CWS1 280805
This has been a fear-driven period that started with
"Anything Helps." I
taught university students for the first time this week. I have 20 students in composition
class. I'm using The Longwood
Writer, a text I really
like. I was just asked to teach
the course on Monday. By
Wednesday, my first day of teaching, the students had already attended two
class sessions without an instructor.
They were a bit confused and angry. I assured them that the missed classes would not hurt them,
and that they could become excellent university-level writers through the
course. We spent class on Friday,
the day their texts arrived at the campus bookstore, at the campus library
doing information literacy. My
stomach was in knots all week, stressing about my responsibility to provide a
firm foundation in writing to my students, but by Friday, I was feeling like
this will be a good class, they all seem to want to work, and it is a dream
come true to be in a group of young people who want to learn.
On Friday, during the twenty-minute drive from the university in
downtown Beaufort to my home on the island, I thought about how much has
changed in the past few weeks. My
feet were killing me. I had worn
some nice black leather heels I bought in Ecuador in 1996. Everyone complements me on those
shoes. In them, my big feet look
small. My grandmother always
bought nice shoes for me when I was small. My mother bought shoes too small for her feet for so many
years, that now, in her seventies, she has terrible foot problems and closets
full of shoes she does not wear.
My feet are more like my grandmother's: wide and long with bent
toes.
Two years ago, a day or so after I graduated from the university I
taught at this week, my mother and I were shopping. She loves to shop.
I find it annoying. I asked
her if I had lived up to her expectations for me. She didnÕt answer.
She looked away. Her memory
isnÕt so good since the breast cancer, brain aneurysms, colon cancer, and the
terrible infection that followed, an infection that lasted through a year and
stays at nursing homes and hospitals.
ÒNo,Ó Mom said. I bit
my lip.
ÒWell what were your expectations?Ó I asked.
ÒI donÕt know,Ó she said.
I laughed out loud.
Howled. (I sneeze loud,
too.) She hurried away with her
cart; I hurried into my heart. My
mother has never known me, nor have I known her, this is what I thought at that
moment.
As I drove home from the University on Friday, I thought about how
bad my feet hurt from wearing those nice-looking leather shoes (both my bent
little toes were blistered) shoes I wore for Mom. I pulled into my dirt driveway and parked. Got out of the Explorer. Unloaded my book bag. Something strange lay in the driveway
near the barn where Pete parks his truck.
Looked like a piece of tire tread.
Like the kind you see on the highway. Blown off a semi.
I took a step in that direction, wondering what it was. I stopped. The tire tread looked like an alligator. Oh, I thought to myself, Pete must have
dropped off a fake alligator to put in the wetland. The eyes glistened yellow with that vertical black pupil
sparking with life. Four feet
long. The ridges along its back
were the pointed clefts of many chins.
I dropped my bag and dialed Pete on the cell phone. As it rang, the gator scurried off into
the woods, headed for the wetland behind the barn. I heard shuffling leaves on the forest floor. The first gator I'd seen in six years
of living on the island quickly disappeared.
Later that evening, Pete and I agreed that seeing the gator was
proof that our efforts to restore the wetland are working.
Pasternak wrote that what is truly great is without
beginning. Moments are like
that. Beginnings, new selves
emerging from selves inside a lifetime.
Moments. Movement. Change. A lived life.
This is all I ever wanted for myself.