In Maine, I had a friend for a little while. I met her right at the beginning of my time at Salt, and we got along really well. She was a bit older than me and was there for the radio program. Salt is just a semester long, and the first month or so is spent with all students joined together, learning about field work and ethnographies. Once we moved into our tracks and got buried in our respective documentary stories, we lost touch and didn't really see each other anymore, but I still think of her sometimes. Her name was Sara, and she was from New York. A friend of hers had this amazing old house that was in the process of renovation, and no one had been living in it. So he let her stay in it for super cheap. I remember that there was almost no furniture. A table, I think, with a couple of chairs. The beams were all exposed, because the dry wall and ceiling had been torn out. I was living on Peaks Island, and on a couple of nights that I stayed too late in town and missed the ferry home, Sara let me stay over. She had an inflatable mattress that she'd outfitted with flannel sheets. She put a couple of drops of lavender oil on my pillow, and I've always remembered that as one of the most thoughtful hosting gestures. Even in the midst of such chaos, I felt cozy and welcome. Upstairs in the house, there was a closet or room that had all these names of previous residents that had accumulated over the years. She had this idea to do a documentary about the people attached to the names, and she even started on it: she spoke with her friend and got connected to someone who'd been there before. She was going to interview the people, and I think she did. I was supposed to come back and photograph the space, but it didn't end up happening. We were on different paths by that time.
So I guess I've just been thinking about how we leave pieces of ourselves behind. Having now moved so much and been in so many different places, I find that it's pretty hard to hold onto people. People who have such importance now can so easily become watery memories, become names on a wall (if you can recall them at all). I realized the other day as I was talking to my landlord--a really lovely woman who is younger than me and really rooting for me to end up in a place that fits, and who has come through in amazing ways when I felt exhausted, un-rooted, and without a home--that I would never see her again once I left here. And mostly that's okay. Only so many can become your people.
Someone, and I can't remember who (probably for the best), told me that I wouldn't make a difference. That all my students would forget me. That I was crazy to get involved in this work. This past week, one of my students from last year came and sat in my class while I was running Poetry Club just because he wanted to visit. He thinks little of poetry and is far more interested in video games and JROTC, but he sat there quietly while we read and discussed extended metaphor and personification. On the attendance sheet, he wrote "Gabe (just visiting)." The day after that, another former student came by and gave me an index card. On it, she'd written a note thanking me for being her teacher, for being someone she could talk to. And she wrote "I guess by now I consider you a pretty good friend." Friday, one of the students from my most difficult, frustrating class last year, who left school to go to a military academy to try to get his act together, came by to say hello and tell me that he'd just signed to join the marines. He was in full uniform from the academy, holding his hat and all. I told him I was really proud of him; he was more serious than the last time I'd seen him, and the jitteryness I was so used to seeing in him was no longer there. So I guess what I've come to is this: I don't really need more. These kids, in these moments, appreciate what I've done, or tried to do, for them. Maybe they'll remember in a year or two or ten; maybe they won't. But if I've done my job right, something will stick to them, even if it's just a vague sense of kindness from a silly, blonde woman. And I'm okay with that. |