, some were customers. The waitresses would
flirt with us, especially if they were just passing through. We would always
scrounge up enough to tip them a bit extra, thinking that it would make them
like us more; thinking that they were flirting because they liked us. In
reality, they flirted knowing we would do just that, and for no other reason.
How did that not occur to us? Willful ignorance, or wishful thinking? Neither,
but a strange combination of both. It did develop what seems to be a lifelong
habit of tipping well. In part based on those memories, and part on the fact
that so many friends in college worked at places just like this. Now I tend to
tip the flirty ones less. Still, I think I learned more about college life by
flirting with and trying to get a date with college girls when I was in high
school than I did actually going to college. And for quite a while now, the
waitresses have been younger than me. I don’t need to learn about younger women
at this point.
The college customers never paid us much mind. There were
exceptions, even an anomaly. I ended up tutoring a girl on literature and
practically wrote a few papers for her: Camus, Hemingway, Beckett, Joyce....
We were being loud and sarcastic, talking about a literature
assignment from our high school class. She was in the booth next to us with her
laptop. She asked us to ‘shut the hell up’ because she was trying to
concentrate. It was actually one of the politest ‘shut the hell ups’ we ever
got from a college kid there. We, with equal sarcasm, asked her what she was
trying to concentrate on that was so important. It just so happens it was the
same writer we had just been talking about: Hemingway. She was working on a
paper on the same thing we had just finished a unit on. Of course, she told us
to shut up to get our attention, I think. At least in hind sight, that is what
I think. She of course despised having a high school kid tell her anything, but
she wanted to go to grad school, so she needed the grade and so needed the
help.
We had a spectacular literature teacher in our school. I
somehow managed to get all of my classes with her. That was not something
anyone wanted at that point. She was difficult, and got more so the more
classes you took from her. I was oblivious to that because I loved the
literature and the challenge. The college girl was a biology student. She was a
research biologist really, she just needed the degrees so they would let her do
what she was hell bent on doing, and what she was probably made to do. She
never got literature, and she never really cared or cared to. I helped her get
the grades she needed to keep her GPA high, which she insisted was essential
for an Ivy League grad school. I got some sweet dreams, some new confidence in
my literature skills and a new understanding of biology from her. No, not of
her biology or of mine. A new understanding of evolution. And I am not talking
about her not selecting me for breeding.
She impressed on me the fact that evolution was not a plan.
Evolution was random and humans were not the pinnacle of some story of
progress, not the ultimate goal of the system or plan. We were just as random
as any other living thing and only better than others because we survived.
Well, maybe better because we were surviving better for now. She was an
atheist, and a rather militant one. It was about the only thing she understood
from Camus, and maybe she thought he was too soft on the point. It was probably
why she never got Joyce. Just the fact that he was educated by Jesuits and referenced
religion at all distracted her from anything useful he might have to say. And Godot
was obviously God, and as a result of no interest.
She was also sure that the way we were surviving was too
heavy handed and going to result in our rather rapid extinction. That still
hasn’t come yet, but I am more and more convinced she was right with every
season that passes. I often wonder where she is now. A few years back I found
her on the internet. Well, I found an obituary. She had killed herself. No idea
why she did it, but I still think maybe literature could have helped… If I had
known it better at the time.
Now I think I know it too well: the literature. I used to
puzzle over it, wanting to know it completely and definitively. Know it like I
used to think biologists knew DNA, evolution and all that stuff. Their stuff. I
would read stories and poems, read the commentaries, the diaries, the letters…
everything. Then I would listen to the lectures, expecting the key: the Urim
and the Thummim to decode it—if it had to be magical and couldn’t be logical.
I never thought I knew, but I figured I was close. I was
closer than others. And it was at that point I started to argue. I would tell
professors, colleagues and definitely students what it all meant. If they could
counter-argue, I would learn and listen. It was like how we used to argue
politics in my family: always cocksure, but always willing to learn from a
fight. Still, I always figured I was further along than anyone else, closer to
the truth of any work I bothered to argue about. I didn’t have a firm grasp of
the works, I knew that. I did, however, have it in may hand more fully than
anyone else. What ever it was, it was on my hand; I just had to firm up my
grip. Just a bit tighter, and I would have it completely.
Then, one by one, they slipped out all together: the
stories, the poems, the answers and the people around me. When the last one
fell to the ground, it took me a while, but I realized I could pick them right
back up. (Well, not the people. That was more difficult.) Each time, each one,
when I picked it back up, I gripped it differently. I felt it differently—in my
hand, my mind… even my heart. After a while, I would drop them again: on
purpose. Pick them up again and again: always differently and new. Always just
as good. Always the same in some way: the words on the page were always the
same. The same literal words, but everything else could be different.
It was no longer about the answer; it was about answers. It
wasn’t about resolution, or being done; it was about the conflict, and how it
never ended. This was exciting. The idea that it would never end was suddenly
more exciting and fulfilling than the idea that I would someday find the end. It
was about the process as much and the answers.
My grip on people changed at that point. Students and
friends, colleagues, were held with a lighter touch on my part. But they stayed
in my hand much better and, except for the ambitious ones, they enjoyed in much
more. We found answers in the text, and to the texts, and they were answers for
us as well—for our times and lives. Answers for my questions or their questions
and both. And not answers to merely academic questions. Well, that is with the
students and friends.
The colleagues were different. (I won’t even talk about the
administration and publications.) Was everything relative all of the sudden?
Was it all a free for all? If there were no answers (read: academic answers),
what were out years of education for? (And the mountains of debt.) What of our
authority as teachers, as experts? How could we make, indeed force, the world
to be a better place with this kind of approach? Was literature then really
just entertainment and escapism? The way I was approaching it, it had no
singular and stable truth, and therefore could effect no change, no progress.
Well, at least not any more so than pop culture: TV, popular music and movies.
This approach wasn’t disciplined at all because it wasn’t scientific. (But was
science really what we understood it to be?)
The way I learned to use my grip was not easy to stick to.
It was rewarding—especially for my students. None of them went on to study or
teach literature. In that respect I was seen as a failure. But who can make a
living teaching literature these days? More importantly, I know it made their
lives better.
But mine? At some point it wears you down. Santiago,
Vladimir, Sisyphus: they all lived that life. Most people just read it. Some
learn from it, grow a bit and move on. Pain is nothing to a man; born astride a
grave we are; perpetually forging in the smithy; we must imagine him smiling. But
it does get old, as I get older. It is still exciting and fulfilling. It is
more and more exhausting. Is it worth it? Still?
I understand the biologist more than ever now. If I knew the
stories better and could lead better back then, maybe she would still be
someplace I could find her. But would she be worth finding? And if I found her
at this point, would I be welcome as I am?
