2004-09-24 � chalk on the board

Chalk on the board, ink on the placemat

Hello Friday. How are you?
Me? I'm up. I'm down, I'm sideways, I'm levitating left, right and center. I do NOT feel like making sense. And so I won't.

All morning, I've been weirdly nostalgic about all the things I wrote and said and did and listened to in college. I've been thinking about angsty black-clad boyfriends and professors with charming ticks. Like my Shakespeare prof. whose fingers were ochre with nicotine and whose hair was wild like Einstein's. Every time he wrote on the board, he'd wind up with a round cloud of chalk on his jumper. (Now, you're thinking I shouldn't be using the term "jumper" to describe his sweater being that I'm not British... but he was, and I like the term, so there.)

Then there was another Brit professor whose pretentiously titled "Utopian Thought For a Better Society" course I took. He wore a mustard coloured cordoroy blazer with leather patches on the elbow and had a big dark '70's style coif and the most marvelous turn of phrase. I sat in the very back row of the auditorium next to a girl who spelled "women" with a "y" (womyn) and, truth be told, I rarely remembered a word he said. But the way he said it! O, my inner language lover swooned. Every line was lyric. Poetry dropped from his lips so easily, so naturally, alive and glossy with his Oxford accent. Unfortunately, his class was ridiculously early in the morning and I often slept through it. And I turned in my mid-term papers embarrassingly late. I thought I was doomed to fail that course and repeatedly chastised myself for not dropping it earlier when I could. The last time I saw him was when I plopped my final exam booklet on the wooden table in front of him. Peering at my name on the exam cover, he said, "Melanie Ford?" and my heart dove to my shoes.

This is it, I thought, gazing longingly at the exit. He has found me out. I'm such a fraud. He's going to tell me I had no right showing up for the final exam after missing so very many of his elegant lectures.

Instead, he said something that astonished me.

"I've been wanting to talk to you! I wanted to tell you that your last paper made me rethink the way I teach this course entirely. You're a very gifted writer."

He patted the chair beside him and as my classmates filed past, dropping their exam booklets on the pile, we talked about poetry and literature and my major at the time (English).

That conversation lives within me, glowing like a candle atop a cake, whenever I get down on myself. I later found a book which listed him as a major influence in Canadian poetry.

I'm remembering also many nights spent, deep in a red vinyl booth at a tumble-down coffee shop, the air blue with smoke, watching snow fall into the syringe-strewn parking lot across the street. Back in the days when we were "just friends" and yet so much more, Jack and I would sit in comfortable silence, drinking cup after cup of coffee heavy with cinnamon, pushing a paper placemat, the kind with the quaintly scalloped edge, back and forth between us. He would write a line, I would write a line, he would write another, back and forth until the placemat was covered in ink and ridiculousness. Then we would steal a placemat from another table and start all over again.

I wish I kept those. Now, I can only remember one line he wrote "...Shelly Winters screams into her party hat."

I don't know what I thought I would grow up to be then. I imagine I didn't really think that much about it.

But I've been thinking about it more as I walk my dog in the park and the trees shift colour and tumble down around me. What do I want to be when I grow up?

The answer isn't anymore clear now than it was then. All I know is I want to be me... whoever THAT is.


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