ESSAY How They Do Return

Although they think and hope not, they are beaming into me. I feel a secret knowing of them.A protective barrier is missing in me, it seems. I look at their faces, and I don’t turn away – no use, anyway. The knowledge enters instantly, like music in an elevator. Escape. Don’t go there. Not. There is everywhere.

After such a breach I meet my self to set the wall again. The ritual: I ask for God’s grace to shape their lives, mark them deep in my invisible facebook, and try to let them go, like dandelion puffs floating away on the breeze. Oh, but come see, how they do return.

They were my students. Twenty-two years I looked out at them every day. I knew their confusion, boredom, daily delights, moments of accomplishment, terrible pain, and sometimes their violent anger. So I tried to teach them: about colors, nature’s structures, artists who couldn’t wouldn’t quit, and striving.

There was a price to be paid for my need of constant masonry repair. I hadn’t enough barriers, it seems, but barriers were all around them. And they were looming, a garbagedog slum facing the city and state on the hill. Poverty, disease, crime, social disenfranchisement, loneliness. It hurt, I worried, I fumed, I worked on with increasingly thin, darkened hope, finding willed energy a kind of substitute.

The years went by, and it took more and more to get on the elevator every day. Fewer visits to the “nailed it that time” floor. Imagining it instead. Seeing others mark victories and defeats. And those deadening recoveries that failed, like World War I no-man’s-land battles. I always thought there’d be a success floor where I’d finally get off, when I wanted to, when it was over.

I had turned away from sour grinding accountability demands in yet another attempt at efficacy. Just when I’d finally made whole: Delight in finding your creative self. Know it and never turn from it. Grow that in your heart and mind. Clichés but I was a fresh spring of belief. I offered paint, brushes, ideas, and honored their efforts. Drop crumbs along an uphill path and hope they think/know they’re pearls. So, what, I didn’t go to medical school.

Instead, I fell off. Of a counter. Putting up a poster of Munch’s “The Scream”. On the way down I didn’t, only that moment of knowing that I was going to hit the floor. Oops, it’s over now.

The afterlife provides occasional then and now encounters . I live in my students’ neighborhood and I see them around, a lost transparency of small town life. One day a beautifully cared for sports car parked next to me at the market, and a brimming confident young man greeted me and introduced me to his wife and baby – one of those sparkler students that had brightened the room with his energy. Still sparkling. How he struggled over his drawings, always dissatisfied. He loved cars better, perhaps.

A special ed student with such gentle intuitive work, now a grocery clerk with a way-too- soon pregnancy. A photography student I’d once disciplined for showing pornographic material on the bus, taking my rolls of film for processing at the camera store. Reading the financial news: my all time favorite aesthetics student is now writing shrewd commentary on diminished retirement savings. A delicate figurative watercolorist – I heard her unusual name paged over the airport loudspeaker – but with “Doctor” in front of it. News of an OD on heroin- a feral kitten of a student who started a fistfight with a basketball player. Draped for dental work by a former calligraphy student.

Working their way through school? That would be our pest control technician (UCLA), my athletic shoe salesclerk (CSUN), my car wash dispatcher (UCLA), discreet double hearing aids instead of an Ipod earbud. I accepted the offer of a free hot wax. And count 3 at the upscale market. I still have a beautiful red chili pepper drawing from one of them.

There will be more for a while, and then less as time distances me from my second set of school years.

And there’s still my first set – 45 years later, I will go back this summer to the high school reunion ritual. We will all be old together now. And some are gone. So am I, really, left with the aging person’s inescapable work of reflection. There is tranquility in dailyness, now that those big years are done. I have much to turn to: places I need to see, care to give a beloved family, and drawings and paintings yet unmade.

And the walls? They now look like the low stone walls I saw separating the green fields of Ireland, with gaps between the stones so stormy winds pass through. And through those rough-edged openings, I see sheep cavort like puffy clouds, and a blue blue sky.