What Is Life?

Over the years, I or Leslie would joke, one of us, usually me, “What is life?” The question, for me, which I shared at the time, years ago, with my wife, came from a recalcitrant student of mine. “Recalcitrant student” is basically the same, in my short career as a teacher, as saying that black was dark.

Anyway, Tony would sigh that while everyone was working on something, and I was “monitoring.” It took everything I had to ignore his question.

But it’s a good question. Even though it would recur as a joke, it quickly, to both Leslie and me (we’d admit later), would evolve into a sort of private needs analysis. What about ______? Did he really mean _________? They couldn’t have thought that ________? And, we all know, there’s no answer.

For game birds, the question is more basic, if asked at all, which most would say doesn’t happen. Ever. For those creatures.

Today was Christmas. There was the usual several-day lead up. Now I’m walking the dogs on the golf course, snow here and there, crispy, then some quiet wet grass, what will spring be like? Will the greens show snow mold? Probably. They didn’t spray them this fall, the morons. Blah blah blah. What a waste some thoughts are.

I used to love Christmas. Like most kids (I don’t actually know if this is true; it could just as easily not be), I’d get up earlier than my parents, sometimes conspiring with my sibling, and plot and hedge and wonder. I’d listen, too. That was private. Something never to be checked with the other. Shameful to admit that, maybe. Or maybe just claiming something like a moment for myself. Something before the deluge of waking up parents, of tinsel getting caught in bows and ribbons. Of scoldings, forgivenesses (because of Christ’s birthday) calculated agonizingly by the scolder, pecking orders chipped away at, families going at it.

Lucky to have had that, to have had all that. All that it was. Lucky not to have known it wouldn’t last. Unlucky to have realized, probably simultaneously, that it was over. When you don’t have your own children, there’s no surrogacy period, and we’re in about the 5th decade of disillusionment. Of course, if you do have children, there’s always the chance they’ll hate you; that’s the consolation prize we give each other when we’re scared shitless we’ll be too daft to know what to do when it’s too late. Or even that it’s too late.

So what is life? For me, for the past long while, it’s been two-thirds waiting and one-third chukar hunting and trying to make sure nothing falls through the cracks during that one-third. I think I’ve done a decent job at scribbling all that down. At managing it. At monitoring it. Maybe I leveraged that in my classroom when Tony was just, maybe, breathing an expression of boredom out loud. Or maybe he wanted someone to answer. Or maybe he was just playing the fool. As a brown-skinned kid, one of exactly two at our school, who suffered through (or at least sailed through) years of ignorance and bullying (“The Wall”), Tony became a flag-flying MAGA-phile. I see his truck and his flag sometimes there in town. And I’d bet he hasn’t a clue he impacted me in any way.

One of my proudest achievements as a teacher, mainly because of what the students taught me from the experience, was having Tony’s class read Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno. I expected them to hate it or at least be bored by it. The opposite. That’s for keeps. Which makes me wish I’d had Tony and his class, all pretty recalcitrant boys who I’d genuinely come to love, read Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” I know Tony would have taught me a lot about the last few lines:

“…the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.”