IAN RUDERMAN

Dear Bam-Bam,

     I can’t believe you want to follow in my footsteps. I don’t have any advice for you–only the prediction that you’re going to make a lot of wonderful mistakes–but I do have a confession. One year, right when I was about to turn thirty-five, I thought I was done with teaching. It was the year after your grandmother died and the classroom–or maybe it was just that school–was the last place I wanted to be. It was 1992. I drove a Ford F-250 back then–can you imagine?–I was a lot fitter and my hair was still dark. As I drove back to school after a long summer break, however, I found growing strangely nostalgic. On the side of the road I saw the flag of late summer: wilted flowers, grass browning, leaves getting thicker by the second. By now the clock on the dash no longer made sense, and I was thinking in fifty-minute blocks instead of hours, of lesson plans I hadn’t written and a grade book I hadn’t set up. I turned off the main road, coasted over a hill and from behind a veil of maples the school emerged. Once The Mount had been the site of an industrious Shaker village and for some years afterward an academy of good repute. When I’d arrived eight years earlier, however, I’d found little more than a ragged stump in the woods, a lonely child with three minivans, an asthmatic yellow bus, a grimy cafeteria and a collection of dorms that could only be described as fixer-uppers. 

     I parked outside Wickersham and climbed two flights of dim stairs to the Winter Meeting Room. From the doorway, I saw Candy Dafoe in red sneakers and bright green shorts. She was shaking her fist at some fool who’d gotten to the pastry she wanted. Behind her were the familiar faces, all tan, most in shorts. I also saw one of the new teachers, your Aunt Kara, who’s not really your aunt, talking to our always baffled headmaster. There was also a couple I didn't know. The guy was good looking and pink-cheeked. The woman was wearing white shorts and a pale yellow polo shirt that made me think of dishtowels. And when they reached across each other–he for a mug, she for a napkin–I could tell they weren’t quite sure where everything belonged.

Slipping into the room, I poured a glass of cranberry juice as the stranger wrapped a bagel in a napkin. Looking up, she apologized for stealing my breakfast.

     ‘Take anything you want. Let me know if you need help with a chair,’ I said.

She smiled at my bad joke and I told her my name. She nodded at her guy, now by the window with a Danish and said, ‘I’m The Girlfriend Mary and I’m just visiting.’

     I had questions, but when Candy heard my voice, she blitzed me and wrapped me in a bear hug. For a moment I wasn’t halfway through my thirties and wandering back to work at the last possible minute. I was ten and playing touch football at recess–grass stains on my pants, first on the dogpile, wishing more than anything that our teacher, Mrs. S., would forget about us. 

     I was an adult though, so when the mugging stopped, The Girlfriend Mary disappeared and our opening meeting began. 

     After a few minutes, I realized I wasn’t the only one struggling to pay attention. The Girlfriend Mary’s Danish-eating boyfriend, I noticed, was squirming in his seat, peeking at me, his forehead wrinkling in a kind of semaphore. I nodded, but his expression threw me. It was like he had the same shirt, but with different buttons, or he was trying to remember if he’d packed his toothbrush. He stopped squirming though when Candy smacked him in the shoulder, made his stand, and introduced him as ‘Sam Iafrati, our new Swiss Army Knife.’ 

     He’s a tool, I thought as a man I hadn’t noticed moved to the front of the room and began to lecture us on the educational plight of adopted middle children with peanut allergies. Yes, I’m making that up, but there’s no way I could follow what our guest speaker was saying, for I’d gotten up at five that morning and my coffee had long worn off. Anyway, the presentation grew fuzzy, my eyelids grew heavy, and soon I was back in New Hampshire, running through the woods and restaining your grandmother’s deck. I could’ve stayed there, too, but the butterflies of July were scared off by the banging chairs of September, and when I came back to The Mount, people were heading for the doors. 

     Candy offered me paper and a pen. “Goals for the year. You’ve got forty-five minutes.”

     Given forty minutes to do the impossible, I went back to my car and drove up the road to Medicine Shop, where I unlocked my apartment for the first time in three months.