Ordinary World (36 page)

“Maybe you can try again?”

“Maybe.”

She paused again.

“You know, Andrea, you have a lot to be proud of, the way you’ve worked so hard to get past your husband’s death while still keeping his memory alive. And doing it all on your own, too.”

            I took in a breath, a lump forming in my throat. “I wasn’t exactly alone, but I know what you mean. I didn’t have children to worry about. You’re the one that had it so tough.”

            “Still,” she said. “You didn’t let it stop you from moving on. I’m proud of you,” she said after a beat, her voice choked with emotion.

            Tears filled my eyes as I too choked up. “Oh Mom,” was all I could say.

***

Shortly after my return from Europe, I went back to NU to speak to Jeff. It turned out that I may have been too hasty in my resignation, I told him—I wanted to teach again. Part time.

“Not Comp,” I said more emphatically than intended. “But I was wondering if there was something in the Creative Writing program, or even just an upper-level course in rhetoric.”

“I’m sure we’ll find something for you to do,” Jeff said. “NU takes good care of its own. Trust me—the door didn’t slam behind you.”

 “Just one course,” I reminded him again.

“One is all you’ll need.”

Meanwhile, Miranda suggested that our book club read
Man’s Search For Meaning
by Viktor Frankl—a much heavier read than most of our selections, but we all decided to go for it. I vaguely remembered reading it in college for a psychology class; I also remembered needing to put it down because I couldn’t see past my tears to read the words clearly. This time I wept again with the same intensity and empathy, but also had an epiphany that I shared with Melody.

“Frankl says that between stimulus and response, one is free to choose. Do you know what that means? It means I can choose the way I respond to Sam’s death, to my mother’s behavior, to my students’ writing. And when I think that that’s how he survived the concentration camps, when he realized that that was the one thing
no one
could take from him, that one essential freedom…”

My eyes welled up from the magnitude of the moment. So did Melody’s.

This was what Melody had been trying to tell me all along. In the face of powerlessness,
that
was my ticket to freedom. I could choose to be eaten alive by grief, to spend the rest of my life living in fear of that powerlessness and the unknowable; or, I could respond differently. Not react—
respond
. I could either keep Sam alive in me and others, or bury him along with his physical body.

I could choose to forgive, too.

Forgiveness wasn’t a one-shot deal, I learned. Rather, it was a lot like the revision process; it involved re-seeing a person or a situation in different ways, of looking past the surface errors and finding the real meaning, finding truth. Once accessed, that truth could be transformed into compassion, understanding, love.

The hardest person to forgive was the drunk driver. He would’ve been graduating college by now; instead, he was serving time for manslaughter. He fucked up his life and knew it. Hell, he fucked up
my
life, and all this time I’d assumed he didn’t give a shit about that.

Since Sam’s death, I had written so many letters to that kid. Angry, hate-filled, horrid letters in which I wished his own death on him. The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty—we all have it. Thank goodness I had never sent any of them. Thus, my first step in forgiveness was to destroy those letters. As they burned in a pile of leaves in my backyard, my anger raged right along with the flames. I wanted to kill him myself. And then I cried cathartically, once again, for the loss of my husband, my best friend, our life together. But I also realized that this kid had taken his own life too, metaphorically. We all lost something.

I began writing letters again, and this time I sent them. Some began angrily but moved towards a gesture of willingness
. I’m willing to learn to forgive you.
Willingness was always a good starting point, whereas hate and bitterness and resentment took up too much energy. Sam had come to realize that right before he died. I think his novel was the beginning of his forgiving his own father for leaving. And he had come to take a position on war that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with forgiveness. “Imagine if we had forgiven the terrorists instead of bombing the wax out of the ears of innocent people,” he’d said. “Imagine if instead of a ‘war on terror’ we had a “forgiveness of terror’.”

I’d been against war from day one; throughout my life, really. But I hadn’t truly heard him that day. “Thank you, John Lennon,” was my response. In hindsight, my ignorance and dismissal must have hurt him deeply. “Forgive
me
, Sam,” was my present plea.

A few weeks later, the kid responded, expressing his utmost remorse. My first reaction was that his grammar and spelling were atrocious. My second was that of pure cynicism. Of course he’s remorseful. He’s stuck in hell and an orange jumpsuit and can’t even take a shit without someone watching him. Serves him right. The hell he’s sorry. He’s sorry Sam got killed, maybe, but not for getting so tanked in the first place.

Choose a different response
, I heard a voice within me say. I’m pretty sure the voice was Sam’s.

I wrote back to the kid, one line: 
Do you like writing?

 He wrote back.
No. My teachers in High School told me that my writting is terrible and the only way I would pass collage was if i cheated my way thru.

And that’s when I began to see him in a new light. Was it possible that he had gotten so tanked that night in order to forget who
he
was? Was it possible that he took to heart that the only way he was going to get through life was by cheating himself and others? No kid deserves to be told that.

He wasn’t born wanting to be a drunk driver. He wasn’t born wanting to kill my husband.

I wrote to him again.
Would you like to learn something about writing?

He responded.
Yes.

I then sent him a composition notebook, the kind used in elementary school with black and white squiggles on the cover. I also gave him his first assignment: Write about your history with reading and writing, and enclosed a copy of one of Sam’s literacy narratives. Thus began the long-distance tutorial by mail. How completely bizarre and ironic that my first composition student since leaving the field of composition was the one who had caused me to leave in the first place.

I had also tracked down the students from the class in which I’d had the meltdown. I mailed each of them a handwritten apology. One of the boys had dropped out. Another graduated. A third emailed me to tell me he’d gotten wasted that same day, then woke up in the middle of the night after having a vivid dream about my husband. “I quit all of it,” he wrote. “The drinking, the pot, everything. Been clean ever since. I never want to be the cause of someone having a nervous breakdown like you did that day.”

I cringed upon reading the words “nervous breakdown”. Students can be quite perceptive.

Hayley, whose sister had had Sam for a teacher, came to visit me in my office one afternoon.

“Thank you for your note. I’m so glad you’re doing better,” she said. “I had heard so many good things about you as a teacher. That’s why I tried so hard to get into your class. If I could, I’d take another one, but I’m graduating this semester.”

I congratulated her. Then I added, “I’m sorry I ruined your expectations, and that I let you down.”

“It’s okay—it wasn’t meant to be,” she said.

***

My Father’s Letter
was released Columbus Day weekend (how appropriate) to mixed reviews, but captured a lot of attention thanks mostly in part to interviews I did with National Public Radio in Boston, the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, The
Boston Globe
, and both NU and Edmund College’s campus newspapers. I also did book signings at both campuses, as well as Harvard (Sam’s alma mater) and independent bookstores in Amherst and

Harvard Square

before hitting the road for a New England book tour that ended in Manhattan and my hometown on Long Island.

In addition to the reading, EdmundCollege held a small remembrance ceremony for Sam. And there I read the finished eulogy:

I grew up on Long Island, not far from the Walt Whitman birthplace. Back then, the house remained unguarded and exposed to the public. It looked like your typical colonial house—and yet it inconspicuously sat in the midst of commercial supermarkets and shopping centers and delis and the International House of Pancakes. Years later, after some vandalism occurred, the Town of Huntington set out to restore the Whitman house and build an accompanying museum. And a wall, too. Sadly, one can no longer see the house from the street (then again, in those days one had to be looking for it in order to see it at all).
Every visit to every new town or city or state was an adventure for Sam. He would Google information on histories, traditions, events. He’d talk to the locals and go to the places that weren’t on the tourist maps. He’d bring a camera, but would take only those pictures that best encapsulated the essence of the experience because he much preferred seeing the world through his own lens.
On one of our many weekend excursions, I took Sam to the Whitman house, now obnoxiously named The WaltWhitmanBirthplaceState Historic Site and InterpretiveCenter. He went through the museum methodically, reading every placard and perusing every document and intensely studying each artifact. A fountain of knowledge all things Walt Whitman, he augmented much of the docent’s comments with his own bits of trivia, much to my delight and the docent’s dismay for being shown up.
But when we went into the actual house, Sam was awestruck. He pointed to the antiquated wooden desk—“Just think of all the words that came pouring out of him while sitting at that desk!” he said. Then he pointed to another piece of furniture. “Just think of the conversations he had there!” And so on. I sauntered through the house less inspired, although tickled by his childlike thrill.
“Doesn’t this excite you, Sweetheart?” he asked me. “We’re standing in
Walt Whitman
’s house! One of the greatest poets of all time! One of the greatest
citizens
! I’ve seen you more excited walking through a shoe store.”
“Sorry, Sammy,” I said, “but I’ve seen it many times. I’ve been here on school field trips, when I got my driver’s license, breaks from college... it’s like going home to me. And all the hoopla from the museum and the walls and the preservation has kind of taken something away from it all. I liked it better when it was more ordinary, when it was lost in its surroundings.”
“But that’s precisely what makes it
extraordinary
!” he exclaimed. “That desk, that table and chair, this entire house—it was all once ordinary. Just one house owned by one family. How could Walt Whitman have possibly known that generations of generations were going to pass through these rooms and marvel at the greatness to come from something so ordinary? Imagine that—imagine generations to come walking through
our
house like that. Will they ever know our greatness?
“What makes us so great?” I had asked.
“Because we’re
here
. Now.”
Alas, that was Sam—always willing to appreciate the past and look forward to the future without ever being absent from the now. He believed in greatness. But greatness was found in flaws. He believed that flaws, even the horrific ones, made humanity truly worthwhile. Without flawed humanity, there could be no revision. There would be only one way of seeing the world, of relating to one another, of creating a piece of art. Art that is not flawed is not beautiful, he would say. Even Walt Whitman was flawed. Perfection to Sam was the balance of strengths and weaknesses. Love and fear. Feast and famine. He was a Yin and Yang guy all the way.
As a writer and teacher, his own flawed humanity came out on every page that he wrote and shared with his students, and his students loved him for it—he was “real” to them. He was real because he was ordinary. And he was extraordinary because he saw greatness everywhere.
I miss Sam every day. He wanted to travel and see more of the world. He wanted to write novels. He wanted to answer the “what-if” questions that he posed to his students, his friends, me, and the world. He was not in the world—the world was in him. And what I’ve come to realize is that he’s not left the world, he’s
become
the world.
We may never have visitors ambling through our home one hundred years later, our rooms carefully preserved and roped off for protection, gawkers pointing at our couches and tables and chairs, but Sam has clearly left his mark. My heart swells to the bursting point when I think of all the students he’s touched, all those who are better people, less flawed, because of knowing him, even after meeting him for a few seconds. Certainly I am a much better me. It’s up to us to pass on the best of Sam to everyone we meet and know. That way, he can’t and won’t ever leave us, and his greatness will live on.